Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation. Considering the parallel histories of citizenship in Yemen and Tunisia, Challand develops innovative theories of violence and representation that view cultural representations as calls for ...

Palestinian Civil Society examines the development of civil society in the Arab Middle East and the impact of western donors, with particular reference to the Palestinian case. Looking at the evolution of Palestinian civil society organizations from sociological, historical, legal, and institutional perspectives, the book sheds light on the involvement of donors in Palestine, and the effect that aid has had on Palestinian civil society at a social, political and ideological level....

In Imagining Europe, Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand explore the formation of modern European identity. Europe has not always been there, although we have been imagining it for quite some time. Even after the birth of a polity called the European Union, the meaning of Europe remained a very much contested topic. What is Europe? What are its boundaries? Is there a specific European identity or is the EU just the name for a group of institutions? This book answers these questions, showing...

While globalization unifies the world, divisions re-emerge within it in the form of a spectacular separation between Islam and the West. How can it be that Huntington’s contested idea of a clash of civilizations became such a powerful political myth through which so many people look at the world?Bottici and Challand disentangle such a process of myth-making both in the West and in Muslim majority countries, and call for a renewed critical attitude towards it. By analysing a process...

The Politics of Imagination offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary relationship between politics and the imagination. What role does our capacity to form images play in politics? And can we define politics as a struggle for people’s imagination? As a result of the increasingly central place of the media in our lives, the political role of imagination has undergone a massive quantitative and a qualitative change. As such, there has been a revival of interest in ...

This collection of research papers explores the impact of the Arab uprisings on the politics and political economy of foreign aid provision in the MENA region. Contributions focus on the foreign assistance policies and strategies of key donors (United States, Europe, Gulf countries and Turkey), and on the relationship between donors and recipients of foreign aid in a select set of MENA cases (Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine and to a lesser extent Morocco).Despite widespread rhetoric amon...