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Africa and the Middle East: Beyond the Divides June 2020 Contents POMEPS STUDIES 40 Africa and the Middle East: Beyond the Divides June 2020 Contents Introduction: A Transregional Approach to Africa and the Middle East . 3 Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch and Zachariah Mampilly And the Twain Shall Meet: Connecting Africa and the Middle East . 8 Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch and Zachariah Mampilly Sudan’s Revolution ‘Beyond regime change’: Reflections on Sudan’s ongoing revolution . .. 19 Nisrin Elamin, Columbia University The Great Game of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Sudan . 25 Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, European Council on Foreign Relations What Lies Beneath the Sands: Archaeologies of Presence in Revolutionary Sudan . 31 Noah Salomon, Carleton College Warscapes Making Sense of the East African Warscape . 40 Samar Al-Bulushi, University of California, Irvine Magnates, Media, and Mercenaries: How Libya’s conflicts produce transnational networks straddling Africa and the Middle East . 44 Wolfram Lacher, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Berlin Cross-Regional Engagements Determinants of Middle East states involvement in the Horn of Africa. 50 Federico Donelli, University of Genoa, Genoa Network-Building and Human Capital investments at the intersection of China-Africa and China Middle East Relations . 54 Lina Benabdallah, Wake Forest University The Scalar Politics of Turkey’s Pivot to Africa . 59 Ezgi Guner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Identity Movements National Identity in the Afro-Arab Periphery: Ethnicity, Indigeneity and (anti)Racism in Morocco . 64 Hisham Aïdi, Columbia University Black Tunisians and the Pitfalls of Bourguiba’s Homogenization Project . 69 Afifa Ltifi, Cornell University Islamist Movements Rethinking the weak state paradigm in light of the war on terror: Evidence from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania . 73 Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, Northwestern University Why Are There Few Islamist Parties South of the Sahara? . 78 Alexander Thurston, University of Cincinnati Concluding Reflections on Africa and the Middle East . 82 Alex de Waal, Tufts University The Project on Middle East Political Science The Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) is a collaborative network that aims to increase the impact of political scientists specializing in the study of the Middle East in the public sphere and in the academic community . POMEPS, directed by Marc Lynch, is based at the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University and is supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Henry Luce Foundation . For more information, see http://www .pomeps .org . 2 Introduction Introduction: A Transregional Approach to Africa and the Middle East Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch and Zachariah Mampilly Africa and the Middle East have been artificially separated ideological and scholarly circumstances, and evolved in into distinct regions in American political science and very different ways in the decades since . Where African most area studies . Each region has its own professional Studies grew out of the legacies of European colonialism associations, its own journals, its own disciplinary and American racial politics, Middle Eastern Studies preferences and trends . This division of analytical labor evolved from European Orientalism, the American has had significant implications for the ability of both fields Christian interest in the Holy Land, concern for Israel, to grapple with major real world issues . The Middle East and the intensity of Cold War strategic interests . Each Studies analysis of the 2011 Arab uprisings, for instance, area studies field passed through revolutionary moments, was so struck by the novelty within the Arab world of before moving into today’s professionalized, methods- Tunisia’s successful revolt that it failed to appreciate the driven and more disciplinary focused modes of political African context of nearly a decade of episodes of major science . The divides between these fields are striking . political contention . The African Studies analysis of wars Scholars within each field are far more likely to be and contested transitions in countries such as Sudan conversant with and to draw upon research in that field and Libya failed to appreciate the changing patterns of than to reach out to the other for insights or comparative interventionism which had evolved in the post-uprisings cases . Little effort is usually made to justify regional Middle East and how that would affect the trajectory of boundaries which are in fact quite arbitrary . Why, for those cases . instance, are the historical connections between the Horn of Africa with Yemen and Oman less significant than those On February 28, 2020, just ahead of the COVID-19 global with the African continent? The artificiality of this division shutdown, a diverse international group of scholars is especially clear with the definition of African Studies in focused on Africa and the Middle East convened at terms of Sub-Saharan Africa, which has left North Africa, Columbia University’s School of International and Sudan and the Horn in an uneasy position relative to Public Affairs to address these questions . The papers, contemporary area studies . published in this collection, ranged widely over issues connecting West Africa, the Horn, the Sahel and North This has real costs . Many present-day issues require Africa thematically, politically, militarily and culturally . a transregional approach to the study of Africa and The day’s discussions ranged more broadly, exploring the the Middle East, as this volume demonstrates . The possibilities for systematic and rigorous thinking across decomposition of the Libyan, Syrian and Iraqi states artificial regional divides . Together, they represent an have strained assumptions about the supposedly higher initial foray into conceptualizing a transregional political capacity of Arab states which underpinned one political research agenda .1 The goal of this volume is to get science claim of why North Africa was different than sub- American political science to break down the barriers Saharan Africa .2 The spectacular rise in the permeability between academic subfields defined by regions and open of borders, non-state ideologies, privatization of state the fields to new questions raised by scholars from and capacities, and proxy wars in Somalia, Libya and Yemen across Africa and the Middle East . have all highlighted the interconnections across these ostensibly distinct regions . Each region has nurtured The impetus behind this is both intellectual and practical . literatures which could better inform analysis in the other . As our framing essay explains, the fields of Middle East The rise of cross-border non-state financial and ideological Studies and African Studies emerged out of very different networks in Africa, which have produced what Alex de 3 Waal calls a rentier political marketplace, could benefit that can take equally seriously the dynamics of Middle from a Middle Eastern comparative perspective .3 The state Eastern politics and local politics on the ground . As failure often associated with Africa below the Sahara, and Federico Donelli describes, in recent years, a new the rentierism said to afflict Middle Eastern politics, are security competition has been playing out in the region, now widespread across both regions . So too are religious involving the Gulf states, Turkey, and Iran, as well as political movements, urgent questions of migration and China (as discussed by Lina Benabdallah), Russia and the population displacement, legacies of extreme violence, United States . Their involvement layers new rivalries and and the effects of global economic and environmental ideological quarrels onto preexisting post-colonial conflicts trends . All of this, and more, calls for a new approach that have yet to be resolved . For the purposes of this that can make sense of such transregional dynamics collection, the most intriguing development is the Middle without sacrificing depth of area knowledge and grounded Eastern scramble in the Horn of Africa - and increasingly research . into north and central Africa . The long-running Saudi/ Iranian conflict has in many ways been overtaken by an A transregional approach that rejects artificial boundaries intra-Sunni and Gulf quarrel (pitting Saudi Arabia and the can highlight the interconnections between labor, goods, UAE against Qatar and Turkey) . capital, security, people, ideas and political dynamics across proximate space, while still recognizing the cultural, These rivalries are playing out not only across the Red Sea, historical and economic differences between regions that where Gulf states have come to see the Somali coastline as shape such interactions . In such an approach, North Africa their “western security flank” and an integral dimension and the Horn become modal sites of study rather than of their disastrous war in Yemen, but also in North unwanted outliers . Breaking down the divide between African states such as Libya and Tunisia . These regional regions is not necessarily a progressive move . The War on geopolitical struggles driven by security considerations, Terror and the wars in Libya and Mali have brought the ideological commitments and commercial interests – Sahara into the purview of American policymakers almost and aggravated by global warming and food and water exclusively in security terms . As Islamist networks have insecurity – have spurred a wave of investment in military expanded into the Sahel and Sahara, American, Britain bases, ports and infrastructure
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