REMENA Partnership with the APSA MENA Section

The APSA MENA section – and APSA more broadly – is looking forward to a return to a semblance of normalcy in 2022. While many of us are more than eager to return to in-person meetings and workshops, it is nonetheless with an awareness that digital programming has allowed us to reach wider audiences and include a more diverse array of participants that was possible in the past. Members of our community have contributed and will continue to contribute to webinars sponsored by the APSA MENA section in collaboration with the MENA Workshops and other partners. Growth in the number of members based in the MENA region and in Europe speaks to the way in which these formats help us connect in new ways.

I am delighted to report that the section is a co-recipient of a Special Projects grant from APSA for new programming on research ethics planned for summer and fall 2022. Working with the Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa initiative, to which many section members already contribute, the grant will support two workshops – one in Amman over the summer and one at the annual meeting in Montreal – that seek to advance conversations about ethical research practices under distinctive constraints in the MENA region. In particular, we hope to address the needs of graduate students who may be supervised by advisors with limited familiarity with local research conditions. We will rely on the help of section members in encouraging these target audiences – both students and advisors – to attend and participate in relevant components of the programming as details become available.

The annual conference, of course, will be the centerpiece of APSA MENA programming for the year. I look forward to announcing at the business meeting the winners of our prizes and awards and am grateful to the prize committees for their work in reviewing the impressive pool of submissions. Thanks to the substantial work of our program cochairs, Marwa Shalaby and Nadav Shelef, we look forward to sponsoring seven panels and one poster session on a broad range of topics, including religion and politics, public opinion, gender and political processes, ethnic identity and patterns of conflict, and governance and political institutions. The papers reflect a diverse range of methodological and geographical foci. Given the breadth of our section membership, more than one third of the presenters are affiliated with international and/or MENA-based institutions. Most of our panels in 2022 will be co-sponsored, which both indexes and advances the relevance of our section’s work to the wider APSA.

Author: Stacey Philbrick Yadav, MENA Section Chair, American Political Science Association

This article was published in American Political Science Association, MENA POLITICS Newsletter of the Middle East and North Africa Politics Section of APSA, Vol. 5 Issue 1, Spring 2022.