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Until the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the resilience of authoritarian regimes seemed a fundamental feature of regional politics. While economic, political, and internal security policies are most often considered in discussions of regime maintenance, Laurie Brand introduces a new factor, that of national narratives. Portrayals of a country's founding, identity, and bases of unity can be a powerful strategy in sustaining a ruling elite. Brand argues that such official stories, which are used to reinforce the right to rule, justify policies, or combat opponents, deserve careful exploration if we are to understand the full range of tools available to respond to crises that threaten a leadership's hold on power.Brand examines more than six decades of political, economic, and military challenges in two of North Africa's largest countries: Egypt and Algeria. Through a careful analysis of various texts-history and religion textbooks, constitutions, national charters, and presidential speeches-Official Stories demonstrates how leaderships have attempted to reconfigure narratives to confront challenges to their power. Brand's account also demonstrates how leaderships may miscalculate, thereby setting in motion opposition forces beyond their control.

The first major historical account of gender politics during the Nasser era, Revolutionary Womanhood analyzes feminism as a system of ideas and political practices, international in origin but local in iteration. Drawing connections between the secular nationalist projects that emerged in the 1950s and the gender politics of Islamism today, Laura Bier reveals how discussions about education, companionate marriage, and enlightened motherhood, as well as veiling, work, and other means of claiming public space created opportunities to reconsider the relationship between modernity, state feminism, and postcolonial state-building. Bier highlights attempts by political elites under Nasser to transform Egyptian women into national subjects. These attempts to fashion a "e;new"e; yet authentically Egyptian woman both enabled and constrained women's notions of gender, liberation, and agency. Ultimately, Bier challenges the common assumption that these emerging feminisms were somehow not culturally or religiously authentic, and details their lasting impact on Egyptian womanhood today.

Using the war in 1990s Algeria as a point of departure, this study examines the ways in which the science and management of armed conflicts after Cold War has become increasingly reliant upon antipolitical, and thus highly defective, understandings of mass violence.

A study of policing and security practices in the Gaza Strip during the period of Egyptian rule (1948-67), Police Encounters explores the complicated effects on Gazans of an extensive security apparatus guided by intersecting concerns about national interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality.

Considers how Israeli citizenship shapes the collective memory of Palestinians and investigates the dilemmas and strategies inherent in national commemoration.

Digital Militarism considers how social media has become a crucial site in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.

"Originally published in French in 2012 under the title Les coptes d'Egypte."

Reconstructing the history of the Islamic University of Medina, this book sheds light on efforts undertaken by Saudi actors to extend Wahhabi influence beyond the kingdom's borders and suggests a new framework for understanding Islamic transnational religious networks.

This book examines the political challenge that pluralism raises to ideologies of national citizenship in contemporary Turkey.

Set in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, Refugees of the Revolution is both an ethnography of everyday life and a provocative critique of nationalism, exploring how material realities and evolving solidarity networks are reconstituting identity and political belonging in exile.

Examines how and why the Mubarak regime managed to maintain control of Egypt for 30 years despite an ongoing fiscal crisis, and considers the relationship between public finance, politics, and the possibility for social and political change.

Examines the relationship between the Israeli government and the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and theorizes that the occupation is intrinsic to the existence of the Israeli state.

This book chronicles the local histories written by modern Palestinians about their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war.

Moving beyond conventional political and strategic analyses of the Israeli-Iranian conflict, Iranophobia shows that Israeli concerns are emblematic of contemporary domestic fears about Israeli identity and society.

The captivating story of a controversial group of Palestinians who volunteer to serve in the Israeli military.

Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.

The Lebanese Connection uncovers for the first time the story of how Lebanon became one of the world's leading suppliers of illicit drugs, how its economy and political system were corrupted by drug profits, and how the drug trade contributed to the country's greatest catastrophe, its fifteen-year civil war from 1975 to 1990.

Comparing Egypt and Syria, this book argues that Arab states where executive power is more centralized are better at adapting to prevent regime change than states where decentralized relationships prevails.

Examining politics in a small Afghan town that managed to remain relatively peaceful in the years following the fall of the Taliban, this book calls examines how and when violence erupts and calls into question the international community's approach to developing stability in Afghanistan.

This book examines how state officials and select businessmen come together informally to shape economic development in Syria.

Uncovers the hidden history of Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon, from independence to the present, to break new ground in Middle East Studies and challenge existing ways of thinking about migration.

Set during the first two decades of Israeli statehood when Palestinians who managed to remain after 1948 lived under a repressive military regime, Citizen Strangers examines how Arabs and Jews navigated the opposing impulses of exclusion and inclusion in a new state forced by new international norms to grant citizenship and suffrage rights to its unwanted native minority.

This book looks anew at the vexing question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, examining histories of Islamic politics and social movements in the Middle East since the 1970s.