CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 42 / “Rethinking “MENA” from an international perspective”

To be published in October 2019

The term MENA is an English acronym that refers to the Middle East and North Africa, and is found extensively throughout a great variety of political and academic fields. It is nonetheless a fictitious category, like all territorial categories, and poses multiple questions surrounding its effectiveness for the interpretation of dynamics which increasingly take on a global character, rather than a regional one.

In addition, the conceptual construction of the MENA region comprises an exogenous categorisation. Indeed, the Middle East category has its origins in the European colonial past, which has led critical authors to ask themselves “In the middle of what? To the east of whom?” (Bilgin, 2004), and to call into question the perception of a supposedly homogenous and independent entity. Object of many criticisms, other categories were created to refer to the region such as WANA (West Africa and North Africa) that, however, entail similar epistemological problems.

One must highlight that, more than the geographical aspects, these categorisations are based on a supposed ethnicity shared by the populations of these countries and that it is defined, above all in the West, along religious lines. In other words, what this category entails is the idea that the populations of this area have something in common solely by virtue of belonging, supposedly, to the same religion. Above all from the 1990’s, with the affirmation of positions centred on religions and civilisations -expressed by authors like Lewis and Huntington- and more still after the events of September 11th, 2001, the approach to the region MENA has been marked by understanding these countries through a perspective based on religion.

Clearly, all these categories are crossed by discourses of “race”, gender and ethnicity, that are often characterised by the orientalist perspective described by Said in his famous work Orientalism (1979); it turns out that the countries of the Middle East and North Africa have always been a very significant “Other” in the Western gaze.

These exogenous categories undoubtedly represent a military and securitised reading of the region, which comprises more the external interests towards this area than a genuine interest in problematizing it and understanding the real sources of insecurity for the populations of these countries. For instance, it is through this type of critique that suggestions of equivalence between contemporary international “MENA” policies and “terrorism” make most sense. Indeed the discourse on “international terrorism” has been based on a religious racism (Foucault, 2002) and on the construction of places where a necropolitics is exercised that has given rise to a territorialisation process based on a threat emanating from the Middle East and North Africa region. However, this equivalence provides us with a simplistic and even mistaken reading of the (in)securities of the countries in the area.

For all that, the gaze towards the MENA region has often been marked by a supposed “exceptionalism” that has shown its limits more than once when interpreting political and social processes, revealing its inadequacy, for example, to tackle topics like the wave of social discontent that shook the region in 2011 -along with the transformations of the regional and international relations that followed-, as well as the syrian and yemeni conflicts. Following innovative approaches within the field of international relations like postcolonialism, decolonialism and the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies, we argue that it is possible to approach the MENA region in a different way from how it is interpreted in “orthodox” and traditional studies.

As a consequence, what we propose with this edition is: “Rethinking ‘MENA’ from an international perspective.” Leaving to one side these “classical” visions about the region and the traditional way of interpreting it, we seek to attract both theoretical and practical, international or local analyses, that reflect on the diversity and plurality of the region, the sociopolitical transformations or continuities that cross it, along with its internal and external power dynamics. In this sense, we believe that many authors both within and outwith the discipline of international relations provide us with useful tools to examine and deconstruct MENA, its problems, its borders, its history and its security: constructivism, reflectivism, the Frankfurt school, critical theories, Foucauldian genealogy, postcolonialism and critical discourse analysis, amongst others.

 

Coordinators 

Alice Martini and Guendalina Simoncini

 

DUE DATE:

Abstracts:
Abstracts (maximum 250 words) should be sent by email no later than December 15th, 2018 to the following address:

• guendalina.simoncini@sp.unipi.it (Guendalina Simoncini)
• alicecmartini@gmail.com (Alice Martini)

Notification of acceptance or refusal will be sent throughout the week following this deadline.

 

Articles: 

ARTICLES must be sent and abide by our journal’s Style Guide (in Spanish, Manual de Estilo) for submission to a double blind peer-review no later than March 31st 2019.

The articles must be uploaded on the Relaciones Internacionales website https://revistas.uam.es/relacionesinternacionales/user/register, after registering as an author. 

 

LANGUAGES: 

Articles in Spanish, English and Portuguese will be accepted, but the articles will be translated into Spanish for publication. Whenever possible, the authors themselves will translate the articles into Spanish.