POMEPS is proud to present the book launch of Thomas Heggammer’s new book, The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (Cambridge University Press, February 2020) on April 3, 2020 at 12PM at the Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 212.

Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologues of all time. Here, in the first in-depth biography of Azzam, Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam’s extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents, CIA agents, and Cat Stevens the pop star. It is, however, also a story of displacement, exclusion, and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.

Professor Thomas Heggammer is a s Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. Trained in Middle East Studies at Oxford University and Sciences-Po in Paris, he has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, New York, and Stanford Universities, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His books and edited volumes include Al-Qaida in its own Words (Harvard, 2008), Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, 2010), The Meccan Rebellion (Amal, 2011), Saudi Arabia in Transition (Cambridge, 2014), and Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cambridge, 2017).

Free copies of the book will be available for students

A light lunch will be provided

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POMEPS is proud to present the book launch of Dr. Amy Austen Holmes’s new book, Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford University Press, 2019) on April 9, 2020 at 12PM at the Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 505.

In 2011, Egypt witnessed more protests than any other country in the world. Counter to the received narrative, Amy Austin Holmes argues that the ousting of Mubarak in 2011 did not represent the culmination of a revolution or the beginning of a transition period, but rather the beginning of a revolutionary process that would unfold in three waves, followed by two waves of counterrevolution. This book offers the first analysis of both the revolution and counterrevolution in Egypt from January 2011 until June 2018.

Amy Austin Holmes is Associate Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo, Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University, and Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. She is the author of Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945. Having spent a decade living in the Middle East through the period known as the Arab Spring, she has published numerous articles on Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain, and the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria. She has written about human rights violations including the Rabaa/Nahda massacre which she witnessed in August 2013; the crackdown on civil society; as well as the issue of US military aid to Egypt.

Free copies of the book will be available for students

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POMEPS is proud to present the book launch of Dr. Aaron Rock-Singers’s new book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival (Cambridge University Press, 2019) on April 16, 2020 at 12PM at the Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 505.

Following the ideological disappointment of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, an Islamic revival arose in Egypt. Yet, far from a mechanical reaction to the decline of secular nationalism, this religious shift was the product of impassioned competition among Muslim Brothers, Salafis and state institutions and their varied efforts to mobilize Egyptians to their respective projects. By pulling together the linked stories of these diverse claimants to religious authority and tracing the social and intellectual history of everyday practices of piety, Aaron Rock-Singer shows how Islamic activists and institutions across the political spectrum reshaped daily practices in an effort to persuade followers to adopt novel models of religiosity. In so doing, he reveals how Egypt’s Islamic revival emerged, who it involved, and why it continues to shape Egypt today.

Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History. He is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on 20th century Islamic movements and states. He uses the tools of social and intellectual history to trace the emergence and performance of particular projects of piety and, more broadly, the ways in which men and women employ their bodies to challenge the prescriptive visions of religious elites to regulate daily practice.

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POMEPS is proud to present the book launch of Dr. Aili Mari Tripp’s new book, Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocracies Adopt Women’s Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2019) on April 23, 2020 at 12PM at the Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 505.

Aili Mari Tripp explains why autocratic leaders in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria embraced more extensive legal reforms of women’s rights than their Middle Eastern counterparts. The study challenges existing accounts that rely primarily on religiosity to explain the adoption of women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries. Based on extensive fieldwork in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and an original database of gender-based reforms in the Middle East and North Africa, this accessible study analyzes how women’s rights are used both instrumentally and symbolically to advance the political goals of authoritarian regimes as leverage in attempts to side-line religious extremists. It shows how Islamist political parties have been forced to dramatically change their positions on women’s rights to ensure political survival. In an original contribution to the study of women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa, Tripp reveals how women’s rights movements have capitalized on moments of political turmoil to defend and advance their cause.

Dr. Aili Mari Tripp is the chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Tripp’s research has focused on women and politics in Africa, women’s movements in Africa, women and peacebuilding, transnational feminism, African politics (with particular reference to Uganda and Tanzania), and on the informal economy in Africa. Her current research involves a comparative study of women and legal reform in North Africa.

Free copies of the book will be available for students

A light lunch will be provided

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