This introductory chapter offers a critical reassessment of the disciplinary contours have become all the more desirable in light of the momentous and unforeseen sociopolitical upheavals, known as the Arab uprisings, which started in Tunisia in December 2010. The “territory-crossing” reach and substantive implications of the uprisings have compelled North Africanists to review some of the paradigmatic and procedural assumptions in their field of studies, and to don fresh conceptual and methodological lenses when reading Arab societies more broadly. To this end, the chapter addresses the following questions: have the Arab uprisings exposed heretofore underestimated regional commonalities for historians and social scientists to explain? And can post-uprising research promote greater analytic rigor and disciplinary synergies in North African studies, to the benefit of more varied transregional and comparative perspectives on national developments?
Social Currents in North Africa offers multidisciplinary analyses of social phenomena unfolding in the Maghreb today. The contributors analyze the genealogies of contemporary North African behavioral and ideological norms, and offer insights into post-Arab Spring governance and today's social and political trends. The book situates regional developments within broader international currents, without forgoing the distinct features of each socio-historical context. With its common historical, cultural, and socioeconomic foundations, the Maghreb is a cohesive area of study that allows for greater understanding of domestic developments from both single-country and comparative perspectives. This volume refines the geo-historical unity of the Maghreb by accounting for social connections, both within the nation-state and across political boundaries and historical eras. It illustrates that non-institutional phenomena are equally formative to the ongoing project of postcolonial sovereignty, to social construction and deployments of state power, and to local outlooks on social equity, economic prospects, and cultural identity. Scholars in the field of North African and Maghrebi studies were invited to working group meeting held by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), Georgetown University in Qatar, to reflect on their specialized disciplinary or methodological approaches to the region, and to comment on the overall validity of North Africa as a cohesive geo-historical unit for social scientific analysis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.