Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Mediterranean Politics

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in-between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics.

This book collects some of the most important articles from the Mediterranean Politics journal in the last twenty years, and suggests how they shed light on the policy and analytical challenges that lie ahead in Euro-Mediterranean relations.

The political transformations initiated by the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen have been marked by strong political contention, continued social mobilization and, albeit to different degrees, weak central state institutions. This book proposes that, rather than agreed roadmaps of institutional change (e.g. elections, drawing up new constitutions) and centrally crafted transition processes, it has been the competition of key political actors for resources of political power and control that has set the pace and influenced the direction and depth of the transformation processes. Hence, the contributions in this volume use an actor-centred approach. Two perspectives are assumed: first key political actors - referring to the "Politically Relevant Elite (PRE)"- are identified and their motivations as well as their strategies and capacities to steer the transformation process. Secondly , the authors investigate the capacity of politically "Mobilized Publics" to exert influence on agenda setting and decision making, ask to what extent popular and social movements have emerged as political actors in their own right, and to what extent such forms of bottom-up participation have constituted a fundamental change to the political culture of these countries. Both avenues of inquiry analyze how the elites are constrained by continued social mobilization, how they engage with mobilized publics to promote their own agendas, and whether the extended scope of popular participation contributes to the legitimacy and stability of the emerging political orders, or causes disruption, fragmentation and conflict. This book was previously published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

This book examines the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa, and how it impacts young people¿s civic and political participation today.

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in- between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics.In recent years, the Middle East has seen States attempts to shape buffer zones or safe zones in border regions, for example, in Syria's borderlands in the aftermath of the civil war. Typically studies on in- between borders refer to three interrelated aspects: space (territorial, symbolic), power (states or non-state actors) and identity (definition of the self/other). In this volume, the authors investigate these axes of research through the notions of sovereignty and belonging in order to assess how these concepts may highlight in-betweenness through a political dimension. Stemming from a perception of the borders as processes, these various studies aim to explore the theoretical potential of in- between border spaces to re-think sovereignty and identity belonging in such interstitial zones. While notions such as heterotopia, margins, liminality, borderlands, buffer zones, no man's land or frontiers will be explored, each case study highlights how actors, territory and powers relate to each other in order to improve our understanding of historical and political process that are shaping identities under spatial constraints.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.