Political Parties in the Middle East

This comprehensive collection addresses the important question of political parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Written by historians, political scientists, and sociologists of the region, the book provides a pertinent analytical framework to understand the often complex and turbulent histories of these political parties, their role within the region, and their prospects in the wake of the post-2011 Arab Uprisings. The authors explore a rich and varied range of case studies including Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco.

This book examines where political parties and organizations have been crucial to shaping contemporary historical events and political contestation, but also highlights their shortcomings and failures to deliver on the ambitions and hopes they had often evoked amongst their supporters. Furthermore, it looks at how political parties and their activities have intersected with important issues and themes such as gender, human rights, international solidarity, revolution and social transformation, and sectarian identity.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science, particularly within the MENA region. It was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Siavush Randjbar-Daemi is a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Faculty of History at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research interests lie in the evolution of the state in modern and contemporary Iran, and the contribution to the public sphere―particularly in periods of relative pluralism, such as the early 1950s or 1979–1981―of a variety of actors, from crowds formed by subaltern parts of society to socio-political elites.

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is a Lecturer in Comparative Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, and received his DPhil in Middle Eastern Studies at Queen's College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (2019).

Lauren Banko is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University, USA, teaching courses related to the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa, as well as Palestine and Israel. Her current research is broadly focused on the impact of colonialism before and during the interwar period of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and in pre-1948 Palestine.