Publics, Politics

and Participation

edited by seteney shami

locating the public sphere in

the middle east and north africa

Publics, Politics and Participation

Seteney

Shami

Scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa almost
always engages with politics, yet the assumed absence of
public spaces and fora has led many to think that debate,
consensus, and concerted social action are antithetical to the
heritage of the region. Publics, Politics and Participation
demonstrates not only the critical importance of the public
for the Middle East and North Africa, but how the term
and notion of the public sphere can be used productively
to advance understandings of collective life and, moreover,
how conflict and resistance are generative forces in public
discourse.

At a time when commentaries in the West reduce the Middle
East to rubble, violence, and intolerance, it is a healthy
reminder that public debate and deliberation, however
fragile, occupy an important place in that stigmatized
political region, now as in the past. Seteney Shami and her
colleagues have done a great service in disrupting one more
layer of Orientalism.
—Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley

How are publics linked to politics? The Middle Eastern
context provides the rich texture of this book as it moves
through time and space—from the surveillance of public
conversations in the Ottoman Empire to the Teheran
bazaar and the role of the market in public-making to the
ways in which present-day national public spheres are
expanded and disrupted by new forms of resistance, such
as Arab poetry in Iraq and the Munzur cultural festival in an
Eastern Kurdish province. The authors engage a conceptual
framework that is constantly questioned, revisited and
enriched by both ordinary experiences and layers of
historical heritage. They contribute to the opening up of
“Western” social science and invite us to think differently
about politics and publics.
—Nilüfer Göle, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris

Seteney Shami is director of the program on the Middle East
and North Africa at the Social Science Research Council.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

NEW YORK

WWW.SSRC.ORG