The Rise of the Arab Youth Paradigm: A Critical Analysis of the Arab Human Development Report 2016

This article offers a critical analysis of the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) 2016, that was released by the United Nations Development Programme in November 2016. AHDR 2016 represents the return of the Arab Human Development project, that had been interrupted by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. It also epitomizes the Arab youth paradigm that has increasingly come to frame development and security discourse in the region. While there is much that is familiar in AHDR 2016, there are also concerning developments: a historical revisionism that holds Arab youth responsible for the Arab Spring, and the Arab Spring responsible for the Arab Winter that followed; and a new trend that views not just Arab youth deficits as a dangerous threat to regional and global security, but Arab youth abilities and surfeits as well

The first lady phenomenon:Elites, states, and the contradictory politics of women’s empowerment in the neoliberal arab world

Drawing on analysis of different sources—media analysis, policy documents, interviews, and participant observation—this article analyzes the representation of Queen Rania of Jordan and the First Lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, and their work in civil society. An analysis of Rania and Assad helps illustrate the ways in which gender roles and representations, in the Arab and Muslim world as elsewhere, are always multiple and contradictory, varying across lines of social class and intimately connected to and shaped by the ever changing political and ideological projects of states and elites. As such, there is a need, when addressing gender politics in the Arab and Muslim world, to move beyond simple stances of contesting or inverting single kinds of gender representations (whether “traditional” or “modern”) and instead move toward constructing grounded analyses of how constellations of gender roles and representations are constructed and negotiated within the context of regional and global political economy.</jats:p