While MERIP's offered incisive critiques of the power relations that defined the existing field of Middle East studies, this essay explores how it also represents an alternative model of knowledge production, built outside academia, that has helped reshape scholarship and teaching about the Middle East and North Africa and more broadly about the US relationship to the region. The essay also introduces the other contributions in this forum including an edited transcript of 2020 MESA roundtable on the impact of MERIP on Middle East studies, a historical account that traces the origins of the MERIP collective and three essays exploring the evolution of MERIP's approach addressing, in turn, contributions and innovations within the areas of critical political economy, gender studies, and the politics of culture. Finally, drawing on these contributions as well as Middle East Report issue no. 300 that reviews how MERIP covered various topics, the essay concludes by highlighting the continuing value of MERIP as a teaching resource that allows students and others to understand the transformations across the region over the past half century as well as shifting approaches and theories that have come to help define Middle East studies as an academic field.

In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, past and present members of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) organized a roundtable for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) entitled “MERIP's Impact on Middle East Studies.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on October 14, 2020, the roundtable was conducted as a virtual webinar. The participants included Joe Stork, Judith Tucker, Zachary Lockman, Ted Swedenburg, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Jacob Mundy, and Stacey Philbrick Yadav. The roundtable was moderated by Waleed Hazbun and offered reflections about MERIP's original mission, explained how its model for “research and information” evolved, and explored how over fifty years MERIP's contributions have helped transform Middle East Studies scholarship. The following is a transcript that has been edited for clarity and length.

During the late 1960s, left-wing American activists faced challenges when trying to find out about what was happening in the Middle East and what their government was doing there. Yet overall, some activists still felt that by 1970 the American Left suffered from an overall dearth of solid information and regular, independent, critical analysis of the Middle East. As a result, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and its publication, MERIP Reports, were established in 1971 to fill that void. However, in many ways a major impetus for MERIP's formation was not just its founders’ hunger for better analysis of the region, but also the deep impressions made on them by a dramatic and influential trip several of them took to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in August and early September 1970. Thus, while it is true that, since its inception, MERIP has shaped the study of the Middle East, it is also true that it was the Middle East that first shaped those who formed MERIP.

The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was founded in 1971 as a project of the American New Left in solidarity with and drawing inspiration from the Beirut-centered Arab New Left and anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation in the Middle East and North Africa. The question of Palestine was a central, but certainly not exclusive, concern. From its origins MERIP was committed to political economy as a key method to understanding the Middle East and North Africa. It highlighted the importance of oil in the regional power structure and to the emergent U.S. empire. Many of its articles featured analyses of the social relationships of class and capital. MERIP was wary of “Arab socialism” and pan-Arab nationalism as official state ideologies. Its analysis of the 1979 Iranian revolution won MERIP and its emphasis on the importance of political economy a respected place in Anglo-American academia. Political economy never disappeared from MERIP's orientation, although its salience declined from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. The financial crisis of 2008 drew renewed attention to the structure of global capitalism. MERIP's history positioned it to participate in the renewed attention to class, capital, markets with more attention to the racialized and gendered character of these relationships.

Drawing on a reading of MERIP's articles related to women's and gender studies over the course of its 50-year history, this piece reflects on how MERIP's forays into this field formed part of its overarching aspiration to place scholarship in the service of progressive political projects. I explore how intellectual trends and political commitments worked together to shape the topics and approaches related to gender that appeared in MERIP's pages. The political purposes of knowledge production were omnipresent in the minds of authors and editors, and we see evidence of a conscious program of critique of past scholarship on women and gender in the region, as well as sustained attention to research and writing that could connect, or perhaps even be useful, to struggles in the Middle East region and the amelioration of U.S. policy. The framing of issues varied over time, from a focus on political economy to political action to broader cultural questions, in rhythm with shifts in scholarly paradigms and events on the ground.

In this essay, we examine how MERIP has navigated the frictions between the political economic critique of extraction and domination in the region, and more semiotic models which center “culture,” variously understood, in their analyses of power and inequality. Broadly speaking, MERIP authors have addressed four dimensions of culture writ large: aesthetic expressions and artistic performances; everyday practices and ordinary life in their various multisensorial, affective experiences; identity performance along intersectional terrains of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race; and discursive formations in which the very categories of the “political” and the “economic” are produced and reproduced within shifting fields of power. In all its dimensions, culture is embedded and entangled in material conflicts over production, distribution, and consumption, and thus necessarily political, but not merely so. How to approach cultural politics and political culture without reducing them to a play of hegemony and resistance has been a persistent challenge in cultural analysis. By exploring how MERIP authors have negotiated this fraught terrain—by outlining MERIP's effective culture concept with a focus on its aesthetic dimensions—we offer a window into a central tension within the broader field of Middle East studies.

In thinking through the stark differences in how a research project in Lebanon was received in 2018 versus 2020, this paper seeks to reflect on the fragile relationship between academic researcher and community, on the legitimacy of research in moments of crisis, and on the complexity of pursuing decolonial research in the contemporary West Asia North Africa region.

Descriptions and analyses of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings constitute a veritable cottage industry for journalists, academics, and think-tank consultants. The three books under review here join an ever-expanding library that documents and interprets those crucial events in December 2010 and January 2011, that so passionately raised our hopes only to later so bitterly crush them.