Politics of the Middle East

Abstract This article argues that the interplay between a limited disciplinary research agenda in political science and an overemphasis on quantitative methods has left a whole range of important untapped questions regarding the Middle East and North Africa. This is most obvious, when looking at the leading journals of the discipline following the 2011 uprisings. While, there was a short-lived shift toward topics like social mobilization, the scholarship still maintained the primacy of conventional ontological taxonomies such as Islam and democracy as the main pathways to understanding the region. The diversity of issues and the political complexity of the unfolding processes was overshadowed by many of the age-old questions about democratic transitions. At same time an increasing weight given to quantitative and experimental method often times took precedence over the intellectual and political relevance of the research question being asked.