{"id":17321,"date":"2019-03-25T12:34:54","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T12:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/?p=17321"},"modified":"2021-11-15T09:16:40","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T09:16:40","slug":"the-long-read-from-social-medias-role-in-the-arab-spring-to-new-generation-thinker-qa-with-dr-dina-rezk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2019\/03\/25\/the-long-read-from-social-medias-role-in-the-arab-spring-to-new-generation-thinker-qa-with-dr-dina-rezk\/","title":{"rendered":"THE LONG READ: From social media’s role in the Arab Spring to New Generation Thinker \u2013 Q&A with Dr Dina Rezk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Dina Rezk\u2019s research looks at contemporary history of the Middle East, including the Arab Spring, and has fed into policy briefings to the UK and US governments. She was recently selected as one of the AHRC and BBC\u2019s New Generation Thinkers<\/a>. Here she tells us how the Arab world has used Western cultural stereotypes of them to serve their own agendas, the part that social media played in the uprising \u2013 and her excitement of getting the chance to share her research with wider audiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dina, could you tell us a bit about your background and your research?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m an Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and politics here at the University of Reading and I effectively look at how culture plays into conflict.<\/p>\n

My first project, which was forged in a post 9\/11 era, looked at how western intelligence agencies, and in particular how Anglo Americans, analysed the Arab world between 1958 and 1981.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t imagine it\u2019s a positive picture\u2026 what in particular did you look at?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The kinds of questions I was thinking about was what do<\/em> they get right and wrong, what were the so-called successes and failures – but also how did they conceptualise the region? How did they understand the Arab \u2018other\u2019? And also what did they think about perhaps two of the most important leaders of the Arab world and certainly of Egypt?<\/p>\n

These leaders were President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a nationalist who challenged British colonial presence in Egypt in unprecedented ways; and President Anwar al-Sadat who really initiated the shift towards the West that brings Egypt to its current position as one of the most important allies of the Western World.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve looked extensively at intelligence analysis in the Middle East. What has surprised you most about how the West interprets Middle Eastern politics? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I was surprised at how good the intelligence assessments that I read or came across were!<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t a great surprise to me that culture was really important in how they regarded the Arab world, and that stereotypes of Arab culture were significant in Western intelligence assessments.<\/p>\n

But actually the role that these cultural ideas played in analysis \u2013 sometimes positive and sometimes negative \u2013 were often nuanced and actually used by Middle Eastern actors, by Presidents, analysts, and advisers within the region, to forge their own agendas and shift Anglo-American analysis in the direction they chose.<\/p>\n

So in other words cultural ideas were not just used by the West to understand the Arab world but the Arab world used the ideas that the West had about them to serve their own strategic agendas and goals.<\/p>\n

How so?<\/strong><\/p>\n

So for example, when President (Anwar) el-Sadat sought to justify his trip to Jerusalem in 1977 to address the Israeli Parliament he said: \u201cYou will never understand the Arabs.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is him speaking to the West and Western analysts who were challenging why he took such a step. He alluded to this idea of an Arab psychology as something that he had a privileged access to, and he said: \u201cThese Arabs will never agree on anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he saw this step that was really quite dramatic in breaking with the Arab fold as the only way to cut through what he called the \u2018bluster and rhetoric\u2019 of Arab politics.<\/p>\n

I mean, that is a stark example of what Edward Said [a Palestinian-American academic and political activist] might call native orientalism \u2013 the use of cultural stereotypes, negative cultural stereotypes about the Arab world, by Arabs themselves.<\/p>\n

Watch an excerpt from the interview with Dina:<\/p>\n