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While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Implementation and Disclosure in the Banking Sector: the case of banks with Islamic identity in Syria. This study aims to explore Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure (CSRD) in Syrian banks which have an Islamic identity, investigating their motivations when implementing and disclosing CSR and the challenges banks have faced. This study employed content analysis to extract knowledge from 33 annual reports published by three banks which have Islamic identity in Syria over the period 2008–2020. Semi-structured interviews were then conducted with five participants who are aware of CSRD policy in the banks in the sample, in order to gain a fuller understanding of their motivations in relation to CSR and any challenges they faced. This article draws on the overlap between Stakeholder and Legitimacy theories in order to explain the motivations of the banks in question. The study found that banks which have an Islamic identity increased their levels of CSR implementation during the conflict crisis but were not publishing details on these activities because of a concern regarding the Islamic modesty around charitable actions and to avoid upsetting the sensibility of beneficiaries. Interviewees commented that in the time of conflict crisis, many Syrians needed relief and support. Because of this, banks in our research sample decided to take responsibility to lessen the negative impact of the conflict crisis on the Syrian community. In addition, the analysis revealed that banks engaged with Environment and Human Right issues after 2013 because they wanted to fulfil the requirements of their national partners.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unarguably demands huge financial investments. However, the United Nations has acknowledged the huge financial gap militating against the implementation of the SDGs worldwide, leading experts to question the possibility of complete implementation of the goals by their terminal dateline of 2030. While the bulk of the finance currently outlaid on the SDGs comes from traditional sources including foreign direct investments (FDIs), there is the need to focus more attention on developing and exploiting impact investments that are more suitable for financing development programmes and projects. In this chapter, the SDG implementation profiles of the 12 Arab West Asia countries concerning the five most targeted SDGs were evaluated and sustainable finance issues were discussed. Secondary data were retrieved from World Bank's DataBank. The data were descriptively analyzed. Based on the profiles generated, debt relief is put forward as a possible impact investment mechanism suitable for funding the SDGs. Specifically, this chapter recommends that outright cancellation of debts based on the debt-for-SGD swap could serve as some of the impact investments needed to boost the global drive for a developed, peaceful, and just world.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

In contrast to Ahmet Kuru's argument that a critical juncture occurred in the 11th century when a repressive anti-intellectual state-ulema alliance appeared, which destroyed the creative spirit of the previous centuries in Islam, this review argues that the critical juncture must be sought in the modern era with the development of citizenship in the Middle East.