I spent the summer of 2015 at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem as a CBRL Senior Visiting Fellow. The purpose of the Fellowship was to build contacts, conduct initial semi-structured interviews and develop a working paper on the interactions of intra- and inter-state politics in the post-uprising Arab world, in particular to develop the idea of counter-revolution as an explanatory category in the geopolitics of the region.
The Fellowship was divided into two parts: a period of library research and contact-building at the Kenyon Institute, and a period conducting meetings and semi- structured interviews with activists in Istanbul and Beirut on the subject of counter-revolution. In the first instance I conducted a literature review of the counter-revolution. The work that I undertook at the Kenyon Institute contributed to papers that I subsequently gave on the project theme, both to the University of Sussex’s ‘Research in Progress’ Seminar and the British Middle East Studies (BRISMES) Conference in summer 2016. This research has contributed towards a paper that I intend to submit to a leading international relations journal, as well as towards a book proposal and grant bid in development on the subject of counter-revolution.
The second part of the project was invaluable for deepening the themes developed in the above work, as well as providing new directions from qualitative engagement with the experiences of activists in the region since 2011 and their conception of counter-revolution. In Istanbul, semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of the Hamish collective, a Syrian cultural and intellectual collective of exiles based in the city, along with independent activists. In Beirut, semi-structured interviews were conducted with figures associated with the intellectual journal Bidayyat, closely connected to the Syrian community and providing commentary on the Arab revolutionary processes in general. I also conducted similar interviews with activists working with displaced Syrians in the refugee camps. These discussions were invaluable in developing the themes of the project, especially the role of NGOs and the process of ‘NGOization’ in relation to counter-revolution.