MERIP as a Model for Politically Committed Knowledge Production in Middle East Studies

Abstract

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.