Editor’s Note

For nearly 20 years, Dr. Michael Collins Dunn had been at the helm of The Middle East Journal. In January, Dr. Dunn announced his much-deserved retirement after a long and storied career working on the Middle East. Although he trained as a historian of medieval Egypt, Dr. Dunn became increasingly focused on the modern Middle East by virtue of living and working in Washington, DC. Before coming to the Journal, Dr. Dunn taught at Georgetown University and then cofounded and published a newsletter called The Estimate, which focused on Middle East security issues and was highly regarded in the field.

Dr. Dunn arrived at the Middle East Institute in 1998, having been an MEI member and regular attendee of our events since his student days. As such, he quickly became a repository for MEI’s institutional memory. All of us who were lucky enough to work with him will remember him as a fount of knowledge about all things Middle East, some of which is preserved on his Editor’s Blog at https://mideasti.blogspot.com/. With years’ worth of historical backgrounders, expert insights on regional events, and all kinds of intellectual diversions, his blog is a resource unto itself.

As Editor, Dr. Dunn was committed to what he saw as The Middle East Journal’s identity: a venue for first-rate scholarship on the Middle East that simultaneously meets academic standards without being so esoteric as to be inaccessible to nonacademics, whether they are region-focused professionals, students, or lay readers. Dr. Dunn shepherded the Journal into the digital age by facilitating its availability on platforms like IngentaConnect, Project MUSE, and JSTOR — where it is read and used more widely than it ever was in print.

Yet, throughout all this time and despite several proposals to change the reformat or even shutter the Journal, Dr. Dunn ensured that it continued along the same basic format as it has since 1947. As then, each issue contains five peer-reviewed articles about an array of topics in the region, a day-by-day Chronology of recent developments in the region, reviews of the latest books in Middle East studies by leading scholars in the field, and book annotations by our interns of other Recent Publications.

In part to salute Dr. Dunn, this issue begins with a portrait of Egypt. Our first article compares the authoritarian one-party regime under Husni Mubarak to its post-partisan incarnation under ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, who was recently reelected without significant competition. Applying concepts from the political science literature on authoritarianism, Bruce K. Rutherford of Colgate University contends that while Mubarak’s regime was able to hold together a coalition of supporters through patronage, Sisi’s regime is built around a promise of protection against internal and external threats. Rutherford warns that, even if it appears stable, the regime’s alliances of convenience and their underlying flaws undermine the Egyptian state and will inhibit its ambitious reform program.

A similar alliance was at work in Syria in the 2000s during the early years of President Bashar al-Asad’s rule, according to the American University of Sharjah’s Line Khatib. As the US hungered for regime change throughout the Middle East, the Asad regime allowed jihadist militias to use Syria as a staging ground to launch attacks against US interests and allies in Iraq and later Lebanon. Moreover, Khatib argues, allowing jihadists also served to undermine Syria’s long-standing Islamist opposition and divide the country’s heavily Sufi-influenced Sunni majority. While many might say that this policy of supporting jihadists backfired on the regime as these very jihadists turned against it in support of the broad-based movement for a revolution in 2011, Khatib’s article argues otherwise. She points out that jihadists’ prominent role in the uprising has served the regime well by overshadowing the nonviolent struggle of the Syrian people and allowing the regime to frame opposition to it as terrorism.

Our final three articles all look at Iraq. In the wake of the US invasion of the country in 2003, much of the vast and detailed archives of Saddam Husayn...