Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG)

About us

While MENARG has never been solely an area studies research group, including in its research, education and activities thematic issues stretching beyond the porous borders of the region, over the course of the years the research group has come to include scholars only remotely connected to the Middle East and North Africa. Therefore MENARG is creating the Power in Practice Network (PiPN), a research network that more clearly acknowledges the current research interests of the senior as well as the pre-doctoral researchers.

The MENARG remains multidisciplinary research group housed within the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium. It is primarily dedicated to the production of knowledge about - and critical insight into - the politics, society, and economy of the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Affiliated researchers are also concerned with issues and phenomena that link the MENA to Europe and the global world order: neoliberalism, "Islam", the so-called "war on terror", and solidarity.  

As research hub MENARG remains a house with many rooms. The PiPN constitutes a home for research that speaks to the MENARG research without necessarily focusing on the region. As such MENARG sees the PiPN as an enrichment.

MENARG remains dedicated to:

  • The pursuit of theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous inquiry into the forces shaping politics, economy, and society in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa;
  • Advancing knowledge about, and understanding of, the social and political challenges faced and posed by Muslim communities in Europe;
  • Promoting scholarly publication of research related to these themes, both through MENARG sponsored publications, and via the contributions of MENARG affiliated researchers to the scientific literature;
  • The translation of specialist knowledge and theoretical insight into practical policy recommendations, as well as into policy tools for governmental and non-governmental organizations;
  • The design of courses within the social sciences curriculum of Ghent University, and the development of educational materials and programs for the general public.
  • Promoting more informed public understanding of salient issues through public seminars, speaking engagements, and contributions to the media;
  • Strengthening individual and institutional capacities for political and social research into the MENA region.

The PiPN focuses on not on theories of power, but rather on how power operates in practice,. This implies, a focus on  how power operates through everyday interactions and the material infrastructures through which power is produced and enabled. This entails an analysis of the (a-liberal/illiberal origins of) the socio-technical and ecological arrangements that have historically empowered (and provided a context of normalization for) politics associated with liberal modernity; an emphasis on the contingency and historical peculiarity of the forms of knowledge and expertise that took shape within these arrangements and the power that emerges from these forms of knowledge; and attention to the ways life (human and non-human) and natural agencies are made amenable to particular modes of government and political intervention. The (often violent and essentially colonial) work of reassembling life and nature into arrangements that empower liberal states and markets is not only situated in the past (a kind of original sin). It is going on all around us.

The work of the PiPN explores ow power is produced and deployed through, contemporary,historical and geopolitical relations such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, development and democracy, as well as how power is contested through collective action and the promotion of alternative forms of knowledge and being in the world. The emphasis on practice is a crucial critical move insofar as it challenges the autonomy of the seemingly abstract forces associated with (for example) globalization and the market.

PiPN focusses on decolonizing knowledge and globalizing intellectual histories, the socio-technical and ecological foundations of political power, the illiberal origins/foundations of liberal modernity, techno-politics, the ongoing (and performative) interplay between science and (colonial) world-making; the ultimate dependence of science on non-scientific ways of knowing and the creation of channels through which science might be enriched by other traditions of seeing and forms of knowledge, situating the themes of colonialism, capitalism, racism, development and democracy in deeper dialogue with each other to understand them as integrated geopolitical processes.