The Arab-Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan) has long been at the center of cultural, social, and geopolitical changes in the region, which have been central in shaping the development of psychological practice and science in the region. The region has been at the cross section of multiple foreign influences (French, British, US, Arab), all of whom have impacted academia. This resulted not only in multiple ideologies and schools of psychological thought that remain until today, but also in a trilingual academic system that further deepens the disconnect among psychologists and test-takers in the region. Additionally, the Levant’s experience of occupation, trauma, diaspora, and political instability has led to an increased need and interest in mental health services and displaced populations, and hence the measurement of related constructs. More recently, with increased funding for research on such populations, non-Arab researchers have gained a renewed interest in the region, which has led the way to increased collaborative efforts in the development of psychometric tools. This chapter discusses how these contemporary historical developments have impacted testing-related practices academia, research, and practice in clinical, educational, and industrial/organizational practice.

The everyday policing of common offences tells us a great deal about what kind of social order a states promote. Yet, this introductory chapter argues that while the ‘high-policing’ of behaviours deemed to threaten regime security in the Middle East has attracted scholarly attention, the ‘low-policing’ of more mundane, interpersonal disputes and citizens’ grievances has been largely overlooked. In a bid to address that deficit, this book studies the development of the state’s civil police agency, the Jordanian Public Security Directorate, since the formation of the modern state, and, drawing on legal anthropology as well as political science, focuses on how it manages certain kinds of common disputes in coordination and/or competition with other societal actors. The introduction emphasises the book’s key message, that rather than being primarily concerned with law enforcement, the police are preoccupied with order. In the Jordanian context, the type of order they promote is heavily influenced by tribal traditions, which have more recently been merged with conceptions of civic duty and neoliberal prerogatives. The chapter also affirms the importance of challenging binaries between ‘coercive’ and ‘consensual’ policing, by showing that in pursuit of hegemony, the police have recourse to varied strategies of power.

The Sultanate's political economy evolved continuously. Since the regime presided over an imperial union of territories that differed in their topography and ecology, the process of evolution in these regions exhibited contrasting patterns of change. Agriculture in the Nile Valley manifested procedures unlike crop raising or animal husbandry along the Syrian coast, upland valleys or semi-arid outback of the Syrian Sahel. Commodities imported from South or East Asia transited from ports in Yemen or Western Arabia through entrepôts on the Upper Nile to Alexandria, where they were transferred to European carriers that conveyed them to destinations on the Mediterranean north shore and beyond. Agents in each of these stages answered to differing sponsors, aligned their conduct of business with local politics and extracted revenues at levels fluctuating within the mechanisms that governed inter-regional trade throughout this period. Domestic commerce in both urban and rural settings dealt in the exchange of commodities produced locally in a workshop milieu. Control over (and profiteering from) marketing of lucrative staples that funneled revenues to the regime, such as spices, textiles or sugar, became a principal objective of governmental authority, with results that enhanced the Sultanate’s fisc in the short term but compromised its competitive position in the longue durée. These issues are considered from the perspective of agriculture or animal husbandry in Egypt and Syria, the varying extent of control exercised over them by the bureaucracy, interregional trade and its manipulation by the Sultanate over time, the domestic commercial economy, and finally the overt expropriation or clandestine extraction on which the regime relied as licit sources of revenue diminished in the Sultanate’s final century.

Research has proliferated on several topics that have invited new methodological approaches: the rural setting, gendered relations between men and women, communal status of minorities (Christians and Jews), and religious diversity among Muslims, in particular among those who identified as Sufi mystics. New sources and revisionist interpretations of them continue to transform the field of Mamluk Studies. Yet in many instances, findings on these subjects are confined to discoveries of information on discrete conditions or isolated events that do not lend themselves to comprehensive analysis. They often depend on a single source or fragmentary data set, and require imaginative speculation to formulate hypotheses that apply to questions about their broader contexts in society. The chapter will outline the state of research on these subjects and their potential to open new lines of inquiry by highlighting examples that have influenced revisionist interpretations.

International law has played a part in the Arab-Israel dispute for over a hundred years. The disputes with Egypt, Jordan and Arab Gulf States have been settled and international law played its part. The Palestinians see themselves as the weaker party. They therefore demand that any agreement between the parties must reflect “international legitimacy” and that the relevant United Nations resolutions reflect such legitimacy. To reach agreement on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza both sides will have to make painful compromises. It is ironic that although international law has played a useful and positive part in all stages of the Arab-Israel conflict, these different interpretations of what is international law, in fact, are hindering the possibility of settling Israel-Palestinian issues.

Chapter 4 examines the historic Islamic Law rules and assumptions which underpin issues relating to the custody of children. These historic rules have over time evolved into the modern Family Law of many, if not all, Muslim Family Law States on matters pertaining to child custody. The assumptions about, amongst others, what is in the ‘best interests’ of the child, the role of the mother and the obligations and duties of fathers are unpacked through a close reading and analysis of these rules, from both the pre-modern legal tradition and through two extended case studies (Qatar and Pakistan). Only once the assumptions underlying these rules on jurisdiction and custody, now adopted in Muslim Family Law States, are duly understood can we appreciate the obstacles that need to be tackled on parental child abduction matters. Examining how courts in Pakistan and Qatar approach the issue at hand, we identify how the historical rules have manifested themselves in practice in modern nation states.

Saddam Hussein’s unexpected 1990 invasion of Kuwait forced 300, 000 Kuwaitis of Palestinian descent to flee into Jordan. By 1991, this large exogenous population shock increased Jordan’s population by about 10 percent. Jordanian law allowed these refugees to work, live, and vote in Jordan immediately upon entry. The refugees did not bring social capital that eroded Jordan’s institutions. On the contrary, we find that Jordan’s economic institutions substantially improved in the decade after the refugees arrived. Our empirical methodology employs difference‐in‐ differences and the synthetic control method, both of which indicate that the significant improvement in Jordanian economic institutions would not have happened to the same extent without the influx of refugees. Our case study indicates that the refugee surge was the main mechanism by which Jordan’s economic institutions improved over this time.

Chapter 4 deals with monarchical armies, as these allegedly specific cases are usually less addressed in studies about Arab militaries. It also delves into differences within the monarchies, with Jordan, Morocco and Oman closer to the model of professional/institutionalized Arab armies (with these terms strongly qualified), in contrast to the specific militaries of the Gulf oil states, characterized with overspending in some dimensions (infrastructure and equipment), the maintenance of an understaffed (yet well-paid and “cocooned”) army and the overreliance on the American (or Western) security alliance. It shows that monarchies are not so alien to the military, though they maintain a specific composition. Whatever the differences (and violent encounters) with republics in their trajectory of political development in the two post-independence decades, both types of regimes, monarchies as well as republics, converged in similar authoritarian control after the 1970s. And this chapter also explores a new sense of military assertiveness after 2011 in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

This chapter describes the sample selection, interview methods, characteristics of the sample, and mixed methods of analysis. It begins with a description of violence and migration patterns over time within Syria. This leads to discussion of unique features of Syrian civilians who had become refugees in Jordan and Turkey at the time of fieldwork. After providing additional detail on characteristics of Syrian refugees within Turkey, it describes the interview methods. Then, it discusses who the sampling missed and descriptive statistics of the sample. It ends with discussion of the mixed methods of analysis.

This chapter analyses the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s discourse on the caliphate, the Islamic state and how this is applied in the kingdom’s context. As such, it shows the diversity of Islamist views on this matter and begins to give an idea of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s divisions that partly account for why scholars have drawn such different conclusions with regard to the ‘inclusion-moderation’ thesis.