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My regular contribution to the late, lamented Qahwa Sada experiment was a Friday roundup of interesting academic-ish articles recently published about the Middle East.  That seems like a tradition worth continuing.  So without further ado, here are some interesting pieces which caught my eye this week (even if some of them were published earlier):

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My regular contribution to the late, lamented Qahwa Sada experiment was a Friday roundup of interesting academic-ish articles recently published about the Middle East.  That seems like a tradition worth continuing.  So without further ado, here are some interesting pieces which caught my eye this week (even if some of them were published earlier):

• Christopher Parker and Peter Moore, "The War Economy of Iraq" (Middle East Report).  One of the  best short pieces I’ve seen tracing the rise of Iraq’s underground economy in the 1990s and how it has been reconfigured since 2003.  I was particularly struck by the discussion of Jordan’s role in the Iraqi war economy. Highly recommended.
• Nathan Brown, "The Peace Process Has No Clothes" (Carnegie).  Offers valuable context for what American intervention has been about, and the extent to which American public debate has been divorced from the realities on the ground.
• Roundtable discussion of Ruling But Not Governing, by Steve Cook (TPM Cafe Book Club).
• "Iraqi Refugees in Syria." (Brookings)
• "Parting the Veil", or why the US should engage moderate Islamists.  Shadi Hamid (Democracy).
• James Shanahan and Erik Nisbet, "The Communication of Anti-Americanism". (US Institute for Peace). One of the first pieces which really tries to statistically assess effects of Arab media on attitudes towards America. 
• Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, "Correlates of Public Support for Suicide Terrorism in the Muslim World." Statistical analysis.  (USIP Working Paper)

Also, this might be a good time to point out a few new Middle East themed blogs by interesting folks, in case you haven’t already seen them:

• Hannah Allam, the fantastic McClatchey journalist now based in Cairo.
• Charles Levinson, a good journalist who used to contribute to the Arabist, is now in Gaza
• Daniel Levy, former Israeli official and now of the New America Foundation and Century Foundation, writing on Israeli-Palestinian affairs
• Faisal al-Qassem, the superstar al-Jazeera talk show host, has been maintaining a blog-like site for a while now (mostly in Arabic).