Acknowledgments

This book grew out of a series of conversations during the 2016 convening of the Yale Law School’s Middle East Legal Studies Seminar, which has long provided a wonderful forum for us to come together annually to join discussions with leading experts from the Middle East and North Africa. We are grateful to the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, for hosting the workshop that formally initiated this project in May 2017. That workshop brought together a group of scholars and interlocutors, some of whom are authors of chapters in this volume, to debate the degree to which decentralization might serve as a framework for addressing the challenges faced in the region in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. In June 2018, we convened a second workshop where early drafts of most of the chapters included in this volume were first presented at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, with generous support from the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Promise Institute of Human Rights at UCLA Law. The participants in both workshops provided constructive suggestions for particular papers and invaluable feedback for the conceptual organization of this volume. We would particularly like to thank Zaid al-Ali, Stephanie Koury, Andrew March, John McGarry, Haila al-Mekaimi, and Balakrishnan Menon for their input at an early point in this project. In addition, we would like to thank the participants of the UCLA Law School Faculty Workshop for constructive comments on an early draft of the theoretical framework for the volume, and audience members at several panels where we presented draft chapters at the Middle East Studies Association annual conferences of 2018 and 2019, for their helpful questions; and the participants of the Northern California International Law Scholars workshop in 2020 for their generous feedback on our concluding chapter. We are grateful to Abdallah Ali, Ahmed Ali, Jordan Hutchings, Melis Kilic, Matthew McDonald, Daniel Michaelsen, and Brittany Newell for their excellent research assistance; to Sherry Yuan at UCLA and Stevey Clement and Casandra Fernandez at McGeorge for administrative assistance with the workshops; and especially to Tom Randall at Cambridge University Press, with whom it has been a pleasure to work on this volume. Finally, we thank Jean Marie, Tal, and Ayla for their patience, encouragement, and love, without which we could not have completed this project.