MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize

In his carefully written, well researched paper, "Labour Emigration and State Strength during the Arab Cold War," Gerasimos Tsourapas argues that labor emigration from Egypt during the Nasser period played an important role in projecting the regime's political vision in Africa and the Middle East. His analysis critically engages current literature on labor emigration, challenging prevailing theoretical paradigms in migration studies that tend to focus on how emigration solely enhances states' material capacities. He maintains that, instead of (or perhaps, in addition to) the economic value or "safety net" that emigration provided to the state, the emigration of Egyptian professionals "allowed for Egypt's 'soft power' to be exercised" through Egyptians' political activism abroad.

 

Providing intriguing data on how the Nasser regime used émigré professionals such as educators and doctors to serve normative, foreign policy goals, he offers a nuanced explanation as to why host countries "consent[ed] to subject themselves to potential political influence." Mr. Tsourapas manages to mine a diverse range of primary and secondary sources, despite the difficulties involved in obtaining access to data on a topic that is defined as a "''security issue' by state elites." The paper makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the Middle East and labor migration, and convincingly demonstrates the centrality of labor migration in analyses of the intra-Arab politics of the "Arab Cold War."

 

Ellen Fleischmann, Chair, University of Dayton 

Charles Haberl, Rutgers University 

Selim Kuru, University of Washington