What is the Middle East?

The Theory and Practice of Regions

Marc Lynch author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:20th Feb '25

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What is the Middle East? cover

This Element challenges prevailing concepts of the Middle East as a region with implications for scholarship, policy, and the public.

The Middle East has traditionally been understood as a world region by policy, political science, and the public. This Element examines how the current conception of the Middle East emerged from colonialism and the Cold War, placing it within both global politics and trends within American higher education.The Middle East has traditionally been understood as a world region by policy, political science, and the public. Its borders are highly ambiguous, however, and rarely explicitly justified or theorized. This Element examines how the current conception of the Middle East emerged from colonialism and the Cold War, placing it within both global politics and trends within American higher education. It demonstrates the strategic stakes of different possible definitions of the Middle East, as well as the internal political struggles to define and shape the identity of the region. It shows how unexamined assumptions about the region as a coherent and unified entity have distorted political science research by arbitrarily limiting the comparative universe of cases and foreclosing underlying politics. It argues for expanding our concept of the Middle East to better incorporate transregional connections within a broader appeal for comparative area studies.

ISBN: 9781009557887

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 6mm

Weight: 252g

78 pages