What is the Middle East?

I'm thrilled to announce publication of my hopefully provocative new Element!

I know that there’s a lot happening out there in the world - the destruction of USAID, various Executive Orders, Netanyahu’s visit to Washington and more — and I’ll be blogging about it all soon. But today I’m just thrilled to announce the publication of What is the Middle East?: The Theory and Practice of Regions, the inaugural entry in the new Cambridge Elements in Middle East Politics series. It’s readable and downloadable for free for two weeks, and then available on request for anyone who wants it.

What is the Middle East? is a labor of love - the product of an intellectual journey which took shape through decades of teaching and researching the Middle East and building the POMEPS network to support scholarship on the region, evolved during the workshops and discussions which became Africa and the Middle East: Beyond the Divide, and took policy shape in my 2022 Foreign Affairs article on the limitations of the “Middle East” for policy. About a year ago, after a conversation with the editors of the new Element series, I launched into a full-blown research project that dug in to the long history of debates across disciplines about the area studies in general and the Middle East in particular.

My goal for this Element is that it will provoke serious thought about how to think about regions and promote transregional and cross-regional comparative work. My modest hope is that it ends up being adopted as the reading for Week 2 “What is the Middle East?” in almost any course on Middle East Politics. I love the Element model: 30,000 word pieces focused on core concepts for disciplines, optimized for classroom use, and able to dig into ideas in ways that are hard to do in most academic journal articles. I couldn’t be more excited to see mine out there for everyone to read and engage with — and, for the next two weeks, downloadable for free.

Here’s the abstract:

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.

It starts like this:

For much of the last fifteen years, I have directed the Middle East Studies M.A. Program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Like most of our peers, our program encompasses the Arab world, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. But almost every year, at least one student would want to focus on Afghanistan – fair enough, given America’s two decades of war there. I would have to tell them that Afghanistan fell under the rubric of the Asian Studies Program. But, despite the presence of an outstanding historian of Afghanistan on the faculty, the truth is that Afghanistan was an unwelcome stepchild there as well, in a program which had to cover the languages, politics, and economies of a vast region sprawling from China to Japan, East Asia to Southeast Asia, and even India.

But even if Asian Studies could handle Afghanistan, the answer would still be unsatisfying. Afghanistan, after all, hosted al-Qaeda at the time it planned and executed the 9/11/2001 attacks on America which ignited the Global War on Terror and so much more. Al-Qaeda itself was the offspring of officially tolerated Saudi Salafist activism, failed Egyptian jihadist insurgency, and the ugly aftermath of the Saudi-US-backed Mujahideen insurgency against Soviet occupation. The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 paved the way for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as the consolidation of America’s imperium across what was briefly called the Broader Middle East. As the Afghan war bogged down into nearly two decades of frustrating counter-insurgency, much of the campaign was coordinated and implemented from an American airbase in Qatar. In other words, little of the military and strategic history of the “Middle East” after 2001 could really be told without at least some reference to Afghanistan. And yet it remained stubbornly outside the remit of Middle East Studies institutions or expertise.

The exclusion of Afghanistan from the Middle East was only one of many puzzles and frustrations which I encountered as my research interests and professional programming evolved. A pivotal moment came from a workshop which I organized along with my colleagues Zachariah Mampilly and Hisham Aidi at Columbia University in February 2020, just before the COVID shutdowns began. The workshop focused on transregional connections and comparisons between Africa and the Middle East. It zeroed in on the historical processes by which regions had taken on a sort of ontological reality despite very little basis in objective reality. The Horn of Africa, for instance, is separated from the Arabian Peninsula by little more than an easily traversable – and long traversed – body of water; Oman once ruled Zanzibar, and Swahili remains an official language across the Gulf littoral states. The Sahara Desert may be a formidable physical landscape separating the North African coast from the rest of the continent, but it hardly blocked transit and trade; the historical connections between the Maghreb and the Sahel run deep, despite the best efforts of French colonialism to divide them. Meanwhile, Middle East scholars often told the story of the late Ottoman Empire in ways focused so tightly on the Great Arab Revolt and the rise of pan-Arabism that they ignored parallel processes across the European provinces of the Empire as well as the deep connections between the Arab provinces and British India, which often directly governed them.

In short, conventional maps of the “Middle East” increasingly seemed to me more of a barrier to understanding than an asset. That is not to discount the importance of local expertise and area knowledge, of course. Good scholarship on the countries and peoples of the region certainly required mastery of local languages, extended field research, and all the other conventional markers of area studies. But at the same time, I found it harder and harder to understand why certain countries were deemed comparable and others were not. Why should we understand all Arab countries as somehow comparable despite their very different colonial histories, economic characteristics, political systems, and local cultures? Why compare political mobilization in Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia while ignoring contemporaneous protests in East or West Africa? Is the Middle East really particularly war-prone when compared with, say, Central Africa or the Balkans? Does oil in the Middle East somehow matter differently than it does in Nigeria, Venezuela, or the United States? And, more broadly, what are the political and normative implications of dividing the countries of the Middle East from the broader Global South, implicitly or explicitly rendering their politics and aspirations as somehow unique?

There has been a long history of reflections on the concept of the Middle East, sprinkled across disciplines and journals, which informs the arguments in this Element (Bonine, Amanat, and Gasper 2012). Questioning the definition of our region, it turns out, is almost as hardy a perennial ritual of passage for Middle East Studies as is decrying its ostensible failures (Lynch, Schwedler, and Yom 2022). Those critical perspectives, from some of our most influential scholars across multiple fields – Nikki Keddie, Jerrold Green, Rashid Khalidi, Charles Kurtzman, Nile Green, Asef Bayat – share a remarkable consistency. Almost all point out the absence of linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or historical foundations for the grouping of states, the geopolitical origins of the concept (usually with reference to Admiral Mahan and the rise of American naval power), and almost all ultimately conclude with a pragmatic acceptance of the regional definition in order to get on with things. I agree with and build upon those past examinations, but hope to do something more. In this Element, I argue for taking the contested definition of the region as itself an important topic of inquiry, dig deep into the costs and benefits for both policy and theory of particular definitions of the region, and suggest how different definitions of the region become useful for specific research questions and political projects rather than more or less closely approximating some objective truth.

The Element is divided into five parts. It starts by explaining why “the Middle East” is so problematic as a region, highlighting the tension between its seemingly clear incoherence and the political patterns which suggest that there’s actually something there. It reviews a long history of such questioning from across disciplines, the Cold War origins of the production of knowledge about regions, and the political science debate within a broader set of disciplinary debates about the value of area studies. It then considers different ways of thinking about and operationalizing region: from the outside in (American foreign policy, great power competition, political science conventions, etc) and from the inside out (shared language, pan-Arab and other identity politics and so forth). It then turns to the political science literature to show how assumptions about region have helped to produce misleading conclusions about a wide range of critically important questions. I’ll be surprised if you don’t find at least one of these sections controversial!

It is currently downloadable for free and once the two week window ends, and you’re encouraged to take advantage of that. After that, you can always email me for a PDF copy and I’ll be very happy to share. I’m excited to see this out in the world, and look forward to seeing how people respond to its provocations!

Also….

On this week’s Middle East Political Science Podcast, I talked with Diana Greenwald about her fantastic new book Mayors in the Middle, published in my Columbia University Press series last year. I reviewed and discussed this fantastic book a few months ago, and now you can hear Greenwald talk about the book herself:

Elsewhere in the MENA Academy

There’s a new issue of Middle East Report — always cause for celebration and close attention. This issue focuses on the ‘axis of resistance’: the constellation of regional forces fighting Israeli domination and, with it, broader US imperialism. Several contributors explore the roots of the so-called Axis of Resistance and its various members—whether states, militias or political parties. They consider the tensions and uncertainties raised by Israel’s expanding regional war over the past 15 months and what has followed: from Iran’s relative inaction, to Israeli attacks on critical Axis infrastructure and leadership, to the shutting down of Jordan’s garment industry due to the Houthi blockade. Other pieces locate resistance beyond the Axis—in the everyday ecological practices of Lebanon’s border villages, the post-1967 political theater of Syrian playwright Sadallah Wannous and the long struggle against colonial domination through energy sovereignty in Palestine. The issue was completed before January 27, 2025 and the return of over 300,000 Palestinians to northern Gaza after more than a year of genocidal destruction, and before the release of hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners in the first phase of the ceasefire. But the scenes of return—along with the joyous celebrations of prisoners’ homecomings—are a reminder of who pays the highest cost for resistance as well as its ongoing, enduring presence on the frontlines of colonial violence.

And, finally, a few great articles which have recently appeared, including by POMEPS network members and friends:

Kali Rubaii and Mark Griffiths, “Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up,” Human Organization (January 2025). People engaged in post-war clean-up activities endure a protracted encounter with war: air, soils, and water are toxified, and human health is depleted by effects such as congenital anomalies and chronic disease. In this article, we ask three questions: How are we to conceptualize “clean-up” in the context of war’s toxicity? How does war appear from the perspective of clean-up? And thus, how are we led to more critical understandings of war’s violence in a “post-war” period? We address these questions via examples from fieldwork on post-war clean-up in Iraq, arguing that clean-up does not reduce harm but instead defers and disperses military violence. We further argue that this prompts critical intervention around three key themes: the bodies of war, the materials of war, and the time-spaces of war. In conclusion, we emphasize the urgency of understanding clean-up as a harmful and constitutive aspect of war.

Janis Julien Grimm, “Revolutionary burnout: Subjective crisis responses and the demobilization of mass protest in Lebanon,” Mediterranean Politics (January 2025): Studies on the outcomes of the Arab uprisings have largely focused on protest-exogenous causes of revolutionary failure. By contrast, endogenous drivers of demobilization remain understudied, despite growing evidence on the role of microlevel dynamics in making and breaking revolutionary momentum. This article addresses this gap by exploring the triangular relation between shifts in the structural environment of revolutionary movements, the lifeworld of those affected by these shifts and organizational dynamics on the meso level. Based on a combination of event data and narrative interviews with protagonists of the Lebanese Thawra uprising of 2019, it recentres the debate on revolutionary trajectories on the agents of change themselves. Drawing on relational and emotion-sensitive approaches in social movement studies, I argue that complex subjective meaning making processes to navigate multiple social and political crises are crucial in understanding demobilization in post-revolutionary Lebanon. Formerly committed activists responded to increasing uncertainty through a combination of adaptation, disengagement and abeyance. These vectors of demobilization translated their subjective accounts of lived events into the organizational arena of the Thawra. By fuelling fragmentation, channelling activism into divergent avenues and supporting individual exit from politics they catalysed a decline of protest that is described here as a ‘revolutionary burnout’.

Hanna Berg, “Five-Star Humanitarianism? Navigating Gulf Aid in the Aftermath of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan,” Middle East Critique (January 2025). ABSTRACT: This article examines the role of Gulf aid in shaping understandings of humanitarian governance in Jordan. Through ethnographic engagement, it attends to how humanitarian workers reimagine their practices through the activities of the Emirates Red Crescent (ERC), especially in the Mrajeeb Al Fhood Camp—commonly known as the Emirati Camp. By situating the notion of ‘basic human needs’ at the centre of the analysis, the article addresses how local humanitarian workers understand the temporal and spatial conditions generated by the humanitarian structure and neoliberal economy in Jordan. In doing so, the article suggests that the UAE not only creates its own geopolitical ‘grand compromise’ in comparison to the Global North and the UNHCR but also influences practitioners’ understanding of humanitarianism in the region. This offers an analytical perspective on the role of Gulf countries in the humanitarian field beyond the common focus on their foreign aid as a quiet tool of political and economic influence in the larger Mashriq.

Tamirace Fakhoury, “(Un)usual spaces of refuge? The viewer’s perspective and the politics of knowledge on refugee-hosting geographies,” Migration Studies (January 2025). ABSTRACT: Refugee-hosting geographies represent complex sites of encounter where power and knowledge intersect with territoriality. While they cannot be inherently ‘unusual’, they become so when they deviate from dominant discourses, categories and practices that seek to impose order and meaning within the global refugee regime. The introduction to the Special Issue sets the stage for the collection of papers by conceptualizing (un)usual spaces of refuge. It explores how complex entanglements between policy and knowledge production cast certain geographies of refuge as ‘unusual’, obscuring their role, relevance, and challenges within the global refugee regime. Drawing on perspectives from critical geopolitics, refugee studies and international relations, the collection seeks to achieve three aims. First, it pluralizes perspectives on refugee-hosting geographies beyond the core and periphery and the North/South divide. Second, it calls for mapping everyday cartographies that reflect refugees’ experiences of placemaking. Third, it highlights how policy assumptions about ‘interim’ versus ‘preferred’ geographies can obscure understanding of how refugees perceive durable solutions and destinations beyond the ‘territorial trap’.

Jasmin Lilian Diab, “Displaced in a Land of Denial: Who is an IDP in Lebanon’s Reluctant War?” Migration and Development (January 2025). ABSTRACT: This study examines the Lebanese government’s strategic indifference towards internally displaced persons (IDPs) from South Lebanon, especially after the October 2023 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Using in-depth interviews and participant observations, the research highlights how displaced individuals navigate their precarious situations without formal recognition and support. By not acknowledging IDP status, the government evades legal and moral responsibilities, forcing reliance on informal networks and humanitarian aid. This perpetuates IDPs’ invisibility and marginalisation, hindering their ability to meet basic needs and rebuild lives. The study underscores the power dynamics and state-to-citizen relations shaping IDPs’ treatment in Lebanon.