This week I had the pleasure of talking with Marc Lynch about his fantastic new book/Element, ‘What is the Middle East? The Theory and Practice of Regions’. In addition to his teaching at George Washington University, Marc leads the Project on Middle East Political Science, which runs a fantastic podcast, and he also publishes the Abu Aardvark MENA Academy on Substack, which you absolutely should be subscribing to.
This book - uh, Element - clocks in at around 30,000 words, or a 71-page PDF. I read it in one evening, and then spent the next two days talking about it with my colleagues. For a short book it packs a lot of thought-provoking insights, and if you’re teaching a Middle East-focused undergraduate course it would be great for your syllabus. I downloaded it when it came out so it was free; I see it’s not available as a free download on the landing page anymore, but I also see that Marc wrote on his Substack that its “available on request for anyone who wants it” so drop him a line and I’m sure he’ll be happy to share it.
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.
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