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Syria
Syria was once one of the Middle Easts most stable states. Today it is a country on its knees. Almost 200,000 people are estimated to have died in its bloody internal conflict and, as the violence intensifies, Syrias future looks bleak. In this timely book, Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syrias descent into civil war. He unravels the complex and multi-layered causes of the current political and military stalemate - from rebel fragmentation to the differing roles of international actors, and the rise of competing centers of power throughout the country. Rebel in-fighting and the lack of a centralizing authority, he contends, have exacerbated Syrias fragmentation and fragility. This, in turn, has aided the survival of the Assad regime, contributed to the upsurge of sectarianism, and led to a major humanitarian crisis as nine million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes. A resolution to the Syrian conflict seems unlikely in the short-term as the major actors remains committed to a military solution. As this situation persists, the continued fighting is reshaping Syrias borders and will have repercussions on the wider Middle East for decades to come.
Rethinking Hizballah
International Relations scholarship posits that legitimacy, authority and violence are attributes of states. However, groups like Hizballah clearly challenge this framing of global politics through its continued ability to exercise violence in the regional arena. Surveying the different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of state-society relations in Lebanon, this book presents a lucid examination of the socio-political conditions that gave rise to the Lebanese movement Hizballah from 1982 until the present. Framing and analysing Hizballah through the perspective of the 'resistance society'; an articulation of identity politics that informs the violent and non-violent political strate...
Syria
With more than 500,000 people killed and at least half the population displaced, Syria’s conflict is the most deadly of the twenty-first century. Russia’s decision to join the war has broken the long military and political stalemate but it looks unlikely to deliver any of the core demands that spawned the original uprising against the Ba’athist regime. In this fully revised second edition of his acclaimed text, Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syria’s descent into civil war, the subsequent stalemate, and the consequences of Russian military involvement after 2015. He unravels the complex and multi-layered drivers of the conflict and demonstrates how rebel fragmentation, ...
Sectarianization
An anatomy of the increasing sectarianization of conflicts in the Middle East, by some of the leading scholars writing on the region.
Governance in the Middle East and North Africa
Governance in the Middle East is topic of interest to scholars, activists and policy makers. The currently proposed book is intended to present the first comprehensive framework of the question of governance in the Middle East in its various forms and manifestations: political, economic, and government performance.
Imagined Identities
How are identities being forged during the age of globalization? This collection of essays, by scholars from various disciplines and regions of the world, discusses both the construction and deconstruction of identity in its engagement with culture, ethnicity, and nationhood. The authors explore the tension resulting from the desire to create a new cultural space for identities that are at once national, regional, linguistic, and religious. Among the wide-ranging approaches, Tanja Stampfl looks at the elusiveness of cultural identity in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner; Dawn Morais investigates issues of ethnicity and nationality in Malaysia’s tourism advertising; and Cathy Waegner explores ethnic identities as globalized market commodities. Throughout the volume, identity is approached from a variety of sites—fiction, news analysis, film, theme parks, and field work—to contribute new insight and perspective to the well-worn debate over what identity signifies in societies where the existence of minorities, both indigenous and immigrant, challenges the dominant group.
Shifting Geo-Economic Power of the Gulf
Bringing together for the first time distinguished Gulf experts to analyse the renewed geo-economic prominence of the Gulf states, this volume investigates some of the 'new power brokers' in the world economy: the oil-exporting states of the Gulf. The Gulf Cooperation Council's (GCC) members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, collectively have the largest proven oil reserves in the world and are among the world's largest oil-exporting states. Gulf Arab states are actively pursuing a variety of foreign investment strategies. Some of these investments are being managed by sovereign wealth funds, government investment corporations, and government-controlle...
The Europeanisation of the Western Balkans
This volume casts a fresh look on how the political spaces of the Western Balkan states (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania) are shaped, governed and transformed during the EU accession process. The contributors argue that EU conditionality in the Western Balkans does not work ‘effectively’ in terms of social change because rule transfer remains a ‘contested’ business, due to veto-players on the ground and strong legacies of the past. The volume examines specific policy areas, salient in the enlargement process and to a different degree incorporated in the accession criteria, as well as EU foreign policy in the spheres of post-conflict stabilisation, democratization and the rule of law promotion.
The International Relations of the Persian Gulf
Gregory Gause's masterful book is the first to offer a comprehensive account of the international politics in the Persian Gulf across nearly four decades. The story begins in 1971 when Great Britain ended its protectorate relations with the smaller states of the lower Gulf. It traces developments in the region from the oil 'revolution' of 1973–4 through the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf war of 1990–1 to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, bringing the story of Gulf regional politics up to 2008. The book highlights transnational identity issues, regime security and the politics of the world oil market, and charts the changing mix of interests and ambitions driving American policy. The author brings his experience as a scholar and commentator on the Gulf to this riveting account of one of the most politically volatile regions on earth.
Egypt
Egypt is one of the few great empires of antiquity that exists today as a nation state. Despite its extraordinary record of national endurance, the pressures to which Egypt currently is subjected and which are bound to intensify are already straining the ties that hold its political community together, while rendering ever more difficult the task of governing it. In this timely book, leading expert on Egyptian affairs Robert Springborg explains how a country with such a long and impressive history has now arrived at this parlous condition. As Egyptians become steadily more divided by class, religion, region, ethnicity, gender and contrasting views of how, by whom and for what purposes they should be governed, so their rulers become ever more fearful, repressive and unrepresentative. Caught in a downward spiral in which poor governance is both cause and consequence, Egypt is facing a future so uncertain that it could end up resembling neighboring countries that have collapsed under similar loads. The Egyptian "hot spot", Springborg argues, is destined to become steadily hotter, with ominous implications for its peoples, the Middle East and North Africa, and the wider world.
