The Middle Eastern Regional Order

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Perthes ◽  
Hanns W. Maull
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World War ◽  
Regional Powers ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
Arab States ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Us Intervention

The Middle East has long been dominated by conflict interactions, both among Arab states and with the non-Arab regional powers Israel and Iran. Yet despite much violence and wars the old order in the Middle East—established at the end of World War I—was remarkably stable until 2011, when it disintegrated as a result of the “Arab spring.” The principal cause for this has been the weakness of the Arab states. Outside powers have been invited into the region to compensate for those weaknesses, but they have also exploited them. The disastrous US intervention in Iraq 2003 for a while dampened the willingness of outside powers to intervene, but since the intervention in Libya 2011 there has been a return to interventionism. None of these has been able, however, to overcome the principal dilemma of the region: the weakness of the Arab states.

“NATIONALISM” AND KURDISH NOTABLES IN THE LATE OTTOMAN–EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakan Özoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World War ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Hard Data ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Late Ottoman

The era culminating in World War I saw a transition from multinational empires to nation-states. Large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman searched for ways to cope with the decline of their political control, while peoples in these empires shifted their political loyalties to nation-states. The Ottoman Empire offers a favorable canvas for studying new nationalisms that resulted in many successful and unsuccessful attempts to form nation-states. As an example of successful attempts, Arab nationalism has received the attention that it deserves in the field of Middle Eastern studies.1 Students have engaged in many complex debates on different aspects of Arab nationalism, enjoying a wealth of hard data. Studies on Kurdish nationalism, however, are still in their infancy. Only a very few scholars have addressed the issue in a scholarly manner.2 We still have an inadequate understanding of the nature of early Kurdish nationalism and its consequences for the Middle East in general and Turkish studies in particular. Partly because of the subject's political sensitivity, many scholars shy away from it. However, a consideration of Kurdish nationalism as an example of unsuccessful attempts to form a nation-state can contribute greatly to the study of nationalism in the Middle East.

The Troubled Course of Secularism in the Modern Middle East

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Salem
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the troubled evolution of secularism in the modern Middle East, focusing mainly on the Arab world but subsuming elements of the Turkish, Iranian, and Israeli experiences. It looks at secularism as a purposeful ideology and movement but also at secularization as a sociohistorical process that accompanied modernization, urbanization, and the consolidation of Middle Eastern states. The chapter describes a period of secularizing activism that can be seen among many Middle Eastern states from the end of World War I through the 1960s, then describes a period of secularist retreat and the resurgence of Islamism from the late 1970s to the 2010s. The present moment is one of uncertainty, in which Islamism has lost its luster in many contexts but secularism also is not part of a well-articulated or compelling vision of the future.

Regional order and regional powers in the Middle East and North Africa

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Quero ◽  
Eduard Soler
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Great Power ◽  
English School ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Regional Powers ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Impact

This chapter discusses whether and to what extent the internal political changes unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa since 2011 have triggered a shift in the subsystem’s regional order and its institutions. Drawing on the English School and constructivist theories of International Relations, it firstly discusses the impact of the Arab Spring on the ‘constitutional structure’ of the regional order. Next, it examines if we have witnessed a change in some of the fundamental institutions in place in the MENA region (alliances and amity/enmity cleavages, non-intervention, multilateralism and bilateralism, and great power management). It argues that slight changes in the fundamental institutions since the Arab Spring generally respond to a more fundamental systemic change that took place in the context of the 2003 war in Iraq. However, despite attempts to challenge it, the constitutional structure of the regional order remains intact.

Remaking the Middle East: The Prospects for Democracy and Stability

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 163-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Local Traditions

This essay is an exploration of the ramifications for the Middle East of the profound transformations in global politics implied in the end of the Cold War and the birth of a new, American-dominated world order. In doing so, Anderson takes up an issue posed since the birth of many of today's Middle Eastern states after World War I: the influence of great-power politics in the Middle East and within the individual states of the region which, added to local traditions, result in an explosive mix. She concludes with the prospects for Middle East democracy in the new world order.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

The Government of War

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-793
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
State System ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Services ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
The Government

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

The Kingdom of Jordan: The Eye of the Hurricane in a Turbulent Middle East

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. p65
Author(s):  
Sri Michael Das
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Eastern Oyster ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
World War ◽  
Hostage Crisis ◽  
The World ◽  
Anwar Sadat

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, situated not only physically at the center of the world has also been the center of some of its most significant moments. These involved the Kingdom’s role in supporting peace between Israel and Egypt alongside former President and Humanitarian Jimmy Carter. Carter, demonized for his Southern style and failures in the Middle East, especially during the Iran Hostage Crisis, engineered one of its greatest diplomatic feats ever: Peace between ancient enemies, Israel and Egypt. Their long-standing vendetta which had real consequences for centuries nearly moved the modern world to the brink of World War 3. In stepped President Carter, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and eventually, the Royal Family of Jordan and all that changed. In this paper I would like to explore the personalities, roles and conditions that brought them together, re-celebrate their achievements, and challenge the world to model their characters and repeat their successes. Once again or even still, Israel is the pearl in the Middle Eastern oyster, and a weary world is eager move on. It is my hope my research will give us an inkling where to begin a process that could once again prevent a Global Conflict.

The Great War of the Postcards

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.

Making History to/as the Main Pillar of Identity: The Assyrian Paradigm

Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 631-646
Author(s):  
Bülent Özdemi̇r
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Segment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions

In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document