What is the Middle East?
The Theory and Practice of Regions

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

Marc Lynch (Author)

9781009557887, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 February 2025

78 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1 cm, 0.26 kg

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.

1. Introduction: Is the Middle East a Region?
2. What is the Middle East?
3. The Middle East from the Outside In
4. The Middle East From the Inside Out
5. The Middle East and Comparative Area Studies.

Subject Areas: Sociology [JHB]