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'A powerful corrective' Guardian 'This should be compulsory reading' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads ‘For anyone interested in the future of Islam, both in Britain and the Islamic world, this is an important book’ The Times The gulf between Islam and the West is widening. A faith rich with strong values and traditions, observed by nearly two billion people is seen by the West as something to be feared rather than understood. Sensational headlines and hard-line policies spark enmit...

This book enhances our understanding of 'the popular' in the study of politics through a critical examination of the uses and constructions of 'the people', from the establishment of the Turkish Republic to the present. It proposes ways of reading the insertion and operationalisation of the notion of 'the people' as a concept, a political subject, the object of policy and politics over the past century. The author assesses the ways 'the people' have been shaped by the history of the republic and...

Discussions of modernity-or alternative and multiple modernities-often hinge on the question of secularism, especially how it travels outside its original European context. Too often, attempts to answer this question either imagine a universal model derived from the history of Western Europe, which neglects the experience of much of the world, or emphasize a local, non-European context that limits the potential for comparison. In The Politics of Secularism, Murat Akan reframes the question of se...

This edited volume presents a detailed account of the dynamics of socioeconomic contention in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses what has happened to the socioeconomic grievances that played a key role in the mass mobilizations of 2010 and 2011. The book is based on an original data set of socioeconomic protests in the two countries and on in-depth case studies that cover the two most important types of socioeconomic contention: labor prot...

This series examines the major historical topics through a mixture of narrative and analysis of the key issues involved. It aims to encourage handling and assessment of original historical material. This volume explains how the modern political map of the Middle East has developed since 1918, from the Ottoman Empire to the British and French mandated territory, the creation of independent states and the foundation of Israel in 1948 with subsequent land wars between Israel and its neighbours. The...

This book examines the mobilization, role, and trajectory of women rescuers and perpetrators during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While much has been written about the victimization of women during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, very little has been said about women who rescued targeted victims or perpetrated crimes against humanity. This book explores and analyzes the role played by women who exercised agency as rescuers and as perpetrators during the genocide in Rwanda. As women, they took acti...

Islamic movements in North Africa have historically been distinguished from their counterparts in other parts of the Arab world because they have demonstrated a marked willingness to work within the political system and have at times even been officially recognized and allowed to participate in local and national elections. As a result, Islamic thinkers from the Maghrib have produced important writing about the role of Islam and the state, democracy, and nonviolent change. In this book, Emad Sha...

The purpose of this book is to narrate important, dynamic events that have taken place in the Indo-U.S. relations, beginning from 1943 to 2013. This includes the American role in India's independence, the Cold War, demise of the Soviet Union, resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, terrorists' attack of American cities in 2001, decline of American power, rise of India, and rise of China. The study is confined to only three areas: terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear energy. The defining m...

The book aims to counter the normative functioning of creativity in contemporary capitalism with a plethora of alternatives to radical creative practices. In the first part, titled "Creative Capitalism", five authors analyze the forms of contemporary capitalism: on the one hand, there are new ways of working which include flexibility, mobility, and especially precarity; on the other, there are new forms of recovery and accumulation. In the second part, titled "Multitudinous Creativities: Radica...

What does US aid "buy" in the Middle East? Drawing on extensive primary source research, this book examines the role and consequences of US aid to three countries in the Middle East. The author argues that the political survival strategies of incumbent leaders in Egypt, Israel, and Jordan shaped not only the type of aid that these countries received from the US, but also its developmental and geopolitical impact. Leaders who relied heavily on distributing selective benefits to their ruling coali...

What are the still-unknown horizons of world thought? This book brings together prominent scholars from varying disciplines to speculate on this obscure question and the many crossroads that face intellectuals in our contemporary era and its aftermath. The result is a collection of "manifestos" that contemplate a potential global future for thinking itself, venturing across some of the most marginalized sectors of East and West (with particular emphasis on the Middle Eastern and Islamicate) in...

Arab migration is not just a feature of recent instabilities in the Middle East. The Lebanese and Syrians have a long established history of migration to Africa, North and South America as well as Europe, while North African Arabs have long established links to France. The Yemeni community in Britain is one of the most established and yet least known of all migrant groupings. Yemenis began settling in British ports at the beginning of the 20th century, and after World War II they became part of...

In April 1997, Egyptian President Mubarak and U.S. Vice President Gore agreed to explore the possibility of creating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Egypt and the United States. The very idea of such an agreement has been met by controversy and skepticism from critics in both countries. The authors of this book, however, believe that the case for considering an FTA between the U.S. and Egypt rests on solid economic and political grounds. An agreement could help promote Egyptian economic ref...

From the chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal comes a deeply reported exploration of the decades-long power struggle between Iran and the United States that led to a historic (and potentially disastrous) nuclear deal. For more than a decade, the United States has been engaged in a war with Iran as momentous as any other in the Middle East--a war all the more significant as it has largely been hidden from public view. Through a combination of economic sanctions, global...

President Barack Obama’s first trip abroad in his second term took him to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he despondently admitted to those waiting for words of encouragement, “It is a hard slog to work through all of these issues.” Contrast this gloomy assessment with Obama’s optimism on the second day of his first term, when he appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace, boldly asserting that his administration would “actively...

This book examines the unintended consequences of top-down reforms in Iran, analysing how the Iranian reformist governments (1997-2005) sought to utilise gradual reforms to control independent activism, and how citizens responded to such a disciplinary action. While the governments successfully 'set the field' of permitted political participation, part of the civil society that took shape was unexpectedly independent. Despite being a minority, independent activists were not marginal: without the...

On March 15, 2006, members from both parties in Congress supported the creation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to review the situation on the ground and propose strategies for the way forward. For more than eight months, the Study Group met with military officers, regional experts, academics, journalists, and high-level government officials from America and abroad. Participants included George W. Bush and members of his cabinet; Bill Clinton; Jalal Talabani; Nouri Kamal al-Maliki; Generals J...

The late Israeli Foreign Minister, Prime Minister and President Shimon Peres was a towering figure in Israeli and Middle Eastern politics. But what drove the hawkish statesman behind Israel’s nuclear deterrence and early settlement policy to stake his political reputation on peace negotiations with the Arab world and the PLO, Israel’s sworn enemy? In this insider’s account, written by Avi Gil, Peres’s close confidant over almost 30 years, we witness firsthand the tense moments during the histor...

In 1962 Gary Snyder, with his wife, the poet Joanne Kyger, joined Allen Ginsberg and his companion Peter Orlovsky for a long trip to India and surrounding countries. As always, Snyder kept extensive journals of his travels and, in this particular case, also wrote the whole account in one long letter to his sister. It was an amazing trip, and one that eventually took on legendary status as an iconic Beat Voyage. Complete with slides and photographs, Passage Through India takes us on a journey tha...

Eric Rouleau was one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation, a status he owed to his extraordinary career, which began when Hubert Beuve-Mery, director of Le Monde, charged him with covering the Near and Middle East. In 1963, Rouleau was invited by Gamal Abd al-Nasser to interview him in Cairo, a move which was not lost on the young Rouleau-going through him, a young Egyptian Jew who had been exiled from Egypt in late 1951, shortly before the Free Officers coup, was a means to ren...