ABSTRACT
As a graduate student in the early 1980s with an interest in both international relations as an academic discipline and the Middle East as a regional subject, I found myself in a bind. There were numerous, excellent narrative accounts o f international politics in the region. There were more than enough theories out there in the academic literature with which to contend. But the efforts to put the two together-regional realities and international relations theory-were few and far between. I began to envy my comparative politics colleagues, who could read all sorts o f theoretically informed accounts of the domestic politics of Middle Eastern countries. It was therefore literally a revelation when I read Paul Noble’s ‘The Arab System: Pressures, Constraints, and Opportunities.’1 Here was what I was looking for: a work that was properly attuned to the nuances o f the region’s politics, but at the same time sought to use theoretical concepts in international relations to provide a larger framework for understanding those nuances. I had found a model for how to write about the international relations o f the Middle East.
