ABSTRACT
Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the Handbook problematizes Middle East politics through an interdisciplinary prism, seeking a melioristic account of the field. Thematically organized, the chapters address political, social, and historical questions by showcasing both theoretical and empirical insights, all of which are represented in a style that ease readers into sophisticated induction in the Middle East.
It positions the didactic at the centre of inquiry. Contributions by forty-four scholars, both veterans and newcomers, rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis. Substantive themes include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Like any field of knowledge, the Middle East is constituted by texts, authors, and readers, but also by the cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts within which diverse intellectual inflections help construct (write–speak) academic meaning, knowing, and practice. By denaturalizing notions of singularity of authorship or scholarship, the Handbook plants a dialogic interplay animated by multi-vocality, multi-modality, and multi-disciplinarity.
Targeting graduate students and young scholars of political and social sciences, the Handbook is significant for understanding how the Middle East is written and re-written, read and re-read (epistemology, methodology), and for how it comes to exist (ontology).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|148 pages
Knowledge frames and horizons
chapter 2|49 pages
Middle of where? East of what?
chapter 7|12 pages
Studying the international relations of the Arabian Peninsula/Persian Gulf
part II|73 pages
Towards re-conceptualizations of the democratic and the authoritarian
chapter 11|17 pages
Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa
chapter 12|19 pages
‘Economic reform’ since the 1980s
chapter 13|12 pages
Overcoming exceptionalism
part III|75 pages
The secular and the religious
chapter 17|12 pages
Sectarian fault lines in the Middle East
part IV|59 pages
Gendered relations and realities
chapter 22|13 pages
Islam and resistance in the Middle East
chapter 24|14 pages
Gender
part V|92 pages
Borderline politics
part VI|98 pages
Conceptual categories
chapter 38|14 pages
The theoretical and methodological traps in studying sectarianism in the Middle East
part VII|71 pages
Navigating the field