ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the state as a political-geographic phenomenon. It examines a number of topics of a more general global, regional, and/or historical nature after first putting the region into the broader context of the Heartland of the Tricontinental Hub discussed which provides a brief statistical sketch of the countries immediately surrounding our sixteen-nation core. Nine Middle East states are republics, six are monarchies, and one—the UAE—is a unique hybrid. Most of the polities entered the second half of the twentieth century as traditional societies and monarchies. Religious movements have strongly impacted the Middle East, and they are of crucial importance in the regional geopolitical equation today. The Islamic state was a theocracy, and religion and politics—"church and state"—are congenitally linked in Muslim concepts. Early geopolitical concepts of "Heartland" and "World-Island" appeared in Sir Halford J. Mackinder's paper of 1904 with his conceptual modifications in 1919 and 1943.
