ABSTRACT
Though a degree of abstraction is inevitable in any scientific approach, it is best grasped when it is rooted in the concrete situation and the main intellectual–social context of the Middle East. Three main dialectics divide specialists in explaining the region’s intellectual–social context, and they are often echoed at the level of the street. They are: Whether the region’s main characteristics/problems are to be explained by domestic factors or external ones. Is the region’s explanation to be primarily inside-out or outside-in? and specifically, and since this region continues to be conflict-ridden, how can we explain its (in)security problems, in order to deal with them? The debates also include whether such explanation is best served by focusing solely on the region, inspired by its “specific” characteristics, or alternatively by counting principally on the universal and tested concepts/methods of social theory and its various disciplines and joining the “scientific” enterprise of dissecting patterns and building generalizations.
