Halliday, Fred (2012) The Middle East, interstate norms and intervention: the great anomaly. In: Stetter, Stephan, (ed.) The Middle East and Globalization: Encounters and Horizons. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 135 - 152. ISBN 9781137031754
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Throughout the past decades of writing on the international relations of the Middle East, considerable emphasis has been laid on locating the events in this region and the policies of individual states within patterns of global power and interstate conduct. Thus historic frameworks that viewed the region in terms of relations between religious and/or civilizational blocs (“Islam,” “the West,” “the Sick Man of Europe,” etc.) or of long-term environmental and climatic factors (Oriental despotism, desert societies, etc.) gave way, after 1920, to analyses that set the international relations of the region within the prevailing international/global context of the period: first, colonialism; then, the 1930s and World War II; next, the Cold War; and finally, since the end of the Cold War in 1991, “globalization.” Such an emphasis on global context and global trends is, evidently, salutary—both to identify structures of global power that transcend the region and its actors, shaping and limiting their actions, and, by introducing a comparative element, to question the tendency of all or nearly all who write on, let alone participate in, regional politics to take the Middle East as in some way sui generis—as singular or unique—in regard to the incidence of nationalism or religious fundamentalism and the role of the armed forces or terrorists, not to mention the occurrence of interstate wars. If there is one overriding and abiding error in nearly all social science work on the Middle East—in International Relations (IR) as in politics, sociology, or economics—it is the failure to set this region, and its associated political and social behavior, within a comparative perspective. Each region, indeed each state, in the world is, of course, different, as is every individual—but nowhere near as different as they and their friends and enemies pretend to be (Halliday 2005).
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/97811370317... |
| Additional Information: | © 2012 The Editor |
| Divisions: | International Relations |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JZ International relations |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Feb 2013 10:23 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Jan 2024 07:00 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/48703 |
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