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More than 40 years ago, recognizing that higher education would have to take responsibility for educating Americans about other world cultures and societies, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (later known as the Higher Education Act). Title VI of this act has provided extensive support for foreign languages and area studies development in the nation's universities and colleges. As a result, millions of Americans have been able to acquire knowledge about other parts of the world. Today, there are new issues, demands, and perspectives. Americans are more likely than ever to encounter different cultures, business practices, histories, ideologies, and ways of life. In addition, ...
Aftermaths offers compelling new ideas on exile, migration, and diaspora. Ten contributors-well-established scholars and promising new voices-working in different disciplines and drawing from diverse backgrounds present rich case studies from around the world. Seeking fresh perspectives on the movement of people and ideas, the essays take on a wide range of subjects such as the influence of religion upon diasporic consciousness, the conflict between the local and the transnational, the fate of historical tragedy in globalization, the reinvention of social bonds across migrations, and the agoni.
Economic aid is one of the cornerstones of the Egyptian-American relationship, and plays a significant role in promoting US policy objectives in the Middle East. Focusing on the latter half of Hosni Mubarak's rule, Dina Jadallah argues that, through its aid policy, the US has attempted to use a reforming and democratising narrative to transform Egypt into a stable "market democracy" that would be aligned with US interests in the region. This aim has been pursued in conjunction with one that promoted a comprehensive "warm peace" with Israel. By highlighting the opposition within Egypt to US aid, Jadallah analyses the key issues that came to the fore during the 2010/11 protests in the country and led to the downfall of Mubarak. Extending her analysis into the post-revolutionary period, the author provides interviews with regime insiders and prominent critics, inside state institutions and outside, who actively challenged the regime. This enables her to assess the different perceptions of US aid both under Mubarak and in the current political situation, contributing to an incisive analysis of modern Egypt and its relations with its superpower ally in the region.
In conducting political science research today, one's methodology is of paramount concern. Yet, despite the obvious chasm between theory and practice that all scholars experience in the field, there are no specific guidebooks on meeting the methodological and ethical challenges that fieldwork presents. Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa helps fill this vacuum, focusing specifically on doing research in the one of the most important regions in contemporary world politics. Janine A. Clark and Francesco Cavatorta have gathered together a large and diverse group of researchers who study the region and focus on methodological "lessons learned" from their first hand experiences of employing a variety of research methods while conducting fieldwork. The contributors also look at the challenges of conducting field research in a variety of contexts, such as in areas of violence, and using research methods such as interviewing and ethnography. This volume will therefore be an invaluable companion book to more standard methods books and a useful tool, not just for Middle East scholars, but for all researchers conducting research in complex settings.
In T. E. Lawrence’s classic memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence of Arabia claimed that he inspired a “dream palace” of Arab nationalism. What he really inspired, however, was an American idea of the area now called the Middle East that has shaped U.S. interventions over the course of a century, with sometimes tragic consequences. America’s Dream Palace brings into sharp focus the ways U.S. foreign policy has shaped the emergence of expertise concerning this crucial, often turbulent, and misunderstood part of the world. America’s growing stature as a global power created a need for expert knowledge about different regions. When it came to the Middle East, the U.S. government wa...
In December 2010, the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable vendor set off a wave of protests that have been termed the "Arab Spring." These protests upended the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen while unsettling numerous other regimes throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Dafna Hochman Rand was a senior policy planner in the U.S. State Department as the uprisings unfolded. In Roots of the Arab Spring, she gives one of the first accounts of the systemic underlying forces that gave birth to the Arab Spring. Drawing on three years of field research conducted before the protests, Rand shows how experts overlooked signs that political change was stirring in the region and ...
Since 2011, the Arab world has seen a number of autocrats, including leaders from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, fall from power. Yet, in the wake of these political upheavals, only one state, Tunisia, transitioned successfully from authoritarianism to democracy. Opposition parties forged a durable and long-term alliance there, which supported democratization. Similar pacts failed in Morocco and Mauritania, however. In Why Alliances Fail, Buehler explores the circumstances under which stable, enduring alliances are built to contest authoritarian regimes, marshaling evidence from coalitions between North Africa’s Islamists and leftists. Buehler draws on nearly two years of Arabic fieldwo...
The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation. Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with postcolonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the field to how anthropological work on civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated analytic approaches. A vision common to all the contributors is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of Euro-American academic trends and scholars.