Regions in IR Theory

Regions and regionalism were central to the foundation of post–World War II IR theory and political science. A robust literature examined the emergent European experiment with integration, and from the start speculated about the possibilities of replicating that liberal institutionalist design in other world regions. IR theorists in the 1950s and 1960s routinely examined regions as subunits of the global order, conceptualizing regions such as the Middle East as “subordinate international systems” (Binder Reference Binder1958), “regional international politics” (Thompson Reference Thompson1973) and “regional subsystems” (Cantori and Spiegel Reference Cantori and Spiegel1969; Reference Cantori and Spiegel1973). Comparing these subordinate regional systems was a growth industry, meriting, for instance, an International Studies Quarterly special issue in 1973. Cantori and Spiegel (Reference Cantori and Spiegel1973) described regions in terms of a core, a periphery, and an intrusive system (i.e. external powers) in ways quite similar to Buzan and Waever’s later explication of regional security complexes, fleshing out those conceptions with a set of “pattern variables” (the balance of power, the nature of communications, the nature and degree of cohesion, and the structure of relations). The regional substructure of international relations was largely taken for granted as the medium through which Cold War bipolarity flowed, with area studies charged with explaining the particularities of regional experience as part of a broader international contest for influence, power, and security. The study of regions, as Thompson (Reference Thompson1973) observed decades before the area studies controversy rocked political science, presented “an opportunity for the integration of the findings of area specialists and international relations students.”

Even as the literature on region developed, however, it remained something of a truism that “regions” represent an amorphous category which typically fails to capture any sort of objective reality about the lived experience, political dynamics, or security concerns of those who live within them. Russett (Reference Russett1967) proposed that regions should be defined by “geographic proximity, social and cultural homogeneity, shared political attitudes and political institutions, and economic interdependence.” But the degrees of such shared characteristics and the blurring of the boundaries always caused analytical confusion. Thompson (Reference Thompson1973) compared more than two dozen studies of Middle Eastern international relations and showed the remarkably low overlap in the countries included. Decades of scholarship critiqued the concept of region by pointing to the absence of objectively measurable commonalities which would make for analytical coherence. Latin America may be largely Catholic and Spanish-speaking, but Brazil – one of its largest powers – is not. Asia speaks dozens – indeed, hundreds – of languages, and contains countries ranging from the vast land terrain of China to the archipelago of islands of Indonesia. Even the most straightforward territorial demarcation of region based on continental scale is more problematic than it appears; it is not obvious, as Ali Mazrui (Reference Mazrui1974) pointed out decades ago, why the narrow breadth of the Red Sea divides Africa from Arabia while hundreds of miles of the Sahara Desert do not divide the African continent.

All of this is today largely forgotten. Regional analysis faded from fashion in the 1980s, with most of the publications on regional subsystems from that era disappearing from view so thoroughly that today they are virtually never cited or included on even the most comprehensive syllabi devoted to the IR of the Middle East. The rise of Waltzian style neorealism pushed scholars to look for universal patterns derived from the structure of the system and to abstract away from regional or local particularities. With Realists arguing that patterns of balancing and bandwagoning could be explained through rigidly parsimonious calculations of power under anarchy, the value of regional expertise came to be devalued. That aligned well with the rational choice and formalizing trends within the rest of political science, all of which prioritized the search for universalizable rules of politics and downgraded area knowledge. When constructivism rose to challenge the dominance of Realism in the 1990s, it tended to take regions at face value in order to examine how regional norms or institutions might lead to systematic deviations from Realist expectations (Barnett Reference Barnett1998; Lynch Reference Lynch1999). The diminished focus on regions coincided with the broader crisis of the area studies in the 1990s (see further), where key foundations such as the SSRC dismantled the institutional architecture of funding and support to the area studies in favor of a focus on globalization and transnational trends.

The 1990s and 2000s, surprisingly, proved to be a boom time for the study of regions in international relations (Börzel and Risse Reference Börzel and Risse2016). The newfound interest in regions derived in part from the perceived success of the European Union, but also from the empirical rise of regional organizations across many of the world’s regions which sought to emulate the EU model, the increasingly autonomous dynamics of regions freed from the Cold War’s confining structures, and the general rise of constructivism within IR theory. The “new regionalism” responded to the processes of globalization and looked at the multiscalar forms of regional adaptation (Hettne Reference Hettne2015). Much of the interest in the so-called “new regionalism” in IR theory revolved around questions of comparative regionalism and regionalization, driven in large part by the empirical growth of regional economic cooperation and the development of attendant formal organizations, and often approaching the problem through the lens of neoliberal institutionalism and economistic rather than culturalist assumptions (Mansfield and Solingen Reference Mansfield and Solingen2010). The intellectual agenda focused on the relative institutionalization of regional organizations, often with the European Union as an explicit or implicit touchstone for comparison. The appeal of the European model for comparative regionalism is clear. After World War II, the states of Europe managed to overcome centuries of destructive warfare through the creation of supranational organizations and the opening of borders to trade and mobility. The transformative effects of the European Community, and then the European Union, on every level from security, law, and economies to culture and norms offered one of the most powerful examples of structural change and construction of liberal order in the history of world politics.

Regionalism studies typically sidestepped the definitional questions about regions by focusing on the organizations – ASEAN, the African Union, Mercosur – and evaluating their progress (usually deficient) toward matching this great European transformation (Fawcett and Gandois Reference Fawcett and Gandois2010; Valbjørn Reference Valbjørn, Borzel and Risse2016). It is small surprise that the Middle East was largely absent from a literature with such a focus, despite the power of pan-Arabism as an ideological movement and the material underpinnings of regional connectivity (among the Arab countries, at least). The Middle East stands out for the absence of regional organizations, political, or economic regional arrangements and any of the kind of formal regionalism prioritized in such studies (Aarts Reference Aarts1999; Fawcett and Gandois Reference Fawcett and Gandois2010; Legrenzi and Calculli Reference Legrenzi and Calculli2013). The Arab League includes only the Arab parts of the region, and is remarkably nonfunctional by any standard (as opposed to the GCC, which for decades developed into a functional institution at the subregional level). Despite the best of American efforts to create regional institutions which included Israel – or Iranian and Turkish attempts to gain access to such institutions – no fully and exclusively Middle Eastern regional organization exists (efforts such as the Baghdad Pact in the 1950s resulted in explosive regime-threatening popular protests across the region). Where the Middle East figured in such studies, it was usually only by noting the absence of whatever features were deemed necessary for liberal order building: democracy, economic integration, supranational organizations, a globalizing middle class, and so forth. While comparative regionalism made tremendous strides as a research program (Bõrzal and Risse Reference Börzel and Risse2016), much of the intensive comparative work on institutional design, economic outcomes, and legal layering simply has little relevance to the Middle East.

The Middle East, or at least the Arab parts of it, fits more comfortably in the study of pan-regionalism than in the study of regionalism in the sense of formal institutions. Comparisons to pan-Africanism and pan-Asianism, focused more on societal level identification and expectations than on intragovernmental cooperation or international institutions, briefly put pan-Arabism at the center of comparative regionalism. Nasser’s pan-Arabism drove politics across the region, building shared identity through political practice from the Gulf to the Levant. The dispersal of Palestinians after 1948, and of Muslim Brothers from Egypt after 1952, and the broader flow of Arab workers into the Gulf, provided material foundations for regional integration.

But that attention faded along with those pan-regional political movements. Pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism may have seemed like urgent objects of study in the 1950s, but by the 1980s those movements had been tamed, discredited, and abandoned. At the same time, methodological preferences in political science strongly tipped interest toward the more concrete and measurable study of the creation and effects of institutions and away from the more amorphous traffic in ideas and identities. The constructivist turn in IR theory of the 1990s did lead to something of a revival of interest in pan-regionalist movements and the cultural dimensions of regionalism. Barnett (Reference Barnett1998) developed an influential conceptualization of Arab regional order built around symbolic competition over norms of regional order which took the region as the unit of analysis. Lynch (Reference Lynch2007) explored the rise of satellite television and the internet as foundations of a regionwide Arab public sphere, uniting at least the Arab portion of the region politically through discourse and a synchronous shared experience familiar to readers of Benedict Anderson. It was only with the 2011 Arab uprisings, however, that approaches based on a regional public sphere fully consolidated.

More security-centric and structural approaches to regions and international order have also paid attention to the Middle East as a region. Buzan and Waever’s influential Regions and Powers (Reference Buzan and Waever2003) takes the Middle East as one of its core case studies. It takes as the starting point for regional security complex theory that “since most threats travel more easily over short distances than long ones, security interdependence is usually patterned into regionally-based clusters” (Buzan and Waever Reference Buzan and Waever2003: 3). This geographic conception of region runs into a multitude of empirical and conceptual problems, of course, many of which will be detailed later in this section. Regional Security Complexes are ultimately defined as “durable patterns of amity and enmity taking the form of subglobal, geographically coherent patterns of security interdependence.” They explicitly reject the idea of defining regions in terms of whether those in the region identify with it (they assert that the Middle East is a region, even though its people do not recognize it) (Buzan and Waever Reference Buzan and Waever2003: 48); what matters is their security practices, and whether they behave as if they are part of a shared security region. What makes the region, then, is its wars and the security interdependencies that result.

Katzenstein’s A World of Regions takes a similarly eclectic approach as it attempts to situate the Middle East within American imperium. His conception of regions is that they are porous, and include both material and symbolic dimensions which are ultimately observed in political practice. In his historical account, the borders and purpose of both Europe and Asia were as contentious and fluid as they are in the Middle East. His primary focus is Asia and Europe, where he sees core states linked to the United States ordering regional politics. The Middle East, joined by Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, lacks such an intermediary. It is provocative, and somewhat disturbing, to consider his suggestion that Washington perhaps conceived of the invasion and occupation of Iraq in order to transform it into such a pro-American core state, in the model of Germany and Japan. The inability of a regional ally to play such a function in the Middle East is not something to simply take at face value, however. Why, given the vast amounts of military and economic assistance along with close alliances, were states such as Iran (under the Shah), Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Egypt (after Camp David) unable to play such a role?

Acharya has been one of the most effective advocates of a regional approach to global order which takes seriously the unique experience of non-Western areas of the world (Acharya Reference Acharya2007, Reference Acharya2014a). Acharya’s influential (Reference Acharya2014a) call for a global IR centered the experience of regions and the expertise of area studies, calling for “the acknowledgement of regional diversity and agency.” Acharya conceptualizes regions “neither as wholly self-contained entities, nor as purely extensions of global dynamics,” and articulates a compelling logic by which the study of regions within global politics centers the role of area studies at the heart of the discipline (Acharya Reference Acharya2014a: 650). These “regional worlds” are less predicated on hegemony than on local diversity and interaction, and typically have long historical roots rather than being artifacts of post–World War II American hegemony. It is not only the Middle East which is “porous” at its borders; all regions share this feature, as regions blur into one another in ways which push against the exclusionary logic of a world fragmenting into closed trade and political blocs (Acharya Reference Acharya2014a).

The tension between realist, neoliberal, and constructivist conceptions of region has significant implications not only for theory but also for the people and states who make up the ostensible regions. The experience of regionalism from within those regions rarely matches the theories or expectations from the top down (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2004; Hazbun Reference Hazbun2017). Regionalism in the Middle East has largely been about strengthening the existing states rather than delegating their functions for the purposes of integration (Hameiri Reference Hameiri2013; Debre Reference Debre2020; Heydemann and Lynch Reference Heydemann and Lynch2024). It has also functioned far more effectively in the societal realm than at the interstate level, usually in opposition to the policy preferences of the region’s states, with subnational forms of regionalization having far more purchase on politics than the formal state bargaining and economic liberalization emphasized in the literature on the EU. The very different theoretical approaches to the nature of US primacy and the role of regions in its imperium, in turn, have offered a host of novel thinking about hierarchy in world politics and the place of the Middle East within global structure (Lake Reference Lake2009b; Mattern and Zarakol Reference Mattern and Zarakol2016; McConnaughy, Musgrave, and Nexon Reference McConnaughy, Musgrave and Nexon2018; Ikenberry and Nexon Reference Ikenberry and Nexon2019; Lynch and Mabon Reference Lynch and Mabon2025).

Is There Value to Theorizing Regions?

The idea of comparing regions makes good sense from the vantage point of international relations that moves beyond the Cold War and the parsimony of neorealism. But comparative regional systems required a level of analytical precision which was rarely on offer. The attempt to turn bureaucratic convenience and physical geography into analytical category has always been fraught. It is one thing to use “Africa” as a shorthand for all the countries on the African continent; it is quite another to assume that there is some essential quality of African-ness that unites them all into a coherent universe of cases for the purpose of theory-building or policy analysis (Basedau Reference Basedau2020). From the perspective of a Middle East scholar, Latin America seems like an easier case for analysis as a region; from the standpoint of a Latin Americanist, the logic of grouping all of South America, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Americas is far less obvious (Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann2015). It is difficult to do more than shake one’s head and laugh softly when reading Samuel Huntington attempt to divide the world into “civilizations” which act like states (the “Confucian-Islamic alliance” lives in infamy). But a great deal of more serious social science implicitly does the same.

The organization of the American academy (at least) into area studies centers and programs presumes that there is value to studying the Middle East, Asia, or Africa as a coherent whole – and a phenomenal amount of good work has been done based on that premise. As early as Reference 64Davison1960, Davison declared that nobody knows where the Middle East is, and that it made little sense as an analytical category, but that nonetheless an “agreement on arbitrary limits” would best facilitate scholarly progress. That compromise has largely continued ever since. It has held, in part, as an act of power: area studies, originating in colonialism and developing through the American academy, imposed order on the world in part through an act of definitional power. Area studies, in their original incarnation, meant American scholars studying foreign lands in the implicit or explicit pursuit of American national interests; American structural power can be seen in the internalization of those definitions by actors, scholars, and states within the regions it defined by fiat.

Why would scholarship based on faulty ontological assumptions have value? First, regions typically do have at least some common features which create economies of scale for the acquisition of expertise and knowledge. The legacies of the Ottoman Empire may not explain everything about the trajectory of the modern Middle East, but one can learn a lot about an entire broad swathe of the world by studying Ottoman institutions, practices, languages, and histories. The entire Middle East might not be Muslim, or speak Arabic, but mastering that religion and language will prove useful across several dozen countries in ways that it will not prove as useful in most others. This is the sentiment of Bayat (2013), who wearily concludes that even if the states of the Middle East don’t have that much in common, they have more in common with each other than they do with states in other regions. I certainly feel more at home visiting a new Arab country than I do when working in Senegal or Uganda, even if the contexts are not identical.

Second, regions may prove useful analytical categories because external powers use them to organize their foreign policies. Global powers such as the United States have organized their foreign policy around such concepts, and through practice and power have created a uniformity which becomes naturalized over decades of repetition and normalization. When the United States and the Soviet Union treat the Middle East – or Africa, Asia, or Latin America – as coherent entities which require and reward a consistent foreign policy, then those policies can in turn shape the region in that direction. For example, once Washington has decided that the protection of oil and Israel requires the suppression of public opinion in one set of states assumed to be deeply hostile, then its support of autocratic regimes will create a self-reinforcing reality of a uniquely undemocratic region even if this was not grounded in history or culture. Entire bureaucracies and foreign policy communities have emerged which serve as vector points for policy engagement and practice; the Gulf might have less in common with the Levant than the term “Middle East” suggests, but in Washington it is at least covered by the same State Department desk officers and studied by the same think tanks.

Third, regions may emerge endogenously through political contestation and practice as regional powers – state or non-state – advance identity proposals to legitimate their ambitions and generate ideational power. As Section 4 details, Nasser’s promotion of pan-Arabism in the 1950s, for example, intentionally constructed the Arab world as the appropriate and necessary site for “Arab” politics to happen. By constructing an identity narrative rooted in anti-colonialism, Palestine, and Arab unity, Nasser and his rivals combined to establish a distinctive playing field in which those issues mattered more within the region than outside of it – and, even more, having a stake in those (and only those) issues defined membership within the region. A state which opted for good relations with Israel in those years might have many qualities objectively associated with Arabness, but would be ostracized from Arab politics. Southeast Asia may have had no prior history as a region, but interaction through ASEAN and shared concerns with China may have generated a sense of region which had not previously existed (Thompson Reference Thompson2013).

Finally, regions may gain their value purely through the long-term structuring effects of the confluence of money, power, and interest (Cumings Reference Cumings1997). As Said (1978) observed, power constitutes not only knowledge about a subject but also the very object to be studied. Decisions by foundations, governments, and universities to organize knowledge in a particular way generate self-fulfilling dynamics which shape how graduate students are trained, where they publish, how they are hired, and what they teach. The Ford Foundation, SSRC, and the Department of Education may have made different decisions about how to divide the world in the late 1940s and early 1950s – adding South Asia and the East African coast to the Middle East, for instance, or placing North Africa within the rest of the African continent – and those regional borders might today feel natural and obvious, buttressed by generations of scholarly networks, expertise, and publication patterns. Succeeding within the field of Middle East studies might then today require familiarity with Swahili and Pashtu in addition to Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Kurdish, and Persian.

Still, as Eckstein (Reference Eckstein and Pye1975) long ago noted, for regions to make sense as analytical units, they must have sufficient common characteristics that differentiate them from other regions. Perhaps that is the case for some regions, perhaps not. But what about the Middle East? The Middle East today typically is understood to include the majority Arab states defined by membership in the Arab League (with a few, such as Mauritania and Djibouti, typically left out or at least ignored), Iran, Israel, and Turkey. This makes sense to many casual observers based on routine practice and regular usage in the media. It similarly makes sense to many political scientists accustomed to the division of knowledge production into tidy regional packages which facilitate comparison or compartmentalization. But it does not quite make sense that it combines thinly populated oil-rich monarchies with massive industrialized northern African states, or that it includes a member of NATO alongside Qaddafi’s eccentric Libya, or that it includes Israel’s settler colonialist semi-democracy alongside Arab autocracies. Certain subregions make more sense based on the various criteria articulated in the literature: the Maghreb (North Africa), the Arabian Peninsula, the post-Ottoman countries of the Levant. But the Middle East?

It would be in a sense trivial to suggest that what unites the Middle East as a coherent world region is its place within global politics, from the colonial scramble of the European great powers to the bipolar structure of the Cold War to the post-1990 American crafting of a global imperium (Buzan and Waever Reference Buzan and Waever2003; Koch Reference Koch2017). It clearly is that. But there’s more. What puts actual coherence into this externally defined region is the emergence of a common set of stakes, actors, forms of power, and identities formulated through shared experience of intermittent transnationalized conflict. It may not be identical throughout, but its members have more in common than non-members. As Asaf Bayat puts it, “the Middle East, one may suggest, holds enough coherence to allow for addressing meaningful analytical questions, even though all this ultimately depends on what sort of analytical questions we wish to raise and what aspect of social life we have in mind” (Bayat Reference Bayat2013: 261). All of us in the business of Middle East political science proceed as if this were true. But is it?

At one level, the answer is yes – and the implications for academic training, language acquisition, and field research are clear. The best political science – and, more broadly, the best scholarship – is done by scholars who are deeply grounded in the country or area they study. Knowledge of the language, history, culture, and physical geography enables what has been called an “ethnographic sensibility,” the ability to intuitively understand the significance and meaning of political events, discourse, and institutions. The efflorescence of Middle East political science of the last several decades has been rooted in the large-scale training and efforts of scholars who have combined rigorous methodologies drawn from general disciplines with that kind of local knowledge. But in a sense, this does not answer the question: why does local knowledge imply “region”? What actual local knowledge of, say, Yemen does a scholar have after spending a decade studying Amazigh politics in Morocco? Why would becoming an expert on Yemen necessarily require training in “Middle East” – and, indeed, what are the costs of such training (such as the exclusion of influences across the Indian Ocean and the East African coast)? Does a grounding in Middle East Studies strengthen one’s understanding of Morocco more than deep study of French West Africa? Perhaps subregions are the answer, and relatively coherent smaller groupings of states which share a great deal of culture, history, and geography – the Levant, the Gulf, the Maghreb – do not need to be aggregated into a “Middle East.” But this too is problematic: what, then, explains the shared engagement with the question of Palestine across subregions, or the patterns of protest diffusion (and non-diffusion) in the 2011 Arab uprisings?

The shared security complexes, historical legacies, shared language, and common political issues emphasized by international relations theory are not enough to capture the true distinctiveness of the Middle East. While each of those approaches illuminates an aspect of the region, all ultimately fall short of capturing the whole. But they point the way toward how to think about the Middle East as some form of region. Ideas, organizations, institutions, interests, and identities have all evolved over the course of a century in response to the distinctive forms of embeddedness of the Middle East into not only geopolitical conflict but also entrenched hierarchies. The particular nature of the Middle East’s incorporation as a region into the global order – as a “subordinate international order,” as Binder (Reference Binder1958) so evocatively labeled it – contributed to the isomorphism of its political institutions, economic arrangements, and social movements.

The Middle East does not actually make intuitive sense as a coherent region, then, but then no region really does. All regions are political constructs, designed for particular reasons and reflecting particular constellations of identity, power, and interest (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2004). Scholars of virtually every world region have criticized the artificiality of categorization of their region. Southeast Asianists point out that their “region” is incredibly diverse across almost every dimension (Pepinsky Reference Pepinsky2023); Latin Americanists point out that Brazil is not Spanish-speaking; among Africanists, it is even something of a running joke to insist that Africa is not a country. But one must start somewhere.

But where? When Admiral Mahan famously coined the term “Middle East,” he did not bother to specify its boundaries; most early usages of the term incorporated India and viewed it as part of the British colonial patrimony (Khalil Reference Khalil2016; Crouzet Reference Crouzet2022). For the eminent historian Nikki Keddie (Reference Keddie1973), the Middle East referred to “the area stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, and is roughly equivalent to the area of the first wave of Muslim conquests plus Anatolia.” For the US State Department, for decades it included the Gulf and the Levant, but not North Africa. The inaugural issue of The Middle East Journal in 1947 featured a map of the region extending to India and most of central Asia (Kurzman Reference Kurzman2007). In 1981, William Thompson observed that of six major studies of the Middle Eastern regional system, none included the same set of states. In 1992, Bernard Lewis speculated (but got few takers) that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Middle East had “resumed its historical dimensions” by reclaiming the six newly independent central Asian republics: “Samarkand and Bukhara are, after all, as much a part of the historic Middle East as Esfahan and Damascus.” Louise Fawcett’s influential edited volume on the International Relations of the Middle East extends the standard definition of the region to include Somalia and Mauritania.

For all of that confusion, people seem to think they know where the Middle East is – and universities are certainly organized as if they do. This has more to do with funding and institutional practice than with intellectual merits. The standard definition of the Middle East was consolidated with the US Department of Education’s Title VI Area Studies grants and includes the Arab states (usually defined as the Arab League membership), Israel, Iran, and Turkey. This collection of states represents geographical contiguity, of a sort, but without clear justifications for where its members begin and end. It lacks coherence historically, linguistically, ethnically, and religiously. The members of the Arab League may be “Arab states,” but that is itself a political construct (see Section 3) which erases wide variations in ethnic identity, such as the Amazigh populations across the Maghreb and the Kurdish populations spread across the Levant. Turkey and Iran are of obvious political and strategic importance to the other states included in the Middle East, but each is also a central player in at least one other region (Turkey into the Balkans and the Caucasus (and increasingly Africa), Iran into the Persianate world of Central Asia and Afghanistan).

The linguistic diversity is not simply the non-Arabic languages (Kurdish, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Amazigh) but extends even to the Arabic-speaking countries. I will long recall my dismay on first visiting Morocco to realize that my Levantine Arabic was useless and that I would be better off using my atrocious French, and my delight at the recently initiated presence of Tamazight as a third language on most road signs. In Tunisia, I found that Islamists were far more likely to be able to communicate with me in Modern Standard Arabic than any other segment of society, including many in the secular, educated elite who preferred French or English, while I found taxi drivers from the south of the country incomprehensible. On my first visit to Qatar, my cab driver stared at me baffled when I asked to go to my hotel in Arabic; a lovely young man from Sri Lanka, he had little difficulty driving a taxi in Doha with facility in only English.

It is telling that the US military uses a different definition of the Middle East than does the State Department or most universities. For military operations, getting things right is a matter of life or death – whether or not those decisions are academically defensible or historically valid. The Central Command extends to Afghanistan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan – while excluding (until quite recently) North Africa and Israel. That makes good sense when one considers the role of US military bases on the Arabian Peninsula for running the air wars and logistics for Afghanistan, or the deep and escalating integration of Gulf states in the political and military affairs of Eastern Africa. On the flip side, when the United States sought to took the lead in combat operations in Libya in 2011, its primary military organization for the Middle East played no role.

Each of these groupings of states represented a confluence of geopolitical and local factors of quite recent vintage. Prior to the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire expanded across not only much of what is now “the Middle East” but also deep into the Balkans and central Europe, but by the time that the regions crystallized institutionally those Christian provinces had been hived off for decades. By the 1800s, most of the Arabian Peninsula coast was functionally part of British India, while the three states of the Maghreb were fully integrated into the French Empire (Algeria actually becoming legally part of France). The connections between Arabia and East Africa ran deep and seemed completely natural based on geography and trade connections; Oman ruled Zanzibar for centuries, and to this day Swahili is a common language across many of the Arab Gulf states (Mathews Reference Mathews2024). Arabs from the Maghreb and the Mashreq viewed each other with suspicion and distance, and could not even communicate with each other in colloquial Arabic. The grouping we now call the Middle East mostly followed the logic of great power politics and the Cold War rather than historical precedent or material economic or political connectivity.

The “Near East” represented the imperial concerns of the United Kingdom, where the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and the Red Sea represented the key connector between India and Europe and a potential source of threat from France and other rival powers (Low 2020; Crouzet Reference Crouzet2022), while the Ottoman Caliphate represented a potential rival for the loyalties of Indian Muslims. The United States had less parochial concerns as it turned its attention to the region after World War II. For Washington, the entire region was a distinct part of a global battleground in the struggle against the Soviet Union – with non-Arab Iran a critical part of the security architecture protecting the flow of oil from the Gulf, and Israel a politically unavoidable part of the security and political challenges across the Levant and the Gulf. The allure of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s forced America’s hand in accepting a broad regional definition, because the issues of the day – especially Palestine but also the wars of national liberation such as in Algeria – objectively were self-evidently interconnected and needed to be dealt with through a regional lens.

That definition was locked in place institutionally by the US government through the 1958 National Defense Education Act, with the Title VI program designed to support area studies centers and foreign language training. Top American research institutions imported star scholars from European institutions to lead these new centers and institutes, bringing along many European colonial assumptions about the region (Lockman Reference Lockman2003, Reference Lockman2016). The emphasis on language training and field research encouraged the scholars trained in these centers toward an ethnographic sensibility, initially, even as foundation funders and US government consumers tried to push them toward the social and behavioral sciences (Khalil Reference Khalil2016; Lockman Reference Lockman2016). It is, as Rafael (Reference Rafael1994) points out, a fascinating contradiction that Middle East Studies (like all the area studies) was founded based on Orientalist conceptions of regional essentialism while cultivating generations of scholars committed to combatting Orientalism, and that generations of scholars trained to oppose US imperialism depended on US government funding and university systems shaped by those official incentives.

For the first several decades, the connection to national security and US interests was clear, with a heavy emphasis on language training, history, and religion producing generations of talented scholars with a particular skill set (Cumings Reference Cumings1997; Mitchell Reference Mitchell and Szanton2003; Khalil Reference Khalil2016). As a result, scholars of the Middle East developed deep expertise about the cultures, languages, history, and politics of the countries in that tightly defined area. But the definition of regions had costs: they were not expected to know much of anything about sub-Saharan Africa or Afghanistan and Pakistan, no matter how important those places might be to the issues they were studying – or, down the road, they would become to American policy interests. The impact of such divides would be laid bare by the transnational networks of al-Qaeda in the 1990s and 2000s, which emerged out of the Middle East but carried out its earliest attacks in Africa and took harbor in Sudan and Afghanistan – all virtually invisible to those who studied the Middle East.

In the 1970s, Middle East Studies was broadly transformed by the political firestorms surrounding the 1967 war and the rise of pro-Palestinian and anti-Vietnam activism in the academy (Hajjar and Niva Reference Hajjar and Niva1997; Lockman Reference Lockman2003). This new politicization problematized the previously quite tight connections between academic and the intelligence agencies, as scholars of the Middle East followed suit with those working in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in rejecting funding and consultation from US government sources (some of them at least; most continued to pursue Title VI and FLAS awards even if they steered clear of the CIA). As many Middle East scholars celebrated – and right-wing critics bemoaned – younger scholars of Arab origin increasingly joined the ranks of Middle East Studies. They brought with them a more critical politics, far more skeptical of connections to American foreign policy and far more critical of Israel. They also brought deep, intimate knowledge of their own societies and languages which challenged the expertise claimed by earlier generations of scholars. In terms of the definition of the Middle East, this had dual, often conflicting, implications. On the one hand, many scholars of Arab origin worked from a presumption of the natural identity of the region as Arab – strengthening the core definition of the region while politicizing and often rejecting the legitimate presence of Israel, Turkey, and Iran (as well as of minorities such as Kurds or Amazigh). On the other hand, many of the leftist scholars among these ranks identified more broadly with the global South and anticolonial struggles, leading them to challenge artificial barriers between regional political struggles against common colonial enemies.

This articulation of the Middle East within the academy was “naturalized” broadly through the circulation of maps, educational practices, bureaucratic routine, and popular discourse (Culcasi Reference Culcasi2010). Few could argue with Said’s (Reference Said1979, Reference Said1981) brilliant demonstration of how “the Middle East” became in the popular imagination a shorthand for violence, corrupt oil barons, and religious fanaticism, with an assumed commonality binding together all the “Orient” from Morocco and Yemen to India (and beyond, where convenient). The distinctions blurred in these popular visions such that it made intuitive sense that historical events in, say, Afghanistan might be taken as a reliable guide to current events in Lebanon. Such crude generalizations rarely gained traction in the academy, but their shadows could be recognized in the assumptions underlying even quite sophisticated research. Take, for example, Steven Fish’s Are Muslims Different which aggregates public opinion surveys and other quantitative data from across multiple “Middle Eastern” (and not other) countries to draw inferences about Islam, a global religion with a billion adherents spread far beyond the Middle East (see Section 4). And they would recur in the early days after 9/11, when a legion of analysts emerged to attribute jihadism to “Muslim rage” or to the pathologies of a decontextualized Arab world.

It is telling that the questioning of the definition of “regions” and “areas” primarily has taken place in moments of profound global structural change – the end of the Cold War and rise of globalization (1990s) and, perhaps, today’s decline of US primacy. Middle East Studies had to adapt to the end of the Cold War and the post-1990 emergence of a discourse of American primacy (Hajjar and Niva Reference Hajjar and Niva1997). The SSRC and ACLS ended their decades-long support for area studies centers as globalization took center stage, while the Ford Foundation, the SSRC, and the Mellon Foundation spearheaded initiatives to “rethink area studies” (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2004; Kurzman Reference Kurzman2007). The idea that globalization had reduced the importance of areas and had made “areas more porous, less bounded, less fixed” (Cumings Reference Cumings1997) became a central pillar of the reorganization of funding priorities and programming. The SSRC, for instance, determined in the mid-1990s “that a number of discrete and separated ‘area committees,’ each focused on a single world region, is not the optimum structure for providing new insights and theories suitable for a world in which the geographic units of analysis are neither static nor straightforward” (Prewitt 1993). In 2016, the SSRC published another important collection entitled Middle East Studies for the New Millennium, the product of over fifteen years of collective work funded by multiple foundations, which once again sought to find purchase for area expertise in an age of declining US primacy and shifting academic priorities (Shami and Miller-Idriss Reference Shamy and Miller-Idriss2016).

The Middle East continued to receive attention, whatever was happening with other areas and regions. This was not necessarily a good thing, of course; public discourse was often dominated by journalists, pundits, and a mixed bag of think-tankers, while even the academic realm became a stomping ground for terrorism experts, war grifters, and neo-Orientalists. Still, the frequent wars and crises in the region ensured that the Middle East remained a primary focus of US government interest and funding, given the insatiable demand for a modicum of language skills and basic cultural knowledge needed to staff the occupation of Iraq and the far-flung networks of the global war on terror. Critics of Middle East Studies might complain that area experts were too critical of US foreign policy or too hostile toward Israel, but few could argue that the US government did not need well-trained experts conversant in regional languages and politics. The debate over whether Middle East scholars should actively serve US interests has been a consistent through-thread for decades, in some ways peaking during the occupation of Iraq when some anthropologists served American counterinsurgency forces in the Human Terrain System – what Roberto Gonzalez termed “mercenary anthropology” – a common issue in other areas too, of course, especially in Asian Studies during the Vietnam years (Cumings Reference Cumings1997).

It is worth acknowledging local agency in these definitional battles, as Section 4 does at length. But such local agency can be observed even at the geopolitical level. The interests and identities of local powers in defining the region are perhaps best seen in the exclusion of Africa. The project of pan-Arabism pointedly differentiated itself from pan-Africanism, splitting potential solidarities across the Global South. For all the colonial roots of this exclusion (see Section 2), we must recognize the deep anti-Black racism and legacies of slavery across much of the Arab world which fueled these divisions. Arabizing post-colonial elites in North Africa advanced national projects against both former European colonial powers and against the Black African countries to their south – erasing Amazigh populations along the way. Southern European elites, keen to join Europe and to differentiate themselves from their North African counterparts across the Mediterranean, pushed hard to create legal and institutional barriers – a project which had particular salience around the place of Algeria, which until 1962 was legally part of France and had a solid claim on that basis to membership in the European Community (Brown Reference Brown2022).

But is there more to the grouping of states in the Middle East than just geopolitical convenience? Are there common features across these states which could plausibly justify their inclusion as well as the exclusion of other possible members? Asef Bayat (Reference Bayat2013) concludes his reflections on the variety of experience across a diverse region with the pragmatic note that in the end, the countries of the Middle East have more in common with each other than with non-Middle Eastern states. Do they? Do the states of the Maghreb (which clearly do share common cultural, institutional, linguistic, ethnic, and political characteristics with each other) have more in common with the states of the Levant or Gulf than they do with those of Francophone West Africa? Are the Gulf states (which really do share a great many common political, cultural, economic, and institutional characteristics) today really more comparable to Egypt than to Singapore or other entrepots of global finance and commerce? What does Turkey, an advanced industrial democracy (of sorts) and NATO member, have in common with the collapsed states of the Arab interior? What are the effects of the rise of English as the primary language of the globalized elites of the Gulf – or the choice by several of those countries to normalize with Israel in the absence of a resolution to the Palestinian issue – mean for their membership in the Middle East?

Hinnebusch (Reference Hinnebusch2015), in his magisterial study of the international relations of the Middle East, lays out several key differences which might impact the region relative to other parts of the world: Ottoman legacies, the distinctive nature of colonial penetration and uneven state development, the mismatch between nation and state, the unusually high level of external interest. The Middle East, he argues, has been shaped by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in ways that non-Middle Eastern states have not been, has very distinctive patterns of sectarian Sunni–Shi’a polarization, and is shaped by the distinctive concerns of pan-Arabism. This approach mirrors recent trends in IR theories of hierarchy, which similarly place significant causal weight on the distinctive ways the Middle East was incorporated into the global order (Lake Reference Lake2009a). The analysis of regional similarity based on the historical sociology of dependent state formation arguably makes more sense within the Levantine core than it does for the Gulf or North Africa, however, to say nothing of Turkey, Iran, and Israel; all had very different experiences of colonialism and entered the global order at different times and by different mechanisms.

Particularly interesting in this regard is the conceptualization offered by Nile Green (Reference Green2014) of at least three civilizationally distinct regions within the area often called the Middle East: a Mediterranean region connecting the Levant with the North African coast and western Turkey; a Persianate region encompassing Iran and much of central Asia and parts of South Asia; and an Indian Ocean region connecting the Arabian Peninsula with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Green notes the intellectual costs of these categorizations: “The study of Iran, Afghanistan, the Gulf, and the Arabian Peninsula have been the most obvious victims of this conceptual restriction through the elision of their formative and ongoing connections to the continental and maritime “farther east” of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.” This conception beautifully captures the historical, civilizational connections which might plausibly make a region – but, at the same time, has virtually no resonance with how contemporary politics and identities are organized.

The trend across the literature on subregions in recent years is telling. The rapidly growing field of Gulf studies has increasingly explored and excavated the Arabian peninsula’s historical and ongoing connections to India and South Asia, from the era of British Empire through today’s patterns of labor migration (Khanna, Renard, and Vora Reference Khana, Le Renard and Vora2020). Turkish studies have explored the shifting domestic conceptions of Turkey’s regional identity, with neo-Ottomanists recalling the long history of the empire and cosmopolitans looking to become part of Europe (Hintz Reference Hintz2019). Maghreb Studies have increasingly looked to the problematic nature of the Sahara as a dividing line, particularly with the rise of Amazigh studies highlighting the ongoing life across the supposed division (Hannoum Reference Hannoum2022). This section builds on these subregional trends as well as broader trends within the IR literature on regions and regionalism to situate the Middle East more effectively.

Orientalism, Political Science, and the Middle East

Here, it is worth returning briefly to the question of Orientalism and its relationship to the area studies. Largely due to the influence of Said, Middle East Studies, more than other world regions, has emphasized Orientalism and the constitutive effects of centuries of the colonial production of knowledge. Each region’s area studies have confronted the artificiality of regions in different ways, slaying different dragons and fighting different prejudices. In the Middle East, the specter of Orientalism – both the academic tradition and Edward Said’s influential critique – has been particularly central. The Middle East is often presented as a uniquely conflict-prone region of the world. In the popular imagination, a whole range of pathologies are uniquely associated with the region: autocracy, violence, fanaticism, gender oppression, and more. Such long-standing tropes have been the subject of a vast array of criticism, inspired by the work of Said on the discursive work of an essentializing Orientalism.

As valuable as that body of work remains, especially in laying bare the relations between colonialism and scholarship, there are reasons to question such a perspective when it comes to the definition of regions. Put bluntly, the Middle East as a discrete region is barely a century old – and there is little agreement about which countries it encompasses, or why. How can we assume timeless, unique pathologies when we cannot even agree on which countries or peoples it describes? And why would those essentializing discourses apply uniquely to the Middle East, as opposed to other colonized area such as India and Africa? Attributing this to “Orientalism,” despite the undoubted racism of the colonial gaze, is unsatisfying. Similarly racist Othering is prevalent across other world regions, and does not clearly differentiate the Middle East from Africa, India, or Asia. Nor do common, seemingly intuitive markers actually denote what they seem: the Middle East is not identical with Arabic-speaking, it does not end or begin at the boundaries of the former Ottoman Empire, it is not exclusively or uniquely Islamic, and its geographical proximity is largely a function of where one begins and stops looking at the map. A wide range of other regional configurations could have been produced by racist versions of Orientalism; what concerns us is this one.

I would argue that political science diverged rather dramatically from other disciplines during the subsequent decades. Most of the disciplines within Middle East Studies were profoundly affected by Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and their scholarship took an increasingly politicized, often identitarian turn. Political science had far less interest in Said’s critiques, though. Instead, as I demonstrate in Section 5, political scientists of the Middle East became consumed with the “area studies controversy” and the challenge posed by advocates of a universal social theory to specialists in particular regions and countries. Modernization theory may have begun with Orientalist assumptions, but it assumed the potential to reach a modern Westernized ideal. Where other disciplines saw their best and brightest young scholars delve deeply into Said and critical theory to investigate positionality, historical memory, discourse, and identity, the rising generation of political science turned to the discipline’s preferred methods – often quantitative or formal, with even the qualitative work almost always rigidly positivist. There is some irony that the most influential attack on Middle East Studies in this era, Martin Kramer’s (Reference Kramer2001) Ivory Towers in the Sand, almost exclusively used examples from political science in his bill of complaints against Edward Said’s alleged perversion of Middle East Studies; those who Kramer most directly critiqued were actually by far the least influenced by his bête noire.

Political science has been perhaps the discipline least impacted by Said and the critique of Orientalism. But, as detailed in Section 5, it has its own set of problems driven by assumptions about the region. To briefly preview here, the literature on the Middle East has for decades been relatively parochial and insular, with a deep study of the region or its individual countries generating vast expertise but often not informing broader disciplinary theories. Many studies of Middle East politics assume a universe of only Middle Eastern cases, with little justification for establishing those boundaries. Why, though, should a study of democracy and autocracy limit its inquiry to the two dozen member states of the Arab League when the challenges of democratization are fully global? Why should the effects of oil rents be studied within the Arab world, without attention to comparable oil producers in Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, or North America? How could we measure the difference of the Middle East from other regions in terms of conflict prevalence if we don’t know which countries belong in the Middle East (Sørli, Gleditsch, and Strand Reference Sørli, Gleditsch and Strand2005)? I would argue that rather than simply broadening the aperture of our datasets to be more cross-regionally comparative (as important as that would be), we need to think carefully about why it seems to make intuitive sense to group together the various subregions into a single region.

The Great Game, the “Near East,” and the Maghreb

The origin story of the “Middle East” region – then named the “Near East” – begins with London’s need to connect its imperial possessions in India back to the home island (Adelson Reference Adelson1995; Foliard Reference Foliard2020). British imperial interests were not limited to the current definition of the Middle East. Instead, they involved complex connections among India, the Hajj regions of Mecca and Medina, the oil entrepots of Iran and the ports of the Arabian peninsula, and Egypt’s Suez Canal. In the run-up to World War I, one of Britain’s greatest strategic fears was that the Ottoman Caliph would successfully mobilize the Muslims of the Raj to a jihad against the Allied Powers – a fear which assumed the unity of a broad Muslim region which transcended the Arab world or even the physical reach of the Ottoman Empire.

As Willis (Reference Willis2009) notes, the British Empire did not divide its imperial territories into neat regions such as Near East and South Asia, as we do today. Much of the Gulf fell under the jurisdiction of the India Colonial Office: “the definition of imperial India was not restricted to the Indian ‘subcontinent’ but was defined in relation to imperial sovereignty. Britain incorporated hundreds of semi-independent polities along the Arabian peninsula into the Raj, and understood Aden as the westernmost point of India, governed by Bombay until finally being transferred to the British Colonial Office in 1937. The military forces of the Aden-based Middle East Command Britain established in the early 1960s were stationed in Kenya until its independence in 1963. Egypt was similarly governed out of the India Office; Lord Cromer, so central to the creation of modern Egypt, learned his profession in India as did so many other British colonial officials who shaped what would become the Middle East.

The French, for their part, sought to demarcate and divide the Maghreb from the eastern, British-, and Italian-owned North African coast and from Black West Africa. As Hannoum (Reference Hannoum2022) documents, French colonial anthropologists generated phenomenal amounts of supposedly scientific knowledge designed to prove the essential difference between the Sahara Desert in the west from its extensions in the south of Libya. Racial differentiation, as elsewhere in the empire, played a central role in determining which areas became the Maghreb and which became French West Africa. Those colonial impositions would have long-lasting effects on race relations and conceptions of citizenship in the post-independence Maghreb countries.

The British and the French largely succeeded in blocking other European powers from gaining access to the areas which made up their colonial domains. Germany and other competitors looked further south into sub-Saharan Africa, or into Asia, leaving the Levant, Gulf, and North Africa largely uncontested within the Great Game (the less said about Italy’s disastrous, near-genocidal incursion into Libya and the Horn of Africa, the better). This was less true in Iran, however, where Russia repeatedly sought to expand its influence, or in Afghanistan, which at the time was far less obviously excluded from the regional domain.

World Wars and the Formation of the Modern Middle East

World War I is often taken as the origin story for the modern Middle East, and for good reason – if one is only looking at the Levant and Egypt. That war should be understood not only as a European war but as an Imperial war in which the great powers generated manpower and resources from their colonial possessions. One of the unintended effects of this mobilization was that soldiers from far-flung colonial possessions came into direct contact for the first time, generating new potential for solidarities across the colonies. Anderson’s (Reference Anderson2021) account of the Egyptian Labor Corps documents one moment of such contact, as Egyptians found themselves fighting alongside Indians and Africans while discovering where the British actually ranked them within the racial hierarchies of the day. The French war effort brought together fighters from as far afield as Senegal and Martinique, shaping the political consciousness of such future luminaries as Leopold Senghor and Frantz Fanon. Such solidarities could have established the basis for a global anti-colonial identity not attached to region or nation. Instead, the push for national self-determination and the Mandate system rooted in racial hierarchies interrupted such emergent solidarities in favor of a system of nascent nation-states and regions more manageable by declining empires.

The Mandate period was crucial for defining the Middle East against other regions, even if that term was not yet in wide circulation (Wyrtzen Reference Wyrtzen2022). Middle Eastern political figures, from the politicians of Egypt’s Wafd to the Hashemite Faisal bin Hussein, prowled the halls of the Versailles conference and sought to shape the future of what they understood as a region. The League of Nations followed an implicitly racial logic in its classification of types of mandates, sorting them by region and placing the Levantine mandates of the former Ottoman Empire in a “semi-civilized” class which differentiated them from the uncivilized (i.e. Black) mandates of Africa. The French and British Middle Eastern mandates were ostensibly intended to provide tutelage toward the creation of modern states and democratic systems which would ultimately qualify them for independent statehood. Nationalists in these Arab mandates rarely challenged their elevation over the African “barbarians,” even if they chafed at European domination and tutelage. In practice, both mandatory powers governed their new territories as colonies, imposing their preferred political and economic systems while facing down sometimes intense nationalist opposition with extreme violence.

The typical template for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East heavily weights the experience of the Levant, in which France and Britain carved up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire through a series of secret agreements (most famously, but not actually most importantly, Sykes-Picot). The regional shared identity of the Levant is difficult to dispute, given that these new states had quite recently been part of the same political order where borders did not exist and elites easily circulated. The Palestine mandate rapidly evolved into a distinctive conflict zone with the influx of Zionist immigration and the sequential battles to shape British colonial policy; no extra work needed to be done to make Palestinians part of that regional construct, since they had been so for many centuries. But it is important to recall that none of the other subregions of the Middle East followed this template: the Gulf was shaped through bargains between imperial Britain and local rulers seeking the upper hand over their rivals along the coast, and Saudi expansion in the interior; the Maghreb was shaped by long decades of French settler colonialism and transformational governance.

The connections between the Levant and the other major subregions of the Middle East in this period require a bit more careful attention. The inclusion of the Maghreb in the Middle East arguably resulted from the circulation of French colonial elites and practices from Algeria to Syria and Lebanon. The post–World War II departure of large Jewish communities from the Maghreb (as well as Iraq and Egypt) to Israel, and the systematic marginalization of the Amazigh communities by post-independence regimes shifted the subregion toward an Arabophone identity which further facilitated connections to the Levant. So did the interest shown by major Arab powers such as Egypt in Algeria’s war of national independence, which generated enduring connections between post-independence FLN elites and the Arab world. These connections were never fully solidified, however, as the Maghreb continued to be embedded within the Francophone community and economically oriented toward Europe through both trade and labor migration.

World War II upended some of these assumptions, but imperial practice remained deeply rooted in the previous era. The British ran much of the war out of Cairo, rather than out of India, which had transformative effects on Egypt while also cementing its strategic ties with the other subregions – the Maghreb, the Levant, and the Gulf (Jakes Reference Jakes2020). The American role in the North African campaigns increased demand for regional expertise in ways that would matter for the evolution of Middle East studies (Khalil Reference Khalil2016; Lockman Reference Lockman2016). The shift from coal to oil in the imperial British and US naval fleets dramatically escalated the global strategic importance of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Gulf, centering those oil producers in the war against Germany and Japan and then in the emergent global Cold War. Palestine, as ever, served as a unifying issue for the crystallization of a region, as concerns that rising Zionist immigration to Palestine could make Arabs and Muslims receptive to Nazi anti-Semitic appeals mirrored at a greater strategic scale the worry in the previous great war about an Ottoman Caliph promoting disloyalty among imperial Muslim subjects. Britain’s final departure from India foreshadowed its near-simultaneous abandonment of the Palestine mandate. The French collapse pushed “France” out of Europe and into its empire, a stunning reversal. And the great battles between the Allies and the Nazis across North Africa forced a recognition of the strategic importance of the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

The Cold War, Pan-Arabism, and America’s Middle East

Britain’s hegemony over the definition of the Near East did not survive its late 1940s departure from India and Palestine; by the time it finally wrapped up its Gulf positions in 1971, the UK had long since ceased to be the dominant player in any part of the region. France too lost its core Middle Eastern positions with the 1956 Suez war fiasco and the bloody eight-year war of Algerian national liberation; while it attempted to sustain a Francophone Africa in the ensuing decades, it faded as a regional superpower. The “Middle East” became a primarily American conception, rooted in geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union and built upon different assumptions about what ultimately mattered (that the State Department retains a Bureau of Near East Affairs, despite this, remains a source of some bureaucratic amusement).

The rise of pan-Arabism in the 1950s (discussed in the next section) brought about perhaps the most clearly regionalized politics of any world region. The 1956 Suez Crisis showed the connections across subregions powerfully in the emerging “Middle East” region, as France supported the British–Israeli plans to seize the Suez Canal and undermine Nasser’s new regime in large part because they saw pan-Arabism as supporting the Algerian war of national independence. The United States, for its part, forced Britain and France to withdraw from their positions in the Sinai in part for fear that being seen as siding with Israel would have catastrophic effects on America’s position with the Arab world. In both cases, direct and indirect connections among the countries of the Middle East – but not beyond, and with Iran and Algeria necessarily included – played a critical role at the highest strategic level.

It is worth considering here the global effects of the Arab cold war, which were quite different in many ways from their effects on intra-regional dynamics. Western powers saw the potential alignment of pan-Arab regimes with the Soviet Union as a profound threat in the context of the broader Cold War, even if (or perhaps because) their real focus was anti-imperialism rather than any genuine support for Communism. But there was another, secondary effect of pan-Arabism that rebounded to the benefit of the Western powers. The focus on Arab unity came at the direct expense of broader global anti-colonial solidarity, blunting its revolutionary impact on the global stage. Nasser began as a core participant in Bandung and other foundational moments of the Non-Aligned Movement, while Maghreb states such as Algeria figured prominently in the global anti-colonial movement (Malley Reference Malley1996; Byrne Reference Byrne2019). But Nasser grew jealous of African leaders such as Nkrumah and Senghor, and sought to define pan-Arabism in part against pan-Africanism, with racial animus and local political concerns driving Egypt and other pan-Arab regimes toward the more insular pan-Arab discourse.

The defeat of pan-Arabism after 1967 is typically seen as the consolidation of the state system and the emergence of a more normal, Realist form of regional international relations. This is both true and misleading. It is certainly the case that the creation of massive national security states fueled by the oil boom and dedicated to ensuring the survival of existing regimes dampened the ability of popular opinion to be heard on issues such as Palestine. But it is equally the case that Arab labor migration to the Gulf continued in this period, providing continuity in the underlying material foundations of regionalism while also serving as a transmission belt (both financial and ideational) for the rapid rise of Islamism across most of the region (Lacroix Reference Lacroix2014; Medani Reference Medani2022). The Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war which followed, as well as the parallel civil war in Lebanon and rise of Hezbollah, further consolidated the Gulf’s regional security complex in ways that connected it to the Levant.

Why did the United States care whether the Middle East was a region? In part because for the sake of its bureaucratic organization, but also because it pursued a stable set of interests in the Middle East over the course of nearly half a century which it viewed as core to its global security. It placed a particularly high value on the production and transportation of oil from the Gulf at sustainable prices, which was a core pillar of the Western capitalist system and the foundation of American hegemony within the West. It was committed to the survival and prosperity of Israel, primarily for domestic political reasons but also for strategic reasons in the post-1967 period. And, throughout, it was determined to prevent Soviet gains within the region, which it viewed as a proxy for the global balance of power in ways similar to the domino theory which kept it locked in Vietnam for so many bloody years. All of those core interests required that Washington work to sustain the status quo of friendly regimes who would ensure both the flow of oil and Israel’s security despite considerable domestic opposition. That typically meant that the United States avoided pressures for democratization within its Middle Eastern allies, while encouraging instability and regime change where possible within Soviet clients. Iran was one of the earliest battlefields of the Cold War, as the United States (incorrectly) viewed the election of Prime Minister Mossadegh and his efforts toward nationalizing oil as part of a Soviet conspiracy and acted covertly to overturn his rule and return the Shah to the throne.

That constellation of interests largely defined the American view of the Middle East. In this conceptualization, Gulf connections to East Africa or to India didn’t matter all that much, but the views of Gulf states toward Israel and Palestinian national movements mattered a great deal. Iran seemed a natural part of the region from this lens prior to the 1979 revolution, as it played a critical role in oil production and the nascent OPEC while fending off Soviet threats and serving as the primarily US military proxy in the Gulf region; after the revolution, Iran posed the most severe external threat to key American allies in the Gulf and Israel (by way of Lebanon’s Hezbollah). From this perspective, Israel was part of the region by definition (even as it was excluded by the rest of the region), since much of US policy toward the region was intended to serve the interest of advancing Israeli security and the Palestinian issue lay at the heart of inter-Arab politics. Israel’s role in cultivating African allies or supporting South African Apartheid – or its placement within the European group at the United Nations because of its political exclusion by the Arab bloc – did little to promote alternative conceptions of Israel as a transregional power (Gidron Reference Gidron2020).

The repeated Arab–Israeli wars played a key role in consolidating the full picture of the US conception of the Middle East as region. While the 1967 war gets the most attention as a transformational moment, the 1973 war arguably played a more critical role in consolidating a “regional” concept. In particular, the Saudi- and Iranian-led OPEC oil blockade in support of the Egyptian–Syrian attack of Israel established a connection between the Levant and the Gulf which would never really be forgotten. Washington’s move to monopolize peace diplomacy after 1974 at the expense of the Soviet Union involved shuttle diplomacy not only to the frontline states and Israel, but also to Saudi Arabia and other regional stakeholders. Later, the peace process launched in 1991 explicitly came in response to the difficulties of maintaining alliance with both Israel and most of the Arab states; their participation in the coalition to liberate Kuwait had carried the cost of at least an effort to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Madrid peace process worked across dual tracks, one of them a series of bilateral negotiations between Israel and frontline Arab states and the other a multilateral track taking on issues of “regional” concern such as the environment and water – which affected but did not include a wider range of states than those considered part of the “Middle East.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the crystallization of US primacy in the Middle East after 1991 perhaps surprisingly did not lead to any significant rethinking of regional boundaries. The Clinton administration remained focused on promoting Arab–Israeli peace, including the creation of a multilateral track in the Madrid peace talks which largely replicated membership in the Middle East, and the dual containment of Iran and Iraq, largely implemented through security cooperation with the Gulf states and Turkey. That agenda left little space for thinking beyond the traditional region. Middle East Studies too remained largely impervious to broader trends toward studies of globalization, democratization, and regional integration – in large part because none of those things which had become such popular objects of study in the discipline seemed to be happening within the region. The greater challenge in this era, as detailed next, was the turn toward global issues and the downgrading of all area studies within the academy and particularly within political science.

Alternative Identity Projects

There have been quite a few alternatives to the Middle East proposed from within the region, none of them yet successful in replacing it but each offering a different logic of regional construction. The extent to which these map onto local political identities and discourse, and inform patterns of political mobilization and contestation, can inform constructivist theoretical approaches to region.

Identity and Regions

Buzan and Waever make very clear in Regions and Powers that the self-perception of states and people makes no analytical difference; what matters to them is what states do, not what people feel. That aligns with much of the outside-in analysis of international relations. But this will not do. This section has argued that it must matter that there has never been a successful regional identity project based on “the Middle East,” and that those which do advance that frame have been resoundingly rejected either by popular resistance or by powerful regional actors. To the extent that regimes formulate their foreign policy based on their perceptions of threat and the demands of symbolic competition, their understandings of the region in which they operate must matter to some degree. And to the degree that public opinion is able to impose itself on the regime security obsession of regimes, it would seem to matter that those publics overwhelmingly seem to prefer Arab or Islamic regional concepts. It is here, in the domain of identity, norms, discourse, and shared understandings, that area studies approaches offer essential insights into the nature of regions which resonate with constructivist approaches in the broader IR literature.

Comparative Area Studies

Perhaps the greatest problem posed by the difficulty of defining regions in world politics comes not from the study of politics within a particular region or country but rather from the attempt to implicitly or explicitly compare regions (Ahram Reference Ahram2011). There are different ways of mobilizing regions in comparative analysis, of course. Basedau and Koller (Reference Basedau and Köllner2007) offer a useful distinction between inter-regional (how broad global trends affect different regions), intra-regional, and cross-regional comparison. Intra-regional comparison assumes that countries within a region share enough in common to justify comparison, presumably by holding factors such as geography, climate, or culture constant. Inter-regional and cross-regional comparison both assume that regions have enough internal coherence that it makes sense to use them as units of analysis when evaluating the effects of global processes. Hanson usefully quotes Harry Eckstein on the point that regions/areas are only justifiable if “the societies and polities of different regions constitute distinctive types” (Hanson Reference Hanson, Landman and Robinson2009). This Element has argued that those assumptions are at best problematic, but the literature has largely proceeded as if they were not.

Comparing across regions is one of those things which seems obvious in theory but becomes problematic in practice. There is always implicit comparison, of course; think about Toqueville holding France in his mind as he contemplated America. Much of early political science (especially but not only modernization theory) implicitly relied on European or American history as the template of normality, with areas in some sense defined by their deviance from those (very different) trajectories. Thus, the absence of democracy becomes a puzzle to be explained by virtue of the lack of something to be found in the West or the persistence of tribalism becomes a puzzle by virtue of the fading of such loyalties in the West. The study of regional international relations in the 1960s often proceeded in a similar way, seeking to identify reasons why areas of the world did not behave in the ways that European-generated theory predicted that they should. Such comparison is not only appropriate, but essential to the political science mission; Solingen’s (Reference Solingen2007) comparison of democratization in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East offers an excellent positive example of such regional comparison.

The problem arises with the shift from comparison across regions to comparison of regions, when the level of analysis is taken to be the region – an arbitrary grouping which is assumed to share fundamental attributes – rather than individual countries or clearly comparable sets of countries. Seeking to understand the difference in economic development between Egypt and Brazil is one thing; examining the divergence between “the Middle East” and “Latin America” is quite another. Ahram (Reference Ahram2011) offers an excellent overview of methodological issues which arise, particularly the (mis)use of regional dummy variables in quantitative analysis, typically without explicit discussion or justification of the membership of the region in question.

It is worth repeating here that this is not necessarily about the traditional area studies debate, the methodological debate over whether politics is best understood through a close study rooted in field research and language skills or through more universalizable formal models. Intra-regional or inter-regional comparison could be done using any set of methods, qualitative or quantitative, and could adhere in principle to any set of commitments about the logic of inquiry. The issue which I want to highlight here is the unacknowledged work being done by the assumption of coherent regions which risks unreflectively shaping the choice of comparisons in ways that either distort or foreclose possible conclusions. The greater durability of monarchies, demonstrated through comparison with non-monarchical Arab regimes, might fade away if the comparative universe were other oil-rich rentier states. The inability of Islamists to participate in democratic elections, demonstrated through their behavior in deeply undemocratic Arab regimes, may vanish if the comparative universe expanded to include Asian, South Asian, and African cases. Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar might look different if they were understood as key nodes in global finance, transit, and migration rather than as “Arab” states (Khanna, Le Renard, and Vora Reference Khana, Le Renard and Vora2020).

Take the study of Islamist movements. There is a vast literature comparing Islamist movements across the Arab world (to which I have been pleased to contribute). Countless books and articles have examined the trajectories of Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated movements, their ideologies, their electoral performance, and their social services. The overwhelming majority of the work which seeks to go beyond a single country case study or subregional comparison (Islamists in North Africa or Islamists in the Gulf) still limits its comparative lens to the Arab countries. The costs of that limitation can be seen in some exemplary recent works which look farther: Gumuscu’s (Reference Gumuscu2023) comparison of Turkish Islamism with Tunisia and Egypt; Medani’s (Reference Medani2022) examination of the role of remittances in fueling Islamist movements in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia; Farquhar’s (Reference Farquhar2016) study of the export of Saudi Islamism to Africa. Limiting the comparative universe to Arab countries makes it very difficult to isolate the real relationship between Islamism and democracy, since Arab Islamists operate within profoundly autocratic regimes where no movement, of any ideological stripe, has demonstrated democratic success. Attributing extreme violence to Islamist ideology by only looking at Middle Eastern cases, which tend to involve Islamists, risks missing the equally extreme violence of leftist, fascist, or mercenary forces in other regions. The flourishing of violent Salafi-jihadist groups across the Sahel and Africa makes it difficult to sustain assumptions about the unique susceptibility of Middle Eastern environments to such extremism. Similar problems can be seen across many domains of inquiry, from democratic transitions and authoritarianism to the prevalence and severity of civil wars.

Another dimension of the problem can best be summarized by Ella Shohat, who warned that “any serious analysis has to begin from the premise that genders, sexualities, races, classes, nations and even continents exist not as hermetically sealed entities but, rather, as part of a set of permeable, interwoven relationships” (2001: 1269). Comparative area studies can occlude critical transregional studies which capture flows and networks which cross the boundaries of regions. It is not obvious that the impact of the flow of Islamist ideas or labor remittances from the Arabian Peninsula should best be studied by comparing regions – the Middle East, South Asia, Africa – rather than by transregional analysis. Migration and refugees, ever more central to the political economy and lived culture of regional states, cannot possibly be understood without a transregional orientation. And as Israel’s war on Gaza forces Palestine back onto the agenda of international organizations and into the core of politics in much of the world, from the United States to the Global South, it is not obvious that the rapidly circulating ideas about the nature of the conflict or how to respond can be usefully studied within a comparative nation-state framework.

So What to Do?

Rather than simply admire the problem, I would like to conclude with some suggestions of how to proceed with the Middle East as a region.

Celebrate area studies as the best of political science. There is no reason for so much defensiveness about area studies within the discipline. Scholarship on the region over the last several decades has, in my view, conclusively shown that it is more than possible to engage the concerns of the broader discipline through close study of Middle Eastern cases. What’s more, the decade since the Arab uprisings have shown that it is not seriously possible to answer critical questions about core questions such as democratic transitions, autocratic durability, protest diffusion and dynamics, migration, civil wars, or transnational movements without reference to Middle Eastern cases.

Despite the incoherence of the regional designation, and the distorting effects described in this section, there is no denying that Middle East–focused scholars have been enormously productive in the last two decades (Lynch, Schwedler, and Yom Reference Lynch, Schwedler and Yom2022). They have overcome many of the methodological and disciplinary problems which for so long blocked development of the field, without (for the most part) sacrificing the language skills and field experience which have marked the area studies. The 1990s turn away from areas was a mistake; my call to problematize regions draws different conclusion. As Acharya (Reference Acharya2014a) so eloquently argues, the best political science will be done by people with deep knowledge of their cases. Decades and decades of defensiveness about the viability of the area studies in general, and Middle East Studies in particular, should be abandoned for good.

Match the region to the question. Celebrating area studies does not mean accepting any particular definition of the region, however. In his 2016 history of Middle East Studies in the United States, Zachary Lockman wryly concludes that “beyond its common geographic focus, the field has an essentially institutional, pedagogical and social rather than an intellectual basis.” But nonetheless, he notes, those within the field can “engage in meaningful intellectual conversation … because despite differences of discipline and intellectual orientation they often share substantial specific and general knowledge, linguistic competence, interests and experiences.” That seems like a useful starting point for picturing a way forward in the use of “the Middle East” as an organizing concept for political science. We should avoid the “congealing of contingent boundaries into reified realities” (Sinha Reference Sinha2013: 266) in favor of flexible definitions based on specific questions and methodological needs.

The organization of knowledge within universities inclines toward fixed sets of countries, of course, and won’t easily follow such flexible notions. After all, if one is running a Middle East Studies program, one needs to know what faculty to hire, what languages to teach, and what courses to offer. But that instrumental reality does not necessarily have to translate into how we organize our research and analysis. We need to stop thinking about the Middle East as an enclosed, fixed unit of analysis and start thinking about it in terms of the particular qualities and characteristics which countries inside – and outside – of that region share which are relevant to particular questions we wish to answer. As this Element has attempted to demonstrate, many things we take for granted about the Middle East are artifacts of our quite arbitrary regional definitions. Our political science will be better when it combines deep area expertise with a much more elastic definition of the areas in question. We need to be able to theorize and research transregional connections and comparisons, seeing the world in terms of dense networks rather than discrete regions, without losing sight of the critical importance of grounded, sustained field research and local knowledge.

Decolonizing the Middle East isn’t going to help … One response to the problematic origins of the idea of the Middle East has been to rename it in the name of broader trends toward decolonization the academy (Bishara Reference Bishara2023; Culcasi Reference Culcasi2023). Some of the solutions involved make excellent sense, particularly calls to more fully integrate scholars from the region and to pay more attention to scholarship and ideas emanating from the region. As Katzenstein (Reference Katzenstein2001: 789) argued two decades ago, “an infusion of intellectual energy from foreign graduate students and post-docs is leading to a reinvention of traditional area studies as global networks of scholarly engagement” (789). The more that scholars “from the region” are integrated into the core of the enterprise, the more that their conceptions and reconceptualizations of what makes region will come to shape the discipline. When a Black Iranian sets out to write Iranian history, she is more likely to bring forward transregional histories of slavery and the erasure of former slaves from nationalist historiography (Baghoolizadeh Reference Baghoolizadeh2024).

The least persuasive recommendation, though, is to replace “the Middle East” or “MENA” with SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Such a linguistic shift would have the salutary effect of rejecting the definitions associated with European colonialism, to be sure. But it would still define the region geographically in relation to a global power (in this case China) without offering any useful, unique, or defensible boundaries to the region. Adopting SWANA just follows on the long tradition detailed earlier in this Element of arbitrarily imposing definitions of the region from the outside, without solving any of the problems which that has caused.

… but subregional and transregional approaches might. The call to match region with question goes hand in hand with greater attention to subregional distinctions. The shared experience and identity of the Maghreb, the Levant, or the Gulf are orders of magnitude greater than those which bind the Middle East as a whole. Those subregions do tend to share a common history – whether with Ottoman legacies or encounters with imperialism – and similar resource endowments, degrees of stateness, institutional forms, and political culture. Green (Reference Green2014) offers one of the most interesting of these subregional definitions, but there are many others on which to draw.

That said, it would be as much a mistake to reify subregions as it would be to reify the region as a whole. One of the most intellectually exciting projects of recent decades has been the rise of Indian Ocean Studies, situating the Gulf within a maritime context spanning India and the East African coast (Green Reference Green2014; Low Reference Low2022; Crouzet Reference Crouzet2022). The Indian Ocean context allows us to see both historical and contemporary developments in genuinely new ways, rethinking the Ottoman legacy alongside British and French imperial histories and recapturing the long, deep connections between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Rather than call for the designation of a new “region,” Indian Ocean studies should be a model for facilitating new thinking about transregional connections and global histories. Similarly, literature connecting the Maghreb with the Sahel and French West Africa has helped to see the construction of regional borders while elucidating the political, strategic, environmental, and economic costs of arbitrary divisions.

The definition and study of the Middle East cannot not be political. This Element has raised a wide range of critical questions about the conceptualization of the Middle East as a region, highlighting the many ways in which its definition is contested. That contestation should be embraced, and studied, rather than suppressed in the name of scientific precision. I was quite taken with Schwartz’s (Reference Schwartz1980) argument about Asian studies, that the question of whether Chinese values and ideas had penetrated and shaped the surrounding areas enough to create an East Asia region was a “fruitful ambiguity,” an important and critically useful area for research rather than a reason to abandon area studies. Area studies should be the antidote to Orientalism, he argues, refusing to take all of the Middle East as a unified monolith precisely because of the intensity of local knowledge, language study, and lived experience. If area studies is understood as inherently cross-disciplinary, it should act as a self-corrective to the assumptions and blind spots of any single discipline. Thompson (Reference Thompson2013) similarly mounts a persuasive defense of Southeast Asia as a region, despite all its ambiguities, in part because of the agency of those in the region seeking to organize the region along those lines. Studies of the Middle East should be expected to explicitly define and defend its borders, and to consistently consider how conclusions might change those borders be affected and different comparisons made.

The question of Israel’s inclusion, and on what terms, is the elephant in the room in all discussions of the definition of the Middle East as a region, and the most openly contested politically. The war on Gaza, which began in October 2023, will only make those questions more intense. Again, this should be embraced as a question rather than ruled out of the analytical framework. Israel may always be in the Middle East, but not of it – and that should be taken as a key marker for thinking about the definition of the region rather than as a problem to be avoided. It is entirely appropriate analytically for Israel to be included in the Middle East for strategic analysis but excluded when the object of analysis is identity and regional self-definition. That triggers controversial political questions, true, but, as this Element has demonstrated, so are all definitions of region. On one vision, Israel should be included in the region on all levels, because even the rejection of its inclusion is a political act worthy of analysis and it would be virtually impossible to assess Arab identity without its Israeli Other. Furthermore, nearly a quarter of Israel’s citizen population is Palestinian Arab, a figure which grows to more than half if one takes seriously the one-state reality created by Israel’s permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (Barnett et al., Reference Barnett, Brown, Lynch and Telhami2023). On another, it should be excluded by virtue of its non-Arab identity and the hostility toward its project among most of the region’s members. But again, these disagreements are productive rather than fatal: Israel’s inclusion should be assessed across multiple dimensions, with its inclusion for the purposes of analysis not necessarily implying normalization of its presence in the region.

In Praise of Comparative and Transregional Area Studies

This Element’s examination of the Middle East comes neither to bury the region nor to praise it. Excavating the intellectual and institutional history of the regional construct helps us to understand how and why its borders were drawn, as well as the stakes of those definitions and the costs of losing other definitions which might have been. It is quite possible to understand that past in all its problematic glory without abandoning the quite impressive Middle East political science research community which has been developed over the course of decades. Multiple disciplines, from history and anthropology to critical geography, are moving in the direction of transregional and cross-regional comparison. Political science should seek to emulate and elaborate those moves without prejudice to its core disciplinary strengths. Area studies, in all of its inherent interdisciplinarity, should lead the way even as it moves beyond arbitrary and misleading reifications of specific regions.