toensing_052414_1 Current Analysis Please Explain This Map In early May the website Vox made a small splash on the Internet with “40 Maps That Explain the Middle East [http://www.vox.com/a/maps-explain-the-middle-east].” Chris Toensing • 6 min read
Current Analysis Once More Into the Breach Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009) Patrick Tyler, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East (London: Portobello Books, 2009) Ussama Makdisi • 18 min read
MER Article Afghan Women When we are hungry, nobody listens, but when we are fighting, they send us loads of firearms and artillery. Why? -- Zubaida (April 1998) Saba Gul Khattak • 11 min read
MER Article (Re)Made in the USA Over the last two decades, a number of presidents of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) have used their platform at annual meetings to express concern about decline in the field. [1] One is reminded of the Ottomans who, according to many (now discredited) accounts, were also in perpetual dec Lisa Hajjar, Steve Niva • 21 min read
MER Article The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate The “collapse of communism” in 1989 and the victory over Iraq in 1991 sparked a wave of triumphal declarations by Western pundits and analysts who believed that all “viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism” had now been exhausted and discredited. Some then tried to sketch a foreign policy Yahya Sadowski • 31 min read
MER Article Orientalizing America: Beginnings and Middle Passages In the quincentennial year of 1992, critical Middle East studies can and should play a powerful, constructive role in the battles against right-wing efforts to deny the multicultural strands of American and Western identity. The usual reaction is to attack ethnocentrism, stereotyping and the Orientalism of establishment culture. But such Michael M.J. Fischer • 14 min read
MER Article Al Miskin During the first seven months of this year, for the first time since the Cold War began, the position of “official enemy” of the United States went unfilled, the Soviets having resigned the role. That deplorable deficiency, which threw the White House and the Pentagon into a panic, has now been reme Al Miskin • 3 min read
