Politics Society in MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This course introduces students to the politics and society of the Middle East by exploring some of the main political and social problems facing the region today. The topics covered emerge from academic, policy, and everyday debates about real-world questions and challenges that have affected and continue to affect the lives of people in the region. We will debate these questions ourselves, and scrutinize how they have been studied and analyzed in academic scholarship. We will also dwell on more fundamental questions of how research agendas emerge, which questions end up being studied and why, and the relationship between area studies knowledge and general theories of comparative politics. Each week we will read four important works that each in their own way seek to make sense of a set of puzzles or questions related to that week’s topic. These works include a mix of ‘classic’ texts in the field of Middle East comparative politics and newer research on the same questions. The focus of the course is on the 20th and 21st centuries, though occasionally we may discuss more historical periods. The course is structured as a survey and, as such, we will be aiming to cover a broad range of topics, including: state formation, authoritarianism, oil and rentierism, political Islam, sectarianism, informal politics, and the Arab Spring revolutions. The topics we will cover are certainly not exhaustive, but they are selected to capture some of the most significant debates and questions that have motivated research on the region. Students will have the opportunity in their final assignments to delve more deeply into one of these topics, or to explore one that we haven’t covered in the course.