Last year, I published a Cambridge Element titled What is the Middle East? The Theory and Practice of Regions. It surveyed the origins and the implications of the adoption of the concept of the Middle East as a region, and argued that regional scholars should think in more transregional terms,
This Must Be the Podcast: Samuel Helfont I'm supposed to be writing a piece about the US-Iran deal, and finding it a bit challenging. Nobody seems to have seen the actual text of the agreement. American and Iranian descriptions of the agreement are diametrically opposed on all
I'm pleased to announce the publication of POMEPS Studies 60 Weak States in a Turbulent Middle East. It's based on a workshop I ran with Waleed Hazbun at the University of Alabama a few months ago, and builds on the series of regional international relations projects
This Must Be The Podcast: Kali Rubaii Resurgency, by Iraqi-American anthropologist Kali Rubaii, is one of the best books I've read about Middle East politics in the last few years. Based on years of ethnographic research with Iraqi farmers from Anbar, many of them displaced into Iraqi
Plus two great new reviews of America's Middle East Jason Brownlee joins me on this week's podcast episode to talk about his new book Force Without Authority (Oxford University Press, 2026). Brownlee is well known in the Middle East political science community for his work on
There's a lot happening in the Middle East these days. But when Middle East academics get together, more likely than not the main topic of conversation is going to be how everyone is handling the use of AI in the classroom. So it's exciting to see
Earlier this week, Michael Young interviewed me for Diwan about my book America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region. I was happy to answer his questions, in part because I spent several happy years as a non-resident senior fellow at Carnegie's Middle East program.
Middle East Politics and the Academy
The Middle East Political Science Podcast returns this week after a short break with a fascinating conversation with Hossam el-Hamalawy about his new book Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso 2026). It was a real pleasure to reconnect with Hamalawy, who I last saw in Cairo
I'm delighted to announce the publication of POMEPS Studies 59 Political Movements in North Africa and the Sahel, available as a free PDF download. It is the product of a joint POMEPS-Pasiri workshop held in February at the University of Florida, organized by me and Ben Smith
I haven't been able to post on here for a while because I've been traveling and frantically working to finish a few things, so I just wanted to catch up on a few things. The Middle East Political Science Podcast returns next week with a great
I'm in that rare situation of publishing two pieces at the same time which, in key ways, disagree with each other: my contribution to a Middle East Law and Governance roundtable celebrating the scholarship of Gregory Gause and a short piece for the Arab Center in Washington based
Shibley Telhami and I joined Ezra Klein in New York for his popular New York Times podcast to talk about our 2023 edited volume The One State Reality, our series of publications in Foreign Affairs about the end of the two state solution, and the harsh and deterioriating realities on
The last two and a half years have challenged some of the most enduring assumptions about Middle Eastern order in the field of International Relations of the Middle East. The US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, followed by Israel's re-invasion of Lebanon, Iran's
How do states deal with routine cross-border smuggling during periods of protracted counterinsurgency? Firat Bozçali's new book, Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey's Kurdish Borderlands, explores the complex interactions between the state and society in the Kurdish-dominated province of Wan which borders Iran. His
That and more in the new wave of the Middle East Scholars Barometer I'm pleased to be able to share the results of the recently completed ninth wave of the Middle East Scholars Barometer. Shibley Telhami and I have been polling scholars of the Middle East once or
Apologies for a second mailing in one day, but this one has been eating at me for the last week and rather than try and publish it somewhere I decided to post it here. The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas passed away over the weekend at the tender
I've been running a bit ragged lately, with a lot of travel to various talks and workshops and a number of pressing deadlines. I should have quite a bit of interesting stuff to share next week! For this week, just the podcast and a couple of videos from
We take a break from the grim headlines to spotlight another new episode of the Middle East Political Science Podcast Last year, I published a Cambridge Element called What is the Middle East: The Theory and Practice of Regions. It build upon a March 2022 Foreign Affairs article which argued
"Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbors has inexorably dragged them into a war that they had desperately hoped to avoid. The potential entry of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia into direct war alongside Israel and the United States represents the first full-scale manifestation of