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. But
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 in
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 with
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 weathering of
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 careful border
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