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This is Abu Aardvark's MENA Academy, a newsletter about Everything MENA Political Science and Politics.
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A New Home for Transregional Studies
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,
Iraq Through the Archives
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
Weak States in a Turbulent Middle East
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
Resurgency and Warscape in Iraq
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