Some personal news
(For those who care. But what's a blog for if you can't share personal news?)
First, as some of you may have seen, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation just announced their 2026 class of Distinguished Scholars. I am absolutely thrilled that they chose to support my book Battle Scars: Violence in the Middle Eastern Warscape. I have been working on this book in various forms for years, and now I'm making the final push to finish it. It's an ambitious effort to rethink our approach to international relations, comparative politics, and much else through the lens of "warscape" – a concept developed mostly by scholars of long-running African conflicts and more recently adopted by a handful of great scholars of the Middle East (many of whom took part in an fantastic but ultimately abandoned project a few years back I organized with Stephane Lacroix at Sciences Po). I'll have a lot more to say about this project as I progress, but for now I'm just grateful to Guggenheim for the recognition and opportunity, and excited to move forward with the research and writing. I'm on sabbatical this spring, working on the project mostly from Gainesville, Florida; I'll return to teaching at GW in the fall.
Second, I was excited to learn that The Political Science of the Middle East, the monumental project I edited with Jillian Schwedler and Sean Yom featuring nearly 50 scholars from all career stages and surveying the state of the art across nearly a dozen subfields, is now out with an authorized Arabic translation. Thank you to the Arab Center in Doha for doing such a great job translating a long and complex text, and making it available for Arabic speakers across the region. I don't have a copy yet, or a link to purchase, but I'm excited just to know that this is out there.
Third, I was happy to see two substantive and constructive reviews of America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region appear in top outlets. In Foreign Affairs, Lisa Anderson writes:
Lynch, among the most prominent American political scientists working on the Middle East, offers a furious critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region since the end of the Cold War. He argues that the heady ambitions of the unipolar moment permitted American policymakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, to pursue the imposition of a U.S.-centric order without the resolution of the central conflict in the region—that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Indeed, he suggests that the dispute was prolonged by the U.S. commitment to a “peace process” that was, in fact, all process and no peace, which served only to prolong U.S. involvement in the region and justify Washington’s indispensability. The failure to recognize the urgency of the Palestinian issue inevitably led to policies that ignored regional public opinion, undermined putative democracy promotion efforts, propped up autocrats, and required several U.S. military interventions to put down increasingly violent eruptions of popular discontent from Iraq and Syria to Libya and beyond. Lynch does pull some punches; he insists that these U.S. policymakers are talented, earnest, and knowledgeable, and yet they are the authors of monumental blunders and disastrous policies, including, in Lynch’s well-documented view, advocating a ruinous invasion of Iraq and supporting Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East Journal, James Stocker reviews America's Middle East alongside two other recent books about the failures of US policy. Stocker calsl it "a forceful critique tracing the history of what he sees as American primacy in the region, dating it from the end of the Cold War to the present day. Gaza, he concludes, is exceptional only in the details."
Fourth, I am going back out on the road next week for a series of talks. This time, I'm heading back to my Midwestern roots. I'll be getting my Badger on at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Monday, March 2 at 12:00. On Tuesday, I'll be at the University of Chicago for a closed research workshop, but if you live in the area and are interested in warscapes drop me a line and I'll try to get you in. Then on Wednesday, I'll be speaking over lunch at Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. I hope to see a lot of my Cheesehead and anti-Cheesehead people at the talks – please come out if you can! For my dirty south friends, I'll also be speaking at the University of Alabama on March 12 at 4:30 and at Emory University the evening of March 16.
Finally, the rather expensive annual renewal of my Ghost hosting is about to hit. If you've ever thought about subscribing to Abu Aardvark to help me keep it going, this would be the time! No pressure, just saying. Where else are you going to get weekly Talking Heads lyrics smuggled into your inbox, right?
