When in the Arab World is written from the inside for anyone who wants to live or work with Arab culture.

Recounting recent encounters between Latin American and Arab countries this unique volume explores how, despite both geographical and cultural distances, Latin American revolutionaries constructed an image of the Arab World as one sharing their own political views and interests. From the nationalization of the Suez Canal to Latin American perspectives on the Arab Spring Federico Vélez offers a fascinating historical and contemporary analysis on the behaviour of actors on the periphery of the international system. Contributing to debates regarding ideological and political autonomy the book provides a comprehensive historical account of relations between the countries of Latin America and the Middle East alongside new analysis on the ways marginalized states can sometimes build unlikely alliances in their attempts to challenge structures of power.

Based on a decade of research, including in-depth interviews with many leading figures in the story, this edition is essential for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the turmoil engulfing the Middle East, from civil wars to the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

This book explores the emergence of an anarchic states-system in the twentieth-century Arab world. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalist movements first considered establishing a unified regional arrangement to take the empire's place and present a common front to outside powers. But over time different Arab leaderships abandoned this project and instead adopted policies characteristic of self-interested, territorially limited states. In his explanation of this phenomenon, the author shifts attention away from older debates about the origins and development of Arab nationalism and analyzes instead how different nationalist leaderships changed the ways that they carried on diplomatic and strategic relations. He situates this shift in the context of influential sociological theories of state formation, while showing how labor movements and other forms of popular mobilization shaped the origins of the regional states-system.

Despite notable socio-economic development in the Arab region, a deficit in democracy and political rights has continued to prevail. This book examines the major reasons underlying the persistence of this democracy deficit over the past decades, drawing on case studies from across the Arab world to explore economic development, political institutions and social factors, and the impact of oil wealth and regional wars.

"In few of its postwar policies has the United States been more ill at ease than in dealing with the Arab world...For two decades it has felt its way through the recurrent crises of the area, seldom entirely failing in its objectives, yet equally seldom quite reaching them. Bold initiative and sustained consistency have not been the hallmark of its approach." With these words John S. Badeau , who served as United States Ambassador to Egypt from 1961 to 1964, begins his reassessment of American policies in the Middle East. In setting forth the American approach to the area, Mr. Badeau carefully defines United States interests, primary and subsidiary. He evaluates the new forces of nationalism, non-alignment, and modernization in the Arab world, as well as national and personal rivalries, the tensions between the radical and conservative states, the residual onus of European colonialism, and the Soviet presence. In evaluating the instrumentalities and guidelines for the exercise of American foreign policy in the Middle East, Mr. Badeau also spells out the inevitable dilemmas that the United States must face. A case study of American diplomacy in Yemen illustrates both the opportunities for and the constraints on policy. He concludes that a reappraisal of United States policy in the area is in order, urging that our approach take into consideration not only our true interests and capabilities in the Middle East, but also the changing political realities of the Arab world.

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media disseminationDLfrom phonograph cylinders to MP3sDLeach subjected to the political and economic forces of its particular era and region. Carried by mass media, the broader culture of Arab music has been thoroughly transformed as well. Simultaneously, mass mediated music has become a powerful social force. While parallel processes have unfolded worldwide, their implications in the Arabic-speaking world have thus far received little scholarly attention. This provocative volume features sixteen new essays examining these issues, especially televised music and the controversial new genre of the music video. Perceptive voicesDLboth emerging and establishedDLrepresent a wide variety of academic disciplines. Incisive essays by Egyptian critics display the textures of public Arabic discourse to an English readership. Authors address the key issues of contemporary Arab societyDLgender and sexuality, Islam, class, economy, power, and nationDLas refracted through the culture of mediated music. Interconnected by a web of recurrent concepts, this collection transcends music to become an important resource for the study of contemporary Arab society and culture. Contributors: Wael Abdel Fattah, Yasser Abdel-Latif, Moataz Abdel Aziz, Tamim Al-Barghouti, Mounir Al Wassimi, Walter Armbrust, Elisabeth Cestor, Hani Darwish, Walid El Khachab, Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri, James Grippo, Patricia Kubala, Katherine Meizel, Zein Nassar, Ibrahim Saleh, Laith Ulaby.

Once a voiceless region dominated by authoritarian rulers, the Arab world seems to have developed an identity of its own almost overnight. The series of uprisings that began in 2010 profoundly altered politics in the region, forcing many experts to drastically revise their understandings of the Arab people. Yet while the Arab uprisings have indeed triggered seismic changes, Arab public opinion has been a perennial but long ignored force influencing events in the Middle East. In The World Through Arab Eyes, eminent political scientist Shibley Telhami draws upon a decade's worth of original polling data, probing the depths of the Arab psyche to analyze the driving forces and emotions of the Arab uprisings and the next phase of Arab politics. With great insight into the people and countries he has surveyed, Telhami provides a longitudinal account of Arab identity, revealing how Arabs' present-day priorities and grievances have been gestating for decades. The demand for dignity foremost in the chants of millions went far beyond a straightforward struggle for food and individual rights. The Arabs' cries were not simply a response to corrupt leaders, but were in fact inseparable from the collective respect they crave from the outside world. Decades of perceived humiliations at the hands of the West have left many Arabs with a wounded sense of national pride, but also a desire for political systems with elements of Western democracies -- an apparent contradiction that is only one of many complicating our understanding of the monumental shifts in Arab politics and society. In astonishing detail and with great humanity, Telhami identifies the key prisms through which Arabs view issues central to their everyday lives, from democracy to religion to foreign relations with Iran, Israel, the United States, and other world powers. The World Through Arab Eyes reveals the hearts and minds of a people often misunderstood but ever more central to our globalized world.

America’s engagement with the Arab world stretches back far beyond the Iraq wars. According to Milton Viorst, the current conflict is simply the latest round in a 1,400-year struggle between Christianity and Islam, in which the United States became a participant only in the last century. Today, the Bush Doctrine aims to free the Arab peoples from political oppression and create a democratic Iraq. So why are Arabs, and Iraqis in particular, so suspicious of our efforts? The explanation, Viorst says, is simple: “What the American leadership has miscalculated, or simply dismissed, is Arab nationalism.” In Storm from the East, Viorst offers a balanced, lucid, and vital history of America’s uneasy relationship with the Arab world and argues that brutal conflict in the region will continue until the West, with the United States taking the lead, honors the Arabs’ insistence on deciding their own destiny. Viorst examines the long struggle of the Arab world to overthrow Western hegemony. He explores the Arab experiences with democracy and military despotism; Nasserite socialism in Egypt and Ba’athism in Syria and Iraq; tribal monarchy in Saudi Arabia and Jordan; guerrilla warfare waged by the Palestinians; and, finally, Islamic rebellion culminating in Osama bin Laden’s extremist al-Qaeda. All have the same goal: the liberation of the Arabs from foreign domination. Storm from the East is a powerful work that, like no other, limns the political, religious, and social roots of Arab nationalism and the present-day unrest in the Middle East.