Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis details the relationships between the Egyptian Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Al Thani royal family in Qatar, and between the Mauritanian Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah and the Al Nahyans, the rulers of Abu Dhabi and senior royal family in the United Arab Emirates. These relationships stretch back decades, to the early 1960s and 1970s respectively. Using this history as a foundation, the book examines the connections between Qaradawi’s and Bin Bayyah’s rival projects and the development of Qatar’s and the UAE’s competing state-brands and foreign policies. It raises questions about how to theorize the relationships between the Muslim scholarly-elite (the ulamā) and the nation-state. Over the course of the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis, Qaradawi and Bin Bayyah shaped the Al Thani’s and Al Nahyan’s competing ideologies in important ways. Offering new ways for academics to think about Doha and Abu Dhabi as hegemonic centers of Islamic scholarly authority alongside historical centers of learning such as Cairo, Medina, or Qom, this book will appeal to those with an interest in modern Islamic authority, the ulamā, Gulf politics, as well as the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

When Alex Patrick was assaulted by another student last year, her elite boarding school wouldn't do anything about it. This year Alex is head of the Mockingbirds, a secret society of students who police and protect the student body. While she desperately wants to live up to the legacy that's been given to her, she's now dealing with a case unlike any the Mockingbirds have seen before. It isn't rape. It isn't bullying. It isn't hate speech. A far-reaching prescription drug ring has sprung up, and students are using the drugs to cheat. But how do you try a case with no obvious victim? Especially when the facts don't add up, and each new clue drives a wedge between Alex and the people she loves most: her friends, her boyfriend, and her fellow Mockingbirds. As Alex unravels the layers of deceit within the school, the administration, and even the student body the Mockingbirds protect, her struggle to navigate the murky waters of vigilante justice may reveal more about herself than she ever expected.

A former U.S. ambassador to Japan offers his insider's view of relations between the two most powerful economic forces in the world. Armacost examines the promise and frustrations of interdependece at a time when the world is changing, and chronicles American efforts to reduce a massive trade imbalance, arrange a more equitable sharing of mutual defense costs, and design a global diplomatic partnership with Tokyo.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The intimate true story of three of the greatest American generals of World War II, and how their intense blend of comradery and competition spurred Allied forces to victory. “One of the great stories of the American military.”—Thomas E. Ricks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Omar Bradley shared bonds going back decades. All three were West Pointers who pursued their army careers with a remarkable zeal, even as their paths diverged. Bradley was a standout infantry instructor, while Eisenhower displayed an unusual ability for organization and diplomacy. Patton, who had chased Pancho Villa in Mexico and led troops in the First World War, seemed destined for high command and outranked his two friends for years. But with the arrival of World War II, it was Eisenhower who attained the role of Supreme Commander, with Patton and Bradley as his subordinates. Jonathan W. Jordan’s New York Times bestselling Brothers Rivals Victors explores this friendship that waxed and waned over three decades and two world wars, a union complicated by rank, ambition, jealousy, backbiting and the enormous stresses of command. In a story that unfolds across the deserts of North Africa to the beaches of Sicily, from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and beyond, readers are offered revealing new portraits of these iconic generals.

For centuries the world’s Great Powers, along with their fleets, armies, and intelligence services, have been drawn to the Persian Gulf region. Lying at the junction of three great continents – Asia, Europe, and Africa – and sitting athwart the oceanic trade routes that link the cities of the world, the Gulf, like a magnet, has pulled superpowers into the shallow waters and adjacent lands of the 600 mile long appendage of the Indian Ocean. An observer at Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf would alternately have watched pass in the 15th century the treasure ships of Chinese Admiral Zheng He, in the 16th century the caravels of Portuguese Admiral Afonso de Albuquerqe, in the 17th century the merchant ships of the Dutch East India Company, in the 18th to the 20th centuries the frigates and steamships of the British, and finally in the late 20th century to today, the cruisers and aircraft carriers of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Perhaps in the future, Americans may be supplanted by the Indians, or perhaps the Chinese. In the Great Powers’ comings and goings since the 1400s, several consistent broad interests emerged. For the majority of this time, for example, the superpowers entered the Gulf region not to colonize, as the Europeans did in other places, but rather to further trade, which in the 20th century increasingly included oil. They also sought a military presence in the Gulf to protect seaborne flanks to colonial possessions further east on the Indian sub-continent and beyond (India, in fact, has long cast a shadow over the Gulf, given its historic trade and cultural ties to the Gulf region, strong ties that continue today). In their geo-political jockeying, furthermore, the Great Powers sought to deprive their rivals access to the states bordering the Gulf region. In tending to these enduring interests inside the Strait of Hormuz, the Great Powers through history concentrated their trade, political, and military presence along the littorals. Not surprisingly, their navies have played a substantive role. Imperial Crossroads: The Great Powers and the Persian Gulf is a collection of connected chapters, each of which investigates a different perspective in the broader subject of the Great Powers and their involvement with the states of the Persian Gulf. This volume concentrates on four western nations – Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States – and concludes with a look at the possible future involvement of two rising Asian powers – China and India.

This book examines the regional order in the Gulf Region and the wider Middle East, focusing on regional rivalries and security alliances. The authors analyze the regional system in terms of its general structure as well as the major inter-state and non-state security alliances. The structure of the regional system in the wider Middle East and the shake-ups it has experienced explain the ongoing regional rivalry and polarization since 2011 in hotspots such as Syria, Yemen, and Libya. As such, the various chapters address regional transition and power dynamics between and among regional great powers and non-state militant actors across the Gulf Region and the wider Middle East in terms of the alliance building, persistence, and disintegration since 2011.

Examines the development of a socioeconomic region in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf during a 150-year period, focusing on regional ties through long-distance trade networks.

This volume, based on both European and Ottoman sources, investigates the commercial, military and diplomatic relations between the Dutch and the English in the Levant from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. On the one hand there was a more or less constant commercial rivalry and there were moments of outright military hostility between the two powers. On the other a common life in the Near East led to a form of solidarity which transcended the political situation in the home countries. The role of the local population of the Levant, of Ottoman officials, and of the Greeks, Armenians and other eastern Christians who intervened both as merchants and as embassy dragomans or interpreters, was often decisive in influencing the dealings between the Dutch and English residents. The nine papers examine these different aspects of a relationship which has never before been studied in a Levantine context.

Cities of the Arabian Peninsula reveal contradictions of contemporary urbanization The fast-growing cities of the Persian Gulf are, whatever else they may be, indisputably sensational. The world’s tallest building is in Dubai; the 2022 World Cup in soccer will be played in fantastic Qatar facilities; Saudi Arabia is building five new cities from scratch; the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Sorbonne, as well as many American and European universities, all have handsome outposts and campuses in the region. Such initiatives bespeak strategies to diversify economies and pursue grand ambitions across the Earth. Shining special light on Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—where the dynamics of extreme urbanization are so strongly evident—the authors of The New Arab Urban trace what happens when money is plentiful, regulation weak, and labor conditions severe. Just how do authorities in such settings reconcile goals of oft-claimed civic betterment with hyper-segregation and radical inequality? How do they align cosmopolitan sensibilities with authoritarian rule? How do these elite custodians arrange tactical alliances to protect particular forms of social stratification and political control? What sense can be made of their massive investment for environmental breakthrough in the midst of world-class ecological mayhem? To address such questions, this book’s contributors place the new Arab urban in wider contexts of trade, technology, and design. Drawn from across disciplines and diverse home countries, they investigate how these cities import projects, plans and structures from the outside, but also how, increasingly, Gulf-originated initiatives disseminate to cities far afield. Brought together by noted scholars, sociologist Harvey Molotch and urban analyst Davide Ponzini, this timely volume adds to our understanding of the modern Arab metropolis—as well as of cities more generally. Gulf cities display development patterns that, however unanticipated in the standard paradigms of urban scholarship, now impact the world.

The Persian Gulf has come to represent one of the most strategically significant waterways of the world. In terms of geography, geopolitics, resources, global political economy, and regional influence, the Gulf is perhaps home to the world’s most significant group of countries. Focusing on the complexities of the interplay between domestic-level changes and region-wide interactions, this book presents the reader with the first comprehensive survey of the dynamics of change in this crucial area. Systemic-oriented in its approach, the impact of war and revolution on the countries of the sub-region is discussed, and the ways in which these factors have shaped the security dilemmas and responses of the Gulf States is also explored. The role of oil is examined in terms of the impact of its income on these states and societies, and the manner in which oil has shaped the integration of these states into the global system. Oil has shrunk developmental time in these countries, and has accelerated generational shift. At the same time, it has created the dialectical relationship which now characterizes the difficult balance between prosperity and instability which is at the heart of the sub-region. Casting new light on the workings of a strategically significant part of the international system, this book will be an essential resource for students and scholars of international relations, international security and Middle Eastern politics.