Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics

Through a historically informed, empirically nuanced analysis of towns and cities across the West Bank, Diana B. Greenwald offers a new theory of local government under indirect rule.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling.

Ora Szekely draws on sources including in-depth interviews, conflict data, and propaganda distributed through social media to examine how competing narratives of the civil war in Syria have shaped the course of the conflict.

After Algeria’s president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for a fifth term in early 2019, a popular peaceful uprising erupted calling for change. Thomas Serres offers new insights into the last years of Bouteflika’s rule and the factors that shaped the emergence of an unexpected social movement.

Shouting in a Cage offers new ways to understand co-optation’s power and its limits by examining two co-opted parties, the Wafd Party in Egypt and the Istiqlal Party in Morocco.

David B. Roberts offers a definitive guide to continuity and change in the Gulf region. He explores the forces challenging and bolstering the status quo in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates across the political, social, economic, military, and environmental dimensions of security.

Classless Politics offers a counterintuitive account of the relationship between neoliberal economics and Islamist politics in Egypt. Hesham Sallam examines why Islamist movements have gained support at the expense of the left, even amid conflicts over the costs of economic reforms.

Lumbering State, Restless Society offers a comprehensive and compelling understanding of modern Egypt. Nathan J. Brown, Shimaa Hatab, and Amr Adly guide readers through crucial developments in Egyptian politics, society, and economics from the middle of the twentieth century through the present.

Under what circumstances are civil-war combatants more or less likely to commit ethnic violence? Nils Hägerdal examines the Lebanese civil war to offer a new theory that highlights the interplay of ethnicity and intelligence gathering.

Curtis R. Ryan explains how Jordan weathered the turmoil of the Arab uprisings. Crossing divides between state and society, government and opposition, and struggles over elections, reform, and identity. Jordan and the Arab Uprisings is a definitive analysis of Jordanian politics before, during, and beyond the Arab Spring.

Janine A. Clark examines why Morocco decentralized while Jordan did not and evaluates the impact of their divergent paths in order to explain how authoritarian regimes can use decentralization reforms to consolidate power. Local Politics in Jordan and Morocco challenges our understanding of authoritarian regimes’ resilience.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar traces half a century of shifting Islamist doctrines, demonstrating that religious narratives in Iran can change rapidly, frequently, and dramatically in accordance with elites’ threat perceptions. Religious Statecraft constructs a new picture of Iranian politics in which power drives Islamist ideology.

Protection Amid Chaos follows Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan as they develop binding claims on assets and resources in challenging spaces. Nadya Hajj shows how they adapt flexible though legitimate property rights claims based on legal knowledge retained from their homeland to the restrictions of refugee life.

Based on comparative historical analyses of Iran, Jordan, and Kuwait, Sean L. Yom examines the foreign interventions, coalitional choices, and state outcomes that made the political regimes of the modern Middle East. A key text for foreign policy scholars, From Resilience to Revolution shows how outside interference can corrupt the most basic choices of governance: who to reward, who to punish, who to compensate, and who to manipulate.

As colonial rule dissolved in the 1930s and 1950s, Middle Eastern autocrats constructed new political states to solidify their reigns, with varying results. Why did equally ambitious authoritarians meet such unequal fates? Yom ties the durability of Middle Eastern regimes to their geopolitical origins. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, many autocratic states had little support from their people and struggled to overcome widespread opposition. When foreign powers intervened to bolster these regimes, they unwittingly sabotaged the prospects for long-term stability by discouraging leaders from reaching out to their people and bargaining for mass support—early coalitional decisions that created repressive institutions and planted the seeds for future unrest. Only when they were secluded from larger geopolitical machinations did Middle Eastern regimes come to grips with their weaknesses and build broader coalitions.

The Arab Uprisings Explained offers a fresh rethinking of established theories and presents a new framework through which scholars and general readers can better grasp the fast-developing events remaking the region

One of Foreign Policy's Best Five Books of 2013, chosen by Marc Lynch of The Middle East Channel

Beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and concluding with the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings, Frederic M. Wehrey investigates the roots of the Shi'a-Sunni divide now dominating the Persian Gulf's political landscape. Focusing on three Gulf states affected most by sectarian tensions—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait—Wehrey identifies the factors that have exacerbated or tempered sectarianism, including domestic political institutions, the media, clerical establishments, and the contagion effect of external regional events, such as the Iraq war, the 2006 Lebanon conflict, the Arab uprisings, and Syria's civil war.

In addition to his analysis, Wehrey builds a historical narrative of Shi'a activism in the Arab Gulf since 2003, linking regional events to the development of local Shi'a strategies and attitudes toward citizenship, political reform, and transnational identity. He finds that, while the Gulf Shi'a were inspired by their coreligionists in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, they ultimately pursued greater rights through a nonsectarian, nationalist approach. He also discovers that sectarianism in the region has largely been the product of the institutional weaknesses of Gulf states, leading to excessive alarm by entrenched Sunni elites and calculated attempts by regimes to discredit Shi'a political actors as proxies for Iran, Iraq, or Lebanese Hizballah. Wehrey conducts interviews with nearly every major Shi'a leader, opinion shaper, and activist in the Gulf Arab states, as well as prominent Sunni voices, and consults diverse Arabic-language sources.