Power and Stability in the Middle East

Auteur :

Éditeur : Zed Books	Date & Lieu : 1989, London & New Jersey
Préface :	Pages : 206
Traduction :	ISBN : 0-86232-808-X
Langue : Anglais	Format : 135x215 mm
Code FIKP : Liv. Eng. Ber. Pow. N°1493	Thème : Général

Présentation

Table des Matières

Introduction

Identité

PDF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book of this sort requires the cooperative effort of a large number of people over an extended period. I began working on this project in the early to mid-1980s. when it became apparent to me and other colleagues in the field that comprehensive, comparative historical treatments of states and issues in the Middle East were few and far between. This, at a time of increasing conflict and crisis in a strategically important region of the world. It was the recognition of this fact by Robert Molteno at Zed Books that made the launching of this project possible in the mid-eighties.

I would like to thank, first and foremost, all the contributors to this volume, who in addition to producing excellent pieces of research and writing commissioned especially for this volume, have endured the long and arduous process of publication with great patience. I would especially like to thank David Seddon, Fred Lawson. Farideh Farhi and Julie Peteet for their prompt response at various stages of this project, as my thanks go to Fikret Ceyhun, Ghassan Salame. Paul Saba, and Ahmad Azim for their cooperation and help in making the completion of this volume possible. Additionally, my thanks go to the editors of the Journal of Palestine Studies and MERIP Middle East Report for permitting the publication of the articles by Pamela Ann Smith and Joe Stork, as well as allowing the publication of a revised version of articles by Seddon and Salame which have previously appeared in the Report.

I would also like to thank David Dickens. Cyrus Bina. Sohrab Behdad. Ertugrul Tonak. Hamid Hosseini and Behzad Yaghmaian for their input through discussion on various topics involving the Middle East.
My thanks also go to Peggy Hart, who typed and retyped numerous versions of most of the articles in this book, with countless hours spent in front of the computer; her work is much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank Robert Molteno and Michael Pa His of Zed Books for their commitment and dedication to the project in seeing to it that a solid piece of important scholarly work on the subject is produced and made available to a broad audience in Middle East studies in a timely fashion.

Needless to say. any errors in fact or interpretation remain those of the authors of individual articles, while I. as editor, assume responsibility for selection and inclusion of the essays that make up this book, as I do for my introductory comments and observations that constitute the opening pages.

B.B.

About the Contributors

Ahmed N. Azim is an Egyptian economist, now an associate professor of organizational theory and policy analysis at the University of Calgary. Canada. He is currently engaged in research on the political economy of Egypt and the Middle East.

Fikrer Ceyhun is a graduate of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Ankara. Turkey, and is currently a professor of economics at the University of North Dakota. USA. His articles have appeared in Economic Forum and the Review of Radical Political Economics. He is currently engaged in research on the political economy of Turkey.

Farideh Farhi is an Iranian social scientist, now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is presently engaged in research on a comparative analysis of the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua.

Fred H. Lawson is assistant professor of government at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he teaches international relations and Middle East politics. He is the author of Bahrain The Modernization of Autocracy (Boulder. Co Westview Press. 1987).

Julie Peteet received her Ph. D. in Anthropology from Wayne State University in Detroit. She has taught at the American University of Beirut and Georgetown University in Washington, and conducted fieldwork on Palestinian women in Lebanon in 1980-82. She was more recently a senior research fellow at Yarmouk University in Jordan. Her publications include articles on Palestinian women in Lebanon in the Journal of Palestine Studies and MERIP Reports.

Paul Saha is a practising attorney in Tucson. Arizona. He is presently doing work on the Jewish National Question, the history of the Bund and leftwing Zionism and implications of Gramsci's work for socialist strategy in the developed capitalist countries.

Ghassan Saame is a Lebanese social scientist. He teaches political studies at the American University of Beirut, and Saint-Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of Saudi Foreign Policy Since 1943 (Beirut. 1980).

David Seddon is reader at the School of Development Studies. University of East Anglia, where he teaches North African and Middle Eastern development. He is the author of Moroccan Peasants and is currently editing a collection on The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Turkey (with Çaglar Keyder).

Pamela Ann Smith is a journalist specializing in Middle East studies, and is the author of Palestine and the Palestinians. 1873-1983 (New' York St. Martin’s Press. 1984).

Joe Stork is editor of Middle East Report in Washington. DC and co-founder of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). He writes and lectures on contemporary development in the Middle East and United States policy there.

About the Editor

Dr Berch Berberoglu is associate professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Nevada. Reno. USA. He is an internationally recognized scholar specializing in the Middle East and in political economy, class analysis, and comparative historical studies on a world scale. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Development and Change. International Studies and Research in Political Economy, among others. His recent book Turkey in Crisis from State Capitalism to Neo-Colonialism (London Zed Press. 1982) is the first comprehensive radical history of the 20th Century Turkish political economy to appear in English. His most recent book. The Internationalization of Capital (New York Praeger Publishers. 1987) examines the nature and contradictions of imperialism and capitalist development on a world scale. He is also the editor of a two-volume collection of classical and contemporary Marxist writings on India Vol. I India National Liberation and Class Struggles Vol. II Mode of Production, Class Struggles and Revolution in India (both published by Sarup & Sons, Publishers, Meerut. India in 1986 and 1987. respectively).

Introduction

The most recent crises in the Middle East centering around the civil war in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, are part and parcel of the larger crisis engulfing the region for the past 40 years. Clearly, the period from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 to the present is replete with critical events unfolding in a continuous drama of social and political struggles, war and revolution. The origins of these crises in the Middle East, however, go much further back in history - to the disintegration and collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the invasion of its territories by the European powers at the beginning of this century. By the end of World War I. Ottoman Turkey had lost most of its territories to Britain. France. Italy. Greece, and other Western powers who divided these lands amongst themselves, turning them into colonial possessions. Thus. Britain came to possess the Persian Gulf region and today’s Iraq. Kuwait. Jordan. Israel. Egypt, and parts of North Africa; France established a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, while continuing its colonization of Tunisia. Algeria, and Morocco; while the United States. Germany. Italy. Greece, and other lesser powers divided Turkey and its adjacent territories between themselves. Western penetration of the Ottoman Empire, which had begun a century earlier, was now complete with its final partition through brute military force.

Thus began a prolonged period of colonial rule in the Middle East, which lasted several decades and led to the development of nationalist sentiment and struggles that resulted in wars of national liberation and revolution by the 1940s and. especially, in the 1950s. It is during this period that an increasing number of countries in the Middle East - including Syria. Lebanon. Iraq. Jordan. Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria - gained their independence and emerged as ‘autonomous’ nation states. In Lebanon, nationhood was achieved through a ‘peaceful’ transition of power to neo-colonial elements who remained within the Western imperial orbit; in Egypt. Syria, and Iraq, nationalist regimes came to power through military coups led by junior officers in the army; and in Algeria a protracted war of national liberation finally forced the French out. These struggles took place in response to Western intervention in and control of the Middle East. The partition of the region into colonial possessions also deprived long-established nationalethnic groups of their homelands and dispersed them across several nationalpolitical boundaries, as in the case of …