CENTRE for MEDITERRANEAN, MIDDLE EAST & ISLAMIC STUDIES

Follow this link for our book review of Dmitri Trenin, What is Russia Up To in the Middle East? (Polity Press, 2018).

Dmitri Trenin’s book is a welcome contribution to a thin body of print on Russian politics in the MENA region. Rather than enunciating in detail Putin’s regional policies -by definition an impossible task in 140 small pages- Trenin offers a succinct summation of these policies, their short-term impact and their perceptions by the region’s states. Well-versed in Russia’s geopolitical Weltanschauung, Trenin is aware of the country’s perennial interests in the greater Middle East. Far from a newcomer to the region, Russia has after all had a ‘rich history of involvement’. Yet continuities are often punctured by ruptures: the demise of the Soviet Union and the rejection of its mediating initiatives in the First Gulf War meant that the Middle East ‘almost vanished’ from Russian foreign policy. Moscow’s restoration of ties with Israel in the fall of 1991 and its co-chairing of the Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid the same year looked more like spasmodic attempts at survival of a flittering giant.

Follow this link for our book review of Frédéric Pichon, Syrie, une guerre pour rien (Les Éditions du Cerf, 2017).

Frédéric Pichon’s diminutive book is more of a scathing indictment of what Western nations, France in particular, have done wrong in Syria. It is by no means a history of Syria’s war, which the reader ought to be familiar with before reading. French scholarship on Mediterranean affairs has been in no shortage. By virtue of its former regional status as a great power and an ever-sophisticated academia, France counts many knowledgeable pundits. Yet, an overwhelming preponderance of Anglophone international relations literature and the more introverted nature of the French academia has meant that francophone publications have made less noise.

Follow this link for our book review of Alison Pargeter, Return to the Shadows: The Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda since the Arab Spring (Saqi Books, 2016).

A lot of ink has been spilt on the role of political Islam in post-Arab Spring politics. In the beginning, there was an assumption of an almost teleological nature whereby the democratic renaissance of the region would at a minimum bring the forces of political Islam to the fore. There was even the potential for it to be rendered the single most important socio-political actor in part of the region. While the first premise has certainly proved true, Alison Pargeter’s book is a detailed, eloquent attempt at explaining the second: political Islam’s inability to ensconce itself in power, once in its antechamber.

Lebanon’s size has always been inversely proportional to the magnitude of its turbulence. More of a mirror of the region’s intricacies than a catalyst, the country offers a unique regional case; although in ever-simmering tension, it manages to escape the contours of a country-wide flare-up. This is more often than not attributed to the country’s bitter memories of the civil war (1975-1990). For others, it is the product of an ill-thought out, yet relatively balanced consociational mechanism of power-sharing.

‘The Battle for Syria’ is an ambitious endeavor penned by a scholar well-versed in the region’s sociopolitical intricacies. An original and timely contribution, it situates the Syrian conflict within a rapidly-changing Middle East. Indeed, the subtitle rather serves as an involuntary warning and an index of its remit, focusing mainly on the behavior of external actors. Those seeking an immersion into Syria’s domestic political dynamics would be well-advised to look elsewhere. Phillips takes the approach of the international relations’ scholar, which at times makes the book feel informationally overloaded. The book’s leitmotif is that the Syrian theatre has been a reflection of the power projection of 6 main players, namely the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar and Turkey). It is the external behavior of those countries that has invariably had a heavy impact on the ravaged country’s state of affairs.

Klaus Wivel's book is one of those books that, as per Franz Kafka, resemble the axe hitting the frozen sea. In the post-9/11 world there has been no shortage of bibliography regarding the Mediterranean/ Middle East. By contrast, one could make the case that there has often been an abundance of bibliography, focusing excessively on issues such as terrorism, Western attempts at a normative reconstruction of the region and the intricacies of political Islam.

The civil war in Yemen began in March 2015, after the overthrow of the government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi by the Houthis, a Zaidi Shia-led movement and the commencement of an air campaign against the former by a Saudi-led coalition. The conflict has a distinctly international undertone, as it involves all important regional actors and hasn’t escaped the attention of international ones. In addition, it is fought for both pecuniary interests (securing unimpeded access to the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandab strait, where much of the world’s oil shipments pass through)[1] and ideological ones (checking what is seen by the Gulf States as Iran’s burgeoning hegemonic ambitions following the July 2015 nuclear deal). Not too dissimilar to Syria, regional power projection has left an already poor country in tatters and led to one more humanitarian disaster. The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall put it best when he wrote that Yemen today has become “another Syria, on a smaller scale”.[2]