Statecraft in the Middle East: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and Security (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781784535803)

What role do ideas play in state-building and state activity? Thisbook argues that government policies in both foreign relationsand domestic politics must always be situated within a broaderideational and societal context. Imad Mansour analyses how governments in thecontemporary Middle East have governed internally and acted externally basedon societal narratives, which bring together a variety of ideas about a society'shistory and place in the world. He argues that there is a dominant societalnarrative that acts as a primary building block of statecraft, where statecraftis understood as an ongoing set of local, regional and global state-buildingprocesses. Mansour investigates the ways in which statecraft in the Middle Easthas been guided by narratives through a close historical reading and comparativediscussion of the political activity of six states - Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran - in the second half of the twentieth century and the earlytwenty-first century. His book demonstrates the analytical power of narrativesin understanding statecraft and explains why governments' decisions need to beunderstood in complex ways

Author: Imad Mansour
ISBN-10: 178453580X
ISBN-13: 9781784535803
Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company
Language: English
Published: 11/30/2016
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.50w x 1.00d