Rethinking Middle East Politics - Softcover

Bromley, Simon

4.25

8 ratings by Goodreads

9780292708167: Rethinking Middle East Politics

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292708165 ISBN 13: 9780292708167

Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr, 1994

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Rethinking Middle East Politics considers a range of debates on the character of political and socioeconomic development in the Middle East, focusing on the linked processes of state formation and capitalist development.Simon Bromley seeks to reformulate the central questions involved in the study of state formation. He builds a comparative framework based on an examination of key developmental processes in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and offers a range of substantive theses on the place of democracy and Islam in the region. His findings explain a very large part of what appears to be significant in the emergence of the modern Middle East. Rethinking Middle East Politics presents a new way of analyzing politics in the Middle East, offering a perspective that has major implications for rethinking Third World politics more generally and for the social and political theory of modernity.

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Review:

Bromley has written an incisive, balanced, and insightful treatment of some of the most important and influential paradigms in Middle Eastern studies. Looking at each of the analytical frameworks critically, he offers his own interpretation of some of the more important forces at work in the process of state formation in the Middle East. . . . A provocative examination of a much debated aspect of Middle Eastern politics. It should be carefully read by anyone who is interested in examining the historical forces behind state formation in the Middle East.

From the Back Cover:

This book considers a range of debates on the character of political and socio–economic change in the Middle East, focusing on the linked processes of state formation and capitalist development.

The author seeks to reformulate the central questions involved in the study of state formation: he develops a comparative framework based on an examination of key developmental processes in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and he offers a range of substantive theses on the place of democracy and Islam in the region. Moreover, he argues that, by focusing on the historical character of surplus appropriation, by detailing the specific social relations which have governed these processes, and by considering their patterns of reproduction and transformation, we can explain a very large part of what appears to be significant about the transformation of the modern Middle East. In particular, we can better and more fully explain the key features of the region than can those accounts that have stressed its cultural or institutional peculiarities.

Rethinking Middle East Politics is concerned to formulate a new way of analysing politics in the Middle East, developing a perspective which has major implications for rethinking Third World politics more generally and for the social and political theory of modernity.

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