Book Readings
Pick of one the books to review:
General introductions to MENA politics:
Recommended: Fred Halliday. The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge University Press 2005
Recommended: M. E. Mc Millan: From the First World War to the Arab Spring What’s Really Going On in the Middle East? Mc Millan 2016
Roger Owen: State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1992/2006
R. Stephen Humphreys, Between Memory and Desire, The Middle East in a Troubled Age, University of California Press 1999
Arab Spring:
Recommended: Marc Lynch (ed.): Arab Uprisings Explained, 2014
Gerges, Fawaz: ISIS: A History. 2016
Fraihat, Ibrahim: Unfinished revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring, 2016
How to write a summary (2-3 pages):
1. Describve the aim and the main topic of the book: does it ask a question, what does the author want to say
2. summarize main points: what are the main perspectives and main answers
3. Pick five concepts and define them (example: authoritarian, islamism, governance etc.)
4. Choose one topic, ideally something concrete, that has most interested you, or something you do not agree with, or something suprising, describe it and analyse this topic on half a page (eg. intervention in Bahrain and Western responsibility..)
The Summary is due 10. 11.