Is the ‘Orientalist’ past the future of Middle East studies?

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Notes

Pinar Bilgin is in the Department of International Relations, Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara 06533, Turkey.

The author would like to thank Adam David Morton, Bilge Criss, Tore Fougner and Umit Cizre for comments.

Rashid Khalidi, ‘Is there a future for Middle East studies?’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, July 1995, at http://w3fp.arizona.edu/mesasoc/Bulletin/khalidi.htm, accessed 25 October 2000.

Jerrold D Green, ‘The politics of Middle East politics’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 27 (3), 1994, p 517.

Robert Bates, ‘Area studies and the discipline: a useful controversy?’, PS, 30 (2), 1997, p 169.

Edward W Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1978.

Here the term Oriental studies is used to refer to the early tradition

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 123.

See, for example, Neil L Waters (ed), Beyond the Area Studies Wars: Toward a New International Studies, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000; Mark Tessler, Jody Nachtweu & Anne Banda (eds), Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Stanley Kurtz, ‘Studying Title VI: criticisms of Middle East studies gets a congressional hearing’, National Review Online, at http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/kurtz/kurtz061603.asp, accessed 12 September 2003.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 126.

Timothy Mitchell, ‘Deterritorialization and the crisis of modern science’, in Mirsepassi et al, Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World, p 167.

Ibid, p 169. For example, the literature on ‘failed states’ rests on assumptions about ‘“stateness” against which any given state should be measured as having succeeded or failed’. Presenting the experiences of developing states as ‘deviations’ from the norm not only reinforces commonly held assumptions about ‘ideal’ statehood but also inhibits reflection on the ‘broader and more prevalent crises in the capacities and legitimacy of modern states’. See Jennifer Milliken & Keith Krause, ‘State failure, state collapse, and state reconstruction: concepts, lessons and strategies’, Development and Change, 33 (5), 2002, pp 753–755.

Ian S Lustick, ‘The disciplines of political science: studying the culture of rational choice as a case in point’, PS, 30 (2), 1997, p 176. See also David Ludden, ‘Why area studies?’, in Mirsepassi et al, Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World, pp 131–136.

For a critique of the ‘physics envy’ in international studies, see John Lewis Gaddis, ‘History, science, and the study of international relations’, in Ngaire Woods (ed), Explaining International Relations Since 1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp 32–48; and Steven Bernstein, Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein & Steven Weber, ‘God gave physics the easy problems: adapting social sciences to an unpredictable world’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (1), 2000, pp 43–76. On the record of rational choice theory in the study of world politics, see Bruce Bruno de Mesquita, ‘The benefits of a social-scientific approach to studying international affairs’, in Woods, Explaining International Relations Since 1945, pp 49–76.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 16.

On the differences between explaining and understanding as distinct approaches to international studies, see Martin Hollis & Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. See also Alexander Wendt, ‘On constitution and causation in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 24 (special issue), 1998, pp 101–117.

Manfred Halpern, ‘Middle Eastern studies: a review of the state of the field with a few examples’, World Politics, 15 (1), 1962, p 110.

I William Zartman, ‘Political science’, in Leonard Binder (ed), The Study of the Middle East: Research and Scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, New York: John Wiley, 1976, p 267.

Rex Brynen, ‘The state of the art in Middle Eastern studies: a research note and the American empire’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 4 (4), 1986, p 409.

Robert H Bates, ‘Letter from the president: area studies and the discipline’, APSA–CP Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section in Comparative Politics, 7 (1), 1996, p 1. Given the current prevalence of rational choice approaches in political science, the relevance of such criticisms remains.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, pp 120–130.

Philip S Khoury, ‘Current developments and future directions in Middle Eastern studies’, Frontiers, 6, 2000, at http://www.frontiers.com, accessed 10 September 2003.

See Rashid I Khalidi, ‘The Middle East as an area in an era of globalisation’, in Mirsepassi et al, Localising Knowledge in a Globalising World, pp 171–190 for a response to this challenge within the Middle Eastern context.

Mirsepassi et al, 'Introduction', in Localising Knowledge in a Globalising World, p 13.

Ibid, p 4.

Ibid.

Judith E Tucker, ‘Middle East studies in the United States: the coming decade’, in Hisham Sharabi (ed), The Next Arab Decade: Alternative Futures, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988, pp 312–313.

Earl L Sullivan & Jacqueline S Ismael, ‘Introduction: critical perspectives on Arab studies’, in Sullivan & Ismael (eds), The Contemporary Study of the Arab World, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1991, p 2.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 39.

Little, American Orientalism, p 314.

Ibid, p 309.

Ibid, p 317.

On ethnocentrism in security thinking, see Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979.

Ken Barger, ‘Ethnocentrism’, available at http://www.iupui.edu/nanthkb/ethnocen.htm, accessed 17 September 2003.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 28.

Said, Orientalism, p 2.

John Agnew & Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy, London: Routledge, 1995, p 45.

Robert Kaplan, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, New York: Free Press, 1993.

On the distinction between ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ theories, see Robert W Cox, ‘Social forces, states and world orders’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10 (2), 1981, pp 126–158.

On the distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘constitutive’ theory, see Steve Smith, ‘The Self-images of a discipline: a genealogy of international relations theory’, in Ken Booth & Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theory Today, Oxford: Polity Press, 1995, pp 1–37.

See Edward W Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, London: Vintage, 1994.

Kramer also underestimates the role imperial interests played in the making of Oriental studies. The author mentions ‘the experience of Crusade, Renaissance and Enlightenment’ (p 5) yet leaves out colonialism and imperialism as factors that have shaped the study of the Orient.

See also Edward W Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts determine how We see the Rest of the World, London: Vintage, 1997; and Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W Said, ed Gauri Viswanathan, New York: Vintage, 2001.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 2.

Peter Johnson & Judith Tucker, ‘Middle East studies network in the United States’, MERIP Reports, 38, 1975, p 4.

Richard D Lambert, ‘DoD, social science, and international studies’, ANNALS of the AAPSS, 502, 1989, p 95.

Georgetown University, which had missed the ‘boom years’ of US government funding, solicited the Gulf governments to set up its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Bernstein et al, 'God gave physics', p 43.

Ibid, pp 43–4.

Irene L Gendzier, ‘Following the flag’, Middle East Report, October–December 1997, p 10.

Chris Hill, ‘Academic international relations: the siren song of policy relevance’, in Christopher Hill & Pamela Beshoff (eds), Two Worlds of International Relations: Academics, Practitioners and the Trade in Ideas, London: Routledge, 1994, pp 3–25.

Alexander George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 1993.

See, for example, Naseer Aruri & Muhammad A Shuraydi (eds), Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W Said, New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001; and Rashid Khalidi, ‘Edward W Said and the American public sphere: speaking truth to power’, Boundary 2, 25 (2), 1998, pp 161–177.

Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, p 5.

Norvell B De Atkine & Daniel Pipes, ‘Middle Eastern studies: what went wrong?’, Academic Questions, 9 (1), 1995, p 70.

Agnew & Corbridge, Mastering Space, p 46. For a discussion on the theoretical and practical impact of area studies on current approaches to ‘failed states’, see Pinar Bilgin & Adam David Morton, ‘Historicising representations of “failed states”: beyond the cold war annexation of the social sciences?’, Third World Quarterly, 23 (1), 2002, pp 55–80.

Notwithstanding criticisms that the Middle East is still being represented and is not allowed to represent itself, the level of introspection and change in Middle East studies cannot be denied.