The Middle East in the international system: improving, understanding and breaking down the international relations/area studies divide

Abstract

The year 2016 is a particularly timely one for a re-launch of the Institute for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Durham University. Events in the Middle East and North Africa continue to present huge challenges for regional and international order and yet remain poorly understood by scholars and policy makers alike. This underlines the importance of area studies centres like this one to promoting a better understanding of the contemporary international system and represents a welcome reversal, or at least slowing down, of a trend towards the closure of different area studies institutes and the resulting loss of these centres of expertise. Once gone they are hard to replace. In this short paper, the aim is to promote thinking and further discussion about the relationship between Middle East Studies and International Relations (IR) and the ways in which the two may be more fruitfully engaged in order to better understand the politics of change in the Middle East.