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"Syria's civil war has entered an explosive third phase. Radical Islamist forces now lead the military campaign against the Ba'th Party-led regime of President Bashar al-Asad. The Islamists compete with one another for popular backing, but have alienated the general public by fighting with other militias and assaulting minority communities. In response, Kurds and 'Alawis have created armed formations to protect their co-religionists. The growing sectarianization of the conflict resonates with sectarian mobilization in Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon, which threatens to spread the war across state boundaries." (author's abstract)

Among the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa, Saudi Arabia is at once paradigmatic and exceptional. The kingdom epitomizes what every schoolchild knows about this part of the world—limitless deserts, camel-herding nomads, oil wells, jet-setting princes, reactionary religious authorities, severely restricted gender relations—all in one neat package. At the same time, it takes these features to extremes approximated only by neighboring Abu Dhabi and Qatar, neither one of which has elicited anything like the same degree of journalistic or scholarly scrutiny. It is no wonder that the concept of the rentier state has been applied more persistently and innovatively to Saudi Arabia than anywhere else, including Iran, whose political economy the notion was originally coined to describe.

Historical scholarship on Arab nationalism has experienced a conceptual revolution over the last two decades. It is now widely accepted among historians that local identities and loyalties have been crucial components of nationalist thought and action from the very beginning; it is equally well established that the line between nationalism and various elements of Islam is much harder to draw than one might imagine. In addition, there is solid evidence that nationalism across the Arab world took shape, arguably as an unintended consequence, out of sustained interaction among conflicting elite and popular conceptions of political community. Moreover, it turns out to be important to differentiate Arab nationalism as a cluster of ideological principles from Pan-Arabism as a set of diplomatic practices that constituted a basic component of regional statecraft, initially at the time the Ottoman Empire found itself disintegrating and later on as the newly independent states of the Middle East and North Africa experimented with ways to get along simultaneously with one another and with outside powers.