Suchergebnisse

Decades before 9/11 and the 'Arab Spring', US and Arab elites contended over the future of the Middle East. Through unprecedented research in Arabic and English, Envisioning the Arab Future details how Americans and Arabs - nationalists, Islamists, and communists - disputed the meaning of modernization within a shared set of Cold War-era concepts. Faith in linear progress, the idea that society functioned as a 'system', and a fascination with speed united officials and intellectuals who were otherwise divided by language and politics. This book assesses the regional implications of US power while examining a range of topics that transcends the Arab-Israeli conflict, including travel, communities, gender, oil, agriculture, Iraqi nationalism, Nasser's Arab Socialism, and hijackings in both the United States and the Middle East. By uncovering a shared history of modernization between Arabs and Americans, Envisioning the Arab Future challenges assumptions about a 'clash of civilizations' and profoundly reinterprets the antecedents of today's crises

Citino provides a framework for understanding the transition from British imperial hegemony to an American capitalist order in the Middle East, and the historical antecedents of America's leading role in the Gulf War.

The East Ghor Canal was a Cold War–era irrigation project financed by the U.S. government in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By placing East Ghor in the context of previous land reform campaigns in the Jordan River valley during the Ottoman imperial and British mandatory periods, this article criticizes scholarly interpretations of Cold War modernization. Portraying U.S. overseas development policies as outgrowths of American liberalism ignores the ways in which the liberal tradition could be reconfigured when it encountered other reform legacies in Third World regions. The transnational study of postwar expertise neglects the distinct historical antecedents that prepared the ground for development programs in particular places. The article challenges the notion of American exceptionalism by reinterpreting East Ghor in a long-term regional context. Global and regional perspectives together are needed to understand the history of development, a point that underscores the need for greater collaboration between Cold War and area studies.

The East Ghor Canal was a Cold War-era irrigation project financed by the U.S. government in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By placing East Ghor in the context of previous land reform campaigns in the Jordan River valley during the Ottoman imperial and British mandatory periods, this article criticizes scholarly interpretations of Cold War modernization. Portraying U.S. overseas development policies as outgrowths of American liberalism ignores the ways in which the liberal tradition could be reconfigured when it encountered other reform legacies in Third World regions. The transnational study of postwar expertise neglects the distinct historical antecedents that prepared the ground for development programs in particular places. The article challenges the notion of American exceptionalism by reinterpreting East Ghor in a long-term regional context. Global and regional perspectives together are needed to understand the history of development, a point that underscores the need for greater collaboration between Cold War and area studies. Adapted from the source document.

This article re-examines America's approach to cold war modernisation in US-Arab relations during the era of Nasser. It shows how US and Arab modernisers pursued different aims on the basis of similar assumptions about the nature of societal change. By analysing Arabic political literature and describing US-Arab conflicts over development in Iraq and Egypt, it illustrates how the cold war raised expectations regarding total modernising systems and escalated an earlier rivalry among Arab anti-colonial movements. This contribution fills a gap between studies of cold war development that emphasise conflict and those that explain modernisation theory in an exclusively American context. Adapted from the source document.

The expansion of U.S. power across the Middle East has led to a convergence between what had previously been distinct historical fields. As U.S. foreign relations scholars turn their attention toward the Middle East and as Middle East historians address the implications of American imperialism, both groups have produced new research on the Cold War era. Since 2001, Rashid Khalidi, Juan R. I. Cole, and Ussama Makdisi have reexamined American foreign policy during the Cold War to understand the antecedents of current events. With the evolution of U.S. diplomatic history into a more cosmopolitan international history, its practitioners have consulted sources in regional languages. Recent scholarship has incorporated the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into global narratives based on the themes of superpower rivalry, decolonization, and the struggle for development. While these global narratives help to counter regional exceptionalism, historians of the Cold War would also do well to read more Middle East historiography. The growing significance of American power for the MENA region calls for greater collaboration between the two fields on common interests that they have developed, at least so far, mostly in isolation.