Suchergebnisse

Examines the Israeli-Palestinian policy of the George W. Bush administration; view that initially disengaged, under pressure from US groups, Europe, and the Middle East, President George W. Bush in a June 2002 speech acknowledged desirability of creating a Palestinian state and declared Yasir Arafat an unreliable negotiating partner. Summary in English p. 828.

Since the Appearance over 40 years ago of Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, some observers of Middle East regional politics have ascribed great, if largely unexplained, societal significance to the role of information and communications in this rapidly changing and invariably hard to read region. Those persuaded by the profound if uncertain sociopolitical role of communications were both rewarded and analytically challenged by the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979. This upheaval may be characterized as the first political revolution in the Middle East, or anywhere else, that might not have succeeded had it not been for the information revolution. Although those of us who witnessed this cataclysmic event first hand did not as yet have the term "information revolution" as part of our conceptual tool-kit, we did document in rich if unsystematic detail the crucial and central role played by the accoutrements of communications in Iran's upheaval.

The Middle East field is in a crisis within the broader discipline of political science. A review of major departments of political science reveals surprisingly few that have full professors with the politics of the Middle East as their primary research focus. This lacuna exists at such universities as Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Chicago, Ohio State, Emory, Brown, Dartmouth, North Carolina, Rice, Pittsburgh, Brandeis, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Some of these departments have no Middle East faculty at all, others have denied tenure to deserving junior faculty, while still others have an interest in the region but claim to lack resources to make the necessary appointments.The situation is clearly better at institutions such as Columbia, NYU, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Indiana, UCLA, Texas, Princeton, Georgetown, George Washington, Rutgers, and a few others. Nonetheless, there are problems here too. Some faculty are administrators and do not teach a full load. Others may be nearing retirement and are concerned that they will not be replaced by a scholar who also specializes in the Middle East. Although we can disagree about particular institutions or individuals (e.g., Is so-and-so "really" a Middle East scholar?), it is evident that this field is in danger of being marginalized both in professional recognition by the discipline as a whole, and in political science departments that may appreciate having Middle East politics courses on the books, but not the scholarship of the course instructor.Disregard for the Middle East field can be attributed to an array of political and disciplinary factors with which most of us are familiar. And one could reasonably expand the problem to include all area studies.