Browse Hierarchy POL327: The International Relations of the Middle East

This module aims to provide students with the opportunity to study the Middle East from within the discipline of International Relations (IR). As such, students will take the analytical tools of IR and apply them to the region. In so doing, students will be asked to familiarise themselves with these tools but also to question their applicability beyond the global North. This understanding will be based on seeing the states of the region as vulnerable to external intervention, to sub-state movements of ethnicity and sect as well as supra-state identities. Students will then be asked to examine relations between the region itself and the wider international system, looking at how the Middle East itself was a product of the `late colonialism¿ of the inter-war period. Students will then study the causes and effects of the quasi- or neo-imperial interventions of the Cold War and post-Cold War era.