Product Description: This volume focuses on interpreting the changing domestic and regional dynamics in the Arab world and Iran. Its chapters discuss an array of countries, events, actors, and issues - from an examination of the Arab Spring and the Tunisian democratic transition, to an exploration of the role of Saudi-Iranian geostrategic rivalry, to the impact of ethnic and sectarian politics in Syria, Iraq, and across the region...read more

Product Description: Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the previously well-established organisation of world politics has been thrown into disarray. While during the Cold War, the bipolarity of the world gave other powers a defined structure within which to vie for power, influence and material wealth, the current global political landscape has been transformed by a diffusion of power...read more

Iran stands at a critical juncture in its history. In the era of Presidents Hassan Rouhani and Barack Obama, the Islamic Republic has a unique opportunity to regain its traditional greatness as a cradle of rich civilisation and culture, with a capacity to be a very influential and stabilising regional actor. In this incisive analysis, Amin Saikal, a leading expert on Iranian politics, traces Iran?s transition from pro-Western monarchy to Islamic Republic and explores the choices open to Rouhani?s moderate reformist government. The Islamic Republic has endured a difficult journey throughout its existence. But since Khomeini assumed power in 1979 it has been characterised by a degree of exceptionalism, which has seen Iran lock horns with the United States and prove itself an effective and shrewdly calculating player on the international stage. Looking to the future, Saikal does not shy away from confronting the difficult choices facing Iran today. Failure to achieve reconciliation with the United States in the coming years, he argues, will not only have serious implications for Iran?s internal stability and for the future security of the Middle East, but also for America?s position within this volatile and unpredictable region.

The recent "Arab spring", with its popular uprisings in many Arab countries, has exposed the ambiguity at the heart of American promotion of democracy in the Middle East. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were packaged as democracy promotion, as heralding the beginning of a new phase in the politics of the Middle East when democracy would replace authoritarian regimes. Many of these authoritarian regimes, however, were sustained by US support. The recent popular uprisings threaten to bring democracy without promotion by the US, and threaten to overthrow regimes previously supported by the US and important for US strategy in the region – hence an initial hesitant response by the US to some of the uprisings. This book explores the contradictions in American democracy promotion in the Middle East. It discusses the principles underlying US democracy promotion, and the debates surrounding US policy formation, and examines the application of US democracy promotion in specific cases. It concludes by assessing the likely future patterns of US engagement with democratic reform in the Middle East.

Product Description: The West Asian states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran have over the last few decades represented an arc of crisis. Characterized by fractured and dysfunctional political elites, fraught economic policies, and ideological struggles between the forces of authoritarianism and democratization, neo-fundamentalism and pluralism, they embody a mosaic of ethnicities...read more

Product Description: The West Asian states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran have over the last few decades represented an arc of crisis. Characterized by fractured and dysfunctional political elites, fraught economic policies, and ideological struggles between the forces of authoritarianism and democratization, neo-fundamentalism and pluralism, they embody a mosaic of ethnicities...read more

Product Description: A broad-ranging assessment of relations between the Muslim and Western worlds in the contemporary era set in the context of the way these have evolved historically. Arguing that the relations have been marked by long periods of peaceful coexistence, but also by many instances of tension, hostility, and mutual recrimination, Amin Saikal assesses the impact of the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, the consequences of the Iranian revolution and of the wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan, and charts a course for future co-existence...read more

Product Description: The early years of the twenty-first century have been characterized by a sense of widespread anxiety and fear because of the violent activities of groups of terrorists who claim they act in the name of Islam. Their acts of terrorism, viewed by a majority in the Muslim world as crimes which must be subject to the law, are in tragic contrast to the efforts of many Muslim intellectuals who have been working for the past several decades to find common ground between people of all faiths based on the universality of humankind...read more

Product Description: A broad-ranging assessment of relations between the Muslim and Western worlds in the contemporary era set in the context of the way these have evolved historically. Arguing that the relations have been marked by long periods of peaceful coexistence, but also by many instances of tension, hostility, and mutual recrimination, Amin Saikal assesses the impact of the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, the consequences of the Iranian revolution and of the wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan, and charts a course for future co-existence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This book is a study of regime change in an underdeveloped country with a weak state and strong autonomous social organizations. Regime change is in many countries a traumatic and disruptive experience, but few countries have paid as high a cost to retain traditionally accepted relationships of authority as has Afghanistan since the communist coup of April 1978...read more

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An Afghan journalist reviews critical events leading up to the Shah's fall from power in Iran, attempting to answer questions concerning the Shah's ties to the United States and the Soviet Union