Welcome
This is the online companion for the ninth edition of Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa: Development, Democracy, and Dictatorship, edited by Sean Yom. It provides chapter abstracts, updated online research sources, discussion questions, flashcards, and quizzes to facilitate the use of this book.
Though there are many primers on MENA politics, this volume stands as among the most venerable and time-tested. It has been published since the 1980s and is updated heavily with each edition. As a book embodying comparative politics, it covers almost every country in the region, aiming to give readers deep knowledge of the Arab states plus Israel, Turkey, and Iran.
You can use this book as a standalone reader into Mideast politics, reading chapters in sequence in order to fully comprehend the region’s economies, states, regimes, and leaders – the core concerns of the book, and not coincidentally many policymakers, journalists, and academics. Or, you can pair this alongside its sister text, The Societies of the Middle East and North Africa: Structures, Vulnerabilities, and Forces, also published by Routledge and edited by Sean Yom, to gain a more wholistic view of the region. That book is the perfect complement, because it unpacks the social and cultural life of regional populations, focusing on topics like urbanization, gender, youth, religion, and identity.
Whether used alone or paired with its sister volume, Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa has been designed to be read in different ways. Some readers can peruse the text in its entirety, with the first two chapters providing a thick introduction to regional history and contemporary dynamics, and the remaining 16 chapters each tackling a different country that can be read in sequence.
Other readers can treat the book as a reference volume, with each chapter serving as an independent guide to a different country. Indeed, the 16 country-based chapters are structured identically: first, historical background; next, social and economic environment; next, political structures (e.g., institutions of power); then, political dynamics (e.g., significant trends, developments, and events); next, foreign policy; and finally, future prospects, or projections about what might transpire in each country’s politics in the coming years. This makes each chapter digestible and, equally important, comparable.