The Arab State: Dilemmas of Late Formation

This book is concerned with state formation and collapse in the Middle East. In particular it examines the conditions under which states remain intact during late formation and how they resist various internal and external pressures.Providing a theoretical framework to examine state formation in the Middle East, the author departs from treating the state as a given, examining it instead as a 'process'. He argues that what emerged in the Middle East in the beginning of the twentieth century are social fields and not states as defined by Max Weber. After examining the constitutions of these fields'”their cultural, material and political structures'”he identifies three stages of state development in which different cases can be located.The first to raise the question on the survivability of the territorial states in the Middle East while engaging with both International Relations and Comparative Politics theories, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East politics, Comparative Politics and International Relations.