The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East

Olivier Roy

March, 2008
Cloth, 160 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-70032-0
$24.95

Contents:

Introduction: The War on Terror: between Fourth World War and Optical Illusion

I. Who is the Enemy? Where is the Enemy?

The obsession with Iraq

An illusion: the weight of lobbies in the decision to invade Iraq

The project to reform the greater Middle East

The failure of the top-down democratization policy

The return to a policy of containment or the eradication of Islamism

II. The Middle East: Atomization of Conflicts and New Fault Lines

The three traumas of the Arab Middle East

The political imaginaire in crisis: between nationalism, clannism, and supranationalism

From pan-Arabism to forms of pan-Islamism

A tectonic upheaval: Shiites against Sunnis

III. Iran, Between the Bomb and Bombardment

The Ahmadinejad phenomenon, parentheses or continuity?

An American bombardment?

IV. And meanwhile, Al Qaeda

Related Subjects

• International Affairs
• Middle East Studies

About the Author

Olivier Roy is research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). A world authority on Islam and politics, he currently lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris and has acted as consultant to the French Foreign Ministry since 1984. His books with Columbia University Press are Secularism Confronts Islam; Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah; and, with Mariam Abou Zahab, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection.

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