International Relations of the Middle East

This chapter offers a critical perspective on contemporary security in the Middle East, by exploring the ways in which state and non-state armed groups have sought to reorder the regional balance of power, especially after the 2003 American-led in- vasion of Iraq. It reveals the strategic processes of politicization and depoliticization of violence that key regional and foreign actors employ in order to delegitimize or legitimize the use of violence in pursuit of rival political agendas. These dynamics are central in understanding the conflict and the scramble for control over resources and political developments in key countries across the Middle East.

Since Iran’s revolution in 1979, relations between Washington and Tehran have been invariably fraught. The Trump presidency saw escalating tensions which the Biden administration has sought to moderate with uncertain results. This article locates contemporary events within a broader analysis of US policy towards Iran, which for over four decades has oscillated between attempted rapprochement and hostility short-of-war. Seeking to explain the fluctuation and failures of US policy, it shows how two intersecting logics have shaped and constrained the decision-making environment – path dependent at the international level, cyclical at the domestic level. Going beyond accounts which treat domestic constraints in an ad hoc manner, the article explores how the electoral cycle systematically shapes decision-makers’ ability to respond to geopolitical conditions. Shedding light on contemporary policy debates, it concludes that any lasting departure from the default posture of hostility will require a favourable alignment of conditions on both levels.

Wide field-of-view (FOV) cameras, which capture a larger scene area than narrow FOV cameras, are used in many applications including 3D reconstruction, autonomous driving, and video surveillance. However, wide-angle images contain distortions that violate the assumptions underlying pinhole camera models, resulting in object distortion, difficulties in estimating scene distance, area, and direction, and preventing the use of off-the-shelf deep models trained on undistorted images for downstream computer vision tasks. Image rectification, which aims to correct these distortions, can solve these problems. In this paper, we comprehensively survey progress in wide-angle image rectification from transformation models to rectification methods. Specifically, we first present a detailed description and discussion of the camera models used in different approaches. Then, we summarize several distortion models including radial distortion and projection distortion. Next, we review both traditional geometry-based image rectification methods and deep learning-based methods, where the former formulates distortion parameter estimation as an optimization problem and the latter treats it as a regression problem by leveraging the power of deep neural networks. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art methods on public datasets and show that although both kinds of methods can achieve good

This paper uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the EU's first policy reassessment in light of the Arab uprisings. COM(2011)200 A Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity (PfDSP) claims to outline a new framework for EU Democracy Assistance (DA) based on a new conception of democracy, and a new position for democracy in the EU's external relations. The paper analyses PfDSP and one of its key antecedents, COM(2001)252, to assess this claim, focusing on the way two pillars of the debate on democracy – civil–political and socio-economic rights – are defined and how they are organized into a narrative about democracy and its promotion. This analysis suggests that the conceptual structure – and therefore policy implications – of PfDSP maintain unaltered the substantive vision of a liberal model for both development and democratization in the region. This continuity sets the EU up to repeat earlier mistakes, which resulted before 2011 in the poor reputation of the EU on democracy promotion among pro-democracy opposition groups – many of which were central to the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.

Il Medio Oriente per come lo conoscevamo fino ad oggi (quello per intenderci dei confini tracciati da Mark Sykes per il Regno Unito, e François Georges Picot per la Francia, nel 1916) sembra essere finito. La disintegrazione dell'integrità territoriale di alcuni stati-nazione è accompagnata da una porosità dei confini, che vengono attraversati quotidianamente da movimenti di profughi e formazioni combattenti.

Upon request from the newly established Ba'athist leadership in Syria, the German Democratic Republic sent dozens of special advisors to Damascus between 1965 and 1972 to help set up the state institutions that would move Syria from being a predominantly agricultural country to an agro-industrial one: reforming the decision-making process of national government in Damascus, setting up central planning over produc- tion and distribution and enforcing land reform were some of the key issues dealt with by East German and Syrian officials. The encounter proved highly important because the two regimes came close enough to assess their mutual assets and limits upon which they would establish a long-lasting partnership, whose institutional legacy featured in Syrian formal politics as late as the 2000s. State institutions, mass organisations and public enterprises thus became the main avenues for these two ‘Easts’ to interact during the Cold War.

Arab nationalism and Pan-Islamic solidarity present challenges to political scientists and historians of the modern Middle East because of their transnational and seemingly timeless appeal. Sonoko Sunayama successfully tackles these topics in her work on the changing relationship between Syria and Saudi Arabia from 1978 through the 1990s. Sunayama argues that concerns about identity (and its manipulation through various ideologies) facilitate alliance building between Syria and Saudi Arabia. She does not disregard other explanations for alliances, such as balance of power or economic considerations (both aid and trade), or the importance of social networks. She states, however, that they do not fully explain good Syrian–Saudi relations during periods when the two states’ policy goals differed significantly, for instance, between 1978 and 1990. During this period, Sunayama explains that relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia were friendly and cooperative on the surface but stormy and hotly negotiated in private.

This thesis analyses the external and internal influences on the process of state formation in Oman since 1920 and places this process in comparative perspective with the other states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. It considers the extent to which the concepts of informal empire and collaboration are useful in analysing the relationship between Oman, Britain and the United States. The theoretical framework is the historical materialist paradigm of International Relations. State formation in Oman since 1920 is examined in a historical narrative structured by three themes: (1) the international context of Western involvement, (2) the development of Western strategic interests in Oman and (3) their economic, social and political impact on Oman. The incorporation of the Arabian littoral into the security sphere of the British empire in India separated the Imamate in the mountainous interior of Oman from the British-backed Sultans in Muscat. This culminated in the Treaty of Sib in 1920...

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1 The Theoretical Context Chapter 2 Oman and British Imperial Expansion 1798-1920 Chapter 3 Informal Empire in Oman 1921 - 1931 Chapter 4 The Expansion of the Sultanate 1932-1955 Chapter 5 The Consolidation of the Omani State 1956-1977 Chapter 6 Western Strategic Interests in the Contemporary Omani State Conclusion Notes to the Reader Bibliography Index