POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast

Nadav Shelef talks about his latest book, Homelands: Shifting Borders and Territorial Disputes, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the idea of homelands and nationalism and articulates an analogous theory for how and why the places that people think of as their homelands stop being part of their homeland around the world. Shelef explains, “One of the things that I did was to look at how domestic media around the world talked about territory that they had lost. And when you do that, you can actually see territory drop from the discourse in particular cases. In Pakistan, they stopped talking about East Pakistan very, very quickly and they switched the terminology and started talking about Bangladesh in ways that are very difficult to imagine Palestinians stop talking about Jaffa.” “For these changes to spread and become real they need to be reinforced politically. And what we see - in fact, what we see going on right now among Palestinians - is something of a withdrawal from the idea of but the acceptance of partition and the redefinition of the territory in which Palestinians can achieve their national aspirations because it’s not working. And so to the extent that ideas consistent with partition lose politically, we’re not going to see them spread and we’re going to see other kinds of solutions,” says Shelef. Shelef says, “I think we have two main lessons. One is that homelands matter. That is simply claiming or talking about a piece of territory as part of the homeland greatly increases the likelihood of international conflict between neighbors that would share that territory… The second is that homelands can change. Even though they matter they are a variable and as a variable, they can vary over time. And that implies that the impact that they have or that their loss has on conflict could also vary. Once you no longer consider a territory part of the homeland, you should see a reduction in conflict over that territory.” Nadav Shelef is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Israel Studies and Professor of Political Science. Professor Shelef teaches and studies nationalism, religion and politics, Israeli politics and society, and middle east politics. His current projects focus on understanding how homelands change and the conditions under which religious parties moderate their positions. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Laleh Khalili talks about her latest book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant for the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.   Khalili explains, “Whenever you look at the list of the Journal of Commerce’s top 10 container ports in the world, the only port that is not either in East Asia or Southeast Asia in that top 10 list is Dubai, Jebel Ali in Dubai. And to me, that was also really interesting. Why is it that Jebel Ali, which does not have a very large hinterland, which is a city-state, why would it end up being such a significant port for container transport?” Khalili continues, “What is interesting is that there is very little actually about the role of trade and the transformation of the peninsula beyond the trade in oil once oil becomes the commodity that starts defining the political economy of these countries.” “I wanted to zoom out to a more regional Indian ocean and global trade. But I also wanted to zoom in and focus on the kind of stories that emerge in the context of these forms of global trade and to locate Arabian Peninsula not as some sort of hermetically sealed exceptional kind of object of study but rather as one node in the large vast network of global trade and developing and transforming constantly as this kind of nodes,” says Khalili. Laleh Khalili is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies  (Stanford 2013). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Marc Lynch speaks with Marwa Shalaby of Rice University about the status of women in politics in the Middle East.

Catherine Herrold talks about her latest book, Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book uncovers the strategies that Egyptian NGOs have used to advance the aims of the country’s 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “What the book argues is that, in fact, many development NGOs and local grant making foundations did promote democracy. But they did so in ways that went unrecognized by the Western democracy promotion establishment and, far more importantly, by successive ruling regimes in Egypt. And they did so, number one, by masking their democracy promotion work...And number two, instead of focusing on the procedural form of democracy, they sought to build substantive democracy through participation, free expression, and rights claiming at grassroots levels,” explains Herrold. She goes on to say, “these development NGO and foundations really focused on the grassroots and they created spaces for collective action for discussion, for debate, for problem solving…They created spaces for free expression through arts and culture and other means in which citizens could come together and express their views for the future of Egypt. And they coached grassroots communities on their basic human rights as citizens and on claiming those rights from local government officials...” Herrold argues, “There are three to four primary weaknesses of U.S. democracy assistance. Number one, it focuses almost exclusively on a procedural form of democracy. It seeks to reform national political institutions often in the shape of U.S. democratic institutions which are not necessarily the types of institutions that…might be best in the target country. Number two, it is expressly political. So it's separate from aid for socioeconomic development or humanitarian assistance. [Number three], it's also highly technical. Democracy aid produces outputs such as reports trainings et cetera that often fail to result in the desired outcome of democracy…And finally it tends to be elite…It tends to circulate in a relatively elite militia of highly trained, highly educated professionals…” Catherine Herrold is an Assistant Professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a Faculty Affiliate of the Indiana University Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the American University in Cairo (Egypt) and Birzeit University (Palestine). She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Qatar. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Fanar Haddad talks about his latest book, Understanding ‘Sectarianism’: Sunni-Shi’a Relations in the Modern Arab World, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification, but as a multi-layered concept. Haddad said, “One of the problems with how sectarianism, the phrase, is approached is that it’s almost always is presented as meaning just one thing thereby condensing what is inescapably a multifaceted subject into some mono-dimensional or mono-colored aspect. And so if we are going to take sectarian identity we need to avoid making the same mistake.” “What I propose in the book is that sectarian identity operates on four dimensions simultaneously, on four interlinked dimensions. And these are the doctrinal dimension, the subnational, so that’s the dynamics within a single nation-state. Thirdly, at the level of the nation-state, so in terms of how sectarian identity interacts with nationalism and national identity, and finally on a transnational level, as well. And by dissecting it in that way, we can start better identifying what aspect of sectarian identity we’re actually concerned with or is actually relevant when people use that catchall phrase sectarianism,” Haddad said. Haddad explains, “Blindness is not necessarily neutrality because unless you remedy the underlying structural imbalances, blindness becomes a way of perpetuating and enforcing these imbalances… Were one to raise the issue of structural sectarian discrimination, one will be accused of being sectarian or being guilty of sectarianism. So whether it’s in Bahrain or Syria or in Iraq today or previously before 2003, it’s almost criminalized to lobby or raise awareness of structural sectarian discrimination that disproportionally affects one sectarian identity. And the parallel I draw is, ‘Would we ever think of calling the NAACP a racist organization for lobbying for the rights of a minority?’” Fanar Haddad is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, Washington D.C. He has lectured in modern Middle Eastern politics at the University of Exeter, at Queen Mary, University of London and at the National University of Singapore. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Samuel Helfont talks about his latest book, Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book investigates religion and politics in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as well as the roots of the religious insurgencies that erupted in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003. Helfont said, “I found that there was proliferation of religious symbols and religious rhetoric in Iraq, especially in the 1990s, but when you sort of dug down you see that all of this was promoted and created by the regime. Not as a way to embrace Islamism but as a way to combat it.” “The assumption on the US part was that the Iraqis really didn’t have control, which I find to be just a huge mistake on behalf of people planning the war in 2003. And they go in thinking that the regime, when it crumbles, isn’t going to have much effect on Iraqi society or the religious landscape to the sense that they thought about it because they didn’t think the regime really had control. What you find is that the regime had a very strict control," said Helfont. Helfont explained, “[Saddam Hussein] thinks that religion could be an important instrument for him and his regime, but he has a problem which is that he doesn’t control the religious landscape. So you can’t get into the public and start saying to people ‘Hey be a good Muslim’… So you see Saddam and his regime, the Ba’thist regime, begin to try to shape the religious landscape, try to eliminate people they’d see as problematic, try to replace them with people that they think are more loyal to the regime or at least will follow the rules.” Samuel Helfont is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His research focuses on international history and politics in the Middle East, especially Iraq and the Iraq Wars. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Sara Pursley talks about her latest book, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about the role of gender and family reform projects in Iraq, two ideas of modernization and economic development, from the 1920s to the first Ba'ath coup in 1963. Pursley said, “For the 1950s, the discourses were really different. They were really focused on economic development as the basis for full political and economic sovereignties. We get different terms, different concepts playing a more important role and also much more of an emphasis on poor families, peasant families, and urban working-class families and how those could be reformed to produce workers and sort of loyal subjects of the regime.” She goes on to explain, “The equal inheritance clause was indeed very controversial and there’s a lot of things written about it in this period, but every other aspect of this law was not a consensus but there was widespread agreement on the rest of the law, especially among state authorities, feminists, communist, Ba'athists, Arab nationalists, Sunni religious authorities…. The exception was the Shia religious clerics who had a broader critique of the law.” "The differences in the public discourse kind of get submerged into the social reform project which all of the parties, you know, the Ba’athist, the communists, the other Arab nationalist party which was the independence Party, the National Democratic Party, those were the four main political parties that were sort of supporting the coup in the begging. They all, in spite of all their differences, [had] really strong consensus about the need for social reform, the need to create a new kind of Iraqi who would be the agent of economic development. And so really what I want to get at here is that consensus is partly what enabled the depoliticization of the Iraqi public sphere that many historians, not just me, have seen as kind of laying the groundwork for the 1963 coup,” said Pursley.  Sara Pursley is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Pursley works on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the modern Arab Middle East, mainly Iraq. She has explored questions related to economic development and modernization theory, histories of psychology and pedagogy, gender and sexuality, childhood and youth, revolution and decolonization, Islamic and secular family law, land settlement projects, and the transition from British to American empire. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen talks about his latest book, Qatar and the Gulf Crisis: A Study of Resilience, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. In his book, Coates Ulrichsen offers an authoritative study on the Qatari leadership and population’s response to the 2017 economic blockade from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt. Coates Ulrichsen said, “I wanted to look at how Qatar had responded [to the blockade] because the initial assumption, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was that Qatar would fold; they would get their way, there would be a power play. Even though it's never clear what exactly they wanted from it. But Qataris were able to respond very quickly and to rapidly reconfigure a lot of their economic and trading arrangements and also to defeat the crisis politically.” He goes on to explain, “On the 6th of June, the day after the blockades began; President Trump tweeted in apparent support…So from an Emirati Saudi point of view, initially it seemed to be going to plan. What I think they miscalculated was the fact that the White House is not the US government and no one individual can shift an entire set of bureaucratic institutions and interests. And of course Qatar is home to the forward headquarters of Central Command, of CENTCOM, and has a very close and long U.S. economic and strategic relationship as well.” “I think it was probably a hope from the blockading states in 2017 that the blockade would get international support and this was one of the manifestations of its failure that almost no international partners signed on to it. Several other regional states in the Middle East and parts of Africa initially downgraded ties with Qatar but most of them since have resumed. But from an international point of view, there was virtually no support for the blockade at all,” said Coates Ulrichsen. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Ph.D., is a Baker Institute fellow at Rice University for the Middle East. Previously, he worked as senior Gulf analyst at the Gulf Center for Strategic Studies between 2006 and 2008 and as co-director of the Kuwait Program on Development, Governance and Globalization in the Gulf States at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 2008 until 2013. Coates Ulrichsen’s articles have appeared in numerous academic journals, including Global Policy and the Journal of Arabian Studies. He also writes regularly for the Economist Intelligence Unit, Open Democracy, and Foreign Policy, and authors a monthly column for Gulf Business News and Analysis. Coates Ulrichsen holds a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Noah Salomon talks about his latest book, For the Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst. “So the book really set out to explain something that I felt hadn't been touched on in the literature on Islamic politics and that was to look at the Islamic State project from the question of its sustenance, how is it sustained particularly over a period of almost 30 years as it was in the Sudanese case. We've seen a lot of work on the sort of theoretical possibilities of the Islamic State or the impossibilities of the Islamic State but very little on how it becomes a subject of daily life…What I was puzzled by and curious by is how this political project, particularly if it was characterized as not just a failed state but a weak state, had persisted over this period for so long and despite its many failures,” said Salomon. He explains, “When I began to look elsewhere for where this kind of Islamic State building was going on, I began to see the Islamic State as both more pervasive and more elusive than I had imagined when I went into the field…there were [Islamic State] projects taking place in the public sphere to instill a certain kind of popular affiliation with something called the Islamic State. That didn't always mean attachment to the regime—attachment to the Islamic State meant many things for many different people. And you know what we saw take place over the years is in fact many different attachments to an Islamic political language...” He argues, "I think it would be a mistake for us to equate the revolution with opposition to Islam and politics writ large. Certainly the revolution was opposed to Omar al-Bashir, his regime, the political party that he represented, and their particular vision. But what I am trying to argue is that Islamic politics is much broader than that and became much broader than that.” Noah Salomon is Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College. A recent recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, he is currently based out of Beirut working on a transregional project on Islamic unity and its discontents in the context of popular revolution and in its aftermath. His books have won the 2017 Albert Hourani Prize from the Middle East Studies Association as well as the 2017 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Analytical-Descriptive Studies from the American Academy of Religion. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Steven Brooke talks about his latest book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. Through an in-depth examination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Brooke argues that authoritarians often seek to manage moments of economic crisis by offloading social welfare responsibilities to non-state providers. “One of the kind of key things that we often hear about Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood is that one of the reasons why they're popular is that they provide all sorts of things like clinics and schools and things like that. And this kind of makes people support them in elections or mobilize for them or just think kind of positively about these organizations. And so one of the things I wanted to do with the book was basically empirical—I just wanted to kind of see if I could research these things that everyone talks about and everyone seems to think matter, “said Brooke. He explains, “One of the things that really came out of the archival evidence was that the Brotherhood really focused all of their work on paying and middle class customers…When I started the field work for this [book], I thought I was going to find these facilities staffed with members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were devoting their time to working in these medical facilities and that they were doing it for free and that the people who were using them were going to be poor and destitute. And that wasn't the case at all…These are middle class enterprises.” He goes on to say, “Initially I was expecting that that these [medical] facilities were going to be kind of underneath the radar of the state or they were going to be hidden away kind of fly by night enterprises. But really I kind of kept coming up against these points where it showed just how integrated these services were into the state. I mean they were providing dialysis services and being reimbursed by the Egyptian government for them.” Steven Brooke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focuses on comparative politics, religion and politics, and the politics of the Middle East. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and the British Journal of Middle East Studies. Brooke received his Ph.D. in Government in 2015 from The University of Texas at Austin. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Salwa Ismail talks about her latest book, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book demonstrates how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities and structuring their interactions with the regime and with one another. “The main question [of the book] was really to understand the centrality of violence to the Assad regime and it was also to kind of expand our perspective on violence beyond seeing violence as purely repressive and thinking that it must be functioning; it must do something. I wanted to understand what it did to Syrian society and Syrians as political subject citizens and their understanding of themselves, each other, and the relation to the regime,” said Ismail. When describing the political prison apparatus, she explains, “It was very common to make prisoners eat soiled food too. It was soiled with either urine or vermin or sewage water or even sometimes forcing them to drink soiled water and so on…So you think that this is cruel and irrational but you have to look at what it does to the political prisoner in terms of their own sense of self and their ability to kind of maintain a sense of their humanity and self-respect…The experiences and the feeling of not being able to stand up for yourself or for fellow political prisoners…that kind of gives us a sense that there is a political objective to this which is to undo the political subjectivity of these prisoners so they cannot really dissent.” She goes on to say, “There was a kind of recurrence of these campaigns to make the political prisoners not only renounce their political commitments and allegiance to particular political parties but also to actually completely reverse themselves and pronounce their allegiance, for example, now to Bashar al-Assad; so it was a complete overturning of the subject.” Salwa Ismail is a Professor of Politics, with a focus on the Middle East, at SOAS University of London. She is a member of the London Middle East Institute and the Center for Palestine Studies. She has authored multiple books, including Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (2006) and Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (2003). Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Ceren Lord talks about her latest book, Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book is about how Islamist mobilization in Turkey has been facilitated from within the state by institutions established during early nation-building. “I believe my book offers a corrective to some of the established common wisdoms that look at Islam as politics or religious politics more broadly in terms of seeing it as a reaction to the crisis of a secular state or a grassroots mobilization against a secular state. Instead I focus on how religious politics should be situated as the outcome of a more dynamic struggle within the state itself,” explains Lord. “I started working on the Diyanet back in the 2000s…Most of the literature saw this [the Diyanet] as an apparatus of the secular state and under the AKP the Diyanet came to be seen as the implementer of the AKP ideology. Whereas if you look at…the practices of what the Diyanet has been doing, actually it has great levels of agency and has been one of the key agents of Islamization in Turkey that's been completely missed in the literature because there is such a binary analytical framework in at the country,” Lord argues. Lord goes on to say, “It's been a massive transformation of the state [since 2016]. It has been unprecedented really in Turkish history in terms of the amount of civil servants that they have removed from office. What's happened now is that they have been replaced by various other religious organizations…there has been an emptying out all of these institutions and filling them up with pro AKP and add on top people that are not necessarily qualified to do the job.” Ceren Lord is currently British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, with Middle East Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), where she was previously a Sasakawa Peace Foundation Postdoctoral Research Officer. She completed her PhD in May 2015 at the London School of Economics, Government Department, focusing on the role of the state and the ulema (Diyanet) in the rise of political Islam in Turkey. She is a regular contributor to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Associate Editor at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and the lead editor for the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) Contemporary Turkey series published by I.B. Tauris. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Omar Dewachi talks about his latest book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book presents the history of healthcare in Iraq, the rise and fall of Iraqi medicine, and the role of healthcare in the making and unmaking of the infrastructure of the state. Dewachi explains, “For four decades the state [of Iraq] invested in training doctors and building better health care institutions. Regardless of the ideology of the ruling parties…there was constant interest in developing the health care infrastructure.” He expands, “The war platform was very important in the 1980s and actually both Iraq and Iran showed…a lot of investment and mobilization of the population to respond to the possible health fallout from the war. So in both countries actually you see cutting down of infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates, and the mobilization of the population to actually do public health on a grassroots level.” “What you get in the 1990s [is] a very disturbing war project where you destroy the infrastructure of the country and then you put an entire population under sanctions. And that experiment soon in a very quick way begins to undermine the functioning of a relatively powerful state infrastructure…Which basically also means a kind of a dismantlement of human infrastructure of expertise and knowledge and training networks. So all of this gets completely dismantled in relationship to the lack of available supplies and deterioration in hospital sanitation and increases in in poverty and inequality,” explains Dewachi. Dewachi is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Anthropology. Dewachi graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology in 2008. His research focuses on the biomedical, environmental, and social experiences of war injury, displacement, and the rise of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) across different conflict-settings and therapeutic geographies in the Middle East. His work has culminated in the inauguration of the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

Is American global hegemony already over? On this week’s podcast, Daniel Nexon talks about his latest book, co-authored with Alexander Cooley, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order, with Marc Lynch. The book explores pathways in which hegemonic orders come apart—short of great power war—and the kinds of processes that are playing out in shaping global politics today. “The big biggest change since the 1990s has been the development of the fact that many more powers not just China and Russia but also Saudi Arabia had the capacity to and have been engaged in efforts to ride some of the kinds of goods we associate with international order; with hedge funds, private and club goods development assistance, that sort of thing. And that these are increasingly in sort of conflict with one another; they're increasingly representing contestation over the shape of order rather than say collusion to maintain a similar kind of broad order, " Nexon argues.  He explains that the United States "had to engage in huge payouts and huge concessions to allies like Saudi Arabia to try to reassure them and those types of bargaining, those kinds of bargaining processes are actually fairly fundamental the way that that ordering works, that hegemony works." "It's important when we talk about the sort of unraveling of the US's ability to engage in sort of unbridled hegemonic ordering that it's not just a story about the rise of a potential peer competitor in China or the activities of a traditional great power like Russia, it's also a story about the diffusion of power outward from states that are not global great powers but are also capable of playing this game," said Nexon.  Nexon is an Associate Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies and was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018. His book, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (2009), won the International Security Studies Section Best Book Award for 2010. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.

How did the Persian Gulf states' energy use and policies change with the discovery of oil? That is what Jim Krane tackles in his latest book, Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf, which he discusses on this week's podcast with Marc Lynch. Energy Kingdom traces the history of the Gulf states’ energy use and policies, looking in particular at how energy subsidies have distorted demand. "Nobody ever lifted the hood on their own economies domestically in the Gulf— and looked at just how much energy they use domestically," said Krane. "Energy has been cheap in the Gulf since day one— I really kind of peg the the low prices back to the 1973 oil embargo... But the average household in the UAE used between four and five times  as much electricity as a household in Arizona, where you also have a very hot climate and energy intensive lifestyles." "It was amazing to me that even Arizona pales in comparison with energy demand and in a place like the UAE— and the UAE isn't even the highest. Kuwait is just off the charts for the amount of amount of energy that that's used." said Krane. "And one of the reasons for that is because it's just so incredibly cheap" due to government subsidies. "Not only were rising energy demand a threat to the economy, but it's a threat to the ruling sheikhs that govern these these countries. And if they couldn't get it under control, at some point they're going to have change the way of the type of governance that they had in that region," said Krane. Krane is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and is the author of City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (2009). A former journalist, he was a correspondent for the Associated Press and has written for publications including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. Music for this season's podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ferasarrabimusic)and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/feras.arrabi/)page.