The World Today Series: The Middle East and South Asia. More than a quarter of the world's population live in the Middle East and South Asia, yet our knowledge and understanding of the region is often limited to news updates about the latest conflicts and crises. This edition of the annually updated volume of the World Today Series provides important insights that take the reader beyond the headlines. It offers detailed and up-to-date information about the politics, economies and societies of the twenty-four states that make up the region. Contemporary events are placed in their historical context, through an examination of major civilizations and key historical events. This volume introduces major themes that have shaped the region, including the struggles of ordinary people to achieve democratic rights; the role of oil in shaping society; burgeoning environmental threats; and the rise and fall of the Islamic State caliphate. While there is reason for optimism in regards to the Middle East and South Asia, this is tempered by the very real challenges that confront the region. The general reader will gain an understanding of these challenges and opportunities through an exploration of current and past developments.

This annually updated volume of the World Today Series is designed to place in context the passionate controversies and emotional attachments of the two billion people who live, study, work, and die in the Middle East and South Asia. Despite room for optimism in some areas, many parts of the Middle East and South Asia continue to face extraordinary challenges and difficult outlooks. Much of this has to do with conflict across the region, which extends well beyond atrocities perpetrated by the Islamic State and the Assad regime in Syria.This volume depicts a region where hundreds of millions seek dignity as humans and respect from their governments. This volume helps the general reader understand recent and past developments from these countries.

Emerging Scholarship on the Middle East and Central Asia: Moving from the Periphery provides fresh analysis and cutting-edge critique of phenomena and events across the region. Working out of diverse disciplinary traditions, the authors call on varied theoretical frameworks in order to challenge entrenched stereotypes and long-standing perspectives. This volume explores emerging directions in scholarship across a range of issues, including: the Gulf; Saudi strategizing; Afghan refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran; contemporary Turkish politics; the current Syrian conflict; Middle Eastern and Central Asian art; perceptions of security threats from Afghanistan; and the potential future role of China in the region. The authors in this volume have given wide-berth to dominant approaches to scholarship on the region, while grappling with overlooked issues and marginal populations in order to advance new frameworks. On the Periphery deserves a central place in future scholarly engagement with the Middle East and Central Asia.

In Iranian Hospitality, Afghan Marginality, Elisabeth Yarbakhsh unpacks ideas around culture, identity, and the relationship between Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees living in Shiraz, Iran, and surrounding areas. Yarkbakhsh highlights the ways in which shifting policies and practices toward refugees over the past forty years have run parallel to the transitive notions of what it means to be Iranian.Yarkbakhsh exposes the complex interplay of identity and hospitality as it emerges out of variously competing and intersecting Islamic, historical, and literary narratives of Iranian identity, carefully illustrating how these factors circumscribe Afghan refugee life in the city of Shiraz.