Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa is the first book to examine issue-driven antagonisms within groups of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states and their impact on relations within the region. The volume also considers how shock events, such as internal revolts and regional wars, can alter interstate tensions and the trajectory of conflict. MENA has experienced more internal rivalries than any other region, making a detailed analysis vital to understanding the region's complex political, cultural, and economic history. The state groupings studied in this volume include Israel and Iran; Iran and Saudi Arabia; Iran and Turkey; Iran, Iraq, and Syria; Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and Algeria and Morocco. Essays are theoretically driven, breaking the MENA region down into a collection of systems that exemplify how state and nonstate actors interact around certain issues. Through this approach, contributors shed rare light on the origins, persistence, escalation, and resolution of MENA rivalries and trace significant patterns of regional change. Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa makes a major contribution to scholarship on MENA antagonisms. It not only addresses an understudied phenomenon in the international relations of the MENA region, it also expands our knowledge of rivalry dynamics in global politics.

Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa is the first book to examine issue-driven antagonisms within groups of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states and their impact on relations within the region. The volume also considers how shock events, such as internal revolts and regional wars, can alter interstate tensions and the trajectory of conflict. MENA has experienced more internal rivalries than any other region, making a detailed analysis vital to understanding the region's complex political, cultural, and economic history. The state groupings studied in this volume include Israel and Iran; Iran and Saudi Arabia; Iran and Turkey; Iran, Iraq, and Syria; Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and Algeria and Morocco. Essays are theoretically driven, breaking the MENA region down into a collection of systems that exemplify how state and nonstate actors interact around certain issues. Through this approach, contributors shed rare light on the origins, persistence, escalation, and resolution of MENA rivalries and trace significant patterns of regional change. Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa makes a major contribution to scholarship on MENA antagonisms. It not only addresses an understudied phenomenon in the international relations of the MENA region, it also expands our knowledge of rivalry dynamics in global politics.

The three main levels of analysis in international relations have been the systemic, the national, and the individual. A fourth level that falls between the systemic and the national is the region. It is woefully underdeveloped in comparison to the attention afforded the other three. Yet regions tend to be distinctive theaters for international politics. Otherwise, we would not recognize that Middle Eastern interstate politics somehow does not resemble Latin American interstate politics or interstate politics in Southern Africa (although once the Middle East and Southern Africa may have seemed more similar in their mutual fixation with opposition to domestic policies in Israel and South Africa, respectively). This book, divided into three parts, first makes a case for studying regional politics even though it must also be appreciated that regional boundaries are also hazy and not always easy to pin down empirically. The second part examines power distributions within regions as an important entry point to studying regional similarities and differences. Two emphases are stressed. One is that regional power assessments need to be conditioned by controlling for weak states which are more common in some regions than they are in others. The other emphasis is on regional power hierarchies. Some regions have strong regional hierarchies while others do not. Regions with strong hierarchies operate much differently from those without them in the sense that the former are more pacific than the latter. The third part of the book focuses on regional differences in terms of conflict behavior, order preferences, rivalries, and rivalry termination.