Transcending Disciplinary Divide/s : A Comparative Framework on the International Relations of the Middle East

The call for papers for this conference alludes explicitly or tacitly to two different divides. The first one is that between Comparative Politics on the one hand, and International Relations/International Political Economy on the other, in the field of Middle East studies. The second, more implicit divide, suggests that the study of international relations of the Middle East has been detached from the study of International Relations more generally. This memo responds to the organizers’ invitation to reflect on some of my own efforts to transcend those two divides. Indeed, the conceptual framework I revisit here has also sought to extricate the study of international relations/international political economy of the Middle East from yet a third divide, one that implicitly or explicitly separates the Middle East from other regions, as if things were so completely different (“exceptional”) in the former that they almost preclude cross-regional inferences. This is certainly not the case. All these divides may have more to do with sociological aspects of the profession than with intrinsic analytical barriers