Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
Regional Studies
Middle East Publications
Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
The Center for Middle East Studies strives to contribute and support research and scholarly work that challenge conventional wisdoms and preconceived notions about the Middle East through its publications. Our Occasional Paper Series features lectures, events and larger research projects of our core faculty, visiting scholars, research affiliates and others edited into short and accessible essays. Our center has also published several co-edited volumes you can read about below.
By Micheline R. Ishay
A surprisingly hopeful assessment of the prospects for human rights in the Middle East, and a blueprint for advancing them
The enormous sense of optimism unleashed by the Arab Spring in 2011 soon gave way to widespread suffering and despair. Of the many popular uprisings against autocratic regimes, Tunisia’s now stands alone as a beacon of hope for sustainable human rights progress. Libya is a failed state; Egypt returned to military dictatorship; the Gulf States suppressed popular protests and tightened control; and Syria and Yemen are ravaged by civil war. Challenging the widely shared pessimism among regional experts, Micheline Ishay charts bold and realistic pathways for human rights in a region beset by political repression, economic distress, sectarian conflict, a refugee crisis, and violence against women. With due attention to how patterns of revolution and counterrevolution play out in different societies and historical contexts, Ishay reveals the progressive potential of subterranean human rights forces and offers strategies for transforming current realities in the Middle East.
By Micheline R. Ishay
The third edition of The Human Rights Reader presents a variety of new primary documents and readings and elaborates the exploration of rights in the areas of race, gender, refugees, climate, Artificial Intelligence, drones and cyber security, and nationalism and Internationalism. In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, it addresses human rights challenges reflected in and posed by global health inequities. Each part of the reader corresponds to five historical phases in the history of human rights and explores the arguments, debates, and issues of inclusiveness central to those eras. This edition is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of essays, speeches, and documents from historical and contemporary sources, all of which are placed in context with Micheline Ishay’s substantial introduction to the Reader as a whole and context-setting introductions to each part and chapter.
By Ahmed Abd Rabou
Developing the traditional civil-military relations approach to include security actors, the book compares the style of civil-security relations in both Egypt and Turkey. The volume comprehends the competition between civilian actors and military and security actors to impose control over the political regimes in transition and how this is related to the issue of good governance and democratization.
The Egyptian and Turkish cases are viably comparable in terms of the status of civil-security relations and level of civilian control, specifically considering the different outcomes of the latest military putsches in both country (2013 in Egypt and 2016 in Turkey), and the extended experiences of both countries with a strong military influence and presence in politics. The different responses of the Egyptian and Turkish publics to the coup attempts invite an interesting comparison, especially given that in both cases, the public was the decisive factor in the success or failure of the coup.
Focusing on civil-security relations within the broader context of good governance and democracy in Egypt and Turkey this book will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in political science, specifically comparative government studies and Middle East studies.
By Ahmed Abd Rabou
Al-Shououk Publications (2023). In Arabic.
"Israel’s Golem and the Crisis of Democracy"
By Micheline Ishay
New Lines Magazine, Oct. 3, 2023
"Walking a Thin Line of Representation: Analyzing the Behavior of Egyptian MPs"
By Ahmed Abd Rabou
Middle East Law and Governance, Co-written with Hassan, M. and Abdelgawad, H. (2021)
"Arab Spring and the Issue of Democracy: Where Does Middle Eastern Studies Stand?"
Ahmed Abd Rabou
Arab Spring: Modernity, identity, and change
"Human Rights Amidst Despair in the Levant and the West"
Micheline Ishay
Philosophy and Social Criticism, Feb. 19, 2020
"Iran, Saudi Arabia and Modern Hatreds"
Micheline Ishay
In The State of Human Rights: Historical Genealogies, Historical Controversies, and Cultural Imaginaries, 2020
Danny Postel, the Assistant Director of the Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University, challenges the conventional wisdom about Iran and its foreign policy orientation.
On May 30, 2019, thirteen scholars met at the University of Denver’s Anderson Academic Commons to hold a frank scholarly conversation aimed at confronting the raw horror of the Christchurch mosque shootings.
CMES Director Nader Hashemi takes a dissenting view of the Abraham Accords, the agreement in the summer of 2020 between Israel and two Arab states (Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates).
Elizabeth Tsurkov, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, offers a close analysis of internal Israeli debates as it relates to the war in Syria and documents the specifics of Israeli intervention in Syria from 2011 to 2019.
In April 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi delivered the keynote speech at the annual conference of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) in Washington, DC, where he received the Muslim Democrat of the Year Award. Following his murder in the fall of 2018, CMES published an edited transcript of his speech in honor of his courage and willingness to speak truth to power.
Todd Green, Associate Professor of Religion at Luther College, critiques the common trope that Islam as a religion is in need of a reformation primarily through the writings of the controversial author and polemicist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
William Hartung explores the early relationship between the Trump administration and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what it means for the region more broadly.
Randall Kuhn, former Associate Professor at the Korbel School and Director of its Global Health Affairs Program, addresses the important issue of why the Arab uprisings of 2011-2012 erupted when they did by focusing on the “retreat from marriage” in the Gulf states and how it complicates the simplistic notions advanced to explain the uprisings.
Abdullah Al-Arian, Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, writes about the state of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt following the 2013 military coup d’état that ended Mohamed Morsi's presidency.
Edited transcripts of a panel discussion and interview with Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), on the issue of Holocaust denial in the Arab-Islamic world.
Richard Bulliet, Professor of History at Columbia University, examines the relationship between religion and the state in the “Muslim South”—that half of the Muslim world located south of Medina, whose peoples came to Islam centuries after those of the “Muslim North”—and how understanding the different means of legitimating governance in the Muslim South sheds light on the crisis of legitimacy in Muslim-majority states like Egypt today.
John Calvert, Professor of History at Creighton University, examines the evolution, agenda and trajectory of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood within the framework of a changing Egypt.
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