1 Introduction

This paper is a shortened version of a working paper developed with the Arab Council for Social Sciences ‘New Regionalisms’ Working Group. The author acknowledges the support of Carnegie Corporation New York to this research as part of the Mapping Connections project based at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.

Recent years have seen unprecedented changes to the political, social, and economic dynamics of the Middle East. Devastating conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere have displaced millions of people within and across borders, disrupting existing territorial arrangements and making the region the site of the largest forced displacement since the Second World War. New political antagonisms underpin these conflicts, with struggles for regional influence generating complex patterns of inter-state rivalries and alliances between various countries in the region—including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. These regional struggles mediate and overlap with the on-going intervention of major global powers. Closely coupled with these shifting political dynamics is a reconfiguration of trade, finance, and investment flows, with new relationships evolving between Middle Eastern states and neighboring regions such as East and West Africa, South Asia, and the Balkans. All of these regional trends are framed within an increasingly unstable and fragile global order, marked by the rise of new powers such as China and Russia; the resurgence of right-wing populism, xenophobia, and protectionism in the US, Europe, and elsewhere,; and a rapidly mutating array of political, economic, and ecological crises that have been further intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given these contemporary trends, this paper explores how we might think through the shifting, contradictory, and plural features of the Middle East in ways that move beyond the constraints of competing nationalisms, geographical silos, and disciplinary boundaries. To this end, the main objective is methodological—an attempt to outline some of the key analytical perspectives that might productively frame a better understanding of the new regional dynamics of the Middle East. With this aim in mind, the paper begins by engaging with a set of longstanding critiques of ‘area studies’—a scholarly endeavor that is most traditionally associated with the in-depth study and knowledge of particular world ‘regions’ or ‘areas’.

The second part of the paper turns to a more in-depth discussion of these themes in the context of the Middle East itself. I highlight three key methodological issues arising from the first part of the paper, which might help us better understand contemporary regional dynamics: (1) a focus on the various cross-border flows that serve to both upset state-centric approaches to the region, while also destabilizing the particular conceptual categories through which we often think of social processes in the Middle East; (2) closer attention to borders, borderlands, and transboundary processes in the Middle East, all of which contribute in powerful (yet often unexpected and unrecognized) ways to the making of the national and regional scales; and (3) a recognition that regional processes in the Middle East need to be considered as mutually constitutive of a global totality and that this necessitates a closer analysis of the various relations that exist between the wider world market and the regional scale. Taken as a whole, these perspectives not only open up a range of productive questions around the dynamics of the Middle East itself but also signal some interesting ways that the study of the region might contribute to broader social science debates.

2 Critiquing Area Studies

Before addressing some of the more concrete issues associated with the contemporary Middle East, it is important to highlight a few of the main criticisms that question the validity of knowledge production centered upon a specific region.Footnote 1 These critiques encompass both the normative and instrumentalist dimensions of regional knowledge as a scholarly field, as well as theoretical and methodological issues related to how regions are understood, defined and deployed in relation to one another. Thousands of pages from many different disciplinary perspectives have been devoted to these debates, and it is impossible to do full justice to them here. Nonetheless, it is useful to present a brief summary of these discussions, as they help to frame some of the core methodological issues relating directly to the study of the Middle East today.

First, as many scholars have argued, the institutionalization of modern Area Studies as a scholarly field needs to be situated in the specificities of the post-war period, which closely aligned the study of regions with the perceived needs of US foreign policy and security at the time.Footnote 2 Accompanying the expansion of US institutions globally—including US businesses, military, and intelligence apparatuses, and the new multilateral organizations that incorporated a distinctly American interest—knowledge about the ‘other’ took on increasing strategic importance for the US state. Similar in this respect to the genesis of International Relations,Footnote 3 the concerns of area studies scholars aligned with the requirement of US policymakers to better understand the objects of their overseas interests, particularly in the wake of the breakdown of British and French colonialism and the emergence of newly independent states across many parts of the world. This need was further reinforced by the realities of the Cold War, with East European and Russian Studies scholars cultivating expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of the Soviet bloc, while Asian and Latin American Studies assisted in combatting Soviet encroachment into areas identified as American ‘spheres of influence’. All of this was supported materially through various state funding agencies and large private foundations (such as the Ford Foundation). Through the sponsorship of research and direct financial assistance to academic departments, these institutions helped cultivate what East Asian scholar Bruce Cumings was to describe as “astonishing levels of collaboration” between the US state and the particular concerns of area studies scholars.Footnote 4

This “intimate relationship” between the institutional history of area studies and the “hegemonic ordering of the post–World War II world by the United States”Footnote 5 is important to highlight, as it helped structure the intellectual concerns and methodological orientation of many scholars toward regional knowledge. Nonetheless, these kinds of critiques need to be tempered with the recognition that no site of academic knowledge production has been impervious to the influence of state, corporate, and military interests—and it makes little sense to exceptionalize area knowledge in this regard.Footnote 6 Moreover, it is important not to flatten out the diverse array of historical actors and contradictory motivations that drove the development of area studies as a specific scholarly pursuit. As Zachary Lockman convincingly documents in the case of the US, much of the impetus for establishing Middle East studies came from outside of government—pushed by scholars motivated by a genuine desire to promote interdisciplinarity (particularly across the humanities and social sciences) and to encourage a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of non-Western societies.Footnote 7 These laudable aims converged with a more radical critique of the US state through the 1960s and 1970s, and many area studies scholars were to participate in oppositional movements and consciously situate their academic research within a broader resistance to US foreign policy. Today, Western-based scholars who openly oppose US or other government policies in the Middle East, or who express solidarity with struggles in the region (notably Palestine) are often subject to ferocious campaigns of silencing and harassment.

If area studies cannot simply be reduced to their role in American post-war expansionism, a second set of critiques has focused more on a range of methodological and conceptual problems that have shaped the dominant approach to this field. Reinforced by a reliance on state funding, area studies departments have often been dominated by political scientists and development economists seeped in the teleological tropes of modernization theory.Footnote 8 Within this perspective, the newly independent states that emerged from colonial rule were urged to follow US-centered prescriptions for development, with the ‘West’ embodying the promise of technological advance and material prosperity.Footnote 9 Shaped in large part by the rivalries with the Soviet bloc, modernization theory advocated a stagist conception of development that was heavily tied to the idea of economic growth. As Goss and Smith note, “Knowledge was to be generated and applied toward an understanding of the processes of modern social change, particularly state building and economic development. Ultimately, all this was viewed through the lens of American economic, political, and strategic interests in particular parts of the world”.Footnote 10

Closely related to this particular framing of ‘development’, area studies scholarship has also been frequently critiqued for reinforcing “a static set of Orientalist conceptions of the world”,Footnote 11 in which the cultures of the ‘other’ were imbued with a timeless essentialism that was viewed as both distinct from, and inferior to, those of Western societies.Footnote 12 This critique overlaps with a more general problem with colonialist legacies of knowledge production, in which the non-Western world is perceived as a place “for fieldwork and theory-testing, rather than for discovery of new ideas and approaches”.Footnote 13 In this respect, ‘local informants’ are considered as objects of study—the primary source for empirical, concrete, and raw material drawn from a particular place—rather than as active producers of knowledge (particularly at the level of theory and method). As Koch notes, all of this has meant that issues of positionality and “questions of representation” continue to be inherent and hotly debated features of area studies scholarship.Footnote 14

These kinds of critique certainly retain a strong validity, although matters are again more complicated than they initially appear. For one, a range of important research institutions and networks are now located outside of the Western academy and are actively involved in the development of new regional knowledge. Moreover, as critiques of the concept of ‘Orientalism’ have noted, a simple focus on the West can homogenize and flatten the very real social differences within countries and regions outside of the core, leading to an ‘Orientalism in reverse’Footnote 15 or a privileging of non-Western elites as the authentic voice of the ‘other’.Footnote 16 Furthermore, as King highlights in a perceptive review of several key area studies texts, it is very difficult to neatly demarcate “what constitutes local versus non-local scholarship … or address the complexity of distinguishing between ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ scholars”, particularly in a world marked by large diaspora communities who hold multiple and overlapping forms of belonging and identity.Footnote 17

A further prominent strand in critiques of traditional area studies concerns its alleged lack of theoretical self-reflexivity or disciplinary focus. A former President of the Association for Asian Studies claimed over two decades ago that “there is no theory of area studies or area-specific knowledge; there is only a set of institutional, personal, and fragmented disciplinary, market, and professional interests that converge primarily on funding”.Footnote 18 In the absence of a clear engagement with specific social science debates, area studies scholars have failed “to describe, let alone to theorize, area‑specific knowledge as such”.Footnote 19 Closely overlapping with the turn toward rational choice and quantitative methods in political science, area studies scholars were criticized for being overly focused on qualitative research and displaying a lack of theoretical and methodological rigor.Footnote 20

Amitav Acharya has described this “area studies versus the discipline” controversy as a “peculiarly American debate”,Footnote 21 pointing out that in many other parts of the world, scholars seek to combine a deep understanding of particular countries or regions with a commitment to theoretical and methodological engagement. Nonetheless, the explicit interdisciplinary aspirations of area studies can manifest as a “truculent antitheoretical empiricism”Footnote 22 or narrow positivism. Area studies departments can be particularly prone to these kinds of methodological problems, as they often bring together scholars working across vastly different historical time periods. Such historical breadth can certainly be positive and productive, but it can also essentialize and imbue a false sense of transhistoric permanence to a particular region, in which supposedly unique cultural, political, or social features end up as timeless explanations for change across a very long duree. As Middell and Naumann note with respect to the perception of ‘Asia’, the particular region under study becomes “an age-old cartographer’s fantasy”, which imposes “an artificial unity on highly diverse peoples and regions, distorts their internal structuring, and ignores the unities of historical networks and social relations [across different world regions]”.Footnote 23

By the early 2000s, a “perceived crisis in area studies”Footnote 24 was reflected in both a drying-up of funding to academic programs and a deeper conceptual crisis around how to theorize the territorial category of a ‘region’ and ‘area’. As Dirlik points out, scholars began to question the “utility of spatializing the world into areas that were products of its Orientalist legacies, reinforced by post–World War II geopolitical assumptions”Footnote 25. Numerous books, mostly focused on Asia (or its sub-regions), sought to ‘locate’, ‘rethink’, or ‘reconceptualize’ these spatial categories.Footnote 26 Partly this reflected a larger epistemological critique of the oft-unspoken Orientalist and essentializing representational frames that were used to think about particular locations. But the existential crisis of Area Studies was also deeply connected to a seeming shift in the wider global order—the onset of an era of ‘globalization’ which, at both an academic and popular level, was met with claims of a new borderless world, a space of flows, and the alleged demise of the nation-state as an organizing principle of the world market.Footnote 27

For area studies scholars, the forces of a new globalism and the apparent weakening of the nation-state presented a serious analytical challenge. From its early history, Harry Harootunian points out, Area Studies had been “founded on the privilege attached to fixed spatial containers” in which the model was “undoubtedly … the nation state”.Footnote 28 Such an approach had corresponded neatly with the perceived reality of the post-war order, where decolonization had created a patchwork of discrete parcellized territories “that were often the relatively recent product of European imperialism and contained within their boundaries a bewildering variety of social, economic, and cultural forms”.Footnote 29 Not only did area studies scholars uncritically adopt nation-states as the basic “units of scholarship” but they also tended to specialize in a handful of larger and more influential states within particular regions, rather than the region as a whole.Footnote 30 A major consequence of this state-centrism for the direction of area studies research was a lack of attention to cross-border and transnational flows—connections that were now positioned center-stage within processes of globalization.

In this context, a range of interesting contributions sought to reframe the study of regions and regional knowledge in light of the new global processes.Footnote 31 Scholars called for renewed attention to the ‘meso-scale’,Footnote 32 ‘regional worlds’,Footnote 33 or a ‘world regions’ approach, which recognized the significance of not only how regions “self-organize their economic, political, and cultural space, but also how they relate to each other and shape global order”.Footnote 34 A key feature of these contributions was their focus on trans- and intra-regional interactions, which emphasized the “political, social, and economic entanglements” that connected different zones across the world and sought to elucidate the transcultural connections and extensive flows of goods, people, and ideas that historically linked regions too often thought of as impermeable bounded territories.Footnote 35 Throughout all of this, an important shift in emphasis was evident—an attempt to situate the regional as a constitutive part of the global, not as an opposing or dichotomous sphere.

3 New Regionalisms and the Study of the Middle East

Given this wider theoretical framing, the discussion that follows seeks to suggest a few themes and associated questions that relate to the study of regionalisms and the new regional dynamics of the Middle East.

The first issue to highlight in mapping the new regional dynamics of the Middle East is the wide proliferation of different kinds of cross-border flows within the region. These include, for example, the devastating cross-border displacement of populations as a result of various wars and conflicts. Indeed, as the most conflict-affected region of the world today, the Middle East has recently witnessed the largest forced displacement since the Second World War. This displacement has an enormous impact on social processes in the Middle East itself, a fact that is often forgotten in popular framings of the supposed ‘migration crisis’ as a mostly European concern.

Beyond the movement of people, the Middle East is also a significant site of cross-border capital flows. My own research has explored the ways in which economic liberalization in the Middle East over recent decades has been closely bound up with the internationalization of Gulf capital throughout the wider region.Footnote 36 Gulf capitalists now dominate key economic sectors of many neighboring countries, including real estate and urban development, agribusiness, telecommunications, retail, logistics, and banking and finance. In this sense, the neoliberal reforms articulated in various structural adjustment packages through the 1990s and 2000s did not just reconfigure structures of class and state at the national scale, they also led to new regionalized circuits of accumulation superintended by Gulf business conglomerates. One consequence of this is that Gulf capital has become interiorized in the class structure of many Arab states, and the political economy of the wider region is increasingly pulled around the dynamics of accumulation in the Gulf.Footnote 37

We need better theorization of what these cross-border movements might mean to how we perceive standard social science categories such as class, nation, state, ideology, economy, and politics. Foregrounding the Gulf, for example, as a central axis of regional capital accumulation, pushes us to look at the interaction between processes of class formation at the national and regional scales. Do nationally bound concepts such as the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’—r’as al mal al watani—make sense today, given the pronounced interiorization of Gulf capital in the class structures of other Arab states? Or how do we think through categories such as a ‘national labor force’ in ways that are cognizant of the many millions of people (in some cases a majority of national populations) who are temporary migrant workers lacking in citizenship rights, or who work in the region but are displaced from their national territories? Where do we place the significant diaspora bourgeoisies—Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, and so forth—who may be deeply connected to their national politics but whose centers of accumulation lie firmly outside of their national territories? What new forms of political or economic power might be emerging alongside these regional cross-border flows? How do we understand concepts such as financialization—where individuals, households, firms, and states increasingly depend upon financial markets for their day-to-day reproduction—when approached from the regional scale? And how are all these regional processes bound up with the development of other scales—including, crucially, urban and city spaces—across the Middle East?

3.1 Borders, Borderlands, and the ‘Political Economy of the Margins’

In thinking through the ways that regional cross-border flows might upset state-centric ways of looking at the Middle East, we should also be wary of homogenizing the national scale as an undifferentiated spatial unit. In this respect, scholars working on the political economy of conflict have highlighted the importance of the ‘political economy of the margins’—a recognition that national-level processes, institutions, and actors should not be taken as representative of state territories as a whole.Footnote 38 This has direct methodological implications for our research, including the need to place greater emphasis on sub-national variation,Footnote 39 and a more critical approach to aggregate national-level data that often obfuscates the profound spatial differentiation found within state territories.Footnote 40 In respect to the latter, for example, it may be necessary to reinterpret data in ways that go beyond standard administrative ways of dividing territory (such as urban, municipal, or local jurisdictions), in order to better capture the inherent unevenness of the national scale.

Working in other regional contexts, some scholars have suggested that a greater analytical appreciation of sub-national variation requires a particular emphasis on ‘borderlands’—regions located on the peripheries of at least two national states, and straddling an international border.Footnote 41 Borderlands—particularly in situations of conflict—are often sites of chronic violence and marginalization, where vulnerable populations may depend upon a mix of informal, illicit, or criminal activities.Footnote 42 They are typically marked by different kinds of social and political fragmentation, with multiple state and non-state groups contesting for power.Footnote 43 And because of the economic asymmetries that often arise as a result of borders, borderland economies may also create economic incentives and risk premiums that are tied in complex ways to the making of national political settlements.

Because borderlands are highly interconnected spaces, they are critical to wider processes of state formation.Footnote 44 In the Middle East, the importance of these areas is clearly evident—for example, the various border zones of Syria with Turkey, Lebanon, and JordanFootnote 45; Palestinian cities such as Jerusalem, and the various border areas of the West BankFootnote 46; Yemen's land and sea connections with Saudi Arabia and Oman; the dense cross-border linkages found across North Africa; and the newly emerging and overlapping sovereignties encountered in waterways such as the Red Sea. Nonetheless, there is a notable lack of grounded research that situates these borderland spaces in the making of the regional scale. What are the patterns of accumulation and forms of livelihood that exist in these and other borderlands, and how may they be connected to political and economic power elsewhere in the Middle East? What role do borderlands play as nodes in new regional flows of finance, commodities, and aid—and how might this shape emerging hierarchies at the regional scale? Who are the new political and economic actors—often described as ‘brokers’ in the borderlands literatureFootnote 47—that mediate and bridge these complex cross-border linkages? And how might spaces of apparent stability, security, and prosperity in the Middle East (e.g. the financial and real estate markets of Dubai), be relationally connected to dynamics of violence and instability in borderland areas?

3.2 The Middle East, Regional Hierarchies, and the Global

The importance of transnational flows, borders, and borderlands highlights the need to understand the Middle East as more than a simple agglomeration of national territories. But as noted earlier, any theorization of the regional scale also needs to be situated in relation to a wider totality: a capitalist world market marked by the seeming relative decline of longstanding centers of power in North America and Europe—and the concomitant rise of new zones of accumulation and growth in other parts of the world. This increasingly unstable hegemonic order is underpinned by a complex set of cross-border interdependencies and inter-state rivalries. Accompanying this is an associated rescaling of spatial structures across the world market, including an increased prominence to the regional scale and the emergence of new regional processes, identities, and hierarchies.

These global shifts are crucially important for any study of the Middle East. Long recognized as a ‘crossroads’ for world-scale processes, the region today plays a major role in mediating new global networks of trade, logistics, infrastructure, and finance. It is noteworthy, for example, that the busiest airport in the world for international travel is now located in the Middle East—Dubai International Airport, which surpassed London’s Heathrow Airport in 2015—as well as the world’s fourth largest port operator, DP World, whose international footprint extends across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.Footnote 48 As a ‘global super-connector’ linking different zones of the world market, the Middle East plays a critical role in circulatory processes and the making of global production and consumption chains across the planet.Footnote 49

Closely related to these circulation processes are the Middle East’s financial markets. Historically, financial surpluses emanating from the region—particularly the Gulf states—have been crucial to the making of financial power and the wider architecture of global finance. This includes the emergence of the so-called EuromarketsFootnote 50 in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the rise of the US dollar as ‘world money’ in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 51 These global connections were mediated through various financial markets in the Middle East (e.g. Beirut and Bahrain), which helped position the Middle East as a key element to the eventual global dominance of Anglo-American financial institutions. Today, while the Middle East remains deeply connected to the leading centers of international finance, several new dimensions of the region’s global financial role are now evident. These include its position as the financial headquarters for banks active across Central Asia, Africa, and South Asia; the prominence of Middle East offshore financial zones in money laundering, tax evasion, and the sheltering of illicit wealth from nearby regions; and the region’s global leadership in alternative forms of finance and financial markets, notably Islamic Finance.Footnote 52 These new global connections—coupled with the enduring importance of the Middle East to Western financial markets and institutions—are crucial to locate as part of the reconfiguration of the regional scale today.

The Middle East also plays a pivotal role in the global movement of coercive technologies, techniques, and doctrines. This role encompasses not simply the region’s position as the single largest export market for weapons and military hardware in the world but also its centrality to the testing of new security technologies, including emerging forms of surveillance and population control. A number of authors have pointed to the complex transnational circuits underpinning the arms trade and surveillance industry in the region, including the circulation of War on Terror logics, military technologies, personnel, training manuals, cross-border operations, police forces and Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs).Footnote 53 All of these make the Middle East a key node in the global diffusion of new norms of securitization and militarism. At the same time, these global connections powerfully shape the dynamics of conflict in the region itself, and the differential ways that militaries have become embedded in political and economic structures at both the national and regional scales.Footnote 54 Once again, however, it is striking to note how this dimension of the region is largely occluded in the wider literature on surveillance capitalism, securitization, and the new technologies of state control.

Of course, these global connections remain firmly tied to the fundamental role of the Middle East’s oil and gas supplies within the world market. Despite the recent rise in so-called ‘non-conventional’ oil produced from US and Canadian shale fields,Footnote 55 the Middle East remains the central axis of world hydrocarbon markets, with the region’s total share of global oil production standing at around 40% in 2019. Historically, these supplies underpinned a major transformation in the world energy’s regime through the mid-twentieth century, with oil and gas supplanting coal as the primary fuel for global transport, manufacturing, and industrial production. More recently, the Middle East has been essential in meeting the increased demand for oil and gas that followed China’s move to the center of global manufacturing. In this sense, the key structural shift in the global political economy over the last two decades has been predicated on closer (and rapidly changing) ties between the Middle East and Asia.Footnote 56 All of this, moreover, has positioned Middle East oil producers as key protagonists in climate change debates and any future energy transition away from fossil fuels.

Placing these kinds of global transformations and circuits in the Middle East helps illuminate the on-going regional interests of world powers such as the United States, the European Union, Russia, and China. Throughout most of the last century, the US has been the dominant foreign power in the region, with American hegemony resting principally upon deep political, economic, and military ties with Israel, on one side, and the Gulf Arab states, on the other. More recently, however, this longstanding hegemonic position has been undermined by the multifaceted crisis of the Middle East state system, and the increasingly conspicuous challenge to US hegemony presented by rival powers. This has precipitated a range of new foreign interventions including direct involvement in the region’s wars and conflicts, as well as backing to the various governments, movements, and armed militias that have emerged in the wake of the Arab uprisings. In assessing these new inter-state rivalries and forms of intervention, it is essential to look beyond simply the military dimension. In this respect, one underexplored aspect is the plethora of new trade, economic, and investment agreements that are currently under negotiation. Such agreements are explicitly aimed at drawing Middle East countries into the orbit of particular economic blocs outside the region and are also closely tied to a range of new bilateral and multilateral aid packages. They are thus a major driver of new regional dynamics.

In addition to shaping the trajectories of numerous wars and conflicts in the region, the Middle East’s co-constitution with ‘the global’ is critical to understanding the sharp internal hierarchies and political antagonisms that have come to mark the regional scale over the last decade. The struggle for regional power is generating severe tensions and new alliances between various countries—including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. New forms of regional power projection are emerging alongside the intensification of these rivalries. These include attempts to shape discursive narratives through the control over media and associated infrastructures (traditional and online); a reshaping of the political economy of cultural production, including the decline of earlier geographical centers of art and music; and the strategic extension of citizenship and residency rights to foreign political and economic elites. All of this overlaps with new cross-border flows of development and humanitarian aid that fundamentally depend upon—and help to create—emergent infrastructures and logistics networks.Footnote 57 Once again, it is important to stress that all of these innovations have spatial and scalar effects; they work to produce the region as a region and need to be conceptualized outside of state-centric frameworks.

In mapping all of these connections, we must remember to look beyond simply the relationships between the Middle East and the core centers of global power. As a fluid and constructed space, the Middle East is dynamically formed through complex and contradictory interactions with other nearby regions. A range of recent innovative historical work has illustrated the value of thinking about the Middle East through this lens (for example, through the networks and relations of the Indian Ocean).Footnote 58 This is also extremely important to the contemporary moment, given the deep and rapidly changing connections between the Middle East and other regions such as Central Asia, South Asia, East Africa, and the Mediterranean. We need to be much more attentive to these kinds of inter-regional relationsFootnote 59—including those that involve oceans and waterwaysFootnote 60—and also ask what we might learn from comparing regions that are often assumed to be ‘incomparable’.Footnote 61

4 Conclusion

An underlying theme of this paper has been its emphasis on the relations, connections, and flows that help to constitute the region as a particular type of spatial representation through which we perceive our social and material existence. As such, regions are indeed abstractions—but they are “real geographical abstractions”, in the sense that they are conceptual categories “determined by historically and geographically specific practices”, and which function with practical, concrete effectsFootnote 62. By focusing on the relations between various scales such as the urban, national, regional, and global—treating those relations as internal to the making of these scales, not as external factors—we stress the dynamic, contradictory, and processual manner through which scalar representations of space are produced as ‘forms of appearance’ of social reality.

In relation to the Middle East, the paper has foregrounded the inherent unevenness and profound socio-economic polarization that marks the production of the regional scale. This sits in sharp contrast to older narratives of ‘Arab unity’, or more recent pan-regional visions promising mutually-beneficial outcomes through closer political and economic integration. The normative assumptions that typically underpin these kinds of market-led ‘regionalisms’ should be rejected; instead, we should recognize how patterns of marginalization and dispossession in some parts of the region are both produced by—and simultaneously help to generate—the accumulation of wealth and power in other parts. The reality of this divergence and unevenness runs against homogenizing accounts that flatten the Middle East as a region in uniform ‘decline’ or ‘crisis’. In contrast, the deep inequalities and social differences encountered in the region are co-produced alongside zones of tremendous prosperity, security, and stability. Following Lefevbre, the social relations underpinning these processes necessarily take on a spatial inflection,Footnote 63 and mapping the ways that social polarization cascades through a multiplicity of variegated scales is essential to understanding the contemporary regional dynamics of the Middle East.

In setting out a research agenda around these themes, it is useful to once again reiterate the potential contributions that detailed ‘area studies’ knowledge and analysis of regions such as the Middle East can bring to wider social science debates. A few of these—by no means an exhaustive list—have been noted in passing above. These include an understanding of global processes that move away from a singular focus on the ‘commanding heights’ of the world economy; the role and nature of borders and borderlands; processes of racialization and the nature of citizenship practices; debates around infrastructure, logistics, and global circulation; and concepts such as financialization that have been developed with virtually no consideration of spaces outside core zones of the world market.

Perhaps most importantly, however, closer attention to the regional scale as a particular instantiation of world processes opens up new avenues for thinking about the Middle East in relation to, and alongside, other key ‘areas’—Latin America, South-East Asia, South Asia, and so forth. In this respect, the relative lack of genuinely inter-regional work involving the Middle East is perhaps the most problematic legacy of traditional approaches to the region. A closer study of these relationships can potentially reveal interesting theoretical and empirical insights into the character of regions and regionalism more generally—an objective that is particularly pressing given the interdependencies of different regions that are increasingly configured across East/West and South/South lines, and which are shaping the world system in new and unpredictable ways.