The Middle East Journal articles

Recent articles from The Middle East Journal

Editor's note.(Editorial)
March 22, 2009... Among the offerings in this spring issue of the Journal are: an assessment of the possible role of Arab journalists in a new "Arab Awakening;" a case study of a major jihadi-ist group in Algeria and its evolution; an examination of the geopolitics of Azerbaijan's foreign policy since...

Border guards of the "imagined" watan: Arab Journalists and the New Arab Consciousness.(Report)
March 22, 2009... Media plays a fundamental role in the formation of national identity, most famously detailed in Benedict Anderson's theory of the imagined community. In the Arab world, a media revolution is contributing to the emergence of a reawakened regional Arab consciousness. A comparison of data from...

The local and global jihad of al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghrib.(Report)
March 22, 2009... Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghrib (AQIM) was founded in 2007 as the latest offshoot of the global jihad. But it is deeply rooted in a long and complex history of Algerian violence, with the "Afghan" volunteers in the 1980s, the civil war raging in the 1990s, and the more recent crisis of the...

Azerbaijan's foreign policy and challenges for energy security.(Report)
March 22, 2009... This article examines Azerbaijan's foreign policy by demonstrating the interplay between the oil-led development process and early post-independence regional conflicts that enforced a Western orientation in the country's foreign policy. It is argued that geopolitics continue to prevail in the...

Shari'a under challenge: the political history of Islamic legal institutions in Israel.(Report)
March 22, 2009... This article examines the evolving relationship between Israel and the legal institutions of its Muslim minority since 1948. The Israeli case study demonstrates how, over the long run, an inherently conflictual relationship between a non-Muslim state and its Muslim minority can evolve into a...