F. Gregory Gause
"It will come as no surprise that 'identity matters' in the foreign policies of Middle Eastern states. The authors of Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East grapple with the difficult questions of just how identity matters: How are identities formed? How do they affect foreign policy? Which of the menu of possible identities becomes salient in a state's foreign policy during a particular period? Why do identities change over time? This book provides a new and more rigorous framework for reconsidering the old question of how ideas affect and are affected by foreign policy decisions in the Middle East."
Scott Rothstein
"This book marks an important and strong contribution to the scholarship of the Middle East. More geared for a scholarly audience with some background in the Middle East, it is written coherently enough to remain accessible to a motivated general reader. The analyses are deep, the theoretical context is consistent, and the questions addressed are relevant to both current affairs and recent history. Furthermore, the breadth of literature cited by authors is impressive, adding more weight to the conclusions they reach."
Abdalla M. Battah
Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East would make an excellent text in IR and Middle Eastern studies for either upper-division undergraduate or graduate courses. Its most obvious strength is that it problematizes both identity and national interest, challenging the usual givens assumed by traditional IR approaches.
Middle East Journal
This collection of essays deals with the effects of national identity on the regional politics of the Middle East. As the editors point out in the introduction to this volume, although many experts are aware of the importance of national identity, they have not taken it sufficiently into account in their attempts to understand how the foreign policies of Middle Eastern countries are shaped.
Roland Dannreuther
The one undoubted strength of this book is the quality of the country-specific contributions. All the authors are well-known specialists on Middle Eastern politics and provide complex and sensitive analyses of how the multiple identities of the peoples of the region interact with their rulers' domestic and foreign political objectives.... This is an engaged, well-focused, and stimulating set of contributions which achieves a coherence through focusing on the question of identity in Middle East politics.
