Introduction to Middle Eastern Politics

The course treats the Middle East as a region where domestic politics and international politics are inseparable, you cannot explain the Syrian civil war, the Arab Spring, or Iran's regional posture without holding state-level dynamics and great-power competition in the same frame. Working from Fawcett's textbook, you move chronologically from the region's post-Ottoman formation through oil, Arab-Israeli conflict, and the post-2011 ruptures, with a research paper as the main deliverable alongside quizzes and exams. It sits as a regional-studies anchor in the IR curriculum, giving you the historical and conceptual grounding that later courses on security, foreign policy, and conflict assume you already have.