Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

Kristian Ulrichsen

The First World War in the Middle East is an accessibly written military and social history of the clash of world empires in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus. Coates Ulrichsen demonstrates how wartime exigencies shaped the parameters of the modern Middle East, and describes and assesses the major campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and Germany involving British and imperial troops from the French and Russian Empires, as well as their Arab and Armenian allies. Also documented are the enormous logistical demands placed on host societies by the Great Powers' conduct of industrialised warfare in hostile terrain. The resulting deepening of imperial penetration, and the extension of state controls across a heterogeneous sprawl of territories, generated a powerful backlash both during and immediately after the war, which played a pivotal role in shaping national identities as the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. This is a multidimensional account of the many seemingly discrete yet interlinked campaigns that resulted in one to one and a half million casualties. It details not just their military outcome but relates them to intelligence-gathering, industrial organisation, authoritarianism and the political economy of empires at war.

The First World War in the Middle East

David Held

This book examines the political, economic and social transformation of the six member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the ways in which these states are both shaping, and being reshaped by, the processes of globalisation. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the volume combines thematic chapters focusing on issues such as globalisation, nationalism and identity, political thinking, and economic diversification and redistributive policymaking with empirical chapters studying specific aspects of reform and change: the emergence of governing markets the rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds Islamic Finance the relationship between energy and sustainability trends in foreign aid donorship, strategic and foreign policy formulation. Contributions from experts in the field provide cutting-edge snapshots of a region in flux and collectively offer a roadmap of its repositioning in the global order, examining the interaction between global processes and internal dynamics of change and resistance that inject new dimensions into debates over the loci of local and global transformations and the manner in which each plays off the other. Situating the Gulf States firmly within their global twenty-first century context, this book will hold particular appeal to theorists of globalisation as well as to scholars of comparative politics, international political economy and area studies.

Politics, Economics and the Global Order

The Transformation of the Gulf

Qatar and the Arab Spring offers a frank examination of Qatar's startling rise to regional and international prominence, describing how its distinctive policy stance toward the Arab Spring emerged. In only a decade, Qatari policy-makers - led by the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, and his prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani - catapulted Qatar from a sleepy backwater to a regional power with truly international reach. In addition to pursuing an aggressive state-branding strategy with its successful bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar forged a reputation for diplomatic mediation that combined intensely personalized engagement with financial backing and favorable media coverage through the Al-Jazeera. These factors converged in early 2011 with the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolts in North Africa, Syria, and Yemen, which Qatari leaders saw as an opportunity to seal their regional and international influence, rather than as a challenge to their authority, and this guided their support of the rebellions against the Gaddafi and Assad regimes in Libya and Syria. From the high watermark of Qatari influence after the toppling of Gaddafi in 2011, that rapidly gave way to policy overreach in Syria in 2012, Coates Ulrichsen analyses Qatari ambition and capabilities as the tiny emirate sought to shape the transitions in the Arab world.

Kristian Ulrichsen

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