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Studying the International Relations of the Arab World: the significance, but not the centrality, of the Arab League
Abstract
What is the “International Relations (IR) of the Arab world”? How should it be taught? What place should be assigned to the League of Arab States (LAS) in such a focused course? These are the three interrelated questions this paper seeks to address, theoretically and methodologically informed by Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education and by IR scholarship concerned with worlding beyond the West and regional worlds. Fundamentally, this paper argues that the advancement of knowledge on how states, institutions and social movements deemed to be “Arab” interact with each other, and with their non-Arab counterparts, both at the regional and global levels demands a course of its own at the postgraduate level. This is due to the fact that a course focused on the IR of the Arab world enables the study of a whole set of political, economic and cultural dynamics that simply cannot be properly addressed when subsumed under the wider umbrella of IR of the Middle East. This study is anchored by the following qualitative methods: discourse analysis of syllabi of IR of the Middle East and related courses; active participant observation in the classroom and semi-structured interviews with graduate students enrolled in the IR of the Arab world course at a federal university in Brazil during the 2019 and 2020 academic years; and dialogues (in Freirean terms) with Arab scholars, intellectuals, activists and diplomats. The study reaches the conclusion that such a focused postgraduate course should assign a significant but not central role to the functioning of the LAS and its several related institutions. Therefore, International Relations of the Arab world should comprise a discussion of the role of regions in world politics and how the Arab world constitutes one of these regions, as well as a critical assessment of the meanings historically and currently attached to the signifier “Arab” and its implications for how Arab states and non-state actors relate to each other, their immediate neighbors, and the Global North and South. Likewise this proposed course should encompass the characteristics of Arab political economy, the historical and political evolution of the LAS, Arab migrations and diasporas, Arab knowledge production in IR, the role the Arab media plays in regional and global politics, and how Arab cinema and literature propagates a sense of Arab identity – that is radically plural, just like the Arab world itself.
Discipline
International Relations/Affairs
Geographic Area
Arab States
Sub Area
Arab Studies