When:
Thursday, October 8, 2020 12:00 PM
-
1:30 PM
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs
Sovereignty, Order and Conflict presents
Jacob Mundy
Associate Professor, Colgate University
Making Hegemony in the Middle East
The region of the Middle East
holds a central place in narratives of the reluctant postwar American empire.
Proponents of American dominance have even bemoaned the US “retreat” from the
region as an assault on the international security arrangements that have
underwritten global prosperity since 1945. There are threefold problems with
this understanding, starting with the notion of hegemony as commonly used by
international relations scholars and the US foreign policy “commentariat,”
which often bear no relation to its Gramscian inspiration. Secondly, the
narratives marshalled forth in these accounts, whether critical, apologetic, or
laudatory of US policy in the Middle East, are unable to account for the
contradictions and ambiguity of the actual history of America’s entanglement in
the region. Finally, the Middle East itself is untheorized, passing as a
Bourdieuian doxa when in fact the ideational, material, and
spatio-territorial formation of the contemporary Middle East can only be understood
as immanently emergent within the very mutual constitution of the Middle East
and the refashioning of America’s global power since the mid-Cold War.
Ultimately, this intervention seeks to account for the reasons why the making
and unmaking of US hegemony has been tied to the making and unmaking of the
Middle East.
Co-Sponsored by the Geography Department
Click here to register
For more information, please contact Ryan Griffiths, rgriff01@maxwell.syr.edu or for additional accommodation arrangements, please contact, Morgan Bicknell, mebickne@syr.edu.