SOCY 3515 Wars and Revolutions in the Middle East

This undergraduate seminar examines wars, revolutions, and other forms of contentious politics in the modern Middle East through the intertwined histories of Iran, Palestine, and Algeria, from nineteenth-century imperial expansion and colonial conquest to the wars on Gaza and the recent U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. These cases are central to the broader trajectory of war and revolution in the region. The Algerian Revolution became a defining anticolonial struggle and model for revolutionary movements. The Palestinian struggle has shaped regional wars, occupation, armed resistance, mass uprising, and international politics for more than a century. Iran experienced constitutional revolution, foreign intervention, oil nationalism, the 1979 Revolution, interstate war, and the emergence of a revolutionary state that has profoundly shaped regional politics. Following these trajectories also brings Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and other cases into the course through war, exile, revolutionary diffusion, foreign intervention, and regional alliances. The course follows these histories chronologically and comparatively. We examine imperial intervention, settler colonialism, constitutionalism, nationalism, revolution, armed struggle, occupation, civil war, interstate war, state formation, and mass protest. Particular attention is given to the social forces, organizations, and institutions through which people made political claims and participated in conflict. A central concern is how geopolitical forces, political institutions, and social transformations interact to shape contention. We examine why political strategies change, how revolutionary movements expand and build institutions, how states respond through reform, repression, incorporation, and counterinsurgency, and how wars and revolutions transform states and societies. Together, the three main cases provide a way to trace broader historical trajectories of war and revolution across the Middle East and into the present.