Why is the "everywhere war" mostly in the Middle East and North Africa?

July 15, 2020

Why is the "everywhere war" mostly in the Middle East and North Africa?

Episode 96

Why is the "everywhere war" mostly in the Middle East and North Africa?

In this podcast, Professor Jacob Mundy examines the historical and geographical definition and categorization of the MENA region through the discourse of the “everywhere war”, questioning the middle east as a permanent structure of conflict. In nowhere else in the world, war-particularly foreign intervention-is as prevalent and constant as in the MENA region. Professor Mundy argues that the creation of the MENA region as an identity component can be considered as a form of “violence”. He also traces the oil-security nexus, particularly the instability that it engenders across cases and time.

Jacob Mundy is an Associate Professor at Colgate University in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. He is the author of Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence: Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics (Stanford University Press, 2015) and more recently Libya (Polity Press, 2018). During the 2018-19 academic year, Professor Mundy was a Fulbright Scholar with the Université de Tunis and a research affiliate with CEMAT. He has also twice served on the board of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and is also on the editorial committee of Middle East Report. His current research examines the political economy of Libya’s transition after 2011.

This episode is part of the Contemporary Thought series and was recorded on September 12, 2019, at the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis, as part of “Reinforcing Critical Research on North Africa” project organized by CEMAT and CEMA and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.