Modern Politics
Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Ethnic Conflict and International Politics in the Middle East, ed. Leonard Binder. 396 pages, bibliography, index. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8130-1687-8

In Ethnic Conflict and International Politics in the Middle East, Binder has assembled a provocative series of essays on a much-neglected topic: the interplay between ethnicity and foreign policy in the greater Middle East. As with many edited volumes, the cohesion of the overall work is weak. Nevertheless, the high quality of several of the chapters (and even the lesser efforts are quite solid) makes this volume of considerable interest to specialists and students focused on a particular country or issue.

The volume grew out of a UCLA workshop and demonstrates the importance of ethnicity to understanding the politics of the Middle East. Ethnicity in the region has received only limited scholarly attention, a gap this volume helps fill. Even more importantly, Binder’s collection takes us beyond a narrow assessment of the issues involved (a problem common to many country-based works that examine ethnicity), noting the interaction between local ethnic issues, national foreign policies, and regional politics. As Binder argues, a regime’s ethnic strategy and its foreign policy are often one and the same; keeping the country united or distracted at home often guides a state’s foreign policy decisions.

Several of the chapters are excellent. Laurie Brand’s work on Jordan, Martha Brill Olcott’s assessment of Central Asia, and Ian Lesser’s analysis of ethnic strains in Turkey all speak directly to the questions of how foreign policy and ethnic management interact. Lustick’s chapter on hegemony and nationalism is theoretically and empirically provocative, pushing our understanding of both the region and of ethnic identity formulation in general. The remaining chapters also are of interest to scholars of ethnicity and to students interested in a particular region or theme.

Several minor gaps deserve mention. Israel, a nation of immigrants from many lands, is not assessed directly (though Lustick examines it in his broader theoretical chapter), even though it would seem an ideal choice for this study. Diasporas, which are vital to understanding various Kurdish movements and Islamist organizations today, are given short shrift.

Where this volume disappoints most, however, is in its lack of unity. As Binder notes in his introduction, the meaning of ethnicity is often not clear: the term is often used to include tribal, linguistic, historical, territorial, religious, and other identities. Rather than focus on several agreed aspects of this broad topic, however, this volume accepts almost anything as ethnicity, making it difficult to trace consistent themes throughout the chapters. Thus Gilles Kepel authors an interesting chapter on Islamist movements, but its link to ethnicity is unclear. Similarly, David Menashri provides an insightful analysis of the interplay between religion and nationalism in Iran’s foreign policy, but the importance of Iran’s various ethnic communities and their particular concerns is given only limited attention. Muhammad Muslih’s chapter on Hamas also is well done, but its link to ethnicity is at best tenuous, even under the broadest definitions of the term. As a result of this lack of standardization, it is difficult to draw broader lessons from this volume despite the quality of the individual chapters.

Daniel Byman
The RAND Corporation

Turkey in the Middle East: Oil, Islam, and Politics, by Alon Liel. Translated by Emanuel Lottem. 253 pages, bibliography, index. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-55587-909-8

Turkey in the Middle East is a timely, fascinating, and hopelessly disorganized account of Turkey’s relations with Middle Eastern countries over the past half century. It is timely because Turkey has become Israel’s closest ally in the region, and the author, a former Israeli diplomat who has closely observed Turkish diplomacy over two decades, is well placed to reflect his country’s perceptions of the striking change in Turkey’s orientation. Liel also offers many interesting insights into Turkey’s relations with Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the other oil producing states in the region, as well as with Israel. Unfortunately, this book has no overall focus or thesis, and it reads more like a collection of articles than an organized book with an introduction and conclusion.

The majority of the book is devoted to documenting Turkey’s expanding demand for oil and its diplomatic efforts from 1973 to the mid-1980s to import it from Iraq, Iran, Libya, and the Soviet Union at discounted prices. Water may have been a factor. The Turkish government denied that it slowed the filling of the Keban Hydroelectric Dam in 1974 to get Iraqi oil at special prices (p. 55), but its control of the flow of the Euphrates into Syria and Iraq may have put it in a better bargaining position. By 1978, however, when Turkey’s foreign exchange reserves almost vanished, it resorted to bartering wheat and other goods for oil. Turkey was unable to honor all its commitments and in the end spent more for oil bought at spot prices than normally contracted oil at market prices would have cost. The barter deals possibly encouraged Turkish industrialization, however, and contributed to Turkey’s surge of exports in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s Turkey had reversed its trade deficits with the Arab oil producers and become a net creditor.

After 1984 or so, as oil prices softened, Turkey overcame its dependence on the oil producers and could improve its relations with Israel. Turkey had downgraded diplomatic relations to the level of a single second secretary in 1980, possibly to please the Saudis (pp. 110-15). In 1992 Turkey agreed, in the author’s opinion, to upgrade them to full ambassadorial level in order to induce Israel to join the multilateral water talks (p. 20) proposed by the Madrid Conference; by 1995 military agreements augured close strategic ties. Ehud Barak became the first Israeli prime minister officially to visit Turkey in 1999, although David Ben Gurion (who had studied in Istanbul before World War I) had secretly visited Adnan Menderes in 1958 to lay the foundations for “‘peripheral’ cooperation among Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia, and Israel” after the breakdown of the Baghdad Pact (pp. 205-6). Barak discussed water among other matters: Turkey finished building offshore tanker terminals at the mouth of the Manavgat River, 50 kilometers east of Antalya in early 2000 and seeks to sell water to Israel and possibly to Jordan and Palestine as well (pp. 23, 123).

This book is marred by many little factual errors: Aden does not lie at the mouth of the Red Sea (p. 206), and the author confuses OPEC with OAPEC (p. 105), the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, which was the one that cut production as a result of American aid to Israel during the October 1973 War. Turkey was already assembling F-16s at a plant outside Ankara well before 1991 (p. 163). The index is just a catalogue of names without analytic subject categories. Nevertheless, there is much information here for those who study oil or water politics in the region or, better still, analyze their interrelationships. Another sub-theme, only hinted at, might be the impact of Turkish perceptions of Jewish influence in the United States on Turkey’s propensity to cooperate with Israel.

Clement Henry
University of Texas


Russian-American Relations: Islamic and Turkic Dimensions in the Volga-Ural Basin, edited by Hafeez Malik. 314 pages, index. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-312-23168-7

This collection of articles draws together Russian foreign and domestic policy, US policy toward Russia, especially regarding Russia’s internal minorities, and the efforts of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan to establish sovereignty within the Russian federation. Malik’s introduction ties the articles together, pointing to several reasons that the US government should take interest in Muslim nationalist movements within Russia. Echoing Cold War scholarship, the editor argues that Russia is imperialist and expansionist, while “the Volga-Ural basin and the Caucasus have become the soft underbelly of the Russian Federation as Islam is acting as a catalytic force for the resurgence of Tatars, Bashkorts and the Caucasian Muslim peoples” (p. 5). Nevertheless, while Malik views the resurgence of nationalism as an unstoppable force causing difficulties to the Russian Federation, difficulties which apparently the US should exploit, nowhere in this volume is there substantiation of the assertion that “Islam is acting as a catalytic force” for the nationalist movements among Tatars and Bashkorts. Rather, the rhetorics of nationalism expressed in the articles by M. H. Khasanov (Tatarstan), Engel Tagirov (Tatarstan), Zinnour Uraksin (Bashkortostan), and D. Zh. Valeyev (Bashkortostan) are shaped by Soviet scholarly understandings of ‘nation,’ with allusions to Islam as repressed and emergent culture, not as political ideology. Bashkort scholar Aislu Yunusova argues that Islam in Russia is fragmented, personalized, and used cynically by politicians. Malik’s article on Bashkort nationalism as it was expressed in a 1993 ‘Kurultai’ reinforces the impression that Islam is one element in cultural unity and identification, but not a guiding political force.

Nine of the articles discuss Tatar and Bashkort nationalism, and represent a spectrum of opinion, ranging from desires for full independence from Russia to federation agreements that would allow Tatarstan and Bashkortostan economic and cultural sovereignty. Six other articles examine US and Russian policies toward Russia’s Muslim constituents and Muslim neighbors in the ‘near abroad’–Azerbaijan and Central Asia–as well as Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Most of the authors view the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as an important step in Russia’s efforts to assert control over its former union republics. Alvin Rubenstein argues that the US should bolster the independence of the ‘near abroad’ states in order to keep Russian imperialism at bay. Sergey Gretsky reviews Russian relations with Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Robert Barylski examines Russian policies toward nationalist movements within the Russian federation in the early 1990s, especially Chechnya. Mikhail Konarovsky presents a Russian government position, emphasizing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to justify Russia’s policy toward Chechnya and Tajikistan. Makhmud Gareyev calls for Russia to pursue military and economic integration of the CIS, in order to create a multi-polar world that offsets US hegemony, and to deter the threat of destabilizing Islamic fundamentalism. Garayev argues that the West’s goal is “to direct a powerful Islamic wave against Russia” (p. 151).

Although Russian-American Relations provides a wealth of perspectives, its two parts are not well integrated; furthermore, it lacks consistent transliteration and is marred by inadequate editing, which permits wildly inaccurate statements like the notion that the Chechnyans established sovereignty through war with Russia in 1468 (p. 3). These problems detract from an otherwise valuable volume that should become part of the collections of those who examine Russian-Middle East relations, as well as those who study Muslim nationalities in the Russian federation.

Marianne Kamp
University of Wyoming

Battle for Peace in Sudan: An Analysis of the Abuja Conferences, 1992-1993, by Steven Wöndu and Ann Lesch. 247 pages, index, maps, photographs, appendices. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000. $52.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-7618-1516-3

In 1992, in an effort to end the Sudanese civil war, President Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria offered to sponsor peace talks between the Sudanese government (dominated by the National Islamic Front), and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). Held in the Nigerian capital of Abuja in 1992 and 1993, the talks ultimately ended in failure, allowing one of the world’s longest and deadliest conflicts to continue unabated. Battle for Peace in Sudan is a fascinating study of these negotiations, written by Wöndu, who served as official notetaker of the SPLM delegation, and Lesch, a political scientist and Sudan specialist. The book should be required reading for anyone interested in the religious dynamics of the second Sudanese civil war, the start of which, in 1983, coincided with the regime's introduction of Shari’a hudud laws. This assertion of Islamic law, which grew stronger after 1989, antagonized the predominantly non-Muslim southern Sudanese population, and added to longstanding grievances about the country’s grossly unequal regional distribution of political power and wealth.

At Abuja, disagreements over religion and state thwarted conflict resolution. Sudan government delegates insisted that the country was and had to be an Islamic Arabophone state, since Islam was the majority religion (70 percent) and Arabic the plurality language (40 percent). SPLM delegates maintained, on the contrary, that the Sudan had to be a secular, multicultural state if it were to survive within extant borders, and protested the agenda of successive postcolonial, northern-dominated regimes to propagate Arabic and Islam.

The SPLM came to Abuja in 1992 weakened by a schism over the viability and desirability of unity or secession. Whereas its mainstream branch accepted, in theory, the continuation of the unitary territorial state, provided that the government affirmed a commitment to secularism as well as to regional power-sharing, a splinter group insisted that differences with the regime were irreconcilable and that a North-South divorce should occur.

The Nigerian conference hosts thought that their country had lessons to offer. Like Sudan, Nigeria had struggled after independence to overcome potential northern-southern, Muslim-Christian divisions, and had even fought a civil war, the Biafran War (1967-70). After Biafra, Nigerian leaders sought to reunite the country by redrawing internal boundaries, devolving greater authority upon smaller regional states, and devising power-sharing mechanisms within the army and central government. Significantly, they also declared Nigeria a secular state: no religious group would dominate. At Abuja, SPLM delegates welcomed suggestions to model a post-war Sudan on the Nigerian model, but Sudan government delegates rejected the model outright.

Since independence, the Sudan government has had something of a colonial relationship to its southern regions. It has promoted a ‘civilizing mission’ based on Arabic and Islam, and, like a textbook Marxist-Leninist example of imperialist predation, has tried to extract southern natural resources―above all water, and now, increasingly, oil―to benefit Khartoum. Not surprisingly, where so much wealth and culture is at stake, none of the warring parties has yielded. Since 1983, therefore, Sudanese (overwhelmingly southerners) have died in the hundreds of thousands. Like many other attempted peace initiatives, the Abuja talks failed to end the war. Battle for Peace in Sudan helps to explain why, by illuminating the profound ideological rifts that have made the conflict so intractable.

Heather J. Sharkey
Trinity College