Course Title：全球政治经济视野中的西亚

The term the “Middle East” is a Western construct that loosely defines the geography in which multiple Western Asian nations are located. Moreover, series of uprisings, starting from 2010-2011 in West of Asia; imperial direct and indirect interventions in places like Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iran; unprecedented violence, destruction, and emergence of extremist groups such as ISIS in 2014; along with the ongoing development in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have refocused world attention to Western Asia and its relations with the West. This course introduces this region via and within the discipline of Global Political Economy (GPE). In doing so, the course provides a combination of theoretical and methodological approaches of GPE to analyse the historical context in which the current political affairs and the nature of unequal development in the region can be comprehended. By introducing the discipline of GPE and its epistemological relevance to understand the Western Asia, the first week highlights the necessity of the critical, emancipatory, and none-Western approaches to understand a peripheral region such as Western Asia. In the second week, the course introduces the mainstream theoretical approaches (realism and liberalism) and highlights their limitations. This brings us to the Marxist theory and its relevance to understand the Global South in which the Western Asia is located. The lectures of the third week provide a historical materialist analysis of Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and the creation of the state of Israel, and Iran. The fourth week examines on the neoliberal phase of global capitalism and its impact on the nations of Western Asia. The course concludes that the current economic-political status of the region is the most recent phase of the historical uneven and combined development, caused by new forms of imperial dominations. In this regard, the Chinese Alternative, which is fundamentally different from the historical Western imperial interventions and domination of the region, can reflect positively on Western Asia and enhance the quality of the development in this peripheral region.