Why is the Middle East the only part of the world which has drawn the West into wars in the last thirty years? With a sequence of events since 1945, including the Six-Day War, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the two Gulf wars, the Middle East has been the most important region of diplomacy, crisis, and controversy for the West. More recent events - notably the 2001 attack on the United States but also a number of other events (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, nuclear proliferation, oil) - have even further escalated both engagement and debate. This has been punctuated by large-scale immigration to the West from the region. Islamism is the only ideology that challenges the dominant, globalizing, modern form of society.

All of these factors have greatly increased interest in the West toward its engagement in the region and the need for good materials explaining the history, the strategies, events, and ideas. This new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Political Science, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to answer these and other questions, and to enable users to make sense of the subjectâe(tm)s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output.