For a long time, the dominant approach within the study of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline has been to regard the Middle East as a separate geopolitical entity -- which is assumed to portray crucial aspects of a distinct regional political system: with its major and minor powers; core and peripheral states or regions. Although rarely manifested and mostly unacknowledged, this implied an engagement with some rather complex epistemological and ontological claims, which hold a major stake within the philosophy of social sciences, in general, and the study of politics, in particular. The rise of regional conceptions of inter-state, inter-national relations in the post WWII academic pursuit of IR has undeniably been a development that precipitated some consensus or a middle ground upon which an engagement with a supposedly mechanical anarchical state-system has become possible, with the appropriation of an attitude that calls itself realism which has successfully monopolized over linguistic and normative vocabularies in an uncompromising attempt to construct and authorize a specific empirical position as a reification of “the real.” Thus, what is primarily at stake in the study of regional systems -- whether as a function of policy-formulation, specialized investigation or an academic pursuit -- is this almost absolute conception of the reality of regional systems that seems to prevail overwhelmingly within much of the literature.
For a long time, the dominant approach within the study of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline has been to regard the Middle East as a separate geopolitical entity -- which is assumed to portray crucial aspects of a distinct regional political system: with its major and minor powers; core and peripheral states or regions. Although rarely manifested and mostly unacknowledged, this implied an engagement with some rather complex epistemological and ontological claims, which hold a major stake within the philosophy of social sciences, in general, and the study of politics, in particular. The rise of regional conceptions of inter-state, inter-national relations in the post WWII academic pursuit of IR has undeniably been a development that precipitated some consensus or a middle ground upon which an engagement with a supposedly mechanical anarchical state-system has become possible, with the appropriation of an attitude that calls itself realism which has successfully monopolized over linguistic and normative vocabularies in an uncompromising attempt to construct and authorize a specific empirical position as a reification of “the real.” Thus, what is primarily at stake in the study of regional systems -- whether as a function of policy-formulation, specialized investigation or an academic pursuit -- is this almost absolute conception of the reality of regional systems that seems to prevail overwhelmingly within much of the literature.