Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Peter J. Munson is a Marine officer with more than eleven years of service, has seen several operational and combat tours in the Middle East since 2001, and [...]

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MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Ami Pedahzur is associate professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin. His new book is The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle against Terrorism.
From Ami Pedahzur
One [...]

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From Philip Carl Salzman
There is one central lesson that cultural anthropology has to offer. It is the lesson of Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology, of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and of their intellectual descendants, such as Clifford Geertz, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the second half of the [...]

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From Assaf Moghadam
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point just released a study on the foreign fighters streaming into Iraq. The new study, Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road in and Out of Iraq, edited by my colleague Brian Fishman, expands on an analysis of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s personnel records conducted by the [...]

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From MESH Admin
Fighting between government forces and Shiite rebels in the mountainous governate of Sa’ada in the far north of Yemen has displaced approximately 130,000 people since 2004. The Washington Post ran an article a month ago, explaing the context of the fighting. This new situation map, prepared by the UN Office for the Coordination [...]

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MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Priya Satia is assistant professor of modern British history at Stanford University. Her new book is Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s [...]

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From Andrew Exum
Be sure to read the speech given on Monday by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Association of American Universities in Washington.
Since 9/11, the U.S. and its allies have been involved in two prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are low-tech conflicts in which anthropological skills and language [...]

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