The region where imperial decisions have the longest half-life.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Statement to the Knesset
Anwar Sadat · 1977
Argues face-to-face negotiation, not further war, can resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and offers full peace in exchange for a complete Israeli…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement
Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot · 1916
The secret Anglo-French partition of Ottoman territory, whose lines were drawn to suit imperial convenience and contradicted the independence Britain…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Nutuk
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk · 1927
Atatürk's own six-day address recounting the Turkish War of Independence, arguing the old Ottoman order had to be entirely dismantled rather than…
+3 more at this level
11 works
Anwar Sadat
Argues face-to-face negotiation, not further war, can resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and offers full peace in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot
The secret Anglo-French partition of Ottoman territory, whose lines were drawn to suit imperial convenience and contradicted the independence Britain had already promised the Arab revolt.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Churchill King & Charles R. Crane
Recommends against imposing French and Zionist-favoured mandates on Syria and Palestine, arguing the wishes of Middle Eastern populations, gathered directly, should determine their own political future.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations Special Committee on Palestine
Recommends partitioning Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, arguing the two communities' national claims could not be reconciled inside a single unitary government.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations Security Council
The UN Secretary-General's own investigation concludes Iraq's 1980 invasion violated international law and bears responsibility for starting the war, a finding Iraq had resisted throughout eight years of fighting.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert H. Scales Jr.
The U.S. Army's own official history, arguing Desert Storm's swift, low-casualty success rested on deliberate post-Vietnam reforms to doctrine, training and technology rather than on Iraqi weakness alone.
United Nations Human Rights Council
The UN's own investigators document a systematic pattern of killings, torture and enforced disappearance by Syrian government forces in the war's first year, and identify similar crimes on a smaller scale by armed opposition groups.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Atatürk's own six-day address recounting the Turkish War of Independence, arguing the old Ottoman order had to be entirely dismantled rather than reformed to build a modern nation-state.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Ruhollah Khomeini
Argues Islamic jurisprudence requires clerical rule under a supreme jurist rather than secular monarchy or Western-style democracy, providing the ideological blueprint for the Islamic Republic founded a decade later.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael L. Ross
Uses cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to argue oil and mineral wealth statistically depresses a country's likelihood of democratising, through rentier, repression and modernisation effects.
Jack A. Goldstone
Argues the 2011 uprisings succeeded or failed depending on whether each regime's military and elite networks stayed loyal, not on the size or intensity of the protests themselves.