Explore the vast range of titles available.

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production. Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George R. Trumbull IV

At a time when Iran is represented in the French media as a rogue state obsessed with its nuclear programme, and whilst France is portrayed in the Iranian media as a decadent and imperialist country, this book examines the ways in which these representations and stereotypes are shared, nuanced, or overcome beyond the sphere of the fourth estate. Here, Laetitia Nanquette examines the functions, processes and mechanisms of stereotyping and imagining the 'Other' that have pervaded the literary traditions of France and Iran when writing about each other. Orientalism versus Occidentalism explores the extent to which orientalism and occidentalism have each influenced and are in turn perpetuated in the texts of both French and Iranian authors. And conversely, it also looks at the consequences of attempts by authors to distance themselves from these two discourses. After both using and questioning the dichotomy of orientalism and occidentalism, Nanquette details how France and Iran represent each other in the contemporary period through their narrative literature in prose, by listing and classifying all the ways in which they do so. She examines the image of the Other in the works of writers such as Goli Taraqi, Bernard Ollivier and Marjane Satrapi. In order to explore this, Nanquette draws upon a broad range of literary genres such as the historical novel, travel writing and autobiography. This exploration of the literary traditions of the relationship between France and Iran is used to shed light on the cultural history of Franco-Iranian relations and on contemporary socio-political realities. With themes that feed into popular debates about the nature of orientalism and occidentalism, and how the two interact, this book will be vital for researchers of Middle Eastern literature and its relationship with writings from the West, as well as those working on the cultures of the Middle East.

The hidden diplomatic story at the heart of the conflict is that while European public opinion was fairly uniformly against the invasion, European governments split almost down the middle, with Aznar's Spain, Berlusconi's Italy, Kwasniewski's Poland and Blair's Britain all siding with President Bush, while Jacques Chirac and Germany's Schroder led European governmental opposition to the war. [...] two scholars from the Heritage Foundation wrote in The Wall Street Journal, \"the Conservative Party's leadership appears increasingly to be following the rise of anti-Americanism in the polls, rather than leading public opinion.\"