The politics of militant group survival in the Middle East : resources, relationships, and resistance

• Main Author: Szekely, Ora
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Palgrave Macmillan 2020
• Subjects: Political science; Comparative government; International relations; Peace; Politics and war; Terrorism; Political violence; POLITICAL SCIENCE > Essays; POLITICAL SCIENCE > Government > General; POLITICAL SCIENCE > Government > National; POLITICAL SC; 320
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/VNU_123/81176
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

This book began with a question—and a confl ict—that I encountered entirely by accident. In June of 2006, while a graduate student at McGill University, I headed to Beirut for an internship with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, where I planned to spend the summer doing research on the barriers to integration faced by the Palestinian community in southern Lebanon. But events, in the form of the July War, intervened. First in Beirut and then from Amman, I watched along with the rest of the region as Hizbullah demonstrated far greater resilience than anyone (other than possibly Hizbullah themselves) had predicted. I found this all the more fascinating for the stark contrast it posed with the behavior of most of the combatants in the Lebanese civil war, on which I had written my MA thesis at the University of Chicago. Conversations that summer with friends in Beirut and Amman and in graduate seminars at McGill when I returned to Montreal in the fall led me to focus my research on the issues at the heart of this book: the political roots of militant group resilience, the role of nonstate actors in shaping both local and regional political narratives, and the interconnected histories of the nonstate actors at the center of the Arab–Israeli confl ict.