The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st did not favor students of International Relations, especially those focusing on the Middle East.

Decades before 1990, political scientists and their colleagues from the distinct yet related field of International Relations claimed they could analyze and, to some extent, predict the evolution of societies by placing them within a broader framework of modernization - capitalist, socialist, or some 'third way' - and changes in the global system, what is now referred to as 'globalization' since the early 1990s.

However, history did not lose its ability to surprise, and in the last decades of the 20th century, it proved that this magic, famously highlighted by Hegel, remained very much alive.

The Tunisian sociology professor Fraïg Stambouli once explained to me, while driving enthusiastically around his hometown, the city of Monastir, the former residence of President Habib Bourguiba, that three events in recent years had called into question the social sciences' claims of knowledge about the Middle East, and more broadly.

(. . .) [Excerpt from the introduction of the edition]