Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Reader in Comparative Politics and International Relations and Chair of the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A cultural genealogy (Routledge, 2006, 2009), Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2008, 2010), A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and them beyond Orientalism (Oxford/Hurst, 2011) and the forthcoming On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today (Bloomsbury). Educated at the Universities of Hamburg, American (Washington DC) and Cambridge, where he received his MPhil and PhD, he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow in International Relations and Peace Studies at St. Edmund Hall and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Since 2007, Adib-Moghaddam is based in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS. His writings have been translated into many languages and he is a frequent contributor to leading newspapers and TV channels around the world. .

'This passionate and elegant work is a vigorous antidote to a constellation of discourses steeped in the Weltanschauung that the title of Samuel Huntington's infamous book encapsulates so well. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam's reflections are a stimulating contribution to Edward Said's legacy of radical critique of all essentialist constructions of otherness.'- Prof. Gilbert Achcar, author of The Arabs and the Holocaust and (with Noam Chomsky) Perilous Power: The Middle East and US foreign policy 'What Adib-Moghaddam has done is to establish an exceptionally powerful refutation of clashing civilizations. Eloquently, rigorously and imaginatively, he traces and critiques genealogies of binary and simple oppositional thought and argues that the future of the world depends on our accepting and understanding complexities and internal oppositions.'-Prof. Stephen Chan, 2010 International Studies Association (ISA) Eminent Scholar in Global Development 'Eloquent, powerful, incisive and impressive in its range, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations is a masterly work of critical deconstruction in the finest tradition of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. For anyone wishing to better understand the current state of international politics, this book is absolutely essential.'-Richard Jackson, Secretary of the British International Studies Association (BISA)