Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making

by Laurie A. Brand

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, scholars of international relations have begun to reexamine conventional notions of security, factoring economic issues into the equation. Traditional security studies tended to focus on alliances, almost always understood in military terms and generally attributed to balance of power considerations. In Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations, Laurie Brand offers a new take on international relations.

Using the Middle East as a regional example to bridge the gap between the fields of political economy and security studies, Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations provides a new and provocative analysis of alignment shifts in the developing world.

A nation at the crossroads of inter-Arab politics, Jordan has been a central player in the Arab-Israeli conflict and other major issues which affect the Middle East. Brand explores Jordan's relationship since the early 1970s with five key Arab states--Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and Iraq--arguing that the structure of the domestic economy and the composition of state revenues play a determining role in alliance shifts.

Brand's five extensively researched case studies are supplemented by a thoughtful analysis of recent developments in the Middle East, including the Gulf war and the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Challenging the assumptions of earlier scholarship, Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations had broad implications for the future study of the domestic and foreign relations of Middle Eastern and other developing countries.

"Jordan's relations with its Arab neighbors have too often been viewed through the lens of the regional conflict with Israel. In this pathbreaking study of Jordan's foreign policy, Laurie Brand argues that more attention must be focused on the structure of Jordan^s economy and the requirements this imposes on the state to seek revenue from its neighbors. The research in the five case studies is exemplary and the conclusions are persuasive."

--William B. Quandt, University of Virginia

"Brand makes a significant contribution to the study of both international relations and Middle Eastern politics. Her examination of the efforts of the Jordanian regime to ensure its financial solvency through judicious foreign alignments not only challenges the traditional conception of security that underlies conventional balance of power theory, it also illuminates previously murky episodes in the history of inter-Arab relations. The argument is clever, provocative, and enlightening."

--Lisa Anderson, Middle East Institute, Columbia University

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Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations