The Rise of Area Studies As the Cold War got under way, government officials and academic leaders became ever more concerned about the shortage of people who were trained in foreign languages and had some expertise on parts of the world which were now regarded as key fronts in the Cold War. From the 1950s onward concern in elite circles about the dearth of expertise necessary to maintain US global power and the resulting flood of new funding, both from the government and private foundations, got Middle Studies up and running in the United States.

Modernization Theory the process of transition from a traditional society to a modern society universal and unilinear process Adherents of modernization theory tended to see traditional societies as essentially static. These traditional societies were said to lack institutions and internal dynamics that might led to social transformation from within. As a result change had to come from outside Local elites as playing a crucial role in introducing change to their own societies. An example: Nineteenth century Ottoman history

Politics? Representing the world outside of Europe and America as backward and hence in need of outside intervention, modernization theory served the cause of Euro-American imperial goals in the second half of the twentieth century. Consolidating the power of “westernizing” local elites

COMMON POINT BETWEEN ORIENTALISM AND MODERNIZATION THEORY?

Turmoil in the Field the world underwent serious political and intellectual upheavals in the late 1960s and 1970s, and within this upheaval comprehensive critiques of Anglo-American Orientalism and modernization theory emerged Andre Gunder Frank: the same historical forces, global systems and structural inequalities of wealth and power over the past few centuries had developed certain countries and underdeveloped others, and a were continuing to do so today. The questions of political economy

Critical Perspectives in Middle East Studies As was the case in Latin America studies, for critical scholars in Middle East studies the turn to political economy served as a way to criticize and move beyond the essentialist notions of Orientalism and modernization theory. The late 1960s witnessed the birth of a new women’s movement, and this in turn brought into being the new academic field of women’s studies. Feminist scholars argued that most scholarship had ignored women as active participants in shaping the social world. Soon enough this trend began to affect the study of the Middle East as well. Young scholars began to delve into the history and lives of women in the Middle East