UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how U.S. foreign policy shaped the origins and expansion of Middle East studies and expertise. For over sixty years the United States has considered the area called the "Middle East" to be vital to its national security interests, and governmental and academic institutions have been essential pillars in support of this policy. America's involvement in the Middle East has matched its rise as a global superpower and I argue that U.S. foreign policy significantly influenced the production and professionalization of knowledge about the region. I demonstrate that passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 ultimately led to the growth and diversification of the field. Moreover, my dissertation contends that an unintended consequence of this expansion was strained relations between academia and the government, which contributed to and was compounded by decreased federal funding for area studies. By the late and post-Cold War periods, I assert that these factors led to a perceived decline in the field while private think tanks garnered increased attention and influence.

Drawing on research completed at national, university, and foundation archives, I explain how key governmental and non-governmental institutions collaborated to promote Middle East studies and expertise. I examine early American attempts to produce contemporary regional expertise through different wartime agencies and programs during the First and Second World Wars. In particular, I focus on the Inquiry, a group of scholars created to help President Woodrow Wilson prepare for the Versailles Peace Conference, as well as the Office of Strategic Services and the Army Specialized Training Program. I assert that the example of these initial efforts and their alumni helped establish the institutional precursors for the development of area studies. During and after the Cold War, I analyze how the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency coordinated with the Middle East studies programs at Princeton and Harvard and supported the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo. I also discuss the coordination of private foundations and academic societies with governmental agencies as well as their funding and support of area studies programs before and after the NDEA. This includes the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

I conclude that different regimes of knowledge production and cultures of expertise related to the Middle East have emerged over the past century. While these regimes have often intersected and competed for supremacy, I contend that U.S. foreign policy interests and goals have had a predominant influence on the contested ways knowledge is produced, communicated, and consumed. I demonstrate that the terminology and associated geographical representations inherent in U.S. foreign policy discourse has been adopted and promulgated by academic scholarship on the Middle East. Thus, revealing that even when Washington's policies are contested by area experts its interests have already been subsumed into existing discourse on the region. While university-based Middle East studies were successful in expanding and enhancing the U.S.'s knowledge about the region and producing potential candidates for government service, I assert that the foreign policy and intelligence establishments developed their own processes for collecting and analyzing information and trends which benefited from but were independent of academic scholarship on the Middle East. Furthermore, I argue that think tanks emerged at the expense of university-based Middle East studies programs by actively pursuing research agendas in support of U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region.