Middle East in the past and future of social science

The raise of Middle Eastern studies is often attributed to an American political and military proyect within the context of the Cold War. However, its emergence dates back to the interwar period and it was fostered not only for political reasons but for the Western ambition to create a universal science. Thus, social sciences built the objets that shaped them from a certain way of differentiating the local and the global. Area studies, for their part, contributed to define the local territories whose characteristics would express more or less imperfect ways of the universal. This chapter reconstructs this process focusing on Middle East area studies.