Minority Rights in the Middle East

This, the third book of the OUP Series on Minority Rights Law, focusses on minorities in the Middle East. Written at a time of great turmoil and also hope in the region, the book seeks to examine important minority questions that are central to the events that have unfolded across the region from 2011 to date. The Middle East is a region that raises contentious political, legal, and historical debates. Coming closer to a contemporary understanding of the region challenges, confuses, and demands the critical questioning of numerous assumptions in the public realm. Our analysis is contained in six chapters divided in two parts. The first part examines fundamental underpinning concepts to the discussion and provides an overview of the region, while the second offers a detailed analysis of the history, identity, legal provisions, and remedies available to minorities in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. In offering this analysis we suggest not one, but multiple geographies, and not a fixed, immovable space, but one which, through its historical social formation, has been continually transformed, in more recent centuries through the invidious interference from outside. In examining the shifting constructions of religious, linguistic, and ethnic minorities in the region, the focus of this book lies on two primary questions; first, how the sociopolitical groups definable as minorities engage (or are excluded from) sites of power and, secondly, how state practice on minorities intersects and informs modern constitutionalism and international law.