The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East

The pivotal years that laid the foundations for our times – in the Middle East and the world

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a series of world-shaking events occurred in the Middle East. Revolution established an Islamic theocracy in Iran, extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated, the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty was signed, the Iran–Iraq war began and the Lebanese civil war continued.

This volume challenges prevailing interpretations of this tumultuous era by centring the Third Worldists in Iran and Palestine. These revolutionary, anti-imperialist groups, whether secular or religious, Marxist or nationalist, identified with an internationalist framework that saw the division between the prosperous nations of the capitalist West and the poorer countries of the Global South as the key fault line in the world order. In eleven thought-provoking studies, scholars examine how revolutionary Third Worldist fervour at once culminated and came under attack at the tail end of ‘the long 1960s’. They explore the fate of Third Worldism in terms of ideas, practices and lived realities for people in the Middle East, and reveal how its decline paved the way for a new global politics, one which has done much to shape our present age.