Introduction -- American interests and a history of promoting the status quo -- A constructivist institutionalist methodology -- From candidate to crisis: laying the discursive tracks of the freedom agenda -- September to December 2001: the decisive intervention -- Constructing the freedom agenda for the Middle East -- Institutionalising the freedom agenda: a policy of conservative radicalism -- Obama's freedom agenda: conservative pragmatism and the 2011 revolutions
Summary
This book explores how George W. Bush's Freedom Agenda for the Middle East and North Africa was conceived and implemented as an American national interest, from the Bush era right through to the initial stages of the Obama administration. It highlights how the crisis presented by September 11 2001 led to regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, but more broadly how American policy towards the region had a softer imperial side, which drew on broader economic theories of democratisation and modernisation. The Freedom Agenda contained within it a prescribed method of combating terrorism, but als
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-223) and index
