In times of crisis: Middle East policy between the counterterror state and the marketplace of ideas

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ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine how the notion of ‘crisis’ has developed as a dominant framework through which the U.S. foreign policy establishment understands and ultimately legitimates security interventions into the Middle East. Specifically, I locate the emergence of this framework in the converging demands of a post-9/11 security state—or what has been called the U.S. ‘counterterror state’ (Masco 2014)—and a growing think tank expert industry in Washington DC positioned to provide ‘outside’ regional analysis and policy recommendations to government officials. Relying on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among foreign policy elites in Washington, I trace how such think tank experts emerged as one of the few ‘credible’ sources of expertise for the U.S. government after other regional scholars and analysts were largely dismissed. I then examine why this crisis framing has become so central to the work of these experts and the market-driven logics and forces that have increasingly implicated the U.S. counterterror state.