Makdisi, Ussama2017-04-202017-04-202017Makdisi, Ussama. "The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East." (2017) James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy: <a href="http://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/mythology-sectarian-middle-east/">http://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/mythology-sectarian-middle-east/</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/94091The invocation of sectarianism as a category of analysis for understanding the Middle East is misleading. It conflates a religious identification with a political one, and it ignores the kinship, class and national and regional networks within which sectarian self-expression has invariably been enmeshed. What is urgently needed is a new research agenda to study the dialectic — the complex, constant and unequal relationship between local and foreign — that makes up the modern Middle East.engResearch paper