The Geopolitics of Expertise Iran, US Empire, and the Foreign Policy Experts Who Sustain America's Forever Wars

How did an elite group of foreign policy experts based at Washington DC think tanks come to play an integral role in sustaining America's confrontation with Iran and extending its forever wars across Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA)—a region often called the 'Middle East'?? The culmination of over fifteen years of research, The Geopolitics of Expertise is the first book to examine this community of Middle East policy experts from the inside out, through close contact with these experts and the policymakers they seek to influence. Political anthropologist Negar S. Razavi maps out the broader structures that have empowered these specialists within a transnationally-contested terrain, revealing how an expert's policy influence is derived by their ability to successfully navigate competing geopolitical factions operating within Washington. This astute and impassioned book offers explanations for the status quo of US militarism in the SWANA region by examining how foreign policy elites construct Iran as a so-called unknowable enemy. Razavi's analysis moves beyond state-centric models of geopolitics to instead demonstrate how a privileged class of actors operating outside the formal boundaries of the state (and indeed, beyond national borders) use the realm of expert debate to reshape US global power in ways that ensure war.