Journal of International Affairs

The Journal of International Affairs is cited in Edward Said’s Orientalism in connection with scholarly writing on political and social thought in the Middle East. Its reference in the book places the journal within a broader academic network of conferences, research, and publication, while illustrating how apparently specialized studies can participate in contested accounts of Arab and Islamic societies.

Scholarly Context

Said’s note identifies an article by Manfred Halpern, “A Redefinition of the Revolutionary Situation,” published in the Journal of International Affairs, volume 23, number 1, in 1969, pages 54–75. Halpern’s later thesis, presented at Princeton University’s 22nd Near East Conference on Psychology and Near Eastern Studies on May 8, 1973, was prepared for by that article. The sequence links journal publication to conference scholarship and to an expanding inquiry into continuity and change, collaboration and conflict, and the pursuit of justice in Islamic contexts.

Place in Said’s Argument

The journal citation sits among references to works that treat Arab and Islamic societies through broad explanatory models. Said’s surrounding notes question scholarship that implies Arabs think differently from other people or lack rational, concrete problem-solving approaches. He also points to disputes over whether “Islam” can serve as a unified historical category, and to arguments that some accounts reproduce an image of Islam as inherently religious, feudal, and antirational. In this context, the journal is not singled out as the target of a separate critique; its appearance helps map the scholarly literature through which such claims and debates were conducted.

Relation to Academic Institutions and Debate

The cited work’s conference setting and publication history show how arguments traveled between research forums and academic journals. Said’s wider discussion describes critiques that reshaped area studies and affected history, anthropology, political science, literature, and sociology, including challenges to Eurocentric perspectives and conventional uses of sources. The Journal of International Affairs is one publication named within this landscape of inquiry, rather than an institution for which the excerpt supplies a separate history, editorial program, or account of its organization.

Evidentiary Scope

The available evidence establishes the journal’s title and a specific bibliographic connection to Halpern’s 1969 article. It does not describe the journal’s founding, editors, ownership, publication practices, or institutional structure. Its significance here is therefore contextual: the citation helps locate a strand of academic writing that Said situates within larger debates about how Arab and Islamic societies are studied and represented.