The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East with Sean Mathews (Hurst, 2025)
From New Books in Middle Eastern Studies · 01:38:00
Show by Marshall Poe
Caught between wars raging in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Greece is an island of relative stability. Popularly considered the cradle of Western civilisation, this is a Christian Orthodox state on the edge of the Islamic world. And, after a half-century of integration into NATO and the EU, Greece is now reabsorbing into the Near East, as the West fractures and new Middle Eastern powers rise. The country’s importance as a cultural and geopolitical hybrid is growing.Travelling through the region, Sean Mathews explores at ground level the tectonic shifts reshaping Europe and the Middle East. He meets the last Greek merchants in Cairo, and hears from Istanbul’s remaining Greeks about Turkey’s break with the West. In Jerusalem, he discovers a budding alliance between Greece and Israel; and in a faded Ottoman port, he encounters football hooligans loyal to a Russian oligarch.The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst, 2025) is a bold reappraisal of Greece as a Near Eastern nation uncovers its Byzantine and Ottoman past as a key to survival in today’s chaotic, shrinking world.Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others. He calls Athens home and travels often in the region. This is his first book.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. He is also a host on the Thinking Global podcast for E-International Relations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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