Guest editors' note.

• Author: Yesiltas, Murat

In a radio broadcast in 1939 Winston Churchill defined Russia in a famous quip as 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' The chain of metaphors in Churchill's famous maxim was to point the difficulty of making sense of the great political transformation Russia had gone through. Though perplexed, Churchill had a key to solve the Russian riddle: the national interest or more precisely 'historic-life interests' The 'new Middle East' is also a riddle inside an enigma rolled up in a puzzle mat. The former is difficult to grasp even with metaphors. The national interest is not a 'key' either, for it appears more of a political ploy than an analytical edifice that can hardly be applicable to the haplessly artificial regional states. The enigma of the 'Arab Spring,' the mystery of the ISIL, the riddle of Russian intervention in Syria and the puzzle of Turkish national interests in the Middle East are few items in the long list of explanandum.

The Middle East has often been a headline-grabber and the pressing issues frequently ignite debate and controversy. While the former is always a vague concept with no clear territorial, political or cultural borders, we have seen the evolution of even a vaguer concept: the 'New Middle East.' Academic studies for understanding the latter are scarce, while journalistic accounts abound, positions are advanced, and polemical exchanges often win the day. Contemporary commentaries often call for a new language to describe the perplexing state of affairs, rather than coming up with original explanations. While recent studies sometimes shed light to the new dynamics in regional politics, analyses are limited to finding different parallelism between past and present or blaming the past for what the Middle East stands for today. The popular representations or even dominant academic accounts of the new Middle East often explain it away as a source of threats and challenges. Such an attitude not only reveals an increasing sense of confusion, it also speaks eloquently to our perception of the Middle East as the new 'Other,' an alien region that cannot be reformed or known on its own terms, playing by its own rules and eventually challenging almost everyone in the world.

Such accounts barely capture the complex nature of the new Middle East. Rather than providing answers, they tend to generate more questions regarding the recent tectonic shifts. Although there are many different and conflicting arguments...