Becke Johannes. The Land Beyond the Border: State Formation and Territorial Expansion in Syria, Morocco, and Israel

SUNY Press, 2021. — 304 p. — ISBN 978-1438-4822-31This book is based on a revised PhD dissertation originally submitted at Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 under the supervision of Markus Jachtenfuchs and Eyal Zisser. Th e fi nal manuscript would not have seen the light of day without the help, encouragement, and critiques of my friends and colleagues who supported me throughout a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford University and my fi rst years as assistant professor of Israel and Middle East studies at the Heidelberg Center for Jewish Studies (Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg).
At the risk of missing a few names, I would like to express special gratitude to Derek Penslar, Sara Hirschhorn, Jonathan Gribetz, Steven Terner and Ari Roth (in the United States); to Amnon Aran, Peter Bergamin, Menna Abukhadra, and Roman Vater (in the United Kingdom); to Orit Rozin, Elie Podeh, Assaf David, and Oren Barak (in Israel); to Frederek Musall, Viktor Golinets, Roland Gruschka, Henning Sievert, Johannes Zimmermann, Jenny Hestermann, Shelley Harten, and Daniel Mahla (in Germany); to Michael Rinella and the staf f at SUNY Press; to Manfred Müller from mr-kartographie for producing the maps; to my comrades from the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies (BTS), especially Anael Labigne, Matthew Stephen, and Kathrin Stephen; to my parents and my sister; and fi nally to my lovely wife Anna, who succeeded in publishing her own PhD dissertation considerably faster than me.