This is the definition of the Middle East given by a dictionary widely used in the United States. For the authors of this dictionary, as for many of its users, conflict is not merely a descriptive attribute of what we call the Middle East, but part of its very definition.

How did this come to be? Can it be that a geographical region is actually defined by the quality of its politics? Would there be no Middle East were there no turmoil there? Would we call this region South-west Asia perhaps? What is in a name? And what, in the final analysis, is all this turmoil?

I will suggest that this place we call the Middle East – which now seems to be both East of nowhere and yet in the Middle of everything – has been, since the very term arose, as much an imaginative invention as an actual geographical place. As Ghassan Salame, one of the region's leading political scientists, put it: