Prof. Rami Ginat

Personal website

Professor Rami Ginat is currently heading the Department of Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He took his BA and MA degrees at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Tel-Aviv University; and his Ph.D. degree in Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. His fields of expertise are focused on the study and teaching of the modern Middle East. His work pays careful attention to the mutual feedback between politics and ideas; that is, examining ideology in view of changing political realities and vice versa. He published many books and articles on a variety of subjects related to the Great Powers and the Middle East, and Cold War studies with special reference to Egypt and Syria. His most recent books include A History of Egyptian Communism, which was described by Johan Franzé as “…the definitive history of the early Egyptian communist movement” ( The American Historical Review ); and "A work that will quickly become the go-to source on the history of communism in pre-Nasserist Egypt" (Joel Gordon, Bustan. On Egypt and the Struggle for Power in Sudan: From World War II to Nasserisim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Brian Peterson wrote in The American Historical Review: “... Remarkable book... It's an illuminating study that explores Sudan's rather unique place in the history of imperialism ... In moving between regional and international levels of analysis, Egypt and the Struggle for Power in Sudan forces historians to rethink certain assumptions about the complex and contradictory relationships between imperialism and nationalist movements, while providing a definitive political and intellectual history of Egypt's postwar struggle for control over Sudan.”  Egypt and the Struggle for Power in Sudan critically examines the intense Egyptian exertions to prove categorically that Egypt and the Sudan constituted a single territorial unit. These efforts were clustered around several dominant theoretical layers: history, geography, economy, culture and ethnography. It also explains the ideological, social and  political undercurrents, which led to the demise of the doctrine of the unity of the Nile Valley in the revolutionary era.