War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Ariel I. Ahram

War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa

First Cut: Frequency of War

The first cut at an answer about whether MENA is particularly conflict prone comes by comparing the number of conflicts within the region to the rest of the world. Figure 1.1 uses the PRIO/UCDP data to tally every type of conflict that occurred each year between 1945 and 2016. Figure 1.2 calculates the number of wars in MENA annually as a percentage of the global total.

Figure 1.1 Percentage of conflict in MENA countries

Source: Peace Research Institute, Oslo/Uppsala Conflict Data Project, data available at https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/; Nils Petter Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–37.

Figure 1.2 Number of conflicts by year

Source: Peace Research Institute, Oslo/Uppsala Conflict Data Project, data available at https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/; Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset.”

The results show that while MENA has had decadal spikes in conflict episodes, there have also been years in which the region has been comparatively peaceful. From 1980 until 2000, war in MENA declined both in absolute number and in global proportion. Put another way, the rest of the world experienced more conflicts, but MENA remained stable or declined. Looking at the conflict frequency statistics from 1960 to 2003, PRIO researchers concluded that Asia and Africa were just as conflict prone as MENA or even more so.¹⁴

At the same time, it is worth noting that since around 2003 the number of conflicts worldwide has increased dramatically. This increase is driven at least in part by the spike in conflict within MENA itself.

Zooming in on the regional perspective produces an interesting insight into how these wars and conflicts are distributed across the region (Figure 1.3). Certain countries, like Israel and Iraq, have been in continual war over the last seven decades. By contrast, countries like Oman, Tunisia, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia have seen relatively infrequent and short-lived conflicts (at least until recently). This is not to say that these states were wholly pacific. Rather, it is to suggest that the impact of war-making and its ancillary effects on state and society vary within the region.

Figure 1.3 Years at war for MENA countries, 1945–2017

Second Cut: Conflict Types

Another step in interrogating claims of regional exceptionalism is to examine the types of war fought within MENA. Figure 1.4 presents the data on inter-state war regionally and globally. Interstate war is clearly the least common form of warfare globally. Inter-state war is nearly entirely absent from Latin America and Europe. Some analysts deem interstate war so rare as to be obsolete or extinct.¹⁵ Yet MENA consistently accounts for a significant portion of interstate conflicts globally. Much of this comes from the persistence of conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, a topic to which we shall return later on. But there are other cases to consider as well, such as the Iran–Iraq War and the Iraqi war against Kuwait in 1990 and 1991. The fact that MENA seems to be uniquely prone to interstate conflict adds an important caveat to the global-level analysis favored by both CoW and PRIO/UCDP projects. It suggests that regional security complexes, not just world systems, have a significant part in shaping conflict.

Figures 1.5 and 1.6 present the data on internal (civil) wars and internationalized internal wars. In examining trends in internal war, MENA is much less remarkable.

Figure 1.4 Interstate conflicts, MENA v. the world

The global trend in internal wars began increasing in the 1960s and peaked in the mid-1990s, with MENA’s trajectory basically following this global course. Internationalized internal wars rose dramatically in the mid-1990s globally, with MENA following course through the 2000s and 2010s.

Third Cut: Conflict Magnitude

Beside the frequency and form of war is the question of war’s magnitude. Here, again, social scientists have run into substantial issues related to conceptualization and data collection. It requires a definition of war – which is difficult enough. It also requires an idea of the mechanisms by which war causes destruction. The human security approach, as discussed above, insists on accounting for not just the damage inflicted by and upon armies, but also the suffering borne by civilians. Indeed, it points out that over the twentieth century, civilians, not soldiers, experienced by far the most deaths during war.¹⁶ Statisticians of war use the term battle deaths to denote all deaths, whether of civilians or combatants, attributable to direct military action. Battle deaths therefore include deliberate attacks as well as inadvertent (i.e., collateral) damage.

Figure 1.5 Internal wars, MENA v. the world

While the idea of battle deaths is somewhat intuitive, collecting accurate data is practically very difficult. Armies often keep track of their own casualties and try to monitor the strengthening or weakening of their adversaries. However, these data are often classified, censored, or subject to political bias. There is a tendency to undercount or ignore civilian deaths, either by denying they occur at all or by reclassifying the dead as combatants. This legitimates them as targets for violence. Reflecting on the experience of the Syrian civil war, novelist Khaled Khalifa observed that “during war, a body loses all meaning.”¹⁷

But there is a countermove against this as well. International organizations have sought to collate reports of deaths from among combatant countries. A growing network of civil society organizations have developed techniques to cull data through local media reports about violent incidents. They have also begun using techniques for “crowdsourcing” casualties through social media.¹⁸ This approach, though, has its limitations. As highlighted by Megan

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