War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Ariel I. Ahram
rel="nofollow" href="#ue04c8e8e-de4f-5e09-96a3-f958f6a710f6">Chapter 4 examines the role of ethnicity or “ancient hatreds” in regional wars. Finding a common sense of national identity is a crucial component of state-building. But instilling and reproducing this identity often spurs violent resistance. Chapter 5 examines the role of geopolitics and outside intervention in conflict. It shows how outside powers have always played a major role in regional politics, but their ability to spur or restrain conflict has been equivocal. One of the most important elements of geopolitics is not the direct commission of war, but enabling states (and non-state actors) to conduct war on a larger scale.
Chapter 6 offers an extended case study of the last decade of MENA history as a protracted and multi-level regional war. It shows how the civil wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, often treated as discrete conflicts, became interconnected as theaters in a larger regional and global contest. This contest involved the United States and Russia as the main extra-regional players, but most crucially Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, and others as regional actors asserting supremacy. Operating transnationally, the conflict traps escalate war to the point where initial objectives and interests no longer matter.
The seventh and final chapter of the book shifts the focus to peace and peacemaking. There have been innumerable diplomatic plans and efforts to end wars in MENA. Only a fraction have made much impact. Many of these initiatives came from extra-regional powers or their close regional allies. At the same time, “bottom-up” efforts to achieve local conciliation and peace also have a mixed record. This chapter evaluates how different approaches to conflict resolution and mitigation address the potential “traps” of oil, identity, and geopolitics. In many cases, “solving” one trap only exacerbates the problems of the other, creating a Gordian knot that cannot easily be untied. Nevertheless, attention to those places where peace has gained a footing is important for understanding how conflicts in MENA might end.
Notes
1 1. Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Penguin, 2012); Nils Petter Gleditsch et al., “The Forum: The Decline of War,” International Studies Review 15, no. 3 (2013): 396–419.
2 2. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2017 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3.
3 3. Robert Malley, “The Unwanted Wars: Why the Middle East Is More Combustible Than Ever,” Foreign Affairs, November 1, 2019.
4 4. Miguel A. Centeno and Elaine Enriquez, War and Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 175. See also Wim A. Smit, “Military Technologies and Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Charles Tilly and Robert E. Goodin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
5 5. Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2003), 13.
6 6. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Kalevi J. Holsti, “War, Peace, and the State of the State,” International Political Science Review 16, no. 4 (1995): 319–39; Dan Slater, “Violent Origins of Authoritarian Variation: Rebellion Type and Regime Type in Cold War Southeast Asia,” Government and Opposition 55, no. 1 (2020): 21–40.
7 7. Alexander Bellamy, World Peace (and How We Can Achieve It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 126.
8 8. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11.
9 9. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
10 10. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 83.
11 11. Abbas Amanat, Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012).
12 12. Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 81.
13 13. Nikki R. Keddie, “Is There a Middle East?,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4, no. 3 (1973): 255–71 (258).
14 14. Yaniv Voller, “From Periphery to the Moderates: Israeli Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly 130, no. 3 (2015): 505–36; Kamal S. Salibi, “The Lebanese Identity,” Journal of Contemporary History 6, no. 1 (1971): 76–86.
15 15. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, eds., The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ariel I. Ahram, Patrick Köllner, and Rudra Sil, eds., Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
16 16. For one example, see Paul Salem and Ross Harrison, eds., Escaping the Conflict Trap: Toward Ending Civil Wars in the Middle East (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 2019).
17 17. One recent exception is Anders Jägerskog, Michael Schulz, and Ashok Swain, eds., Routledge Handbook on Middle East Security (London: Routledge, 2019).
18 18. Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett, “The Post-War Public Health Effects of Civil Conflict,” Social Science & Medicine 59, no. 4 (2004): 869–84; Christopher J. L. Murray et al., “Armed Conflict as a Public Health Problem,” BMJ 324, no. 7333 (2002): 346–9; Michael Palmer et al., “Long-Lasting Consequences of War on Disability,” Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 6 (2019): 860–75.
19 19. Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Thierry Gongora, “War Making and State Power in the Contemporary Middle East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 323–40.
20 20. Steven Heydemann, “Introduction,” in War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East, edited by Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1.
21 21. Lingyu Lu and Cameron G. Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building in the Middle East,” Political Research Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2013): 239–53; Mehran Kamrava, Inside the Arab State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Daniel Neep, “War, State Formation, and Culture,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (2013): 795–7; Rolf Schwarz, “Does War Make States? Rentierism and the Formation of States in the Middle East,” European Political Science Review 3, no. 3 (2011): 419–43.
22 22. Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Karl Spracklen, Making the Moral Case for Social Sciences: Stemming the Tide (New York: Springer, 2015).
1 Accounting for War in the Middle East and North Africa
War and conflict are common leitmotifs in descriptions of the Middle East and North Africa. Media coverage depicts the region as marred by constant crises, atrocities, and bloodlettings, a veritable breeding ground for violence. But how much war is there in MENA? How are these wars fought? How bad are they? These questions relate, respectively, to the frequency, the form, and the magnitude of armed conflict. Answering them requires an approach that compares MENA to other areas of the world and looks within the region for internal variation. This chapter examines the patterns of war and organized