War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Ariel I. Ahram
of comparison. First is the comparison between MENA and other regions, particularly in the developing world. Second is the comparison between MENA countries. Third is the comparison over time from the beginnings of the modern state system through mid-twentieth-century decolonization to the twenty-first century. MENA on the whole has followed global modes in most important respects. However, some countries within the region have been especially war prone. Moreover, the magnitude and impact of war have increased dramatically in MENA since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Measuring war is not easy. War is as complicated an activity as a social or behavioral scientist can study. It entails enormous feats of organization, coordination, and discipline. In 1971, sociologist Fred Charles Iklé, later a senior US defense official, described the challenges of amalgamating “the most diverse indicators: reports from the battlefield, statistics on potential military resources, and impressionistic predictions of how friend and foe will bear the cost and suffering of further fighting.”1 Accessing, collating, and assessing this data is always hard. Prevailing insecurity on the ground might obstruct the gathering of information. Belligerents wishing to promote specific narratives about who instigated violence or its impact sometimes deny access to information from conflict-affected areas or even fabricate events for the purposes of public relations. The obfuscation extends even to the words used to describe a particular conflict. War comes with attendant organizational, normative, and legal standards about how combatants (and civilians) should behave. Yet belligerents often try to upgrade or downgrade specific instances of conflict in order to control narratives of conflict. To call an adversary a terrorist or criminal, rather than a soldier, is both to elevate your standing and to denigrate the opponent.2 These descriptions can have major implications for the conduct of conflict.
The question “What is war?” is simultaneously ontological, conceptual, and methodological. Many analyses revert axiomatically to German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. But that only begs the question of what political ends war extends. Historian Jeremy Black parses between functional and cultural/ ideological elements in the definition of war. “Functionally, [war] is organized large-scale violence. Culturally and ideologically, it is the consequence of bellicosity.”3 In each of these domains there can be considerable variation, but the results are the same.
Roughly coinciding with Iklé’s lament, social scientists in the 1970s launched the Correlates of War (CoW) project. Their aim was to remove the study of war from the sole purview of war-fighters and to address the study of war from a scientific perspective. Housed at the University of Michigan, researchers cataloged data on instances of conflict worldwide extending back to 1816. This was not an arbitrary cut-off point. The end of the Napoleonic wars is often cited as the beginning of the modern European state system. This fundamentally Euro-centric periodization was closely tied to the way the CoW researchers conceived of war itself. CoW was a product of the Cold War. Many of its researchers saw their role as finding ways to address US–Soviet tensions. The CoW definition favored large-scale war (with over 1,000 battle deaths) mostly conducted by the standing armies of powerful states. It was not that CoW researchers were unaware of internal (civil) conflicts. It was that they regarded these wars as less consequential to the global calculus of peace and conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.4
In the 1990s, there was a push to expand definitions of what war was, why it happened, and what its effects were. Some argued that war had assumed entirely new features, with different kinds of antagonisms and involving different – often non-state – antagonists. Political scientist Mary Kaldor, for one, suggested that these “new wars” did not involve a contest of combatants’ political wills, as Clausewitz had suggested. Instead, the combatants treated war as an opportunity for commercial expansion, not political victory. As a result, war is self-perpetuating as actors reproduce political identity and seek to further narrow economic interests.5 For some analysts, these characteristics suggested that these contests were not war at all, but something different and apart. For others, though, there was little novel in these supposedly “new wars,” as profit and power had commingled in war for centuries.6
The advent of human security dovetailed with this broadening concept of war. Traditionally, the academic field of security studies focused on explain military victory in the pursuit of national security. Accordingly, when measuring the impact of war, this approach focused on ascertaining damage inflicted by and upon professional armies. The human security approach, though, insisted on considering harms civilians suffer as equally worthy objects of inquiry. If war was indeed a social process, then the civilian experience had to be regarded as a salient explicandum.7 The emphasis on human security inspired new efforts to catalog and categorize wars. Scandinavian researchers associated with the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Uppsala University’s Conflict Data Program (UCDP) created what is now the most comprehensive database on conflict in the post-1945 era. Again, this periodization matters. The year 1945 is often cited as a critical juncture, with the beginnings of decolonization and independence for countries of the developing world. These countries had been (and probably still are) systematically underrepresented in traditional security studies approaches, even though they contain the bulk of the world’s population and the bulk of its conflicts. The types of war in these regions differed from what CoW had aimed to measure. As the PRIO/UCDP effort showed, after 1945 most wars were fought not between countries, but within them. These wars overwhelmingly occurred in the developing world.
In terms of organizational bases, such internal wars are highly variegated. Some internal wars involve two (or more) sides fielding more or less conventional military structures of roughly equal stature waging battles to control clearly demarcated territories. Some are more asymmetrical, with conventional and centralized state armies fighting against irregular forces that are loosely organized and militarily weak. These opposition forces are variously dubbed guerrillas, insurgents, or militias, or, less sympathetically, bandits and criminals. They rarely control much territory but wage a low-level campaign to disturb state control. Finally, in some circumstances both state forces and rebels are relatively weak or decentralized. The distinction between rebel fighter and state forces becomes less distinct, comporting with the “new wars” hypothesis about apolitical war.8 Additionally, internal wars often attract outside intervention, leading to distinctly “internationalized” dynamics in which foreign powers provide belligerents with economic, political, and military support.
Terrorism is closely tied to internal wars. Terrorism is almost necessarily a pejorative term. No one self-defines as a terrorist or deems their actions as terrorism. Security scholars Tarek Barkawi and Mark Laffey described the use of the term as a categorical error which delegitimizes resistance to Northern domination by non-state actors.9 Other specialists have developed more workable and perhaps useful definitions of the concept of terrorism, but acknowledge that the designation is problematic.10 Nevertheless, the specter of terrorism holds unique valence in the Middle East, especially when conjoined with concerns about “resurgent” or “radical” Islam.11 The US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were couched in a discourse about a “global” war on terror. The unquestionable focus of the campaign, however, was predominantly Muslim regions of MENA and nearby Central Asia. This phrasing was counterproductive from an analytic or strategic perspective. It did, however, have the discursive advantage of simultaneously ennobling the United States’ actions while denigrating its opponents as illegal combatants who were not entitled to the kinds of protections stipulated in international laws of war.12 Such discourse continues today. An American think-tank report, for instance, opines that “radical Islamist terrorism in its many forms remains the most immediate global threat to the safety and security of US citizens at home and abroad, and most of the actors posing terrorist threats originate in the greater Middle East.”13
Over the last seven decades, MENA offers examples of interstate wars, internal wars, and internationalized civil wars. But not all of these types of conflicts were evident the whole of this time. They appeared in different times and places. Examining these intra-regional differences and comparing MENA to global trends is a useful entry point to assessing the peculiarities of violence in the region.