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

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Introduction

      Iraq. Palestine. Libya. Yemen. Syria. Today these words denote not just countries, but also brutal, interminable, or recurrent wars. News reports of massacres, bombings, assassinations, and airstrikes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have become so frequent that some are desensitized to the bloodshed. But this violence is not far away. Weapons and troops dispatched from the West are deeply involved in the fighting. At the same time, the threat of foreign terrorism unleashed in cities like New York, London, Brussels, Paris, or elsewhere has become a major security concern.

      Beyond the moral and political problems, war and violence in MENA pose an analytic puzzle. Scholars of international relations have described a general decline in war and lethal violence, although the causes and even moment of the beginning of the decline remain in some dispute.¹ MENA stands out as the anomalous outlier. The researchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute diagnose MENA as suffering “chronic insecurity and persistent susceptibility to armed conflict” at the heart of contemporary global security concerns.² A former senior US official finds MENA “more combustible than ever.”³

      This exception has elicited a number of exceptional explanations. Some focus on geopolitics and the destabilizing impact of outside powers. This approach, typically anchored in realist theories of international relations, argues that the balances of power and threat amongst countries is the primary determinant of war. Outside interventions create regional instability and precipitate conflict. This approach has proven useful in explaining the region’s interstate rivalries and conflicts, including the Arab–Israeli wars. Yet geopolitical explanations tend to falter when it comes to the region’s myriad internal wars. They are also mute as to the larger questions of war’s social ramifications and the ability of regional actors to make their own political and military designs.

Some analyses focus on the region’s natural resources, particularly oil. Economics – or, more crassly, greed – drives war. The region’s surfeit of oil and gas is a kind of attractive nuisance. This abundance of wealth elicits outside intervention that creates further destabilization. It also empowers autocratic regimes to repress internal enemies and combat external ones. Again, this type of explanation has purchase on certain cases, but leaves important questions unanswered. It says little about the Arab–Israeli wars, fought mainly by energy-poor countries. It also misses some of the important mechanisms by which oil affects regional politics and indirectly contributes to the propensities for violence.

      A third common and problematic strand of explanation focuses on the clashes between the region’s ethno-sectarian communities. Identity is undeniably important in MENA’s politics, but no more so than in politics in any other region. Emphasizing specific proclivities for violence among ethno-sectarian groups verges on cultural determinism or outright racism. Worse yet, such arguments are empirically dubious. If identities are static and hard-wired, conflict should be constant and perpetual, not fluctuating. While there are many conflicts in the region, much of the violence occurs within ethno-sectarian groups, rather than between them. Moreover, while political violence is common, it is by no means incessant. To explain ethnic war, we must also be able to account for periods of peace and cooperation. In sum, while identities matter for conflicts, specific social and political conditions must also be present to activate and guide violence. The enactment of violence often solidifies identities, not the other way around.

      This book takes a socio-political approach to the causes and consequences of war. The core premise is that war is socially constructed and socially constrained. As sociologists Miguel Centeno and Elaine Enriquez put it, war is a behavior that reflects “who we are, what we believe in, and how we live together.”⁴ War differs from other kinds of violence in scale and complexity. It requires unique and intensive organization and institutions. There are no armies of one. So-called “lone wolves” are a myth. Wars are fought by relatively large and distinguishable groups for political ends. But war also transforms the institutions and groups that it touches. Increasingly, the field of security studies seeks to consider and measure the destructive impact of war. Wars, especially civil wars, are often deemed a kind of development in reverse, with long-lasting and dire effects on life expectancy, educational levels, and economic performance.⁵ But war has had constructive social effects as well. It shapes culture, alters economic relationships, and spurs technological and commercial innovations. One of the most important impacts, and a key theme of the book, is how war changes states and societies. In some accounts, the very creation of states and their positioning as cornerstones of political order comes as an ancillary externality or side-effect of the conduct of warfare.⁶

      The first aim of the book is to probe the notion that MENA is exceptionally violent. To do this, it disaggregates the war in the region by frequency, form, and magnitude. Interstate wars, civil wars, and insurgencies are each conducted and organized differently. The intervention of outside powers complicates the picture further. Taking a cue from theories of human security, this book concentrates on two questions that are often overlooked: who fights and who dies? The modes of conflict have shifted through the region’s history. Looking more closely and self-consciously at episodes of violence dispels the widely held view that MENA suffers a singular predilection for war. The violence in MENA departs from global trends in certain characteristics and dimensions, while in other respects it follows or even sets patterns that have become the worldwide norm.

      Secondly, the book traces the connection between the progress of warfighting and processes of state formation in MENA, thus emphasizing the transformative role of war and conflict. The state, as German sociologist Max Weber famously put it in 1919, is a political entity that “successfully claims the monopoly over the legitimate use of force within a given territory.” States are in a unique and paradoxical position when it comes to war and conflict. On the one hand, well-functioning states are important guarantors of human security and world peace. On the other hand, states are also the main instigators and organizers of war.⁷ States face challengers within and outside their territory. Michael Mann, in a contemporary gloss on Weber, points out that most historical states “have not possessed СКАЧАТЬ