Abstract
‘Nowhere’, Henry Kissinger observes, ‘is the challenge of international order more complex — in terms of both organizing regional order and ensuring the compatibility of that order with peace and stability in the rest of the world.’1 In the face of a devastating civil war in Syria, the seizure of significant parts of the Mashriq by Daesh (the self-styled ‘Islamic State’), the collapse of state authority in Libya and Israel’s frequent wars on Gaza, Kissinger’s statement might sound like common sense. Its implicit bias towards external intervention highlights one of the main issues undermining peace in the region, though: the historical subjection of Arab countries to interventions motivated by the geopolitical and strategic interests of external actors. Such interference has created or intensified fault lines within the fabric of Arab societies, ruptured homegrown state-formation processes, shored up authoritarian rulers and forged different types of resistance in the process. This chapter examines the complex interplay of national policies, international interventions and local agency in creating or mitigating challenges to peace in the Middle East and North Africa. It explains conflict in the light of the region’s hegemonic modes of pacification and their current crisis.
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Notes
Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).
James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 20–78.
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989).
Amos Perlmutter, ‘The Praetorian State and the Praetorian Army: Toward a Taxonomy of Civil-Military Relations in Developing Polities’, Comparative Politics 1, no. 3 (1969): 382–404.
Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Nazih Ayubi, Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 289–328.
E.g. Eva Bellin, ‘The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 139–157;
Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michele Penner Angrist, Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005).
Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 120.
David Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings1916–1935 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 218.
Many Shi’a religious scholars reject the categorization of Alawites as a branch of Shi’a Islam (Martin Kramer, ‘Syria’s Alawis and Shi’ism’, in Shi’ism, Resistance and Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 237–254). On sectarianism in Yemen’s current conflict, see Peter Salisbury, ‘Is Yemen Becoming the Next Syria?’ Foreign Policy, 6 March 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/06/is-yemen-becoming-the-next-syria/, accessed 7 March 2015.
Fanar Haddad, ‘Sectarian Relations in Arab Iraq: Contextualising the Civil War of 2006–2007’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 2 (2013): 115–138.
Syed Farid Alatas, ‘A Khaldunian Exemplar for a Historical Sociology for the South’, Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006): 397–411 (401–402).
For a comparative analysis, see Yitzhak Nakash, Reaching for Power: The Shi’a in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Stephan Rosiny, ‘Power-Sharing in Syria: Lessons from Lebanon’s Taif Experience’, Middle East Policy 20, no. 3 (2013): 41–55 (44).
International Crisis Group, ‘Syria’s Phase of Radicalisation’, Middle East Briefing 33, 10 April 2012, 4, http://www.crisisgroup.org/∼/media/Files/Middle%20East%20 North%20Africa/Iraq%20Syria%20Lebanon/Syria/b033-syrias-phase-of-radicalisation.pdf, accessed 1 April 2014;
Adeed Dawisha, Iraq: A Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 269;
Emile Hokayem, Syria’s Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levante (London: Routledge, 2013), 34–35.
Toby Dodge, Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012), 152–174; Helen Macreath, ‘Lebanon: The Changing Role of Sectarianism’, OpenDemocracy, 25 June 2013, https://www.opendemocracy.net/helen-mackreath/lebanon-changing-role-of-sectarianism, accessed 15 April 2015.
Jeremy Sarkin and Heather Sensibaugh, ‘How Historical Events and Relationships Shape Current Attempts at Reconciliation in Iraq’, Wisconsin International Law Journal 26 (2008): 1033–1077 (1060–1067).
Brian Katulis et al., ‘Iraq’s Political Transition after the Surge’, Center for American Progress, September 2008, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2008/09/pdf/iraq_transition.pdf, accessed 15 March 2014.
E.g. Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009);
Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
On the merging of the civilian and military occupations, see Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (London: Verso Books, 2003).
See Fromkin, To End all Peace, 515–529; David Gilmour, ‘The Unregarded Prophet: Lord Curzon and the Palestine Question’, Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 3 (1996): 60–68.
Jeff Halper, ‘The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control’, MERIP 216 (2001); Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007);
Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 90.
Zartman defines a mutually hurting stalemate as a situation in which the status quo or no negotiation inflicts (political, material or social) costs on all conflict parties (William Zartman, ‘The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments’, The Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1, no. 1 (September 2001): 8–18 (8–9)).
David Cronin, Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation (London: Penguin, 2010).
Previous Israeli Labour governments might have been more diplomatic but equally denied Palestinian sovereignty (Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 125–131).
BBC News, ‘Will ICC Membership Help or Hinder the Palestinians’ Cause?’ 1 April 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-30744701, accessed 1 April 2015.
Sandra Pogodda and Oliver Richmond, ‘Palestinian Unity and Everyday State Formation: Subaltern “Ungovernmentality” versus Elite Interests’, in Third World Quarterly, 36, no. 5 (2015): 890–907.
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Pogodda, S. (2016). Middle East and North Africa: Hegemonic Modes of Pacification in Crisis. In: Richmond, O.P., Pogodda, S., Ramović, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40761-0_31
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