Routledge Handbook of International Relations in the Middle East [1 ed.] 0415317282, 9780415317283

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Notes on contributors
1 The blurred line between state identity and realpolitik • Shahram Akbarzadeh
2 Neoclassical realism: domestic politics, systemic pressures, and the impact on foreign policy since the Arab Spring • Thomas Juneau, Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Lawrence P. Rubin
3 What constructivism? • Vendulka Kubálková
4 Historical sociology and Middle East international relations • Ewan Stein
5 Subaltern realism meets the Arab world • Mohammed Ayoob
6 Islam, political Islam, and the state system • Frédéric Volpi
7 Don’t shoot the elephant: Middle East stability after the Iranian nuclear deal • Karim Kamel and Patricia M. Lewis
8 The revolutionary guard in Iranian domestic and foreign power politics • Farzan Sabet and Roozbeh Safshekan
9 The Arab uprising and regional power struggle • Raymond Hinnebusch
10 US–Israel relations during the Obama administration: fundamental shift, or adaptation to new realities? • Robert E. Looney
11 Saudi Arabia and Iran: Islam and foreign policy in the Middle East • Simon Mabon
12 The Arab Spring and Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East • Mark N. Katz
13 China’s foray into the Middle East: from ambivalence to ambition? • Michael Clarke
14 Oil production, innovation, and politics in the Middle East • Hamid E. Ali and Nesreen N. Al Anbar
15 Qatar: an ambitious small state • Matthew Gray
16 GCC foreign policy: the struggle for consensus • Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
17 EU policy in the Middle East: unfulfilled aspirations • Christian Koch
18 Old and new challenges for ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East • Jordi Tejel
19 UN Security Council Resolution 1325: a framework for women’s peace activism in the Middle East? • Sophie Richter-Devroe
20 The demise of the Arab strongman? Authoritarianism and the future of the Middle East • Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta
21 Armed non-state actors and strategic decision-making • Wietse van den Berge
22 Islamic State: aberration, or accelerant of system-wide changes to come? • Michael S. Smith II
23 Proxy relations: Iran and Hezbollah • Shahram Akbarzadeh
24 The Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda after the Arab Spring: a failed project • Alison Pargeter
25 Transition and the Arab Spring • George Joffé
26 Shock absorption: Palestinian–Israel status quo 2009–17 • Philip Leech-Ngo
27 The rise and fall of Turkey in the Arab Spring • Paul A. Williams
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

This handbook examines the regional and international dynamics of the Middle East. It challenges the state society dichotomy to make sense of decision-making and behavior by ruling regimes. The 33 chapter authors include the world’s leading scholars of the Middle East and International Relations (IR) in order to make sense of the region. This synthesis of area studies expertise and IR theory provides a unique and rigorous account of the region’s current dynamics, which have reached a crisis point since the beginning of the Arab Spring. The Middle East has been characterized by volatility for more than a century. Although the region attracts significant scholarly interest, IR theory has rarely been used as a tool to understand events. The constructivist approach in IR highlights the significance of state identity, shaped by history and culture, in making sense of international relations. The authors of this volume consider how IR theory can elucidate the patterns and principles that shape the region, in order to provide a rigorous account of the contemporary challenges of the Middle East. The Routledge Handbook of International Relations in the Middle East provides comprehensive coverage of International Relations issues in the region. Thus, it offers key resources for researchers and students interested in International Relations and the Middle East. Shahram Akbarzadeh is Research Professor in Middle East and Central Asian Politics at Deakin University and the Deputy Director (International) of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University (Australia). He held a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship (2012–2016) on the Role of Islam in Iran’s Foreign Policy-making and recently completed a Qatar Foundation grant on Sectarianism in the Middle East.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Edited by Shahram Akbarzadeh

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Shahram Akbarzadeh; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Shahram Akbarzadeh to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Akbarzadeh, Shahram, editor. Title: Routledge handbook of international relations in the Middle East / edited by Shahram Akbarzadeh. Other titles: Handbook of international relations in the Middle East Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018050299 (print) | LCCN 2018055868 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315229591 (master) | ISBN 9781351859530 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9781351859523 (Epub) | ISBN 9781351859516 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9780415317283 | ISBN 9780415317283 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315229591 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Middle East—Foreign relations—21st century. | International relations. Classification: LCC JZ1670 (ebook) | LCC JZ1670 .R68 2019 (print) | DDC 327.56—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050299 ISBN: 978-0-415-31728-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22959-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors

viii ix x

  1 The blurred line between state identity and realpolitik Shahram Akbarzadeh   2 Neoclassical realism: domestic politics, systemic pressures, and the impact on foreign policy since the Arab Spring Thomas Juneau, Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Lawrence P. Rubin

1

8

  3 What constructivism? Vendulka Kubálková

23

  4 Historical sociology and Middle East international relations Ewan Stein

46

  5 Subaltern realism meets the Arab world Mohammed Ayoob

59

  6 Islam, political Islam, and the state system Frédéric Volpi

69

  7 Don’t shoot the elephant: Middle East stability after the Iranian nuclear deal Karim Kamel and Patricia M. Lewis

v

82

Contents

  8 The revolutionary guard in Iranian domestic and foreign power politics Farzan Sabet and Roozbeh Safshekan   9 The Arab uprising and regional power struggle Raymond Hinnebusch 10 US–Israel relations during the Obama administration: fundamental shift, or adaptation to new realities? Robert E. Looney

96 110

125

11 Saudi Arabia and Iran: Islam and foreign policy in the Middle East Simon Mabon

138

12 The Arab Spring and Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East Mark N. Katz

153

13 China’s foray into the Middle East: from ambivalence to ambition? Michael Clarke

164

14 Oil production, innovation, and politics in the Middle East Hamid E. Ali and Nesreen N. Al Anbar

184

15 Qatar: an ambitious small state Matthew Gray

195

16 GCC foreign policy: the struggle for consensus Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

209

17 EU policy in the Middle East: unfulfilled aspirations Christian Koch

222

18 Old and new challenges for ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East Jordi Tejel

237

19 UN Security Council Resolution 1325: a framework for women’s peace activism in the Middle East? Sophie Richter-Devroe

252

20 The demise of the Arab strongman? Authoritarianism and the future of the Middle East Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

265

vi

Contents

21 Armed non-state actors and strategic decision-making Wietse van den Berge

279

22 Islamic State: aberration, or accelerant of system-wide changes to come? Michael S. Smith II

300

23 Proxy relations: Iran and Hezbollah Shahram Akbarzadeh

321

24 The Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda after the Arab Spring: a failed project Alison Pargeter 25 Transition and the Arab Spring George Joffé

330 350

26 Shock absorption: Palestinian–Israel status quo 2009–17362 Philip Leech-Ngo 27 The rise and fall of Turkey in the Arab Spring Paul A. Williams

376

Bibliography391 Index421

vii

FIGURES

3.1 3.2 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4

The three-pillar US IR pantheon Secular and post-secular Oil production in the Middle East Crude oil price and USA shale oil production Budget deficits for Middle East countries Real GDP growth and oil rents

viii

32 35 185 186 189 191

TABLES

3.1 Questions asked before the Third Debate and the arrival of constructivism 3.2 Questions asked in the Third Debate: ontology, epistemology and methodology of US IR and the answers by constructivism(s) 3.3 A summary of a comparison between mainstream constructivism and neoliberal institutionalism 14.1 Youth unemployment in the Middle East 21.1 Rational Actor Paradigm: aspects concerning key event 1, filling the void left behind by the ISF 21.2 Rational Actor Paradigm: aspects concerning key event 2, IS’ attack on the KRI 21.3 Rational Actor Paradigm: aspects concerning key event 3, the KRI’s involvement in Kobanî

ix

30 31 34 193 290 291 292

CONTRIBUTORS

Shahram Akbarzadeh (PhD) is Research Professor in Middle East and Central Asian Politics and Deputy Director (International) of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University (Australia). He held a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2012–16) on the Role of Islam in Iran’s Foreign Policy-making and recently completed a Qatar Foundation project on Sectarianism in the Middle East. He is the co-author of The Politics and International Relations of the Middle East: Crisis Zone, with Kylie Baxter (Routledge, 2018), and many related research papers in International Politics, The Washington Quarterly, and Third World Quarterly. Hamid E. Ali is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Public Policy and Administration at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and one of the founders of the Public Policy Program and former Director of Master of Global Affairs at AUC. His research interests are in the areas of peace economics, inequality, and economic development. His most recent publications include Defense Spending, Natural Resources, and Conflict (Routledge, 2017, co-authored with Christos Kollias) and Darfur’s Political Economy: A Quest for Development (Routledge, 2017). Ali’s research has also been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Peace Research; Food Policy; Defence and Peace Economics; and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. Nesreen N. Al Anbar has a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) and a Master’s degree in Emergency and Public Safety Management, both from Drexel University, Philadelphia. Dr. Nesreen brings expertise to several areas, including public health policy, health management, public policy, and applied statistics. Currently, as an educator, Dr. Nesreen teaches research methods, health policy and program evaluation, and quantitative analysis at the American University of Cairo. Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Michigan State University, and Senior Fellow, Center for Global Policy. A specialist in conflict and security in the post-colonial world, he has published extensively on the Middle East and South Asia as well as conceptual essays on issues relating to security and order. His latest books include The Many Faces of Political Islam (University of Michigan Press, 2008) and Will the Middle East Implode? (Polity Press, 2014). He has earlier served on the faculty of Jawaharlal

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Contributors

Nehru University, New Delhi, and the Australian National University, Canberra, and held visiting appointments at Columbia, Oxford, Princeton, and Brown Universities. He has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller, Ford, and MacArthur Foundations, and from the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii. Wietse van den Berge is a PhD student at Leiden University’s Institute of Security and Global Affairs. He focuses his research on the conflict between the Islamic State and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq as a case in which armed non-state actors in the Middle East behave like states do. Wietse is a research fellow at both the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague and the Netherlands Defense Academy. Francesco Cavatorta is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Laval University, Quebec. His current research focuses on party politics in the Middle East and North Africa. He has co-edited a forthcoming book (with Lise Exeter): Political Parties in the Arab World (Edinburgh University Press). Michael Clarke is Associate Professor at the National Security College, Australian National University, Canberra. He has published extensively on the history and politics of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (China), Uyghur separatism and nationalism, Chinese foreign and security policy, American grand strategy and nuclear proliferation, and non-proliferation. He is the author of Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia – A History (Routledge, 2011), author (with Andrew O’Neil and Stephan Fruhling) of Australia’s Nuclear Policy: Reconciling Strategic, Economic and Normative Interests (Routledge, 2015), and editor of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in China: Domestic and International Dimensions (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2018). Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (PhD) is a Fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and an Associate Fellow with the Middle East North Africa Programme at Chatham House. He is the author of six books, two on the First World War and four on the Gulf. His research focuses on the international relations, international political economy, and comparative politics of the Gulf States. Coates Ulrichsen holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and worked at the Gulf Center for Strategic Studies in London and the London School of Economics before he joined the Baker Institute in 2013. Matthew Gray is based at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, where he is an associate professor at the School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) and an affiliated researcher at the Organization for Islamic Area Studies. He teaches and researches on Middle Eastern studies in general, with a focus on the politics, political economy, and international relations of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Prior to taking up this position in September 2016, he was based at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia, over 2005–2016. He has also held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, Japan (2015–16), and at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University in the UK (2011). He is the author of three books on the Middle East: Global Security Watch – Saudi Arabia (Praeger, 2014); Qatar: Politics and the Challenges of Development (Lynne Rienner, 2013); and Conspiracy Theories in the Middle East: Sources and Politics (Routledge, 2010); and has also published widely in journals and edited books on the politics and political economy of the Middle East, especially the Gulf.

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Contributors

Raymond Hinnebusch is Professor of International Relations and Middle East politics at the University of St. Andrews. His major works include Egyptian Politics Under Sadat (Cambridge, 1985); The International Politics of the Middle East (Manchester, 2nd ed. 2015); and Syria: Revolution from Above (Routledge, 2001). He co-edited The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, Lynne Rienner, 2nd edition, 2014; Turkey-Syria Relation: Between Enmity and Amity, Ashgate, 2013; Sovereignty after Empire: Comparing the Middle East and Central Asia, Edinburgh, 2011; The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences, Lynne Rienner, 2006; and Syria: From Reform to Revolt, Syracuse, 2014. He edited After the Arab Uprisings: Between Democratization, Counter-Revolution and State Failure, Routledge, 2016 and co-edited, with Omar Imady, The Syrian Uprising: Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory. He is currently a co-researcher in the project on sectarianism in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings based at Aarhus University. George Joffé specialises in the contemporary history, current affairs and international relations of the Middle East and North Africa with a particular emphasis on North Africa. Until 2017 he taught a postgraduate course on these fields and supervised masters and doctoral dissertations at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He is now attached to the London Middle East Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. He was previously the deputy-Director and acting director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He founded and is now the co-editor of the Journal of North African Studies which is the only peer-reviewed journal on this area in English and is also the official journal of the American Institute of Maghrib Studies. Thomas Juneau is Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research focuses on the Middle East, in particular on Iran and Yemen. He is also interested in Canadian foreign and defence policy, international relations theory, and the relationship between intelligence analysis and policy. He is the author of Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2015), editor of Strategic Analysis in Support of International Policy Making: Case studies in achieving analytical relevance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and co-editor of Iranian Foreign Policy Since 2001: Alone in the World (Routledge, 2013). He has published book chapters and articles in, among other publications, International Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Nonproliferation Review, Orbis, International Journal, Canadian Foreign Policy, Middle East Policy, and International Studies Perspectives. From 2003 until 2014, he worked with Canada’s Department of National Defence, mostly as a policy analyst covering the Middle East. He also acts as a consultant for various departments with the Canadian government and is a frequent commentator in Canadian and international media. Karim Kamel is a program analyst with Carnegie Corporation of New York’s International Peace and Security program, where he focuses on strengthening nuclear security. Before joining the Corporation in 2015, Mr. Kamel was a program associate at the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum of the Social Science Research Council. Prior to that, he worked as an external relations consultant at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. Mr. Kamel holds a Master of Arts in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at San Jose State University. He also attended The American University in Cairo. Mr. Kamel currently sits on the steering committee of the Middle East Next Generation of Arms Control Specialists Network. Mark N. Katz received a B.A. in international relations from the University of California at Riverside in 1976, an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University xii

Contributors

School of Advanced International Studies in 1978, and a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. He has been a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, since 1988. Links to many of his publications can be found on his website: www.marknkatz.com Christian Koch is Senior Advisor for Research at the Bussola Institute in Brussels dedicated to Gulf-Europe relations. He is a project leader at the Gulf Research Center (GRC) Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland, where he previously served as Director. Dr. Koch’s other posts have included head of international studies at the GRC in Dubai and head of strategic studies at the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, Abu Dhabi. Dr. Koch’s work combines the analysis of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states on pertinent foreign and security issues, with a particular interest in GCC-EU relations. He is particularly interested in better understanding the dynamics driving regional security issues in the Gulf region and promoting aspects of cooperative security among regional and international actors. Dr. Koch is the editor of eight books; author of Politische Entwicklung in einem arabischen Golfstaat: Die Rolle von Interessengruppen im Emirat Kuwait, as well as numerous chapter contributions and journal articles; and co-author of “Establishing a Regional Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Gulf Region”. He regularly writes for the international media on Gulf issues, including in the Financial Times, Handelsblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Jane’s Sentinel publications, and has appeared on the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Al Arabiyya television. Dr. Koch received his PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and has taught at Sciences Po in Paris. Vendulka Kubálková ( JUDr, PhD) is professor of International Studies at the College of Arts and Sciences, Miami University. VŠE, Economics University, Vysoká škola ekonomická, Prague, Czech Republic. Her early work dealt with Marxism and Soviet Marxism-Leninism. Later she worked on the much-misunderstood Gorbachev’s New Thinking, which she interpreted as inspired by Gramsci’s concept of counter-hegemony. With Nicholas Onuf, who first introduced constructivism to the International Relations discipline, she co-chaired a (post-positivist) constructivist Miami Theory group and co-edited an M.E. Sharpe series on International Relations in a Constructed World. She began following very early the inattention in Western IR to religion and has proposed the creation of a post-positivist constructivist approach to IR called International Political Theology (IPT). It was to be added to International Politics (IP) – a pursuit of power, and International Political Economy (IPE) – a pursuit of wealth. Her proposed IPT would add a dimension of a pursuit of meaning to include a serious study of religions. She argued against the binary distinction between religion/faith and reason, rational and irrational. Her most recent concern is with what we teach in IR and the use of information technology to facilitate a broadening of the very narrow scope of what the American IR discipline covers. Philip Leech-Ngo is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Centre on Governance. He was the Gordon F. Henderson Post-doctoral Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa (2016–17) and has taught at the Universities of New Brunswick, Exeter, Plymouth, and Liverpool. He is the co-editor (with Shabnam Holliday) of Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle East (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016) and the author of The State of Palestine: A Critical Analysis (Routledge, 2016). Patricia M. Lewis is the Research Director, International Security at Chatham House in London. Her former posts include: Deputy Director and Scientist-in-Residence at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute; Director of the United Nations Institute xiii

Contributors

for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR); and Director of VERTIC. Dr. Lewis served on the 2004–06 WMD Commission, chaired by Dr. Hans Blix, the 2010–11 Advisory Panel on Future Priorities of the OPCW, chaired by Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, and was an Advisor to the 2008–10 International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), chaired by Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi. She was a Commissioner on the 2014–16 Global Commission on Internet Governance, chaired by Carl Bildt, and is on the EEAS Space Advisory Board (SAB) as a Senior Space Advisor to the EU Special Envoy for Space. She holds a BSc (Hons) in physics from Manchester University, a PhD in nuclear physics from Birmingham University, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Warwick. She is a dual national of the UK and Ireland. Steven E. Lobell (PhD UCLA) is Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Utah. His research interests include neoclassical realism, the political economy of security and peacemaking, the challenges of hegemony, emerging states and the rise and decline of great powers, and economic statecraft. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of seven books, including Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016, with Norrin M. Ripsman and Jeffrey Taliaferro) and The Political Economy of Regional Peacemaking (University of Michigan Press, 2016, with Norrin M. Ripsman). Lobell has published journal articles in Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, International Interactions, Review of International Studies, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, and International Relations of the Asia Pacific, and co-edited a special issue of International Politics on “Regional Contestation to Rising Powers.” His recent article, “A Granular Theory of Balancing” (International Studies Quarterly, 2018), is part of a book project. Lobell is the PI of Minerva Research Initiative award, “Power Projection, Deterrence Strategies, and Escalation Dynamics in an Era of Challenging Near Peers, Rogue States, and Terrorist and Insurgent Organizations.” Robert E. Looney is a Distinguished Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. He specializes in issues relating to economic development in the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America. He has published 22 books, including the Handbook of US–Middle East Relations (2009). His articles on Middle Eastern issues have appeared in Middle East Policy, Middle Eastern Studies, OPEC Review, Middle East Journal, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and The National Interest. As an international consultant, Dr. Looney has provided advice and assistance to the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the RAND Corporation, and the International Monetary Fund. Simon Mabon is Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University. He is the author of Saudi Arabia and Iran: Soft Power Rivalry in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013), Houses Built On Sand (Manchester University Press, forthcoming), and co-author of The Origins of ISIS (I.B. Tauris, 2017). He has published in journals including Middle East Policy, Third World Quarterly, British Journal of Middle East Studies, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Pietro Marzo is a PhD scholar in Political Science at Laval University, Quebec. He holds a Master in International Public Affairs from the Luiss School of Government. His doctoral project focuses on the international dimension of Tunisia’s transition to democracy. Alison Pargeter is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, and a Senior Research Associate at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). xiv

Contributors

Her primary research focus is on political and security issues in North Africa and the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on Libya. Her other main area of research is on political Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood. She has published widely in her field and her books include Return to the Shadows: The Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda after the Arab Spring (2016); Libya: The Rise and Fall of Gaddafi (2012); The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition (2010); and The New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe (2008). Alison is also a Senior Associate at global consulting firm, Menas Associates. Sophie Richter-Devroe is Associate Professor in the Women, Society and Development Program at the College of Humanities and Social Science at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar, and an Honorary Fellow at the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. Sophie’s broad research interests are in the field of everyday politics and women’s activism in the Middle East. Her research is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Greece. She has done research and published work on Palestinian and Iranian women’s activism, Palestinian refugees, Palestinian cultural production, Syrian refugees, and the Naqab Bedouin. She is the author of Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Norrin M. Ripsman is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor in the International Relations Department at Lehigh University. He has held prestigious fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School at Harvard University (2010– 11), and the Norwegian Nobel Institute (2015). His research interests include democracy and national security, postwar peacemaking, constructing regional stability, the political economy of national security, neoclassical realism, and the impact of globalization on national security. He is the author/co-author of five books, most recently Peacemaking from Above, Peace from Below: States, Societies, and Peace Between Regional Rivals (Cornell University Press, 2016) and (with Steven E. Lobell and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro) Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), a co-editor of four books, and the author of over 20 peer-reviewed articles in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Millennium: A Journal of International Studies, International Interactions, International Studies Review, Geopolitics, and other peer-reviewed journals. He earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Lawrence P. Rubin is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Rubin is the author and editor of three books, including The End of Strategic Stability? Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries (Georgetown University Press, 2018) co-edited with Adam Stulberg, Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics (Stanford University Press, 2014), and Terrorist Rehabilitation and Counter-­ Radicalisation: New Approaches to Counter-terrorism (Routledge, 2011) with Rohan Gunaratna and Jolene Jerard. Rubin served in the U.S. Department of the Defense, RAND Corporation, and National Defense University and has held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the Associate Editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. Farzan Sabet is a postdoctoral fellow in the Global Governance Centre at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He acquired his MA and PhD in international history at the institute and wrote his doctoral dissertation during a two year Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellowship in the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Dr. Sabet is a global historian xv

Contributors

who studies the intersection of advanced technologies, global regimes, US foreign policy, and Middle East politics through a multidisciplinary lens that includes IR, sociology, and law. A second interrelated vein of his research is on modern Iranian politics. This research examines Iranian foreign policy, the functioning of the Islamic Republic’s competitive authoritarian politics, and political thought in Iran and its global dimensions. Roozbeh Safshekan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Alberta and masters in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University and Political Science from the University of Tehran. His research interests include Cyberpolitics, International Relations theory, and comparative social movements. Roozbeh is the recipient of a number of academic awards, including a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship, and Queen Elizabeth II Doctoral Award. His most recent peer-reviewed publications include a journal article on “Iran and the Global Politics of Internet Governance” and a book chapter on “An Unfinished Odyssey: The Iranian Student Movement’s Struggles for Social Justice”. Michael S. Smith II is a terrorism analyst who specializes in the influence operations of SalafiJihadist elements, an international consultant in the field of countering violent extremism, and a teaching fellow in Johns Hopkins University’s Global Security Studies program. Smith’s insights of threats posed by al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State, as well as opportunities to improve counterterrorism policies have been sought by members of the US Congress, White House officials, and counterterrorism officials from various governments comprising the Global Coalition to Counter Daesh. He received both his master’s degree in Intelligence and Security Studies and graduate certificate in Intelligence Analysis from The Citadel. Ewan Stein is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of the books International Relations in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and Representing Israel in Modern Egypt: Ideas, Intellectuals and Foreign Policy from Nasser to Mubarak (I.B. Tauris, 2011), and has published articles in journals including Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, and Democratization. Jordi Tejel led a research project on “minority” conflicts in the Middle East at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies between 2010–16. Since 2017, he has led a research program funded by the European Research Council on Transborder Spaces, Circulations, Frontier Effects in the Middle East at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). His most recent books include Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (Routledge, 2009) and Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (ed. with Sluglett, Bocco, and Bozarslan, World Scientific Press, 2012). Frédéric Volpi is Professor of the Politics of the Muslim World and Director of the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh (UK). He specializes in democratization, authoritarianism, contentious politics, and Islamism, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. His most recent books include Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings (Ed.) (Amsterdam UP, 2018), Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa (Oxford UP, 2017), Handbook of Mediterranean Politics (Ed.) (Routledge, 2017), and Political Islam Observed (Oxford UP, 2010). Dr. Volpi is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Mediterranean

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Contributors

Politics. He has conducted research in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco with support from the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Paul A. Williams is is lecturer in American University’s School of International Service (Washington, DC). His research is focused on resource-centric global politics and Turkey’s foreign policy and energy relations. He is currently undertaking a project that examines Turkey’s hydro-hegemony in the context of its Southeast Anatolia Project as part of the Working Group on Water and Conflict in the Middle East hosted by Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. His publications include “Energy and Trans-European NetworksEnergy (TEN-E)”, in Europeanization of Turkish Public Policies: A Scorecard (2016);“Euphrates and Tigris Waters – Turkish-Syrian and Iraqi Relations”, in Water Resource Conflicts and International Security: A Global Perspective (2012), and “Turkey: A Neglected Partner”, in America’s Challenges in the Middle East: The Obama Administration’s Policies (2011).

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1 THE BLURRED LINE BETWEEN STATE IDENTITY AND REALPOLITIK Shahram Akbarzadeh

The Middle East has been making news for decades – mostly bad news. From Arab-Israeli wars, hostage taking, Islamic revolutionary upheavals, jihad against the Soviet Union, more wars, to the scourge of sectarian warfare, the region appears to be in ongoing turmoil. Yet the level of scholarship on the Middle East and the underlying currents that lead to explosive eruptions on a regular basis remains limited. Popular revolts in Arab states in 2010–11, dubbed the Arab Spring (because it held the promise of opening up the political landscape), caught region experts by surprise. For all the ink that had been spilt on the Middle East, the scale and intensity of the popular revolt was unexpected. The community of scholars on the region were caught even more off-guard with the rise of sectarian conflicts that have become a prominent feature of politics in the region, threatening to shatter the idea of the nation-state. Studies of politics and its subfield of international relations in the Middle East had adopted the conventional scholarly approach that placed the state front and center. Studies of politics and international relations in the Middle East have examined a range of topics including wars, political systems, revolutions, and regional dynamics, almost exclusively from a state-centric perspective. Taking the state for granted has been the overarching feature of scholarship, even when studying social movements and state weakness. This field of study has produced insightful analysis on the nature of the state, strengths and weaknesses of political systems, and challenges to the ruling order, albeit “overstating the state”. In his seminal work, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, Nazih Ayubi examined the range of social, political, and economic pressures facing modern states in the region, concluding that the Arab states tend to shift further towards authoritarianism to compensate for their weakness.1 In exploring questions of stability, political legitimacy, and cultural/traditional liabilities that challenge the state, Ayubi pointed to the inherent weakness of the state, but this did not prompt a recalibration of the analysis. The Arab state remained the primary unit of analysis, bent on self-preservation in a system of states. This pattern has remained the dominant feature of scholarship on the international relations of the Middle East. The state-centric approach is consistent with various re-incarnations of the realist school of thought in international relations. To be sure, the modern experience of the Middle East – especially in the second half of the twentieth century – provides ample evidence on the significance of the state. The Arab-Israeli wars presented a case of emerging states, seeking to prove their worth in a hostile environment: the Israeli state fighting for survival, and Arab states 1

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to enhance political legitimacy. The short-lived United Arab Republic (UAR, 1958–1961) confirmed this pattern as two post-colonial Arab states experimented with the formation of a super Arab power under the charismatic leadership of President Gamal Abdul Naser. The convergence of Egypt and Syria under the UAR flag and their subsequent divorce has given further evidence of the centrality of the state in the political imagination of the elite in the Middle East. A similar pattern may be observed in the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi invasion of Iran’s southern territories in 1980 sought two distinct objectives: giving Iraq greater access to waterways to the Persian Gulf, and weakening Iran’s hostile new regime. Baghdad’s concern with Iran’s message of revolution was shared by other regional powers. The young Arab sheikhdoms to the south of the Persian Gulf felt vulnerable to calls from Tehran for Arab Muslims to follow the Iranian example and overthrow their ruling regimes. The formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 1982 that brought together Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates was aimed at countering Iran. The concern with state self-preservation meant that GCC members saw Iraq as a bulwark against Iran’s message of revolution. This concern, however, revealed a prevailing feature of political thinking: confusing ruling regimes with the state. Iran’s call for revolution was aimed at incumbent regimes and the emulation of the Islamic model of government that had emerged in Iran following the 1979 revolution. This was a call for the Islamization of the state, not its abolition. GCC members’ concern with self-preservation therefore was effectively about the future of the ruling regimes. Protecting incumbent regimes in the Middle East has emerged as the key driver of state policies, domestic and foreign. This is doubly true in the authoritarian context of the region, where incumbent regimes are not subject to popular wishes, except in exceptional cases such as the 2011 popular revolt. Placating the ruling regime against internal and external threats is the primary driver for decision-making. This feature highlights a challenge to the abstract view of the state as a rational actor. Ruling regimes exercise power with a view to their past and their future. They carry an identity informed by religion, culture, and history. This is an important aspect that constructivism and to some extent neoclassical realism have sought to incorporate in the analysis of international relations. Taking note of regime identity as a unit of analysis adds a key dimension to our understanding of the way states behave and relate to each other, and how ruling regimes respond to domestic/societal incentives and threats. It allows for changes in the priorities of the ruling regimes to reflect evolution and identity shifts. Far from being static, ruling regimes evolve to accommodate change inside and outside their domain while seeking to maintain continuity. Keeping this balance is challenging. Cultural changes in the Middle East commensurate with the rise of the educated middle class have generated significant pressure for cultural and political change, but this remains an uneven experience. The growing educated middle class in the region has been a force for modernization. In contrast, the more traditional sections of the society are suspicious of this push for change and view it as a threat to their identity and value system. The latter phenomenon is captured in the term ‘westoxification’, to depict the erosion of traditional values by encroaching Westernization. This process is seen as a threat to the authentic way of life and values. The ruling regimes are forced to navigate these counterpressures, some more successfully than others, always with an eye toward their legitimacy and continuity. Saudi Arabia and Iran present two archtypes of the merger between the state and the ruling regimes and how the concern with regime legitimacy and priorities colore the behavior of the state. Following the ascendancy of King Salman bin Abdulaziz in Saudi Arabia in 2015, the ruling family experienced a generational shift with far-reaching implications for state behavior internally and externally. Soon after assuming the throne, King Salman appointed his son 2

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Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) as defense minister and deputy Crown Prince ( January 2015). Taking this key role at 30 years of age meant that MBS was in a position to act on the sentiments and aspirations of his generation, who were well-educated, internationally well-connected, and aware of Saudi Arabia’s external image. For the new generation of Saudi elite, the problem with Saudi Arabia’s image was closely tied to the way it had handled regional challenges and Iran. Under King Faisal and his successor King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia was inclined to shy away from provoking Iran and worked behind the scenes to support its allies. A long-term perspective on regional issues and avoiding major foreign policy shifts typified the Saudi approach. In short, the Saudi approach to foreign policy was risk averse. This was clearly unsatisfactory to the new generation of Saudi elite, who saw the quiet diplomacy approach as a sign of weakness. For MBS and his ilk, Saudi Arabia’s risk aversion had left Iran unchallenged, allowing it to spread its influence across the Middle East and make inroads into Saudi Arabia’s backyard. MBS broke with Saudi Arabia’s cautious security and foreign policy-making by launching Operation Decisive Storm, a bold move that brought Saudi armed forces in combat in Yemen. In Riyadh’s perspective, the Yemen war was justified in terms of the need to roll back Iran, which was accused of sponsoring Houthi rebels. The Yemen war signaled a change of tenor in the way Saudi leaders responded to threats. They sought to take the lead in initiating a direct response to Iran, rather than lobby the US for action. This new approach led to the formation of a military coalition of forces with the United Arab Emirates and token representation from a number of other Arab states. While the war has dragged on, and the Saudis have not been able to achieve their objective of suppressing the Houthi rebellion, this assertive response has helped send a strong message to Iran and the Muslim world: Saudi Arabia is reclaiming the mantle of Muslim leadership and will not tolerate Iranian expansionism. This newfound assertiveness was on display again in 2016 when Saudi Arabia encouraged Muslim states to break diplomatic relations with Iran in response to mob attacks on the Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran, and even more forcefully the following year at the Istanbul summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. In 2017 the Saudi leadership used the OIC summit to chastise and isolate Iran for what the Saudis called aggressive and destabilizing interference in the internal affairs of neighboring states in the region. This was a symbolic show of force, signaling to Iran that the Saudi leadership was prepared to challenge Iran publically. The new Saudi leadership does not appear to be constrained by the modicum of behavior that governed its predecessors. The generational shift in Saudi Arabia and the new assertiveness against Iran has had implications for Saudi foreign relations, most significantly with the US and Israel. The Obama administration’s pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, signed in July 2015, only months after MBS assumed this post as defense minister, provided an opportunity for him (and his allies in the royal family) to stamp his mark on Saudi national security and foreign relations. Under MBS’ leadership, Saudi Arabia openly challenged the US decision to sign the nuclear deal with Iran. In this period, the Saudi view of the US dimmed significantly. Washington was seen to be betraying Riyadh and putting Saudi security and interests at risk by moving to free Iran from sanctions. The sense of betrayal was palpable and enhanced the desire in the new leadership for self-reliance in Saudi’s national security. After months of negotiations, Saudi Arabia signed a multi-million-dollar arms deal with the US: an agreement worth a staggering US$350 billion over 10 years.2 The change of administration in the US, especially the overtly anti-Iran agenda of President Donald Trump, has repaired some of the damage in Saudi-US relations. According to Prince Khalid bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Ambassador to the US, ‘there is a huge improvement in the Saudi-US relationship under this administration. I think that President Trump is determined to work with his allies in the region to counter Iranian expansionism and terrorism’.3 But by this time, the new foreign policy thinking has been solidified. The new 3

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US administration has not changed the new leadership’s assertive (critics might say adventurist) foreign policy in the region. The Saudis’ greater assertiveness in relation to Iran and efforts to challenge the Obama administration’s pursuit of the nuclear deal presented a unique point of confluence with the Israeli position on Iran. Tel Aviv had been publicly lobbying the US to take action against Iran and warned against the nuclear deal. Israel shared the Saudi point of view that freeing Iran from international sanctions would embolden Tehran and offer it a free hand to meddle in the region even more forcefully. This convergence of views facilitated a series of meetings between the Saudi and Israeli leaders to coordinate their position and lobby the Obama administration. These efforts were initially made behind closed doors, but they soon came to light and paved the way for a public rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. This is a remarkable policy shift, as Saudi Arabia does not have official diplomatic relations with Israel and needs to manage widely held public opinion that continues to see Israel as an occupying power of Islam’s third holiest site. In this respect the Saudi leadership is taking a risk by deviating from the consensus view and flirting with a taboo subject. Engaging in talks with Israel, with the long-term prospects of establishing full diplomatic relations, has the potential to seriously undermine the political legitimacy of the Saudi leadership, and appears to be at odds with its assertion of global Muslim leadership. Yet, the new leadership appears ready to take this risk in order to challenge the threat that Iran is seen to be presenting. In other words, the regional threat from Iran is seen as near and present, overshadowing the protracted dispute with Israel over its occupation of Muslim lands. Indeed, Saudi Arabia has already made a number of attempts to find a negotiated deal with Israel to address the matter, including Palestinian grievances, showing interest in moving away from the deadlock with Israel. The urgency of what is seen as a real threat has given the Saudi leaders the justification to take the opportunity to open a new chapter in Saudi-Israel relations, effectively prioritizing hard geostrategic considerations over religious and ideological agenda. The Saudi leadership is clearly hoping that it can maintain popular loyalty by depicting the Iranian threat not purely in security terms, but through a sectarian lens, blurring the line between hard-power considerations and ideological concerns. The blurred line between hard-power calculations and ideological concerns raises questions about the most appropriate conceptual framework to make sense of the Saudi behavior. On the one hand, the realist approach appears to have some explanatory merits as hard-power considerations are gaining prominence over Islamic affiliations and the self-proclaimed notion of Saudi leadership in the Muslim world. The rather contentious rapprochement with Israel is a stark example of hard-power foreign policy thinking at work. On the other hand, this shift is predicated on the assertive style of the new Saudi leadership. The MBS agenda, internal and external policies, reflect growing domestic pressure for change, especially amongst middleclass Saudis who seek more entrepreneurial and social opportunities. MBS reform agenda pays homage to this growing domestic push and suggests that domestic considerations need to be incorporated into the conceptual approach. Neoclassical realism purports such a conceptual framework and could shed light on shifts and re-orientations at the top. However, neoclassical realism is less interested in the power of ideas and identity politics, major factors in a state that is deliberately ideological and justifies its policies in relation to religion and its religious standing. The constructivist approach in international relations appears to be more adept at capturing the force of ideational factors in shaping Saudi behavior. However, as has been discussed previously and throughout this book, a mix of factors affect policy change. Adopting a conceptual framework to capture this mix is a challenge that has occupied scholars of the region. The Iranian case presents a similar dynamic at work. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on the premise of advocating for Muslim interests globally. The post-1979 Iranian 4

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Constitution makes it incumbent on the government of the day to advance the interests of the ‘down-trodden’ anywhere they may be. This constitutional mandate was based on Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary ideas, which expected the Iranian revolution to serve as a beacon for other popular uprisings throughout the region. Iran’s message of revolution and political change along Islamic lines proved to be a source of anxiety among ruling regimes in the neighborhood, resulting in the ostracization of Iran. Khomeini’s venomous attacks on Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the Saudi dynasty set the tone of the relationship between Iran and its neighbors and served to isolate Iran. In response, the Iranian leadership made a virtue of its pariah status primarily for domestic propaganda, but also for its revolutionary projection to the region as it hoped to galvanize public opinion in the Arab world. Here the Iranian regime was conscious of the gap between ruling regimes in the region and their population, and sought to invest in it to undermine potential threats and ultimately remake the region in its own image. While this mix of ideological zeal and hard-power considerations gave way to a more measured foreign policy over time, especially under President Khatami, the Arab Spring and the subsequent descent of the region into sectarian conflict revived Iran’s revolutionary agenda. The firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thrived in the context of political upheaval and explicitly pushed for the revival of Khomeini’s revolutionary message for the region. In Ahmadinejad’s view, the Arab world was just catching up with the lessons of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Under his leadership, Iran hosted a major conference in Tehran to celebrate the “Islamic Awakening” of the Arab world, and feted the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in an obvious attempt to forge a new partnership with far-reaching implications for the regional balance of power. Unfortunately for Ahmadinejad, the military coup in Egypt (2013) removed the prospects of that partnership. Iran’s ambitions of expanding its links in the region were further challenged with the deteriorating situation in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad had been a loyal ally of Iran, now under threat by a host of armed groups, including the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, known by its Arabic acronym as Daesh. The arrival of the softly spoken Hassan Rouhani to the office of the presidency in 2013 did not change this dynamic. While Rouhani toned down the fiery rhetoric of his predecessor, and secured a nuclear deal with P5 + 1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), Iran under his leadership remained committed to supporting Assad’s war efforts to crush the rebels. In this respect, Rouhani’s approach was consistent with that of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who traditionally takes a more ideologically driven stance on policy matters. Protecting Assad and maintaining Syria as an ally are integral to Iran on two important grounds. Ideologically, Syria is a key player in Iran’s anti-US and anti-Israel narrative. Syria’s history of antagonism with Israel and support for Iran, especially during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), made it a natural partner for Iran’s notion of an “axis of resistance”. Such a partnership served Iran to project an image of pursuing a revolutionary agenda in the region and standing up to Israel, seen as the occupying power of Muslim lands. The Iranian regime puts significant stock in the propaganda value of this alliance – externally and internally. AntiAmericanism and challenging Israel have been key pillars of Iran’s Islamist ideology and central to state identity in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anti-Americanism is an almost immutable aspect of the ruling regime’s identity that sets the parameters of inclusion and exclusion for foreign policy choices. This explains why Mohamad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, the two Iranian presidents credited with pursuing a reformist and pragmatic agenda, found it impossible to cross the redline and explore normalization of relations with Washington. Rouhani’s aversion to even meeting with President Obama in the wake of the 2015 nuclear agreement was highly noteworthy. For many observers, this would have been the best time for direct talks between the two, and Obama would have been the most promising US president for Iran to engage. Such 5

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a rapprochement, however, would have damaged Iran’s carefully choreographed image as the bastion of anti-Americanism and an uncompromising champion of Muslim interests against international bullies. Internally, the anti-American message has been integral to the foundation of the ruling regime. Noting chants of ‘Down with the Shah, Down with America’ during the 1979 revolution and the subsequent hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran, the regime has institutionalized anti-Americanism as an article of faith. Street murals depicting the wickedness of the US and the courage of Iran for standing up to it remind Iranian citizens of the centrality of this concept to the identity of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While it is impossible to ascertain the extent of popular subscription to this idea, it is clear that for the core of the regime’s support base, anti-Americanism is non-negotiable. Maintaining this line, therefore, is critical for the regime’s legitimacy amongst its support base – not to mention that many Iranian leaders are likely to be genuinely committed to it on a personal level. In short, anti-Americanism is woven into the identity of the Islamic Republic of Iran and presents a redline that the Iranian leadership will not cross. Beyond the ideological aspect, there is a hard-nosed calculation behind Iran’s response to the Arab Spring. Encouraging revolts against incumbent regimes in the region and steadfast support for the Assad regime in Syria serve an important security purpose for Iran. Anti-regime revolts in Egypt and Bahrain and unrest in Saudi Arabia held the prospects of seriously undermining states that were explicitly anti-Iran. The prospect of popular revolts toppling hostile regimes was gleefully welcomed in Iran as a much-awaited development; such an outcome held the promise of breaking Iran out of containment and weakening the US hand. This would have been reminiscent of Saddam’s fall in Iraq as it removed a major regional rival and security threat for Iran. The same logic applies to Iran’s commitment to keeping Bashar al-Assad in power. Syria has been a loyal ally of Iran ever since the 1979 revolution and has been instrumental in Iran’s outreach into Lebanon and the formation of Hezbollah. The latter has proven to be a resilient fighting force that gives Iran an asymmetrical edge in relation to Israel and the US. Through the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran maintains the capacity to hit at Israeli and US interests in the region and has on numerous occasions threatened to do so. This is Iran’s deterrence strategy. The Iranian leadership has warned the US and Israel that any military action against Iran, especially at the height of the nuclear deadlock, would lead to retaliatory action across the region. Maintaining this capacity to retaliate is integral to Iran’s deterrence strategy, a priority that has obvious implications for Iran’s position on Syria, which serves as an ally and transit point to the Lebanese Hezbollah. There is a merger of security considerations and ideological imperatives in the way Iran relates to the outside world. This is not unique to Iran, as other regional powers also present their external policy choices with reference to history, religion, and culture, although Iran manifests a pronounced case. The blurring of the line between tangible and ideational factors presents a challenge in the search for the most relevant conceptual approach with explanatory powers to make sense of international relations in the Middle East. While examining international rivalries, tensions, and opportunities, cornerstones of the realist approach, will offer some insight into state behavior, they do not offer any explanatory perspectives on leadership style or domestic factors that could influence decision-making.4 As neoclassical realists would postulate, one cannot assume a perfect ‘transmission belt’ between the international order and foreign policy decisions, because threats are ‘distorted’ by perception and human error.5 Incorporating the interpretative phase where political leaders filter international pressures and opportunities to adopt their response offers an important step in our understanding of international relations in the Middle East.6 The leaders’ interpretation of threats and possibilities are filtered through 6

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subjective assumptions, fears, and expedient calculations. Noting the gap between state and society and the general tendency of incumbent regimes to rely on dual tools of indoctrination and suppression to protect their hold on power, the question of regime continuity is always a primary concern in any decision-making process. That consideration is central to the promotion of patriotic ideologies and the self-proclamation of the incumbent regimes as champions of the nation to the exclusion of alternative voices. In the case of Iran and Saudi Arabia, this is manifested in two distinct Islamist ideologies, officially adopted as the source of state identity. The constructivist approach in international relations highlights the significance of state identity, shaped by history and culture, in making sense of international relations.7 The power of ideas is certainly understood by the incumbent regimes, but the question remains as to the weight of ideas in forming policy. In the case of Iran-Saudi rivalry, for example, how significant is their ideological discord? And how does that relate to questions of power and security? As the large body of literature on that topic suggests, the two are effectively intertwined in a continuum. Any examination of power and security in the Middle East needs to take account of ruling regimes’ beliefs and perceptions. Examining international relations in the Middle East would involve a holistic approach to take account of social, political, and religious pressures that impact on ruling regimes. These internal pressures place constraints or incentives for the way states respond to external stimuli or generate new courses of action. Taking account of social and ideational factors in the way regimes form policy would go a long way toward addressing the state-centric view of international relations in the Middle East.

Notes 1 Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). 2 Javier E. David: “US-Saudi Arabia seal weapons deal worth nearly $110 billion immediately, $350 billion over 10 years”, CNBC, 20 May 2017. www.cnbc.com/2017/05/20/us-saudi-arabia-seal-weapons-dealworth-nearly-110-billion-as-trump-begins-visit.html. 3 “Huge improvement in US ties under Trump: KSA ambassador”, Saudi Gazette, 9 August 2017. http:// saudigazette.com.sa/article/514782/SAUDI-ARABIA/US. 4 Joseph M. Parent and Sebastian Rosato, “Balancing in Neorealism,” International Security 40, no. 2 (2015): 51–86. 5 Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, no. 1 (1998): 246–247. 6 Norrin M. Ripsman, Jeffrey W. Taliaferro and Steven E. Lobell, Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 7 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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2 NEOCLASSICAL REALISM Domestic politics, systemic pressures, and the impact on foreign policy since the Arab Spring Thomas Juneau, Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Lawrence P. Rubin Introduction What explains the foreign policy changes of states in the Middle East since the Arab Spring of 2011? The scholarly community’s understanding of foreign policy dynamics in the Middle East is often poor, ad hoc, or mostly based on case studies, while there are few theoretically informed comparisons. In this chapter, we apply a neoclassical realist framework to understand the opportunities and constraints on Egyptian, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian foreign policy. We contend that the engagement of the great powers and the nature of the sub-systemic strategic environment affected the degree to which domestic political forces – neoclassical realism’s intervening variables (IVVs) – determined foreign policy in different Middle Eastern states. These intervening domestic-level variables include state-society/civil-military relations, strategic culture (including ideology), domestic institutions, and elite perceptions in shaping their respective foreign policies. Iran and Saudi Arabia faced a restrictive sub-system, which meant a lesser role for intervening domestic variables with the environment encouraging a more assertive foreign policy for both states. For Egypt, which faced a more permissive sub-system, domestic politics could play a greater role and contribute to a temporary shift in orientation, though Cairo’s foreign policy remained mostly disengaged and hesitant between 2011 and 2015. One important implication is that domestic-level developments across multiple states, including the prospect of continued regime fragility, the ongoing use of sectarianism, and a more disengaged US, can shape international and sub-systemic outcomes. Recent outcomes include a weakened Iraq, which acted historically as a check on Tehran’s ambitions, and a disengaged and inward-oriented Egypt, thereby creating opportunities for a rising Iran to expand its influence in the region. We begin this chapter with an overview of the literature on the Middle East and the Arab Spring, which allows us to show that there is a shortage of systematic and theoretically informed studies of how states have adjusted their foreign policies to the rapid changes in the region since 2011. On this basis, we propose that neoclassical realism can fill this gap. After an overview of neoclassical realism, we apply it to explain the foreign policies of the Iran–Saudi Arabia dyad and of Egypt. The chapter concludes by highlighting the relevance of neoclassical realism for the study of the international relations of the Middle East. 8

Neoclassical realism

Political science and the Arab Spring Prior to the onset of the Arab Spring in late 2010, Comparative Politics and area studies dominated the Political Science literature on the Middle East. The field was primarily preoccupied with themes such as the lack of democratic transition in the region, authoritarian durability, and Islamist movements.1 International Relations theory remained a marginal player in these debates.2 Similarly, the majority of the recent literature about the Arab Spring is written from a Comparative Politics and regional studies perspective. Most of this insightful work focuses on the domestic politics of states, individually or as a series of connected cases. These studies, in which both the independent and dependent variables are mostly identified with the domestic level, have addressed questions that help explain the causes and timing of the uprisings, the prospects for democratization in the region, and reasons for the resilience of monarchies.3 A second wave of literature focuses on themes such as authoritarian resilience and the weakness of popular mobilization after the uprisings failed to produce significant political change.4 While these insights from Comparative Politics are important, they often overlook or underplay international and transnational influences on domestic politics as well as the impact of domestic factors on foreign policy and international relations. 5 For example, external influences and international drivers, such as military and political interventions, the role of transnational identities, as well as social media and satellite television, on the spread of the uprisings, and the effect of these external influences on the regionalization of conflicts are largely underplayed.6 The large-scale public discussion on the role of sectarianism as a driver – or as a c­ onsequence – of the uprisings and their aftermath has led many to incorporate it within an international relations framework. At the heart of the internationalization of sectarianism is the role that it plays in the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. This dynamic is exemplified by understanding the current Middle East through the lens of a “new Arab Cold War” in which Iran and Saudi Arabia play leading roles in a regional conflict that involves both states and non-state actors.7 This new cold war – following the previous Arab cold war of the 1950s and 1960s, which, broadly, pitted conservative pro-US monarchies against Arab nationalist republics led by Egypt – emerged in the mid-2000s and then intensified after 2011.8 An important reason for the increasingly sectarian hue of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, especially since 2011, has been the rise of state weakness throughout the region.9 This has led non-state actors in the arc of fragile and collapsed states from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen to systematically invite outside powers to penetrate local conflicts.10 Constantly seeking to outmaneuver the other, Iran and Saudi Arabia support local militias, political parties and movements, rebel groups, and governments on the basis of a varying mix of interest, transnational identity, and faith.11 These dynamics underscore the importance of studying the intersection of foreign and domestic policies in the pre- and post–Arab Spring era.12 Some, for example, suggest that regimes face ideational threats and respond through ideational balancing.13 This body of work also includes those who analyze how events since 2011 have impacted the regional system of alliances and alignments.14 For these authors, the primary driver of alliance politics in the Middle East, and especially of inter-Arab relations, was and remains the overarching preoccupation with regime security; the uprisings have not changed this focus. Drawing on these ideas and other international relations theories, Gause suggests that traditional balance-of-power logic cannot provide ‘a satisfactory explanation for systematic under-balancing by Saudi Arabia and other pro-U.S’ regional powers in the face of rising Iranian power. Instead, he argues that ‘alignment patterns among the Sunni states are driven more by ideological compatibility and regime similarity’.15 One important gap in this nascent literature on the international relations of the Middle East since 2011 is a broader, more rigorous perspective of how states have adjusted – or failed to 9

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adjust – to this new regional strategic environment. In essence, what is missing is a framework to understand systemically and conceptually how states have responded to domestic and international changes. This chapter offers a way forward toward understanding the Arab Spring from an international relations perspective: how both international pressures – arising from rapid and uncertain shifts in the regional and international distribution of power and in the regional security environment – and domestic factors have shaped how Middle Eastern states have adjusted, or failed to adjust, their foreign policies since 2011. The chapter recognizes that the story of how Middle Eastern states’ foreign policies have adjusted is still under development and needs more structured and rigorous comparisons. Nevertheless, we advance a first cut by demonstrating that neoclassical realism provides a relevant framework for the study of the international relations of the Middle East.

Neoclassical realism: systemic pressures and domestic politics Neoclassical realism represents a powerful explanatory improvement on existing realist, liberal, and constructivist approaches to international relations and the levels-of-analysis problem.16 It prioritizes structural realism’s emphasis on the international system and incorporates domestic political phenomena as intervening variables to explain foreign policy, grand strategy, and international outcomes. Structural realist approaches explain foreign policy and international dynamics in terms of international constraints and opportunities, largely dismissing the influence of domestic politics, leadership, and other sub-unit factors.17 This is problematic when studying the Middle East, where leaders must often prioritize maintaining their hold on power in the face of potential coups d’état or, more recently, serious challenges to their leadership from popular domestic uprisings and ethnic/tribal/religious divisions. An approach to Middle East international politics that cannot account for the impact of the Arab Spring, the sectarian fighting in Iraq and Syria which contributed to the rise of ISIS, the Sunni-Shiite divide in the Levant and Persian Gulf, Lebanon’s struggling consociational democracy, civil-military relations in Egypt, the personality or leadership style of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or divisions among the royal family in the House of Saud on the foreign policy of Arab states would be of only limited value. In contrast, liberal and other Innenpolitik approaches downplay the influence of the international system and regional sub-system, instead privileging domestic political coalitions, opposition movements, social media, and political processes. This is insufficient because it removes the foreign from “foreign policy” and the international from “international politics”. To assume that we can explain foreign policy, grand strategy, and international politics without significant reference to the external regional and international environment that states face and the influence of regional and extra-regional states is just not credible. To explain contemporary Middle Eastern dynamics without reference to the US and Russia, for example, would be ludicrous. To ignore Iran’s growing relative power in the region neglects an important cause of shifting relations among Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.18 The other leading approach, constructivism, does incorporate both domestic and international factors, asserting that foreign policy and international outcomes are determined by national and international culture and identities. Nonetheless, it provides no guidance on which national and international identities will predominate; therefore, it fails to offer an a priori theory. It cannot, for example, tell us in advance if Saudi leaders will construct their grand strategies primarily in response to American pressure, the Iranian threat, the declining price of oil, the need for domestic stability, internal in-fighting among the royal family, or the teachings of their Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam. Thus, realist, liberal, and constructivist theories lack 10

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explanatory power and can account for state behavior only in rare instances of intense domestic or international threats. In contrast, neoclassical realism offers a powerful approach to the study of foreign policy, grand strategy, and international politics. Neoclassical realists posit that the external ­environment – comprised of the international system and the regional sub-system – presents constraints and opportunities for states that drive foreign policy and inter-state interactions. These systemic stimuli, however, are filtered through the intervening domestic-level processes of perception, decision-making, and policy implementation, which are in turn affected by a range of state and sub-state variables, including leader images, strategic culture, state-society relations, and domestic institutions.19 As a result, states in the Middle East have responded differently to external pressures and opportunities based on their unique domestic political circumstances. The influence of these intervening variables on state behavior varies depending on the nature of the strategic environment states face. In general, when states inhabit a restrictive environment characterized by intense short-term threats to their survival, including the regime’s survival, or powerful short-term windows of opportunity, domestic politics has only a limited impact on foreign policy, typically affecting its style and timing rather than its content. In contrast, when the external environment is more permissive – characterized by less intense or less-imminent threats to survival or less tempting or less fleeting windows of opportunity – domestic politics can play a greater role in determining a state’s foreign security and military policy responses. Only when state leaders face intense and imminent domestic challenges to their ruling position, or when they have little autonomy to enact national policy, are they likely to allow domestic imperatives to pursue policies at odds with international pressures.20 In this regard, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat could contemplate waging a risky war with a stronger, and U.S.-backed, Israel in 1973 only because a failure to regain the Sinai would likely result in a revolt against his leadership.21 Neoclassical realism can do more than simply explain foreign policy choices and the selection of grand strategy. After all, the policies of multiple states interact to produce international outcomes. Therefore, systemic and domestic forces combine to influence not only state strategies but also international politics at both the regional and global levels. In this regard, the strategic choices of states can affect international systemic and sub-systemic outcomes. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s decision to engage in sectarian favoritism and exclusion over nation-building, for example, contributed to the civil war in Iraq and, in particular, fanned the flames of Sunni extremism. Once Syria also descended into civil war after 2011, the Alawite-led regime of Bashar al-Assad’s war against the primarily Sunni opposition further opened space for Sunni extremism to expand. Weakened governments in both Iraq and Syria have turned to Iran in their battle with their respective oppositions, enhancing Tehran’s influence and regional power, and thereby provoking insecurity in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. Thus, whether there will be a trend toward regional conflict or peace will depend not only on the regional distribution of power and the role of extra-regional states, but also on the strategic choices that local and regional states pursue, which in turn is affected by their domestic makeup. Not only does neoclassical realism represent a significant theoretical improvement on broader theories of foreign policy and international politics, but it also represents an important corrective on existing approaches to Middle East foreign policies and regional dynamics. Much of the research on the Middle East is written from an area studies perspective and the distinct cultural, historical, social, religious, and political dynamics within the Middle East. Concomitantly, those who use culture as an explanatory variable are often accused rightly or wrongly of polemicization.22 11

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While subaltern realism and omnibalancing represent two approaches that do combine explanatory factors at different levels of analysis to explain the international politics of the Middle East, they do not do so in a coherent, systematic, and predictable manner. Subaltern realism asserts that the behavior of “Third World” states is determined both by the dependence of these weak states on the great powers and by their need for stability and order within. Yet, as Mohammed Ayoob, its originator, points out, subaltern realism is not a coherent theory, but instead more of a corrective to structural theories of international relations.23 It cannot, therefore, provide a guide for understanding the past and prospective policy choices of Middle East states and sub-systemic dynamics. Steven David’s omnibalancing theory correctly observes that Third World leaders must balance against both domestic and international threats to maintain both national security and their regime’s hold on power.24 Only in extreme and rare situations, however, do internal threats trump inter-state realities when conducting foreign security policy or planning grand strategy. Instead of treating internal and external threats as largely interchangeable, as omnibalancing does, neoclassical realism’s assertion that leaders prioritize the external environment when making foreign policy, but tailor their responses based on their unique domestic circumstances, is more convincing. In general, neoclassical realism suggests the following important insights about Middle Eastern international politics. First, regional states conduct foreign relations primarily to counter external threats and, more rarely, to exploit external opportunities. The dynamic of the new Middle East, which is witnessing the collapse of a number of states, including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, has created opportunities for regional powers to extend their influence but has also created new regional flashpoints among them. Second, while Middle Eastern leaders have a keen interest in keeping domestic opposition in check, this domestic consideration is the primary driver in foreign security policy-making only in extreme circumstances, when the prospects of leader or regime de-selection through revolution or coup appears imminent. Most of the time, leaders will incorporate their domestic political requirements into their choice of strategies to respond to international constraints and opportunities, rather than tailoring foreign policy primarily to meet their domestic political needs. Third, the prospect of a more disengaged US, especially given its greater energy independence, means that regional states will have more room to maneuver because the great powers will not stoke or restrain their behavior.25 It also alters the dynamics for small powers.26 In the next section, we will illustrate the utility of neoclassical realism by explaining Saudi, Iranian, and Egyptian foreign policy from the upheavals of Arab Spring in 2011 to the end of the Obama administration in 2016. We do so by focusing on key NCR variables at different levels of analysis.27 We begin by examining the international dimension, particularly the distribution of regional and global capabilities, structural modifiers (such as geography and technology), the degree of clarity in the region, and the nature of the strategic environment the states face. We then examine the domestic-level variables that can intervene between systemic pressures and state policy choices, including leader images, strategic culture, state-society relations, and the nature of domestic political institutions. Finally, we explore how these independent and dependent variables interact to affect our object of inquiry, the grand strategic choices of Middle Eastern states.

The Iran–Saudi Arabia dyad Until a few years ago, Saudi foreign policy was cautious, reactive, and mostly consisted of quiet diplomacy and back-room hand-outs of cash. Since the onset of the Arab Spring in late 2010, Riyadh has become much more willing to use diplomatic, economic, and military force and to 12

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project its power. Iranian foreign policy has arguably not changed as much, but the uprisings have also forced important adjustments on Tehran. The Islamic Republic has faced unprecedented opportunities to penetrate newly weakened or collapsed states, while the war in Syria has threatened it with the loss, or at least the weakening, of its only state ally in the region, the Bashar al-Assad regime. More generally, Iran and Saudi Arabia have faced an increasingly restrictive strategic environment since 2011. According to neoclassical realism, this implies that both states faced strong systemic incentives and pressures, reducing the potential causal impact of domestic political processes on foreign policy. Intervening variables, in other words, mattered, but less than in cases of states facing more permissive environments. Analysis of Saudi and Iranian foreign policy adjustment since 2011 tends to emphasize multiple drivers: for Saudi Arabia, its perception of – and frustration with – US restraint under President Barack Obama, the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and its opposition to revolutionary and democratic forces abroad that threatened the regional status quo (notably in Bahrain); for Iran, its own acute threat perceptions, the particular strategic culture of the Islamic Republic, and its domestic politics; and for both, their intensifying regional competition. Neoclassical realism proposes a framework to integrate some of these variables into a rigorous framework. The balance of power in the Persian Gulf sub-system features two dominant regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia.28 Irrespective of the identity and worldview of the rulers in Tehran and Riyadh, by dint of the two countries’ actual and potential geographical, economic, religious, and human assets, their leaders each see their own country as a legitimate and dominant regional power. This does not imply that war or even high levels of tension are automatic. Indeed, certain eras such as the 1970s witnessed the two countries develop relatively cooperative relations as they broadly shared similar visions of regional order; yet even then, suspicion and mistrust remained high. Thus, the bipolar sub-systemic distribution of power in the Gulf means that strategic competition is probable, though its form is conditioned by structural modifiers and unit-level variables. The balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran has undergone significant fluctuation since 2010. In terms of conventional military power, the balance massively favors Saudi Arabia and its partners: Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members outspend Iran on defense by a factor of about seven to one, while they also benefit greatly from the US security umbrella, including air and naval bases.29 Because of the largely zero-sum nature of their dyadic relationship, Iran’s gains have often been losses for Saudi Arabia, and vice versa. Iran has gained from the fall or weakening of American and Saudi partners, especially Mubarak’s Egypt, while the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq between 2011 and 2014 opened further space for Iran to penetrate its neighbor. But Iran has seen its own standing damaged by the troubles of its only state ally in Syria. Iran’s economy has also suffered significantly from the collapse of oil prices and international sanctions. Structural modifiers also have an important effect on the parameters of strategic interactions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Geography, first, shapes their constraints and opportunities. Most obviously, the two face each other off in the Persian Gulf, making a high level of contact between them inevitable. The distribution of physical barriers also matters: Iran is mountainous, whereas Saudi Arabia consists mostly of open desert. Historically, this has pushed Arabian Peninsula states – flat and sparsely populated, at least compared to Iraq and Iran – to seek protection from extra-regional powers. The UK played this role for part of the twentieth century, and was steadily replaced by the US after its withdrawal from the region in 1970. The second structural modifier, the offense/defense balance, ‘pertains to the balance of military technologies and therefore the intensity of the security dilemma, only between pairs or 13

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groups of states’.30 Iran and Saudi Arabia lack the sustainable ability to project power as their conventional militaries are weak, Iran for lack of reliable advanced equipment and because of the presence of US troops surrounding the Islamic Republic, and Saudi Arabia for a lack of competence in using the major weapons systems it has purchased over the decades.31 This advantage for the defense has had a dampening effect on the intensity of the security dilemma in the Gulf; it certainly pushes Riyadh and Tehran to avoid direct combat and instead confront each other indirectly by supporting militant groups in weak or collapsed states throughout the region (i.e., Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, etc.). Structural signals have been particularly unclear; that is, threats and opportunities have not been readily discernable given the breakdown of regional order. This is an important insight of neoclassical realism: when signals are less clear, there is more scope for domestic political processes to have a causal impact. Iran and Saudi Arabia have also faced an increasingly restrictive regional environment since late 2010, as they have faced a widening array of intensifying and imminent threats, and a less engaged US. Growing state fragility, in particular, has led to the emergence of new threats and opportunities for both. It has fed their worsening security dilemma, as both acutely perceive that the other will exploit weak states to pressure its rival. Thus, Saudi Arabia has feared that Iran would seek to take advantage of instability in Bahrain and Yemen to penetrate its two smaller neighbors, while Iran has viewed the war in Syria largely as an effort by its rivals, including Saudi Arabia, to overthrow Assad. Structural factors shape the broad parameters of strategic interaction between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Domestic political processes then constrain the ability of elites in both countries to undertake strategic adjustment in response to changing structural incentives. Beginning with Saudi Arabia, the first such intervening variable is leader images, which affect perceptions – how members of the foreign policy executive understand the structural environment. Saudi perceptions can be broken down into two components: (1) the fear that the US is not only abandoning its traditional role as guarantor of Saudi security and retrenching from the Middle East, but is also tilting towards Iran, especially after the nuclear deal; and (2) Saudi policy-­makers’ conviction that Iranian power is pervasive and fast growing. In particular, they fear – almost obsessively – that as the uprisings toppled and weakened governments throughout the region, a hegemonic Iran has been decisively filling the vacuum. Both perceptions are inflated, but because they are deeply held by the Saudi foreign policy executive, they have driven important aspects of decision-making.32 A second intervening variable, strategic culture, has also played an important role in shaping Saudi threat perceptions. More specifically, neoclassical realism can effectively integrate ideology as an element of strategic culture into its causal chain. Indeed, many scholars have identified ideological compatibility as a key driver of alliance choices among Sunni states, including Saudi Arabia.33 This helps explain why and how, in adjusting to a rapidly changing regional environment (the independent variable), and given its perceptions of US intentions and of Iranian power, Saudi Arabia sought primarily to work with like-minded, or ideologically similar, states and non-state actors and to oppose more ideologically distant actors. Finally, the emergence of Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) since 2015 and his idiosyncratic beliefs and images has had an important impact on how Saudi Arabia has adjusted its foreign policy.34 Now virtually in control of all levers of state power, MBS is critical of what he views as the American failure to intervene forcefully in Syria and of US engagement of Iran.35 He has also been dismissive of what he labels his country’s “comatose” foreign policy until 2015.36 He has been the main driver of his country’s intervention in Yemen, yet the causal importance of MBS’s leader images is better understood in combination with structural pressures and other domestic variables. 14

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Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy adjustment to changes in the regional and domestic environment since 2010, and even more so since 2015, has been characterized chiefly by its growing assertiveness. Riyadh has been significantly more willing to use force than in the past, either directly (Bahrain, Yemen) or indirectly (by supporting groups in Syria). The Saudi decision to intervene in Yemen in 2015 illustrates how the neoclassical realist causal chain operates. The collapse of order in Yemen since 2011 presents a direct threat to Saudi security, but one to which no clear, optimal response is apparent. Despite evidence that Iran’s support for the Houthis is relatively small, Riyadh appears convinced that Iran’s presence in Yemen is strong and represents a new step in Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions.37 In response to the chaos in Yemen and to the perceived – but inflated – Iranian threat, Riyadh launched an air campaign in 2015 and ramped up its support for groups broadly sharing its opposition to the Islamic Republic. The role of MBS – the ambitious and anti-Iran Crown Prince – has also been essential in shaping this response. This last intervening variable demonstrates the mechanism of the neoclassical realism causal chain: it argues that leader images have a greater causal impact on short term, crisis decision-making, whereas other domestic processes such as perceptions operate at a broader level, impacting how states adjust their grand strategy. In Iran’s case, ideological compatibility has been an important IVV which, as with Saudi Arabia, also explains how Tehran has adjusted to changes in the regional environment since 2010. The strategic culture of the Islamic Republic is revisionist, as it opposes the US-dominated regional order and is hostile to conservative, pro-American monarchies such as Saudi Arabia. The Islamic Republic perceives itself as the leader of the resistance camp, a coalition of states (also including Syria) and non-state actors (the groups and militias supported by Iran, such as Lebanese Hezbollah) linked together by this rejectionist approach.38 The other intervening variable having a constraining effect on Iran’s foreign policy is found at the level of its domestic institutions. Changes in the balance of power among the multiple factions involved in policy-making in the Islamic Republic can lead to real but limited shifts in foreign policy. As the balance of factional power shifts in favor of more moderate or hard-line elements, foreign policy tilts in a corresponding direction. As such, the election of a moderate, Hassan Rouhani, to the presidency in 2013 did not lead to major changes in foreign policy after he replaced the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013; he had to operate within the parameters of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. But Rouhani has had a tactical effect in toning down more confrontational rhetoric and impulses. The combined causal impact of structural variables and of domestic, intervening variables explains how the Islamic Republic has adjusted to events in the region since late 2010. Iran initially sought to portray the uprisings as an Islamic Awakening that would overthrow illegitimate US-aligned regimes. Yet once the uprisings reached Syria, Tehran abandoned this rhetoric and steadily escalated its support to the Assad regime. Iran’s intervention in Syria thus illustrates how Iran’s foreign policy adjusted to shifts in the regional environment. The war in Syria threatened to upend the regional balance of power to Iran’s disadvantage; uniquely, the system here sent reasonably clear signals to Iran on the threat and the optimal response. Tehran thus launched an increasingly assertive campaign of balancing, mobilizing internal resources from various branches of its military, and, externally, a widening array of like-minded non-state partners (Shia militias from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan). There is broad consensus within the regime on the need to support the Assad regime, whose survival is crucial to Iran’s ability to project power in the Levant. But more moderate elements, including President Rouhani, have been able to smooth the rougher edges of the intervention, by toning down what inevitably would have been more confrontational rhetoric had a hard-liner been in power. Moderates have 15

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also actively encouraged Iranian participation in fledgling peace talks, which many hard-liners regard much more suspiciously.

Egypt In contrast with Saudi Arabia and Iran, Egypt has faced a more permissive strategic environment since it concluded a peace treaty with Israel. As a result, domestic drivers have been extremely influential in determining Egyptian foreign policy and its responses to regional shocks since 2011, as neoclassical realism would expect. For more than 40 years, Egyptian foreign policy has been relatively conservative and status quo–oriented. It has focused primarily on its relationships with the US, Africa, the Gulf, and to a lesser extent, Europe.39 In the last two decades, Egypt has turned increasingly inward, and it has been much less engaged regionally. A focus on leadership succession, especially in the 2010s, required considerable political attention, and Egypt’s economic challenges remained a constant problem. Yet, the most significant foreign policy change came during the period of the most significant regional change – 2011–15. In fact, since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Egypt’s foreign policy underwent two shifts amidst the changing regional environment of the Arab uprisings. These shifts in Egyptian foreign policy were driven by major domestic political changes: the election of Mohammed Morsi in June 2012 and the military coup which brought Abdelfatah al-Sisi to power a year later. While Morsi’s tenure shifted Egypt’s foreign policies away from many of its traditional interests and allies, Sisi restored these policies and, in some cases, went a step further. In both cases, the military, as a domestic political institution, acted as a check on power, constraining the foreign policy shift. Thus, consistent with the tenets of neoclassical realism, the Egyptian case illustrates how domestic politics, as an intervening variable, shapes foreign policy outcomes. At the sub-systemic or regional level, the US has been Egypt’s great power backer since the 1970s. The cornerstone of this relationship for Egypt is the security assistance package that the US has provided since Camp David was signed. The US has provided Egypt with security and economic assistance since the 1970s, most notably $1.3 billion per year in security assistance since 1987. This assistance is justified by Egypt’s military cooperation and its maintenance of the Camp David Treaty with Israel.40 In return, Egypt grants the US expedited passage through the Suez Canal, which is an important strategic benefit for its military activities in the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean, and Egypt cooperates militarily in a number of different arenas, particularly in counterterrorism.41 One exogenous regional shift that occurred was the disappearance of Iraq as a political rival after the 2003 invasion. Cairo was unable and uninterested in filling the void of Arab leadership, which was partially filled by Egypt’s primary regional rival, Iran. The U.S. support for Egypt has kept it from encountering a significant decline as a regional power. Yet, geography, as a structural modifier, has meant the Egyptian state did not need to be focused on an external military threat and could focus on domestic politics. With the exception of Israel, with which Egypt has had a treaty for over 40 years, Egypt’s traditional regional rivals, Iraq (pre-2003) and Iran (post-1979), are geographically distant. These states, which often lacked the military power projection capabilities, competed in other ways, including through ideological competition.42 Despite public rhetoric to the contrary, the Iranian threat remains largely in the ideological domain. Egypt’s regional environment, characterized by the absence of a hegemon, has meant that intervening variables have shaped Cairo’s foreign policy orientation. The two main domestic-level, 16

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intervening variables are strategic culture – specifically, ideology/identity – and state-society relations, most notably Egyptian civil-military relations. The regimes’ different ideologies account for the foreign policy shift in 2012–13 and its return after Morsi was overthrown. The military, as a political institution, is responsible for being a constraint on the ideologically driven foreign policy as well as the driver on foreign policy before and after Morsi’s rule. The first shift in foreign policy occurred after the election of Mohammed Morsi in June 2012. From the time Mubarak stepped down from power until Morsi’s election, the Supreme Council of Allied Forces (SCAF) acted as the placeholder and interim governing body. Upon assuming power, Morsi flirted with many changes that sought to reorient Egypt’s foreign policy along more populist lines. Throughout his campaign for President, Morsi’s rhetoric did not focus extensively on foreign policy, but he did promise an “independent” one. Morsi pursued some of these objectives by: moving closer to the “resistance axis”, particularly Islamist actors and governments in the region; strengthening relations with Qatar at the expense of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and shrinking the gap between public opinion and Egypt’s foreign policy.43 While Morsi may have been acting with few systemic constraints, he encountered domestic constraints on his foreign policy. For example, despite Morsi’s harsh rhetoric about Israel and ideological affinity toward Hamas, he was unable to abrogate the peace treaty and did not move any closer toward Hamas. His attempts to end the blockade on Gaza were met with opposition from the military and security services, which sought to protect Egypt’s borders. In addition, Morsi did not alter Egypt’s policy toward Gaza and, under his rule, executed harsh measures, much to the surprise of the Islamists in Gaza, Hamas.44 Instead, Morsi played the role of mediator in the November 2012 Gaza crisis between Israel and Hamas.45 Had Morsi moved in the direction of closer relations with Hamas, he would have faced pressure from the military. Morsi also tried to realign relations by reaching out to Iran, which put him at odds with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf States. Early in his presidency, he visited Tehran under the auspices of a non-aligned movement conference.46 Several months later, President Ahmadinejad reciprocated in a three-day visit to Cairo.47 Yet this visit, the first of its kind in three decades, was met with stiff domestic opposition.48 Egypt also shifted its regional alignment. Saudi Arabia (and the UAE) had been its most important allies in the region since the 1970s. Under Morsi, however, relations became increasingly strained as Qatar moved closer to Egypt. Qatar pledged billions to Egypt in the form of grants and loans.49 These relations were also consistent with Qatar’s policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in other countries and having cordial relations with Iran. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE continued their relations with the military during this period and were supportive of the military’s overthrow of Mohammed Morsi. The second major shift occurred after General Abdelfatah al-Sisi’s overthrow of President Morsi in July 2013. After Sisi came to power, he rebalanced Egypt’s foreign policy and reoriented it to the status quo ante that resembled foreign policy under Hosni Mubarak. For example, Sisi realigned with Saudi Arabia and UAE, away from Qatar, which it saw as an enemy and a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, immediately after assuming the presidency, Egypt rejected Qatar’s previous pledge of $12 billion in aid and accepted Saudi Arabia and UAE’s offer for aid. Since 2013, Egypt has received over $30 billion in aid in the form of oil and cash grants from these Gulf States.50 Sisi also reversed Egypt’s attitude toward the Syria conflict from one of opposition to Assad to acceptance. During this period, Egypt’s relationship with the US, a key player in the Middle East and Cairo’s great power supporter, remained fraught with tensions. Because this relationship is a constant, it has little bearing on any change in the regional balance of power. Yet it still plays 17

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an important role in affecting Egypt’s foreign policy orientation. The US’ perceived support of Mubarak’s ouster and its openness to accept Morsi’s and Islamist rule over Egypt created distrust of Washington among the military and supporters of the old regime. Furthermore, the US’ suspension of Egypt’s foreign military aid after Sisi seized power represents a nadir in its relationship with the US. Nevertheless, these bilateral stresses did not shift the balance of power in the region and were a constant across regimes and US administrations. During this tumultuous period, structural signals have been unclear. Because of Egypt’s internal disorder, responding to external threats, such as Iran, has not been the priority. Despite the rhetoric, Egypt has not taken any strident military actions to counter Iran. Egypt has also been extremely hesitant to play a role in conflicts that do not affect its border security.51 Some suggest that Saudi Arabia and the UAE had hoped Egypt would contribute more militarily than it has.52 The combined causal impact of structural variables and of domestic, intervening variables explain Egypt’s aborted shifts in its foreign policy. Structural factors shape the broad parameters of Egyptian foreign policy in a few ways. First, Egypt’s location, or its geography, meant that it was far away from its regional competitors, which lacked the power projection capabilities to threaten directly. Geography does play a role in facilitating the relationship with the US because of Egypt’s control of the Suez Canal. Second, Washington’s cordial relationship with senior military leaders may have constrained any radical shifts in foreign policy. Third, the flow of ideas, particularly the contagion from the Arab Spring, directly affected domestic politics in Egypt by helping to facilitate social upheaval and regime change. The tenure of Morsi shows that domestic political processes constrain the ability of elites to undertake strategic adjustment in their foreign policy. As the change in regime ideology under Morsi showed, the military (as well as the structural factor mentioned previously) constrained his ability to shift Egypt’s foreign policy drastically. Had Morsi stayed in power longer, it is unlikely he would have been able to make major changes to Egyptian foreign policy given the political and economic power of the military as a domestic political institution, as well as the demands of Egypt’s primary ally, the US.

Conclusion Neoclassical realism represents an important theoretical development. It is uniquely suited to explaining the foreign policy dynamics of a region like the Middle East, where states face intense threats from both within and without. As our case studies indicate, neoclassical realism provides the theoretical leverage to explain why domestic political factors were more significant in determining Egyptian foreign policy since 2011, whereas they were important but less salient in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The more permissive security environment that Egypt faced during this period allowed the Morsi government to tailor Egyptian foreign policy to its religious and coalition interests – to the extent that the military, as a domestic constraint, allowed – and the Sisi government to conduct foreign policy with domestic stability as its primary focus. In contrast, the more restrictive security environments that Iran and Saudi Arabia faced meant that internal factors – such as ideology, domestic politics, and the preferences of individual leaders – were still important but less salient than in the Egyptian case. This represents a significant improvement on existing approaches to analyzing foreign policy in the region that either privilege domestic pressures or regional dynamics, or contend that both internal and external constraints matter without providing clear guidance as to when and how these constraints shape policy.

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Looking ahead, neoclassical realism suggests that the foreign policies of key regional states are likely to be shaped by a number of international and regional trends and challenges that could alter the nature of the strategic environments Middle Eastern states face. Most importantly, the nature of great power engagement in the region will be of pivotal importance. Currently, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia have the US as a strategic supporter, which provides them with some degree of security in a turbulent region. They are also no doubt pleased with the tough stance that the Trump administration is taking toward their primary strategic rival, Iran. With the Trump administration talking down its overseas commitments and calling for an “America First” strategy, however, Cairo and Riyadh may feel more insecure and thus face more restrictive environments in the future, which would diminish the impact of domestic politics on their foreign policies. At the same time, a US disengagement from the region might free Iran’s hand to increase its influence in the region. A related consideration is the role that Russia plays in the region. Russia has inserted itself as a key broker in the Syrian civil war, which means it has also developed an important relationship with Iran through this conflict and the negotiations over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( JCPOA).53 Russia is also playing an important role in the Libyan civil war.54 If Moscow extends its influence within the region as Washington retreats, that change has the potential to disrupt the patterns of regional relations considerably. A final consideration that should affect the region in the coming years is state fragility (e.g., Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain) and sectarianism, and the opportunities they create for relatively strong states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, and space for them to penetrate and expand. Iran, in particular, has become highly skilled at exploiting state fragility and sectarianism through its support for non-state actors throughout the region. This strategy allows it to compensate for its relatively weak conventional army and its absence of reliable allies. Looking far ahead, this implies that a trend of state strengthening in the region – as unlikely as it is for the foreseeable future – would reverse some of these Iranian gains.

Notes 1 See F. Gregory Gause III, “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 4 (2011): 81–90. 2 There were, of course, some notable exceptions. See, for example, Stephen Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998); Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 3 See, for example, Mehran Kamrava, ed. Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2014); Sean Yom and Gregory Gause, “Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (2012): 74–88; the special issue of Mediterranean Politics 21, no. 1 (2016): 1–204; Project on Middle East Political Science, “Reflections Five Years After the Uprisings,” POMEPS Studies 18 (2016); Project on Middle East Political Science, “The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State,” POMEPS Studies 11 (2015). 4 Marc Lynch, ed. The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015). 5 See Project on Middle East Political Science, “International Relations and a Changing Middle East,” POMEPS Studies 16 (2015). 6 On the intervention in Libya, see Christopher Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013); on Syria, see Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). On the localization of conflicts, see Marc Lynch, The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2016).

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Thomas Juneau et al. 7 F. Gregory Gause III, Beyond Sectarianism: The New Middle East Cold War, Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper 11 (2014): 3. 8 Morten Valbjorn and Andre Bank, “The New Arab Cold War: Rediscovering the Arab Dimension of Middle East Regional Politics,” Review of International Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 3–24. 9 Bassel Salloukh, “The Arab Uprisings and the Geopolitics of the Middle East,” International Spectator 48, no. 2 (2013): 32–46; Geneive Abdo, The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 10 For an important work on the role of outside powers in the Lebanon case, see Basel F. Salloukh and Rex Brynen, Persistent Permeability: Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (London: Ashgate, 2004). 11 Thomas Juneau, Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Simon Mabon, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Power and Rivalry in the Middle East (New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 12 Lawrence Rubin, “Islam, Domestic Politics, and International Relations,” International Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2011): 159–166. 13 Lawrence Rubin, Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 14 Curtis Ryan, “Regime Security and Shifting Alliances in the Middle East,” in Project on Middle East Political Science, “International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East,” POMEPS Studies 16 (2015). 15 F. Gregory Gause III, “Ideologies, Alignments, and Underbalancing in the New Middle East Cold War,” PS: Political Science and Politics 50, no. 3 (2017): 674. See also F. Gregory Gause III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 16 This section draws from Norrin M. Ripsman, Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, and Steven E. Lobell, Neoclassical Realism, the State and Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016). On the levels of analysis problem, see David Dessler, “What’s at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?” International Organization 43, no. 3 (1989): 441–473; Jennifer Sterling-Folker, “Realist Environment, Liberal Process, and Domestic-Level Variables,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1997): 1–25. 17 Joseph M. Parent and Sebastian Rosato, “Balancing in Neorealism,” International Security 40, no. 2 (2015): 51–86. 18 Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ’Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 19 Norrin M. Ripsman, Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, and Steven E. Lobell, Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Gideon Rose, “Review: Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, no. 1 (1998): 144–172. 20 Ripsman, Taliaferro, and Lobell, Neoclassical Realist Theory. On foreign policy autonomy, see Norrin M. Ripsman, Peacemaking By Democracies: The Effect of State Autonomy on the Post-World-War Settlements (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002). 21 Mohamed Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (New York, NY: Quadrangle, 1975), 20; Hani Shukrallah, “Political Crisis/Conflict in Post-1967 Egypt,” in Charles Tripp and Roger Owen, eds. Egypt Under Mubarak (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), 70; and Michael N. Barnett and Jack S. Levy, “Domestic Sources of Alliances and Alignments: The Case of Egypt, 1962–73,” International Organization 45, no. 3 ( June 1991): 369–395 at 387–389. 22 For more detail on these debates, see the other chapters in this volume. 23 Mohammed Ayoob, “Inequality and Theorizing in International Relations: The Case for Subaltern Realism,” International Studies Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 27–48. Also, see Ayoob’s chapter in this volume. 24 Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no. 2 ( January 1991): 233–256. 25 Arthur A. Stein and Steven E. Lobell, “Geostructuralism and International Politics: The End of the Cold War and the Regionalization of International Security,” in David Lake and Patrick Morgan, eds. Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 101–122. 26 Kristen P. Williams, Steven E. Lobell, and Neal G. Jesse, eds. Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons: Why Secondary States Support, Follow, or Challenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 27 Ripsman, Taliaferro, and Lobell, Neoclassical Realist Theory, chaps. 2–4.

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Neoclassical realism 28 The Gulf sub-system is potentially tripolar, but it has not been since 2003 when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was knocked out of the equation by the American-led invasion. It has been bipolar by default since then, intensifying structural pressures steering Iran and Saudi Arabia to compete with each other. The weakening of Egypt and Syria at the broader regional level since 2011 has further intensified these pressures. 29 Thomas Juneau, “US Power in the Middle East: Not Declining,” Middle East Policy 21, no. 2 (2014): 40–52. 30 Ripsman, Taliaferro, and Lobell, Neoclassical Realist Theory, 41. 31 See Mehran Kamrava, ed. International Politics of the Persian Gulf (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011), especially chapters by Fred Lawson, F. Gregory Gause III, and Mehran Kamrava. 32 Toby Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring that Wasn’t (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 33 Gause, “Ideologies, Alignments, and Underbalancing,” 674; Mark Haas, “Ideological Polarity and Balancing in Great Power Politics,” Security Studies 23, no. 4 (2014): 715–753. 34 MBS became deputy crown prince soon after his father, Salman, became King upon the death of Abdallah. MBS became Crown Prince in 2017 after he removed his cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, from the position. 35 Mark Mazetti and Ben Hubbard, “Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition,” The New York Times, 15 October 2016. 36 “After a Year of Boldness, Saudi Arabia Is in Retreat,” The Economist, 10 December 2016. 37 Thomas Juneau, “Iran’s Policy Towards the Houthis in Yemen: A Limited Return on a Modest Investment,” International Affairs 92, no. 3 (2016): 647–663. 38 Juneau, Squandered Opportunity, 85–92. 39 Lawrence Rubin, A Typology of Soft Powers in Middle East Politics. Dubai Initiative Working Paper 5 (2010): 1–20. 40 Jeremy Sharp, “Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations,” Congressional Research Service, (updated) 24 March 2017. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33003.pdf, accessed 10 September 2017. (Found in summary) 41 Ibid., 1. 42 Rubin, Islam in the Balance, 26. 43 Abdel Moneim Said Aly, “Post-Revolution Egyptian Foreign Policy,” Brandeis Crown Center Middle Brief November 2014, No. 86. www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/meb/MEB86.pdf, accessed 10 September 2017. 44 Nida al-Mughrabi, “Egypt Floods Gaza Tunnels to Cut Palestinian Lifeline,” Reuters, 13 February 2013. www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-egypt-tunnels-idUSBRE91C0RF20130213, accessed 10 September 2017. 45 CNN wire staff, “Egypt and Morsy Proved ‘pivotal’ in Gaza Cease-Fire Talks,” 22 November 2012. www.cnn.com/2012/11/20/world/meast/egypt-gaza-morsy/index.html, accessed 10 September 2017. 46 Ernesto Londono, “Visit by Egypt’s Morsi to Iran Reflects Foreign Policy Shift,” The Washington Post, 22 August 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/visit-by-egypts-morsi-to-iranreflects-foreign-policy-shift/2012/08/27/4baf4b3a-f060–11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_story.html?utm_ term=.f64ad27d988a, accessed 10 September 2017. 47 Kareem Fahim and Mayy El-Sheikh, “Ahmadinejad Visits Egypt, Signals Realignment,” The New York Times, 5 February 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/irans-president-visitsegypt-in-sign-of-thaw.html, accessed 10 September 2017. 48 Tom Perry and Yasmine Saleh, “Iran’s Ahmadinejad Kissed and Scolded in Egypt,” Reuters, 5 February 2013. www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-iran-idUSBRE9140EK20130205, accessed 10 September 2017. 49 Marwa Awad, “Qatar Says to Invest $18 Billion in Egyptian Economy,” Reuters, 6 September 2012. www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-qatar-investment-idUSBRE8850YK20120906, accessed 10 September 2017. 50 Angul McDowell and Lin Nouiehed, “Saudi King Sets Aside Frustrations with Egypt for State Visit,” Reuters, 5 April 2016. www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-egypt/saudi-king-sets-aside-frustrationswith-egypt-for-state-visit-idUSKCN0X212M, accessed September, 10, 2017. 51 An example of a foreign military action is Egypt’s involvement in Libya: Patrick Kingsley, Chris Stephens, and Dan Roberts, “UAE and Egypt Behind Bombing Raids Against Libyan Militias, Say US

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Thomas Juneau et al. Officials,” The Guardian, 26 August 2014. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/26/united-arabemirates-bombing-raids-libyan-militias, accessed 7 September 2017. 52 Hussein Ibish, “Egypt and Saudi Arabia: No Divorce Pending in a ‘dysfunctional’ Marriage,” The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, 19 January 2017. www.agsiw.org/egypt-saudi-arabia-nodivorce-pending-dysfunctional-marriage/, accessed 10 September 2017; www.agsiw.org/egypt-saudiarabia-no-divorce-pending-dysfunctional-marriage/, accessed 10 September 2017. 53 Anna Borshchevskaya, “Russia’s Cooperation on the Iran Deal Is No Favor to Washington,” Policy Watch, 2646, 7 July 2016. www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/russias-cooperation-onthe-iran-deal-is-no-favor-to-washington, accessed 25 September 2017. 54 Jared Malsin, “U.S.-Made Airplanes Deployed in Libya’s Civil War, in Defiance of U.N.,” Time, 8 May 2017. http://time.com/4746914/libya-civil-war-airplanes-haftar-uae, accessed 22 September 2017.

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3 WHAT CONSTRUCTIVISM? Vendulka Kubálková

In the troubled world of the twenty-first century, with a need for a change on an ­unprecedented – indeed, epochal – scale, globally and regionally, everywhere, also in areas such as the Middle East, who would not want to be a constructivist? Throughout its history, constructivist thought was always radical, in its many versions indeed revolutionary, with a long, distinguished but variegated lineage.1 Referred to in different fields of inquiry also as “constructionism”, constructivism was noted in the discipline of IR2 only since the late 1980s, introduced there by Nicholas Onuf ’s in his 1989 book World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations. However, and quite amazingly, by 1998 constructivism has become the newest, formally recognized mainstream approach in the discipline of IR in the US, as the third of the three US IR mainstream approaches alongside neorealism and neoliberalism.3 And the meteoritic rise has not stopped there: according to a survey by US-based research group TRIP, more than 50% of scholars and students of IR from countries other than the US said they are constructivists or use a constructivist approach.4 In the US this newly minted mainstream constructivist approach has become popular very quickly, but here too there is a major change: what happens in the US IR discipline has much broader consequences; the discipline of IR does not exist only as it did some hundred years ago only in two countries,5 the US and the UK:6 IR is now a globalized discipline. According to the TRIP, in 2014 IR as a field of study existed in 32 countries and nine languages, and a mere three years later, in 2017, the TRIP World Faculty Survey found IR in 40 countries on six continents. It seems to be amazing since it was after all only in 1977 that Stanley Hoffmann had called IR “an American Social Science” serving primarily as a legitimizing tool for American foreign policy, dominated by scholars from the US, much of its content devoted to understanding the world from the “American point of view”. The ontology and the epistemology of the discipline, according to Hoffmann, were all American, demonstrably Eurocentric, America-centered.7 Or, is it despite globalization the same? IR is taught in a large number of some estimated 5,000 tertiary outfits existing in the US, dwarfing studies of IR anywhere on the planet.8 In the globalized IR, the US contingent continues to dominate the worldwide study of IR with its largest and best-funded academic community and the dominant journals. There is a worldwide market for textbooks in English, and the production of texts has become a major export industry,9 advancing the globalization of IR. In the US, IR is in many regards institutionally 23

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unique: IR is a subfield of Political Science alongside many other subfields: Comparative Politics, American Government, Local Government, and Area/Regional Studies, including Middle East Studies (MES).10 These are all co-joined by philosophical postulates embedded within a single way of understanding their topics, i.e., positivism. Thus, the official version of mainstream constructivism is by definition positivist, although the first versions of constructivism in IR were decidedly not. Critical IR scholars (and they, too, are regarded as constructivists) watch the globalization of IR and a spread of US IR approaches as an important part of the ‘global knowledge governance’, ‘knowledge production and diffusion across borders, inextricably linked to universities’, building inter-elite consensus on global standards.11 The critical constructivist argument is that how knowledge is constructed plays a major role in the construction of the world. As a response to such concerns, there is a growing body of literature advocating the search for and recognition of “non-Western” approaches in which post-colonial studies now play an important role. So far, many authors report, it has been difficult to shed the Western categories no matter how hard they are being rearticulated: they are a lens through which the world has learned to view itself, through models and concepts presented as objective, universally valid, but in fact, so it is argued, developed in and for the “West”.12 Constructivism, obviously drawing primarily on its US IR version, is now popping up everywhere, including in the Middle East Studies: it has been referred to in analyses of terrorism or the Arab Spring by authors hailing not only from the US. Constructivism figures in a subtitle of a well-received 2017 book by Louis Gordon and Ian Oxnevad, Middle East Politics for the New Millennium: A Constructivist Approach (which cites out of many constructivist works only Alexander Wendt, the main US IR mainstream constructivist). What does this “turn to constructivism” mean? Is it some metamorphosis of how we study IR? Is it a pretext simply to ignore IR? Or, has the word constructivism acquired some new meaning, or rather, has it lost any meaning to become no more than a quasi Zeitgeist, a cry for help, an expression of the helplessness of the troubled world?

About this chapter The task assigned by the editor of this volume to this chapter is to address ‘the relevance to the Middle East region of the constructivist international relations theory and its potential ability to offer a useful set of tools to make sense of regional dynamics. . . . The Middle East region has attracted significant scholarly interest, but International Relations theory was rarely used as a tool to understand events, or not with much success’. This chapter is not an attempt at a constructivist analysis of the Middle East. It is not an overview of all constructivisms. Since Nicholas Onuf first introduced constructivism into the IR discipline in 1989, many important constructivist works of different forms followed: the overview of all of them is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a good selection of them is listed in the bibliography. Left out from our concerns here, for instance, are the “norm constructivists”,13 with their emphasis on norms, the norms’ lifecycles, their diffusion as well as “norm entrepreneurs”, belonging more to comparative politics than to IR. So are other forms and variations of constructivism, such as realist constructivism, pragmatic constructivism, etc. The chapter focuses on the two very different forms of constructivism, one positivist and the other nonpositivist, and how one won and the other lost. To understand what was involved, we go to the questions of ontology, epistemology, and methodology of IR. We go over the IR various divisions, its vicissitudes, but most importantly the IR philosophical underpinning, which prevent it from addressing many issues central to the Middle East. In conferences, symposia, 24

What constructivism?

panel discussions on the pages of professional scholarly journals, it is acknowledged that the IR discipline is going through a crisis of relevance. The American Review of Political Science, for example, published an article asking whether the IR, which in the US is a subfield of Political Science, should be “dropped” as a subfield.14 Many contributors to the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations, for example, seem to agree that the IR discipline should change, should become pluralist.15 None of these debates, however, show any concern for the relevance of such an important region as the Middle East, much less whether religion, so important as it is, matters or not. The chapter proceeds under several headings: 1 2 3 4

The international politics and foreign policy analysis split – leaving out regional studies The tale of two constructivisms: Onuf and Wendt An excursion to the “IR philosophy101”: how Wendt’s constructivism became the mainstream approach and what was lost Towards post-secular constructivism?

For brevity’s sake, there are several illustrations allowing us to simplify an otherwise complicated argument – particularly in part 3 of this chapter (Table 3.1, 3.2, Figure 3.1 and Table 3.3) and in part 4 (Figure 3.2). At the end of the chapter, there is an Appendix showing at a glance differences between positivist and nonpositivist/constructivist positions in regard to some selected topics. All of this is presented in order not to have to reiterate arguments made many times on previous occasions.16

International politics and foreign policy analysis split – leaving out regional studies For a variety of reasons,17 the US IR discipline split since the 1950s into two parts, international politics and foreign policy analysis – a distinction which Andrea Teti refers to as a binary separation of “theoretical/universal as against empirical, particular” with a relation between them historically strained and limiting the relevance of IR theories to MES.18 This is a distinction between general IR theories as against regional studies, that is to say, the systemic study of International Politics (IP) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). The IR theorists draw with broad brushstrokes on their large theoretical canvas with no attention to the detail such as regional studies need to handle. With the introduction of structural realism/neorealism by Kenneth Waltz in 1979, which dominated US IR for a quarter of a century, this division has been particularly obvious. International Politics has explained the dynamics of IR from the material structure, the uneven distribution of capabilities across functionally same units, states, with the assumption that states, regions are interchangeable, and will respond in the same way to the material structure, which was the main, indeed sufficient, independent explanatory variable. FPA would handle the details.19 The way the IR discipline has been set up, whomever would want to be a constructivist would want to do no more than break out of the determinism that says that states have to behave in a certain way depending on their position in the “structure”. From this perspective, the structure acts as a set of constraints on the actions of any state. That’s in a nutshell how constructivism found its way to IR. The two most prominent constructivists whom we discuss here still think along the lines of the distinction of the International Politics vs. Foreign Policy Analysis, although there are major differences between them. Both Alexander Wendt, the most popular mainstream constructivist, 25

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and Nicholas Onuf, who introduced the term constructivism to IR, make it no secret that they are not interested in the “events”, or “data”, only in “the big picture”. Neither of them addresses in their theories any particular region or issue, no matter how important, emphasizing that their task is to “provide a big picture”. The best-known positivist mainstream constructivist Alexander Wendt says: My work is entirely theoretical. I treat what I know about real-world politics as a source of interesting problems for both me and my students, although I am relatively skeptical about using the “real world” as data against which to test theory. Sometimes it can be useful to test theories if it answers a specific question to which we don’t already at least implicitly know the answer, but I’m not sure we’ve learned as much about the world by testing our theories all the time, as some people seem to think. 20 And Nicholas Onuf confirms the same attitude. ‘Events’, he says, ‘have never inspired me’. And he continues, I am not very much interested in events – either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what’s happening in the world at any given moment. Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events – how often I find them glued to one news source or another. Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious they should be. Most people in the field engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in ‘cases’ or as statistically manipulated patterns. Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and training. At the same time, students also need exposure to theory – big picture thinking – and, in my view, the philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.21 However, Onuf ’s form of post-positivist constructivism did not preclude others following Onuf from trying out constructivism to any specific region or circumstances, as we will show in the following sections. Of interest to mention here too is that the most famous US IR constructivist, Alexander Wendt, has essentially abandoned his constructivism to move on beyond it to possibly its exact opposite, quantum mechanics, so fashionable nowadays, and use it as the explanatory framework for international relations.22 Wendt proposes that consciousness and social life – so important to constructivism – are, in fact, a macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon sharing with natural sciences the quantum foundations. Visionary or revolutionary as it has been referred to and may well be, a major concern will be how to do quantum social science empirically, how useful for the Middle East, for example, will be concepts such as “wave-function collapse” that initiates “temporal symmetry breaking” as experienced in “entanglement” with others?

The tale of two constructivisms: of Nicholas Onuf and Alexander Wendt Constructivism was first introduced into the IR discipline by Nicholas Onuf in his 1989 book World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations. (Wendt’s first constructivist sortie came later, his 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” and his main book, now regarded by his colleagues as a canonical book published in 1999, Social Theory of International Politics.) Around Onuf ’s version of constructivism, there formed at the two neighboring universities in Miami where Onuf lived between 1994 and 2005 a “Miami Theory Group”. In an effort to simplify and make accessible Onuf ’s oeuvre the Miami Theory Group 26

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produced a number of volumes in a series called after its first volume,“International Relations in a Constructed World”. 23 The series was praised as ‘an outstanding and comprehensive series on constructivism’.24 Onuf ’s World of Our Making was not an easy read. In fact, the Miami Theory Group asked him to write a simpler piece, which he called “Constructivism: User’s Manual”,25 his most cited piece. World of Our Making is for scholars. The “User’s Manual” is for anybody – or so we thought. Onuf ’s constructivism was new, radical, and as far as IR, revolutionary: it was post-positivist, and unlike positivism it did not ignore the language and put the language in the forefront; it was non-state-centric, it focused on people, real people, not artificially created entities. It drew on hitherto-unexplored tradition in IR: philosophy of language. Philosophy of language explores the relationship between language and reality and the nature of meaning. Thus, constructivist theories of language are connected to the revolutionary idea claiming that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through “speech acts”, as revolutionary a discovery as for physics was the discovery that measurement itself could change measured reality. Speech act theory was developed by J. L. Austin, although other previous thinkers have had similar ideas. Onuf called his constructivism Rule Oriented, but some of us preferred to call it more simply linguistic constructivism, or simply taking a linguistic turn. When constructivism became of interest in IR, Onuf ’s constructivism was called radical or thick – as against Wendt’s conventional or thin. Onuf ’s ideas are very infectious once one grasps them. They open a different view of the social world: not just IR but social relations since they all are part of Onuf ’s grand project of social theory, of which IR is just a (very important) slice. It is completely different from the standard positivist view of the world. To begin with, in positivism language is only a passive tool “reporting”, a one-way street, not affecting that which is reported, language is not “constructing”. Teaching it and using in research was very different from the IR political science routine: there we taught the search for variables, both dependent and independent, looking for the patterns of their relations to explain, predict, and verify hypotheses. Only that counted as a theory; only that was a legitimate academic pursuit in IR. The Miami Theory Group tried to develop Onuf ’s ideas on many topics, though not on the Middle East, except for a chapter on Islam by a University of Miami PhD graduate, Nizar Messari, now the dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Other than that, and of particular interest here, there is an unpublished doctoral dissertation of the late Xiao Feng on constructivism and the Chinese language, exploring the differences in and comparison of meaning of Chinese as a non-Indo-European language with Indo-European languages, something begging to be explored for other nonIndo-­European languages also in the Middle East. There was also my own effort to explain Gorbachev’s new thinking, and the lessons from the post-communist Eastern Europe for Cuba as a case of a change of ideas, change of rules in any “regime change”. Departing well beyond what secular Onuf would undertake, I tried to explain religion in a piece called “Towards International Political Theology”.26 On reflection, Onuf went too far by repeatedly arguing that IR discipline was a discipline without a subject, about nothing,27 and proposed to comprehend IR inside a much broader field, social theory, which could not be popular since it represented an existential threat to IR as an autonomous discipline. In an academic popularity quest, and particularly due to the disciplinary politics, a very different form of constructivism popularized by Alexander Wendt overshadowed Onuf ’s constructivism. Wendt’s constructivism became very quickly elevated to the mainstream status and 27

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Onuf ’s constructivism “vanished”. In terms of its non-state-centric cast (it is a social theory), its attention to language (it is based on the linguistic turn) and even to religion, there might be found some insights of use to the students of MES, to which we will return. The mainstream form of constructivism is associated with the work of Alexander Wendt, most importantly his famous 1992 article, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”, and his 1999 book, Social Theory of International Politics. The latter is a response to the reigning structural realism’s “canonical” text of Kenneth Waltz in 1979, Theory of International Politics. That it was intended as a response was made clear even in Wendt’s choice of a title for his book. He used Waltz’s title but prefixed it with the adjective “Social”, thus Social Theory of International Politics. Wendt’s book also soon became a canonical text.28 Wendt’s work came with several strikingly memorable lines/catchphrases, which no PR agency could improve on. They are now on the lips of all IR graduate students, certainly in the US: ‘Anarchy is what states make of it’, ‘States are people, too’, ‘ideas, identities matter’. (Onuf ’s only catchphrase might be “world of our making” and “speaking is doing” and “co-construction”). Wendt’s lines alone would seem to convey a radical break from the standard IR approaches, in fact, their repudiation: a possibility to change anarchy? “Anarchy” (i.e., an absence of any authority above sovereign states) as an organizational principle of the system of states, which is axiomatically postulated to exist both in “the real world” and in all IR theories. “Anarchy” as a defining feature of the IR discipline separates IR from other fields of political science, thus justifying the existence of IR as a separate field; the reference to “states” as “making anarchy” would seem to upgrade states downgraded in structural realism, where they were capable of no more than uniform responses due to their position in the material structure. As noted above the study of states, their foreign policy was relegated to another field – Foreign Policy Analysis to be studied there albeit within the parameters of structural realism. There states’ “identity” was a redundant term being exogenously given from their material capability in the structure. Wendt’s lines would seem to convey a new era, a new understanding of the world, and a sharp departure from the tradition of IR discipline. The verb “make”, as in states “making”, conveys a possibility of a change lost in insistence of realist approaches on the essentially unchanging nature of international relations. No longer sounding deterministic, these soundbites convey that international relations are socially “constructed”. The implied ability to construct conjures up a promise of a new discipline of IR. Different identities of states, presumably would ipso facto lead to different theories of IR? The constructivist approach would make up for the discipline’s neglect of ideas, and fill that void, giving a new lease on life to the IR discipline. However, Wendt’s constructivism, which now dominates the mainstream US IR to the exclusion of other forms of constructivism, has become a theory compatible with the other reigning approaches, neorealism and neoliberalism, no more than an adjunct to a neoliberal approach, the “bird of the feather”.29 It was no more than a much-needed makeover after neorealism and neoliberalism failed to explain the end of the Cold War. As the leading British IR scholar Steve Smith put it, the radical possibilities promised by social constructivism have been ‘hijacked by a mainstream’ and the dominant, now increasingly popular form of constructivism of Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein, etc. have been assigned an unthreatening role of an adjunct explanation for those things that the positivist mainstream finds difficult to explain.30 In order to explain Smith’s indictment, we have to make an excursion into a sort of an “introductory IR philosophy 101” to overview some ontological and epistemological issues.

28

What constructivism?

Only then can the process be appreciated of how constructivism became canonized. Only then a search for a different form of constructivism, which would be useful for the MES, can begin.

An excursion to the IR philosophy of 101: how Wendt’s constructivism became the mainstream approach and what was lost To summarize what is a complicated argument involving questions of ontology and epistemology, and for brevity’s sake, we illustrate the main issues surrounding the adoption and adaptation of constructivism to the US IR graphically in several figures. The range of key omissions should become clear. The explosive atmosphere of what is referred to as the IR Third Debate facilitated the arrival of constructivism into the discipline.31 Drawing on the work of continental philosophers such as postmodernist/poststructuralist Michel Foucault and critical sociologist Jürgen Habermas a number of IR postmodernist, poststructuralist, and critical theorists (including Richard Ashley, James Der Derian, David Campbell, and R.O. Walker) led the “debate”. They were collectively referred to as “posties”, and the early constructivists were indiscriminately added to them since many were anti- or post-positivists too. Until the Third Debate, nobody in US IR would discuss words such as ontology and epistemology, only methodology. Ontology and epistemology were unnecessary to mention since they were assumed as given, positivist, neopositivist. To this day, emphasis on courses in IR curricula only on methodology, teaching students methods, quantitative and qualitative and exclusion of all else, is a telltale of a positivist orientation of an IR graduate program. However, the Third Debate forced a deeper examination, not just of methodology. Until the Third Debate, there was in place a tacit injunction to “leave philosophy to philosophers”, but during the Third Debate, the can of worms of philosophical issues was burst open and not so much a debate, but a battle began. The targets, the reigning neorealists, responded with an utter shock worth quoting even today.32 On the face of it, there were many things to attack: positivism, or neopositivism, its naturalism, its conception of science, its conception of rationality. More specifically, the way Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism, aka neorealism,33 focusing only on “material” structure ignoring things “ideational”. Assailed was the rationalist assumption that the interests and identities of actors – primarily – or exclusively of states, were given, and states regarded as “interchangeable”. Thus, the role of ideas, discourse, and identities in explaining political behavior was reduced to material power. International politics was seen as essentially timeless and unchangeable – given the “nature of things”, such as human nature and the consequences of a lack of a common authority between states known as “anarchy” a result of the Peace of Westphalia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the latter also attacked as a myth, a figment of imagination. IR was all about material structure, and the human agency was lost. Structure would determine but there were no people to do “constructing”. Last but not least, it was argued that IR as a field of studies was misconceived, other forms of studying the world should be found, critical theory, historical materialism34 or social theory.35 The Third Debate, including the early constructivists, forced a deeper examination – going into the theory/philosophy of knowledge. In order to discern differences between different positions, philosophical questions were asked. To abbreviate, we contrast what was involved in Table 3.1 and Table 3.2. Table 3.1 is nearly empty, with only methodology filled in (3A), and the rest is crossed out, empty; since these remained tacit, those questions are redundant. That’s how it always was. Table 3.1 then becomes filled in. Table 3.2 read line-by-line from the top-down shows the change.36

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Vendulka Kubálková Table 3.1  Questions asked before the Third Debate and the arrival of constructivism Before the Third Debate and the arrival of constructivism, issues of ontology, theory of being, epistemology, and a theory of knowledge were in the US IR implied, assumed, “bracketed out” as given, not discussed, not taught, in Figure 3.1 crossed out. Only methodology was taught, sharing empirical-analytical methods with natural sciences, verified with unilinear causal models and methods. Scientific knowledge was connected to direct evidence by testing against direct observations. Objectivism was assumed, and quantitative analysis was emphasized. 1. Ontology: “a theory of being – what is”: “is there a ‘real’ social world out there that is independent of our knowledge of it?” 2. Epistemology: “a theory of knowledge”: what is knowable about the social world and how we know what we know. 3. Methodology: “where is my evidence”?   A Empirical-analytical methods as in natural sciences, verified with unilinear causal models and methods; scientific knowledge connected to direct evidence by testing against direct observations. (Assumes objectivism). Emphasis on quantitative analysis

Follow from the top of Table 3.2 with its now filled-in spaces. According to answers about the social world ontologically speaking, there emerged a distinction between anti-foundationalists and foundationalists, depending on whether or not those asked thought the social world was or was not dependent on our knowledge: see 1A and 1B for the answers. Epistemological issues followed from the ontological split led to the division between the rationalists on one side and the reflectivists on the other: see 2A and 2B. This distinction was institutionalized as a binary by the then ISA president R.O. Keohane in his ISA Presidential Address.37 The binary Keohane created was between rationalists and reflectivists. Rationalists (2A in Table 3.2) included realists, neorealists, liberals, neoliberals, and others, as long as they adopted the broad theoretical and ontological commitments of rational-choice theory. Reflectivism (2B in Table 3.2) referred to a range of theoretical approaches that oppose rational-choice accounts of social phenomena and, generally, positivism. Being a reflectivist in this binary was not flattering; it consigned reflectivists to a non-­ mainstream status: all reflectivist approaches were, according to Keohane, lacking a “clear program that could be employed by students of world politics”, i.e., unable to formulate and verify hypotheses, via identifying dependent and independent variables etc. A reflectivist- rationalist binary became one of the central fault-lines within the IR discipline. However, efforts were made to bring the two sides, or parts thereof, the rationalists and reflectivists, together. In “Seizing the Middle Ground”, and we draw in Table 3.2 a bridge,38 argued how constructivism can be understood in a way that builds bridges between reflectivists and rationalists, bringing one form of constructivism into the mainstream. “Scientific realism” was used to bring on par things that were not observable and those that were observable, as it is explained in Table 3.2, 2AB. Hence, 2A and 2AB became compatible. This is, however, not the entire story. The US IR discipline became besieged on yet another front: the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, the bipolar structure of the world mapped out in a great deal in the US IR discipline. The US IR discipline did not see it coming; when it happened, it was left grappling with the change, discovering that most of the cold war theories would not fit no matter how hard they might be stretched. In the 1980s, IR in the US was dominated by neorealism and neoliberalism, neither of which was well equipped to explain major 30

Table 3.2 Questions asked in the Third Debate: ontology, epistemology and methodology of US IR and the answers by constructivism(s) 1. Ontology: “a theory of being – what is” Social world The key question: “is there a “real” social world out there that is independent of our knowledge of it?” 1A If “yes” – foundationalists B If “no” – anti-foundationalists argue: argue: Social world is constructed; social and natural worlds are not analogous There is a “real social world”– “out there” existing independently of me 2. Epistemology: “a theory of knowledge”: what is knowable about the social world and how we know what we know. The key questions: “What we can know about the social world and how?”           “Can an observer identify ‘real’ or ‘objective’ relations between social phenomena?” 2A If “yes”: Rationalist-Positivists argue: through direct observation seeking causal relationships between social phenomena for explanation and prediction

2B If “no”: Reflectivists (aka Interpretivists) as against Rationalist – social phenomena are socially constructed, Rejecting the notion of a “real” world beyond our own subjectivity, for how could one observe such a world if it does not in fact exist? e.g., normative approaches, classical idealism, some list here postmodernism, post positivist constructivism 2AB If “yes, but . . .”. Scientific realists (building a “bridge” between positivists, interpretivists, or a via media – Wendt) There are some social phenomena which can be directly observed, but other relations are not directly observable – some deep social structures and social phenomena exist but can’t be directly observed; e.g., in Wendt’s constructivism, also in critical theory, in the English School, Gramsci, Marxism

3. Methodology: “where is my evidence”? 3B Methodology is not 3A Empirical-analytical methods 3AB Seeks explanation of to devise “methods” but observable phenomena, as in natural sciences, verified reconstruct the world and understanding of nonwith unilinear causal models understood as human world observable phenomena, puts and methods; scientific Seeks understanding of social more emphasis on qualitative knowledge connected to phenomena, the meanings analysis (assumes subjectivism) direct evidence by testing actions have for actors uses both (assumes objectivism against direct observations. for observables, subjectivism for (Assumes objectivism). Emphasis non-observables) on quantitative analysis

Vendulka Kubálková

REALISM

LIBERALISM

CONSTRUCTIVISM

US IR COMPETING PARADIGMS

Figure 3.1 The three-pillar US IR pantheon

ideational world-transforming shifts that were occurring in the underlying foundations of world politics. The end of the Cold War, unpredicted and unexplained, the resurgence of religion, the end of the bipolar arrangement, and uncertainty as to what will happen next, instabilities across the planet – were something the IR discipline in its existence never before experienced. The title of an article by Professor Mearsheimer in the 1990 Atlantic Monthly summarized the prevailing sentiment: “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War”.39 A solution had to be found. In Greek tragedy, deus ex machina, a mechanical device – a crane or a riser – would bring gods onto the stage to resolve the plot and conclude the play, a tragedy or a comedy. Constructivism became the solution. Not a crane but a Pantheon, a building, ironically originally meaning a temple “dedicated to all the gods” or to a “group of illustrious or notable persons or things”. The Pantheon complete with three pillars arrived on the scene, with its picture drawn in a 1998 article in Foreign Policy called “International Relations: One World, Many Theories”.40 In it, Princeton Professor Steve Walt declared constructivism to have ‘largely replaced Marxism as the pre-eminent radical perspective on international affairs’[sic] (Marxism deemed irrelevant, he claimed, now that the Soviet Union ceased to exist); or a “new form of idealism” or “idealism’s new clothes”.41 Both assessments are off the mark. Constructivism has become the third US IR pillar, next to neorealism and neoliberalism. It is a carefully vetted form of constructivism, a sort of a compromise, a bridge, and a via media, which gave a new lease on life to the US IR without compromising its foundation.42 After much theoretical haggling, building bridges, and looking for “via media” and compromises, one type of constructivism meeting the criteria in the rationalist/reflectivist binary became “canonized”, “mainstreamed”, and others “delegitimized” as a part of the “non-mainstream”. 32

What constructivism?

It is important to note that the Third Debate did not alter the views of the positivists, who continue to dominate many leading departments and journals, particularly in the US. With Wendt, the kind of constructivism emphasizing norms and identity has entered the mainstream in the US. Indeed, it is very close to the neoliberal approach, as could be seen on Table 3.3 with a comparison between neoliberal and mainstream constructivist approaches to highlight the similarities and the differences as Wendt characterized them.43 What then can we make of Wendt’s famous lines ‘anarchy is what states make of it’, ‘ideas, ideologies, identities matter’, ‘ideas not all the way down’, and ‘states are people, too?’ Alexander Wendt’s constructivism is strictly state-centric. It might not stretch to the multilayered reality of the Middle East with states in the context of intertwining tribal, cultural, religious loyalties, and entities. Where in all of its cultures, civilizations, religions, nongovernment organizations, many not territorially organized, fit in a strictly state-centric scheme? The existence of anarchy too as a territorial states-based organizing principle of humanity dating from the Christian reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is challenged from many quarters – postmodernist, rule-oriented constructivist, not to mention Chinese and Muslim scholars – but Wendt strictly adheres to it, except allowing some modifications based on an intersubjective agreement basis among states: but how? And to unpack another of Wendt’s vignettes, ‘States are people, too’, we discover that states are not real human beings, real kings, religious leaders, presidents, or prime ministers. The leap from the identity of an individual to corporal identity such as that of a state is at best difficult. To Wendt, states are abstractions of mysterious provenance, which Mika Luoma-Aho has linked to the lineage of the Christian Corpus Mysticum,44 something Wendt may not be aware of. Perhaps most importantly, as the leading IR scholar Jack Snyder confirmed, in Wendt’s constructivism there is no place for religion.45 In an authoritative study, Jack Snyder agrees that the most likely IR approach to deal with religion, i.e., constructivism, ignores it: Wendt does not have anything much to say about religion. Constructivist international relations theory would seem to provide friendly terrain for the role of religion in international politics because of its emphasis on ideas, norms, identity and culture. Although no single work captures constructivism’s full intellectual diversity, Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics comes closest to being the canonical text. Neither the term religion nor any specific religions appear in the book’s index. This is not accidental. While Wendt notes that the domestic-level cultures that units bring to the international situation matter for the development of international-level culture, his main interest lies in the way units create international-level “cultures of anarchy” through their interactions. His prominent version of constructivist theory is therefore not the most religion friendly statement of this approach.46 There are other issues: in a region, which for centuries has been a theater of fierce contestations of religions and cultures and ethnicities, with languages playing an important role, Wendt’s actors “do not speak” any particular language(s), they simply do not speak at all, as Zehfuss pointed out.47 They “interact” or “signal”, in the process learning from each other’s reactions and altering their identity – to wit, the concrete example Wendt uses in his most famous article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”. In the article, Wendt likens Reagan and Gorbachev to two hostile aliens, Alter and Ego. The aliens meet for the first time. Through a series of gestures, they determine whether the other is hostile or friendly. Each exercises an element of choice, and thus agency, in how this relationship develops. Choice is not unlimited. Alter and Ego coexist in a social relationship, and their 33

Mainstream constructivism

Neoliberal institutionalism

Both positivist: insisting on empirical testing of propositions/ hypotheses against facts

Both approaches: the same mechanism of functional/ institutional efficiency and causal logic

Rationalist-behavioral, exogenously Yes, maximizing Independent variables Both approaches: interests or given by the anarchical (bipolar but limited role, placed norms, ideas, utility cold war) material structure within rationalist learning, identity which has causal power: USSR framework as road formation and as a superpower restricted by the maps and preferences transformation cold war and has to rationally in cost-benefit (inconsistent follow these external dictates in calculations with neoliberal its fp, BUT some institutional premises – identity Impact of ideas on modifications are possible (by “new objective reality not should be thinking”) studied held constant) institutions, interests Identity and interests are endogenous Yes, once Not pure rationalist Constructivism interests are to interaction, i.e., dependent (cost-benefit adds: agency, established variable, i.e., not given, and calculations but process, social (through therefore can be transformed reflectivist, taking ideas structure, interacceptance Anarchy, cold war, structure are and understandings subjectivity of ideas and socially constructed by collective into account in changed meanings. Thus states can relation to interests that identity) transform competition into influence decisioncooperation: “new thinking” could Consider also making and choice of psychological change the superpower game action insights Ideas regarded as capable of changing reality

States’ identity and interests

Explanation of social change

Ideas are

States’ rationality

New topics and key words

Domestic politics

Not studied

Framework

Language

Table 3.3 A summary of a comparison between mainstream constructivism and neoliberal institutionalism Mainstream constructivism is positivist; that is, it shares the main features and requirements of a commitment to knowledge as science. It adds to this approach its own vocabulary, however. It talks, that is, of “agency”, “process”, “social structure” and most importantly “inter-subjectivity” used routinely in sociology. States – which are personified and regarded as people – agree inter-subjectively that they can override objective reality. What is agreed inter-subjectively becomes a “social fact”. The domestic politics of states are eliminated. States are depicted as quasi-persons. Thus, anything going on in the minds of real people becomes hors de combat. Language is not studied. “Agents” interact, but they do not talk. One day, therefore, they may decide that “anarchy” – the foundation stone of IR – need not exist any more. This is the implication of Wendt’s famous quote that “anarchy is what states make of it”. Since real people are not part of this form of constructivism, as one of his mainstream colleagues freely admits, it cannot handle anything to do with faith or religion in any innovative way; indeed, it cannot handle it at all.49

Not studied

What constructivism?

choices are partially dependent on the responses of the other. The space for choice is thus regarded as “mutually constituted”. They do not speak; they signal to each other, dropping their weapons and advancing gingerly towards each other and, in the learning process, slowly changing their identities and interactively agreeing to end the Cold War!48 It is worth repeating that this scenario comes from Wendt’s most celebrated article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”. In retrospect and in hindsight, it is difficult to accept that the Cold War was ended by Gorbachev and Reagan in the roles of Alter and Ego. It is even more difficult to imagine a scenario of the key figures of today’s multilayered complex Middle East acting along the lines of multiple “aliens” that Wendt imagined.

Towards post-secular constructivism? Why go to this length only to conclude that the mainstream constructivism of the US IR does not provide any better tools than any other earlier IR theoretical approaches and that the binary, as Teti calls it, between the particularistic/regional studies and universalist/IR theory has not closed, and IR theories continue to be of limited use? A lengthy explanation of this simple conclusion has been nonetheless in order. IR is now a globalized discipline, and its approaches, particularly with fancy attractive soundbites spread far and wide and might mislead, may be taken at face value, ignoring what baggage they carry. Or, that they mean nothing. Figure 3.2, which is obviously very schematic and simplistic, should be read as a culmination and a development of the two previous figures, Table 3.1 and Table 3.2, cumulatively peeling

Ontology: “a theory of being – what is” - in the “real world” two types Foundational

Anti-foundational monism

dualism there are two substances Cartesian substance dualism of mind and body

a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world, the doctrine that only one supreme being exists.

MODERN PROJECT

modernization, secularization positivism rationalism

From ontology flows a particular type of epistemology

Figure 3.2 Secular and post-secular N.B. Descartes himself claimed he received his visions from God.

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post-structural, post-modernist

Vendulka Kubálková

off bit-by-bit layers to get deeper into the roots of our understanding of the world. Figure 3.2 shows the sharp contrast of the modern and the “pre-modern”, which was assumed to secularize but did not: it shows separately religions and secular theories. The Middle East, one of the most crucial and volatile parts of the world, the complexity of which defies amateurs, presents a profound challenge to IR theory. Only the scholars of MES who can straddle the complexity of secular and post-secular can develop their form of constructivism, which would make sense of the mosaic of specific features embedded in the Middle East but nonexistent in the West, from which the US IR hails. The existing IR theories are simply not equipped to handle the region’s specific characteristics, the importance of religion, tradition, ethnicity, languages, and the complex web of power struggles embroiling the region. IR discipline has reinforced its neglect of religion and, more importantly, its inability to incorporate religion into its theories. To positivists, religion stands in sharp contrast to reason and is not to be taken seriously. Unsurprisingly, religious and secular thought starts from different ontologies – all religions share a distinction between ordinary and transcendental reality. Religious thinkers see human experience as only one (small) dimension of a multidimensional reality that is ordered by design but is not knowable to sensory perception. Creating gods is a necessary feature of the human search for identity and transcendence. A believer must follow the dictates of conscience that are beyond the realm of “rational choice”.50 This chapter’s hope has been to encourage the Middle East experts to develop constructivism that is more fitting for the region. For that purpose, the chapter has “exhumed” bits and pieces of the original post-positivist linguistic constructivism (see the Appendix) – now long ago overshadowed by the US IR mainstream and buried under its rubble. Linguistic constructivism is not a theory; it is a framework and a re-reading of the world, and parts of it might be useful. It does not formulate testable hypotheses, theories which explain and predict; it offers insights. It is not state-centric; it focuses on people, their agency, the source of which can be not just material or social (Onuf ) but also transcendental or immanent.51 Linguistic constructivism analyzes languages, speech acts, rules, co-constitution of institutions, and agents, and it can handle religion. And these might be some of the features of what could develop into post-secular constructivism. The post-secular constructivism would not/could not be exclusively state-centric: not just because of large numbers of non-state entities, but because of the radical revival of Islam challenging the Westphalian system of states. To secular IR theory, religion eludes the territorial boundaries that are characteristic of state-centric IR. The ultimate goal of radical revivalists is the Islamization of the international political order, replacing the secular state with an Islamic system under God’s rule. Non-state groups claim authority for a people who are often not selfcontained within a state, but they also look to state institutions to promote Islam. Support for Islamic movements is statist and transnational at the same time. Incorporating religion into IR theories, particularly in the US, argues Ann Tickner,52 has been built on ontological foundations of a system of states rather than on social relations among people, an ontology that complicates the incorporation of religion into its theories. There too, linguistic constructivism may be useful since it is primarily dealing with people. The constructivism for the Middle East would have to be post-secular; in the Middle East, one must understand the faith to understand the region’s politics, unlike in the West where religion is greatly marginalized as a result of the Enlightenment period and the experience of the Renaissance. The mainstream constructivists are prepared to consider ideas, including religious ideas, and changing identities and state interests but – and that is crucial – subordinate them to the rational-choice theory. Religion is of concern only if it can be treated as

36

What constructivism?

a “dependent variable”, “soft power”,53 nongovernment organization to assist in the peace process or development or can be connected to an explicitly faith-based state (as in Iran and Saudi Arabia). In Figure 3.2, anti-foundational postmodernists/poststructuralists are marked in a box: there is nothing very religious about them. They, too, like the “modern” secular IR scholars, equally reject/ignore religion. However, the “post” critics of the mainstream have succeeded in unsettling their mainstream colleagues, challenging the IR mainstream’s insistence on the strict ‘use of evidence to adjudicate between claims’, and assigning theories which are not ‘testable’ to the ‘margin of the field’ because it is ‘impossible to evaluate their research program’.54 Tickner quotes approvingly Kubálková’s claim that it is not possible to study religion adequately in a positivist framework.55 Tickner, also arguing for a linguistic constructivist approach, agrees that there is a profound difference between positivist and religious understandings of the world. Indeed, positivists’ reliance on logic and the positive evidence of the senses are seeking non-religious foundations for secure knowledge. Kubálková, whom Tickner quotes, advocates the shift to an insider’s perspective in the search for knowledge. Such a perspective, characteristic of hermeneutic and post-positivist thought more generally, has religious antecedents in romanticism which originated in the late eighteenth century as a revolt against modern rationalism. Kubálková states56 that, up until 200 years ago, religions provided the dominant mode of thought, and many schools of thought, such as phenomenology and hermeneutics, have their roots in religion. The stress on identity, the inside/outside distinction, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, all characteristic of post-positivist thought, has always been central to religious thought and practice. Thus, post-positivist approaches to knowledge cumulation are likely to be better at understanding religious worldviews. Tickner points out that theories built upon the epistemological foundations of secular rationalism are not particularly useful for understanding religious motivations or worldviews. The social sciences, which have emerged out of Enlightenment thinking, are themselves part of the secular rationalist thinking. Religious worldviews may be better understood using methodologies that are reflexive and dialogical, not those based on instrumental rationality. While linguistic constructivism has also been secular, Kubálková claims that approaching human action through linguistic constructivism – as a world created through human action and the meaning that humans give to their actions – is the methodological path by which we can incorporate religion into international relations. The post-secular constructivism would have to be based on a linguistic turn, taking seriously religions, spoken and written, as well as secular discourses of the power politics, all of these complex layers permeating the Middle East. Apart from the insights, the constructivist ideas are to this day not without important supporters. In her “Taking Religion Seriously”, Ann Tickner quoted earlier, for example, supports linguistic constructivism and the effort to build an “International Political Theology” of Kubálková, agreeing that the linguistic constructivism makes sense regarding understanding religion. Fabio Petito also supports a linguistic turn: if treated seriously, language opens the door of the discipline of IR to the dialogue among cultures, religions, and civilizations, which is otherwise essentially ignored in the IR discipline, blocked by the positivist treatment of language as a mere passive tool, with which the mainstream constructivist Wendt agrees. Only with language or a linguistic turn, claims Petito, is it possible for an academic reflection on the dialogue of civilizations to replace Western unilateralism, universalism, and monologue, a dialogue so important for the future of the world order.57

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Vendulka Kubálková

Tickner is paying the greatest possible compliment: Kubálková and Morgenthau both claim that fundamental questions about human existence cannot be answered in modern secular “scientific” terms. Both are searching for a way to understand human motivations, which, as they suggest, are not adequately explainable in instrumental rationalist terms. Both are helpfully suggestive of some ways in which we need to rethink contemporary knowledge production to better understand religious worldviews.58 The title of this chapter raises the question of what type of constructivism might help us to understand the complexity of the Middle East today. I have proposed a new form, “post-secular constructivism” to embrace a range of dimensions not common in the constructivism’s versions we have seen so far. There continues to be a worldwide “constructivist turn,” and any constructivist has to accept that - historically - constructivism meets with a great deal of resistance. Not necessarily because of inconsistencies or gaps in the argument, but because of the “justifiable suspicion that constructivism intends to undermine too large a part of the traditional view of the world.” 59 The gravity of the problems of the Middle East requires that we accept the challenge and try.

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Appendix 3.1 Positivism and linguistic constructivism compared: part 1

Mainstream IR approaches

Linguistic Constructivism

The ontological status of the “world” including IR

The world is “out there” to be found – we “mirror” the world either as detached, objective observers,

By the use of the verb “to construct” is conveyed that (real) people are “constructing” reality.

The ontological status of people

or as people who are observed Constructivism maintains that construction is inseparable from the effects of that which and whose behavior (devoid is being constructed, i.e., social relations of meaning or intentionality) “construct” or co-constitute people as can be reified into objects. social beings. Their ideas and values are excluded or it is traced back to material factors

The ontological Language is a neutral medium, status of language representing reality. It is studied only for its propositional content

The objective of research

The world is not “out there” to be found and stepping out of it to study the world is only provisional. The social world is made up of people (agents, which means competent participants) who in turn are themselves made. Not all of the world is social; only that part that is constructed by people.

– people as agents observing structures refers Seeking regularities in the to agents acting in institutions and the world by establishing laws consequences (intended and unintended) (connecting events) so that of their actions through their application the world’s events, for example, can be explained, predicted, controlled

39

Vendulka Kubálková

What is studied

Mainstream IR approaches

Linguistic Constructivism

Events, their description and explanation

– people as agents acting in institutions (institutions refers to agents, rules and the consequences of acts) making rules, i.e., as influencing others and as making other people do something

Language has its own ontological status. The status of realist Regarded as facts: note, It is one of the universals of the human these can be overridden assumptions species (together with reasoning). Speech by Wendt’s version of (state-centrism acts and deeds and the patterns they make constructivism, which anarchy, states’ equal rules; rules in turn make agents, regards “social facts” as being objectives and that is, competent participants who wield based on inter-subjective behavior) influence and make the world. Rules are interaction and as such as assertive, directive and commisive equal to facts 1  finding rules and to identify them as one of the three generic categories of rule, 2  identifying agents, institutions and structures 3  explaining their content, e.g., “realism”, “liberalism”, which is then studied and analyzed as the content of the three categories of rules Rules-based relations and institutions • The identification of agents/structures/ rules • (IR consists mainly of commisive rules, studying their interface with the rules of other states) • rules, their main categories, mixes, support for them by other rules, in consciousness and culture • the study of rules’ content Regarded as the content of rules as issued by agents in order to make the world a certain way

40

Appendix 3.2 Positivism and linguistic constructivism compared: part 2

International Relations as a Discipline Focus

Linguistic Constructivism (C)

C. is a social theory that claims to deal with the most International Relations as a general principles on which societies, indeed humanity discipline claims that the topic of and not only IR, are based. C. is part of a tradition international relations is its sole that includes Max Weber, Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons, focus. IR is one of the disciplines Anthony Giddens, and scholars who predated (and/or in the Western academy now rejected) the specialization of Western academe into fragmented into multiple disciplines more narrow academic disciplines each characterized by its insistence on a particular disciplinary focus. IR is not ignored: it is regarded as a particularly US IR has not one but there are important category of social relations. So much so that three mainstream approaches. The it is seen as deserving a separate inquiry. International singularity of the focus on IR of relations are at the apex of multiple social relations of mainstream approaches, and on great complexity. IR constitutes only one set of these neorealism in particular, means relations. It is impossible to tear them out of their that they can devise elegant, simple broader context, however. C. addresses all the issues that (truncated) theories of world affairs, the IR discipline does although it always places them uncomplicated by the need to add within a broader context other types of relations

Axioms The mainstream approaches are structuralist, i.e., they emphasize the importance of structure as defined by uneven distribution of capabilities across functionally like units The state is the main actor. It is a “territorially based political unit characterized by decision-making and enforcement machinery, that is legally sovereign (i.e., it does not

Constructivism is not structuralist. It regards agents (and rules) as being of equal importance: structure to C. is any stable pattern of rules, institutions and unintended consequences as observed by other agents (the preferred label for a structure is social arrangement) Constructivism unwraps the reified package of positivism and presents states consistently as social relations It sees sovereignty as a fiction and agents as always limited by rules that give other agents the opportunity to act. It sees states in IR a society of relatively self-contained societies constituted by different rules

41

Vendulka Kubálková

International Relations as a Discipline

Linguistic Constructivism (C)

recognize any higher or lower unit of equal or superior strength) and . . . [it] exists in a world of other similarly composed units”. IR deals with relations of states in a unique environment of anarchy. States as like units means they are unitary and uniform: sovereignty and survival are fundamental parts of a state’s identity. Any other possible “identity” is deemed irrelevant. International relations and domestic politics are fundamentally different, and domestic politics is relegated to other disciplines, e.g., domestic politics in other subfields of political science.

Anarchy is a condition of rule but C disagrees with the anarchy as characterization of the states system, calling it heteronomy, pattern of unintended consequences (rules are not directly responsible for agents’ conduct), international anarchy too is a social relation States are different according to the prevailing types of rules. International relations and domestic relations are mutually connected, made out of the same cloth (although made up of very different categories of rules).The parallel existence of states, then, as they interact and coexist brings them into a form of relationship where again they either “speak” to each other in commisive terms, which oblige both the one speaking and the one hearing, or because amongst them none can agree to become an agent and rule, they understand their relationship as at best based on the unintended consequences of the input of all the participants. The difference in the functioning of the state on the one hand and relation of many states on the other is in the type of rules and in the type of agency that is seen to exist there.

Notes 1 According to the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Vico, who was regarded as the forefather of constructivism, the natural world is made by God, but the historical world is made by Man. Men make their history. Karl Marx agreed. Immanuel Kant argued that we can obtain knowledge about the world, but it will always be subjective knowledge in the sense that it is filtered through human consciousness. Max Weber emphasized that the social world (i.e., the world of human interaction) is fundamentally different from the natural world of physical phenomena. Human beings rely on “understanding” of each other’s actions and assigning “meaning” to them. To comprehend human interaction, we cannot merely describe it in the way we describe physical phenomena; we need a different kind of interpretive understanding, or verstehen. Max Weber concluded that ‘subjective understanding is the specific characteristic of sociological knowledge’. Emile Durkheim used a distinction between the brute and social – i.e., man-made, socially agreed upon, facts. These are just several relevant glimpses back. The term constructivism was around for a long time throughout the twentieth century, education, psychology, and sociology, before it was imported to the US IR discipline. In education, constructivism was developed into an extensive enterprise based on experiential learning. The key analyst here was Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Peter Berger’s 1966 The Social Construction of Reality, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, was in 1998 declared by the International Sociological Association as the fifth-most important sociological book of the twentieth century. As the main source of his inspiration, Berger refers to Alfred Schutz using “construction” (in German Aufbau) in his 1932 Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, literally in English “meaningful construction of the social world,” published in English as Phenomenology of the Social World. John Searle, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein used construction and constructivism, albeit in a very different way. Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration is referred to by most today’s IR constructivists. 2 The standard usage is that International Relations (IR) is capitalized when it refers to the IR discipline (also International Studies) and in lowercase when it refers to the world events. Stanley Hoffmann referred to this distinction as the “state of the world” in contrast to the “state of the discipline”, i.e., the “world” and the “discipline”. Stanley Hoffmann, “An American Social Science: International Relations”, Daedalus 106, no. 3, Volume I (Summer 1977): 41–60.

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What constructivism? 3 Stephen M. Walt, “International Relations: One World, Many Theories”, Foreign Policy 110 (1998): 29–46. 4 Ayşe Zarakol, “TRIPping Constructivism,” PS, January 2017. 5 The author of this chapter bears witness to the fact that IR was not studied, recognized as anything to be studied across the then vast Soviet bloc and China: she was the first-ever student who went from the then Czechoslovak Socialist Republic to study IR in the UK. IR were comprehended in historical materialism, an epiphenomenon of more important forces, there called class, later by R.W. Cox and historical materialists in the West styled as “social forces”. 6 Australians used to regard themselves as a part of the UK contingent, eventually to become the English School (in many views a precursor of constructivism). 7 Hoffmann, “An American Social Science,”. 8 Approximate figures of US, UK, Australian, and Canadian universities establishments convey the sense of the enormity of the number of the US universities and their IR faculty: 4,400 in the US, 319 in the UK, 228 in Canada, and 106 in Australia. 9 “Books at Amazon” department offers over 80 texts, and that is just those with the words “International Relations” or the “world” or “globalization” in their title. They are all in English by British, Australian, and American authors. Many IR textbooks appear in many editions. Interestingly, the preface of the second edition of one of the texts published by a leading publishing house proclaims that only after its first edition that particular textbook was adopted in courses in 35 countries. Many texts come out in many editions and with many IT enhancements and dedicated websites. Some textbooks are available online to download free of charge. 10 https://www.apsanet.org/RESOURCES/For-Students; www.isanet.org/ISA/About-ISA/History. Accessed on 31 December 2018. 11 James H. Mittelman, “Global Knowledge Governance: A Critical Perspective”, ISA Annual convention, New Orleans, 2015, 2–3. 12 The tradition of looking for non-US approaches started by Stanley Hoffmann has been taken up by, e.g., S. Smith ed., International Relations: British and American Perspectives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), K.J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 1985); Smith Steve “The Discipline of International Relations: Still an American Social Science?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2, no. 3 (October 2000): 374–402; Amitav Acharaya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies”, International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 647–659; A. Acharya and Barry Buzan, “Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory? An Introduction,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 7, no. 3 (2007): 287–312. Pinar Bilgin, “Looking for ‘the International’ beyond the West”, Third World Quarterly 31, no. 5 (2010); Jonas Hagman and Thomas Biersteker, “Counter-Mapping the Discipline: The Archipelago of Western International Relations Teaching”, in Andreas Gofas et al., eds. The Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations (London, New York, NY: Sage, 2018); Messari Nizar, Arlene B. Tickner and L.H.M. Ling, Theorizing International Politics from the Global South: A World of Difference (Worlding Beyond the West) (London: Routledge, 2018); Peters, Ingo and Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar, eds. Globalizing International Relations: Scholarship Amidst Divides and Diversity (Berlin: Springer, 2016). 13 For example, Martha Finnemore, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996); Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”, International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 887–917. 14 Dan Reiter, “Should We Leave Behind the Subfield of International Relations?” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 481–499. 15 For example, Timothy Dunne, Hansen Lene, and Colin Wight, “The End of International Relations Theory?” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 405–425. Patrick T. Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “International Theory in a Post-Paradigmatic Era: From Substantive Wagers to Scientific Ontologies,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 543–565. Justin Rosenberg, “International Relations in the Prison of Political Science,” International Relations (2016). Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Out of One P, into Another? Comments on Rosenberg”, International Relations 31, no. 1 (2017). Lake David A., “Theory Is Dead, Long Live Theory: The End of the Great Debates and the Rise of Eclecticism in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 567–587. Thakur Vineet, “Reflections on Dead Theory in International Relations,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 140–145.

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Vendulka Kubálková 16 Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), Nicholas Onuf, “Constructivism: A User’s Manual,” in Kubálková et al., eds. International Relations in a Constructed World (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); V. Kubálková, Nicholas Onuf and Paul Kowert, eds. International Relations in a Constructed World (M.E. Sharpe, 1998). 17 Vendulka Kubálková, “Foreign Policy, International Politics, and Constructivism,” in V. Kubálková, ed. Foreign Policy in a Constructed World (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 15. 18 Andrea Teti, “Bridging the Gap: IR, Middle East Studies and the Disciplinary Politics of the Area Studies Controversy,” European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007): 117–145. 19 Kubalkova, “Foreign Policy,”. 20 Alexander Wendt, “Alexander Wendt on UFO’s, Black Swans and Constructivist International Relations,” Theory Talk #3, Friday, 25 April 2008. 21 Nicholas Onuf, “Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivism, Turns in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making,” Theory Talk #70, Thursday, 2 July 2015. 22 Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science Unifying Physical and Social Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 23 “International Relations in a Constructed World”, ME Sharpe series edited by Vendulka Kubálková, Nicholas Onuf, and Ralph Pettman included the following volumes: V. Kubálková, Onuf, and Kowert, International Relations in a Constructed World (1998); Ralph Pettman, Commonsense Constructivism, or Making of World Affairs (2000); Karin M. Fierke and Knud Erik Jorgensen Jorgensen, International Relations: The Next Generation (1999); V. Kubálková, ed., Foreign Policy in a Constructed World (2001); Daniel M. Green, ed., Constructivism and Comparative Politics (2002); Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, Andrew J. Nathan, and Kavita Philip, eds., Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (2003); Francois Debrix, ed., Language, Agency and Politics in a Constructed World (2003); Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (2007). 24 Cristol, Jonathan, “Constructivism, International Relations,” 2011. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ page/internationalrelations. 25 Onuf, “Constructivism: A User’s Manual,”. 26 For example, Vendulka Kubálková, “Towards an International Political Theology”, Millennium, Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 657–704; V. Kubálková, “Towards an International Political Theology,” in F. Petito and P. Hatzopoulos, eds., Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 27 Onuf, World of Our Making; Onuf, Theory Talk #70. 28 Jack Snyder, ed. Religion and International Relations Theory (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14. 29 J. Sterling-Folker, “Competing Paradigms or Birds of a Feather? Constructivism and Neoliberal Institutionalism Compared,” International Studies Quarterly 44 (2000): 97–119. 30 Steve Smith, “Foreign Policy Is What States Make of It: Social Construction and International Relations Theory,” in Vendulka Kubálková, ed. Foreign Policy in a Constructed World (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). 31 Lapid Yosef, “The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era,” International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1989): 235–254. 32 “reading [Ashley’s] essay is like entering a maze. I never know quite where I am or how to get out . . . some of [his] comments bewilder me . . . I often do not recognize myself in what he writes about me.” (Waltz in Robert O. Keohane, ed. Neorealism and Its Critics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), 337). Gilpin continues (p. 301): [we – the neorealists] “are all card-carrying members of insidious and rather dangerous conspiracy that, like Socrates, is indoctrinating the youth (read graduate students) in false and dangerous ways of thinking . . . the Kafkaesque prosecutor . . . exposed us for the evil that it is. The heinous and common crime of these perverts of the next generation of graduate students in international relations is “neorealism”, the felony . . . one does not know whether to be bemused or downright scandalized. . . . I am not sure precisely what it is that I and my fellow defendants have actually committed. . . . Unfortunately [the publisher] failed to send an English translation with the original text. . . . I have no idea what it means. It is this needless jargon, this assault on the language, that gives us social scientists a bad name . . . the opacity of the prose, crimes and serious misdemeanor. (ibid.) 33 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 34 Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium 10, no. 2 (1981).

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What constructivism? 35 Onuf, World of Our Making. 36 I base these figures on the works of Jonathan Grix, “Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Research,” Politics 22, no. 3 (2002): 175–186; Gregory J. Moore, “Research Methods for International Relations Studies: Assembling an Effective Toolkit,” ISA 48th Annual Convention, Hilton Chicago; 2007; David Marsh and Paul Furlong, “A Skin, not a Sweater: Ontology and Epistemology in Political Science,” in D. Marsh and P. Furlong, eds. Theory and Methods in Political Science, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 37 Robert O. Keohane, “International Institutions: Two Approaches,” International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 4 (December 1988): 379–396. 38 Emmanuel Adler, “Constructivism and International Relations,” in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons, eds. Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage, 2001), 95–118; Jeffrey T. Checkel, “International Norms and Domestic Politics: Bridging the Rationalist- Constructivist Divide,” European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997): 473–495; James D. Fearon and A. Wendt, “Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Skeptical View,” in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons, eds. Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage), 52–72. 39 Mearsheimer‘s article opens with the following summary: “The conditions that have made for decades of peace in the West are fast disappearing, as Europe prepares to return to the multi-polar system that, between 1648 and 1945, bred one destructive conflict after another”. 40 Walt, “International Relations,” 38. 41 Jack Snyder, “One World, Rival Theories,” Foreign Policy, November/December, 2004. 42 Wendt’s “compromise” was that neither agent nor system are preferable, but rather what he (or Anthony Giddens originally) called “structuration” is what really occurs between agent and structure. But structures shape (or even determine) agents, and these same agents shape (or even determine) structures, and so on and so on. In a moment in time, one might argue that one or the other (agent or structure) is acting as an independent variable, and the other way around, but in the end, agents and structures are not independent of each other as it regards IR, but mutually constitute each other over time. However, the line of reasoning is consistent with positivism/rationalism. 43 Sterling-Folker, “Competing Paradigms,” 44 Mika Luoma-Aho,“International Relations and the Secularisation of Theological Concepts: A Symbolic Reading,” Perspectives Review of International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2009); Mika Luoma-Aho, God and International Relations: Christian Theology and World Politics (New York, NY: Bloomsberry Publishing, 2011). 45 Snyder, Religion and International Relations Theory. 46 Snyder, Religion and International Relations, 14. 47 Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 48 Wendt, “Anarchy,” 49 Wendt, “Anarchy,” 50 Vendulka Kubálková, “Towards an International Political Theology,” in F. Petito and P. Hatzopoulos, eds. Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 51 See Otto Rudolph, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, 2010[1957]) 1926 (Kissinger Legacy Reprints) ­Paperback – 10 September 2010. 52 J. Ann Tickner, “On Taking Religious Worldviews Seriously,” to be presented at the Robert Keohane festschrift conference, Princeton University, February 2005, p. 16; published also as Tickner, J. Ann, “On Taking Religious Worldviews Seriously,” in A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). 53 Vendulka Kubálková, “The Turn to Religion in International Relations,” E-IR, 3 December 2013. www.e-ir.info/2013/12/03/the-turn-to-religion-in-international-relations-theory/. 54 Robert Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 173–174. 55 Ann Tickner, “Taking Religion Seriously,” 19. 56 Ibid., 22. 57 Fabio Petito, “Imperial Monologue or Civilizational Dialogue?” in Michális S. Michael and Fabio Petito, eds. Civilizational Dialogue and World Order ((Berlin: Springer, 2009). 58 Tickner, “Taking Religion Seriously,” 22. 59 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “An introduction to radical constructivism”, in Paul Watzlawick (ed.), The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? Contributions to Constructivism (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1984), p. 31.

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4 HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY AND MIDDLE EAST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Ewan Stein

The Middle East is often considered synonymous with endemic conflict. Alongside its apparent imperviousness to democratization, the persistence of conflict at both the inter-state and sub-state level has contributed to the view that the region is somehow ‘exceptional’. Some have attributed the region’s exceptional propensity to authoritarianism and conflict to the overweening influence of religious and ethnic identities and their incongruency with modernity. Others have posited that enduring legacies of colonialism and dependency have given rise to authoritarian nationalist states, on the one hand, and anti-Western opposition movements, on the other. Although this chapter does not claim that the Middle East is exceptional, it nevertheless asserts that the persistence of authoritarianism and international conflict are closely linked and, indeed, mutually reinforcing. It focuses on clarifying the evolving stances of Egypt and Iran toward overarching regional conflicts. The positions of each state have undergone considerable transformation, and in opposite directions, since the 1970s. Until 1973, Egypt led opposition to US imperialism and Zionism, as well as to pro-Western monarchies in the Gulf. With the signing of the peace treaty, however, Egypt withdrew from the Arab-Israeli conflict and aligned with the US and Saudi Arabia. Iran, conversely, was America’s staunchest ally and enjoyed good relations with Israel and Arab monarchies until 1979. Just as Egypt was making peace with former foes, revolutionary Iran assumed leadership of a regional struggle against US imperialism, Zionism, and “reactionary” Arab regimes. Explanations for regional antagonisms, as well as for periods of reconciliation, have suffered from a narrow definition of the state and ill-defined conception of society. Although a number of more critical approaches to IR and foreign policy analysis have addressed this bias by foregrounding societal movements, they have not incorporated their findings into more general theorization about how inter-state, state-society, and inter-societal relationships combine to shape regional order in the Middle East. As Fred Halliday enjoined, while historical sociological insights have been central to a range of Middle East studies academic concerns, the challenge is to apply these insights, from international relations and Middle East studies alike, to the history of the region, to its states and ideologies and to the particular combination of political, security and socio-economic forces that constitute the Middle East as a whole.1

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This chapter argues that this ‘combination’ consists, on the one hand, in regimes’ mutual interests in reproducing particular configurations of power and, on the other, in the role societal movements play both in supporting and opposing them in this endeavor. In elaborating this argument, I propose that some so-called non-state actors be recognized as belonging to the ideological state apparatuses of states. It first reviews existing attempts from a range of theoretical perspectives to conceptualize Middle Eastern order, before sketching out an alternative historical sociology of regional order.

Realist approaches For structural realists, regional order is a function of the balance of power. The realist paradigm encompasses a range of approaches, but all agree that ‘power is the currency of international politics’. Structural (or neo-) realism, the dominant approach during, and substantially shaped by, the Cold War, ‘ignore[s] cultural differences among states as well as differences in regime type, mainly because the international system creates the same basic incentives for all great powers’. Structural realists maintain that power is essential to the maintenance of security, and thus states (which are the only theoretically significant actors in international affairs) balance or bandwagon with other states in order to preserve their security.2 Failure to balance, or bandwagon, against power results in insecurity and conflict. Although in its ‘pure’ form structural realism ignores unit-level variable factors, the canonical realist treatment of the Middle East is that of Stephen Walt, who uses the region as a case study to modify balance of power theory. To explain what seemed to be anomalous alignments, Walt introduces an epistemological dimension to Waltz’s classic statement of structural realism in claiming that states do not balance power per se, but rather balance against threats. Walt takes ideology, perceptions, and rhetoric seriously as constituents of regional order. Gause, however, notes that in Walt’s work, ‘the process by which states identify threats is undetermined. There seems to be an assumption that the source of greatest threat is obvious to decision-makers (and analysts)’.3 Walt does not ask why some states threaten others, how states identify threats against which to balance, or why they choose particular allies with which to align. Gause views ‘ideological and political threats’ to the legitimacy of regimes as the most salient drivers of regional conflict. Another realist author who has adapted neorealism to the realities of international behavior is Thomas Juneau. Although dealing with the foreign policy of one state, rather than regional dynamics as a whole, Juneau’s work provides an explanation for why one pivotal state, Iran, has consistently cleaved to an antagonistic vision of regional order. In a neoclassical realist study, Juneau sets out to explain why Iran “squandered” the opportunity after 9/11 to pursue a potentially profitable rapprochement with the US and end its “suboptimal” foreign policy. Juneau explains the anomaly in terms of Iran’s “unconventional” power resources, path dependency, and the strength of internal factions. Juneau develops his argument via a more nuanced conception of a state’s power resources than a straightforward neorealist accounting of material assets would allow. Iran’s power resources, for Juneau, are weighted toward ‘unconventional and intangible elements: asymmetric military capabilities, the appeal of Iran’s rejectionist model, and alliances with nonstate actors’.4 The sources of Iranian power thus encourage foreign policies geared toward burnishing its image as a confrontational state and maintaining influence over armed groups that can “spoil” US designs for the region. They form the basis of Iran’s power as an international actor: ‘The appeal of Iran’s rejectionism’, for example, ‘contributes to its power because it provides Tehran with opportunities to constrain the margin of maneuver of Arab states aligned with the United States’.5 Iran’s

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power, and hence ability to disrupt US-dominated order in the Middle East, is thus heavily dependent on alliances and societal perceptions external to the state. This interpretation of the role that identity plays in influencing other states and society mirrors that of constructivism, discussed as follows, which also views ideational factors as elements of a state’s external power projection. Juneau explains Iran’s “irrational” strategy of pursuing regional insecurity rather than material gain through realignment with the US as a result of path dependency. Specifically, the dominance of a conservative faction in Iranian politics has imbued domestic institutions with revisionist identity. This constrains policy: by limiting the terms of political debate or through the built-in biases of these institutions and their shaping of policy-making. This contributes to explaining the pathdependency of the causal chain: identity has a strong causal effect that is difficult to reorient. Importantly, when this policy is suboptimal, the resulting negative consequences are perpetuated.6 The concept of path dependency enables neoclassical realist theory to explain the persistence of “sub-optimal” antagonistic foreign policy, or policy that would seem to jeopardize the state’s interests. Realists, as Reus-Smit has noted, judge states’ interest in maximizing power to be unproblematic.7 If their policies do not respond to the need to maximize power in the international system, then reasons for this failing must be found within the workings or composition of the state, which neoclassical realism provides. While Iran is no different from other regional powers in seeking to shape its regional environment in line with its interests, those interests are undefined. Another variant of realism that incorporates a domestic dimension to explain alignments is Stephen David’s theory of omnibalancing. Under this rubric, regimes in the Third World conclude alignments with other states in order to balance both internal and external threats. One of the examples David uses to illustrate his theory is Sadat’s alignment with the US: The Egyptian military, workers, intellectuals, and students had grown increasingly impatient with the continuing stalemate and sought to force the Egyptian leader to regain the territories from Israel. For Sadat to deal with the threats from the Egyptian groups, he had to force Israel to return the lands it had seized.8 Omnibalancing, however, adopts a largely episodic perspective on the provenance of domestic threats, which makes it difficult to discern any historical patterns in regional order. In the Egyptian example, David takes societal demands for the restoration of the occupied Sinai at face value, without considering the deeper political and economic grievances that drove popular protests. Nor does he consider how foreign policy was effective in ameliorating them – which, given the eruption of bread riots in 1977 and Sadat’s assassination four years later, it arguably was not. If regional order consists in multiple episodic processes of “omnibalancing”, why have palliative alignments persisted for long after the supposed internal threats have been suppressed? As Allinson has noted, the theory of omnibalancing does not explain why particular allies are chosen over others or why regimes face threats. It rather imports the ahistorical neorealist model inside the state.9

Constructivism and the English School Constructivists, as well as scholars of the English School, view conflict primarily in ideational rather than material terms, stressing the importance of international institutions and normative 48

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frameworks. Thus, for Michael Barnett, Arab politics are ‘symbolic politics’. Insecurity and conflict result from the ineffective use of symbolic power: ‘More often than not Arab leaders deployed symbolic power, not military power, to enhance their security and control each other’s foreign policies’.10 Inter-state conflict in the Middle East has thus revolved around the definition of, and congruency with, the norms that constitute regional order. In the 1950s and 1960s, states came into conflict over their congruency with the norms of “Arabism”, which manifested dissatisfaction with the international system, particularly its central institution of state sovereignty and the subjection of the region – and broader Third World – to Western imperialist domination. Although much of this conflict was ideational as opposed to material, it nevertheless “symbolically entrapped” states into pursuing apparently reckless or risky foreign policies in order to bolster their Arabist credentials. When such policies failed, as with the collapse of the UAR in 1961 and, most dramatically, the Israeli defeat of Arab militaries in 1967, Arabism’s normative force gave way to the status quo norm of sovereignty. Regional antagonisms thus arise, for constructivists, from the alleged “incongruency” between the norms of sovereignty, which reflect international system satisfaction on the part of regional actors, and those of “Arabism”, which manifest system dissatisfaction.11 For Barnett, normative forces evolve and influence policies through inter-state interactions, but are ultimately rooted in state identities, which he argues are established through domestic processes of legitimation. The rise of statist state identities reflected public disillusionment with Arabist foreign policies and enabled reorientation toward the West, including through accommodation with Israel. This dichotomous conception of regional (dis)order is mirrored in the English School of IR, which identifies binary distinctions within the ‘primary institutions’ of the region, which constitute ‘durable and recognised patterns of shared practices rooted in values held commonly by the members of inter-state societies, and embodying a mix of norms, rules and principles’.12 Primary institutions divide into “master” and “derivative” institutions. The former are global norms (such as sovereignty, diplomacy or territoriality), whereas derivative institutions reflect how these norms are “applied” at the regional level. The English School adds nuance to Barnett’s constructivist framework by stressing the historical interaction between master and derivative institutions. The latter are not necessarily diametrically opposed to the former, which opens the possibility that states may cooperate, rather than clash, over the definition of regional norms. In this vein, and drawing on the work of English School theorist Hedley Bull, Amitav Acharya develops the concept of ‘norm localisation’, which expresses the way in which global norms are adapted and framed to resonate with local cultures.13 The English School in general has been criticized for its Eurocentrism, in that the norms of global society are primary, with local agents free only to reinterpret them or reject them out of hand.14 Acharya later advanced the notion of ‘Norm subsidiarity’, which accords more agency to regional actors and ‘concerns the process whereby local actors develop new rules, offer new understandings of global rules or reaffirm global rules in the regional context’, in order to improve their position relative to global powers.15 The theory of norm subsidiarity helps explain why they might orient themselves against, and hence come into conflict with, the great powers, but it does not specify how subsidiarity serves the interests of the regimes and other actors that articulate them and struggles to explain why some regional actors develop and embrace subsidiary normative frameworks whereas others simply “localise” global ones. This is because of the constructivism that lies at the core of Acharya’s conceptual framework. Acharya’s brief discussion of norm subsidiarity in the Middle East draws on the work of Michael Barnett and equates subsidiary norms in the region with those of Arabism. In rather circular terms, he argues that “system-dissatisfied” states are more likely to promote norm subsidiarity 49

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than “system-satisfied” ones and hints that this dissatisfaction emerges not from real abuse or neglect but from unwillingness to take advantage of externally available resources: As great powers are normally expected to possess the resources to offer sufficient material incentives (including security protection and economic aid) to lure weak states into their ambit, their failure to attract the desired level of weak state representation in institutions created by them would indicate nonmaterial variables at work, including normative forces.16 System-dissatisfied states thus shun external offers of support because to accept it would violate regional normative expectations, which in turn perpetuates their dissatisfaction. The work of Barnett and Acharya thus ultimately locates the roots of inter-state conflict in the domestic sphere, via a conception of conflicting state identities that are ultimately determined at the societal level. But the mechanisms through which domestic support for statist or Arabist identities (that is, norm localization versus subsidiarity) translates into shifts in state identity and thus conflictual versus amicable foreign policies are not specified. Similar omissions are found in other constructivist IR scholarship on the Middle East. Buzan and Waever’s exposition of the Middle East as a Regional Security Complex (RSC) considers the domestic level only insofar as it produces identity conflicts. Otherwise, the Middle East RSC has produced ‘rather Westphalian-looking interests and (in)security dynamics at the regional level’, which have been ‘driven by a traditional agenda of territorial disputes, ideological competitions, power and status rivalries, and ethnic and cultural divisions’.17 In relation to the domestic level, Buzan and Waever conclude that ‘with some notable exceptions . . . domestic turbulence in the Middle East does not determine the international security agenda’. The exceptions, for them, are the Kurdish question and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the latter of which ‘is in some ways the key to the whole Middle Eastern RSC’, becoming ‘the main driving force of the antagonism between Israel and the wider Arab and Islamic worlds’. The authors note that ‘Arab nationalist, Islamist, and Zionist sentiments at the level of the “street” have generated serious domestic resistance in many states to Arab-Israeli deals’, but do not elaborate on just how this has constrained foreign policy. In arguing that ‘domestic insecurities were largely contained within the framework of the state system’,18 Buzan and Waever accept Barnett’s reading that Arabist norms have declined relative to statist ones, but they do not explain how sentiments on the ‘level of the street’ translate into the regional security agenda, or how some states, such as Egypt, have been able to disregard these sentiments and conclude deals with Israel.

The political economy of regionalism Etel Solingen’s work on regionalism offers some clues into the ways in which societal sentiments, mediated by social movements, might influence the level of conflict in a region. Solingen seeks to provide ‘explanations for decades of Middle East wars and enduring rivalries in the interArab, Arab – Israeli, and Arab – Iranian arenas; for cooperative Arab – Israeli breakthroughs in the early 1990s and reactive responses to them’.19 She argues that the predominance of inwardlooking or “statist-nationalist” coalitions in Middle East states drives regional antagonism. These coalitions have consolidated power in the region partially through rentierism, which enabled them to buy off discontent, and partially through the pursuit of antagonistic foreign policies: Their grand strategy, in its purest form, hinges wholly on the interests of state industry and ancillary inward-looking military-industrial sectors, as well as of ethnic, religious, 50

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and nationalist groups threatened by internationalization. Regional insecurity and competition helps sustain these coalitions in power whereas rising regional cooperation has the potential of eroding their resources and undermining their objectives.20 Solingen provides a compelling picture of the interaction between coalitions’ domestic power bases, which she sees as both material and ideological, and their foreign policy interests. This adds depth to constructivist and English School accounts of regional order and does not take interests for granted as realists do. However, Solingen’s account fails to explain why antagonisms take the ideological form that they do and understates the pacific effects of internationalizing coalitions. Most importantly, Solingen’s framework does not adequately define or explain the orientation of states like Egypt, which moved from statist-nationalism to crony capitalism rather than internationalism, but which nevertheless became bastions of regional inter-state stability. Solingen notes that ‘Since Sadat’s inception of a new [economic] model. . . . Egypt never initiated war against Israel again’.21 Yet the Egyptian military remained the dominant institution within the Egyptian state and pursued a highly monopolistic domestic agenda, despite losing some ground to business interests from the 1990s.22 Although paying lip service to neoliberal values, Egypt’s political economy remained a closed shop under Sadat and Mubarak. Yet the peace with Israel has held for over four decades. Like Juneau, Solingen attributes the persistence of conflict in the Middle East, despite the economic transformations of the 1970s and 1990s, to “path dependency”. The statist-nationalist policies of the 1950s and 1960s continued to influence state behavior in subsequent decades: ‘Clearly, political forces unleashed by Nasserism and rentier economies constituted formidable barriers to change’. Solingen concludes that ‘declining oil windfalls in the 1980s denied Middle East leaders resources available erstwhile to avoid adjustment, yet path-dependent legacies burdened change. The Middle East remains the region least integrated into global trade and finance after subSaharan Africa’.23 Unfortunately, she provides little insight into how these path dependencies constrained change or why, given the failure of states to open up their economies, they have remained at (albeit cold) peace with Israel since 1973. She also homogenizes Middle Eastern states: all ruling statist-nationalist coalitions pursue externalization policies to remain in power, thus sustaining a conflictual regional order. Her framework cannot explain why Egypt withdrew from conflict with Israel in the absence of an internationalizing coalition or why Iran, which like Egypt moved from statist economics to crony capitalism, remained embroiled in it. Most importantly, society, which drove the populist models in the 1950s and 1960s, largely disappears from the explanatory picture in subsequent decades in favor of an explanation based on path dependency. A major problem with the paradigms outlined earlier in seeking to explain alignment decisions is whether states, regimes, or ruling coalitions have an interest in balancing against anything, or whether conflicts over normative frameworks actually flow from states’ interests in coercing and entrapping other states. The theory of omnibalancing, and Solingen’s reading foreign policy “externalization” accept that alignments and foreign policy may serve internal purposes, but they are either painted as episodic palliatives or uniformly applicable to all statistnationalist regimes. A second, closely related, issue is that all of these conceptions of regional order prioritize elite-level political considerations, with societal factors left ill-defined. The role of society is either bracketed as the Arab or Muslim “street”, which negatively acts to deter the pro-Israeli or pro-Western foreign policy that states would otherwise regard as “optimal”, or it is deemed to have been influential in the past, shaping political systems that have, due to path dependency, resisted change for decades. And, crucially, domestic-level conflicts and insecurities, whether in 51

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the form of societal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, civil wars, or political oppression, are neglected due to a focus on elite-level dynamics.

Critical security studies Critical security studies moves the “referent object” of security discourse from the state to society, thus providing a deeper interpretation of regional (dis)order. Walid Hazbun, for example, assesses the security concerns of societal groups like tribes and parties and highlights the role of social movements in providing security where states do not. Social movements not only helped to protect citizens against rapacious “insecurity-generating” states, but also spearheaded anti-imperialist movements, which often performed more effectively and thus gaining more legitimacy in this regard than states. The critical security agenda focuses the international relations debate on “internal” historical sociological dynamics, and links conflictual foreign policies with the influence of social movements. Thus, for Hazbun, The radical Arab-nationalist states challenged the regional influence of the Westernbacked conservative monarchies. But missing from many accounts in international relations is that regional Arab politics was also shaped by the socioeconomic changes that fostered ideological trends and social movements. “Street politics” became a force in shaping regional geopolitics. Radical nationalist and social-reformist trends mobilized the next generation, providing a support base for Egypt’s Nasser and other Arab-nationalist leaders who challenged Western-backed regimes and attempted to restructure the prevailing order.24 Hazbun’s account usefully combines history and sociology to demonstrate that “street politics”, or societal movements, need to be incorporated into the picture of IR in the Middle East. As Hazbun points out, ‘Across the region, in the eyes of many Arabs, it was nonstate actors through “resistance” movements against occupiers that came to represent successful models of political mobilization’.25 Pinar Bilgin adopts a similar society-focused approach to the question of Middle East regional security. She argues that the scholarly focus on state security reflects the concerns of the great powers and overlooks the state of insecurity in which most of the region’s inhabitants live. Bilgin, like Hazbun, takes seriously the security agendas of societal groups. Although departing from Barnett’s constructivist approach in adopting a bottom-up, as opposed to top-down, approach to regional security concerns,26 however, Bilgin shares his view that state foreign policy has been constrained by discourses of Arabism: ‘although Arab policy-makers prioritised the security of their respective states, they nevertheless found it difficult to act in total defiance of the concerns voiced by other Arab actors that were formulated in terms of Arab national security’.27 Bilgin’s conception of ‘Arab national security’ – formulated in supra-state terms and with society as the referent object – equates to Barnett’s ‘norms of Arabism’. Although providing more detail on the social movements that elaborated pan-Arab and anti-imperialist discourses, Bilgin also locates the force of these discourses on the international, as opposed to domestic, level. Thus, ‘the policy-makers of conservative Arab states were sceptical of Nasser’s articulation of a broader conception of Arab national security and felt threatened by the emphasis he put on its societal dimension’. Citing Barnett, she concludes that ‘Nasser’s interventions were not military but “symbolic”; they were designed to use the influence over Arab public opinion to shape the practices of other governments’.28 52

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Critical security studies explain how non-state actors became more “legitimate” than state ones, particularly in the context of the weakening of states that has allowed them to flourish. They also, in common here with neoclassical realism and constructivism, explore how some states continue to seek association with such movements in order to secure regional objectives. What is still missing from these critical security interventions is an explanation of how the security agendas of societal movements and those of states interrelate in ways that influence regional security dynamics as a whole. While societal security concerns are certainly of normative importance, their broader analytical significance remains unclear. In particular, the critical security research program does not answer Acharya and Juneau’s question about why some states exhibit system dissatisfaction and choose alignment with revisionist non-state actors rather than accepting more materially lucrative relationships with external powers.

Toward a historical sociology of Middle East regional order The central limitation of all of the approaches to regional conflict and security outlined here is the sharpness of the distinction they draw between state and society, on the one hand, and the state, regional, and international environment, on the other. By treating each of these four realms as ontologically distinct, the state in much IR of the Middle East scholarship is both too shallow, in that it is restricted to the ruler and his coterie, and too narrow, in that it is limited to Westphalian territoriality. Societal movements, relatedly, are considered to be either inherently oppositional to states or tools to be used by states seeking to deploy power internationally. I argue for a deepening of the concept of the state used in IR. As Hobson pointed out, the ‘state-society complex’29 came to include erstwhile independent social movements, which served as part of the state’s overall ideological apparatus,30 helping to perpetuate dependence, but producing often schizophrenic foreign or composite foreign policy orientations. I also argue for a broadening of the concept of the state. In this vein, Hoffman and Cengil argue that ‘reproductive strategies of states include, along with their foreign policy strategies, all state policies’ and ‘the Turkish state, as the locus of Turkey’s foreign-policymaking, is not treated as an exclusive unitary agent, above and beyond the reach of other social forces, domestic and international’. Similarly, Aurora Sottimano and Emile Hokayem have demonstrated the extent to which association with Hezbollah and Hamas has constituted an integral part of the structure of power in Syria, rather than simply tools for furthering foreign policy objectives.31 Other examples of work which, like the aforementioned texts, views foreign policy as a primarily internal affair, include Workman’s book on the social origins of the Iran-Iraq War and Allinson’s application of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) to Jordanian foreign policy. Workman applies insights from critical war studies to highlight the domestic motivations of ruling coalitions vis-à-vis subaltern groups in each state: ‘It was a war of two crisis-ridden societies’.32 Workman links the central assumption of realist IR, that states strive to protect and maximize their influence on the international plane, with the domestic support bases of regimes: the Ba’th regime was suddenly handed the opportunity to emerge as the dominant power in the Gulf and enhance its prestige in the Arab world. Greater regional leverage would go a long way toward stabilizing the oil revenues – revenues that were increasingly crucial for the maintenance of the repressive state.33 The repressive state, for Workman, uses foreign policy to maintain the subordination of a range of subaltern groups, including women and ethnic and sectarian minorities alongside excluded classes. Iraqi aspirations for regional domination primarily reflect the regime’s concern with the 53

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reproduction of the unequal system atop which it sits. The link between “geopolitical” dynamics and state-society relations emerges clearly in Workman’s analysis. The regime’s external dependence on oil drove its quest for “regional paramountcy”, which ‘would go a long way toward giving the Ba’th regime the necessary influence to guide regional oil policy (in OPEC decision-making bodies) in predictable and safe directions’.34 Allinson similarly links Jordan’s foreign policy to a deepened and expanded definition of the state in arguing that ‘struggles over Jordan’s external subsidy reflected more than just differences over aid but, in addition, conflicts over the way that aid structured the relationship of the state and certain social groups within it to the global capitalist system’.35 It ‘integrates social and “international” explanation rather than one being subordinate to the other’.36 These analyses of foreign policy represent a fruitful step in deepening our understanding of the drivers of regionalist projects. As single case studies, they do not systematically explore how dynamics of state formation influence broader regional patterns, but the analysis is couched in an understanding of broader regional dynamics, particularly the perseverance of relatively stable antagonistic blocs.

Egypt and Iran: sociologies of antagonistic regionalism With these broadened and deepened definitions of the state in mind, we can proceed to outline a historical sociology of regional order in the Middle East. The following section sketches the foreign policy trajectories of Egypt and Iran, states that “switched sides” in the enduring regional schism between revisionist and status quo powers. I suggest that the role of societal sentiments in driving both revisionist and status quo agendas must be understood in relation to the social and institutional bases of regimes and domestic oppositions, on the one hand, and how external sources of material support encourage or threaten internal power hierarchies, on the other. During the Nasser era, which most of the scholars discussed previously see as pivotal to the formation of Arabist revisionism, or a societal-based Arab security order, populist foreign policies, combined with socialist economic programs and a state ideological infrastructure (especially the Arab Socialist Union), neutralized internal threats to regimes from within and beyond the state. Anti-imperalist and anti-Zionist foreign policies in the name of an oppressed Arab people, whether of the “symbolic” or militarized variety, served the important purpose of externalizing domestic grievances to discredit internal regime rivals and pre-empt societal challenges from the left and the right. Externalization increased in importance as perceptions of domestic inclusivity and security declined. Iran during this period, conversely, was less active in promoting revisionist regional discourses due to its ability to count on substantial US security guarantees (demonstrated in Iran in 1953) and a relatively quiescent, if not wholly supportive, religious establishment. Iranian foreign policy until 1979 instead focused on demonstrating indispensability to the US as a guarantor of regional stability in the face of alleged communist threats in Iran, the Gulf, and the wider Middle East. Egypt’s “externalising” foreign policy was primarily directed inward, toward Egyptian society, whereas Iran’s was directed outward, toward the US. During the 1970s, many states in the region faced increased domestic unrest linked to the declining capacity of welfare-based economies and the rise of crony capitalism. In Iran, the Shah’s regime faced resistance in 1963 and, on a much larger scale, from 1977, expressing ‘a deep, underlying frustration with the economic problems and the political system present in Iran, a frustration increased rather than offset by the rapid and chaotic socio-economic changes of the previous decade and a half ’.37 Frustration was compounded by mass resentment against the Shah’s pro-US orientation, which the regime was structurally unable to alter. The revolution of 54

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1979, it followed, targeted the corruption and despotism of the Shah, as well as American influence in Iran and the region. Post-revolutionary Iran relied on anti-imperialist foreign policy, particularly following the end of the war with Iraq in 1988, to externalize social opposition in a way the Shah’s state, tethered as it was to the US, could not. Similar pressures from below afflicted the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat. Frustration with economic inequality and exclusionary politics was not new in Egypt, but due to the economic restructuring and accompanying geopolitical realignment toward the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, dissatisfaction could also no longer be externalized through revisionist foreign policy agendas. Although the 1973 war was spun as a victory, bread riots shook Egypt in reaction to neoliberal reforms in 1977, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated by jihadists who objected to the peace treaty with Israel. Social unrest was quelled by re-instating the withdrawn subsidies on bread, increased repression of the left and, importantly, the reinvigoration of political Islam as an arm of the state. Egypt’s migration from the revisionist to the pro-US camp has, as we have seen, been explained in terms of omnibalancing (Egypt needed the Sinai back and only the US could provide it), the consolidation of statist identity after the discrediting of Arabism from 1967, or the influence of a new more internationalizing ruling coalition. On closer scrutiny, none of these explanations is convincing. Egypt remained a staunch US ally long after the recovery of the Sinai. The societal movement that replaced Nasserism was political Islam, which was no less revisionist in its foreign policy discourse. And the state of Sadat and Mubarak was, if anything, more economically monopolistic and nationalistic than was that of Nasser. Egypt’s ability to durably change its structural position within the regional order can be explained by adopting a deeper definition of the state. Although proscribed, the Muslim Brotherhood played a key role in absorbing societal opposition to the effects of economic restructuring, political exclusion, and dissatisfaction with Egypt’s abandonment of revisionist foreign policy. The Sadat and Mubarak regimes encouraged the reformation of the Muslim Brotherhood and encouraged the growth of Salafism as instruments of foreign policy externalization. These movements should thus be considered as part of the Egyptian state ideological apparatus. In the case of Egypt, what are normally considered societal movements, in promoting revisionist security discourses, helped to underpin an otherwise brittle authoritarian regime aligned with the US. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood was useful to the state precisely because of its system dissatisfaction. Islamist discourse opposed US imperialist domination and the presence of the state of Israel, and attracted mass support in large part on that basis. It was instrumental in preventing the coalescence of more “internationalizing” coalitions from within the Egyptian middle class. The Brotherhood was a pivotal norm entrepreneur within what Mandaville has termed a ‘global umma’,38 contributing in symbolic if not material terms to a host of antiWestern movements. As such, Egyptian state foreign policy was schizophrenic, contributing both to upholding a statist security order and, through its externalization, to revisionist movements that challenged it. Although upholding inter-state peace in the Levant, and helping Saudi Arabia “balance” its rivals in the Gulf, Egypt has done little to dampen regional conflicts on the societal level. Iran’s historical trajectory was, in some ways, the reverse of that of Egypt. The brittle “statist” regime of the Shah was replaced by a revisionist republic rooted in the country’s most powerful ideological institution, the clergy. Iran’s shunning of Western support in favor of sustaining a regional “axis of refusal”, has been explained in terms of path dependencies related to the dominance of a hard-line faction which imbued Iranian politics with a revisionist identity, even as the state, like Egypt, moved toward a neoliberal-inspired crony capitalist system from the 1990s.39 But Iran’s foreign policy only appears “suboptimal” and path dependent if we neglect the fact 55

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that revisionism was integral to the power structure of the Iranian state from 1979. While the Egyptian state’s absorption of the Muslim Brotherhood as part of its ideological apparatus facilitated its external material dependency and “statist” identity, and exclusion of middle-class reform movements, the Iranian state’s embeddedness in the clergy and alignment with external resistance movements like Hezbollah were essential to its survival in the face of more powerful reformist forces. Until the 1990s, the Iranian regime may have seen its alignment with Hezbollah primarily as a way of “spoiling” US interests in the region, but from the middle of that decade, with the demise of the peace process and the increasingly implacable position of the US, the revisionist alignment became an essential source of ideological power for the conservative regime in the face of threats to its dominance within the state. What has been termed “post-Islamism” emerged as a powerful force in Iranian state and society during the 1990s. The reform movement, coalescing around the presidency of Muhammad Khatami in 1997, embraced many aspects of liberal world order, statism, and democracy. It embodied a shift, in Acharya’s terms, from norm subsidiarity to norm localization, or from revisionism toward embracing the international status quo. Norm localization around post-Islamism threatened to erode the conservative faction’s hegemony by establishing relations with the US and moving Iran out of the revisionist orbit. Domestic selfpreservation imperatives of the Iranian regime spurred its alignments with Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria. The so-called Axis of Refusal can, in this sense, be viewed as part of the ideological and military apparatus of the Iranian state. The Syrian uprising thus constituted an existential threat to the Iranian regime, which has logically expended considerable effort to preserve the Asad regime. Egypt also confronted a growing internal reformist threat from the 1990s, but it was far less successful in penetrating the Egyptian state than was its Iranian counterpart. Its progress was blocked not only by the repressive policies of the Mubarak regime but also by the conservatism of the Muslim Brotherhood, the regime’s ideological auxiliary in state and society.40 The Egyptian uprising of 2011–13 originated from outside the state, targeting first the Mubarak regime and then the Muslim Brotherhood, but it won marginalized reformist sections of the latter, as well as more revolutionarily inclined Salafi actors, to its side. From the perspective of the military, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political ascent post-2011 compromised its reliability as an ideological auxiliary for the state. In suppressing the revolution and assuming control of the state, the Egyptian military liquidated its erstwhile ideological partner. Egypt’s state is now more domestically brittle, and externally dependent, than ever.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that regional conflicts persist due to states’ mutual interests in reproducing particular configurations of domestic, as much as international, power. Societal movements both within and outside of states may constitute allies as much as obstacles in this endeavor and be considered analytically to belong to the state and its foreign policy apparatus. It has reviewed a range of IR theoretical approaches to regional dynamics and concluded that a central conceptual shortcoming has been a narrow and shallow definition of the state. Historical sociology offers a clearer picture of regional conflict by bringing together state, society, regional, and international levels. The chapter briefly outlined the utility of this approach by examining the foreign policy trajectories of two pivotal states, Egypt and Iran. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood became part of the state’s ideological state apparatus, helping to externalize domestic opposition. It contributed to upholding the US security agenda in the region at the cost of helping to fuel regional and global jihadism. In Iran, Islamists constituted the conservative core of 56

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the state rather than an adjunct. The regime confronted a more organized state and civil society opposition than was the case in Egypt, one that would be greatly empowered by strengthening of links with the West. As such, alignment with regional resistance movements became integral to the structure of power in Iran.

Notes 1 Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37 n.30. 2 Timothy Dunne et al., eds. “Structural Realism,” in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 78. 3 “Balancing What? Threat Perception and Alliance Choice in the Gulf,” Security Studies 13, no. 2 (December 30 2003): 273. 4 Thomas Juneau, Squandered Opportunity Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 55. 5 Ibid., 77. 6 Ibid., 46. 7 Christian Reus-Smit, “The Idea of History and History with Ideas,” in Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson, eds. Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123 (check page). 8 Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1 January 1991): 249. 9 Jamie Allinson, The Struggle for the State in Jordan: The Social Origins of Alliances in the Middle East, Library of Middle East History ; 62 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 9–12. 10 Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2. 11 Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Politics of Identity in Middle East International Relations,” in Louise Fawcett, ed. International Relations of the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 12 Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez, “The Primary Institutions of the Middle East Regional Interstate Society,” in Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez, eds. International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 93. 13 Amitav Acharya, “How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism,” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 239–275. 14 Turan Kayaoglu, “Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory,” International Studies Review 12, no. 2 (1 June 2010): 193–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2486.2010.00928.x. 15 Amitav Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism, and Rule-­ Making in the Third World1,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1 March 2011): 96. 16 Ibid., 101. 17 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers : The Structure of International Security (Cambridge , New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 193. 18 Ibid., 194–197. 19 Etel Solingen, Comparative Regionalism: Economics and Security (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 6. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ibid., 146. 22 Robert Springborg, Egypt ((New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). 23 Solingen, Comparative Regionalism, 136. 24 Waleed Hazbun,“A History of Insecurity: From the Arab Uprisings to ISIS,” Middle East Policy 22, no. 3 (1 September 2015): 57. https://doi.org/10.1111/mepo.12143. 25 Ibid., 63. 26 Pinar Bilgin, Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 6. 27 Ibid., 102. 28 Ibid., 104. 29 John M. Hobson, “What’s at Stake in Bringing Historical Sociology,” in Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson, eds. Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Ewan Stein 30 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (New York, NY: Verso, 2014). 31 Emile El-Hokayem, “Hizballah and Syria: Outgrowing the Proxy Relationship,” The Washington Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2007): 35–52; Aurora Sottimano, “Building Authoritarian ‘Legitimacy’: Domestic Compliance and International Standing of Bashar Al-Asad’s Syria,” Global Discourse 6, no. 3 (2 July 2016): 450–466. 32 W. Thom Workman, The Social Origins of the Iran-Iraq War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 25. 33 Ibid., 81. 34 Ibid., 103. 35 Allinson, The Struggle for the State in Jordan, 12. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 212. 38 Peter Mandaville, Global Political Islam (London: Routledge, 2007). 39 Manochehr Dorraj and Michael S. Dodson, “Neo-Populism in Comparative Perspective: Iran and Venezuela,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 1 (2009): 137–151. 40 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (1 January 2004): 205–228.

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5 SUBALTERN REALISM MEETS THE ARAB WORLD Mohammed Ayoob

Subaltern realism As I was finishing writing my book The Third World in the System of States,1 it occurred to me that the main arguments of the book had theoretical implications for the discipline of International Relations. I spent the next few years mulling over this idea, and out of this process emerged a “perspective” (I resist calling it a “theory”) that I found could be applied to the general field of International Relations. This is particularly the case if one defines International Relations primarily as a study of war and peace, conflict and order, in the international system. This perspective argues that since issues of conflict and order among states are inseparable from issues of conflict and order within states, any tool attempting to explain issues of order and conflict in the international system must encompass both relations between states and the level of anarchy and order within states. I christened this perspective “subaltern realism”, for it drew simultaneously from the classical realist (not neorealist) tradition, especially from Thomas Hobbes as a scholar of state-making as well as of international order, and from the contemporary experiences of post-colonial states. The term “subaltern” refers to the latter denoting that post-colonial states, with very few exceptions, are “weak and of inferior rank” compared to the well-established states of the global North, and thus subject to the inter-related pressures of domestic disorder and external penetration.2 Drawing upon the history of state-making in Western Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, I argued that these twin phenomena of domestic disorder and external penetration are typical of the early stage of state-making when state boundaries are contested and when regimes lack unconditional legitimacy in the eyes of large segments of the population over which they attempt to rule. I argued further that since the post-colonial states constitute the large majority of units within the system of states and that since World War II the vast majority of conflicts have taken place within or between post-colonial states, their experiences should form an integral, in fact most important, part of any paradigm that claims to explain issues of war and peace in the contemporary international system. Unfortunately, almost all literature on International Relations theory has been produced in the West, especially the US, and draws its conclusions based on the experiences of Western states during the last hundred years or so. These experiences, unfortunately, are vastly different 59

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from those of the majority of members of the international system. These theoretical attempts emanating from the West, including neorealism and neoliberalism, by skewing the universe from which they draw their data end up presenting very incomplete explanations of the issues of conflict and order currently facing the international system. They do so because they assume the “sameness” of all states inhabiting the system and tend to treat them as “rational”, unitary actors interacting with other similar entities. Issues of war and peace are, therefore, perceived as reflecting the dynamics of inter-state interactions based on calculations of “relative” versus “absolute” advantage. This thinking assumes that concerns relating to order are well-regulated within states and that the foreign policy decision-makers act largely on the basis of external stimuli rather than domestic compulsions. It further assumes that “security” is primarily defined by external threats rather than domestic challenges or a combination of both. However, when one looks at the origins, both in terms of beginnings and causes, of most contemporary conflicts it soon becomes clear that this is not merely an incomplete but distorted depiction of reality. It is evident that most conflicts in the international system today have their roots in issues of domestic disorder typical of early stages of state-making as was the case when Thomas Hobbes was writing the Leviathan.3 In several cases, challenges to the legitimacy of state boundaries, institutions and regimes from within states become interwoven with regional rivalries thus adding an inter-state dimension to these conflicts as well. It should also be noted that regional rivalries often emerge from simultaneous attempts at state-building by contiguous and proximate states. This is the case because states in the early stages of state-making, when boundaries are still in flux and consequently disputed, frequently try to impose control on contested territories and populations and thus run into resistance by their neighbors trying to achieve the same goal over the same or adjoining territories and populations. The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is a classic example of this phenomenon. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the boundaries of most post-colonial states were drawn not by an autonomous process of state formation over centuries through wars and peace treaties, as had been the case in Western Europe, but by colonial powers largely for reasons of intra-imperial convenience. Africa is the prime example of the arbitrariness with which the European powers drew boundaries, but the Middle East does not lag far behind. Such boundaries often divided ethno-linguistic and ethno-religious groups between neighboring states thus setting the stage for secessionist and/or irredentist demands.4 Moreover, unlike in Western Europe at a similar stage of state-making when state-making elites had centuries to build their states and achieved it with the use of overwhelming force and at tremendous human cost, contemporary international norms demand that post-colonial states impose order on their populations quickly as well as in a humane fashion with minimal employment of violence. Therefore, on the one hand there is very little time available to state-makers to complete their task and on the other hand they are expected to reach their goal without the use of overpowering force often needed to bind polities together.5 These contradictory demands create a major conundrum for today’s state-making elites many of whom are unable to impose an adequate degree of order swiftly or to meet international demands for civilized behavior toward recalcitrant elements within their populations. Several of them are, therefore, set up for state failure or at least the perpetuation of internal conflict between the state and domestic dissidents.6 These internal wars, as stated above, often lead to inter-state conflicts as well for reasons enumerated earlier. Continuing domestic anarchy provides the opportunity for major powers to intervene in the internal affairs of post-colonial states to further their own objectives. Great powers have often done so both during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras supporting different factions in 60

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order to protect or enhance their own interests. The proliferation of regional conflicts, a function of the early stage of state-making on the part of contiguous or neighboring states, also provides fertile ground for intervention by major powers who have done so with great abandon since the end of World War II and the termination of formal colonialism.7 The last few paragraphs have attempted to summarize the various aspects of my perspective which, when taken together, forms what I call “subaltern realism”. This perspective, I have argued, has far greater explanatory power when it comes to illuminating the origins and course of most conflicts in the international system today than most other perspectives on offer including the most important ones, neorealism and neoliberalism. Neorealism is fixated on the “security dilemma” generated by inter-state rivalries and argues that issues of conflict and order derive largely from states’ “balance of power” concerns.8 Thus, it totally ignores the internal dimensions of conflicts and refuses to look within the black box called the state. In the current system, where, as I have argued earlier, origins of most conflicts lie within states, neorealism at best provides a very limited explanation of war and peace issues. Neoliberalism is fixated on the concept of “absolute gains” to the near-total exclusion of “relative gains” which forms the bedrock of realist analysis of all types.9 Its obsession with absolute gains is a result of the fact that it draws most of its data from the post– World War II EuroAmerican experience. These states of the global North could afford to concentrate on issues of absolute gains, thus obviating the need for violence and conflict in their mutual relations. They could do so because they are economically prosperous, societally cohesive, with representative and responsive governments, and, above all, part of the NATO alliance that makes issues of relative advantage in the sphere of war and peace redundant in their relations with each other. However, this means that neoliberalism draws its evidence from a very limited universe that does not represent the experience of post-colonial states where internal and inter-state conflict continues to be endemic. Once again, this drastically reduces its power in terms of explaining the actions of the large majority of states in the international system. Finally, a word about the term “theory”. I dislike the term because it has an exclusionary ring to it, based as it is on the assumption that it is the only repository of all truth. “Perspective”, on the other hand, makes no such claim. It is happy to be counted as one of many and, in fact, as subaltern realism does, attempts to build architectonically on earlier perspectives – classical realism in particular – accepting the partial validity to different degrees of competing perspectives. Its only claim is that it does a better, although not a perfect, job of explaining issues of war and peace, conflict and order in the contemporary system compared to the other perspectives mentioned.

The Arab world One can argue persuasively that subaltern realism does a near-perfect job of explaining the underlying causes of the conflict and mayhem persisting in the Arab world today. Almost all Arab states, with the possible exception of Egypt, are new states in the early stages of statemaking. Almost all of them can be termed “post-colonial” because they are the products of the colonial process and/or have had their birth facilitated, as was the case with Saudi Arabia, by one or more colonial power.10 The boundaries of Arab states in the Fertile Crescent can be traced back to the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France as modified by the Balfour Declaration, which sanctioned the creation of Israel, and the Treaty of Lausanne, which determined Turkey’s borders with Syria and Iraq following the Turkish war of independence.11 Boundaries of states on the Arabian littoral of the Persian Gulf were also imposed arbitrarily by the British. These borders, 61

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like the ones in the Levant, do not necessarily conform to the demographic composition of most states. Ethnic and confessional groups, often traditional antagonists, were forced into the same state as in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Such ethnic mixing could be tolerated by the different groups under Ottoman rule because the imperial state was a remote entity that did not interfere, except minimally, in the lives of individuals, and each group was granted considerable autonomy to run its internal affairs under what was known as the millet system.12 However, the importation from Europe into the Middle East of the idea of the nation-state, which demanded (a) a high degree of uniformity in law, language, and often religion, (b) the undiluted loyalty of the citizenry, and (c) was unprecedentedly invasive in character, upended the status quo. The social compact between the state, on the one hand, and individuals and groups, on the other, began to fray and eventually cracked, leaving mayhem, chaos, and state collapse in its wake, such as we currently witness in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Moreover, colonial powers, especially Britain, when they terminated their direct rule over the Middle East, imposed regimes on several of these countries to serve their strategic and commercial interests and often brought outside elites to govern them. This was especially true of Iraq and Jordan, where rulers were imported from the Hijaz, but it was also the case with several sheikhdoms and emirates in the Persian Gulf. These factors, when combined with the concentration of scarce energy resources in the Middle East, the implantation of Israel in the region, and the area’s geostrategic significance in the context of the Cold War, whetted the interventionist appetites of major powers and made the Middle East, especially its Arab component, one of the most permeated regions in the post-colonial world. Several authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes became willing partners of the major powers in this venture, thus removing almost all barriers to external intervention and colluding in the hollowing out of their own states. Dependence on external support and/or petrodollars made these regimes immune to pressures of domestic public opinion and allowed them to run roughshod over dissent. These characteristics have now come to haunt most states in the Arab Middle East. Artificially crafted boundaries, heterogeneous populations, narrowly based regimes, high degrees of external intervention – all features of states in early stages of state-making – plus the operation of international norms that tie the hands of state-making elites in terms of use of force against recalcitrant populations, have led to extraordinary levels of disorder in many Arab countries. Moreover, domestic disorder has quite often become entangled with similar amounts of disorder in neighboring states, thus transforming intra-state anarchy into inter-state conflict. Additionally, because of the easy permeability of Arab states, external major power intervention has added to the already chaotic situation, pitting states against states and groups against groups within the same state.13 This has been the case because major powers have often taken sides in both inter-state and intra-state conflicts in the region, providing arms and financial support to their clients and proxies in order to advance their own goals in the region.

Arab nationalism and the Arab Cold War The recent history of the Arab world is replete with such instances. This chapter will look at just two periods – 1956 to 1967, from the Suez crisis to the Six-Day War, and 2003 to 2018, the post-Iraq invasion period until now – to demonstrate the validity of the thesis that Arab states by and large were, and continue to be, fragile and lack unconditional legitimacy in the eyes of their populations. It will also demonstrate that this state fragility was exacerbated by major power intervention, leading in several cases to state failure. The chapter will further establish that this fragility exacerbated by external intervention lies at the root of the anarchy and mayhem 62

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currently witnessed in the Arab world, thus validating the subaltern realism thesis that state fragility, a function of the early stage of state-making, lies at the base of the disorder and mayhem witnessed in the Arab world. Between 1956 and 1967, the “Arab Cold War”, as Malcolm Kerr called it, pitted the republics, Egypt and Syria in particular, against hereditary monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, Iraq (until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958), and Jordan.14 Following Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 in the face of strident opposition by the British and the French, President Nasser of Egypt emerged as the primary standard bearer of Arab nationalism, which in theory aimed at uniting the Arab countries of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt into one nationstate based on the concept of pan-Arabism. The Arab nationalist forces were supported by the Soviet Union and the conservative monarchies by the US and its European allies for reasons that had much to do with the global Cold War and little to do with regional realities. This external support, however, was merely the icing on the cake, for the rivalry was based primarily on different conceptions of the organizing principle that would undergird the future Arab order. In the case of the Arab nationalists, it was supposed to be pan-Arabism that would render boundaries within the Arab world irrelevant. In the case of the traditional monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, the hereditary principle within discrete Arab states was meant to be the organizing principle for the Arab countries. The very fact that Arab nationalism, which aimed at the eventual unification of all Arab lands and the obliteration of boundaries between Arab states, was seen as a viable option demonstrated the fragility of the Arab state system and the lack of legitimacy of Arab states in the eyes of their own populations. This was particularly true in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire in the Fertile Crescent – Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan – all creations of colonial powers. The fact that the Arab nationalists of Syria, especially the Syrian Baath party, led the movement for the annihilation of Syria’s political identity and begged Nasser for Syria’s unification with a much stronger Egypt, which was certain to dominate a united republic, was a sign that large segments of that country’s population considered Syria’s artificially created borders as illegitimate. The unified state of Egypt and Syria known as the United Arab Republic (UAR) emerged in February 1958 but lasted only three years before it was dissolved in 1961.15 If this was the case in Syria, which had some history of statehood and at least a geographic identity, the impact of Arab nationalism on next-door Lebanon was much more severe. It not only polarized the population but also led to the near-total collapse of the state, which in any case had existed only in the imagination of the Maronite elite. Lebanon had been created out of the French mandate of Syria in order to reward France’s Maronite wards and recreate a Frankish Crusader state in the region.16 However, the French overplayed their hand by attaching large tracts of territory principally populated by Sunni and Shia Muslims to Mount Lebanon – where the Maronites and the Druze were already at each other’s throats – thus making the supposedly dominant Maronites a minority in the homeland created for them. Lebanon, therefore, was an unviable state from the very beginning. It was rendered even more unviable by the twin forces of predominantly Sunni Muslim Palestinian refugee migration after the creation of Israel in 1948 and the impact of the Arab nationalist ideology that was embraced by most of the Muslim population, as well as by some Christian factions, of the country. Lebanon almost unraveled in the first Lebanese civil war of 1958 and was preserved as an independent entity in part by American military intervention on behalf of the Maronite President Camille Chamoun.17 However, this was a reprieve rather than a solution; the civil war returned with far greater force from 1975 to 1990, leaving the country in shambles.18 Lebanon is still mired in the confessional antagonisms that had torn the country apart, and the state structure continues to be weak, with various denominational groups and their leaders (the zaims) controlling most of the levers of power. 63

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Iraq was created by the British after World War I by stitching together three vilayets (provinces) of the now-defunct Ottoman empire – Mosul to the north with a large Kurdish population, Basra to the south with a predominantly Shia population, and Baghdad with a mixture of Sunni and Shia pockets occupying the middle of the country. London installed Prince Faisal, the son of the Sharif of Mecca from the Hijaz, who was driven out of Syria by the French, as the king of Iraq. Faisal, himself a foreigner, surrounded himself with a largely Sunni governing class. This arrangement lasted until 1958 when Faisal II, grandson of his namesake, was overthrown by a military coup and killed.19 Iraq, the kingpin of the American-sponsored Baghdad Pact, had moved firmly into the Western camp under the monarchy and was a leader of the resistance to Nasserite Arab nationalism under its long-serving Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, who was also killed in the coup.20 The instigators of the coup were motivated not by sectarian designs but by the ideology of Arab nationalism that had come to prevail in Syria next door. The leader of the coup, Brigadier Abd-alKarim Qassem, was himself half Kurdish and half Arab Shia. However, Iraq’s new leaders were divided between Nasserite officers and those owing allegiance to the Baath party, which broke with Nasser in 1961, precipitating the dissolution of the UAR. After a series of coups and counter-coups, the Baathists finally captured power in 1968 and consolidated control of the country, which was ruled with an iron hand by strongman Saddam Hussein until his overthrow in 2003. Despite the fact that the country seemed to be pacified under Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule, domestic fissures, both ethnic and sectarian, continued to fester beneath the surface, finally emerging into the open with the fall of the Saddam regime following the American invasion of 2003 and eventually leading to the near-total disintegration of the state. This case made it clear that the regime had become identical with the state, and its fall was a prelude to state collapse.

The invasion of Iraq and the crumbling of the Arab state system Beginning with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, it became clear that national unity within Iraq was more a mirage than a reality. The invasion led quickly to the unraveling of the Iraqi state, with Kurdish northern Iraq emerging as an independent entity in all but name. The rest of the country fell prey to sectarian strife between Shia and Sunni Arabs in part due to the American policy of favoring the Shia over the Sunni on the mistaken assumption that the Saddam regime was essentially Sunni in character. The evisceration of the Iraqi state, again largely because of America’s policy of de-Baathification, which included the demobilization of the Iraqi military, created geographic and political space for extremist jihadi elements to take root and carve out autonomous areas totally outside the control of the nominal state.21 First al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and then the Islamic State were direct products of the evaporation of the Iraqi state structure. The process of Arab state disintegration beyond Iraq accelerated with the short-lived Arab Spring of 2011, which led to the collapse of the Libyan and Yemeni states. Its most severe impact, however, was on Syria, where a brutal war ensued between the Assad regime and a motley group of opponents, with both sides supported by external powers. The most important result of the disintegration of the Syrian state was the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), later christened the Islamic State (IS), and its success in carving out a territorial base straddling parts of both Syria and Iraq, thus obliterating the boundary between the two states.22 Espousing an extreme form of salafi-jihadi ideology, IS terrorized the population under its control and threatened all Muslims who did not subscribe to its ideology with annihilation. Its stated aim was to establish a caliphate based upon the model of the earliest Muslim polity, but in

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practice it became an agent for mayhem and bloodshed in the Fertile Crescent, initially winning stunning victories in both Syria and Iraq, including the 2014 capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. IS was finally routed by a combination of external and internal forces. However, it has left parts of Syria and Iraq devastated. Syria is in effect cantonized with the Assad regime controlling a substantial portion of its territory. However, other actors such as the Kurds and various factions of the opposition continue to control significant parts of Syria. External powers, especially Turkey, Iran, and Russia have carved out their own zones of influence in various parts of the country. The difference between the latest phase of state disintegration in the Arab world and the earlier one was the role played by the major powers in bringing about state collapse. The European members of NATO supported by the US were principally guilty of bringing about the disintegration of Libya by transforming a supposedly humanitarian intervention into one aimed at regime change.23 Yemen was thrown into chaos by the policies of neighboring Saudi Arabia, which wanted to impose its own client regime in the wake of a popular uprising in that country. The civil war that has ensued in Yemen has torn the country apart and led to immense suffering among the population without achieving Saudi objectives.24 Finally, all the major global and regional powers – the US, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran – have contributed to the disintegration of Syria as they have tried to achieve their diverse objectives. Consequently, Syria has now become the primary battleground where both the Saudi-Iranian and American-Russian rivalries are played out through proxies.25 Various groups, including the Assad regime supported by Russia, Iran, and the latter’s proxies, and the motley collection of anti-Assad forces supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the US have carved out their own areas of control. The Syrian Kurds have created an autonomous region of their own on the Turkish border against the opposition of Turkey but with the support of the US. The IS, now in retreat, had come to control large swathes of territory as well. As a result of these numerous wars-within-wars, Syria as a state has ceased to exist on the ground, and it is difficult to imagine if it can be revived as one entity anytime in the foreseeable future.

State failure, sectarianism, and the Islamic state In the past few years, IS has captured the headlines regarding both Iraq and Syria. However, the IS’s spectacular rise and fall hides the real problem faced by both states. The IS is not the independent variable responsible for the chaos and mayhem in both countries, as is commonly assumed in the West by journalists and scholars alike. It is a product of the collapse of the Iraqi and Syrian states because of domestic rivalries and external machinations. State decay is responsible for creating the conditions for the emergence of the IS as it is for the general anarchy prevailing in both states, where life has become ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’. The intermingling of domestic conflict and external intervention aided the emergence of the IS. The IS was not responsible for creating domestic divisions and external interference.26 In addition to the emergence of the IS, the disintegration of the Iraqi state from 2003 and the inability of the state elites to put humpty-dumpty together again led to the emergence into prominence of several fissures that had lain largely dormant in the region. These included the rift between Shia and Sunni in the Middle East.27 Sectarianism, like extremism, is a byproduct of state debility and state collapse rather than its cause. Here, by sectarianism, I mean both religious sectarianism of the Sunni-Shia variety and ethnic sectarianism that pits Kurds against Arabs and Turkmen against Kurds. The rise of sectarianism is directly related to the failure of the state to

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provide security to its population; for the state, above all, is a protection racket par excellence.28 The state provides other services as well, but citizens repay it with revenue and loyalty primarily because it guarantees their security and ensures predictability in intra-societal relations. If or when the state becomes unable or is unwilling to provide security to individuals, groups, or communities, the latter turn to other sources that can do so, especially those of a primordial character that have remained a part of the citizen’s identity, although secondary to that of the identity which the state bestows upon them.29 These are the easiest and most convenient sources to rediscover and fall back upon when the state fails to perform its primary task. The emergence of sectarian, ethnic, and regional militias as alternative providers of security in Iraq, Syria, and earlier in Lebanon with the collapse of the state is best explained by the incapacity of the state to perform its basic functions. All other explanations, including those based on such factors as conflicts of identities or skewed distribution of resources among different segments of the population, while important are secondary to the variable of state failure. Sunni and Shia took refuge in their sectarian identities in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere when the state ceased to be a functioning entity. The story was repeated in Syria as well. As has been stated earlier, weak states are easily permeable entities and, therefore, become theaters of proxy wars among external powers. Proxy wars have the advantage of acting as buffers between the primary antagonists, be they regional or global powers, thus preventing the escalation of conflicts into full-fledged direct confrontations between the principal parties to these conflicts.30 Lebanon was traditionally the classic example of this phenomenon in the Middle East, with its permeable nature providing the opportunity for external powers from the region and outside to engage in proxy wars with their adversaries through the medium of local groups that acted as their surrogates. Maronite militias acted as the proxies for Israel and the US while Sunni groups acted as proxies for Arab nationalist regimes such as those of Egypt and Syria. These proxy wars helped tear the Lebanese social fabric apart, and the humpty-dumpty has not been fully put together until this day.31 Now, as was the case with Lebanon earlier and for the same reason, Iraq and Syria – both failing states – are the primary theaters of proxy wars in the Middle East centered around the rivalry and competition for influence between the two major regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran. In these proxy wars, regimes and militias supported by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are pitted against those supported by Iran. The Saudi-Iranian cold war for primacy in the Persian Gulf, which is the central arena of their competitive relationship but also carries the danger of direct confrontation, is being largely played out in the Fertile Crescent. This proxy conflict has contributed heavily to the surge of sectarianism in both Iraq and Syria. This is related to the fact that Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist Sunni state whose ruling ideology Wahhabism is viscerally anti-Shia, while Iran is the leading Shia state in the Middle East. Both have stoked the fires of Sunni-Shia conflict to serve their own ends, although the Saudi contribution is far greater than that of Iran, because the latter is constrained by the fact that the Shia are a minority in the Arab Middle East, even if they are a majority in Iraq and a plurality in Lebanon, and that Iran is a non-Arab state. Tehran, therefore, has to be much more discrete in how it plays the Shia card if it is to retain influence in the predominantly Sunni Arab world.32 Saudi Arabia does not suffer from any such constraint.33 As has been stated several times, one must realize that sectarianism is not an independent variable that can explain the mayhem in the Middle East. It is a product both of state debilitation as mentioned earlier and of the strategic rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran for predominance in the energy-rich Persian Gulf and influence in the rest of the Middle East. While the former has created the opportunity for the rise of sectarian groups as primary providers of security, the latter has exacerbated the conflicts among sectarian groups by providing material 66

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support, including arms, without regard for the impact of such policies on the social fabric of fragile states such as Iraq and Syria.

Conclusion In short, the history of much of the Arab world from the fall of the Ottoman Empire until today demonstrates that issues of conflict and order in the Middle East can best be explained with reference to the process of state-making and its obverse state failure and its interaction with regional rivalries, on the one hand, as well as with the intrusive capacities and inclinations of major powers, on the other. The somewhat different trajectories witnessed in Iran and Turkey as compared to most Arab countries confirm the conclusion that the longevity of states and the route of state formation are critical variables that determine the degree of order and anarchy in the countries of the Middle East. Both Iran and Turkey have suffered from domestic ethnic dissidence – Iran in Baluchistan and Khuzistan and even in Azerbaijan, and Turkey in the Kurdish areas in the southeast of the country – but in both cases the center has continued to hold. This is the case because Iran has a long history, some would say going back to pre-Islamic times, but certainly to the establishment of the Safavid Empire in 1501, as a state that is embedded in the imagination of the large majority of its population. The Republic of Turkey was created at the end of World War I by an autonomous process of state formation at immense cost in terms of lives and treasure and in the face of strident opposition by all the major powers of that day. None of the Arab countries can match either Iran’s longevity or Turkey’s autonomous process of state formation. These differences go a long way in explaining the fragility of most Arab states and their easy descent into anarchy. Longevity of existence and the route to state formation were two important variables I had emphasized in my iteration of the subaltern realism thesis and in support of subaltern realism’s claim that it is capable of explaining the origins, both in terms of beginnings and causes, of most conflicts in the contemporary international system. The Arab world is an excellent case study that provides more than adequate evidence validating this claim.

Notes 1 Ayoob, M., The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and the International System (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995). 2 For details, see M. Ayoob, “Inequality and Theorizing in International Relations: The Case for Subaltern Realism,” International Studies Review 4, no. 3 (2002): 27–48. For an early iteration of this perspective, see “Subaltern Realism: International Relations Theory Meets the Third World,” in G.S. Neuman, ed. International Relations Theory and the Third World (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 31–54. 3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 1982). 4 F.W. Miles, “Classic Colonial Partition: West Africa,” in W.F.S. Miles, ed. Scars of Partition: Postcolonial Legacies in French and British Borderlands (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 20–74. www. jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1d9nmvp.7. 5 For details of the processes of state formation in Western Europe, see Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Building,” in Charles Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 6 Mohammed Ayoob, “State Making, State Breaking, and State Failure,” in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall, eds. Leashing the Dogs of War (USIP Press, 2007), 95–114. 7 Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament. 8 G.S. Brooks and C.W. Wohlforth, “Realism, Balance-of-Power Theory, and the Counterbalancing Constraint,” in S.G. Brooks and W.C. Wohlforth, eds. World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 21–59. www.jstor. org/stable/j.ctt7sxgh.7; J. Mearsheimer, Structural Realism, 2006. University of Chicago. http:// mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/StructuralRealism.pdf.

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Mohammed Ayoob 9 R. Jervis, “Realism, Neoliberalism, and Cooperation: Understanding the Debate,” International Security 24, no. 1 (1991). MIT Press, 42–63. www.jstor.org/stable/2539347.   R. Powell, “Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relations Theory,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 4 (1991): 701–726.   R. Powell, “Anarchy in International Relations Theory: The Neorealist-Neoliberal Debate,” International Organization 48, no. 2 (1994): 334–338. 10 S. Helfont, Post-Colonial States and the Struggle for Identity in the Middle East Since World War Two (Pennsylvania, PA: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2015). 11 I. Harik, “The Origins of the Arab State System,” in G. Luciani, ed. The Arab State (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 1–28. 12 M. Bruce, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 61–62. 13 M. Dugit-Gros, Foreign Influence in the Middle East: Changes in Perceptions and Expectations (Paris: Arab Reform Initative, 2015). 14 Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ’Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 15 P.J. Kankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002). 16 William W. Harris, Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions (NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997); Farha. M. 2008. 17 R.K. Sorby, “Lebanon: The Crisis of 1958,” Institute of Oriental and African Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Asian and African Studies (2000). www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/082713259_Sorby.pdf. 18 D. Gilmour, Lebanon, The Fractured Country (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983). 19 K. Sorby, “Iraq Under the Reign of Faysal II (1953–1958),” Institute of Oriental and Afri can Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Asian and African Studies (2004). www.sav.sk/journals/ uploads/040914151_Sorby.pdf. 20 P. Seeberg, “The Weakening of the Arab States. Pan-Arabism Re-visited After the Invasion of Iraq,” In Center for contemporary Middle East Studies University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark (2007). 21 B. Isakhan, “The De-Baathification of Post-2003 Iraq: Purging the Past for Political Power,” in The Legacy of Iraq (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 20–35. www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j. ctt16r0j1w.6. 22 N.A. Hamdan, Breakers of Barriers? Notes on the Geopolitics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (London: Routledge, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1138940. 23 Jason Pack, The 2011 Libyan Uprisings and the Struggle for the Post-Qadhafi Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 24 R. Popp, War in Yemen: Revolution and Saudi Intervention. CSS Analyses in Security Policy, Zurich, Switzerland (2015); M.J. Sharm, Yemen: Civil War and Regional Intervention. Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC (2015). 25 M. Ayoob, “The New Cold War in the Middle East,” National Interest, 16 January 2013. http:// nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-new-cold-war-the-middle-east-7974. 26 M. Ayoob, “Elucidating Conflict Structures in the Middle East,” Orient IV (2015): 13–19. 27 V. Nasr, “Extremism, Sectarianism, and Regional Rivalry in the Middle East,” in N. Burns and J. Price, eds. Blind Spot (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2015). www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19gfk32.8. 28 Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back in (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169–187. 29 Mohammed Ayoob, “Why Arab States Have Failed,” National Interest, 19 September 2016. http:// nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/why-arab-states-have-failed-17734. 30 S. Khalaf, “On Proxy Wars and Surrogate Victims,” in Leila Fawaz, ed. Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon (Columbia University Press, 2002). www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/khal12476.5. 31 M.S. Saseen, “The Taif Accord and Lebanon’s Struggle to Regain its Sovereignty,” American University International Law Review 6, no. 1 (1990): 57–75. 32 S. Akbarzadeh, “Iran and Daesh: The Case of a Reluctant Shia Power,” Middle East Policy 22, no. 3 (2015): 44–54. 33 S. Mabon, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Soft Power Rivalry in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).

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6 ISLAM, POLITICAL ISLAM, AND THE STATE SYSTEM Frédéric Volpi

The account that I present in this chapter focuses primarily on the dynamics of Islam in the social and political sphere shaped by the state. It does not engage directly with issues of individual faith or spirituality, or with theological debates. When the actors themselves explicitly position their actions in relation to the political field (loosely defined), I will use the terms “political Islam” and “Islamism” interchangeably. I define Islamism as the political dynamics created by the activities of people explicitly believing that the Islamic doctrine has something crucial to say about how society should be organized now, and seeking to implement this form of governance as a matter of priority.1 Importantly, the impact of Islam on state and society is not always mediated by Islamists but more generally by religious scholars and other pious actors having a concern with personal piety and the observance of religious law. In all cases, the articulation of Islam and Islamism is primarily a social construct representing what such actors in different socio-historical contexts think about the political and the religious, state and society, the individual and the community, and so on. In this perspective, it is important not to reduce the impact of the Islamic creed on state and society to the views of well-known Islamic political actors, religious scholars, or ­ideologues – be they Khomeini, Al-Bana, Qutb, Abd al-Wahhab, Al-Albani, Al-Qaradawi, and so on. Undoubtedly, these and other important thinkers did shape in an important way the impact of Islam on the state and on politics. Some considerable scholarly effort has been devoted to understanding and explaining the works of key Islamic leaders, especially those whose intellectual influence remains palpable to this day.2 However, the crucial element to analyze in relation to their ideas is how specific interpretations of the Islamic doctrine managed to remain pertinent for subsequent generations of believers and activists. To understand this process, it is necessary to examine in what circumstances and for what purposes are specific religious scholars and ideologues invoked. It requires investigating which aspects of their teaching is reused or revised by other actors in different places and at different times. Only by contextualizing the trajectories of specific ideas and practices of Islam in relation to politics can the analyst make sense of the contemporary choices and behaviors of a wide variety of groups and individuals claiming to act in the name of Islam. Like for politics, what constitutes Islam cannot be neatly encapsulated in a definition that is readily accepted by all those concerned. The “fundamentals” of Islam and of politics alike are a contested terrain with ever-shifting boundaries and rules. As constructivists scholars from 69

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Ahmed to Sayyid have illustrated, this is so because the views and processes that are at the heart of Islamic thought and practice are repeatedly re-constructed by individuals, communities, and institutions.3 While Islamic practice, like political practice, is at any one time organized around key norms and rules, these are always reinterpreted and reprioritized to reflect the needs of individuals and communities.4 The analysis of the relationship between Islam, political Islam, and the state that follows is articulated into four main steps. First, it introduces some structuring perspectives on Islam and political Islam in relation to the changing political priorities of the nation-state. Second, it explores the recent historical construction and evolution of different approaches to governance inspired by the Islamic creed. This review sets the foundations for the ensuing two-pronged investigation of the relationship between Islamic perspectives and the construction of politics in the domestic and international sphere in the Middle East and North Africa. In the first instance, I examine how actors advocating different models of Islamic governance, from traditional Ulama to Islamist parties, articulated their claims in domestic politics. Then, I consider how such actors, discourses, and practices have become an integral part of the international political system. The concluding section points to key characteristics of contemporary interactions between Islam and politics that shape the trajectories of these phenomena in the twenty-first century.

Representing Islam and political Islam in a world of nation-states Contemporary debates about Islam and political Islam are grounded on the often-implicit assumption that domestic and international politics are primarily shaped by states. These prevailing perspectives about domestic and international politics reflect a secular and nationalist understanding of societal interactions organized by a system of sovereign nation-states. In both domestic and international affairs, such views help frame the boundaries of the legitimate and illegitimate, the normal and the abnormal, etc. From a nationalist and secular perspective, what needs to be explained in relation to Islam and the state is what makes religious activism fall outside “normal” political categories and processes. More specifically a social sciences approach seeks to explain how the religious dimension of Islamism transforms what would be otherwise standard political claim-making processes. Hence, it is now commonplace for policy-makers and policy analysts (and the media) to rank different forms of Islam from moderate to radical.5 Although such approaches are common, they are only informative insofar as the secular and nationalist assumptions about politics on which they rely are understood and/or relevant. To talk about Islam and Islamism today is also to talk about the state. Although Islam, like other world religions, is not state-centric, there is much that cannot be understood about contemporary trends without referring to the modern state system. As Piscatori noted, this realization had also become inescapable for most thinkers and activists using an Islamic framework of reference by the 1980s.6 In practice, a successful religious current hardly ever strives on spirituality and faith alone. It is embedded in a political and military context; it has an economic and social position; and, as Asad illustrated well, it partakes in particular productions of knowledge.7 Understanding the dynamics of Islam and political Islam requires therefore analyzing the interactions among these different factors and processes. The politics of the national state are crucial today to define the religious field (regardless of the official position of the state vis-à-vis religion), as state institutions establish the formal boundaries between religious and non-religious issues.8 While Islamic actors have always had some input into the politics of states, empires, and other political groupings in the Middle East and beyond, political Islam embodies a current that is far more grounded in the politics of the modern nation-state. From the beginning of the twentieth 70

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century onward, there has been a growing tension between two forms of Islamic influences on the state. On the one hand, there has been an upgrading and modernization of the traditional roles of the Ulama, first as advisors to the prince and their modern-day equivalent, and second as scholar-jurists in the construction of the post-colonial states’ legal and constitutional frameworks.9 On the other hand, there has been a process of formal and informal institutionalization of Islamist movements as political actors seeking to govern the Muslim community directly through the institutions of the state. In this perspective, political Islam is thus a modern phenomenon – a creation of the twentieth century that belongs to the modern era of mass politics.10 Hence, across the region, the interactions (and confrontations) between established and new religious authorities have had a crucial role in shaping the impact of Islam on the state. The tension between an Islamic-inspired approach to social and political order and a secularized, positivist approach to the state and the rule of law is riddled with tensions between traditional and new interpreters of Islam. At different times throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this religious competition over authority has shaped not only how Islam was involved in national and regional politics but also which kind of Islam was prioritized.11 Within the religious field, the challenge of “lay” Islamists against more formally trained religious scholars (Ulama) or traditional authorities (like the Sufi orders) in the name of a return to a “purer” form of Islamic practice was at once conservative and revolutionary. It was a conservative challenge in the sense that it commonly opposed the bargains that established religious actors had struck with the modernizing, secular post-colonial state. It was revolutionary in the sense that it articulated social and political propositions that were at odds with the previously dominant interpretations and implementations of the Islamic doctrine. Political Islam was also innovative in its organizational model, as illustrated by the growth and spread of mass-based organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) across the region.12 These new movements commonly became populist organizations that made full use of the opportunities provided by mass education, mass media and mass politics to support their project of governance. Over the decades, the alliances and the confrontations that shaped domestic and international politics in the Middle East and North Africa repeatedly illustrated how realpolitik was influenced by this competition inside the religious sphere. The case of Egypt in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings provides one vivid illustration of these dynamics and strategies at these two levels. Domestically, the salafists organized in the Al-Nour party strategically chose to support the 2013 military coup of General el-Sisi against the elected MB-led government to limit the dominance of the MB over the religious domain in Egypt. Internationally, Saudi Arabia also strategically supported the 2013 coup in order to contain the regional influence of the MB and the challenge that its ideological leadership posed to its state-sponsored, Ulama-led Wahhabi doctrine.13

The post-colonial evolution of Islamic-inspired perspectives on state governance What was being asked about and expected from Islam in the middle of the twentieth century, during the heydays of the decolonization period, is quite different from the debates of the present day. No doubt these issues will look very different again at the end of the twenty-first century. Some of the early expectations of nationalist state-builders in the region regarding a standard model of secularization and modernization unfolding seamlessly in Muslim societies have been dramatically revised. From the second half of the twentieth century to the present day, one of the key challenges posed by Islam to international politics has been to inscribe the social and political manifestations of this faith into the prevailing secularized narratives of world 71

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order. To a significant degree, the contemporary debates about the role of Islam and Islamism in politics are more concerned with integrating these notions into the prevailing Western models of world politics than they are with specifying the rationale of Islamic worldviews and approaches.14 The classic secularization model which once assumed that the role of religion in politics would simply fade away with time as societies modernized has been seriously challenged by the direction taken by social change. Until a few decades ago, Islam and political Islam were viewed as a hindrance to the development of Muslim-majority countries that could be overcome through socio-economic advances and education. In this perspective, political analysts were thus primarily concerned with explaining away the vitality of various movements inspired by Islam in different parts of the Muslim world through a combination of socio-economic determinism – i.e., people needed time to get wealthier and better educated – and institutional accounts of the shortcomings of the developmental state.15 The emphasis was on showing that the language of Islam expressed in a “primitive” idiom the basic political concerns that local populations could not yet express using a modern political vocabulary. However, even though post-colonial states in the region were often deemed to be seriously flawed, political Islam was not clearly identified as a relevant state actor until the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. The notion of a secularization process that was meant to be an irreversible worldwide historical transformation proved to be a crude oversimplification of actual social trends.16 This does not mean that various forms of secularization are not at work in the region. Indeed, both at the institutional and societal level, the countries of the Middle East have witnessed a secularization of different aspects of life.17 Yet this process, like the impact of globalization, has been far more complex and differentiated than previously thought. As a result, the adaptation of Islamic thought and practice to these new circumstances has produced a fine-grained set of social and political responses and positions reflecting the different circumstances encountered by different actors and movements over time.18 The very emergence and development of Islamist movements as a specific response to the secularized models of state and politics promoted by colonial power in the first half of the twentieth century constituted one Islamic reply to these challenges. The type of social and political organization developed by the MB in Egypt from the end of the 1920s onward represented one possible avenue for an Islamic-inspired reformulation of politics in the age of mass-based political movements.19 The relevance of this type of answer that will become generally known as Islamism or political Islam soon became evident to many actors in the region. As the MB model spread out to other countries, it gave rise to similar movements, each adapted to their specific national political context.20 A few decades later, the promotion of a socially ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam constituted another type of answer to the challenges of secularization and modernization. The regional and global rise of Wahhabism from the 1970s onward illustrated this alternative, Ulama-led trend supported by the financial resources of the petro-monarchies of the Gulf. From the 1990s onward, the entrenchment of a violent transnational jihadi current that started with al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan could also be seen as yet another response to evolving global socio-economic and political challenges; this time using Islamic resources as a tool for structuring a new model of armed resistance against the dominant national, regional, and international actors of the day.21 These mobilizations are at once specific replies to the historical circumstances of their time and a component of subsequent efforts at re-mobilizing Islamic resources. Although all of these responses are not compatible with each other, and at times are even directly in opposition to one another, they all contribute to shaping the options available to new generations of religious and political actors.22 Beyond the specific answers that each movement or current provides – say, on 72

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the shape and function of an Islamic state – they structure the general debate about what Islam should do in politics. Each time, these attempts at harnessing and deploying Islamic resources contributed to a greater acknowledgment among both Muslims and non-Muslims that Islam retained a non-negligible capacity of political mobilization in the region (and beyond).23 Contemporary debates about the position of a politically active global religion in a world of nation-states illustrate that such dilemmas are largely the outcome of the expansion of a western model of state in the region. Local resistance to these new types of governance invoked the Islamic repertoire to construct alternative models of allegiance. Although many, if not most, Islamist movements have advocated or at the very least envisioned a systematic transformation of state and society, in practice they have mainly implemented a piecemeal approach to societal change. The regional and global impact of Islamic-inspired actors can thus be viewed as the incremental accumulation of strategies and interactions that consolidated or challenged the established social and political order at different points in time. Looking at the trajectory of these accumulated changes in recent decades, the implications of Islam and political Islam for state governance in the Middle East and North Africa repeatedly revolved around two axes: domestic and international politics. The first axis centers on the domestic construction of a concrete system of Islamic governance – a debate which initially focused on the notion of an Islamic state before moving toward that of Muslim democracy. The second axis involves the transnational and/or international strategies and tactics of Islamist movements and would-be Islamic regimes. The relative importance given to each part of the debate generally is an outcome of the wider international context. In the 1990s, for example, in the aftermath of the collapse of the communist bloc, domestic issues and the democratization of the regimes of the region were commonly prioritized. In the 2000s, during the “war on terror”, international security aspects became a main focus for politics across the region. In the 2010s, whilst the issue of democratization came back center stage during the 2011 Arab uprisings, the second half of the decade was again dominated by international and civil conflict due to the activities of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Domestic perspectives on governance Regarding national politics and state governance, a basic distinction can be readily made between the more traditional approaches to Islamic governance embodied in the role of the Ulama as the “advisor to the prince” and the Islamist approaches that became ever more prominent throughout the twentieth century in which Islamist movements proposed to rule directly. Throughout the colonial and post-colonial period, traditional religious authorities tried to retain as much religious oversight as possible over the state dealings with the population by reaching agreements with the powers-that-be. Their influence was therefore very much dependent upon the type of political system in place and the role that religion was meant to play in legitimizing the regime. Hence, in the post-colonial period, the importance of the Ulama in the neo-traditional Gulf monarchies was greater that in the “modern” Arab Republics of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, or Libya. Islamist movements by contrast generally gained momentum and popular support by putting forward social and political projects that stood in opposition to the views of the ruling elites of the day. The nature of this opposition varied over time depending on the type of state rule and the political response of the regime. At times these movements were primarily facing repression; at other times, the state authorities made some concessions to manage more efficiently the constituencies that the Islamists were able to mobilize. Up to this day, this balance between repression and cooptation varies from country to country and over time. 73

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For all the intensity of Islamist activism in the region from the 1970s onward, it is noticeable that these movements hardly ever succeeded in actually implementing their preferred system of governance. Roy already suggested a generalized failure of political Islam in the early 1990s.24 By this, he meant primarily the failure of a revolutionist brand of militant Islam that sought to access state power by force. Although the Iranian context provided a rare opportunity for militant Islam to implement the revolutionary Islamic system of governance favored by some actors, the failure of direct action elsewhere in the region (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and so on) did not mean that Islamism could not shape national politics.25 Indeed, what became noticeable from at least the 1980s onward was the slow but progressive Islamization of many aspects of social and political life through a process of internal reconfiguration of nationalist regimes in the region (and beyond).26 Islamic governance was hardly a concrete political issue for most nationalist regimes at the time of independence. Secularized state actors could see the benefits of using Islamic rhetoric to legitimize their rule, but they usually did not seriously consider the institutional implications of these views. It became a very specific set of political concerns a few decades later, however, as Islamist movements became increasingly effective at turning these issues into an effective tool of social mobilization. Their success was due at least in part to the repeated failures of post-colonial regimes at socio-economic development. The scholarship on the region noted at length how the progressive weakening of the welfare state from the 1980s onward not only gave the Islamist opposition ideological ammunitions, but it also made their charitable activities a model of effective social activism.27 Furthermore, a very significant characteristic of the inroads make by Islamist movements into national politics was that their advocacy of a more Islamic rule at the time increasingly coincided with their ideological acceptance of a sovereign state constructed on electoral democracy. In a global context increasingly permeated by democratizing discourses, one of the main conceptual dilemmas for Islamist parties is the accommodation of a democratic concept of sovereignty of the people with the Islamic notion of sovereignty of God. In the social sciences, orientalist-inspired analyses took one horn of the dilemma and argued that no Islamic system could ever be truly democratic since the sovereignty of God ultimately trumped the popular legitimacy of a democratic political system. Post-orientalist views, by contrast, stressed that since the Scriptures were not very specific regarding legitimate political structures, disagreements regarding their compatibility with God’s sovereignty were just a matter of diverging interpretations among religious leaders (and between them and the public).28 Over time, Islamic scholars and Islamist ideologues somewhat duplicated these social sciences approaches using insights from their own tradition. In recent decades, the sovereignty debate inside Islamist movements has passed through three stages. In the first instance, in the aftermath of the decolonization process, as post-colonial states were trying to entrench their rule in an authoritarian-populist fashion, Islamists put forward a rather skeptical if not straightforwardly inimical view of all secular models of state governance. Up to the 1970s, Islamic debates over governance were overshadowed by the issue of the formation of an Islamic state, which alone could implement a properly Islamic form of sovereignty. Inspired by thinkers like Mawdudi and Qutb, this model of governance was deemed the most appropriate to ensure that state policies and laws were a genuine reflection of the Islamic doctrine. From the 1980s onward, the “compatibility with democracy” argument became increasingly dominant in these debates.29 In this perspective, the kind of popular sovereignty represented in liberal democracies was deemed to be compatible with a modernist interpretation of the Islamic doctrine. Democratic political institutions were thus presented as an adequate

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vehicle for the Islamic message by making parallels between this contemporary model and early Islamic practices such as shura (consultation). In the 2000s, the success of the Justice and Development party (AKP) in Turkey was seen as a working illustration of this approach, as was that of Ennahda in Tunisia in the 2010s.30 The third debate that took off in the 2000s but that still remains relatively marginal in political terms bypassed the quest to demonstrate compatibility between Islamic and liberal doctrines and sought to build an Islamic-inspired model of governance on universalist principles shared by Islam and liberalism.31 The debates taking place within Islamist movements, as well as the evolving influence of the Ulama on rulers in the region, are not synchronized with the strategies of state actors. It is at the beginning of the 2000s, when the debate about domestic Islamic governance was most intense and most relevant to the democratization process, that the actions of a particular subset of nonstate actors advocating a globalized armed struggle (and the response of international state actors to this agenda) reoriented the debate and the options available towards a securitization process. The “war on terror” led by the US against al Qaeda after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) seriously constrained the opportunities for a normalization of Islamism in a liberalized domestic political sphere in the region. Whereas the scholarship on the region had seriously considered the likelihood of a process of integration of mainstream Islamist parties in national politics, not least through the lenses of the inclusion-moderation thesis, the sudden “hardening” of the regimes after 9/11 put this scenario on hold.32 The focus on democratic Islamic governance came back to the fore at the beginning of the 2010s, notably due to the 2011 Arab uprisings. As mobilization around Islamic themes was not one of the main drivers of these uprisings in most cases, Islamist actors had to adapt more pragmatically their approaches to the type of political opening that was made available then.33 In countries where the uprisings defeated or significantly weakened the authoritarian regime in place, this situation facilitated the implementation of a model of political liberalization supported by mainstream Islamist movements organized as political parties (Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen). Although these democratic transitions subsequently failed to become entrenched in many countries due to a combination of internal and external pressures, they nonetheless provided practical information regarding how democratic national political institutions could function under the leadership of Islamist parties. From an institutional perspective, the difficulties created by political Islam for democratization commonly have to do with ensuring that in the early stages of open political competition, Islamists who marginally subscribe to the idea of democracy do not take advantage of the new multiparty system to change the “rules of the game”. The main fears are that Islamists could hijack the democratization process – the so-called Islamist free elections trap – and/or produce an illiberal majoritarian democracy.34 Today, these dilemmas can best be addressed by making two types of rather distinct observations. On the one hand, the secularized or neo-traditionalist regimes in the region that refrained from making significant democratic political reforms in order to “save” their country from the Islamist threat commonly entrenched instead their own brand of authoritarian governance – viz. Egypt after the 2013 coup by General el-Sisi for a recent illustration of this trend. On the other hand, Islamist movements and parties have over the years revised their discourse and practices to make them routinely congruent with the rules of electoral democracy (if not fully liberal democracy), up to the point where their members discursively and practically follow these rules.35 The case of the AKP in Turkey in the 2010s also illustrated that when they did slide back toward more authoritarian views and behaviors, this was not due primarily to the replacement of a democratic approach to politics by a religious one, but to an all-too-common illiberal and autocratic drift by the incumbent political elites (and their followers).

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International relations and strategies On the international and regional scene, Islam and Islamism hardly featured prominently at the time of independence, when the region was the site of competition between the two superpowers of the day (USA and USSR). The specifically Muslim character of these societies was deemed to be marginal at most for regional alliances and foreign policy. Indeed, in line with secularization theory, the relevance of religion was expected to decline with time in the region, as people aligned their views with the dominant ideologies of the day. At most, the presence of Islamic discourses was seen to be the expression of conservative forces trying to maintain their position in society. This observation made in connection to the neo-traditional monarchies of the Gulf could nonetheless be very relevant for international players keen to maintain the stability of these regimes as part of their global system of alliances.36 The ambiguity of international actors vis-à-vis Islamic identity markers still remained tangible in the 1980s even after the Islamic revolution in Iran. The revolutionary model of Shia Islamic governance proposed by Ayatollah Khomeini was clearly seen as a threat to Western interests in the region due to the anti-system ideology and aggressive foreign policy promoted by Iran at the time. Unsurprisingly, Western governments sought to weaken and isolate the Islamic Republic, notably via their support for the authoritarian secular regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). Yet, if the brand of revolutionary Shia Islam underpinning the regional strategy of Iran was recognized as a problem for the Middle East, other forms of Islamic activism were harnessed at the same time in support of Western strategic interests. During the Soviet-Afghan conflict (1979–89), the US government was keen to enlist Saudi Arabia to support financially the Islamic-framed Mujahideen resistance movement in Afghanistan. A side effect of this regional support for the Mujahideen’s struggle, portrayed as an Islamic resistance to an imperialist aggression on Muslim lands, was the growth of a transnational network of volunteers for the jihad in Afghanistan structured notably by the al Qaeda organization.37 International recognition of the brand of global jihadism spearheaded by al Qaeda as a defining characteristic of the region would come about progressively in the 1990s, notably as the collapse of the Soviet Union changed global geopolitical calculations. In the Middle East, the Western military intervention during the first Gulf War (1990–91) against the Iraqi regime also contributed to entrench the idea of transnational armed resistance framed in Islamic terms in opposition to foreign meddling in the region. The growing relevance of armed Islamist movements during that decade began to make this model of activism a main element of foreign policy-making.38 As the perception of a jihadi current dominated by uncontrollable outbursts of violence against ill-defined “enemies of Islam” at home and abroad gained prominence in Western foreign-policy circles in the 1990s, these violent transnational actors also began to shape more decisively the debate about political Islam within their own tradition. In the social sciences, as well as in policy and media discourse, this led to the re-emergence of a narrative about an Islamic civilization which recycled old negative orientalist stereotypes about the region.39 These perspectives became all too common after the al Qaeda attacks in the US on 9/11. In the Middle East and North Africa, the decade that followed 9/11 was primarily shaped by the policies and strategies of the “war on terror” orchestrated by the US administration under George W. Bush. Among its many implications for the region, and notably as a result of the US-led 2003 military intervention in Iraq, were two important sets of consequences for the articulation of Islamic identity and practice. First, for mass-based Islamist movements and parties, this new international environment led them to position themselves explicitly on issues

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which had remained debated until then. The positioning of most Islamist movements against the transnational militancy advocated by al Qaeda was generally accompanied by an explicit endorsement of democratic processes in national politics as the main alternative. Even though the 2000s were generally characterized across the region by a clampdown by authoritarian regimes on mainstream Islamist movements in the name of “security”, this period also enabled these movements to solidify their ideological orientation in favor of electoral democracy and in opposition to transnational violence.40 Second, traditional Islamic authorities were also impacted by the dynamics of the “war on terror”. As international actors and regimes in the region sought to counter the appeal of global jihadism, they endeavored to empower alternative Islamic voices, be they Sufi movements, local religious authorities deemed to be moderate, or socially conservative actors (including various brands of scientific Salafism) shunning a political agenda.41 In this way, the global fight against transnational jihadism also contributed to entrench the relevance of Islamic markers for doing politics in the region. Until 9/11 the choices of the regimes of the Middle East and North Africa were deemed to be influenced at the margin by Islamic culture. In the post-9/11 context, western governments had to revise some of their assumptions regarding how far national elites in the region could actually control Islamic activism via the institutions of the state. The issue of a lack of a cohesive center of Islamic authority for structuring the processes of late twentieth-century globalization of Islamic activism and discourse was central to this predicament. As Mandaville noted, this problem was made even more complex by the longer-term processes of democratization of Islamic knowledge and authority, which contributed to the growing strategic importance of the Muslim “periphery” (be it in Muslim-minority settings or in peripheral Muslim-majority countries).42 Transnationally, if different types of Islamic organizations contributed to the formation of a basic consensus across this global ummah about the ideas and practices that were central to contemporary Islam, they did not define a clear and authoritative overall position. Divergences regarding the practical implementation of general principles remained plentiful, not least regarding the legitimate use of violence. At the international level, policy-makers have been mostly concerned with the apparent growing appeal of Islamist discourses justifying violence against a wide range of targets declared apostate – a trend within jihadism commonly referred to as takfiri. Yet, the transformation of the discourse and practices of jihadism as armed militancy is also to be seen against the background of changing global practices of warfare and securitization during the “war on terror”.43 Actors invoking the Islamic doctrine articulate their discourses and practices onto the pre-existing rules of the game usually imposed in the region by authoritarian regimes and recurrent foreign interventions.44 The anti-western rhetoric that commonly characterizes this violent militancy is grounded in the assessment that international actors are supporting local authoritarian regimes, and that they encourage and help them repress activism connected to Islam. From a militant’s perspective, such evaluations repeatedly inform a tactical change of focus from the “near enemy” (the domestic elites) to the “far enemy” (the foreign powers supporting them).45 Since 9/11 it has been common for part of the security literature to explore the specific role played by a religious ideology and socialization process for a specific type of transnational violent militancy.46 However, such considerations can only constitute a side argument in a comprehensive account of the diffusion of a militaristic notion of jihad centering on the dynamics of globalization of conflicts as the core explanatory variable.47 While the size of a violent global jihadi community has grown over the last few decades, it remains doubtful how far this constituency can be viable when disconnected from concrete national-based conflicts, as the collapse of the ISIS networks in the late 2010s illustrate.

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Conclusion The relationship between Islam and the state in the Middle East and North Africa hardly ever involves a fixed and well-defined set of discourses and practices. Instead, it is an open-ended, ongoing debate about the meaning of Islamic religiosity for individuals and communities, and about its political implications for institutionalized governance. It would be misguided to assume that a generic concern with reviving the “fundamentals” of Islam strictly constrains what actors inspired by the Islamic creed could do in a modernizing (or postmodern) societal order and international system. New and old Islamic actors are continuously repositioning themselves – tactically, strategically, and substantively – vis-à-vis other ideas and practices in the political and religious fields. There is a never-ending re-examination of what it means to follow the fundamentals of Islam, even when actors claim that the text speaks for itself or that no new interpretation is needed anymore. In its turn, this process generates a repeated re-articulation of what Islam means for, and demands of the state. Within this general context, however, it is important to note that there are identifiable historical trends in the region at both domestic and international levels. Over time, Islamic actors primarily concerned with the re-Islamization of the masses have had a better opportunity to grow in strength in national politics. From a bottom-up perspective, the success of specific discourses and practices has been tied to the ability of these movements to produce meaningful articulations between the social and the political in different historical conjunctures. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the combination of political democratization and economic liberalization has increasingly given more weight to actors organized as Islamist parties. This particular evolution illustrates the possibility of a routine Islamic input into politics that reflects the popular appeal of Islamic-oriented discourses but does not imply a complete takeover of the apparatus of the secular state. In the contemporary regional context, it is nonetheless too early to say whether this situation will facilitate the establishment of a more consensual religious practice with more representative Islamic “authorities” and more inclusive (internal and external) decision-making processes. What is clearer, however, is that the opposite outcomes are to be expected when mainstream Islamist parties are driven underground by authoritarian state elites. On the international stage, the regional tensions created by competition among states meant that those Islamic actors with large domestic constituencies did not necessarily gained the upper hand in terms of regional diffusions of religious ideas and practices. The tactical advantage that transnational jihadi movements have had in the last few decades was that they could claim to articulate the views and demands of a global Muslim constituency in a way that most nationalbased Islamist organizations could not. Furthermore, they could also argue that to overcome the status quo imposed by authoritarian regimes and foreign powers, violence was required to make state actors pay attention to this Islamic constituency. What has become clear over time is that this type of militancy has not been a very effective means to answer the needs and aspirations of any global or regional Muslim community. However, despite a lack of active mass support, the al Qaeda and ISIS phenomena (and their likely successors) will continue to represent for some activists an appropriate answer to the circumstances of their time. In the medium term, violent transnational militancy will continue to benefit from the interventions of external players in the Middle East and North Africa as much as from the regional conflicts between and within the states of the region. This will remain the case even when specific jihadi organizations are destroyed in the process, as the very tools used to bring them down are the cause of the continuing appeal of this violent militancy model. These dynamics of conflict enable jihadi actors to shape the debates about Islam and political Islam to a far larger extent than their social, political, and religious weight would otherwise allow them to do. In 78

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this context, too, Islamic-inspired discourses and practices that have an over-bearing influence on the contemporary political debates are the ones directly addressing the core functions of the state, namely institutionalized national politics with the Islamist parties, and security and defense with the transnational jihadi networks.

Notes 1 See Frédéric Volpi, Political Islam Observed: Disciplinary Perspectives (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010); Graham E. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 2 See Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds. Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 3 Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise, revised ed. (London: Routledge, 2004); Salman Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, revised ed. (London: Zed Books, 2003). 4 In relation to civil society and the common good, see Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, eds. Public Islam and the Common Good (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 5 For a critique, see Mohammed Ayoob, The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007); Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York, NY: Three Leaves Press, 2004). 6 James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 7 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8 For different illustrations of this process, see Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Charles Hirschkind, “What Is Political Islam?” Middle East Report, No. 205 (1997): 12–14. 9 See Said Amir Arjomand and Nathan J. Brown, eds. The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). 10 Volpi, Political Islam Observed; Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). 11 Peter Mandaville, Global Political Islam (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007). 12 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002); Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928–1942 (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1998). 13 See Khalil al-Anani, “Upended Path: The Rise and Fall of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” The Middle East Journal 69, no. 4 (2015): 527–543; Frédéric Volpi and Ewan Stein,“Islamism and the State After the Arab Uprisings: Between People Power and State Power,” Democratization 22, no. 2 (2015): 276–293. 14 See Volpi, Political Islam Observed; Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 15 For an early critical assessment of these perspectives, see Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 1989). 16 Even the initial proponents of the argument eventually recognized its limitations. See Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1999). 17 See John L. Esposito and Francois Burgat, eds. Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 18 See in relation to the inclusion of not specifically Islamic local concerns and views, Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 19 Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood; Mobilizing Islam; Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers. 20 Beverley Milton-Edwards, The Muslim Brotherhood: The Arab Spring and Its Future Face (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015). 21 See Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Trans. A. Roberts (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002).

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Frédéric Volpi 22 In relation to the transmission of different views via different forms of Islamic schooling, see Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds. Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 23 For an illustration of different bottom-up processes of mobilization, see Quintan Wiktorowicz, ed. Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 24 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam. Trans. C. Volk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 25 Although it represents a Twelver Shia’s perspective, Khomeini’s blueprint for the Islamic Republic of Iran has more affinities with the Islamist approach to politics in Sunni Islam than with the traditional Ulama’s oversight of the state rulers, even if the role of the Shia clergy is also buttressed in Khomeini’s model of governance. See Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 26 Francois Burgat, Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda. Trans. P. Hutchinson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008). 27 See Janine Clark, Islam, Charity and Activism: Middle-Class Networks and Social Welfare in Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Wickham, Mobilizing Islam. For a critical consideration of their actual economic positioning, see Charles Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 28 For a sharp and critical early summary, see Yahya Sadowski, “The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate,” Middle East Report, No. 183 (1993): 14–21. For a subsequent reflection on the theme, see Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 29 For an illustration of this changing emphasis at the time, see John L. Esposito, ed. Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1983). 30 See M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jenny White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 31 See, for example, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 32 See Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Raymond William Baker, Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 33 See Frédéric Volpi, Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). 34 See Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “The Rise of Muslim Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 16, no. 2 (2005): 13–27; Daniel Brumberg, “Islamists and the Politics of Consensus,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 3 (2002): 109–115. 35 See Eva Wegner, Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 36 In relation to the competition with Shia Islam, see Laurence Louër, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (London: Hurst Publishers, 2012). 37 Regarding the Saudi dimension of this militancy, see Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 38 From a European perspective in relation to Algeria, see Frédéric Volpi, Islam and Democracy: The Failure of Dialogue in Algeria (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 39 For critical assessments, see Fawaz A. Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996). 40 This evolution has been identified by some scholars as a post-Islamist trend. See, for example, Bayat, Making Islam Democratic. 41 See, for example, Joas Wagemakers, Salafism in Jordan: Political Islam in a Quietist Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For the multiple expressions of salafism, see Roel Meijer, ed. Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (London: Hurst, 2009). 42 See Mandaville, Global Political Islam; Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003). 43 See Olivier Roy, Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State. Trans. C. Schoch (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Islam, political Islam, and the state system 44 For a general argument about the rationale of political violence in Muslim-majority societies, see Mohammed M. Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003). 45 See Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 46 See, for example, Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 47 In the context of the recent revival of sectarianism in the Middle East as the result of the Syrian conflict and the regional competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia, see Frederic Wehrey, ed. Beyond Sunni and Shia: The Roots of Sectarianism in a Changing Middle East (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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7 DON’T SHOOT THE ELEPHANT Middle East stability after the Iranian nuclear deal Karim Kamel and Patricia M. Lewis

Introduction The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( JCPOA) was negotiated over a period of several years, between Iran and an international group of countries.1 The Plan of Action has been hailed as a significant achievement in international attempts to prevent Iran from developing a fully fledged nuclear weapons capability. Although Iran has always denied a desire for nuclear weapons – based on the theological premise that the use of weapons of mass destruction is against all that is holy2 – the development of Iran’s peaceful uses nuclear program, as monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), skated too close to the edge of nuclear weapons capability for comfort. Indeed, there are a number of unresolved questions, not least of which is: how far did Iran go in developing a military capability in terms of weapons design and non-nuclear components testing prior to 2003 (when the UN National Intelligence Council judged ‘with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program’)?3 Such issues – including the measurement uncertainties over the amount of enriched uranium produced, Iran’s regional-reach ballistic missiles program, and the strategic military intentions of Iran in the Middle East – have meant that the JCPOA despite its success in the short term has not been universally welcomed. Two countries in particular – Israel and Saudi Arabia – have expressed particular anxiety over the JCPOA and the consequent potential freeing of Iran’s economic and political-military activities. The nuclear weapons issue is but one of several concerns that remain in regard to Iran’s behavior in the region; Iran’s political and military activities and the support for certain non-state armed groups being seen as particularly troubling. In the year that followed the adoption of the JCPOA, the political ground has shifted in the US. The election of President Trump has meant that many of the flagship policies of President Obama are being intentionally and swiftly unraveled. Although President Trump was not the most vociferous Republican voice against the efficacy of the JCPOA,4 he is on record as saying he thinks that it was “the worst deal in history”,5 with the inference that he believes that he could have negotiated a better one. In October 2017, President Trump decided not to certify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA but stopped short of US withdrawal from the agreement and gave Congress a 60-day window to decide whether to bring back sanctions on Iran. However, in mid-December 2017, Congressional leaders announced that they had “no plans” to re-impose sanctions.6 Work on a toughened approach which might be acceptable to President 82

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Trump – such as a requirement to make the freeze on Iran’s capabilities permanent – has been continuing in Congress but took longer than the mid-January deadline for the Presidential decision.7 As a consequence, at the beginning of January 2018, the US position going forward remains uncertain. President Trump again waived US sanctions, but stated that this would be “a last chance” and that the US would withdraw from the JCPOA unless the US Congress and European allies are able to “fix” the agreement.8 Any proposed changes to the deal, however, would likely be impossible for the other members of the agreement and would likely cause instability in the Iranian government. As the future of the US role in the JCPOA is in doubt, the future of the JCPOA itself is in doubt. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov stated that the “agreement cannot be implemented if one of the participants unilaterally steps out of it. It will fall apart, there will be no deal then”.9 The three EU parties to the JCPOA – France, Germany, and the UK – and the EU itself have made clear their view that the JCPOA is working and that it must continue.10 It is important that the international community fully understands what is at stake and ascertain the impact and potential impact of the JCPOA in the short-, medium-, and long term so as to understand how – if at all – the agreement could contribute to peace and stability in the Middle East.

Immediate and short-term impact The protracted EU3 + 3 negotiations and the JCPOA itself have both provided a breathing space for Iran and the Middle East region regarding conflict against Iran. While the JCPOA is far from popular in the Middle East, and certainly Iran has increased its political and military activities in the region, any potential nuclear weapons development has been halted for at least 15 years in regard to the enrichment program and, it is hoped, for longer or even completely. The preface in the JCPOA lays out the aspirations of the parties in which they hope to “ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful . . . and anticipate that the full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security”. The most significant and tangible immediate outcome of the JCPOA has been the ability of the IAEA to gain greater access to key nuclear sites in Iran and increase information, knowledge, and understanding about the Iranian nuclear program. The JCPOA calls for comprehensive measures providing for transparency and verification, and it requests the IAEA to monitor and verify the agreements voluntary nuclear-related measures, provide regular updates to the Board of Governors, and to the UN Security Council. Specific requests for the IAEA include: • • • •

•

Continuous monitoring of the excess centrifuges and enrichment-related infrastructure at Natanz Continuous monitoring of removed centrifuges and enrichment-related infrastructure at Fordow Technical cooperation for meeting international qualification standards for nuclear fuel Arrangements to address past and present issues of concern as laid out in the “Roadmap for Clarification of Past and Present Outstanding Issues” (related to the issues in the annex to the IAEA report of 8 November 2011).11 Monitoring of the implementation of voluntary and transparency measures, which ensure a long-term presence of the IAEA in Iran and include: • •

The IAEA monitoring of uranium ore concentrate for 25 years Containment and surveillance of centrifuge rotors and bellows for 20 years 83

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• • •

Use of IAEA-approved and certified modern technologies including online enrichment measurement and electronic seals A reliable mechanism to ensure speedy resolution of IAEA access concerns for 15 years

Technical cooperation for peaceful nuclear technology, including: • • • • • • • •

Nuclear power plants Research reactors Fuel fabrication Joint advanced R&D such as fusion Establishment of a regional nuclear medical center Personnel training Nuclear safety and security Environmental protection

A few days after the JCPOA was agreed, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2231 (2015), which requests the IAEA Director General to “undertake the necessary verification and monitoring of Iran’s nuclear-related commitments for the full duration of those commitments under the JCPOA”.12 Subsequently, the IAEA Board of Governors authorized the Director General to implement the verification and monitoring of Iran’s nuclear-related commitments and report throughout the full duration. By January 2017, the IAEA had developed a set of documents that provided the needed clarifications for the implementation of Iran’s nuclear-related measures and that were endorsed by all participants of the Joint Commission.13 The IAEA has reported throughout the implementation thus far that it has verified and monitored Iran’s implementation of its nuclear-related commitments in accordance with the modalities set out in the JCPOA. By November 2017,14 the IAEA has reported positively in terms of: (1) activities related to heavy water and reprocessing; (2) activities related to enrichment and fuel; and (3) centrifuge research and development, manufacturing and inventory. For example, the IAEA reports that Iran has not pursued the construction of the Arak heavy water research reactor and has not enriched uranium above 3.67% U-235. The Agency also reports that Iran is fully cooperating with its requirements and has notified the IAEA of its provisional implementation of the Additional Protocol and full implementation Modified Code 3.1, meaning that Iran has voluntarily applied the Additional Protocol on a provisional basis pending its entry into force. The Agency has conducted complementary accesses under the Additional Protocol to all the sites and locations in Iran which it has needed to visit. Iran must seek ratification of the Additional Protocol by 2023.

Immediate regional reactions Prior to the JCPOA, regional actors frequently expressed deep concerns about the nuclear capabilities of Iran in the short to medium timeframes. There was a real fear that the US or a regional state could carry out a military attack on Iran with the purpose of preventing what was seen as an inevitable nuclear weapons program. Analysts researched possible targets and modes of weapons delivery, and maps were pored over to see which countries might grant airspace for aircraft. According to Anthony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan in their 2009, 114-page “Study on a Possible Israeli Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Development Facilities”, there was also the likelihood of a tactical nuclear use by Israel.15 Potential consequences of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, including unintended consequences. were explored through scenarios and simulations,16 but in the immediate period following the JCPOA adoption, despite considerable fear and angers 84

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as a result of the deal, the potential for an attack on Iran appears to have been dropped for the time being. There is little doubt that the combination of sanctions, negotiations, and the hope for a deal inhibited, not only the hand of Iran in its nuclear program but also the drums of war emanating from factions within the US, Israel, and the Gulf. One of the most notable events in the lead-up to the deal was that of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2012,17 in which he said that the only way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon would be to prevent the country from amassing sufficient enriched uranium. To demonstrate his concerns, he showed a cartoon-style diagram of a bomb with black lines at 70% (said to be the first stage) and 90% (said to be the second stage). He drew a red line below the 90% line and said that Iran had completed the first stage and were well into the second stage, ready to move on to the final stage of developing weapons-usable highly enriched uranium (HEU) by Spring 2013 – a matter of months away from the date of his speech.18 In the following months, throughout 2013, talks between Iran and what was known either as the P5 + 1 (the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) or the EU3 + 3 (the three European powers – France, Germany, and the UK – plus China, Russia, and the US) were held under the auspices of the European Union and chaired by the European Union High Representative (Catherine Ashton). After several rounds of talks in Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Switzerland, the Joint Plan of Action ( JPA or Geneva interim agreement) was announced on 24 November 2013 in Geneva. The JPA froze key parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for temporary relief on certain economic sanctions, and by January 2014, the details of the technical aspects of the JPA were published.19 Negotiations between Iran and the EU3 + 320 continued throughout 2014, resulting in the “framework agreement” in April 201521 and the JCPOA in July 2015.22 All of these events would seem to have been just what Prime Minister Netanyahu would have wanted, but by the time of the JCPOA agreement, both Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s governments were speaking openly against the deal. In May 2015, Netanyahu spoke to the US Congress, stating that “this deal won’t be a farewell to arms, it would be a farewell to arms control. And the Middle East would soon be crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires. A region where small skirmishes can trigger big wars would turn into a nuclear tinderbox”.23 His main concerns are that Iran retains some nuclear enrichment capabilities which, if the deal collapses or if Iran were to withdraw, could enable Iran to develop the bomb. “It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb. It paves Iran’s path to the bomb”, PM Netanyahu said. “This is a bad deal”.24 As the negotiations progressed towards the JCPOA, Saudi Arabia began to echo Israeli concerns and made veiled threats regarding the possibility of creating their own nuclear weapons capability in response to what they saw as a long-term Iranian nuclear threat: “the kingdom of Saudi Arabia will take whatever measures are necessary in order to protect its security”, said Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Ambassador to the US in March 2015.25 Their mutual concerns over Iran has led to increasing contact between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and there seems to be a developing strategic relationship between the two Middle East powers, in large part as a result of the JCPOA, which has resulted in an emboldened Iran. Their fears are not to be discounted. As discussed later, following the JCPOA, Iran has been far more active in the region, particularly in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Iran is politically active and influential in Iraq, which deeply concerns the Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia. In Syria and Yemen, Iran is involved in the conflicts in ways that disturb Saudi Arabia, and Iran has continued to support non-state armed groups – such as Hezbollah – against Israel. There is no doubt that these are real problems and that Israel and Saudi Arabia have genuine concerns. The JCPOA only addresses the nuclear issue and deliberately does not address ballistic missiles or regional 85

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military activities. To have included such issues in the negotiation would have destroyed all potential for agreement,26 and despite economic sanctions, Iran would have still been involved in and influencing the political landscape of the Middle East, but with a nuclear weapons capability rather than without.

Medium-term impact Positive trends In May 2017, President Rouhani won reelection with 57% of the vote. The election featured a high turnout of 70%. The process and the results could signal for a meaningful democratic reform in Iran. Public figures and celebrities endorsed Rouhani in a vibrant manner, including through videos and blogs, a form of societal interaction that was not as prominent beforehand.27 One activist supporter of Rouhani attributed her ability to engage to the JCPOA. She explained that the deal has been vital in giving a platform for young Iranians to speak, “what he has done for the internet has been revolutionary. He increased the speed and now we no longer need state television as a platform. We are our own media now”.28 The elections also showed tides shifting, with religious matters taking the backseat in campaigns, and discussions rather centering on issues of governance and the economy. Mehdi Khalaji, a Qom-trained Shiite theologian and a Libitzky Family Fellow at the Washington Institute, notes that candidates seemed to have concluded that the Islamic ideology is not as big of an issue among voters anymore; instead, they focused on the economy as the major theme.29 Khamenei urged candidates “to explicitly and decisively declare that the economy and people’s living conditions are their priority”.30 This transfer of attention in itself could help the Middle East, where politicized religious rhetoric has been abused by leaders to distract from issues of governance that directly affect people’s lives. This change in Iran might not impact an overall regional shift in focus, but having a major Middle Eastern country altering its obsession away from religion in politics and into people’s living conditions could foster a less sectarian handling of policies. Moreover, the Sunni-Shia rivalry in the region, which we argue is primarily driven by a power struggle, continues to be fueled by religious splits; thus, easing these divisions could help alleviate some of the tension. At the time of writing this chapter, the recovery of the economy in Iran has not yet been felt by the majority of people, with unemployment looming at 12.5%, 30% of whom are under the age of 30.31 Oil production has rebounded to the pre-sanctions levels, yet the sector’s revival has not had the desired effects on people’s day-to-day lives. Would this recovery eventually create a stronger Iranian middle class that can lead an active political life, carrying the banner of economic reform rather than the ideas of the Islamic revolution? This remains to be seen.

Alarming aftermaths On the other hand, as discussed earlier, many argue that the JCPOA has enabled Iran to increase its hostile behavior in the region. Because Iran’s nuclear program was the main source of contention with the international community, negotiations had been purposefully laser-focused on this issue, to the extent where the JCPOA was forged at the expense of other matters that remain problematic and unresolved. In July 2017, four US senators wrote a letter to President Trump urging him not to certify that Iran is complying with the deal or allow for sanctions relief. Their rationale was that the “suspension of U.S. sanctions falls far short of being “vital to the national security interests 86

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of the United States”. . . . Iran continues to wage a campaign of regional aggression, sponsor international terrorism”.32 The senators cited issues that were outside the scope of the JCPOA, but at the same time attribute their inflammation to it. This widely held view that the deal has emboldened Iran’s regional aggression and engagement in proxy wars rests on three arguments. First, the lifting of sanctions on the aviation industry is enabling Iran to maintain an airbridge to Syria; second, the release of frozen assets provides Iran with billions of dollars, which it can use to fund these proxy wars; and third, Iran may now feel that it has resolved the main source of tension with major world powers, and thus may assume that anything else it does will not be met with harsh reactions. It is no revelation that Iran has created an airbridge to Syria, supplying weapons and fighters through commercial aircrafts. Knowledge about Iran’s utility of civilian flights to support proxy wars dates back to the start of the conflict. In 2013, a Western intelligence report was cited by Reuters indicating that “the equipment being transferred by both companies (Iran and Mahan Air) . . . ranges from communications equipment to light arms and advanced strategic weapons, some of which are being used devastatingly by Hezbollah and the Syrian regime against the Syrian people”.33 The two major Iranian airlines had increased their “commercial flights” to Syria since the conflict had intensified in October 2015. According to David Cohen, US Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, “Mahan Air’s close coordination with the IRGC-QF – secretly ferrying operatives, weapons and funds on its flights – reveals yet another facet of the IRGC’s extensive infiltration of Iran’s commercial sector to facilitate its support for terrorism”.34 In July 2016, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a report that explains how sanctions relief on the Iranian aviation industry empowers Iran to increase its support to the Assad regime in Syria. The report assesses that Iran’s ability to operate a commercial aircraft fleet directly contributes to its ability to fuel the conflict in Syria. It then concludes that the sales of Boeing and Airbus to Iran, which were results of the sanctions relief, will enable Iran to further expand its hostile behavior in the Middle East.35 On the release of frozen assets and Iran’s ability to support proxy wars, speaking at the Republican National Convention, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani noted that the Iran nuclear deal is “putting billions of dollars back into a country that’s the world’s largest supporter of terrorism. We are actually giving them the money to fund the terrorists that are killing us and our allies”.36 Iran did have billions of dollars in frozen assets due to sanctions; according to former US Secretary of State John Kerry, the figure is in the $55 billion range.37 While the majority of these funds are yet to be released, statements like this one by Giuliani make the case that these funds are contributing to Iran’s expansionist policies. Then there is the argument that with Iran sealing the nuclear deal, it feels it can now get away with anything. As US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley put it, “the deal drew an artificial line between the Iranian regime’s nuclear development and the rest of its lawless behavior. It said “we’ve made this deal on the nuclear side, so none of the regime’s other bad behavior is important enough to threaten the nuclear agreement”. . . . Iran’s leaders want to use the nuclear deal to hold the world hostage to its bad behavior”.38 The three arguments that criticize the deal for enabling an Iranian aggressive behavior have merit. However, it is difficult to determine a direct relationship between the deal, or the lifting of sanctions for that matter, and an Iranian aggressive behavior. Yes, the Iranian airbridge had intensified its trips to Syria only a couple of months after the deal was reached, but also this is when the conflict had deepened on the ground. The sales by Boeing and/or Airbus would provide Iran with more airplanes that can theoretically be used to strengthen its airbridge to Syria, but it is quite a stretch to claim that the sales would give Iran the tool to meddle with regional affairs, thus attributing this to the deal. The release of funds does give Iran a significant sum of 87

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money, but to date there has not been a systematic tracking of these funds, as to where they are being directed. Philip Gordon, former special assistant to the US president and White House coordinator for the Middle East, and Richard Nephew, who was the lead sanctions expert for the US team negotiating with Iran, speculate that the release of frozen assets’ impact on Iranian’s ability to fund proxies is overblown. They note that the Iranian support for proxies is relatively cheap.39 They add that “while a boost in revenues from unfrozen assets and increased oil sales obviously provides some scope for additional spending on military activities or terrorism, the regime also has a strong interest in allocating the bulk of any new revenues to its growing population”.40 They also cite General Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who noted that the “preponderance of the money [from sanctions relief] has gone to economic development and infrastructure”.41 Finally, it is hard to conclude that, because of the deal, any Iranian hostile behavior will be overlooked. The US continues to authorize sanctions against the regime in response to its missile program and sponsorship of proxies. “Trump is also reportedly weighing new measures against Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq and Syria, and its support for militant groups elsewhere”.42 The US has recently concluded the largest arms sale ever forged with Saudi Arabia, in part as a reaction to the perceived Iranian threat. There could be a relationship between the JCPOA and Iran’s overall regional ambitions, but there is no evidence of direct causation. The deal did one thing, however, which is dismantle a source of regional and international tension that could have taken an existential turn. Given turbulences and animosities in the region, the last thing that the Middle East needed was to add a nuclear dimension to the equation. One matter worth highlighting in this context, however, is how major powers need to be extra-attentive to their behavior when dealing with Iran, so they would not be perceived as overlooking any lawbreaking actions. For instance, the Obama gesture to release prisoners in 2016 who “did not pose national security threat” was an inaccurate portrayal of what happened. According to a report by Politico, some of the released prisoners were accused of posing threats to national security by the US Justice Department. Three were allegedly “part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration”.43 Another one was charged with conspiring to procure assault rifles and illegally sending them to Iran.44 There is no sensible way to believe that the Obama administration wanted to reinforce an Iranian illegal procurement network, but such slips strengthen the argument that the US might overlook some Iranian behaviors in exchange for their nuclear commitments.

A broader view In August 2015, Kenneth Pollack provided a testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the implications of the JCPOA for US policy in the Middle East, where he noted “this agreement is likely to be made or broken on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, not in the centrifuge halls of Natanz and Fordow”. Two years later, in September 2017, the same perspective was echoed by Nikki Haley’s remarks at the AEI, where she cited Iran’s engagement in regional proxies as evidence of their nonadherence to international law, and questioning whether it would make sense for the US president to certify their compliance with the deal in this regard. She concludes by noting, “we must consider the whole picture, not simply whether Iran has exceeded the JCPOA’s limit on uranium enrichment. We must consider the whole jigsaw puzzle, not just one of its pieces”.45 88

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The “jigsaw puzzle” is quite complicated, and in the spirit of trying to understand the effects of the deal on regional stability, it becomes critical to investigate what these proxy wars mean for Iran and why they are being pursued with the current alarming rate. In his testimony to congress, J. Matthew Mcinnis, resident fellow at the AEI, noted that “Tehran placed such emphasis on building foreign forces to defend its security and project its influence in the years after 1979”.46 During the Iraq-Iran War, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) worked with Iraqi Kurdish militants and assembled the Badr Corps to help fight against Saddam Hussein. The IRGC also supported a Lebanese Hezbollah from local Shia militias to combat the Israeli invasion. Currently, the Quds Force is Iran’s overarching arm on proxy wars’ fronts, providing direct assistance to the so-called axis of resistance. According to both US government reports and Iranian official statements, Tehran has helped create a 50,000-strong Syrian paramilitary group known as Jaysh al-Shabi (The People’s Army) to aid Syrian government forces.47 Given the suffering of Iran during its war with Iraq in the 1980s, and seeing the majority of Arab regimes siding with Saddam Hussein, its deterrence strategy became oriented towards taking the conflict outside its territory. The regime needed to create strategic depth that prevented the conflict from creeping into its own borders. This is why, from the Iranian point of view, maintaining Syria as Iran’s zone of influence is crucial for its survival. Mehdi Taeb, a confidante of Khamenei, once described Syria as Iran’s “35th province . . . if we lose Syria we won’t be able to hold Tehran”. On the other hand, Yemen does not hold the same strategic value to Tehran, and its interference in the conflict there is an unnecessary preemption against Saudi Arabia, which regards Yemen’s stability as critical to its own. Iran is playing a dangerous game of trying to maintain peace through active engagements in wars, wars that will foster generations to come with a desire for vengeance. These wars, bundled with the fueling of sectarianism, could be the recipe for decades of instability. In her report “How the Sunni-Shia Sectarianism is Poisoning Yemen”, Farea al-Muslimi of the Carnegie Endowment explains that the conflict is “reorganizing Yemeni society along sectarian lines and rearranging people’s relationships to one another on a non-nationalist basis”.48 The drip-drip violence plays into the hands of those who want division. These divisions will come back to bite them. We have already seen a terrorist attack reaching the heart of Iran for the first time in a decade. Unfortunately, and fortunately, not all Middle Eastern states are composed of one sect or religion. Thus, easing off the sectarian soundbite and active exporting of violence should guide any regional policy-making. Creating pockets of influence is a well-known strategy in advancing agendas for a number of states. For instance, Russia trying to defend minorities in Ukraine or Israel expanding settlements so it could further advance its reach seems to follow the same playbook. These creations of pockets of influence are regarded by the creator power as guarding oppressed sects. The view from the other side is that these pockets are created to lay the groundwork for interference. During a track II meeting, one Iranian scholar suggested a de-conflicting exercise between Iran and its neighbors, where each side recognizes the other’s zone of influence, and in a sequenced manner starts a series of de-escalations. This could follow the model of Sinai I and II agreements. While Sinai I and II were between two states with a clearer end goal in sight, the detailing of disengagements, the sequencing, and verification could provide a useful reference for such a plan.

Long-term impact The JCPOA – for all its limitations – has addressed a major problem and reduced a major threat in the Middle East in that there is now one fewer country with a problematic nuclear program in the region. The long-term issue of Israel’s nuclear capability, however, remains unaddressed 89

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through international law (such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)) or other types of international agreements. Since the failure of the 2015 NPT Review Conference, the significance of the JCPOA for the prospects of long-term peace and stability in the Middle East has increased. The Review Conference failed in large part due to the inability to make progress on establishing a process for a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the region (the Middle East WMD-Free Zone (MEWMDFZ)). The proposal for a Nuclear Weapon–Free Zone (NWFZ) in the region, which later became the broader, more inclusive MEWMDFZ, was first officially introduced by Iran and Egypt in 1974. The aspiration for such a zone formed a significant part of the Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) talks in the 1990s; it was included in UN Security Council resolution 687 that detailed the ceasefire in Iraq following the 1991 war; and it was a fundamental component of the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. In 2010, following a long period of neglect, the MEWMDFZ was placed at the center of the NPT Review Conference, and a plan of action was adopted by the states’ parties that required, among many other things, including 64 action items on nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy, a series of measures on the MEWMDFZ. These measures required the UN secretary general, Russia, the UK, and the US, in consultation with the states of the region, to convene a conference in 2012, to be attended by all states of the Middle East, on the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction, on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at by the states of the region, and with the full support and engagement of the nuclear-weapon states. 49 A facilitator with a mandate to undertake preparations for the convening of the 2012 conference was appointed and was also charged with assisting in implementing any follow-on steps agreed at the 2012 conference and reporting to the 2015 Review Conference and its Preparatory Committee meetings. However, despite all best efforts by the facilitator, the UN, the depositary states, and the state of the region, the conference was not convened in 2012 nor thereafter. Indeed, the following NPT Review Conference in 2015 failed as a result of the failure to convene the conference, and the issue is likely to be a major point of debate in the lead-up to the 2020 NPT Review Conference. One of the least interesting, most provocative expressions in international relations is “all options are on the table”.50 Usually, officials give this response when asked about whether a military action is being contemplated, and sometimes it is even used to reference the possibility of using nuclear weapons. The reality is that in these situations there is no table and certainly no table at which all people and views are represented and given a fair hearing. The only actual table is the governmental negotiations table, and we need to stop talking about a table that does not exist. Before the JCPOA, Iran was facing the threat of a military attack. Now with the JCPOA in place, military threats have subsided, but we need to further invest in the thinking behind the deal to create a regional platform for durable peace. Iran still supports the MEWMDFZ; some Iranian officials even view it as a legacy item.51 Balancing between legacy and new thinking, however, is tricky. While leaning on years of work and UN deliberations on the matter is integral in making the case for the initiative, the WMDFZ needs to integrate newer thinking on WMD. Unfortunately, conversations on the MEWMDFZ are still dominated by an older generation, almost all of whom are men. There is little fresh thinking, and half of the population – women – have very little say or influence in the discussions and policy formation. Likewise, young people are generally excluded, unless they 90

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are junior diplomats who know better than to challenge the status quo in a way that would have real impact. The rhetoric within the debate in the Arab states is stuck around how the Arab States compromised and agreed to the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 only in return for the resolution on the Middle East. In the same vein, the Arab Group continues to push for the Israeli nuclear capability resolution at the General Conference of the IAEA, a tactic which has been futile and led nowhere. There are now other avenues to argue for the creation of a WMDFZ in the Middle East, ones that stand on humanitarian grounds and require a different strategic outlook. Fresh thinking on WMD matters, which includes the humanitarian consequences, the role of women in disarmament, and nuclear weapons and democracy, needs to be woven into the case for a WMDFZ. During the negotiations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, there were no real attempts by Arab states, or by Iran, to import elements of the zone into the conversation or vice versa. This was a missed opportunity, one that could have brought – and could still bring – a vibrant new discourse into the discussions on the zone. There are other proposals that merit reconsideration through a humanitarian lens. These include regional security talks that would incorporate the zone under a wider regional security approach and at the same time address situations such as terrorism, small arms and light weapons, the arms trade, landmines, cluster munitions, and conflict resolution/prevention. Other ideas include regional cooperation on the nuclear energy production, such as proposals for all states acceding to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) in a coordinated fashion. Indeed, very few countries in the region remain outside any of them. Israel is the only state in the region that has not joined the NPT. Israel has signed but not ratified the CWC but not yet signed the BWC. Egypt has signed but not ratified the BWC and not yet joined the CWC. In regards to CTBT membership, the only states that have not signed and ratified in the region are Saudi Arabia and Syria, whereas Israel and Egypt are both signatories but have yet to ratify. Other proposals, such as for a regional fuel cycle, a nuclear fuel bank, and regional nuclear security measures, have indeed led to several initiatives that have been established and demonstrate the practicality of such ideas.52 One of the most successful examples of regional cooperation in the WMD field is the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear Centres of Excellence (CBRN CoE) Regional Secretariat in the Middle East. Established in 2013 in Amman, Jordan, within the EU framework of CBRN CoEs, the regional secretariat is a joint initiative between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre ( JRC) and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI). The Middle East CBRN CoE aims to mitigate CBRN risks of criminal, accidental, or natural origin by promoting a coherent policy, improving coordination and preparedness at national and regional levels, and offering a comprehensive approach covering legal, scientific, enforcement, and technical issues. The CoE has been effective in building capacity and knowledge throughout the region and demonstrates that cooperation within the Middle East on WMD is feasible and practicable.53 In a recent research paper, a young scholar, Tomisha Bino, laid out the case for a parallel regional process which would reset the connection between the WMDFZ and the Middle East peace process. She proposes that the states of the region could establish a complementary regional forum without undermining the NPT, to work towards the creation of a WMDFZ and at the same time reinvest in the abandoned peace process that would include conflict stabilization measures. As she explains: The current political environment, in which several crises and their causes are interwoven, means it is no longer possible for states to expect that their foreign policy mode 91

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of operation, in which they address issues separately and consecutively, is effective or sustainable.54 Not only do Arab states and Iran have a stake in elevating conversations about the zone in a fresh manner, but the same is also true for the entire international community, especially the E3 + 3. The Iranian nuclear deal was an unprecedented agreement in terms of scope and implementation. Many now are debating what happens when aspects of the deal expire. Israel’s main objection to the deal is the sunset clause55 when, in 10–15 years, aspects of the deal start expiring, including critical restrictions on enrichment and reprocessing.56 But rather than cast this as a vulnerability, it can be viewed as an opportunity. One possible way to keep these restrictions even after they expire is to internationalize Iran’s current commitments under the deal. Caps on levels of enrichment or more stringent monitoring and verification could become global norms, the same way inspections outside of declared facilities have become through the Additional Protocol. Another way could be to regionalize them. Certain elements of Iran’s commitments under the JCPOA could be regionally adopted. This would be challenging given the tough case of Israel. To this end, mutually agreed-upon phasing out of existential threats could be part and parcel of a regional plan. With Iran choosing not to develop a nuclear weapon, at least for now, there is no reason why Israel should not take a step or two to assuage the existential threat posed by its nuclear arsenal. This is where elements from the JCPOA and the ban treaty could build the foundation for the WMDFZ. One is normative, and the other is highly technical. Both instruments unraveled around the same time. Going forward, the region needs to adopt a two-track plan to phase out existential threats in the region. In unofficial talks, some Israeli experts expressed that the nuclear option is needed so long as they continue to receive existential threats. It could be challenging for officials currently handling the WMDFZ business to look over the horizon and weave the Iran deal with the ban treaty to create something for the region. This is why the first step would be the creation of a young to midcareer-level group of men and women that has the ability to examine the topic beyond a rigidly held position and look for ways to create a sustainable security structure for the Middle East at large.

Conclusion In George Orwell’s timeless piece, “Shooting an Elephant”, the thoughts of a soldier chasing an elephant that went rogue in a village are detailed to the reader. While the elephant had been raging before the soldier arrived, by the time he got there, the creature appeared to be harmless. The soldier thought he ought not to shoot it. He did not want to shoot it. But the soldier was being followed by a group of people who – seeing him with his big rifle – were eager to witness the shooting. The soldier ended up shooting it, not because he thought the elephant was an actual threat, but because it was expected of him to do so. The same is being done with the JCPOA and Iran today. The current US administration, along with Saudi Arabia and Israel, are constantly attacking the Iran deal and want to shoot it down. Populism surrounding this antagonistic line of debate blames everything troubling in the Middle East on this deal. This line of attack and the perception that the deal will be shot down might be lip service to satisfy an anti-Iran-deal camp, but it could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that might grow beyond a certain individual or an administration, and eventually leading to shooting down not only a harmless creature but one that is actually doing good for the global village. President Trump seems to be hunting down the deal and threatening to shoot it dead with a single shot. Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations 92

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indeed used to be a raging elephant that could have had devastating effects on the whole region, but now with the deal in place, this elephant is under control, and there is no need to shoot it. As Orwell summed up: Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. . . . [L]egally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame. . . . I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Notes 1 China, France, Germany, Russia, UK, US, and the EU (convenor) 2 Gareth Porter, “When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes,” Foreign Policy. 16 October 2014. http://for eignpolicy.com/2014/10/16/when-the-ayatollah-said-no-to-nukes/. 3 Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, National Intelligence Estimate, US National Intelligence Council. www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/20071203_release.pdf. 4 Patricia Lewis,“Trump Leads US Security Policy into Uncharted Territory,” Expert Comment, Chatham House.www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/trump-leads-us-security-policy-uncharted-territory. 5 “ ‘The worst deal’: Trump set for showdown over Iran agreement”, AFP report in The Journal, 12 October 2017. www.thejournal.ie/trump-iran-deal-showdown-3642233-Oct2017/. 6 Patricia Zengerle, “U.S. Congress to Let Iran Deadline Pass, Leave Decision to Trump,” Reuters, 12 December 2017. www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-congress/u-s-congress-to-let-iran-dead line-pass-leave-decision-to-trump-idUSKBN1E62HP. 7 No US bill on tightening Iran nuclear deal imminent: senator, AFP report, 4 January 2018, http:// zeenews.india.com/americas/no-us-bill-on-tightening-iran-nuclear-deal-imminent-senator-207 1938.html. 8 Matthew Lee, “Trump Hands Nuke Deal ‘last chance,’ Waives Iran Sanctions,” Washington Post, 12 January 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/officials-iran-deal-survives-trumpwill-waive-sanctions/2018/01/12/02677228-f7b1–11e7–9af7-a50bc3300042_story.html?utm_ term=.8a0106a69398. 9 JCPOA to ‘Fall Apart’ if US Withdraws, Russian FM Warns, Tasnim News Agency, 20 January 2018. www. tasnimnews.com/en/news/2018/01/20/1632515/jcpoa-to-fall-apart-if-us-withdraws-russian-fm-warns. 10 Patrick Wintour,“UK, Germany and France Urge US not to Tear Up Iran Nuclear Deal,” The Guardian, 11 January 2018. www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/11/eu-and-iran-foreign-ministers-meetin-support-of-nuclear-deal. 11 Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Report by the Director General, IAEA, GOV/2011/65, 8 November 2011. www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/gov2011-65.pdf. 12 The actions requested of the Director General by the Security Council as contained in resolution 2231 (2015) are set out in GOV/2015/53 and Corr. 1, para. 8. GOV/2017/48 Page 2 and Security Council resolution 2231 (2015), subject to the availability of funds and consistent with the Agency’s standard safeguards practices. The Board of Governors also authorized the Agency to consult and exchange information with the Joint Commission, as set out in GOV/2015/53 and Corr. 13 The cost of the provisional application of Iran’s Additional Protocol (€3.0 million) per annum is being met from the IAEA regular budget (GC(60)/2). The estimated cost to the Agency for verifying and monitoring Iran’s nuclear-related commitments as set out in the JCPOA is €6.2 million in 2017. As of 6 November 2017, €9.7 million of extra-budgetary funding was available to meet the cost of JCPOArelated activities for 2017 and beyond. 14 Report by the Director General, Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015), 13 November 2017 (Derestricted 23 November 2017), GOV/2017/48. www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/17/11/gov2017-48.pdf. 15 Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman, “Options in Dealing with Iran’s Nuclear Program,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2010. csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/ files/publication/100323_Options_todealwith_Iran.pdf.

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Karim Kamel and Patricia M. Lewis 16 Ben Brumfield and Oren Liebermann, “Leaked Audio: Israeli Leaders Drew Up Plans to Attack Iranian Military,” CNN, 22 August 2015 (‘The recording with former Defense Minister Ehud Barak was leaked to Israel’s Channel 2 and translated into English by CNN. It detailed three strikes Ehud Barak had allegedly planned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively’). http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/22/middleeast/israel-plan-iran-military-target-strike/index.html. 17 Prime Minister Netanyahu United Nations General Assembly Address, 27 September 2012. www. c-span.org/video/?308419-3/prime-minister-netanyahu-united-nations-general-assembly-address. 18 Ibid. 19 Summary of Technical Understandings Related to the Implementation of the Joint Plan of Action on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program, 16 January 2014. https://obamawhitehouse. archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/16/summary-technical-understandings-related-implementa tion-joint-plan-actio. 20 We use the EU3+3 terminology because that is how the group of countries is officially described in the 2015 JCPOA. 21 Julian Borger and Paul Lewis, “Iran Nuclear Deal: Negotiators Announce ‘framework’ Agree ment,” The Guardian, 3 April 2015. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/iran-nuclear-dealnegotiators-announce-framework-agreement. 22 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. www.state.gov/documents/organization/245317.pdf. 23 Peter Baker, “In Congress, Netanyahu Faults ‘Bad Deal’ on Iran Nuclear Program,” New York Times, 3 March 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/world/middleeast/netanyahu-congress-iran-israelspeech.html?_r=0. 24 Ibid. 25 Alexandra Jaffe, “Saudi Ambassador to U.S. Won’t Rule Out Building Nukes,” CNN, 27 March 2015. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/26/politics/saudi-open-to-nuclear-bomb/index.html. 26 Former US Secretary of State, John Kerry, speaking at Chatham House on “The Iran Nuclear Deal: Reflections on the First Two Years,” 6 November 2017. www.chathamhouse.org/file/irannuclear-deal-reflections-first-two-years. 27 Clifton W. Sherrill, “Why Hassan Rouhani Won Irans 2013 Presidential Election,” Middle East Policy 21, no. 2 (2014): 64–75. 28 Thomas Erdbrink, “Rouhani Wins Re-Election in Iran by a Wide Margin,” The New York Times, 20 May 2017. 29 Mehdi Khalaji, “Vanishing Islam in Iran’s Election,” Vanishing Islam in Iran’s Election – The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/vanishingislam-in-irans-election 30 Ibid. 31 “Hassan Rouhani Wins Iran’s Presidential Election,” Iran 2017 Elections News | Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 20 May 2017. 32 Tom Cotton, et al., Received by The Honorable Rex Tillerson, July 2017, Washington, DC. 33 Louis Charbonneau, “Exclusive: Iran Steps Up Weapons Lifeline to Assad,” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 14 March 2013. www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-iran/exclusive-iran-steps-up-weaponslifeline-to-assad-idUSBRE92D05U20130314, accessed 22 September 2017. 34 “Treasury Designates Iranian Commercial Airline Linked to Iran’s Support for Terrorism,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, 12 October 2011. www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1322.aspx. 35 Paul Bucala and Ken Hawrey, “Iran’s Airbridge to Syria,” American Enterprise Institute, July 2016. 36 Dan Clark,“Is Giuliani Right About the Iran Nuclear Deal?”@Politifact,5 August 2016.www.politifact.com/ new-york/statements/2016/aug/05/rudy-giuliani/no-one-writing-iran-check-under-nuclear-deal/. 37 Glenn Kessler, “Kerry’s Claim That Iran Has Oreceived ‘$3 billion’ from the Nuclear Deal,” The Washington Post, WP Company, 11 May 2016. www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/ wp/2016/05/11/kerrys-claim-that-iran-has-only-received-3-billion-from-the-nuclear-deal/?utm_ term=.b5760547b463. 38 Nikki Haley, “Nikki Haley Address on Iran and the JCPOA,” Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Remarks on Iran and the JCPOA. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Remarks on Iran and the JCPOA, 5 September 2017. 39 Richard Nephew and Philip Gordon, “The ‘Worst Deal Ever’ That Actually Wasn’t,” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 14 July 2017. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/ iran-nuclear-deal-two-years/533556/. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.

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Don’t shoot the elephant 42 Jon Schuppe, “  ‘No One Will Trust’ U.S. If Trump Ends Nuclear Deal, Iran’s President Says,” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 19 September 2017. www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ iran-nuclear-talks/no-one-will-trust-u-s-if-trump-ends-nuclear-n802611. 43 Josh Meyer, “Obama’s Hidden Iran Deal Giveaway,” POLITICO, 24 April 2017. www.politico. com/story/2017/04/24/obama-iran-nuclear-deal-prisoner-release-236966. 44 Ibid. 45 Nikki Haley, “Nikki Haley Address on Iran and the JCPOA,” Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Remarks on Iran and the JCPOA. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Remarks on Iran and the JCPOA, 5 September 2017. 46 J. Matthew Mcinnis, “Iranian Deterrence Strategy and Use of Proxies,” Statement before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on “Defeating the Iranian Threat Network: Options for Countering Iranian Proxies,”. Statement before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations On “Defeating the Iranian Threat Network: Options for Countering Iranian Proxies,” 29 November 2016. 47 Bryan Price, “Syria: A Wicked Problem for All,” CTC Sentinel 6, no. 8 (August 2013): ctc.usma.edu/ v2/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/CTCSentinel-Vol6Iss88.pdf. 48 Farea Al-Muslimi, “How Sunni-Shia Sectarianism Is Poisoning Yemen,” Carnegie Middle East Center, 29 December 2015. carnegie-mec.org/diwan/62375?lang=en 49 NPT 2010 Final Document – Volume I (NPT/CONF.2010/50 (Vol. I)). www.un.org/en/conf/ npt/2010/. 50 Anthony Cordesman, “Options in Dealing with Iran’s Nuclear Program,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 March 2010. www.csis.org/analysis/options-dealing-irans-nuclear-program-0. 51 As expressed in conversations the author had with Iranian diplomats. 52 Frank N. von Hippel, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Emad Kiyaei, Harold A. Feiveson and Zia Mian, “Fissile Material Controls in the Middle East: Steps Toward a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and All Other Weapons of Mass Destruction,” International Panel on Fissile Materials, October 2013. http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr11.pdf. 53 “CBRN Centres of Excellence Establish Secretariat in Middle East,” 10 July 2013, CBRNE, Policy & Initiatives, Preparedness. https://globalbiodefense.com/2013/07/10/cbrn-centres-of-excellenceestablish-secretariat-in-middle-east/. 54 Tomisha Bino, “The Pursuit of a WMD-Free Zone in the Middle East: A New Approach,” Chatham House Research Paper, July 2017. www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/ research/2017-07-27-WMDFZME.pdf. 55 Aaron Magid, “Netanyahu Tells Congress: Remove Sunset Clause from Iran Deal,” Jewish Insider, 24 August 2017. jewishinsider.com/12705/netanyahu-tells-congress-remove-sunset-clause-iran-deal/. 56 Robert Einhorn and Richard Nephew, “The Iran Nuclear Deal: Prelude to Proliferation in the Middle East?” Brookings, 31 May 2016. www.brookings.edu/research/the-iran-nuclear-deal-prelude-to-prolife ration-in-the-middle-east/.

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8 THE REVOLUTIONARY GUARD IN IRANIAN DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN POWER POLITICS Farzan Sabet and Roozbeh Safshekan

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been the subject of intense scholarly attention as it has come to play an increasingly important role in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The scholarly literature on the IRGC has studied it from a number of perspectives, including its history and roles as a military, economic, and socio-cultural actor.1 Fewer studies have focused on the role of the IRGC in Iranian power politics.2 One key trend in this part of the literature has been to view the IRGC as bent on the seizure of power at home and military confrontation abroad.3 Yet these predictions have not been fully realized. This chapter seeks to add to the literature on the IRGC by focusing on its role in Iranian domestic politics and foreign policy. During the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a number of armed groups loyal to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arose to overthrow the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979) and combat the political opposition. Ayatollah Khomeini issued the order to gather these groups into the “Army of the Guardians” (Sepah-e Pasdaran) in late February 1979. The IRGC had an explicitly political function by design, as recognized in its charter which empowers it to fight forces which seek to overthrow the Islamic Republic, and was integral to systematically purging the politically heterogeneous coalition that carried out the revolution.4 The IRGC was thus born as a domestic security force. The fear of US military retaliation following the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran led Ayatollah Khomeini to call for the creation of a popular militia known as the Basij,5 which was consolidated under the IRGC by the Iranian parliament in January 1981.6 This laid the foundation for the IRGC to assume a role in military affairs, which rapidly expanded with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980. The IRGC entry into the war was motivated by the lack of success of ground operations by the Iranian Army (Artesh), decimated by post-revolution purges and a Western arms embargo, to liberate territory occupied by the Iraqi Army in the first six months of the war. The IRGC was thus seized upon as the solution to overcome Iran’s military limitations. The IRGC used its grass-roots network in local mosques, universities, and elsewhere to raise Basij volunteer units, allowing the Islamic Republic to rush masses of troops to the front and help the Army bring the invasion to a halt. While the IRGC lacked the Army’s professionalism and sophisticated weaponry, it compensated with numbers, intense religious and patriotic fervor, and the ability to execute effective tactics and strategies with limited resources. The IRGC proved its effectiveness in four successful joint operations with the Army, including Operation Samen alAemeh in September 1981 which broke the Iraqi siege of Abadan, operations Tarigh al-Ghods in 96

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November 1981 and Fath al-Mobin in March 1982 which liberated much of Khuzestan province, and Beit al-Moghadas in April 1981 which led to the liberation of Khorramshahr. These operations effectively ejected Iraq from Iranian soil by the second year of the war. The IRGC continued to grow as a military actor, achieving its greatest success in Operation Valfajr Eight in February 1986 when it seized the strategic Faw peninsula on Iraqi soil. The IRGC’s military role gradually became institutionalized, beginning with the IRGC charter which tasked it with “strengthening the capacity of the Islamic Republic through cooperation with other armed forces and military training and mobilization of popular forces” as well as “guarding the independence, territorial integrity, and the regime of the Islamic Republic”.7 The need to coordinate the war effort with the government led to the creation of the Ministry of the IRGC,8 and its military function was further formalized when Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Mohsen Rezaie, commander of the IRGC from 1981 to 1997, to prepare it “in the areas of logistics, arrangement of forces, and ground, sea, and air tactics” and furnish it “with powerful ground, sea, and air forces as soon as possible” in September 1985.9 The IRGC therefore played a vital role in the survival of the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini (1979–89) as a domestic security actor against the political opposition and as a military actor against Iraqi invasion. The IRGC as we know it today may not have existed were it not for the intersection of two major dilemmas in the Islamic Republic’s history: a demobilization dilemma at the end of the war in August 1988, followed by a leadership dilemma after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989. The end of the war meant that the IRGC would have to demobilize at a time when Iran’s economy was in ruins and find a new role in post-war society. This task was rendered more difficult by the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. No one else in the Islamic Republic possessed the same combination of revolutionary charisma, religious learning, political experience, and social popularity. This left a vacuum of authority that placed Iranian decision-makers in a quandary about who could provide the decisive leadership needed to transition the state from war to peacetime. This intersection of dilemmas created questions about how the IRGC would transition into post-war Iran without Ayatollah Khomeini’s steady hand. As the latter had pointed out, “If there was no IRGC, there would be no country”.10 The IRGC was not only the sword and shield of the Islamic Republic, but it was also one of its most well-organized and disciplined bases of support. Furthermore, demobilizing and disbanding the IRGC could introduce an unstable element, legions of battle-hardened young men, into an already troubled society. Under these circumstances, the Islamic Republic opted to demobilize the IRGC from a war footing but preserve it as a domestic security and military actor and allow it to expand its non-security functions. In the Islamic Republic under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (1989–present), the IRGC has assumed important economic and socio-cultural roles which are beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, this chapter focuses on the place of the IRGC in Iranian domestic and foreign power politics. Part I looks at the role of the IRGC in Iranian domestic politics. This role is structured by two political ideals: the constitutional mandate that the IRGC “guard the revolution and its achievements” and military non-interference in politics. Under Ayatollah Khomeini, the role of the IRGC in domestic politics was as a security actor that directly policed the political boundaries of the Islamic Republic and confronted its opponents. Under Ayatollah Khamenei, the IRGC assumed a greater role in domestic politics on behalf of the principlist political current. The principlists, whose name is intended to invoke devotion to the principles of the revolution, and who tend toward political authoritarianism, social conservatism, economic egalitarianism, and a confrontational foreign policy, are a coalition that emerged beginning in the early-2000s in reaction to President Mohammad Khatami and the reform movement. The greater political 97

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role of the IRGC was not simply directly as a domestic security actor, but also indirectly through the mobilization of its grass roots to win national elections and placement of senior affiliates in key positions in elected power centers, among other things. Part II looks at the role of the IRGC in Iranian foreign policy. The actions of the IRGC as a foreign policy actor are shaped by its experience in the Iran-Iraq War and military characteristics. This has led the IRGC to have a realist worldview of international relations that emphasizes self-reliance, military power, and zero-sum confrontation. The IRGC participates in foreign policy-making and implementation as both the main military force responsible for Iranian power projection abroad and the actor implementing much of the country’s Middle East policy. The IRGC’s military role is briefly discussed in terms of its foreign policy implications. This is followed by a lengthier discussion of its role in the creation of proxy non-state actors and military cooperation with existing friendly and adversarial state and non-state actors through the Jerusalem Force (Sepah-e Qods), which plays a central role in shaping Iranian foreign policy in the Middle East.

The IRGC in Iranian domestic politics Iranian domestic politics in the first decade after the Iranian Revolution was characterized by a high level of cohesion among the Islamists loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini, who formed the political cadres of the new system, labeled as the Khomeinists here. This cohesion was facilitated by the authority of Ayatollah Khomeini, the need to defeat the remnants of the ancien regime and political opposition in order to consolidate power, and to execute the war effort against Iraq. The consequence was that, between the ouster of President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr until the mid-1990s, factional polarization among Khomeinists did not manifest itself in strong electoral competition.11 This cohesion meant that the IRGC, in its capacity as a domestic security force, had a narrowly defined political role that targeted the opposition but did not involve itself in intra-Khomeinist competition. By the mid-1990s, however, a profound shift in the internal and external circumstances faced by the Islamic Republic led to a transformation of the political role of the IRGC. The end of existential internal and external threats and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini revealed fissures and inaugurated a period of much more intense intra-Khomeinist competition than had previously existed. In this context, the reformist political current mobilized social forces with promises of expanded social and political freedoms to rapidly take over the elected centers of power, such as the presidency and parliament, as part of their competition with the conservative political current, who had strong influence over unelected centers of power, such as the Guardian Council and judiciary. This rapid takeover led to a backlash against reformists by conservatives, who reconstituted themselves under the principlist political current. The IRGC emerged as an important player in this backlash. Ayatollah Khamenei and the principlists came to view the IRGC as an important power center through which they could carry out their competition with reformists, and to a lesser extent the centrist political current led by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Yet the IRGC was not a mere instrument in this competition, but a massive living body with its own priorities. First, the empowerment of elected power centers and the domestic security forces they nominally presided over, including the Ministry of Intelligence, had the potential to downgrade the status of the IRGC as the premier domestic security organization. Second, the IRGC grass roots, including the Basij and network of veteran and martyr families and organizations, tended toward social and political conservatism, economic egalitarianism, and a confrontational foreign policy. The tendencies of the IRGC grass roots could therefore not easily be reconciled with the reformist quest for 98

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expanded social and political freedoms, economic liberalization, and a moderate foreign policy, without causing serious dissension among the grass roots. Third, the reformist emphasis on economic liberalization, which included a greater role for the domestic private sector and foreign companies, threatened the possible economic position of the IRGC. The latter had been allowed to enter the post-war economy as a result of the need for reconstruction and budget shortfalls that had led the government to encourage state entities to fund themselves through economic activities. This nascent role in the Iranian economy was now in danger from competition with the domestic private sector and foreign companies. Finally, the IRGC, as an entity whose influence in Iranian foreign policy was premised on military power, perceived its status to be threatened by a more moderate foreign policy premised on diplomacy, a dynamic explored further in the next section. Therefore, in the polarized politics of the mid-to-late 1990s, the IRGC viewed its own interests as divergent with those of the reformists, moving it into increasingly close alignment with the principlists. This evolution marked a dramatic shift for the role of the IRGC in domestic politics. As noted at the outset of this section, during the first decade and a half following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the IRGC had remained aloof of intra-Khomeinst competition. This stance was conditioned by two political ideals of the Islamic Republic. The first was the mission of the IRGC to “guard the revolution and its achievements”, a role enshrined in Article 150 of the Iranian Constitution.12 At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini had exhorted the military to not interfere in politics. On 10 August 1983, for instance, Ayatollah Khomeini told a gathering of IRGC commanders that “You must ensure that political aspects do not enter the IRGC, because if political thoughts enter the IRGC, its military aspects shall be destroyed”.13 This famous dictum was repeated in other speeches and more formally enshrined in his last will and testament.14 As explained earlier, under Ayatollah Khomeini the boundary between guarding the revolution and its achievements and military non-interference in politics had remained clear. However, the increased intra-Khomeinist competition under Ayatollah Khamenei laid bare the potential contradiction between these two political ideals, a function of the vagueness with which they had been defined. This meant that the IRGC moved from non-interference in politics under Ayatollah Khomeini toward greater emphasis on guarding the revolution and therefore playing a role in politics under Ayatollah Khamenei. The academic and policy literature on the IRGC has tended to either understate or overstate the political role and power of the IRGC. Those who understate its power and role argue it is a non-partisan state entity like any other in the Islamic Republic pursuing narrow parochial interests.15 Those who overstate it present it as the be all and end all political forces in the country destined to dominate Islamic Republic through subversion and outright coercion.16 Both views miss the nuanced and evolving nature of the role and power of the IRGC in Iranian politics. IRGC involvement in politics has taken shape through two discrete, formal and informal, mechanisms. The first mechanism took shape under the auspices of the formal role of the IRGC as a domestic security actor against reformists since the mid-1990s. The IRGC has also used informal mechanisms to interfere in domestic politics, for example, mobilizing its well-organized grass roots in elections for its favored candidates. One of the earliest indications of the IRGC’s attempt to informally influence elected power centers was the second round of the 1996 parliamentary election in Tehran. In the run-up to the vote, then IRGC commander Major General Mohsen Rezaei, addressing the soldiers of the 27th Mohammad Rasoulallah Division of Tehran on 17 April 1996, declared that: You and your families must enter the field with all of your strength, and vote for those who are favored by the supreme leader. Today is the day that the army of his holiness 99

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Rassoul [referring to the division] must conduct its first honorable political operation and this shall be recorded and preserved in the IRGC’s political history. . . . When he [Khamenei] clearly names a threat and declares his sense of danger, we no longer have a justification or excuse to sit and act as we have in the past. . . . In the second round of the election we must enter the field and with our votes prevent the liberals [pro-Rafsanjani candidates], even just one of them, from entering the parliament and creating problems for the nation and country.17 The efforts of the IRGC, however, were ineffectual both during the 1996 election and 1997 presidential election in which Khatami won in a landslide. Having lost the ability to influence elected power centers through informal means with the loss of these elections, the IRGC pivoted to using formal means to confront reformists. One of the first major examples of this was during the 18 Tir student uprising. When the pro-reformist newspaper Salaam was shut down by principlists, pro-reform university students and supporters took to the streets, leading to days of demonstrations. In the midst of the uprising, the IRGC took the unprecedented step of confronting Khatami and presented him with an ultimatum to end the demonstrations, or else: Mr. President, if today you do not take a revolutionary decision and perform your Islamic and patriotic duty, it is unimaginable how late and irredeemable tomorrow will be. In conclusion, we respectfully and with affinity declare to you that our patience is at an end and we will not permit ourselves to tolerate this any longer if you do not address these issues.18 The popular support for Khatami and reformists limited the ability of the IRGC to effectively use informal means to influence elected power centers until the mid-2000s, when divisions among reformists and centrists and voter apathy and low turnout enabled the principlists to win elections. The most well-known example of this is the active support of the IRGC for then relatively unknown candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who went on to win the 2005 Iranian presidential election. The 2005 candidate Mehdi Karroubi was among the first to allege in a letter to the supreme leader that the IRGC directly interfered in the election in favor of Ahmadinejad.19 While the IRGC never publicly acknowledged this, Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif, head of IRGC public relations, hinted at the organization’s favored candidate: “The Basijis, who are a noticeable part of the country’s population, felt that what they wanted and liked was in the approach of him [Ahmadinejad] and it is undeniable that the Basijis vote then was for him”.20 Having mobilized the grass roots to help Ahmadinejad win the 2005 election, the IRGC extended this informal mechanism to circulate key personnel to all levels of the presidential administration and government ministries, all the way down to the provincial level. According to Esmail Kowsari, a senior IRGC commander and former member of parliament, the IRGC did not refrain from providing any support to the new administration and “introduced skillful and effective individuals to Ahmadinejad who everyone can attest were the skillful and successful forces and managers of the administration”.21 This was most evident in the cabinet, where the three key ministries responsible for Iran’s national security (defense, intelligence, and interior) and the three key ministries heavily involved in economic development (oil, energy, and roads and urban development) were headed by former senior IRGC figures.22 The appointment of Rostam Ghasemi to the Ministry of Oil was emblematic of this process. Ghasemi, the former commander of the Khatam al-Anbia Construction Headquarters (KACH) from 2001 to 2011, was appointed as oil minister during Ahmadinejad’s second term. His speech during KACH’s 100

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farewell ceremony illustrated where his true loyalties were: “While I have become a public servant in the Ministry of Oil, my entire existence is in the IRGC and I shall remain this way”.23 The role of the IRGC in the 2009 Iranian presidential election remains the subject of controversy. As in elections since 1996, the IRGC mobilized its grass roots to support the favored candidate. In a speech to Basij members on 19 January 2009, for instance, Brigadier General Abdollah Araghi, then commander of the politically significant Mohammad Rasoulallah Division of Greater Tehran, declared that Ayatollah Khamenei’s support for Ahmadinejad was a beacon for Basij members to support the incumbent, and they were “duty bound” to do so.24 However, allegations of electoral fraud made by reformist presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, and the Green Movement they led, raise the prospect that the IRGC may have used a new indirect means to influence the election. Mousavi expressed concerns that the IRGC orchestrated electoral fraud: Evidence has been received regarding the interference of certain IRGC and Basij commanders in the election. . . . Since the extent of the mentioned illegal actions are not clear and some managers and members of polling stations are among their [IRGC’s] candidates, the possibility of changes to people’s vote troubles the mind.25 A leaked video of a speech by IRGC commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, in which he discusses the response to the Green Movement with members of the organization’s senior leadership, highlighted the possible motivation behind IRGC interference in the 2009 election. In the speech Jafari declared that: The worry and concern which existed and the redline that existed for the forces of the revolution was that the forces that were against the revolution and its values, which during the period of the Second of Khordad [Reform era, 1997–2005] had found an opportunity and had penetrated the regime, would once again come to power. Jafari’s comment can be interpreted to mean that in the 2009 election, the IRGC may have engaged in outright electoral fraud to prevent reformists from retaking the presidency, including manipulating the election outcome. Another interpretation can be that this redline was established in the context of its domestic security response to the Green Movement demonstrations, rather than the election. This interpretation is supported by Jafari’s comment in the video that “In the election and the events afterward it became clear why they [reformists] insisted so much that the IRGC and Basij, under the label “military forces”, should not interfere with the election”. Jafari said that if reformists had it their way, “we should not interfere, so that they could carry out their plot while the IRGC and Basij do not bother them”. These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but we lack evidence to say with certainty the IRGC did engage in electoral fraud.26 The Green Movement demonstrations shook the Islamic Republic to its foundations and created a crisis of legitimacy around the elections. This appears to have led Ayatollah Khamenei, while casting his ballot in the 2013 presidential election, to articulate the political ideal that voting was a “right of the people” (hagh-o nas), a term laden with religious significance in Islam.27 This idea has subsequently been repeated by him in other speeches, with Ayatollah Khamenei asserting that the “protection of the vote of each Iranian, is a Sharia and Islamic obligation and no one has the right to betray this sacred trust”.28 Elsewhere, he has said that “All those who are involved in the implementation, protection, counting, tallying of votes, and announcement of the results must observe an excellence of sacred trust in the safeguarding of the votes of the 101

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nation, and the slightest violation in this matter is a betrayal of trust”.29 On one level, this can be seen as a public statement on the importance of votes and, in the context of the 2009 election, it can be seen as an admonition of the Green Movement for challenging the outcome of that election. On another level, however, if the IRGC did commit or support systematic electoral fraud in 2009, it can also be seen as a signal that this type of political interference is out of bounds. In the subsequent 2013 and 2017 presidential elections and 2016 parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections, the IRGC has continued its pattern of using formal and informal mechanisms to influence politics, but allegations of systemic fraud have not arisen. Regardless, the IRGC has continued to exert influence over Iranian politics through both formal and informal mechanisms, with mobilization of its grass roots continuing to be a mainstay of its electoral repertoire. In the 2013 election, the formal media arm of the political office of the IRGC clearly laid out the characteristics of its ideal candidate, which bore a strong resemblance with the leading principlist candidates.30 In the 2017 election, the IRGC more openly supported presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi. However, in the post-2009 political atmosphere of the Islamic Republic, this influence has been less effective in terms of outcomes. The coalition that made up the principlists has fragmented as a result of Ahmadinejad’s controversial policies, leading principlists who are more moderate to take an increasingly independent stance. Meanwhile, centrists and reformists managed to form a “moderate” alliance. Finally, Iranians, reacting to the mismanagement of Ahmadinejad, came out to vote for moderates, who in 2016 and 2017 were joined by moderate principlists, allowing them to win and throw principlists out of most elected power centers. This was despite an effort by principlists to unite and appeal to the public under the candidacy of Raisi and the Popular Front of the Forces of Islamic Revolution ( JAMNA). Mostafa Mir-Salim, a principlist presidential candidate who was nonetheless close to JAMNA, tacitly identified the IRGC’s informal participation in the election through its support for JAMNA, but highlighted this support as a cause of principlist defeat. He mused that while the people would back the military to the hilt on the battlefield, the latter’s interference in politics would cause people to vote in the opposite direction.31

The IRGC in Iranian foreign policy The foreign policy outlook of the IRGC, as a state entity in the Islamic Republic involved in factional politics and national security decision-making, has been shaped by two factors. First, as outlined in the introduction, the IRGC transformed from a domestic security force during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 into a military force during the Iran-Iraq War. The formative foreign policy experience of the IRGC was therefore the life-or-death struggle against Iraq under Saddam Hussein, in which only Iranian military prowess mattered, and the superpowers, regional states, and international organizations either reacted with silence to Iraqi aggression or actively aided and abetted it. Second, the interaction of the IRGC with foreign policy has almost exclusively been as a military force. This is in stark contrast to its multifaceted role at home, where it simultaneously operates as a domestic security, political, economic, and socio-cultural actor. Its leadership, decision-making, and instruments for operating in foreign policy therefore largely remain military in nature. These two factors mean that the IRGC has a realist perspective on foreign policy which, drawing on international relations scholar John Mearsheimer,32 means it views the world as anarchic rather than one regulated by laws and norms, and therefore emphasizes self-reliance, military force, and zero-sum competition over interdependence, diplomacy, and win-win cooperation. According to Lawrence Potter and Gary Sick “[t]he Iran-Iraq War was an anomaly for the Middle East because it was the first time the superpowers were on the same side”, in this 102

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instance with Iraq.33 The Arab world, with the exception of Syria and Libya, was likewise united behind Iraq. International and regional states, including Western Europe, provided extensive support to Iraq in the form of arms, money, personnel, diplomatic backing, and intelligence.34 When Iraq used chemical and biological weapons on Iranian troops, the international community’s security concerns regarding the Islamic Republic outweighed normative considerations, and no steps were taken to stop it early on.35 Even international organizations which should have been sympathetic to Iran’s cause or at least neutral did not make strong efforts to stop Iraq’s aggression: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) considered holding its seventh summit in 1983 in Baghdad before an Iranian air strike on the venue convinced NAM to move the summit to New Delhi, while the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) did little to condemn Iraq as the aggressor. As a result of its war experience, the IRGC leadership views the international system as anarchic and one in which Iran must place self-preservation and interests above everything else. This means seeking to shift the balance of power in the Middle East in its favor and suspicion of international organizations. The outlook of the IRGC in Iranian foreign policy is often presented as being premised on ideology and driven by belief in concepts like political Shi’ism and Islamic eschatology, “export of the revolution”, and jihad and martyrdom. The role of ideology in relation to the foreign policy outlook of the IRGC, just as with its political outlook, needs to be viewed in a nuanced manner. The foreign policy outlook of the IRGC is in part shaped by the ideological proclivities of the Islamic Republic, but ideology does not drive its outlook and actions as a foreign policy actor. The ideological proclivities of the Islamic Republic provide a rich vocabulary for conducting Iranian foreign policy but often mask power politics. Political Islam is a useful mechanism to mobilize the Muslim peoples of the Middle East to reach foreign policy objectives. “Export of the revolution” becomes a convenient shorthand for the creation of a regional system of allied and like-minded state and non-state actors that maximizes Iranian material interests. Finally, the culture of jihad and martyrdom of the Islamic Republic was in part driven by the necessity of recruiting soldiers and mobilizing the population for the Iran-Iraq War. Ideology provides an important framework for the foreign policy conduct of the IRGC, but its actions are ultimately driven by material interests and practical constraints. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is responsible for foreign policy in the Islamic Republic. However, foreign policy-making also involves the supreme leader, presidential administration, and the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). The SNSC is an important focal point for consensus building and implementation of foreign policy. For example, until the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani, the SNSC was responsible for all-important nuclear negotiations. The supreme leader wields an apparently rarely exercised veto over SNSC decisions.36 Furthermore, the supreme leader has various degrees of influence in the appointment of a majority of the heads of 12 permanent state entities that sit on the SNSC, including the commander of the IRGC. In this framework, the IRGC is only one of a myriad of actors that sit on the SNSC. However, the division of labor in the foreign policy-making process means that the IRGC wields a high level of influence on Iranian Middle East policy. The role of the IRGC in foreign policy is facilitated by its core function as the main military force of the Islamic Republic responsible for power projection abroad and the key capabilities that underpin it. For example, the ballistic missile program furnishes one of the central military deterrent capabilities of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic began developing its own missile capability during the war under the aegis of the IRGC to counter the military and psychological threat posed by Iraqi missiles. In the post-war era, the Islamic Republic has made a strategic investment in its missile program, which the IRGC has continued to oversee. The strong emphasis on missiles has been motivated by the inability of the Islamic Republic to 103

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acquire weapons with comparable capabilities such as advanced military aircraft due to a USled arms embargo, leaving it vulnerable to both regional and extra-regional states that possess advanced military aircraft. In the post-war context, missiles provide a range of capabilities for the purpose of deterrence. The core function of missiles, as during the war, remains to deter wouldbe adversaries from attacking Iran and to provide a retaliatory capability if it is attacked. However, missiles are also inherently dual use and can serve as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. Iranian missiles therefore strengthen the limited nuclear deterrent benefits that the academic literature has shown is provided by nuclear latency.37 Moreover, the conventional deterrent umbrella provided by missiles can give cover to the IRGC to use its other power projection capabilities, most prominently proxy non-state actors. This enables the IRGC to confidently deploy proxies beyond Iran’s borders against an adversary without necessarily provoking direct retaliation against the Iranian homeland by that adversary, which may fear a rain of missiles. The IRGC derives a large degree of its foreign policy influence through its responsibility for the creation of proxy non-state actors and military assistance to state and non-state actors, major sources of the political and military power projection capabilities of the Islamic Republic. The IRGC’s Jerusalem Force (IRGC-JF, Sepah-e Qods), whose name evokes the Islamist goal of recapturing Jerusalem from Israel, oversees this capability. This capability has evolved out of the limited conventional military power of the Islamic Republic due to arms embargoes, the inability to form strong military alliances, and budget constraints. It is also a function of the ideological tools afforded to it by the Iranian Revolution. The Islamic Republic emphasis on political Islam and anti-Westernism allows it to mobilize individuals from Shi’a, Muslim, and other select communities against common foes. Iraqi Shi’a exiles, defectors, and prisoners of war in Iran, associated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) sympathetic to the Iranian Revolution, were recruited and trained in the Badr Brigade in 1983. This proxy group fought alongside Iran against Iraq during the war and provided a unique pool of local knowledge that could be exploited for military, intelligence, and political operations inside Iraq.38 The IRGC-JF generates political and military leverage for the Islamic Republic to manipulate local conditions in the Middle East by identifying states and peoples whose goals and identities overlap to varying degrees with its own and providing them material assistance and training. The IRGC-JF is relatively flexible with the range of state and non-state actors it is willing to work with, who fall on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are proxy non-state actors made up of individuals whose goals and identities closely align with those of the Islamic Republic. The most well-known example of this are proxies made up of Shi’a Arabs sympathetic to the Iranian Revolution, most prominently in the Badr Organization in Iraq and Lebanese Hezbollah. Individuals in these groups are carefully selected and supervised by the IRGC-JF and are considered the most politically and militarily reliable. A 2008 report on the Iranian strategy in Iraq quoted a leader within the Special Groups, Iraqi Shi’a forces marshaled by the Islamic Republic to fight Coalition forces there, as stating that the key attributes he looked for in prospect recruits included “open mindedness”, “physical stamina”, “maturity”, “organizational skills”, “responsible”, and individuals “who are not a problem”.39 These proxies not only closely adhere to the version of Shi’a political Islam espoused by the IRGC-JF, but also fall under its chain of command in their local contexts and foreign battlefields. In the middle of the spectrum are friendly state and non-state actors whose goals and identities somewhat align with that of the Islamic Republic and are not completely reliant on it. Two well-known examples of this are the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) and Ansar Allah (“The Houthis”) in Yemen. At first glance the SAR, which is led by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party,

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has little affinity with the Islamic Republic. However, the Iran-Syria partnership, based on mutual interests and goals, goes back to at least the Iran-Iraq War, in which Syria was the only Arab state in the Middle East to support Iran. Furthermore, the adherence of the Ba’ath Party to what it champions as anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, shared by the IRGC-JF, and the Alawi Arab identity of the al-Assad family which rules Syria, provide some overlap in their identities. Likewise, Ansar Allah today is made up of a coalition of diverse Yemeni tribal and religious elements and operate independently of the Islamic Republic. However, since at least 2012 they have made common cause with the Islamic Republic, through the IRGC-JF, against their common foe, Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the Zaidi Shia faith of many Ansar Allah members and their adherence to political Islam, anti-Americanism, and anti-Zionism also provides some overlap in identities. While less reliable than proxies, IRGC-JF cooperation with friendly state and non-state actors provides a degree of political and military leverage for the Islamic Republic. At the other end of the spectrum are adversarial non-state actors, who nonetheless find some overlap in goals at specific times and places. An example of this includes the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and its offshoots in Turkey and Syria. IRGC-JF creation of proxies and cooperation with state and non-state actors provides the Islamic Republic with a range of leverage to achieve a range of foreign policy objectives. Proxies can be deployed in an expeditionary capacity and as an extension of the Iranian military in conflict zones in the Middle East at relatively lower material and political costs for the Islamic Republic. An example of this is the Fatemiyoun Division, made up of Afghan Shi’a in Iran and Afghanistan, which has little existence independent of the IRGC-JF and whose deployment and deaths in combat abroad have raised relatively little outcry or debate inside Iran. Proxies and non-state actors can also be deployed as more indirect vectors of Iranian military power in the Middle East. The “special groups” made up of Iraqi Shi’a were proxies cultivated by the IRGCJF to disrupt the US presence and efforts in Iraq through insurgent attacks on coalition forces, which contributed to the departure of the US from Iraq.40 Iran has similarly supported Ansar Allah against the Saudis in Yemen. Proxies and non-state actors can also be deployed as indirect vectors of Iranian political influence in regional states. For example, the Badr Organization in Iraq and the Lebanese Hezbollah have a presence in the electoral politics of their respective countries, which allows them to pursue their own agendas and Iranian objectives through political means. Finally, the IRGC-JF can use cooperation with friendly states to not only uphold its interest in those states, but also deepen Iranian influence. IRGC-JF assistance to the al-Assad regime in Syria, for instance, was a key factor in turning the tide of the Syrian civil war in the regime’s favor. As a result, the alAssad regime is now more reliant on the IRGC for its security, which allows the latter to use Syria to better pursue its policies toward Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq. Reports also indicate that the IRGC may be able to parlay this security reliance into economic benefit.41 Some view the IRGC foreign policy project in the Middle East, and by extension that of the Islamic Republic, as the creation of a sectarian-ideological “Shia Crescent” as part of a master plan to “export the revolution” from 1979 onward. However, the influence of the IRGC-JF in Iranian foreign policy, and the power of the Islamic Republic in the Middle East through proxies and state and non-state actors, have evolved as a gradual and historically contingent process. Within this process, the IRGC-JF has been responsive to regional circumstances, rather than determinative of them. Experiences such as the Iran-Iraq War, US-led regime change in Iraq, and efforts to overthrow the al-Assad regime have shaped and reinforced the realist view of the IRGC to ensure the security of the Islamic Republic in the Middle East. Ideological factors aid the realization of this agenda, but material factors drive them.

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Conclusion The Revolutionary Guard has had a mixed record in Iranian power politics under Ayatollah Khamenei. In domestic politics, it has used formal and informal means to exert influence over elected power centers as part of the principlist political current. It informally mobilized its grass roots to help Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win two successive elections and influenced the presidential administration by placing senior IRGC affiliates in his cabinet, and used its formal domestic security powers to suppress the Green Movement demonstrations that challenged Ahmadinejad. The IRGC has played an important role in Iranian foreign policy both through its capacity as the main military force responsible for power projection (for example, through the ballistic missile program) and its responsibility for Middle East policy, through the Jerusalem Force. Most recently, it has defended Iranian interests in the region by mobilizing a transnational force of tens of thousands of local and foreign fighters to turn the tides of the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars in favor of its local allies. Yet both of these approaches have limitations. In domestic politics, the rise of the moderates, composed of the reformist, centrist, and moderate principlist political currents, and increased voter turnout in the context of elections, both as a result of disastrous mismanagement of Ahmadinejad, have led to defeats in the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections and 2016 parliamentary elections. The social coalition and electoral strategy of the principlists and IRGC that helped them take elected power centers in the past appear to no longer be viable, particularly in light of the ongoing generational change in the Islamic Republic, both at the level of elites and society. In this context, the IRGC faces the question of how to help principlists maintain electoral relevance. It could abandon some of its political agenda (for example, a strict adherence to conservative Islamic mores) to appeal to new voters, but then it risks alienating its existing grass roots. On the other hand, the IRGC could fall further back on using existing mechanisms of influence, particularly as a domestic security actor, but then it risks further alienating the new voters it seeks to attract, and even mobilize them against itself and its allies. In foreign policy, the relative success of the IRGC, in part due to its reliance on military power and zero-sum competition to deal with the issues the Islamic Republic faces, has led to adverse long-term consequences. At the regional level, ostensible foes such as Israel and Saudi Arabia are increasingly united with one another in their efforts to counter-balance Iran. At the international level, Iran continues to attract the ire of the West, and therefore faces sanctions on its various perceived malign activities, including the ballistic missile program, support for state and non-state actors in the Middle East, and human rights record at home. Both trends could impose limitations on the long-term power and prosperity of the Islamic Republic. The IRGC, in one form or another, is likely to endure through even cataclysmic political change in Iran, as are these impasses. This state of affairs is unlikely to improve without profound change on the part of the IRGC and its foreign adversaries. It would have to move toward a greater emphasis on diplomacy, negotiations, and win-win cooperation. Such profound change does not appear to be on the horizon.

Notes 1 Afshon Ostovar, Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016); Saeid Golkar, Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran (Washington, DC, New York, NY: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Columbia University, 2015). 2 Roozbeh Safshekan and Farzan Sabet, “The Ayatollah’s Praetorians: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the 2009 Election Crisis,” Middle East Journal 64, no. 4 (Autumn 2010).

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The revolutionary guard in power politics 3 Ali Alfoneh, Iran Unveiled: How the Revolutionary Guards Is Turning Theocracy into Military Dictatorship (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2013). 4 Majlis Research Center, “Asas Nameh-ye Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Eslami (The Charter of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution),” http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/90595, accessed 24 April 2018. 5 Rouhollah Khomeini, “Ahammiat-e Shenaakht-e Mogheiyat Va Sharayet-e Zaman Baraye Tarh-e Masael (The Importance of Knowing the Situation and Conditions at This Time for Bringing up Issues),” The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works. www.imamkhomeini.ir/fa/C207_42906/, accessed 24 April 2018. 6 Majlis Research Center, “Ghanun-e Edgham-e Sazman-e Basij-e Mostazafin Dar Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Eslami (National Mobilization of the Downtrodden Organizations Merger with the Army of the Guardians Law),” http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/90112, accessed 24 April 2018. 7 Ibid. 8 Hossein Alaei, “Ravand-e Tashkil-e Sepah-e Pasdaran: Goftegu Ba Sardar Hossein Alaei (The Formation Process of the IRGC: An Interview with General Hossein Alaei),” The Research Center for Humanities and Cultural Studies, 2009. www.ensani.ir/fa/content/11089/default.aspx, accessed 24 April 2018. 9 Rouhollah Khomeini, “Tashkil Va Tajhiz-e Niruha-ye Sehganeh Dar Sepah Pasdaran (Formation and Arming of the Three Forces of the IRGC),” The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works. www.imam-khomeini.ir/fa/C207_44387/, accessed 24 April 2018. 10 Rouhollah Khomeini, “Tajlil Az Sepah-e Pasdaran Va Navid-e Ayandeh-i Khub (Appreciating the IRGC and Predicting a Good Future),” The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works. www.imam-khomeini.ir/fa/C207_42643/, accessed 24 April 2018. 11 For example, during the First Islamic Republic, and following the ouster of Ban-Sadr, the anointed Khomeinist candidate for presidential elections won with an overwhelming majority ranging between 85% and 95%. This is in contrast to the Second Islamic Republic, where winning candidates in presidential elections achieve relatively lower majorities ranging between 51% and 77%. 12 Majlis Research Center, “Ghanun Asasi-e Jomhuri Eslami (The Islamic Republic’s Constitution),” http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/content/iran_constitution, accessed 24 April 2018. 13 Rouhollah Khomeini, “Lozum-e Ejtenab-e Azay-e Sepah Pasdaran Az Vorud Be Jaryanat-e Siasi (The Necessity for IRGC Members to Refrain from Entering Political Currents),” The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works. www.imam-khomeini.ir/fa/C207_44058/, accessed 24 April 2018. 14 Rouhollah Khomeini, “Vasiatname-ye Siasi-Elahi-ye Imam Khomeini (The Politico-Divine Last Will and Testament of Imam Khomeini),” The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works. www.imam-khomeini.ir/fa/c78_3160/, accessed 24 April 2018. 15 Farideh Farhi, “The Tenth Presidential Elections and Their Aftermath,” in Negin Nabavi, ed. Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 16 Alfoneh, Iran Unveiled. 17 Mohsen Rezaei, “Tahammol Nemikonim Ke Namayandeh-ye Majlesi Asaas-e Jebheh Va Jang Va Manaviat Ra Zir-e Soal Bebarad (We Shall Not Tolerate a Member of Parliament Who Questions the Essense of the Front, War, and Spirituality),” Mohsen Rezaei’s Official Website. http://rezaei.ir/vdcd. j052yt0soa26y.txt, accessed 12 August 2013. 18 Kayhan Newspaper, “The War Commander’s Letter to Khatami (Nameh Farmandehan Jang Be Khatami),” www.magiran.com/n1243300, accessed 24 April 2018. 19 Mehdi Karroubi, “Matn-e Kamel-e Nameh-ye Mehdi Karroubi Be Rahbar-e Jomhuri-e Eslami (The Complete Text of the Letter of Mehdi Karroubi to the Leader of the Islamic Republic),” BBC Persian, 19 June 2005. www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2005/06/050619_karoubi-objection.shtml, accessed 24 April 2018. 20 Ramezan Sharif, “Bazkhani-e Rabeteh-ye Sepah Ba Dolatha-ye Hashemi, Khatami Va Ahmadinejad (Reviewing the Relationship of the IRGC with the Hashemi, Khatami, and Ahmadinejad Administrations),” Shargh Newspaper, 22 July 2013. www.sharghdaily.ir/fa/main/detail/15902, accessed 24 April 2018. 21 Esmail Kowsari, “Sardar Kowsari Dar Goftegu Ba ‘Mardomsalari’: Ahmadinejad Javab-e Khubi Sepah Ra Ba Badi Dad. (General Kowsari’s Interview with ‘Mardomsalari’: Ahmadinejad Answered the IRGC’s Kindness Disregard,” Mardomsalari Newpaper, 30 December 2012. http://archive.mardomsal ari.net/Template1/Article.aspx?AID=23545#155436, accessed 24 August 2017.

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Farzan Sabet and Roozbeh Safshekan 22 During Ahmadinejad’s first term, at least six key ministers were former IRGC commanders and one had strong ties with it: Minister of Defense Mostafa-Mohammad Najjar, Minister of Interior Sadegh Mahsouli, Minister of Energy Parviz Fattah, Minister of Commerce Masoud Mirkazemi, Minister of Information and Communication Technology Reza Taghipour, and Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Saffar Harandi. During Ahmadinejad’s second term, this figure increased to 11, including Minister of Defense Ahmad Vahidi, Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi, Minister of Interior Mostafa-Mohammad Najar, Minister of Oil Masoud Mirkazemi and his successor Rostam Ghassemi, Minister of Roads and Urban Development Ali Nikzad, Minister of Energy Majid Namjoo, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohmmad Hosseini, Minister of Education Kamran Daneshjoo, Minister of Information and Communication Technology Mohammad Hassan Nami, and Minister of Cooperation, Labour, and Social Welfare Abdol-Reza Sheikholeslami. 23 Rostam Ghasemi, “(Revayat-e Farmandeh-ye Sepah Az Vazir Shodan-e Ghasemi),” Hamshahri Newspaper, 8 August 2011. www.hamshahrionline.ir/details/142482, accessed 24 April 2018. 24 Abdollah Araghi, “Farmandeh-ye Sepah-e Tehran-e Bozorg: Bayad Az Dolat-e Ahmadinejad Hemayat Konim (The Commander of the Greater Tehran Corps: We Must Support the Ahmadinejad Administration),” Aftab-e Yazd Newspaper, 20 January 2009. www.magiran.com/ppdf/nppdf/2816/ p0281625490021.pdf, accessed 24 April 2018. 25 Mir Hossein Mousavi, “Matn-e Kamel-e Nameh-ye Mir Hossein Mousavi Be Ayatollah Khamenei (The Complete Text of Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Letter to Ayatollah Khamenei),” BBC Persian, 11 June 2009. www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2009/06/090611_op_ir88_mousavi_khamenei_letter_ text.shtm, accessed 24 April 2018. 26 “IRGC Commander Jafari: Election Of A Reformist Was A ‘Red Line’ In 2009,” IranPolitik, 01 June 2014. http://www.iranpolitik.com/2014/06/01/news/irgc-commander-jafari-election-reformist-redline-2009/ 27 Ali Khamenei, “Bayanat Dar Goft-o-gu Ba Khabarnegaran-e Seda Va Sima Pas Az Sherkat Dar Entekhabat (A Speech to the IRIB Reporters after Participating in the Election),” The Center for Preserving and Publishing the Works of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, 14 June 2013. http:// farsi.khamenei.ir/speech-content?id=22922, accessed 24 April 2018. 28 Ali Khamenei, “Didar-e Aghshar-e Mokhtalef-e Mardom Ba Rahbar-e Enghelab (The Meeting of the People from Different Walks of Life with the Leader of the Revolution),” The Center for Preserving and Publishing the Works of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, 9 September 2015. http://farsi. khamenei.ir/news-content?id=30702, accessed 24 April 2018. 29 Ali Khamenei, “Didar-e Aemeh-ye Jome-ye Sarasar-e Keshvar Ba Rahbar Enghelab (The Meeting of the Country’s Friday Prayer Leaders with the Leader of the Revolution),” The Center for Preserving and Publishing the Works of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, 4 January 2016. http://farsi. khamenei.ir/news-content?id=31820, accessed 24 April 2018. 30 Payam-e Enghelab Monthly, “Namzad-e Aslah Kist? (Who Is the Best Candidate?),” May/June 2013. www.magiran.com/p1125865, accessed 24 April 2018. 31 Mostafa Mir-Salim, “Mostafa Mir-Salim: JAMNA Az Emkanat-e Yek Nahad-e Nezami Estefadeh Mikard (Mostafa Mir-Salim: JAMNA Used the Facilities of a Military Institution),” BBC Persian, 29 June 2017. www.bbc.com/persian/iran-40762896, accessed 24 April 2018. 32 John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (1994). 33 Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, introduction, in Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2. 34 Pierre Razoux, The Iran-Iraq War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson, eds. The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2014). 35 Joost R. Hiltermann, “Outsiders as Enablers: Consequences and Lessons from International Silence on Iraq’s Use of Chemical Weapons during the Iran-Iraq War,” in Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds. Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 36 International Crisis Group, “Iran’s Priorities in a Turbulent Middle East,” 13 April 2018, 6–8. https:// d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/184-iran-s-priorities-in-a-turbulent-middle-east_1.pdf, accessed 24 April 2018. 37 Matthew Fuhrmann and Benjamin Tkach, “Almost Nuclear: Introducing the Nuclear Latency Dataset,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 32, no. 4 (2015).

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The revolutionary guard in power politics 38 Mapping Militant Organizations,“Badr Organization of Reconstruction and Development,” 13 November 2016. http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/435, accessed 24 April 2018. 39 Brian Fishman and Joseph Felter, “Iranian Strategy in Iraq: Politics and ‘Other Means’,” The Combating Terrorism Center, 13 October 2008. https://ctc.usma.edu/iranian-strategy-in-iraq-politics-and-othermeans/, accessed 24 April 2018. 40 Ibid. 41 Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Ellen Francis, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Reaps Economic Rewards in Syria,” Reuters, 19 January 2017. www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-iran-idUSK BN1531TO, accessed 24 April 2018.

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9 THE ARAB UPRISING AND REGIONAL POWER STRUGGLE Raymond Hinnebusch

The Arab uprising has wrought major change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional order. Not only has it led to unprecedented shifts in the balance of power, but the power struggle has also transformed the identity context and normative order in which power balancing operates. While the fundamental rules of the game – the struggle for power, power balancing – have persisted, the game has taken new, more violent and intense forms – within as much as between states. This chapter will examine these shifts in the Middle East regional power struggle, their causes, manifestations, and consequences. First, the constant – and rather distinct – features of the power struggle in the region are identified, specifically the replication of regional “cold wars”; second, variations in the dynamics of the power struggle over time prior to the Arab uprisings are adumbrated to expose the main-springs of system change; then, the impact of the uprising on the regional power struggle is examined, comparing its early and the later years, between which the power balance and the rules changed. The main theme is that the struggle for power is constant, but that differences in levels of state formation, hence permeability of regional states, and the kind of trans-state normative order, together determine variations in the means and intensity with which the struggle is conducted.

Features of the MENA power struggle Regional politics can only be understood by bringing together the material and ideational factors treated in realism and constructivism, respectively. Firstly, in the region’s multi-polar system, inter-state rivalry and insecurity are, as realists expect, endemic, although less from anarchy, per se, than the flawed construction of the regional system – a function of arbitrary boundary drawing that built irredentism and contested borders into the system, leading most states to feel threats from neighbors. Insecurity is exacerbated by the power imbalances from the juxtaposition of large powerful states and microstates (e.g., Iraq and Kuwait) and from arms races and militarization. In such an insecure region, all major powers seek to maximize their power, famously creating a security dilemma, in which all end up less secure. Against this insecurity, all states “power balance”, in particular by forming alliances against shared threats.1 This “realist” inter-state system, is however embedded in a trans-state public sphere in which shared identities and norms constrain and shape the pursuit of state interests.2 This is a function 110

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of the existence of powerful supra-state identities that embrace most regional states – the Arab nation, the Islamic umma – sub/trans-state identities that cut across state boundaries; and the frequently resulting incongruence between territorial states and identity. These factors inject several enduring and distinctive features into regional politics. First, inter-state rivalry for leadership of supra-state communities is endemic, expressed in recurring “cold wars”, in which stronger states deploy ideology and identity discourses to gain allies and subvert rival governments in the search for regional hegemony – made in the name of championing the putative shared interests of an identity community. Second, the chief threat that most Arab states face from each other is less from armies than subversion – challenging each other’s legitimacy and backing disaffected internal opposition. Balancing is therefore as much against ideational threats as hard military threats and consequently often takes a “soft” form, i.e., promoting an ideology meant to buttress their legitimacy and forming alliances with states sharing ideological kinship and shared perceptions of threat from an ideological “other”.3 The most typical balancing dynamic has been “soft balancing” to counter and enervate hegemonic bids – such that hegemony has only ever been temporary; while, on the other hand, hard military balancing was, for a long time, confined to the Arab–non-Arab peripheries – the Arab-Israel conflict zone and the Gulf flank of the Arab world. Fourth, some alliances tend to be excluded by ideological norms – notably those across identity fault-lines – even if these would serve the security interests of regimes/states, i.e., Arab alliances with Israel. Fifth, what order exists in MENA rests largely on a power balance, but this balance is as much a legitimacy balance as a military one, and states’ power balancing has an ideational dimension. Moreover, the power struggle is muted or exacerbated by norms constructed out of widely shared trans-state identities. Although MENA is an ideologically heterogeneous system with rival legitimacy principals (republic vs. monarchy; secular vs. Islamist), insofar as the Arab states enjoyed a common Arab identity, the system approximated a Lockean order in which shared norms muted conflict. The change in the normative structure since the Arab uprising, in which Arabism has been displaced by Sunni-Shia sectarianism, has precipitated a slide toward a Hobbesian order.4 As such, the struggle for power in MENA has dual dimensions and requires dual assets. On the one hand, the main contenders are the regional great powers – those states with hard power – population, resources, military forces. But “soft” ideational power used to win over allies or subvert rivals matters just as much; indeed, while hard power only changes over the long term, alliance formation via soft power can much more quickly alter the power balance in states’ favor. States are not only unequal in hard power but are also unequally situated to wield ideational power: those with relative congruence between territory and identity, thus, enjoying securer loyalties of their populations (Egypt, Turkey), are most able to use such instruments at minimal risk to their own internal stability, while identity-fragmented states are most vulnerable to their use. The power balance among rival states is thus a function not just of their conventional power resources but also their levels of internal state consolidation. Larger states combining material resources with cohesive identities tend to be more ambitious to assume regional hegemony, with such bids having been made by Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey while smaller, poorer, or more identity-fragmented states such as those of the Levant and Gulf tend to be the victims of power struggles.

Variations in the MENA power struggle5 The form and intensity of the regional power struggle has varied over time, basically a function of the level of state formation, hence permeability, with strength of regional states inversely related to the power of trans-state movements. State formation has described a bell-shaped curve, 111

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rising from a low at independence when states were weak and readily penetrated to a peak in the 1980s when they were less permeable to trans-state penetration; and declining thereafter, to a low point reached with the spread of state failure after the Arab uprisings, again empowering non-state actors and states’ ability to penetrate the other via trans-state discourse and networks. This, in turn, determines the typical kinds of conflict. When state formation is low, the power struggle (at least within the Arab core of MENA) has largely been waged via soft power and trans-state subversion – “cold wars”; only when and where states were strong has it been waged via classical power balancing: arms races and war, especially on the Arab–non-Arab fault-lines. When states fail, proxy wars are typical. These phases are outlined in the following sections.

From early independence to the classic Arab Cold War (1945–75) The Middle East regional system was “born fighting”,6 i.e., amidst the first Arab-Israel war and the defeat of the Arab states did stimulate modest military build-ups in the frontline states. However, within the Arab world, in the first decade after independence, most states were weak and suffering competition from sub-state and supra-state identities, with the most immediate threat from domestic opposition, often encouraged by rival states; defensive balancing largely took a soft form since state capacities to project material power were very modest. The main initial rivalry was between Egypt and Iraq for influence in the fragmented Levant.7 In the 1950s they divided over the Baghdad Pact, championed by Hashemite Iraq and opposed by Nasser’s Egypt. This unleashed a “struggle for Syria”8 on the grounds Syria would decide the outcome, each trying to shift Syria’s internal power balance via “competitive interference” – sponsoring military coups, financing of politicians, and radio wars. When Syria opted against the Baghdad Pact and the Iraqi regime was overthrown by anti-Pact military officers, Egypt triumphed. Nasser’s Egypt thereafter came close to becoming the hegemon of the Arab world, enforcing a pan-Arab regime under which state foreign policies were expected to be governed by a common anti-Western/anti-Zionist notion of the pan-Arab interest defined in Cairo. As the most consolidated Arab state, based on an inclusive populist authoritarianism, Egypt had a great advantage over the fragmented readily penetrated oligarchies that ruled elsewhere; Nasser’s capacity to mobilize their populations made it risky for them to defy him. However, other Arab states never ceased to “soft-balance” against Cairo; the result was an “Arab Cold War” between Egypt and its rivals, particularly the surviving monarchies, conducted largely via discourse wars and subversion.9 Among the republics, stronger states (Egypt, Iraq) used pan-Arabism to try to bring weaker ones into their spheres of influence, and weaker states (Syria) used it to defend themselves or get support from a stronger state.10 After the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel, inter-Arab competition was muted as the frontline republics and Saudi Arabia came together to hard balance against Israel, with Riyadh financing the reconstruction of the shattered Arab armies in preparation for the 1973 war in which Egypt and Syria jointly attempted to recover the territories lost in 1967. The Arab war coalition was able to challenge Israel’s military supremacy sufficiently to put a resolution of the Arab-Israel conflict on the international agenda but could not coordinate diplomatic strategies against a concerted US effort to detach Egypt from the Arab consensus through a separate peace with Israel.

State formation and realist power balancing In the 1975–90 period, power politics in MENA began to approximate realist hard balancing. War and war preparation on the Arab/non-Arab fault-lines spurred defensive state formation in the republics. Wars also precipitated the oil price explosion that gave regional states the means 112

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to consolidate themselves and expand their military capabilities. The proliferation of national security states, which posed much greater threats to neighbors than heretofore, enhanced the classic security dilemma. In parallel, the declining permeability of materially hardened states and the gradual debilitation of pan-Arabism reduced the threat of ideational subversion. A multipolar distribution of power among the Arab states emerged as the capabilities of Egypt declined while those of Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia rose. In the absence of an Arab hegemon or concert, the Arab world fragmented, making it more vulnerable to rising external threats from its Western (Israel’s invasion of Lebanon) and Eastern (the Iranian revolution and Iran-Iraq War) flanks. Power balancing therefore focused on these flanks where hot wars were fought and territory at risk, e.g., Syria’s search for the military parity needed to deter its stronger Israeli neighbor once its Egyptian ally made a separate peace with the latter. “External power balancing” via alliancemaking was manifest in the grouping of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan against the Iranian threat and the alliance of Syria and Iran against Israel and also against Iraq. This power balancing did blunt the ambitions of revisionist states (Israel, Iran, and Iraq) to upset the regional balance through offensive wars or export of revolution, but it took costly wars (in Lebanon, Iran-Iraq) to do so. The generalization of external insecurity, state consolidation, and reason of state brought the regional system into closer approximation to the Westphalian model. It was, however, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, injecting a much-increased level of military insecurity into inter-Arab politics where competition had hitherto largely remained at the political-ideological level, which crowned this process.

State decline and the new Arab Cold War (1990s–2010) In a third stage, fully apparent by the 1990s, MENA state-building projects passed their apex and, driven by internal economic weakness, entered a “post-populist” (neoliberal) stage which shrank their social bases and legitimacy. In parallel, as the second Gulf War (1990–91) established US hegemony in the region, balancing was initially replaced by widespread bandwagoning with Washington that temporarily muted regional conflicts. However, this ended with the US failure to deliver an Arab-Israeli peace settlement and as the 2003 American invasion of Iraq precipitated “soft-balancing” against it by many regional states. Moreover, the invasion unleashed a regional power struggle between a pro-US “moderate” axis of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the GCC, and Jordan and an anti-US “resistance axis”, led by Iran and including Syria, Hizbollah, and Hamas. Their power struggle focused on two identity-fragmented Arab states, where the proUS powers were alarmed at the exceptional influence being acquired by Iran – Lebanon where Hizbollah was rising to power and Iraq where the Sunni Saddam regime was replaced with a Shia one that tilted toward Tehran. They engaged in a “New Arab Cold War” made possible by the renewed permeability of regional states from their internal legitimacy declines and the new pan-Arab public space enabled by the rise of satellite TV. As in the 1950s, discourse wars pitted rival narratives: the resistance axis narrative delegitimized the pro-Western alignments of the “moderate” powers and their seeming collaboration with Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. For a period, backed by Qatar’s Al-Jazeera satellite TV and Hezbollah’s demonstrated prowess against Israel, the resistance axis held the ascendency in regional opinion, with its leaders – Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, and Assad – much more popular on the Arab street than the leaders of the Westernaligned states. Non-Arab Iran acquired credibility as a leader of the Arab world as the dominant Arab identity was infused with an Islamic content, as exemplified in Hezbollah’s successful fusing of Arab nationalist with Shia discourse.11 The fear that Iran would inspire rebellion among Shia populations in the GCC states and, moreover, that it was appealing also to Sunnis, led the pro-Western bloc to stir up Sunni sectarian solidarity against what it called the threat of a “Shi’a 113

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Crescent”, stretching from Iran to Lebanon.12 Increasingly, internal threats were coming to be seen in sectarian terms for the many identity-divided societies in the Levant and Gulf, but even Egypt’s Mubarak famously declared that the Shia were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. This attempt to instrumentalize sectarianism failed because the resistance narrative dominated the Arab street. Also indicative of its failure and the ascendance of the resistance axis was the tilting toward the latter of two Sunni Muslim actors newly bidding for regional influence, Turkey and Qatar. But the Sunni powers’ instrumentalism of sectarianism and the sectarian war unleashed inside Iraq by the US invasion started the stimulation of sectarian consciousness that would be deepened in the aftermath of the Arab uprising, especially its later phase.

The early Arab uprising and the power balance in MENA (2010–13) A new regional Cold War? The post-uprising regional power struggle initially appeared to be a continuation of the preuprising “New Cold War” (of the late 2000s): the contending blocs – the Iran-led resistance axis and a Western-aligned Sunni bloc – and the means – trans-state legitimacy wars – were similar. Yet, the immediate issue at stake was now less that of relations with the West than the threats and opportunities issuing from the Arab uprising. Moreover, the blocs had been reconfigured as revolts in Egypt and Syria (combined with the prior debilitation of Iraq by the US invasion) knocked the historic powers of the Arab core out of the power game, leaving a vacuum that the powers on the regional periphery – Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia – competed to fill. Each of the latter had enough power resources, internal coherence, and immunity to the uprising to be able to instrumentalize trans-state legitimacy discourses at reasonable risk. The main battlegrounds were the states that experienced uprisings: while Egypt and Syria were the main prizes in the contest, lesser prizes included the other uprising states of Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. Yemen, on Saudi Arabia’s southern flank, was crucial to its security and Bahrain, although tiny, was also crucial since overthrow of the Sunni monarchy in a Shia uprising could spread Shia revolt to the rest of the Gulf and empower Iran. Iraq and Lebanon, although not experiencing full-scale uprisings, had unconsolidated regimes and fragmented societies highly vulnerable to external penetration and, pivotal to the regional power struggles, were also magnets for it. In many ways this new cold war resembled the classic one of the 1950–60s in the means employed: competitive interference in which rival contenders sought to tilt internal balances so as to bring to power (or prevent the fall of ) friendly forces, hence to expand (or protect) their spheres of influence or roll back those of their rivals. Yet over time, “soft” interference became ever “harder”. Initially competitive interference was mostly via discourse wars in the Arab media, e.g., Al-Jazeera, and via financial and ideological backing of clients, notably of trans-state Islamist movements. But as the uprisings were militarized in several failing states, rival powers began to engage in proxy wars by providing arms and fighters to clients in domestic power struggles. And where the state wholly failed, as in Libya, intervention became yet more overt and via hard power, e.g., Qatari airpower.

Discourse wars shift the legitimacy power balance The discourse wars initially unleashed by the uprisings largely disadvantaged the resistance axis. The pan-Arab media, now dominated by the GCC, reflected the monarchies’ anti-republican agenda; thus, Al-Jazeera actively encouraged revolution in the republics (but not monarchies such as Bahrain).13 Second, the emergent, trans-state networks of Arab youth using the social 114

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media, “netizens of a virtualized Arab commonwealth”,14 reshaped the dominant discourse around demands for democracy and freedom in their own countries, marginalizing the traditional pan-Arab, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist concerns on which the resistance axis had risen.15 Indeed, their calls for Western intervention in Libya and Syria showed they considered repression by indigenous regimes to be the greater threat than imperialism. And, the uprising pushed the key Arab nationalist issue, Palestine, into the background. As a result, Iran’s soft power was debilitated while the legitimacy costs to the Saudis from their Western alignment was eased, and Turkey was positioned to promote itself as a democratic hegemon.

Rise of Islamist trans-state movements The eclipse of Arab nationalism left an ideological vacuum that Islamism filled while, in parallel, the debilitation of the largely secular Arab republics potentially empowered trans-state Islamist movements, but Islam was splintered and its rival variants did not uniformly benefit.16 The main initial beneficiary was the Muslim Brotherhood, whose organized branches in most Arab states, with their extensive charitable and educational networks, seemed poised to rise to power on the back of democratic transition in authoritarian regimes, most notably in Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco; it also benefited from the patronage of Turkey and Qatar. Secondly, Saudi and Gulffunded salafists also entered the political arena, partly as tools of Saudi influence. On the other hand, the anti-imperialist Islamic movements, notably Hamas and Hizbollah, were weakened. Hizbollah’s, and Iran’s support for the Asad regime debilitated their previous high standing in regional public opinion and made them more vulnerable to accusations that they followed a Shia sectarian rather than a nationalist agenda. Hamas, as a result of the Syrian uprising (pitting a non-Sunni regime’s violence against Sunni protestors), could not retain its Sunni constituency without breaking with the resistance axis, but losing Syrian and Iranian support made it dependent on the pro-Western axis, and with the fall of the kindred Morsi regime in Egypt, it was left adrift.17 Popular perceptions changed dramatically: in 2006, 75% of Arabs approved of Iran, including 85% of Saudis, but by 2012 Iran’s approval ratings had plummeted to less than 25%, and in Saudi Arabia, to less than 15%.18 Although these changes can be attributed to the behavior of Iran and Hizbollah in supporting repression of protestors in Syria, rather than their sectarian identity, in time the sectarianization of the region would drive the conflation of the two factors.

The struggle for hegemony Turkey’s bid for hegemony: Turkey seemed well positioned to benefit from its soft power in the uprising. The affinity of its ruling party, the AKP, with the Muslim Brotherhood allowed it to be seen as a model by the most rapidly rising movement in Arab politics at the time. Prime Minister Erdogan was welcomed in Egypt as a hero (where he was by far the most popular world leader). The congruity of Turkey’s political system – a democracy that incorporates Islamic forces – with regional popular aspirations, its alignment with rising business/Islamist coalitions similar to the AKP in the new Sunni democracies (Egypt, Tunisia), and the economic prowess which enabled it to build economic interdependences with the uprising states were all factors empowering Turkey’s bid for regional leadership. Its main challenge was how to manage the Syrian uprising where Asad had been an ally; however, after his repression of Sunni protestors, Turkey sought to replace him with a Muslim Brotherhood–led client regime. The Battle for Bahrain and the ascendency of the monarchies: For the pro-Western monarchies, the loss of Mubarak’s Egypt, state collapse in Yemen, and the potentially contagious Shia uprising in Bahrain were so many opportunities for Iran. Bahrain was certainly the weak spot of the GCC, 115

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being ruled by a Sunni monarchy that discriminated against the large Shia majority. Having “lost” Iraq to Shia power, the Sunni-Gulf monarchies feared Iran would be further benefited by Shia empowerment in Bahrain. The GCC’s military intervention and escalating repression checked the uprising and inflamed Sunni-Shia tensions to the benefit of the Sunni monarchies. The GCC also used the pan-Arab media and the Arab League to legitimize Western intervention against Qaddafi, an old monarchic foe. The monarchies proved more resilient than the republics in dampening the domestic threat of the uprising via a combination of (a) repression, most obvious in Bahrain; (b) political concession, most obvious in Morocco; and (c) economic blandishments to citizens, most obvious in Saudi Arabia, where $97 billion worth of jobs and benefits were promised, the equivalent to $5,000 per citizen. The GCC was ungraded into a “Holy Alliance” to contain the democratic threat, with the richer monarchies transferring billions to the poorer ones (Morocco, Jordan, Oman, and Bahrain) and using petrodollars to promote Salafism, e.g., against the democratic youth in Egypt. The Battle for Syria: Syria was the weak spot of the resistance axis, and the uprising turned it into a battleground pitting Iran against Turkey and the GCC, which saw an opportunity to break the resistance axis. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV encouraged the uprising, and Saudi Arabia financed anti-regime tribes and Islamist factions. With the debilitating of the republics, the GCC assumed the leadership of the Arab League, where Qatar engineered the suspension of Syria’s membership, economic sanctions against it, and calls for the internationalization of the crisis. When Russia and China blocked this at the UN Security Council, the GCC states and Turkey turned to funding and arming insurgents, contributing to the militarization of what was becoming a Syrian civil war. On the defensive, Iran sought to create via Iraq (where post-US occupation, the move of the Maliki regime against Sunni rivals made it more dependent on Iran) a corridor linking Iran to Syria and the Lebanese coast, allowing Tehran to supply Hizbollah and providing the Asad regime with a two-sided buffer that could help it survive.19 Egypt: the pivotal power fails to pivot: The anti-Mubarak revolution was widely seen as Egypt’s chance to reassert its former regional leadership in the Arab world and throw off dependence on the US. The Islamist president, Muhammad Morsi, explicitly promised an independent foreign policy that would restore Egypt’s regional leadership, but Egypt’s options were sharply constrained by its continuing economic dependence on the West and the Gulf States. Morsi’s powers were also sharply constrained by the military, which was invested in the US relationship and the peace with Israel. Morsi did start to take a more neutral position between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but his attempt to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia behind a settlement of the Syrian crisis was rebuffed by Riyadh.20 Morsi was unable to rehabilitate Egyptian regional leadership, and the country remained a battleground of rival powers, notably Qatar which supported him and Saudi Arabia/UAE which successfully plotted with the military to overthrow him.

The shifting power balance in the early uprising In the first years of the uprising, the power balance between the two rival axes tilted against the resistance axis. Iran had lost soft power from support for the Asad regime, the decline of Hizbollah’s regional standing, and the break of Hamas from the resistance axis. The Asad regime, linchpin of the axis, was under mortal threat. Turkey, Qatar, and Hamas had defected to what increasingly appeared to be a “Sunni axis.” But the power balance was not decisively transformed, and Iran and Hizbollah mobilized to counter the former, increasingly joined by an Iraqi Shia regime which perceived a Sunni threat. Thus, as always in MENA, multipolarity prevented any one side from sweeping the board.

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The late uprising and the regional power struggle A Hobbesian cold/semi-hot war? The arena of the MENA power struggle had significantly altered by the third year of the uprising. While competitive intervention by the same warring actors continued, the intensity of the conflict had substantially deepened, assuming features of an unrestrained Hobbesian struggle for power. As the curve of state formation reached a nadir in a slew of failed states, so nonstate/trans-state movements were empowered in an unprecedented way: they not only became autonomous actors within states, breaking up the latter’s monopoly of legitimate violence, but they also challenged their borders and sovereignty. Sectarian discourse precipitated unprecedented high levels of armed mobilization in several civil war–wracked states and exceptional levels of violence in several proxy wars. But even more than hitherto, no side was able to sweep the board: thus, compared to the first Arab Cold War (1954–70), when Egypt had emerged as Arab hegemon, now the relatively balanced power of the main state actors, the greater number of contenders, including non-state actors, and the greater mobilization and militarization of societies made it impossible for rival states to decisively shape the power balance to their own advantage. Rather, actions meant to defend themselves – now chiefly from the domestic spillover of the uprising – increased the insecurity of all.21

Sectarian proxy wars: from instrumentalization to grass-roots sectarianization In the late Arab uprising period, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Iran all deepened their competitive intervention, with arms, money, and fighters sent to governments and insurgents in the identity-fragmented and failing states, above all, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. Crucially, each power increasingly instrumentalized sectarianism in their discourse and choice of proxies in their competitive intervention, although their strategies differed: Saudi Arabia framed Iran as Shia, heretical, non-Arab, hence unentitled to involvement in inter-Arab politics, seeking thereby to benefit from the Sunnis’ demographic superiority. Iran, heading the minority Shia camp, initially sought to portray itself as the Pan-Islamic leader of a resistance axis against US/ Zionist imperialism, but as sectarianism deepened, it assumed the role of defender of minorities against Sunni takfiris. It sought to make up for the Shia’s demographic inferiority via more mobilized unified sectarian networks and by taking advantage of the greater divisions within the Sunni camp. The instrumentalization of sectarianism was a continuation of the struggle of the 2000s, but the Arab street, hitherto relatively immune to sectarianism, was now mobilized by it, not only in the failing states but regionally. A vicious cycle set in between sectarianism and state failures: the existential struggle for power amidst civil wars in the failing states incentivized both regimes and opposition to instrumentalize sectarianism to rally supporters and demonize opponents. In Syria, Bashar al-Asad responded to the protests that threatened to overwhelm his regime by characterizing the opposition as Sunni jihadists in order to rally his base among minorities. Al Qaeda’s various avatars instrumentalized sectarianism in its opposition to regimes, e.g., Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq and its IS successor deliberately sought to provoke sectarian war by attacks on Shia mosques (against the admonitions of al Qaeda-Central under Bin Laden) and slaughter of non-Sunnis, in the belief this would so polarize societies that all Sunnis would have to embrace jihadist leadership.22 Once one side engaged in what seemed to

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be sectarian-motivated violence it precipitated tit-for-tat responses. Importantly, sectarianism seeped downward to the grass roots as failing states lost the capacity to maintain order, activating the security dilemma wherein ordinary people were forced to fall back on their primordial communities for protection, amidst fears of sectarian “cleansing” and massacres, as exemplified in Syria and Iraq.23 Jihad and martyrdom were embraced as normal life gave way to a war economy in which sectarian warlords provided the means of survival; the most motivated fighters, those being fired by sectarian zeal and hatred, attracted the greatest funding from external patrons. Amidst high levels of violence, radical sectarian voices, whether in the social media or among armed factions on the ground, tended to marginalize those in the middle, whether non-­sectarian secularists, Sufis, or even the modernist political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood type. Different from the more restrained modes of contestation in earlier cold wars, in which propaganda was dominant, was the readiness in this period to employ massive violence in proxy wars in which whole populations were made subject to death, displacement, and privation. This greater violence reflects the much greater availability of armaments and firepower and the significant proportions of the population that became combatants. But there was also an unprecedented blurring of the distinction between civilians and combatants in MENA’s versions of Kaldor’s “New Wars”,24 justified by the demonization of whole communities as infidel “Others” and the belief in existential threats to one’s own community. Thus, while secular Arabism had contributed to the integration of Arabic-speaking minorities within states, the new sectarian surge was associated with high levels of violence against the “Other” at the grass roots of societies. It, moreover, stopped the democratization impetus of the Arab uprising in its tracks and fostered instead more exclusionary versions of neo-patrimonial regimes (e.g., Asad, Maliki) fighting similarly exclusionary jihadist opponents. At the states system level, sectarianism precipitated a bi-polarization of state alignments, with all states under normative pressure to take sides on sectarian lines. Regimes whose interests would be damaged by this resisted, such as Egypt, which did not want to see Sunni Islamists empowered, and Oman, which was reluctant to antagonize Iran. Nevertheless, compared to panArabism which had put some normative constraints on the power struggle, this new sectarianism prescribed uncompromising jihad within the Islamic umma against heresy, generating a shift from a Lockean to a Hobbesian system of intense enmity and the move from discourse wars to violent proxy wars tearing societies apart.

Iraq and Syria: failing states, rising trans-/non-state actors The failure of states and the rise of armed non-state actors intensified the power struggle. What had been two key Arab nationalist powers, Iraq and Syria, became, with the Arab uprising, an interconnected field of contestation in which trans-state groups moved back and forth as the power struggle dictated and contested state borders and ruling regimes in an utterly unprecedented way. Thus, the Syria conflict rapidly spilled over as Iraqi actors took sides in Syria, symptomatic of trans-state identities linking the two states; Euphrates Valley tribes from Iraq’s Anbar province sent money, weapons, and thousands of fighters to support their Syrian cousins in Deir al-Zur.25 In parallel, Sunni fighters from across the region and beyond swarmed into Syria to fight the apostate regime that was killing Sunnis. In reaction to this, Iran mobilized Iraqi and Afghan Shia militias to protect Shia mosques and communities near Damascus and soon became involved in defense of the Syrian regime, with some 5,000–10,000 fighting alongside Hizbollah and contributing materially to altering the power balance.26 As state failures opened the door to the rise of powerful trans-state/non-state movements, the very borders and sovereignty of the states came under threat.27 While only a minority in Iraq and 118

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Syria wanted a re-drawing of the boundaries of their states, armed trans-state movements took advantage of the debilitation of states’ territorial control to advance boundary-busting projects. The Syrian uprising strengthened the Kurds’ national and separatist ambitions. Syrian Kurdish regions became effectively autonomous of Damascus under the Democratic Union Party (PYD), in parallel with the more consolidated autonomy enjoyed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. The collapse of Syrian and Iraqi state control over their territories allowed the ISIS movement to seize control over wide areas of western Iraq and eastern Syria, declaring the abolition of the Syrian-Iraq border as part of the construction of a transnational “Caliphate”. It rapidly acquired some of the attributes of statehood, including heavy weaponry, oil resources, control over cities, the ability to enlist wide Sunni disaffection, and to provide a modicum of order and welfare where it governed. This and similar phenomenon in Libya and Yemen showed how porous were the regional states’ “artificial” boundaries and again raised the issue of their permanence; the unmaking of the Versailles-imposed Westphalian system was no longer unthinkable. However, regimes continued to fight back against these revisionist forces, and they enjoyed the backing of great power patrons who were also loathe to see state-remaking or the emergence of terrorist safe havens.

Intra-sectarian contestation The main axes in the early uprising years soon took on sectarian – Sunni-Shia – features, and this remained so in the later years, but parallel to that was a growing fragmentation in the “Sunni” camp at both the state and non-state levels. Inside failing states as civil wars generated existential threat intra-Sunni contestation tended to squeeze out the moderates, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Syria’s Free Syrian Army, and empower jihadists who then entered internecine battles. Thus, in the Syrian civil war, rival jihadist movements Ahrar asSham and Jabhat an-Nusra, and the latter and ISIS, despite their similar ideologies, battled for supremacy. At the regional system level, each of the Sunni powers sought to promote a version of Sunni identity that corresponded to regime interests. Thus the affinity of the ruling AKP in Turkey with the modernist form of political Islam promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s similar support of it, put them at odds with the Saudis and the UAE which, seeing the Brotherhood as a threat to the legitimacy of dynastic rule, branded it as a terrorist group. In postrevolutionary Egypt, Syria, and Libya, the two sides backed different factions, sometimes even opposing sides, with the Saudis either promoting a conservative form of Wahhabi Salafism or else, paradoxically, backing secular generals, such as Egypt’s al-Sisi, who were also fighting the Brotherhood. If the Sunni states were under-balancing against Iran, as Gause argues,28 it is because the Shia-Sunni divide was increasingly cross cut and diluted by the Islamist-secular and intra-Sunni cleavages, and the different factions Sunni states backed in proxy wars had become rivals for power inside states. Regime interests also crosscut sectarian solidarity. Thus, the al-Sisi regime in Sunni Egypt was brought closer to the non-Sunni Asad regime in Syria by the shared Islamist threat to their secular authoritarian regimes; economic interdependence between Turkey and Iran diluted their balancing against each other. On the other hand, in the brief periods when the Sunni powers put their differences aside, as in early 2015, and brought their proxies to coordinate, they briefly reversed the balance of power in the Syrian civil war, marked by the capture of Idlib from the Asad regime. However, this was transitory, and in 2017 the Qatar crisis gave Iran an opportunity to encourage the defection of Turkey and Qatar from the Sunni axis. The fracturing of the Sunni camp and the accommodation pursued by Egypt with Syria and by Turkey 119

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and Qatar with Iran demonstrated how far the normative power of sectarian identities over the foreign policies of Sunni states was being overridden by regime/state interests. In the case of the Shia, by contrast, there was no leadership alternative to Iran, so the main issue was whether Shia in other states (Iraq, Lebanon) gave their political allegiance to Iran or to their states. Those who saw the velayat al-faqih as a transnational leadership were disputed by more “national” versions of Shiism, such as the quietist non-political version promoted in Iraq by Ayatollah Sistani and the politicized populist version of Muqtada as-Sadr. But all Shia were driven together by the threat of Sunni takfiris who legitimized killing them and Iranian leadership was indispensable to the common defense. It was the greater solidarity of the Shia, compared to the growing divisions within the Sunnis, as well as the global targeting of Sunni ISIS, that allowed the Shia to compensate for their considerable demographic inferiority and, indeed, recover the initiative in the later post-uprising power struggle.

Global competitive interference: mutual checkmating The uprising provoked a “New Cold War” among global great powers. After Washington’s failed attempt under George W. Bush to impose a Pax Americana on the region, US power appeared, by mid-2000s, to be receding as the invasion of Iraq inadvertently empowered Iran and fatigue at highly costly interventions led the Obama administration to retreat to offshore balancing. The loss of Mubarak, a key Western client, and the disastrous failure of the Libya intervention, producing a further failed state empowering al Qaeda in North Africa, reinforced the lesson. US interests were still favored by the relative empowerment of the GCC by the Arab uprising and the continued dependency of post-revolutionary Egypt. Moreover, for the US, a failed state in Syria, where Hezbollah and al Qaeda wore each other down, was more cost effective than another Iraq-type effort at “nation-building”. The nuclear deal with Iran was seen as a guard against descent into a much more dangerous regional hot war. However, Western calculations changed with the rise of ISIS, which was perceived (unlike the Asad regime) to be a serious direct threat to the West and precipitated common interests between it, Russia, and Iran. In parallel, Russia and China developed regional stakes in MENA arms sales, energy, and trade, and saw the norm of sovereignty and the authority of the UN Security Council as key to constraining Western dominance in the region and to the multi-polar world order they advocated.29 Thus, after the West used a UN humanitarian resolution to engineer regime change in Libya, Russia blocked a similar intervention in Syria: henceforth, the Syrian crisis would have to be settled by political compromise in which Russian-US cooperation was essential. Then Russia’s 2015 Syria intervention checked the jihadist surge that had threatened to overwhelm the Asad regime. The subsequent fall of eastern Aleppo to the regime, the debilitation of the opposition threat from the Damascus rural areas, and the recapture of Palmyra were landmarks in the shift of the power balance back toward Asad. This empowered Russia to bring Turkey and the exhausted opposition fighters to acquiesce in diplomatic negotiations at Astana, from which the US was marginalized. Washington, however, established footholds in both Iraq and Syria by sponsoring proxies against ISIS in the battles over Mosul and Raqqa. The race to see who would fill the vacuum in Syria from ISIS’s contraction pitted US and Russian/Iranian proxies, with Turkey on its own anti-Kurdish tangent. Thus, no more than the regional powers, were global powers able to sweep the board and establish hegemony in MENA; with no viable solution to the region’s crisis, they instead settled for dividing it up into spheres of influence from which they aimed to merely contain its spillover.

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Re-balancing in the late Arab uprising By the later years of the uprising (2013–17), the regional power balance had again been reshuffled, with the ascendant Sunni powers checkmated and Iranian power revived. Failed Turkish Hegemony: Three years after the uprising, Turkey’s bid for regional hegemony had run aground on Syrian rocks. Erdoğan had imagined installing a client Muslim Brotherhood–run Islamist democracy in Damascus but grossly underestimated the tenacity of the Assad regime, bolstered by its allies, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Turkey appeared impotent even to manage the spillover of the Syrian crisis – refugee flows, Kurdish empowerment – on its borders. In deploying Sunni Islamic identity and backing jihadists against Asad, Ankara contributed to the radical sectarianization that was destabilizing the region, and it soon suffered blowback once ISIS turned against it. Turkey was soon on bad terms with other Middle East states, too. Good relations with Iran soured over Syria. Iraq’s Shia government objected to Ankara’s manipulation of its ties to Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds against Baghdad. When Turkey objected to the Saudi/UAE–backed military overthrow of President Morsy and to Egypt’s subsequent moves to isolate Hamas in Gaza, its ties within the Sunni camp were also damaged. Turkey had started with considerable soft power from its “no problems” strategy toward its neighbors and in the Arab world as a democratic Islamist hegemon when the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to be mounting to power regionally, but the marginalization of the Ikhwan by both secularist and jihadist opponents, the backlash against Turkey’s sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Syria, notably US cooptation of the Syrian Kurds against ISIS, and Ankara’s involvement in protracted warfare against the Kurds debilitated its regional position and put it at odds with most of its neighbors. In compensation, Turkey sponsored its own Syrian opposition forces for use against the Kurds and to carve out a sphere of influence in northern Syria. The exhaustion of GCC power projection: Saudi Arabia’s under its new King Salman and his son were ambitious to make Riyadh a more muscular power capable of balancing Iran. They could rely on Saudi’s wealth to coopt allies and to “buy” soft power via pan-Arab media and trans-state educational and charity networks. Its Wahhabi version of Salafism had heretofore never had wide appeal but came, in a world of sectarian rivalry, to command greater grass-roots support in the region. For the first time, also, the Saudis tried, in Yemen, to add hard offensive military power to the equation. Yet the contradictions built into Saudi policy hamstrung it. On the one hand, its project was profoundly counter-revolutionary, seeking to roll back popular movements in Bahrain and Egypt; yet, Saudi-spread Salafist fundamentalism, while supportive of established Muslim authority, readily mutated, owing to its intolerance of the “other”, into jihadism, which, as in the case of al Qaeda and IS, were hostile to the kingdom. Riyadh sought to construct an Islamist coalition under its leadership to counter both IS and Iran, but while poorer economically dependent states nominally adhered to it, few Sunni states wanted to take sides in its cold war with Iran; significantly, not only Pakistan and Turkey declined to follow Saudi leadership but also its own GCC allies, Oman or Qatar, were unwilling to make an enemy of Iran. The Saudis expected to quickly defeat the Zaydi Houthis, which it perceived to be an Iranian surrogate, but instead its Yemen intervention not only bogged it down in protracted conflict that made the Houthis more dependent on Iran, but, in wreaking great damage on Yemen, seemed likely to generate enduring animosities that would blow back on the Saudis.30 The 2017 attempt to isolate Qatar inadvertently benefited both Turkey and Iran, to whom Qatar had to turn. At the same time, Qatar’s oversized ambitions were also cut down to size as the rise to power across the region of its main surrogate, the Muslim Brotherhood, suffered multiple setbacks,

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notably in Egypt and Syria. Doha’s backing of Islamist factions in Libya put it at odds with Egypt and the UAE, and its former “soft power” as a mediator in regional conflicts suffered as it took sides in regional conflicts and from its alleged financing of jihadists in Syria. The crisis of 2017, in which other GCC states sought to isolate and punish Doha for backing the Ikhwan and for its hedging between Iran and Saudi Arabia, marked another major fracture within what had been seen as a sectarian Sunni camp. Iran rising?: As much from the mistakes of its rivals as its own prowess, Iran recovered its position in the regional power balance. The Iran nuclear deal released it from global-level threat and freed up resources for the regional power struggle. Taking advantage of the rise of IS in Iraq and Syria, it mobilized allied Shia militias and demonstrated its prowess in asymmetric warfare. While the proxies of the Sunni powers were uncontrollable jihadists or ineffective warlords, at odds with each other, Iran’s proxies, under its effective control, played a major role in buttressing Asad and fighting IS, positioning Iran as a major power broker in Syria and Iraq, and giving a new material reality to the “Shia Crescent”. Hamas re-established its alliance with Tehran. Iran’s modest assistance to the Houthis was enough to help bog the Saudis down in Yemen. Iran also benefited from an increasingly fractured “Sunni” coalition, especially in Syria, where the latter largely abandoned its ambition to replace Asad, and in the Qatari crisis, which enabled Iran to pull Qatar and Turkey out of the Saudi/UAE orbit.

Conclusion The Arab uprisings had two major impacts on the regional balance of power. First, together with the US invasion of Iraq, they debilitated the historically central Arab powers, the secular Arab nationalist republics of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, which used to dominate inter-Arab politics. Power drained away to the peripheries of the Gulf, specifically Saudi Arabia, and to the nonArab powers, Turkey and Iran, while Arabism, long wounded, gave way to the Islamic ideologies of these Muslim periphery states. Second, and in parallel, during the early uprising years, the power balance shifted from the Iran-led resistance axis toward the pro-Western Saudi-led bloc, as indicated by the loss of Hizbollah’s and Iran’s standing in Arab opinion, the defection of Turkey and Qatar to the anti-Iranian camp, and the displacement of the hitherto dominant resistance discourse by the rise of Sunni Islamist and democracy movements against authoritarian nationalist regimes in Syria and Libya. However, in the later years of the uprising, the terms of conflict were transformed, somewhat reversing or qualifying these initial effects. Unlike Arabism in the first Arab cold war, the Islamism of the periphery states did not translate into hegemony but, rather, fractured along Sunni-Shia sectarian lines. Sectarianization, together with militarized civil war, stopped the democratization impetus in its tracks. Later, the Sunni Islamists fractured between Ikhwan and salafist-jihadist movements. States found the regional arena more intractable as sectarian or ethnic-based non-state actors were empowered at their expense, seen in the rise of the Kurdish movements, al Qaeda, ISIS and their kindred, Hizbollah and analogous Iraqi Shia militias, all engaged in discourses of sectarianism. The fragmentation of the system made it highly penetrated by great power intervention, most clearly seen in Syria, where rival global powers established virtual spheres of influence at the expense of state sovereignty. But the global powers could no more control the region than regional powers. By the late uprising period, the splintering of Sunni forces, driven by rival versions of Islamism or contrary regime interests, combined with Russian intervention in Syria, re-shifted the power balance back to the Iran-led Shia Crescent/resistance axis. Signs of this included (a) movement away from the anti-Iran coalition by Turkey, Hamas, and Qatar; (b) the enhanced 122

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power of Shia militias on the ground in Syria and Iraq; (c) the defeat of ISIS in Mosul, solidifying the inclusion of Iraq in the Shia Crescent; and (d) the impotence of the Saudi intervention in Yemen. Nevertheless, Iran was able to do little more than checkmate its rivals and had no chance of being accepted as a legitimate leading power in an Arab-Sunni world that was deeply resentful of its penetration. Finally, more than seven years from the onset of the Arab uprisings, the periphery states had failed to take advantage of the collapse of the Arab core to promote their hegemony as each checked the other and none had soft power with the needed universal appeal; indeed, in a world of sectarian bi-polarization (as opposed to one of pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism), no aspirant hegemon can hope, by definition, to have such appeal. As such, the rival aspirant hegemons’ counter-balancing preserved the regional balance of power but at the cost of sectarian proxy wars that were tearing Arab societies apart.

Notes 1 The classic realist treatment of the region is Steven Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 2 Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998); Marc Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999). 3 Laurence Rubin, Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Richard J. Harknett and Jeffrey A. VanDenBerg, “Alignment Theory and Interrelated Threats: Jordan and the Persian Gulf crisis,” Security Studies 6, no. 3 (1997): 112–153. 4 Alexander Wendt lays out how different norms are associated with variations in kinds of anarchy, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992). 5 For a more detailed and documented version of this argument, see Raymond Hinnebusch, The International Politics of the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 6 Barry Buzan and Ole Weaver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 7 Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce, The Crystallization of the Arab State System, 1945–1954 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993). 8 Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). 9 Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Jamal Abd al-Nasir and his Rivals, 1958–1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 10 Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 1996). 11 Morten Valbjorn and Andre Bank, “Signs of a New Arab Cold War: The 2006 Lebanon War and the Sunni-Shi’i Divide,” Middle East Report, No. 242 (Spring 2007): 6–11. 12 M. Luomi, “Sectarian Identities or Geopolitics? The Regional Shia-Sunni Divide in the Middle East,” The Finnish Institute of International Affairss, Working Paper 56, No. 9, 2008), 9. 13 Aref Hijjawi, “The Role of Al-Jazeera (Arabic) in the Arab Revolts of 2011,” in Perspectives (Berlin: Heinrich Boll Stiftung, 2011), 68–79. 14 Chas Freeman, “The Arab Reawakening and Its Strategic Implications,” Middle East Policy Council, 26 March 2011. www.mepc.org/articles-commentary/speeches/arab-reawakening-and-its-strategicimplications. 15 Ahmad H. Rahim, “Whither Political Islam and the Arab Spring,” The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2011); Yasmin Tamlali, “The ‘Arab Spring’: Rebirth or Final Throes of Pan-Arabism?” in Perspectives (Berlin: Heinrich Boll Stiftung, 2011), 46–49. 16 Anissa Haddadi, “The Arab Spring and Islam: Politics, Religion, Culture and the Struggle for Identity,” October 2011. http://m.ibtimes.com/the-arab-spring-and-islam-politics-religion-culture-and-thestruggle-for-identity-236538.html. 17 E. Eric Mohns and A. Banks, “Syrian Revolt Fallout: End of the Resistance Axis?” Middle East Policy 19, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 25–35.

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10 US–ISRAEL RELATIONS DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Fundamental shift, or adaptation to new realities? Robert E. Looney In a dramatic and unprecedented move, the Obama administration, after years of the US vetoing UN votes condemning Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, abstained from UN Resolution 2334.1 In essence, 2334 stated Israel was illegally occupying these lands since Israel had no legal claim to them. The US action thus making a sharp break with past US policy toward that country. To the casual observer, this might well seem to be the case. A closer look, however, suggests a more complicated relationship between the two countries.2 Following the creation of Israel, the US relationship with that country has gradually evolved. US strategic involvement with Israel began in earnest after the Six-Day War in 1967.3 At that time, the French, striving for better relations with the Arabs, suspended arms sales to Israel. Conditions in the Middle East had changed to the extent that the US viewed Israel as a critical element in the maintenance of a balance of power in the region. Israel’s role in this regard gained added importance following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, as evidenced by a dramatic increase in US military assistance to that country, reaching upwards of 20% of that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the mid-1970s.4 While over the years US aid and military assistance to Israel has fallen as a share of GDP, it has always amounted to billions of dollars each year. In addition to its strategic importance, Israel also provides the US with numerous benefits, including intelligence on terrorism and regional politics. The economic relationship is also important.5 Israel is a significant investor in the US economy and the third largest export destination in the region for US products. Because of its importance to the US, one overriding American goal in the region has been the establishment of peace between Israel and its neighbors. Toward that purpose, and beginning with Lyndon Johnson, each US administration has opposed the expansion of Jewish settlements on land that Israel occupied in June 1967. Even the Trump administration, ambivalent at first, appears to be adopting a stance on settlements similar to that of the Bush administration.6 Starting with Bill Clinton and up to the Trump administration, which has been vague on the issue,7 US presidents have associated lasting stability in the region with the adoption of a twostate solution, enabling the Palestinians to prosper in an independent environment.

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From its start in 2009, the Obama administration’s policies toward Israel looked like a continuation of past US-Israeli relations. Military assistance remained high. During his presidential campaign, Obama indicated a continuation of the “special relationship” with Israel.8 Also, he acknowledged Israel as a major US ally. Many of Obama’s high-level advisors were of the Jewish faith. Obama’s pro-Israel stance helped, in part, with his receiving the preponderance of Jewish votes. However, once in office, Obama initiated what appeared to be a significant shift from the realism of his predecessor. Specifically, he shifted US foreign policy in the region away from confrontation and more toward improving the US’s image with the Arab Middle East in particular and the Muslim world in general. Obama also viewed close collaboration with international organizations such as the UN to be critical in engaging enemies such as Syria and Iran, together with resolving long-standing conflicts such as that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Middle East issues rose to the top of his foreign policy concerns.9 From Israel’s perspective,10 however, Obama seemed to represent a departure from the “special relationship” with his • • • • •

De facto advancement of Egypt to the prime US ally in the region; Insistence on a freeze on West Bank settlements; Assumption that the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would aid in the efforts to stop Iran’s development of nuclear weapons; Strained meetings with Netanyahu in sharp contrast to the warm welcomes received by the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas; and Avoidance of Israel on his trips to the region.

Obama’s actions raised concerns in Israel about his attitudes toward that country, with many Israelis believing he was genuinely unfriendly, aloof, distant, and naive about Israel in particular and the Middle East in general. At the end of his administration, a January 2017 poll undertaken by the Israel Democracy Institute found the number of Israelis calling Obama “unfriendly” toward Israel at 57%.11 President Obama did not undertake this shift in relations with Israel in a vacuum but believed there was a growing sentiment in the US and even amongst American Jews for the creation of a Palestinian state and a freeze on new settlements in the Occupied Territories. His other assumption was that Netanyahu could be pressured into aligning Israeli policy closer to that of the US. While the first assumption was no doubt correct, the second one was not, thus undermining most of his Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts. All and all, the Obama years saw the development of increased discord between the US and Israel. The following sections examine the shifts in US-Israeli relations during the Obama administration, their underlying causes, and the extent to which they represent a fundamental change from that in the past.

Obama-Netanyahu contacts As might be expected, a personal relationship between liberal President Obama and conservative Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu faced differences from the start. They got off to an unusually inauspicious start, setting their tone for the years that followed. Immediately upon taking office, Netanyahu rejected agreements made by two previous US administrations. He scoffed at the use of the “two-state solution” as the model for future Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.12 Obama responded by demanding a total end to construction in Jewish settlements in the West 126

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Bank. To Israelis, Obama seemed to be indicating that if the new Israeli government was not going to keep formal and informal agreements made with the previous Bush government, then he need not abide by past agreements either. To Israelis, Obama appeared to imply the informal understanding that would have allowed continued construction in established settlements to satisfy the need for “natural population growth” would not be necessarily continued. Netanyahu had little faith in Palestinian willingness or ability to make peace or to agree to his minimum conditions for peace-making. These included the demilitarization of Palestinian areas, the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and the acceptance that, as part of an agreement, there could be no right of return to Israel proper by Palestinian refugees. In part, Netanyahu’s stance reflected his need to placate his radical nationalist supporters. From the start, Obama focused on Palestinian issues, while Netanyahu was more concerned with Iran’s nuclear program. He apparently believed that Obama could be persuaded to also focus on that aspect. To that end, before his May 2009 trip to Washington, he took the unprecedented step of meeting Jordan’s King Abdallah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to seek their support for placing the Iranian issue at the top of his negotiating agenda. However, Netanyahu, for all his experience in dealing with the US, came to his first meeting with Obama unprepared for the president’s single-minded insistence on dealing with the settlement issue first. The meeting was a disaster, with Netanyahu forced to spend considerable time through 2009 on damage control. His decision finally to back the “two-state” model is but one example. However, at the time, there was growing sentiment in Israel that Obama could push them only so far, and by focusing on the settlement issue, he had limited his bargaining position. Specifically, Israel had no credible negotiating partner. Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was politically weak. Without a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, any promises he makes will be mostly meaningless. All and all, little was achieved in the initial interaction between Obama and Netanyahu. In Israel, Obama’s new approach accomplished little. Because he had failed to extract any substantive concessions from the Palestinians, none of Israel’s leading left-wing political leaders who oppose settlements supported his approach. Even the most moderate Israelis perceived it to be one-sided.13 As seen from Israel, Obama needed to begin addressing Israelis’ concerns too, including those related to the Iranian threat.

Recurring areas of disagreement All through the Obama administration, relations between the US and Israel remained strained. Friction between the two was hard to pinpoint. There was, of course, the gap in political philosophies – conservative versus liberal – that led to serious differences over a long list of policy issues, driven by significant strategic, economic, demographic, and political changes taking place in each country. In the net, these changes tended to push both sides away from the comfortable relationship they had enjoyed for decades.

West Bank settlement issues In March 2010, US General David Petraeus told Congress that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict undermines US interests in the Middle East.14 That testimony unleashed a more in-depth debate over Israel’s strategic value to the US and a parallel discussion in Israel regarding its overdependence on the US at a time when many Israeli officials perceive US global influence and willingness to use force to be waning. 127

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Under Obama, the US-Israel disagreement over Palestinian issues became particularly contentious, especially those associated with the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Historically, US government has considered settlements on these occupied lands as illegal and, along with most other countries, as illegitimate and an impediment to peace. Israel, on the other hand, sees a biblical, political, and historical link to these lands. Israel also sees its security as dependent on controlling activity in these areas.15 Both liberal and conservative Israeli governments have abided or outright encouraged settlement expansion. Even Israeli politicians with considerable reservations over the settlements practice restraint in opposing them for fear of paying a high political price, and as a result, the settlements expanded significantly over the years. In the 1970s, Israeli settlers numbered only a few tens of thousands. By the time of the Oslo Accords, these numbers had risen to 370,000.16 Many of the settlements exist as clusters around Jerusalem or other important religious sites such as Hebron, as well as strategic hilltops and aquifers. Some surround Palestinian cities – for example, Bethlehem – cutting them off from farmlands and restricting their ability to expand and connect to other population centers. Now, a web of settler-only roads stretches across the West Bank, imposing multiple checkpoints. The Oslo Accords established guidelines for the settlements by dividing the West Bank into three settlement categories. Area A has full Palestinian administration limited to urban centers; Area B combines Palestinian civil authority with Israeli security control, mostly in the city outskirts and small towns; and Area C has full Israeli control over most of the countryside, including not only the settlements but also many Palestinian villages. After Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, and as of early 2015, the West Bank settlements expanded by around 80,000. During his administration, new construction took place on 9,000 new West Bank settlement units and 3,000 additional ones in East Jerusalem.17 In this regard, Netanyahu did not vary significantly from past Israeli settlement policy. However, his enthusiasm for settlement expansion, together with the lack of any significant attempts in starting the peace process, led many to conclude they might become a permanent fixture or a major impediment to any attempts at the creation of a Palestinian State. Another factor pointing toward the Israeli assimilation of West Bank territory is the practice of retroactively legalizing outposts across the region without dismantling them.18 Also, Israeli demolition has eliminated hundreds of Palestinian structures in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem.19 To this day, Netanyahu minimizes the importance of settlement-building as an impediment to peace.20 He simply contends that the Arabs and Israelis fought for years before the settlement program began in 1967. Netanyahu appears to believe the country is in a strong enough position, both strategically and economically, to be immune from Obama’s or American pressures over the settlement.21 In fact, many in Israel now see the settlements as permanent fixtures critical for continued Israeli security.22 On the other hand, for years, the American position is that the settlements weaken both US and Israeli national interests.23 For one thing, American administrations question whether Israel can remain a viable democracy if it is home to millions of disenfranchised Palestinians.24 Some in the Obama administration went further, contending that the settlements put the US in the awkward position of being the sole defender of a country that is violating international law.25 In April 2016, Vice President Joe Biden, a long-standing advocate of Israel, argued26 that the Israeli settlement program was moving the two countries further apart. In summary, President Barack Obama’s administration blamed Israeli settlement construction policy for sabotaging Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. More broadly, American officials widely believed that Israel’s failure to reach an agreement undermines its viability as a Jewish and democratic state. US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state” without an agreement with the Palestinians.27 Netanyahu escalated the rhetoric, saying 128

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that he was “deeply troubled” by the US government’s decision to work with a new Palestinian Authority unity government formed in early June.28 All and all, Obama accomplished little progress in resolving the settlement issue. Because he failed to extract any substantive concessions from the Palestinians, none of Israel’s leading leftwing political leaders who oppose settlements have come out in support of his approach. Even the most moderate Israelis perceive it to be one-sided. As seen from Israel, he needed to address Israelis’ concerns, including those related to the Iranian threat, but that was never to pass.

Two-state solution Closely related, of course, to the settlement disagreements between Obama and Netanyahu is the issue of Palestinian independence or the two-state solution. From the Obama administration’s perspective, and for that matter that of most Americans, a two-state situation is the only viable alternative.29 As noted earlier, a one-state solution would entail an Israeli government suppressing (one way or another) millions of Palestinians, making the region a lightning-rod for extremism and instability. Unfortunately, many Israelis (as well as Palestinians) seem to feel the two-state solution30 is a lost cause. Years of negotiations with the Palestinians have gotten nowhere. At this point, there are serious questions about the willingness or ability of either side to make the needed concessions to consummate an agreement. Years of intermittent terrorist attacks from Gaza have convinced many Israelis that they will never achieve peace with the Palestinians. Recent polls indicate a sharp decline (from a recent peak of 79% in 2008 to just 51% in 201531) in support for a two-state solution. Furthermore, 88% of Israelis do not feel the Palestinians are serious about seeking peace.32 By 2013, a majority of the Israeli cabinet officially opposed the creation of a Palestinian state.33

Iran nuclear issue For years, Israel and the US differed on whether Iran was making an all-out effort to produce nuclear weapons.34 The Israeli assessment had the support of Germany, France, and the UK’s intelligence services, but the US, reluctant to get involved in another Middle Eastern war, held back from accepting the Israeli position that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons. In October 2011, the Israeli and US administrations agreed for the first time on estimates of how close Iran was to producing and deploying a nuclear weapon. Their positions also converged on the redline that they do not want Iran to cross. For Israel, that line had been capability, whereas for the US, it was weaponization. By late 2011, Israel conceded that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon, thus moving its stance more closely in line with the US position. Also in 2011, Israel was arguing that Iran’s nuclear weapons-making facilities were on the verge of entering a “zone of immunity” – the point at which they will be too widely disbursed and well-protected for Israel’s military sufficiently to delay the program.35 While Israeli authorities believed that they could carry out an effective strike, they were concerned that Iran’s transfer of uranium stockpiles to the Fordow underground facility would limit its ability to strike effectively. By late 2011, Israeli authorities believed the time they had to mount an effective attack would last for about another nine months, and that the US military, with its superior hardware, has another 15 months.36 As for retaliation, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak felt that rocket attacks by Hezbollah would cause far fewer casualties than previously suggested. However, some of Israel’s leading security officials challenged his assessment. For example, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence 129

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estimated 200,000 rockets positioned in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and the Sinai were permanently targeted permanently on Israeli sites – including major urban centers such as Tel Aviv – and that their dispersal in urban areas made them difficult to neutralize.37 At the time, therefore, Israeli officials concluded that a unilateral strike on Iran should only take place as a last resort. Senior officials warn that, without widespread international backing, Israel could face an intolerable level of diplomatic fallout, especially if the attack caused a regional conflagration and a steep rise in oil prices. They also argued that the stalemate in the peace process will make it hard for Israel to secure the kind of international backing it had during the 2006 Lebanon war. The Israeli preference was that the US, with European political support, should lead the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. However, the Israeli authorities were never able to secure backing, with the US hesitant to participate without evidence that the Iranians were on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon. Israel’s central fear was that the major world powers would settle for a policy of containment if and when Iran begins producing nuclear weapons.38 Israel, therefore, accepted the sanctions program only to get international acceptance for the use of military force before Iran reaches that point. Israeli leaders were skeptical that the sanctions regime in place at the time would work, particularly given waivers and failure to prosecute companies.39 The only sanctions the Israeli authorities believed to be effective were those involving a total international boycott of the Iranian central bank and the threat to use overwhelming military force, not only against the nuclear installations but also against Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets. Throughout most of 2011, Israel was concerned that the “zone of immunity” will be in place by the time failures of the current set of sanctions become apparent. Israel’s eventual acceptance of a newly tightened sanctions regime made a military 2012 strike unlikely. However, Barak did retain the option of a unilateral strike, particularly in the absence of a US commitment to lead an attack on Iran should the international sanctions program fail. With the success of the sanctions regime on Iran creating the possibility of an agreement, the interests of the Obama and Netanyahu governments began to diverge. Obama prioritized reaching an agreement that prevents Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon but would leave it a nuclear threshold state. In contrast, Netanyahu advocated the dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program. He built his career, in part, on a campaign of raising the alarm against a nuclear Iran. Netanyahu felt “obligated” to do everything he could to prevent an agreement, which he has called a “bad” and “dangerous” deal.40 The disagreement between President Obama and prime minister Netanyahu over the proper way of confronting the Iran nuclear threat came to a head when Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the US Congress on March 3, 2016.41 The speech came just two weeks before Israeli parliamentary elections on March 17. Also looming was an end of March deadline for reaching a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu hoped to convince Congress to pass new sanctions legislation, which President Obama threatened to veto. The Obama administration accused Netanyahu of trying to sabotage the Iran negotiations and of meddling in US politics, while Netanyahu contended that the world powers had given up on their pledge to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.42 The president and other senior administration officials refused to meet with Netanyahu during his visit, which was organized by Republican Congressional leaders without White House coordination. By accepting the Republican invitation to address Congress, Netanyahu risked turning Israel into a partisan issue in US politics – an act that would undermine nearly three decades of Democrat/Republican bipartisan support. As expected, Netanyahu’s Washington

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trip pushed the relationship with Obama to its lowest level, with Israel’s prime minister, foreign minister, and ambassador to the US (who coordinated the visit with Republican leaders) all unwelcome in the White House.43 Also creating problems for the Obama administration was the activity of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC had worked for months to prepare a new Iran sanctions bill with bipartisan Congressional support. Most likely this effort would have undermined the chances of reaching an agreement with Iran.44 However, Republican House Speaker John Boehner derailed the attempt by announcing Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Boehner’s announcement pushed key Democratic supporters of the bill to line up behind the president and delay a Congressional sanction debate until after March 24. By this time, it would be too late to stop any deal between the P5 + 1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the US) and Iran. In Israel, Netanyahu portrayed himself as the only candidate who could save Israel and the world from a nuclear Iran. His election campaign focused on security but was criticized by both the left and the right for having an ineffective strategy towards the core national security issue of preventing a nuclear Iran. Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad contradicted Netanyahu recently, telling US administration and Congressional officials that a new sanctions bill would be like “throwing a grenade into the process”.45 Early on Mossad had long taken a contradictory position to Netanyahu on Iran. For instance, in 2011 former Mossad director Meir Dagan claimed that the idea of an Israeli military attack on Iran was “stupid”.46 Also, at the time Israeli intelligence agencies shared the assessment of their US counterparts that Iran’s senior leadership has not decided to assemble a nuclear weapon. A string of former intelligence chiefs and senior military officers also publicly criticized Netanyahu for undermining rather than strengthening Israel’s security. Toward the end of Obama’s presidency, but before the signing of the Iran agreement, Netanyahu’s credibility in the US reached an all-time low. According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, the Israelis were “cherry picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the US”.47 In response, US officials reportedly withheld sensitive intelligence from Israel regarding nuclear negotiations for fear that Netanyahu would manipulate and leak the information. Israeli officials complained that US briefings on the talks were undetailed. Both sides feared that high-level tension would affect cooperation at the bureaucratic level. Despite US-Israeli tensions and Obama’s feud with Netanyahu, his administration requested48 $3.1 billion in mostly military aid to Israel in the fiscal year 2016, much of which was used to purchase US defense systems. The US has a near veto on Israeli defense exports because USmanufactured components are in nearly every Israeli defense product. In December 2015, the White House vetoed Israel’s sale of US-made Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria, disrupting Israeli-Nigerian ties.49 Curbs on Israeli exports have caused tension in the past and remain an ongoing source of resentment and stress on both sides. Netanyahu put himself in an awkward position by speaking to Congress under such controversial conditions. He opened himself up to criticism if the talks broke down. On the other hand, if an agreement was reached, his long-term mission to see Iran’s nuclear program put out of action will have failed. As it turned out, with the signing of the Iran agreement, Netanyahu’s efforts were for nothing. By weakening support for Israel within the Democratic party – whose key demographic groups, such as non-white voters and millennials, are both growing and the most sympathetic to Palestinians – Netanyahu may have risked future military aid altogether.

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Relations with Egypt Another cause of friction between the Obama administration and the Israelis has centered on the US relationship with Egypt. For Israel, Egypt is a country critical for the region’s stability. The Israelis feel they don’t have the luxury of criticizing human rights violations in a country that is actively combating Islamic terrorism and pursuing a set of very pro-Israel policies and actions. There was considerable consternation in Israel when Obama terminated weapon deliveries to Egypt following the military government’s suppression in 2013.50 The Obama administration also refused a customary courtesy meeting in Washington with Egyptian President Abdelfatah al-Sisi.51 In short, Israeli authorities felt that the Obama administration had its Egyptian priorities all wrong, and given the dire situation in the region, it should strive for stability in Egypt, even if it meant temporarily looking the other way on democracy and human rights violations.

Involvement in Syria US policy toward Syria is another area that created frictions between the Obama administration and Israel.52 Whereas the Obama administration prioritized efforts to promote democracy or regime change, Israel was more interested in stability and deterrence. As the Arab Spring flared up in early 2011, the Obama administration appeared inclined to assist in displacing Assad. However, this time the administration backed away from this position, being content to support rebel groups opposed to Assad. The US action raised fears in Israel that it would only lead to increased Islamic extremism and chaos with the eventual fall of Assad. With little cooperation from the US, Israel has been included to work with Russia, with Prime Minister Netanyahu meeting several times with President Vladimir Putin to coordinate their actions toward Syria. Their objective has been to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring missiles but not to overthrow Assad. In Syria at least, Israel has found it much more productive to work with Russia than the Obama administration.53

Diverging interests The differences between Obama and Netanyahu derive from a spectrum of factors, with no one source dominating the discord. Differences between the two reflect changes in the US stake in the region, together with internal shifts in demographics and attitudes in both countries. During the Obama years, the US had reasons to be far less involved in the region than it did previously. First, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, public sentiment in the US turned against supporting further troop deployments to the region. Second, a significant reduction in US and Western dependence on Middle East oil occurred with the surge in US shale oil and gas production.54 The US is now a major exporter of both oil and gas and may become a net exporter of both by 2020. With reserves approaching those in Saudi Arabia, the US may also be the world’s largest oil producer by that date. Also, during the Obama years, public criticism of Israeli policies became more common in the US. It stemmed from public opinion polls increasingly showing a sentiment that Israel’s actions were not in the U.S. national interest. Discontent also spread to several of Israel’s traditional allies. Germany, one of Israel’s closest allies, protested against Israel’s settlement policy by canceling a 30% subsidy to purchase German gunboats.55 Animosity between the US and Israel during this period also reflected fundamentally different approaches to common challenges, as well as shifting demographics in both countries.

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For over a generation, bipartisan support for Israel has been a constant in US politics. However, Israeli policies and shifting US demographics threaten to make Israel a “wedge issue” separating Democrats and Republicans. Unconditional support for Israel has become a staple of Republican politics, whereas Democrats are increasingly critical of Israeli policies.56 Recent polls during the Gaza war illustrate a growing divide. While Republicans overwhelming held Hamas responsible for the fighting, only one-third of Democrats held similar views. Recent Pew and Gallup public opinion polls confirm that the US public is increasingly divided over Israel. Support is eroding particularly rapidly among two crucial constituencies within the Democratic party’s political base. Overall, 29% of those ages 18–29 polled say that Israel is more responsible for the violence in Gaza, compared to just 20% between the ages of 50 and 64. A similar percentage viewed Israel’s military response as excessive. The results reflect a generational gap among unconditional Israel supporters.57 Whereas the older generation lived through periods when Israel’s existence and security were not assured, younger US citizens have reached political maturity in the context of a secure Israel – and US media coverage related to Israel has often focused on settlements opposed by administrations of both parties. Hispanics view Israel as more responsible for the fighting in Gaza – 35%, compared to 20% who blamed Hamas. More than one-third (35%) also said that Israel’s response had gone too far. Hispanics are an increasingly important demographic, including in swing states such as Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, as well as Democratic strongholds such as California, where they make up 25% of the population.58 Israeli society and politics are also changing. For example, important constituencies, including Russian-speaking Israelis and the pro-settler national religious movement, increasingly influence Israeli policy and have senior leadership positions within the government.59 This nationalist leadership promotes hawkish policies and rhetoric that clash with US positions. These leaders are less connected to US elite and society because they have different worldviews and experiences. Nationalist rhetoric and political pressure create an environment where public criticism of the US – Obama and Kerry in particular – occurs for domestic political purposes. Bipartisan agreement is the most crucial pillar of US support for Israel and looks to be inevitably weakening over the long term, absent a dramatic shift in Israeli or Palestinian politics. A proactive and efficient pro-Israeli lobby maintains support at the governmental level, yet a growing number of US constituencies are less supportive of Israeli policies. This disconnect will over time make Israel a partisan issue in the US, potentially reducing long-term US support. When Binyamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister of Israel in the 1990s, he had cool relations with former President Bill Clinton, which contributed to his loss of office to Ehud Barak in 1999.60 More than a decade later, Israeli politics have shifted to the right, and President Barack Obama has only a fraction of the support in Israel that Clinton enjoyed. Netanyahu is again rebuffing the White House, but there have been few repercussions in Israel. In fact, Netanyahu’s steadfastness in the face of US pressure appears to enhance his political position at home, creating a significant dilemma for Obama. On the other hand, right-wing Israeli administrations have rarely found favor in the US. A notable exception was former president George W. Bush’s relationship with Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. In the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks, Bush found kinship with a strong Israeli government that saw itself in a life-and-death struggle with terrorists. However, since the mid-2000s, US and Israeli politics have diverged. The US public grew to feel that the Bush administration had been too aggressive in its approach to the problems of the Middle East. Military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left too many questions of how best to confront asymmetrical (and often non-state) threats.

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Meanwhile, the Israeli public increasingly felt that limited wars in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008–09 were a far more effective way to deal with Israel’s enemies than negotiations.61 The forgiving policies of the Bush administration may have emboldened Israeli leaders to take a tougher line, but this was not decisive. The success of Israel’s “barriers”, which separated both the West Bank and Gaza from Israel proper, helped diminish Israeli urgency to negotiate a peaceful solution to its conflict.62 At the same time, the relative quiet that followed their powerful attacks on the West Bank and Gaza persuaded many Israelis that the most effective way to deal with hostile parties is through resolute demonstrations of strength. In many respects, there was nothing amiss in the US-Israeli relationship during the Obama years. The US public as a whole continues to view Israel more favorably than it does most other countries, and there is lingering sympathy that arises from a common list of perceived enemies: terrorists in general, al Qaeda in particular, and Iran. Still, there was no doubt the two countries were drifting apart. Initially united by the Cold War, then by a common peace-making agenda, and then by a fight against religiously inspired extremism, there is now no shared project. On Iran, many in the US government (particularly in the Pentagon) regard Israel as a worrisome variable rather than an asset, and Israelis openly worry about the consequences of a potentially failed US policy toward Iranian proliferation. Also, the Holocaust imagery that plays such a prominent role in today’s discussions about Israel resonates powerfully with US citizens who were children during World War II but seems remote to younger generations. Israel built its image in the US as an underdog fighting against long odds for its survival, but younger US voters have a hard time imagining a world without Israel. A thick web of ties, combined with solid congressional support, is likely to constrain the deterioration of the relationship. For the first time in memory, it is hard to imagine what the relationship will look like in 10 to 20 years.

Assessment Problems in the US-Israeli relationship that became apparent during the Obama years go beyond a conflict between two political leaders and will prove enduring. Politics are diverging: Israel is settling into a pattern of waging periodic limited wars to deter its enemies, whereas Washington, even with a Trump administration, is likely to remain committed to negotiating agreements that resolve conflicts. Israel can be confident of US support but may be entering a period of strategic drift that creates long-term hazards.

Notes 1 “Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity, Constitute Flagrant Violations of International Law, Security Council Reaffirms,” (New York, NY: United Nations Security Council, 23 December 2016). www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm 2 Excellent accounts of the Obama-Israel connection can be found in: Dennis Ross, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, reprint ed. (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (New York, NY: Random House, 2015); Robert Fisk, Robert Fisk on Israel: The Obama Years (London: Independent Print Limited, 2015); Robert O. Freedman, Israel and the United States: Six Decades of U.S.-Israel Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012); and Ely Claud Simmons, President Obama and Israel: A Seven-Year Compendium (New York, NY: Ely Claud Simmons, 2015). 3 Elizabeth Stephens, “America, Israel and the Six Day War,” History Today 57, no. 6 ( June 2007). www. historytoday.com/elizabeth-stephens/america-israel-and-six-day-war.

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US–Israel relations during Obama 4 Daniel Feith, “The Costs of U.S. Aid to Israel,” Harvard Israel Review (2003). www.hcs.harvard. edu/~hireview/content.php?type=article&issue=spring04/&name=feith 5 U.S. Embassy in Israel, “Fact Sheet U.S. Israel Economic Relationship,” https://il.usembassy.gov/ our-relationship/fact-sheet-u-s-israel-economic-relationship/. 6 Elliott Abrams, “The Trump Administration Settles in on Settlements,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2 April 2017. www.cfr.org/blog/trump-administration-settles-settlements. 7 Uri Savir, “Trump’s Envoy Pushing Two-State Solution as Abbas’ US Visit Nears,” Al-Monitor, 9 April 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/04/israel-palestine-negotiations-peacetrump-deal-making.html. 8 Elliott Abrams, “Obama, Israel & American Jews: The Challenge,” Commentary, 1 June 2010. www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/obama-israel-american-jews-the-challenge/. 9 Adam Shantz, “Obama Hoped to Transform the World: It Transformed Him,” New York Times, 12 January 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/opinion/obama-hoped-to-transform-the-world-ittransformed-him.html. 10 Dana H. Allin and Steven N. Simon, Our Separate Ways: The Struggle for the Future of the U.S. -Israel Alliance (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2016). 11 Daniel Shapiro, “Israelis Cheered for Trump: But They May Miss Obama More Than They Expected,” Washington Post, 19 May 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/19/israelischeered-for-trump-but-they-may-miss-obama-more-than-they-expected/?utm_term=.fa1673066fcc. 12 Amir Tibon and Tal Shalev, “Scenes from a Marriage: The Worst Relationship Between a U.S. President and an Israeli Prime Minister Ever,” The Huffington Press, 11 November 2015. http://highline. huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/bibi-obama/. 13 Caroline B. Glick, “Column One: Fool Me Twice,” The Jerusalem Post, 2 February 2012. www.jpost. com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-One-Fool-me-twice. 14 Matt Duss, “Petraeus Explains the Reality of Middle East ‘Linkage’,” Think Progress, 25 March 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-duss/petraeus-explains-the-rea_b_513784.html. 15 Peter Baker, “For Obama and Netanyahu, a Final Clash After Years of Conflict,” New York Times, 23 December 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-benjamin-netanyahubarack-obama.html. 16 Matthew Lee and Bradley Klapper, “US Takes Tougher Tone on Israeli Settlements in New Report,” Times of Israel, 7 May 2016. https://apnews.com/7c1e8efb6f15450492b54c5c04e19657. 17 Jodi Rudoren and Jeremy Ashkenas, “Netanyahu and the Settlements,” New York Times, 12 March 2015. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/12/world/middleeast/netanyahu-west-bank-settle ments-israel-election.html. 18 Raqul Wootliff, “In Historic First, Israel Legalizes West Bank Outposts with Sweeping New Legislation,” The Times of Israel, 6 February 2017. www.timesofisrael.com/in-historic-first-israel-legalizeswest-bank-outposts-with-sweeping-new-legislation/. 19 Ruth Eglash, “Israel Steps Up Home Demolitions to Punish Palestinian Attackers,” Washington Post, 17 January 2006. www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-steps-up-home-demolitionsto-punish-palestinian-attackers/2016/01/16/7c198910-b4a3–11e5–8abc-d09392edc612_story.html? utm_term=.d681075fa4de. 20 Jamal Dajani, “Deconstructing Netanyahu’s Settlement Myth,” Huffington Post, 2006. www.huffing tonpost.com/jamal-dajani/deconstructing-netanyahus_b_11371564.html. 21 Ben White, “’Just a Few More Apartments’: Netanyahu Dismisses Concerns Over Israeli Settlements,” Middle East Eye, 10 July. www.middleeasteye.net/columns/netanyahu-dismisses-concernsover-israeli-settlements-400286707. 22 Dan Ephron, “The Battle to Capture Territory in the West Bank Ended Quickly: The Battle to Capture Israeli Hearts and Minds Took Much Longer,” Washington Post, 1 June 2017. www.washington post.com/graphics/opinions/israel-settlements/?utm_term=.223eb5137666. 23 Ilan Goldenberg and Brent E. Sasley, “Why Israel’s Settlement Construction Must Be Stopped,” The National Interest, 5 January 2017. http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-israels-settlement-construc tion-must-be-stopped-18958. 24 HagaI El-Ad, “Israel’s Charade of Democracy,” New York Times, 31 May 2015. www.nytimes. com/2015/06/01/opinion/israels-charade-of-democracy.html. 25 “Israel Plans West Bank Settlement Expansion Amid Policy Shifts in Washington,” Chicago Tribune, 24 January 2017. www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-israel-west-bank-settlementexpansion-20170124-story.html.

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Robert E. Looney 26 “U.S. Feels ‘Overwhelming Frustration’ with Israeli Government: Biden,” Reuters, 18 April 2016. www. reuters.com/article/us-usa-israel-biden/u-s-feels-overwhelming-frustration-with-israeli-governmentbiden-idUSKCN0XG09L. 27 Peter Beaumont, “Israel Risks Becoming Apartheid State If Peace Talks Fail, Says John Kerry,” The Guardian, April 2014. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/28/israel-apartheid-state-peace-talksjohn-kerry. 28 Josef Federman, “Netanyahu Tells AP He Is ‘Troubled’ by US Decision,” Seattle Times, 3 June 2014. www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/netanyahu-tells-ap-he-is-troubled-by-us-decision/. 29 Bruce Stokes,“Are American Jews Turning Away from Israel? Recent Polling Shows a Growing Divide,” Foreign Policy, 10 March 2016. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/10/are-american-jews-turningaway-from-israel/. 30 John McLaughlin,“What Ever Happened to the Two-State Solution?” The Daily Dose, 28 August 2016. www.ozy.com/opinion/what-ever-happened-to-the-two-state-solution/71411. 31 Judah Ari Gross, “Support for a Two-State Situation Dropping – Poll,” The Times of Israel, 25 June 2015. www.timesofisrael.com/support-for-a-two-state-solution-dropping-poll/. 32 Ibid. 33 Robert Tait, “Majority of Israeli Cabinet Against a Palestinian State, Minister Says,” The Telegraph, 9 June 2013. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10108714/Majority-ofIsraeli-cabinet-against-a-Palestinian-state-minister-says.html. 34 Fredrik Dahl, “Experts Argue Over Iran Nuclear Bomb Timeline,” Reuters, 7 December 2011. http:// af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE7B620020111207?sp=true. 35 Shashank Joshi, “What Is the Zone of Immunity Iran, Israel and the IAEA’s New Report,” RUSI Commentary, 3 September 2012. https://rusi.org/commentary/what-zone-immunity-iran-israel-andiaeas-new-report. 36 Austin Long, “Can They?” Tablet, 18 November 2011. https://rusi.org/commentary/what-zone immunity-iran-israel-and-iaeas-new-report. 37 “Minister; Hezbollah has Over 200,000 Rockets,” Times of Israel, 8 October 2013. www.timesofisrael. com/minister-hezbollah-has-over-200000-rockets/. 38 Alon Ben-Meir, “The Perils of Nuclear Iran,” 25 February 2014. http://alonben-meir.com/writing/ the-perils-of-nuclear-iran/. 39 Isabel Kershner and David E. Sanger, “Skeptical of Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel Calls for Changes,” New York Times, 6 April 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/world/middleeast/israel-iran-nuclear-deal. html. 40 Daniel Halper, “Netanyahu: ‘This Is a Bad Deal – a Very, Very Bad Deal’,” The Weekly Standard, 8 November 2013. www.weeklystandard.com/netanyahu-this-is-a-bad-deal-a-very-very-bad-deal/ article/766449. 41 Peter Baker and Alan Rappeport, “Key Points from Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress,” New York Times, 3 March 2015. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/03/world/middleeast/netanyahu-congresskey-points.html. 42 David Ignatius, “Why Netanyahu Broke Publicly With Obama Over Iran,” Washington Post, 19 February 2015. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-netanyahu-broke-publicly-with-obama-overiran/2015/02/19/4ea794f6-b885-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html?utm_term=.a19e8ea5053b. 43 Matthew Lee and Julie Pace, “Unwelcome Mat: White House Tries to Counter Netanyahu Visit,” Associated Press, 20 February 2015. https://apnews.com/ff9318d691b24de0b81ae7c0e727be7b/ white-house-mulls-how-counter-netanyahu-iran. 44 M.J. Rosenberg, “AIPAC Spent Millions of Dollars to Defeat the Iran Deal. Instead, It May have Destroyed Itself,” The Nation, 11 September 2015. www.thenation.com/article/aipac-spent-millionsof-dollars-to-defeat-the-iran-deal-instead-it-may-have-destroyed-itself/. 45 “Report: Mossad Broke Rank With Netanyahu, Warned U.S. Against Iran Sanctions,” Haaretz, 22 January 2015. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.638418. 46 Isabel Kershner, “Israeli Strike on Iran Would Be ‘Stupid’ Ex-Spy Chief Says,” New York Times, 8 May 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/world/middleeast/09israel.html. 47 Luke Baker, “Netanyahu on Collision Course with White House over Iran,” Reuters, 19 February 2015. www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-usa-relations/netanyahu-on-collision-course-with-white-houseover-iran-idUSKBN0LN1EC20150219. 48 Nick Thompson, “Seventy-Five Percent of U.S. Foreign Military Financing Goes to Two Countries,” CNN, 11 November 2015. www.cnn.com/2015/11/11/politics/us-foreign-aid-report/index.html.

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US–Israel relations during Obama 49 Michael Wilner,“US Halted Israeli Arms Transfer to Nigeria,” The Jerusalem Post, 26 January 2015. www. jpost.com/Israel-News/Report-US-vetoed-Israeli-sale-of-attack-helicopters-to-Nigeria-388985. 50 Tamara Cofman Wittes, “The Politics of Restoring Egypt’s Military Aid,” The Washington Post, 2 April 2015. www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/04/02/the-politics-ofrestoring-egypts-military-aid/?utm_term=.7fb259462d5d. 51 Hamza Hendawi, “Kept Out of the Obama White House, Egypt’s el-Sissi to Test ‘Chemistry’ With Trump,” Chicago Tribune, 2 April 2017. www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-egypt-elsissi-white-house-visit-20170402-story.html. 52 Alan Dershowitz, “Obama’s Middle East Legacy: Tragic Failure,” The Jerusalem Post, 15 January 2017. www.jpost.com/Opinion/Obamas-Middle-East-legacy-Tragic-failure-478525. 53 “In Phone Call,Netanyahu,Putin Reaffirm Commitment to Mutual Ties,”Times of Israel,22 October 2016. www.timesofisrael.com/in-phone-call-netanyahu-putin-reaffirm-commitment-to-mutual-ties/. 54 Herman Franssen, “Obama and Declining U.S. Dependence on Imported Oil and Gas,” Middle East Institute, 25 November 2014. www.mei.edu/content/article/obama-and-declining-us-dependenceimported-oil-and-gas. 55 Judy Dempsey, “Germany’s Gunboat Diplomacy,” Carnegie Europe, 7 June 2013. http://carnegieeurope. eu/strategiceurope/48383. 56 “Pew: Republicans Love Israel, Democrats Only So-So,” Jewish Press, 15 January 2017. www.jewish press.com/news/breaking-news/pew-republicans-love-israel-democrats-only-so-so/2017/01/15/. 57 Pew Research Center, “Hamas Seen as More to Blame Than Israel for Current Violence,” 28 July 2014. www.people-press.org/files/2014/07/7-28-14-Israel-Hamas-Release.pdf. 58 Ibid. 59 Pew Research Center, “Israel’s Religiously Divided Society Deep Gulfs Among Jews, as Well as Between Jews and Arabs, over Political Values and Religion’s Role in Public Life,” 8 March 2016. www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/. 60 Seth Mandel, “Netanyahu, the Almost-American,” Commentary, 16 August 2016. www.commentary magazine.com/articles/netanyahu-the-almost-american/. 61 Isabel Kershner, “20 Years After Rabin, Israeli Politics Have Shifted,” New York Times, 3 November 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/world/middleeast/20-years-after-rabin-israeli-politics-haveshifted.html. 62 Amos Harel, “Israel’s Walls: Do They Work?” Foreign Affairs, 17 February 2017. www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/israel/2017-02-17/israels-walls.

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11 SAUDI ARABIA AND IRAN Islam and foreign policy in the Middle East Simon Mabon

In early January 2016, Saudi Arabia executed 47 people, including the Shi’a cleric Nimr Al Nimr for his involvement in protests in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom. The executions were condoned by the Council of Senior Clerics, whose head, the Saudi Mufti ‘Abd Al’Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheik, stressed that the sentences were in accordance “to the sharia’a, and there is no doubt for these are the punishments set out in the Koran and they apply to everyone”.1 The executions were framed as essential for national security, amidst allegations that Nimr was an Iranian agent. In neighboring Iran, there was widespread condemnation. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, stressed that the move was “a political error on the part of the Saudi regime. God will not relinquish [avenging] the blood of the innocent. The blood spilled unjustly will rapidly deliver a blow to the politicians and officials of this [Saudi] regime”.2 Khamenei later predicted that Saudi Arabia would experience “divine vengeance” as a consequence. Shortly after, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was set fire to and the Saudi consulate in Mashhad was looted. As a consequence, diplomatic relations between the two states were severed, the latest low point in an increasingly fractious relationship. Historical rivals, the 1979 revolution in Iran added a religious dimension, which became vitriolic given the existential importance of Islam to Riyadh and Tehran. As such, religion began to feature prominently within the political, security, and foreign policies of both states. The construction of the regional security environment provides opportunities for external involvement in the domestic affairs of regional actors and with the increasing tensions between regime and society after the uprisings. Within this, political life became increasingly contested, as many struggled to meet their basic needs within the context of deteriorating and increasingly complex political and security situations. Such conditions provided scope for Riyadh and Tehran to increase their standing across the region by providing support for groups within contested spaces. To this end, the chapter seeks to understand and engage with how the fragmentation of political life – and sovereignty broadly – has provided scope for the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran to intensify and, with it, further escalate tensions across the region. In recent years, the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has become increasingly important in shaping the nature of Middle Eastern politics. Building upon the spread of religious and ethnic identities and pre-existing schisms between regime and society that deepened with the Arab uprisings, Riyadh and Tehran capitalized upon a fragmenting region in an attempt to shape the Middle East in their image. To understand this – and indeed the importance of religion 138

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broadly – we must consider the importance of religion within the fabric of each state, which goes some way in explaining the prominence of religion within foreign policy. Amidst this competition, the nature of regional security calculations would be determined by this rivalry, the consequences of which have spread out into the wider Middle East. The severity of the situation was stressed by President Barack Obama, who noted that The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians – which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen – requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.3 The US had long been seen as a guarantor of regional security for Saudi Arabia – although the presence of external forces in the Gulf was a source of concern for Iran – and as such, Obama’s condemnation was met with a great deal of hostility in Riyadh. In response, Turki al-Faisal, a Saudi prince, publicly stressed that the Kingdom’s 80 years of constant friendship with America to an Iranian leadership that continues to describe America as the biggest enemy, that continues to arm, fund and support sectarian militias in the Arab and Muslim world, that continues to harbor and host Al-Qaeda leaders, that continues to prevent the election of a Lebanese president through Hezbollah, which is identified by your government as a terrorist organization, that continues to kill the Syrian Arab people in league with Bashar Assad?4 Of course, the sensitivity of Middle Eastern politics in the midst of the Arab uprisings played a prominent role in such security concerns, with the struggle between the two states taking on increasing importance in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. Following the protests, the fragmentation of regime-society relations across a number of Middle Eastern states resulted in a wide range of socio-economic and political challenges, all impacting upon human security and the ability to meet basic needs. In these cases, people turned elsewhere to ensure their survival. Such existential issues provided scope for the external penetration of a state, particularly with the existence of shared religious or ethnic bonds that create strong ties between different actors. The severity of the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran meant that such penetration was seen in zero-sum terms through the prism of regional security. To the layperson, at the heart of this rivalry is a religious dimension that pits the most powerful Sunni state against the most powerful Shi’a state to shape the nature of regional politics. In spite of the prominence of religion, one must be careful not to fall back entirely upon religion as the main driving force of the rivalry; indeed, sectarian difference need not necessarily be violent or result in animosity. It can do that, however, when it becomes increasingly politicized and framed in such a way that the other poses an “existential threat” to the survival of the state. We see that Islam plays a prominent role within the fabric of both Saudi Arabia and Iran and, as a consequence, also within foreign policy, yet in both cases, religion is used instrumentally as a means of securing legitimacy for domestic and external audiences. By the very nature of the umma – the worldwide community of Muslims – states that have a prominent Islamic identity have the capacity to speak to people across state borders. Such capacity serves as a means of transcending state borders, the dawla, and speaking to people of the same faith or doctrine in different communities, which is regularly used instrumentally. Of course, there also exists the perception that religion is used as a means of mobilizing particular communities, which is a 139

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prominent feature of regional politics. Perceptions are shaped not only by shared religious ties but also by historical experience, which also requires consideration. Efforts to understand the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran have produced a body of literature that can be separated into three camps. The first suggests that the rivalry is best understood through a balance of power in the Gulf.5 This position suggests that states compete for regional hegemony in a range of different arenas and when state sovereignty fragments, the opportunity to increase power emerges. The second camp6 suggests that religion plays a prominent role in shaping the nature of the rivalry and that proxy conflicts have been drawn along sectarian lines. It boils the rivalry down to an existential struggle about religious difference, neglecting the complexity of identity construction – and change – or the political ramifications of identity politics. The third camp suggests that a more nuanced approach is needed, drawing upon concerns about regime power and legitimacy – externally and internally – with the instrumentalized use of religious difference.7 This chapter offers a genealogical approach to understanding the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, considering the importance of religion within the context of each state’s foreign policy agenda.8 In doing this, the chapter is broken down into five sections: (1) considering the nature of relations between the two prior to the revolution; (2) looking at the first decade of the Islamic republic; (3) considering the scope for rapprochement after Khomeini’s death; (4) looking at the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq; and (5) considering the Middle East after the Arab uprisings. Within each of these sections is a reflection upon the nature of the rivalry, along with the exploration of the role of Islam in shaping actions. Such a breakdown allows for the identification of different periods within the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran, which allows us to acknowledge the importance of a range of different factors in shaping the nature of regional security.

Domestic factors In search of an understanding of the nature of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, one must also consider the role of religion within both states. The preamble to the Iranian Constitution of 1979 notes that The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran advances the cultural, social, political, and economic institutions of Iranian society based on Islamic principles and norms, which represent an honest aspiration of the Islamic Ummah. This aspiration was exemplified by the nature of the great Islamic Revolution of Iran, and by the course of the Muslim people’s struggle, from its beginning until victory, as reflected in the decisive and forceful calls raised by all segments of the populations. Now, at the threshold of this great victory, our nation, with all its beings, seeks its fulfillment.9 Similarly, Article 1 of the Saudi Constitution declares that The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a sovereign Arab Islamic state with Islam as its religion; God’s Book and the Sunnah of His Prophet, God’s prayers and peace be upon him, are its constitution.10 It is hard to ignore the symbolic importance of Islam, reflected in the green on both flags, along with the Shahada on the flag of Saudi Arabia, which stresses the oneness of God and Mohammad’s role as his messenger. It is clear that Islam is built into the fabric of both states, and such prominence positions religion as a major characteristic of regional politics. 140

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If one considers state-building processes in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the role of religion is paramount. For the Al Saud, the centuries-old alliance with the Wahhabist ulemma provides an integral source of legitimacy, allowing a fringe tribe to claim rule over large swathes of the Arabian Peninsula. It is a state run in accordance with the Shari’a, which served as a source of the country’s laws, and although a large number of people may not identify as Wahhabi, the importance of clerics should not be understated.11 Within Saudi Arabia are the two holiest sites in the Muslim world, the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. As a consequence, the Al Saud have derived legitimacy from being the custodians of the two holy places and, in doing so, offering protection to all of those who make hajj. In Iran, whilst religion played a more private role prior to the revolution, in the months after the revolution, faith was positioned front and center within the Islamic Republic. Khomeini’s vision of veleyat-e faqih (The Regency of the Jurist) suggested that in lieu of the 12th Imam, only jurists of a certain status were qualified to rule. This position is a serious diversion from traditional Shi’a thought, which suggests that there should be a clear separation between religion and politics and, as a consequence, deep divisions emerged between clerics following Khomeini in Iran and clerics in Najaf under the tutelage of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. In the Islamic Republic, a system of checks and balances was implemented to ensure that politics was run in accordance with the Shari’a and that Khomeini’s political vision was maintained. Shi’a history played a prominent role within Iran, particularly their construction of a foreign policy agenda. Of particular relevance was the Battle of Karbala, at which Hussein – the grandson of the prophet – was killed. Hussein spoke out against the impropriety of the caliphate at this time, which had accrued vast wealth and behaved in a way that was perceived to be unIslamic. Hussein’s martyrdom, which some suggest was his desired outcome, located ideas of martyrdom, guilt, and sacrifice within the Shi’a experience and Iranian foreign policy.12 With these domestic factors in mind, we turn to competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran and their respective foreign policies.

Rivalry before revolution To understand the characteristics of the contemporary rivalry, let us begin our exploration with a consideration of the rivalry prior to the revolution. In 1929, the Saudi-Iranian Friendship Treaty was signed, following dialogue which included Iranian officials visiting Mecca to witness Wahhabi governance first hand. In the following decades, both states were predominantly concerned with the development with domestic infrastructure projects, paying scant attention to broader regional trends. Whilst there was a legacy of suspicion directed at the “other” across the Gulf, stemming from a long history of Arab-Persian tensions, relations were largely positive. The first serious point of tension emerged from Iranian recognition of the state of Israel, in doing so, positioning Iran on the opposite side of the pan-Arab support for the Palestinian cause. Despite this point of tension, Richard Nixon, then US President, attempted to resolve security concerns in the Persian Gulf by establishing a two-pillar approach, drawing support from both Saudi Arabia and Iran to maintain stability in an increasingly important part of the world.13 Such security calculations were driven by a mutual suspicion – and indeed, fear – of the military capabilities and intentions of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq. Moreover, both were concerned by the legacy of pan-Arab thought, which shaped regional politics during the 1950s and 1960s. Territorial tensions would be a source of friction, particularly over the off-shore boundaries in the Gulf. Respective coastlines varied between 95 to 135 miles away from one another at the northern part of the Gulf, which required an International Court of Justice negotiated accord in 1968.14 Such concerns were bound up in concerns about regional security mechanisms in light 141

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of the British withdrawal from the Gulf. During this time, Iranian influence across the Middle East had increased as a consequence of Tehran’s membership in a number of international institutions, along with maintaining a position of influence as an ally of the US. At this time, Gulf security was shaped by the presence of Western actors, particularly the British. With the decision to withdraw “East of Suez”, a number of questions emerged, particularly with regard to the nature of regional security. The smaller Gulf States would also be affected, with many gaining independence at this time. In Bahrain, independence would raise questions about identity, amidst long-standing suggestions that Bahrain was the “14th province of Iran”. A UN-organized plebiscite across the island returned the motion that Bahrainis wished to be independent, yet Iranian claims to Bahrain continued.15

The impact of revolution Unsurprisingly, revolutionary action in Iran dramatically altered regional security calculations across the Persian Gulf and Middle East. The events of 1978 and 1979, which forced the Shah to abdicate, resulted in the establishment of veleyat-e faqih, the Regency of the Jurist under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini’s vision was antimonarchical and anti-colonial, immediately pitting Iran against a number of states across the region.16 The revolution brought Islamic considerations to the forefront of the rivalry, raising existential questions about regime security and influence across both the Middle East and wider umma. In the formative stages of the Islamic Republic, the importance of Islam was abundantly clear to the new regime in Tehran, yet also to Riyadh, where the Al Saud was reliant upon its long-standing alliance with Wahhabi clerics to provide legitimacy. Given this, a spiral of rhetoric emerged that sought to demonstrate the Islamic credentials of each state. Things began positively, with King Khalid welcoming the establishment of an Islamic Republic: It gives me great pleasure that the new republic is based on Islamic principles which are a powerful bulwark for Islam and Muslim peoples who aspire to prosperity, dignity, and well-being. I pray the Almighty to guide you to the forefront of those who strive for the upholding of Islam and Muslims, and I wish the Iranian people progress, prosperity, and stability.17 In turn, Khomeini also sought to stress cohesion across the Muslim world, transcending language and sectarian allegiance: There is no difference between Muslims who speak different languages, for instance the Arabs and the Persians. It is very probable that such problems have been created by those who do not wish the Muslim countries to be united. . . . They create the issues of nationalism, of pan-Iranianism, pan-Turkism, and such isms, which are contrary to Islamic doctrines. Their plan is to destroy Islam and Islamic philosophy.18 Of course, when relations soured, this rhetoric became increasingly vitriolic and divisive. Khomeini’s vision was explicitly stated: We will export our experiences to the whole world and present the outcome of our struggles against tyrants to those who are struggling along the path of God, without expecting the slightest reward. The result of this exportation will certainly result in 142

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the blooming of the buds of victory and independence and in the implementation of Islamic teachings among the enslaved Nations.19 Saudi Arabia was not immune to this criticism; after all, Khomeini’s vision was explicitly antimonarchical. Given this, coupled with Saudi Arabia’s position of leadership within the Muslim world, it would be hardly surprising to see Khomeini attacking the Al Saud: If we wanted to prove to the world that the Saudi Government, these vile and ungodly Saudis, are like daggers that have always pierced the heart of the Moslems from the back, we would not have been able to do it as well as has been demonstrated by these inept and spineless leaders of the Saudi Government.20 King Fahd, having succeeded King Khalid, referred to the new regime in Iran as ‘hypocrites and pretenders who are using Islam to undermine and destabilise other countries’.21 Whilst sovereign borders were transgressed, the argument put forward suggested that sovereignty was found in God and, as such, both states were dealing with the umma, the global community of Muslims, rather than the Westphalian notion of a nation-state. This point of tension would be a prominent feature across the international relations of Middle Eastern states, particularly amongst those who derived a great deal of legitimacy from Islam. The revolution brought a religious dimension to the rivalry that had previously been shaped by geopolitical considerations about the nature of regional security. Religious rituals would also take on a political dimension. The hajj of 1987 would be one such site of political contestation, when Shi’a Muslims on hajj clashed with Saudi security forces, resulting in the deaths of at least 400 pilgrims, 200 of whom were Iranian. It was later argued that Iranian agents were involved in creating discontent with political motivations. A year later, Iran boycotted the hajj. A year later, the onset of the Iran-Iraq War resulted in a large-scale loss of life, which also drew in regional and international actors, largely on the side of Iraq, who were concerned at the potential for Khomeini’s Islamic vision to spread. While neither side was fully prepared for war, it was expected by many in Iran that the Shi’a of Iraq – long marginalized by the Ba’ath regimes – would join their sectarian kin from Iran, yet this view was misguided and underestimated the importance of Iraqi and Arab nationalism. In 1981, the Gulf Co-Operation Council was established, predominantly in response to security concerns emanating from the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. During the war, a number of incidents threatened to escalate tensions between Riyadh and Tehran, notably an Iranian attack of a Saudi oil tanker and a Saudi attack of an Iranian jet.22 Although threatening to escalate and draw in other Gulf States, the conflict remained between Iran and Iraq, ending in 1988. One of the main reasons for the onset of conflict was Khomeini’s desire to spread his ideological vision across the Middle East, particularly to those with a Shi’a minority such as Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States, and Lebanon, and those with a disenfranchised Shi’a majority such as Bahrain and Iraq. Of those states, two are of paramount importance to our discussion of the immediate aftermath of the revolution, as a consequence of direct Iranian involvement in the domestic affairs of other states. In Lebanon, members of the newly formed Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps – (IRGC) the elite wing of the Iranian military, answerable only to the Supreme Leader – provided logistical and financial support to the Shi’a of Lebanon, working with them towards the establishment of Hizballah, the Party of God.23 The establishment of Hizballah provided Iran with a powerful actor on Mediterranean and sharing a border with Israel. The ideology of veleyat-e 143

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faqih found traction amongst the downtrodden of Lebanon, where Shi’a communities were marginalized politically, economically, and socially.24 In the midst of a 15-year-long civil war, Hizballah provided support to the marginalized Shi’a communities and, over time, the group’s resistance ideology would derive a great deal of popular support. Alongside Hizballah, Iran would strengthen relations with neighboring Syria, which also played a prominent role in Lebanon, supporting the Party of God. This alliance between Iran, Syria, and Hizballah would become known as the Axis of Resistance,25 challenging the regional order. In Bahrain, viewed by many to be the epicenter of sectarian conflict as a consequence of its location in the Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Kingdom’s demographic constitution left it rife for unrest. Decades of marginalization of Shi’a communities provided fertile ground for unrest26 and, once again, with the support of the IRGC, a Shi’a group – the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (IFLB) – attempted to overthrow the Al Khalifa regime.27 Although the coup was thwarted before it could begin, the legacy of Iranian involvement in Bahraini politics created suspicion that Iran was behind any regional unrest. Saudi fears were mitigated by the construction of the King Fahd causeway; although ostensibly designed to improve economic links between the two Gulf kingdoms, the causeway served as a means to provide rapid military assistance to the Al Khalifa regime if required.28 These two sets of events meant that whenever there was unrest amongst Shi’a groups, the belief that Iran was behind the unrest was paramount. Such claims, although understandable, were not always accurate. Indeed, the legacy of the revolution can also be felt in a number of different ways, serving to inspire Shi’a groups across the region, without necessarily having causal links, as was the case with unrest in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Regardless, the perception that Iran was behind unrest only served to fuel tensions between the Sunni Arab states and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A burgeoning rapprochement? At the end of the devastating Iran-Iraq War, a generation of Iranians lost their lives, and the societal and economic consequences were severe, with both economies hit dramatically. Such consequences fed into Iranian strategic calculations at this time. Recognizing the need to develop more favorable relations with neighbors and the international community, and also with a lingering fear of Iraqi aspirations, Iran sided with Kuwait and tacitly supported the international community’s efforts to liberate Kuwait. The amelioration of relations across the Gulf would be a key part of the presidencies of Rafsanjani and Khatami over the coming decade. In 1990, a large earthquake hit Iran, killing 30,000 people, and in response, Saudi Arabia sent aid to help.29 Diplomatic ties between the two were later restored as a consequence of this act. In 1997, then Crown Prince Abdullah attended the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Tehran, in doing so becoming the most senior Saudi official to visit since the revolution. Two years later, President Khatami visited Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, in the first visit by an Iranian leader since the revolution. With Khomeini’s death in 1989, space for rapprochement between the two states opened up. The presidency of Hoshemi Rafsanjani was one such opportunity, as the transition to Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader – and Khamenei’s legitimacy deficit compared to Khomeini – left space for Rafsanjani to take a greater role in the day-to-day politics of Iran. Under Rafsanjani, the two were able to restore diplomatic relations, thawing a frosty relationship in part by visits of prominent state officials to both countries.30 In 1999, President Khatami visited Riyadh, becoming the first Iranian President to do so since the revolution. The same year, Abdullah attended a meeting of the OIC in Tehran, becoming 144

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the first high-ranking Saudi official to visit Iran since the revolution. A series of bilateral deals between Riyadh and Tehran were signed, whilst increasing security cooperation across the Gulf aided the amelioration process. This led to a period of rapprochement within Saudi-Iranian relations, although the two states were still characterized by religious difference. One reason for this, aside from the trust that had been built in the aftermath of the earthquake, was the continued presence of Iraq as a prominent player within regional security calculations, where Tehran and Riyadh shared fear of a belligerent Iraqi foreign policy under Saddam Hussein. Despite this, a key historical dimension of the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran has been over contrasting views of the role of external actors in maintaining regional security. Iran saw itself as uniquely qualified to ensure regional security, given its demographics and long history. In contrast, Saudi Arabia has been reliant upon the US since the Gulf War. This issue would feature prominently in the years to come, particularly with an increased US presence in the Gulf in the next decade.

The “War on Terror” In the early part of the twenty-first century, relations between Riyadh and Tehran appeared cordial. The political rapprochement of the previous decade was supported by security cooperation, which resulted in the establishment of a security pact on terrorism and drug trafficking. Yet the 9/11 attacks would dramatically alter the construction of regional security across the Middle East. As previously noted, regional security in the Gulf had long been shaped by the interaction of three major powers: Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Any change to the ability of one state to shape regional security would have a serious impact upon the ability of the other two states. Thus, in 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein would have a serious impact upon Gulf security, creating a bipolar system that would have ramifications across the Middle East. The 2003 war was a prominent part of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, the ideological response to the 9/11 attacks, which saw the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the toppling of the Ba’athist regime 18 months later. In the early stages of the War on Terror, there was a largely positive relationship between Washington and Tehran, with the latter permitting US planes to use Iranian airspace on missions to Afghanistan. The 2002 State of the Union speech would end any burgeoning rapprochement, however, as Iran was posited as being a member of an “Axis of Evil”,31 also comprising North Korea and Iraq. From this point, relations between Washington and Tehran became increasingly fraught, along with relations between Riyadh and Tehran. The US-led invasion of Iraq under the banner of Operation Iraqi Freedom was hugely unpopular within the international community but within the Muslim world in particular. Despite this, few were sad to see Saddam removed from power. This action created space within the Persian Gulf regional security complex for Iran and Saudi Arabia to compete for influence. The Iraqi rear guard action was short lived, resulting in the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and, ultimately, the transition to Iraq’s first free elections. Under the CPA, the decision was taken to eviscerate the Ba’ath party infrastructure in an attempt to prevent the party from regaining control of Iraq, and all party members across the state were fired from jobs in the police, army, and bureaucratic institutions.32 Little did the CPA realize the impact that such a move would have, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people being made redundant and struggling to provide for their families. Iranian involvement in Iraq’s internal politics was multifarious, stemming in part from shared religious ties, a number of Iraqi dissidents who had sought safe haven in Iran returning to frontline politics, and the presence of a number of powerful militias who received support from Tehran.33 145

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Rising sectarian violence, in part as a consequence of the presence and competing agendas of al Qaeda members, Shi’a militias, and coalition forces, was rife yet the regime in Baghdad appeared either unable or unwilling to prevent it. Coupled with concerns about ensuring that basic needs were met, these would be key factors in explaining why a number of Sunni tribes, particularly from the Anbar province, would turn to groups like Da’ish.34 Such conditions, coupled with the presence of American forces within the region, in Iraq, Bahrain, and Afghanistan, along with a number of other bases, would pose serious issues to a number of actors across the region, particularly those of the belief that regional security should be ensured by those states within the region. Although Iranian foreign policy became more progressive under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, particularly as Khatami sought to reach out to global powers, this would not last. The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the bombastic former mayor of Tehran, as president of Iran in 2005, however, would be a turning point in the construction of regional relations. Ahmadinejad fused a Shi’a outlook with a strong sense of Persian nationalism, which became an aggressive part of his foreign policy. Despite this bombastic outlook, Ahmadinejad traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, when GCC states were reaching out to Iran, building on increasingly positive relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Indeed, Ahmadinejad became both the first Iranian president to attend a meeting of the GCC and also to make hajj whilst serving as president. Despite this burgeoning rapprochement, a number of factors would prevent a permanent thawing in relations, predominantly coalescing around security, albeit defined broadly. Such calculations revolve around national interest and maintaining territorial integrity, with a nod towards the Westphalian notion of non-interference within the domestic affairs of other states. Yet it also involves an understanding of security that sees Islamic legitimacy – and its erosion – as an existential threat to regime survival.35 Saudi efforts to securitize the Iranian threat date back to the revolution in Iran, yet the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would cause consternation amongst many in Riyadh. On a number of occasions, Saudi officials spoke to their US counterparts, documenting the threat posed by Iran. In 2006, Prince Nayif bin Abdulaziz called for the US not to “leave Iraq until its sovereignty has been resorted, otherwise it will be vulnerable to the Iranians”.36 Two years later, in conversation between the Charge and Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Ambassador to the US, Al Jubeir vocalized the severity with which key Saudi officials were viewing the Iranian threat. Al Jubeir recalled the King’s frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. ‘He told you to cut off the head of the snake,’ he recalled to the Charge, adding that working with the US to roll back Iranian influence in Iraq is a strategic priority for the King and his government.37 In 2009, John Brennan, the White House Counter Terrorism advisor, met King Abdullah, who expressed his concerns about the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki” The King said he had ‘no confidence whatsoever in (Iraqi PM) Maliki, and the Ambassador (Fraker) is well aware of my views’. . . . For this reason, the King said, Maliki had no credibility. ‘I don’t trust this man,’ the King stated. ‘He’s an Iranian agent.’ . . . Maliki has ‘opened the door for Iranian influence in Iraq’ since taking power, the King said.38 Perception at Iranian involvement in the manipulation of domestic affairs can be seen across the region, which facilitated this securitization process: in Lebanon, with the establishment of 146

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Hizballah, in Gaza through its support for Hamas, in Iraq with support for the Supreme Council of the Islamic Republic in Iraq, in Bahrain with support for the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, in Syria with support for Assad, in Yemen with support for the Houthis, and in other states with Shi’a unrest. After the revolution in Iran, rhetoric from Khomeini, coupled with article 3.16 of the Iranian Constitution, set out an explicitly proselytizing agenda, grounded in Shi’a thought. In the following years, the fragmentation of regime-society relations across the Middle East and marginalization of Shi’a communities across the region would provide fertile ground for Iran to exploit, and also for perceptions of Iranian involvement to develop. In the years following the invasion of Iraq, the Axis of Resistance39 would gain power and influence across the Middle East, stemming, in part, from the rising popularity of a number of key players, namely Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah (the leader of Hizballah, the Lebanese Party of God). The rising influence of Hizballah in particular would pose a serious problem for Saudi Arabia in light of the 2006 war between the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and the Party of God.40 Despite being an explicitly Shi’a actor in its raison d’etre, the Al Saud provided financial support for the rebuilding of Dahiya, the southern part of Beirut that was destroyed by the IDF. Iran provided financial assistance in the region of $120 million whilst Saudi Arabia provided $1.2 billion for the rebuilding efforts.41 At this point, it becomes apparent that despite religious difference, the quest for legitimacy and desire to be seen to do the right thing meant that Riyadh had to circumvent the concerns of Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia to ensure that an external position of power and influence was maintained, much to the chagrin of the Wahhabi clerics.

The Arab uprisings and the fragmentation of regional order In late 2010, protests spread across the Middle East, emanating from serious schisms between regimes and societies. These tensions resulted in the fragmentation of state sovereignty in a number of states, which provided new arenas for proxy competition between Riyadh and Tehran. Stemming from increased concerns about the nature of political organization and stagnating economies that prevented people from achieving their goals, a growing dissatisfaction resulted in people taking to the streets to demonstrate their frustration. The self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazzizi would be the catalyst for demonstrations across the region, leading to the toppling of political elites in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, whilst regimes in Bahrain and Syria were challenged, to varying degrees.42 The failure of political structures, both formal and informal, left people increasingly marginalized, which required people to turn elsewhere to meet their basic needs. Within this context, both Riyadh and Tehran sought to exploit opportunity structures to strengthen the self and weaken the other, amidst a zero-sum game for the heart of the Middle East. Ultimately, the fracturing of political organization and the nature of state-society relations after the uprisings provided scope for the two to become involved in a number of proxy conflicts, increasingly along sectarian lines. In Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, and Yemen, the two supported opposing sides in conflicts, adding to a long-standing competition in Lebanon. This behavior – and the rivalry broadly – should not be viewed purely as a sectarian conflict; rather, as we have seen, sectarian dynamics have been used as a fig leaf for national interest. As previously noted, Article 3.16 of the Iranian Constitution articulates that “the organization of the nation’s foreign policy based on Islamic criteria, fraternal commitment to all Muslims, and unrestrained support for the impoverished people of the world”. Within the context of the fragmentation of states and the failure of political elites to ensure the protection of people across the Middle East, the Iranian Constitution explicitly called upon the state to protect those 147

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marginalized. Of course, Iranian foreign policy in the years following the revolution created the perception that Tehran was behind unrest across the region, particularly amongst those states with Shi’a minorities. The narrative that Iran was behind unrest in Bahrain and Yemen was compelling to many and, with the religious construction of the Middle East, the spread of Shi’a groups would leave a number of states open to (the perception of ) external penetration. For Ayatollah Khamenei, the uprisings were framed as an extension of the Islamic revolution of 1979,43 where once again, Iran attempted to position itself at the vanguard of regional change. Whilst regimes sought to ensure their survival by stressing that the events were a consequence of sectarian schisms that were manipulated by external powers, this denies the agency of protest groups, along with rejecting the socio-economic grievances that led into people taking to the streets. The protests resulted in regimes referring to a range of strategies to ensure their survival, including the creation of sectarian master narratives as a mechanism of control. Such efforts largely distorted legitimate grievances and divided protest groups along sectarian grounds and, with it, creating a climate of fear and suspicion, which often turned to violence. Of course, sectarian difference need not necessarily be violent, but the existence of sectarian networks, albeit with different types of links among actors in the network, provides an easy opportunity through which one can spread messages and mobilize. The fear of the mobilization of a Shi’a network led to King Abdullah of Jordan referring to a “Shi’a Crescent”, mapping an arc of areas with Shi’a Muslims from Iran through the Middle East to Lebanon. Despite failing to engage with differences within Shi’a thought, particularly over the role of clerics within politics, such concerns have shaped the perceptions of many Sunni states, particularly Saudi Arabia. With the onset of the Arab uprisings, many regimes sought to frame the protest movements as a consequence of Iranian manipulation and interference, drawing upon the Islamic Republic’s history and foreign policy behavior. This strategy involved framing unrest amongst Shi’a populations as a consequence of Tehran’s “propensity for mischief ”,44 creating divisions within domestic populations, whilst also securing regional support from powerful Sunni states. In the climate of uncertainty and instability, the securitization of protest movements would solidify a Saudi-led conservative bloc, who were vehemently anti-Iranian and, as time went on, anti-Islamist. The competition would spill into a range of institutional arenas, including the OIC, which became the site for posturing – and contesting – legitimacy. The OIC would take on an increasingly political dimension, when in 2016 the organization denounced “Iran’s interference in the internal affairs of the States of the region and other Member States (including Bahrain, Yemen and Syria and Somalia) and its continued support for terrorism”. 45 The need to maintain leadership over the Islamic world would be of paramount importance in times of chaos. Independent of the uprisings were negotiations designed to end Iran’s nuclear program and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons across the Middle East. Much to the chagrin of Israel and Saudi Arabia, the successful agreement between P5 + 1 and Iran would result in the lifting of economic sanctions that had decimated the Iranian economy. Around this time, the price of oil dropped from $110 to $30 per barrel in 2015 stemming, in part, from Riyadh increasing supply to maintain the lower price. While the Saudi economy was also hit hard, the thinking was that their economy could withstand such pressures, whereas the Iranian economy could not. Driving this action was the concern that an empowered Iran would increase its sponsorship of its violent proxy groups in particular, Hizballah in Lebanon, and the various militias in Iraq. Such increased sponsorship would have the capacity to empower these groups and to destabilize their local environments. Moreover, as regional security was increasingly seen in zero-sum terms, influential Iranian proxies would coincide with the reduction in Saudi influence. 148

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Such sentiment – and indeed, manifest suspicion – about Iranian aspirations would be reflective of geopolitical shifts across the region. Within the context of what appeared to be an existential struggle for the Middle East, lines between a Saudi-led alliance of Sunni states (and Israel) and what was termed “the Resistance Bloc”, comprising Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas, were drawn. Across a fragmenting region, such support to the “marginalized” would be appealing. As sectarian networks were mobilized, the importance of religion became increasingly apparent, and the failure to adhere to one’s responsibilities to the Muslim world would be seriously damaging to claims to legitimacy. In 2015, the hajj was the site of thousands of deaths when a crane fell on pilgrims. The failure to prevent such events from happening was an opportunity to criticize the Al Saud for failing in their duty to protect Muslims making hajj, whilst also attempting to erode the legitimacy of Saudi Arabia. In a meeting with the families of the victims, Ayatollah Khamenei stated how The incompetence of the Saudis and the insecurity imposed by them against the Hajj pilgrims to the House of God indeed demonstrated that this government is not qualified to manage the Two Holy Mosques and this reality must be spread in the Muslim world and be understood.46 Whilst a number of Iranians died on hajj, the event was used for political – and indeed, geopolitical – ends, much like in 1987, to once again demonstrate Iran’s position at the vanguard of the Islamic world. Such concerns about hegemony and legitimacy within the Muslim world continued to play an important role in defining the nature of Saudi-Iranian relations. In attempting to facilitate this, both Saudi Arabia and Iran have provided financial support to clerics from across the world, hosting them for training and providing economic assistance in support of their vision of Islam. Of course, efforts to demonstrate vitality and legitimacy are also coupled with desires to depict the weaknesses of the religious establishment in the other. Take, for instance, the following remarks from Iranian officials speaking about the spread of Wahhabist ideology: Wahhabism is a tool for the enemies, and Muslims should stay away from the heretical Wahhabism. . . . The disagreements and conflicts among Muslims have today risen to an unprecedented level. In Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, and Bahrain . . . the heretical Wahhabism is the chief cause of conflict. For hundreds of years, Shi’ites, Sunnis, Alawites, and Christians lived together in Syria, but when they [i.e., Wahhabi elements] entered [the arena] – look at the wars and bloodshed that began. Several Arab countries have become tools for the U.S. and Israel.47 Additionally, others presented the view that “The greatest danger threatening Islam today is the existence of takfiris, since with their fatwas they proclaim Shi’ites to be inferior to [even] the Jews and Christians, and strive for Muslim infighting”.48 In return, Saudi officials referred to the statements of the Iranian regime expose its true [character], as expressed by [its] support for terror, and continue the policy of undermining the security and stability of the region’s countries. . . . By defending the actions of terrorists and justifying them, the Iranian regime becomes a partner to their crimes, and it bears full responsibility for its policy of incitement and escalation.49 149

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Such comments would also be presented in Western news outlets, as Adel Al Jubeir purported Iran as responsible for widespread regional unrest, with Tehran attempting to “obscure its dangerous sectarian and expansionist policies, as well as its support for terrorism, by leveling unsubstantiated charges against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”.50 Jubeir also suggested that Iran was “the single-most-belligerent-actor in the region, and its actions display both a commitment to regional hegemony and a deeply held view that conciliatory gestures signal weakness either on Iran’s part or on the part of its adversaries”.51 Once again, after the veneer of sectarianism is removed, we see how political and security considerations feature prominently within the calculations of both states.

Conclusion The role of Islam as a means of deepening divisions between Saudi Arabia and Iran has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Prior to the revolution, despite religious differences, the two were able to work together on a range of issues affecting them. Even after the revolution, it is possible to identify periods of rapprochement where relations between the two appear far more favorable than at other times. Yet, when sectarian differences become utilized for political ends and, perhaps more importantly, when this sectarian difference is securitized for geopolitical ends, the divisions between the two become entrenched. When such positions emerge, it is important to look beyond what appears to be the driving force of violent difference, to consider structural factors both internally and externally, which provide scope for the possibility of action. Such action occurs in a range of different guises, from direct military action to support for proxy actors, to competition attempting to ensure legitimacy and primacy within the Islamic world. It is undeniable that religion has a role to play, but structural factors are equally important. The possibility of improving a position within the Persian Gulf or wider Middle East, or an opportunity to solidify the regime’s domestic position, is perhaps a more important factor, seemingly whatever the cost. What remains clear is that to understand the nature of the rivalry – and ultimately for there to be de-escalation – we must recognize the complexity of the issues and their regional ramifications. By acknowledging the importance of myriad factors – local, regional, and ­international – we are better placed to understand how such factors interact across policy decisions and religious beliefs. By accepting this complexity, and with it the idea that Islam plays a significant yet not sole role in the foreign policy of behavior, we are better placed to understand the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Notes 1 “Unprecedented Tension Between Saudi Arabia, Iran Following Execution Of Shi’ite Cleric Nimr Al-Nimr,” Memri, 4 January 2016. www.memri.org/reports/unprecedented-tension-between-saudiarabia-iran-following-execution-shiite-cleric-nimr-al. 2 “Iran Furious over Saudi Arabia’s Execution Of Shi’ite Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr,” Memri, 4 January 2016. www.memri.org/reports/iran-furious-over-saudi-arabias-execution-shiite-sheikh-nimr-al-nimr. 3 Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/#5. 4 Turki Al-Faisal, “Mr. Obama, We Are Not ‘free riders’,” 14 March 2016. www.arabnews.com/col umns/news/894826, accessed 15 February 2016. 5 Such as: Henner Furtig, Iran’s Rivalry with Saudi Arabia Between the Gulf Wars (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2006); Chubin Shahram and Charles Tripp, Iran-Saudi Arabia Relations and Regional Order (London: Oxford University Press for IISS, 1996), Banafsheh Keynoush, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Friends or Foes?

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Saudi Arabia and Iran (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Robert Mason, Foreign Policy in Iran and Saudi Arabia: Economics and Diplomacy in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). 6 Such as Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). 7 Simon Mabon, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Soft Power Rivalry in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013) and Lawrence Rubin, Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics (Stanford: Stanford Security Studies, 2014). 8 It should be noted that the focus of this piece is on the role of religion in the manifestation of foreign policy, not the role of religion within policy-making processes. 9 Iranian Constitution. www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iran_1989.pdf?lang=en. 10 Saudi Constitution. www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Saudi_Arabia_2013.pdf?lang=en. 11 See: David D. Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005) and Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (New York, NY: Islamic Publications International, 2002), Joseph Kostiner, “On Instruments and Their Designers: The Ikhwan of Najd and the Emergence of the Saudi State,” Middle East Studies 21, no. 3 (1985): 298–323, Joseph Kostiner, “State, Islam and Opposition in Saudi Arabia, The Post-Desert Storm Phase,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 1, no. 2 (1997). 12 Edith Szanto, “Beyond the Karbala Paradigm: Rethinking Revolution and Redemption in Twelver Shi’a Mourning Rituals,” Journal of Shi’a Islamic Studies 6, no. 1 (2013). 13 Fred Halliday, Nation and Religion in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2000), 118. 14 Richard Young, “Equitable Solutions for Offshore Boundaries: The 1968 Saudi-Iran Agreement,” The American Journal of International Law 64, no. 1 (1970). 15 Roham Alvandi, “Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and the Bahrain Question, 1968–1970,” British Journal of Middle East Studies 37 no. 2 (2010). 16 Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution. Writing and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Trans. and annotated by Hamid Algar (Berkely: Mizan Press, 1981). 17 Rubin, Islam in the Balance, 52. 18 Ibid., 2. 19 Ibid., 7. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Jacob Goldberg, “The Saudi Arabian Kingdom,” in Itovar Rabinovich and Haim Shaked, eds. Middle East Contemporary Survey Volume XI: 1987 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 589. 22 Chubin and Charles, Iran-Saudi Arabia Relations and Regional Order. 23 See: Augustus R. Norton, Hezbollah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), Abbas William Samii, “A Stable Structure on Shifting Sands: Assessing the Hizballah-Iran-Syria Relationship,” Middle East Journal 62, no. 1 (2008): 32–53 and James Worrall, Simon Mabon et al., Hezollah: From Islamic Resistance to Government (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016). 24 Augustus R. Norton, Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987). 25 Rola El-Husseini, “Hezbollah and the Axis of Refusal: Hamas, Iran and Syria,” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 5 (2010). 26 Sophia Pandya, “Women’s Shi’i Ma’atim in Bahrain,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6, no. 2 (2010) and Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27 Hasan Alhasan, “The Role of Iran in the Failed Coup of 1981: The IFLB in Bahrain,” Middle East Journal 65, no. 4 (2011): 603–617. 28 Simon Mabon, “The Battle for Bahrain,” Middle East Policy 19, no. 2 (2012): 84–97. 29 See: “Iran Debates Accepting Quake Relief Aid From Enemies,” New York Times, 27 June 1991. www. nytimes.com/1990/06/27/world/iran-debates-accepting-quake-relief-from-enemies.html. 3 0 Christian Marschall, Iran’s Persian Gulf Policy: From Khomeini to Khatami (London: Routledge, 2003). 31 Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. The Foreign Policies of Middle East States (London: Lynne Reiner, 2002), 285. 3 2 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 33 Ibid and Adeed Dawisha, Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) 34 See: Simon Mabon and Stephen Royle, The Origins of ISIS (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 3 5 Mabon, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

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Simon Mabon 36 06RIYADH9175_aSAUDI MOI HEAD SAYS IF U.S. LEAVES IRAQ, SAUDI ARABIA WILL STAND WITH SUNNIS (26.12.06). https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06RIYADH9175_a.html. 37 08RIYADH649_a SAUDI KING ABDULLAH AND SENIOR PRINCES ON SAUDI POLICY TOWARDS IRAQ (20.04.08). https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08RIYADH649_a.html. 38 09RIYADH447_aCOUNTERTERRORISM ADVISER BRENNAN’S MEETING WITH SAUDI KING ABDULLAH (22.03.14). https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09RIYADH447_a.html. 39 See: Shaul Shai, The Axis of Evil: Iran, Hizballah, and the Palestinian Terror (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books, 2005). 40 Mabon, Saudi Arabia and Iran. 41 Frederick Wehrey et al., Saudi-Iranian Relations Since the Fall of Saddam: Rivalry, Cooperation, and Implications for U.S. Policy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), 81–82. 42 Marc Lynch, The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (New York, NY: Public­ Affairs, 2016). 43 “Khamenei hails ‘Islamic’ Uprisings,” Al Jazeera, 4 February 2011. www.aljazeera.com/news/middle east/2011/02/201124101233510493.html. 44 Mabon, Battle For Bahrain. 45 “Final Communiqué of The Extraordinary Meeting of The Council of Foreign Ministers of The Organization of Islamic Cooperation on Aggressions on The Embassy of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Tehran and Its Consulate General In Mashhad,” Ogranisation of Islamic Cooperation, 22 January 2016. www.oic-oci.org/oicv2/topic/?t_id=10837&t_ref=4262&lan=en, accessed 22 January 2016. 46 “Saudis Not Competent to Run Islam’s Holy Mosques,” The Office of the Supreme Leader, 7 September 2016. www.leader.ir/en/content/16203/The-Leader’s-meeting-with-families-of-Mina-andGrand-Mosque-tragedies-in-Saudi-Arabia. 47 “Iran Calls for Violent Shi’ite Reaction Against Saudi Arabia,” MEMRI, 12 February 2014. www. memri.org/reports/iran-calls-violent-shiite-reaction-against-saudi-arabia. 48 Ibid. 49 Memri, 4 January 2016. 50 Adel Bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, “Can Iran Change?” The New York Times, 19 January 2016. www.nytimes. com/2016/01/19/opinion/saudi-arabia-can-iran-change.html?_r=2, accessed 20 January 2016. 51 Ibid.

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12 THE ARAB SPRING AND RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY TOWARD THE MIDDLE EAST Mark N. Katz

As Russian President Vladimir Putin has often stated, he saw the Arab Spring as being an extension of the “color revolutions”, such as those that led to the downfall of authoritarian regimes in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004). He saw these color revolutions as caused not by popular protests aimed at replacing authoritarian regimes with democracy but by American exploitation or even instigation of popular protests in order to replace regimes that cooperate with Moscow with ones allied to Washington. He and other top Russian officials have declared that the ultimate aim of what they see as these American-inspired color revolution efforts, including the Arab Spring, is to replace the Putin regime in Russia with a “democratic” one allied to the US. America and some of its allies providing the military support which enabled Libyan opposition forces not only to resist the efforts of Moscow’s long-time partner, Qaddafi, to defeat them but also to overthrow his regime and even kill him fed into Putin’s view that the Arab Spring was part of America’s anti-Russian color revolution campaign. Furthermore, this belief informed Putin’s determination not to let something similar happen in Syria, where America and many of its allies were calling for another long-time Russian partner, Assad, to step down, and were even supporting Syrian opposition forces seeking the overthrow of his regime. Putin not only provided Assad with weapons to fight against his opponents from the outset of the Arab Spring in 2011, but he even sent Russian military forces to Syria in 2015 to prop up the weakened Assad regime and help it regain some important territory that had previously been lost to its opponents.1 Countering what Moscow sees as the harmful color revolutionary nature of the Arab Spring has become a major aim of Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East, but it is not the only one. Ever since he first came to power at the turn of the century, Putin has sought to restore Moscow’s influence in this region, which had declined sharply when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War. The way Putin sought to do this was to build good relations between Moscow, on the one hand, and all governments and many opposition movements in the Middle East, on the other. Putin had made much progress with this foreign policy approach by the beginning of 2011. The initial stage of the Arab Spring, though, threatened to set back Putin’s efforts to restore Russian influence in the Middle East and even threatened (according to some in Moscow) Russia itself. But with the return of Putin to the presidency in 2012, as well as the way in which the Arab Spring evolved after its initial stage leading to the downfall of four long-time authoritarian rulers, Moscow was not only able to protect its foreign policy aims in the Middle East but to advance them. 153

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Moscow accomplished this through policies aimed both at countering the color revolutionary aspect of the Arab Spring as well as at attempting to work with existing governments and even opposition forces simultaneously. Yet despite the success of this approach so far, there has been an inherent contradiction in it: while the effort to counter the color revolutionary nature of the Arab Spring has involved Moscow in defending the authoritarian status quo against the forces of change, the effort to work with existing governments and opposition movements has involved Moscow in accommodating the forces seeking change. And while the defense of the authoritarian status quo aspect of Putin’s Middle East policy since the outbreak of the Arab Spring has been both prominent and visible (especially in Syria), the effort to accommodate the forces seeking change has also been an important component of it (even in Syria). This chapter will explore the dual nature of Moscow’s Middle East policy since the outbreak of the Arab Spring. I will begin with a brief review of the Soviet approach to the Middle East and a discussion of how Putin’s approach differed from it before the outbreak of the Arab Spring. I will then describe how Moscow at first attempted mainly to accommodate the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring but then turned against them over the course of 2011. After that, I will discuss how Putin has adapted Russian foreign policy to the post–Arab Spring environment in the Middle East. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Putin’s seemingly contradictory foreign policy toward the Middle East since the Arab Spring and what challenges it might face in the future.

Before Putin During the Cold War, there was a sharp distinction between the American/Western sphere of influence on the one hand and the Soviet one on the other. Middle Eastern governments tended to be allied to one of the two competing superpowers. America allied mainly with the “conservative” governments such as Israel, Turkey, and the Arab and Iranian monarchies, while the Soviet Union allied mainly with the “revolutionary” Arab nationalist republics, the region’s one Marxist regime (South Yemen), and various national liberation movements. These alliances were not fixed. In the 1950s and 1960s, some countries switched from being American allies to being Soviet ones (usually as the result of the overthrow of a “conservative” government and its replacement by a “revolutionary” one). In the 1970s, though, two “revolutionary” governments (Egypt and Somalia) switched from being Soviet allies to being American ones.2 There were a few exceptions to this pattern. Kuwait had good relations with both the US and the USSR (though it relied far more on the former than the latter). The Yemen Arab Republic managed to have good relations with both the US and the USSR at the same time.3 The biggest exception, though, would occur with the 1979 Iranian revolution in which the downfall of a pro-American regime did not lead to the rise of a pro-Soviet one, but to an Islamic (and unambiguously) revolutionary regime hostile toward both superpowers. The Soviet Union often did try to have good relations with “conservative” governments in the Middle East. Their unhappiness with American support for Israel was something Moscow particularly tried to exploit. Soviet severance of diplomatic relations with Israel at the time of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War was undertaken as a tangible sign that unlike Washington, which professed friendship with the Arabs but supported Israel, Moscow stood forthrightly with all Arab governments (“revolutionary” and “conservative”) against the common Israeli foe. However, whatever friendly intentions Moscow expressed toward these “conservative” governments was vitiated by what they saw as Soviet efforts to undermine them as well as by Moscow’s enthusiastic reaction to the downfall of any “conservative” government and its replacement by a “revolutionary” one. Indeed, even some of Moscow’s “revolutionary” Arab nationalist allies 154

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became unhappy with Moscow when communist parties in their countries sought to undermine them.4 During the height of the Cold War, then, the Soviet Union was very much a revisionist power while the US was a status quo one in the Middle East (as well as elsewhere). Moscow not only saw the downfall of “conservative” governments and their replacement with “revolutionary” ones as serving Soviet interests, but some Arab nationalist regimes believed Moscow would welcome the downfall of their “less revolutionary” regimes and replacement by “more revolutionary” Marxist ones. Of course, the Soviet Union also became a status quo power in the Middle East in terms of protecting “revolutionary” regimes from being overthrown by forces hostile toward the USSR (including ones backed by revolutionary Iran after 1979) and from leaders seeking to reorient their countries’ foreign policy away from Moscow and toward Washington. Moscow, though, ceased to be a revisionist power in the Middle East during the latter part of the Gorbachev era and during the Yeltsin years. Indeed, Moscow did not really act as a great power in the Middle East (or elsewhere) after the downfall of communism, the breakup of the USSR, and when it was focusing on Russia’s serious domestic issues during the late 1980s and the 1990s. There were, though, some Russian foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East during this period, including Moscow’s improvement in ties (especially in the trade realm) with Turkey, Iran, and Israel.5 Indeed, by this time, the USSR’s breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 was seen in Moscow as having been a mistake, since this move meant that Washington was the only superpower able to talk with both Israel and the Arabs when some of the latter sought a diplomatic solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict beginning in the early 1970s.6 This was a lesson that Putin in particular would take to heart.

2000–10 Among the many other initiatives Putin undertook after coming to power, he early on set about rebuilding Russian foreign policy in the Middle East. During this period, he did not focus on attempting to reassert Russia as a great power in competition with the US, but on the more modest goal of restoring a greater role for Russia in the region than the diminished one it had come to play under Yeltsin. And in this regard, Putin largely succeeded. Before the Arab Spring, he had restored relations that had atrophied under Yeltsin with Moscow’s “revolutionary” partners from the Cold War era, including Syria, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. He also continued and deepened the process begun under Yeltsin of improving ties with both Turkey and Iran. In addition, Putin also established relatively good working relations with America’s “conservative” Arab allies, including Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab monarchies, Jordan, Morocco, Moscow’s erstwhile ally Egypt, and even the US-sponsored postSaddam regime in Iraq. Perhaps most remarkably, Putin presided over the significant improvement in Russian-Israeli relations. At the same time, though, he also cultivated ties with the rival Palestinian movements, Fatah and Hamas, as well as with Hezbollah in Lebanon. While Putin had sought the removal of UN sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and opposed (along with many others) the US-led intervention that overthrew him in 2003, Putin eventually succeeded in establishing good working relations with the American-sponsored governments that arose both in Baghdad and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Furthering Russian economic and commercial interests was one of the main themes in Putin’s Middle East policy. Putin energetically sought to increase Russia’s trade relations throughout the region, and usually brought a large contingent of Russian executives with him on his many visits there. Putin also sought to obtain investment opportunities for Russian petroleum firms in the oil and gas exporting countries of the region, and where possible, investment from them 155

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in Russia’s petroleum sector. Further, Putin also sought to sell two of Russia’s most important export manufactures – arms and atomic energy reactors – to Middle Eastern customers. In all these efforts, Putin had some successes (such as with the burgeoning of trade between Russia and Turkey) but also some disappointments (especially the inability to get much investment from the rich Arab Gulf States or sell arms to Saudi Arabia). One of the greatest irritants to Putin was his inability to get those states owing large sums of money to Moscow from the Soviet era to repay their debts. Given his desire to improve ties with them now, and it becoming increasingly clear that they were not going to repay, Putin ended up backing down on this issue.7 Another theme of Putin’s Middle East policy was keeping the question of Chechnya and the status of Russian Muslims generally off the Arab and Muslim agenda. One of the great disasters for 1980s-era Soviet foreign policy was that Saudi Arabia and some other Arab countries joined forces with the West and Pakistan in not just condemning the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but actually aiding the Afghan resistance fight against it. During the 1990s, Moscow was fearful that this scenario would be repeated in Chechnya. Indeed, Moscow frequently accused Saudi Arabia in particular of aiding the Chechen rebels during the 1990s. Putin took up this theme as well when he came to power at the time of the second Russian-Chechen War. After the 9/11 attacks, Putin repeatedly referred to the fact that 15 of the 19 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. This may have been an effort to show Washington that the US and Russia were both being beset by a common Saudi-backed Islamist threat. But as Russian-American relations soured when the Bush administration and its “coalition of the willing” launched an invasion of Iraq in 2003 that had not been sanctioned by the UN Security Council, Putin pivoted to cultivating improved Saudi-Russian relations at a time when Washington’s ties with both Moscow and Riyadh had become strained.8 Yet another theme in Moscow’s Middle East policy at this time was emphasizing that since Moscow had good relations with all the major actors in the region (indeed, with everyone except the jihadists, who had bad relations with virtually everyone), Moscow was in a better position than Washington to serve as a mediator. Moscow, then, saw Russia and America as being in reverse positions from what they had been in between the time the USSR broke diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 and the end of the Cold War. While Washington was able to have a greater role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy back then because it could talk with both Israelis and Arabs while Moscow could not, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Moscow could talk to all sides (including Israel) in the Middle East’s disputes while Washington would not talk (or talk much) with several important actors, including Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Even then, Moscow did not seem to make this claim in order to exclude the US from any diplomatic process aimed at resolving Middle East conflict, but as a way of showing that Moscow could be of use to Washington and Iran through serving as a mediator between them. President Obama actually asked Moscow to play just such a role in 2009.9 Before the onset of the Arab Spring, then, Moscow had succeeded at increasing Russian economic ties with the Middle East, keeping Chechnya and the status of Russia’s Muslims largely off the Middle East’s agenda of concern, and attempting to portray Russia as a more responsible, status quo–oriented great power than the US, which had intervened in Iraq under Bush (but became more chastened under Obama). The prospects for Moscow continuing to make steady progress along these lines appeared good.

2011 Like its counterparts in the West and elsewhere, the Russian government was caught off guard by the outburst of the Arab Spring uprisings. The first of these in Tunisia very quickly led to the 156

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flight of President Ben Ali on January 14, 2011. Like Western governments, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sought to adjust to the new reality. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 26, Medvedev stated, “I think that what happened in Tunisia was a big lesson for governments all around the world. Governments should not sit on their laurels and settle back in comfy chairs, but need to grow and develop together with society, regardless of where they are”.10 Here, Medvedev seemed to be aligning Russia with the West in accepting democratic change in Tunisia. When the Arab Spring spread to Egypt, Medvedev called for a peaceful resolution to the situation. After Mubarak’s downfall, though, Moscow quickly emphasized the importance of a “strong, democratic” Egypt and sought to work with the new government. But just as Moscow aligned itself with the West in accepting rapid political change in Tunisia and Egypt, it also aligned itself with the West and Saudi Arabia in opposing political change in Bahrain and supporting a Saudi-negotiated power transfer aimed at defusing the situation in Yemen. Moscow, though, was not aligned with the West or certain Gulf Arab states when it came to Libya. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, where regime change occurred very quickly through largely peaceful means, Qaddafi forcefully resisted his opponents and appeared to be on the verge of defeating them in early 2011. When discussion arose in the West about the possibility of military intervention against Qaddafi for humanitarian purposes, both Medvedev and Putin objected. However, after the Arab League called for the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya to protect Qaddafi’s opponents from him, Russia – along with China – abstained in the vote on the UN Security Council resolution that authorized it (thus allowing the resolution to pass). Almost immediately afterward, though, Moscow began complaining that the US and NATO were going beyond the terms of the resolution authorizing a no-fly zone by actively intervening on the side of Qaddafi’s opponents. Even then, Moscow did not do much to counter this by seriously aiding Qaddafi. At the G-8 summit in Deauville on May 27, 2011, Medvedev even declared that Qaddafi “should leave”, and offered Russian mediation in order to bring this about. In early June, he sent a personal representative to Libya to hold talks both with the Qaddafi government and with the rebels. However, neither the West, the Gulf Arabs, nor the Libyan opposition took up Moscow’s offer to reach a negotiated solution with Qaddafi, but went on to overthrow him instead. Events in Libya would affect the Russian approach to the uprising in Syria, where Moscow’s long-time partner, the Assad regime, was besieged by opposition forces being armed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. In late May 2011, Medvedev declared that Russia would not support the imposition of Security Council sanctions against Syria as the West was calling for. Moscow clearly did not intend to allow a Security Council resolution to serve as the basis for Western intervention in Syria as had occurred in Libya. But also as in Libya, Moscow held talks with various Syrian opposition groups. Still, as the end of the Qaddafi regime drew nearer over the course of 2011, Moscow’s determination to back Assad in cooperation with Iran strengthened.11 Putin’s late-2011 decision to run for president in 2012 instead of allowing Medvedev to do so may have been related to Putin’s unhappiness with him for not vetoing the Security Council resolution against Qaddafi that Putin accused the West of using as a pretext for intervening in Libya. Putin’s belief that America and the West were using the Arab Spring to promote its color revolution agenda not just in the Middle East but in Russia as well was hardened by the outbreak of anti-Putin demonstrations in Russia that began in reaction to the widespread belief in Russia that the Kremlin had rigged the 2011 Duma election results.12 What also seems to have genuinely outraged Moscow was its perception that America was pursuing double standards. Whereas the US acquiesced to the suppression of the Arab Spring opposition to the authoritarian regime in Bahrain, where America maintained a naval base, Washington vociferously objected to Moscow aiding the fight against the opponents of the 157

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authoritarian regime in Syria, where Russia maintained naval facilities.13 This reinforced Moscow’s belief that America only supported color revolution where a change of regime would benefit American geopolitical interests (especially vis-à-vis Russia) and opposed it where a change of regime would not do so.

After 2011 The Arab Spring revolutionary wave of 2011 toppled long-standing regimes in four countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen) and seriously threatened to do so in two others (Syria and Bahrain), which only external intervention prevented. Since 2011, though, the Arab Spring revolutionary wave has not spread anywhere else. Furthermore, the elected government it gave rise to in Egypt was ousted by that country’s military in 2013. Syria, Libya, and Yemen have all descended into civil war, and unrest continues in Bahrain. Only in Tunisia were the democratic aspirations of the Arab Spring achieved, though not without continuous challenges. The centerpiece of Russian policy in the region has been its support for the Assad regime – first through providing weapons, enabling it to beat back its opponents in 2012–14 and then through direct military intervention beginning in September 2015 when Assad’s opponents had grown powerful once again. Russian military forces have remained there ever since, where they have focused on an air campaign in support of the ground war being fought by Assad’s forces and its Iranian, Hezbollah, and other Shi’a militia allies. Putin also expressed strong support for al-Sisi’s 2013 overthrow of Mohamad Morsi (the elected Muslim Brotherhood leader who had grown increasingly unpopular by the time of his ouster). Putin’s support for al-Sisi stood in contrast to the Obama administration’s disapproval of the Egyptian coup, and set in motion renewed close ties between Cairo and Moscow.14 In Libya, Russia (along with others) recognizes the UN-sponsored Libyan government, but also supports (also along with others) one of its rivals, General Haftar, whose stronghold is in the eastern part of the country. In Yemen, Moscow has ties with the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed official government, but also talks with some of its opponents. In Bahrain, Moscow has cultivated friendly relations with and expressed support for the Saudi-backed Bahraini monarchy that continues to face opposition. At the same time, Moscow has good relations with post-revolutionary Tunisia. Beyond those countries most affected by the Arab Spring, Moscow has continued its pre–Arab Spring policy of seeking friendly relations with everyone, including the “conservative” Arab states, Iran, Israel, and even Turkey (despite a temporary period of mutual hostility following Ankara’s shooting down of a Russian military aircraft flying in the vicinity of the Turkish-Syrian border).15 The narrative that Moscow has advanced toward the Middle East as a whole is, as noted earlier, that America and the West had backed the Arab Spring as a form of color revolution intended to bring pro-Western democracies to power, but their actions ended up causing conflict and unleashing the forces of Islamist extremism. Russia, by contrast, is a status quo power seeking stability through cooperation with the existing governments of the region. Thus, Russia is a more reliable partner than the US for Middle Eastern governments.16 At the same time, the narrative that Moscow has advanced toward America and the West (as well as the Middle East) is that they, along with Russia, face a common enemy in jihadist movements such as ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (which, despite its name change and formal disaffiliation with al Qaeda, Moscow still refers to by this name). Whatever the shortcomings of the Assad regime, it is far better for everyone that it continue ruling Syria instead of the jihadists, who are the most likely to seize power if Assad is overthrown. The West and its Middle Eastern allies,

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then, should join with Russia and even Iran in supporting the Assad regime against the common jihadist enemy.17 To those such as Israel and the Gulf Arabs who see Iran as their primary opponent and are concerned about the growth of its influence in Syria and beyond, Moscow argues that the Russian military presence in Syria allows Russia to keep Iran in check there.18 In addition, the Russians advance the narrative that because Moscow can talk with Tehran about regional conflicts while the US cannot or will not, Russia is far better placed than Washington to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Syria. Russia working together with Iran and Turkey but not with America in the Astana process is further proof of this.19 In addition to its intervention in support of Assad as well as diplomacy aimed at a settlement (which Moscow insists that Assad will be a part of ) in Syria, Moscow can also point to its support for al-Sisi in Egypt and the Al Khalifa royal family in Bahrain as evidence of Russia being a responsible great power whom others can rely on. But Moscow does not always oppose the forces of change, especially in cases where the status quo has broken down. In Libya, as noted earlier, Moscow recognizes the weak UN-approved government in the west, but also supports one of its opponents, General Haftar, in the east. Still, Russia is not alone in supporting Haftar, but has done so along with American allies Egypt, the UAE, and even France.20 In Yemen, while Moscow continues to recognize the internationally accepted, Saudi-backed Hadi government, Russia kept its embassy open in Sana’a after Yemen’s capital was overrun by the Houthis (an anti-Saudi, pro-Iranian Shi’a movement based in the far north of Yemen). Even if it does not provide support for the Houthis (as Iran has reportedly done), Moscow has held talks with them as well as their ally (and erstwhile enemy), former Yemeni president Ali Abdallah Salih, until his death at the hands of the Houthis in December 2017.21 Even in Syria, where Putin has intervened militarily in support of the Assad regime, Moscow is also (along with Washington) supportive of the Syrian Kurdish forces whom Assad has vowed to defeat. Like America, Russia values the Syrian Kurds for being effective fighters against Islamic State forces in Syria. At the same time, after the revival of Russo-Turkish relations in mid-2016, Moscow has acquiesced to Turkish military incursions into northern Syria that have been aimed against the Kurds.22 Further, while Moscow frequently proclaims that it is fighting against the Islamic State in Syria, some observers have noted that Russian forces have concentrated their attacks on the non–Islamic State forces that are a greater threat to the Assad regime and have not targeted the Islamic State as much. There is even some indication that Moscow fears that if the Islamic State is eliminated completely, all of the Islamists from Russia’s North Caucasus fighting for it will return to Russia and have to be fought against there instead.23 While Moscow now denounces Washington for having “abandoned” its long-time ally Mubarak at the beginning of the Arab Spring and portrays Russia as a firm ally of al-Sisi, Moscow actually had relatively good relations with the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Morsi, during his time as president before al-Sisi ousted him. Indeed, Putin met with Morsi and discussed trade and economic assistance with him.24 Furthermore, at the same time that Russia maintains good relations with anti-Israeli Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, Moscow also maintains close ties to Israel (with which it has extensive security and trade cooperation), as well as to the Gulf Arab states that also fear Tehran. Even though Russian-Turkish relations abruptly deteriorated as a result of the November 2015 shoot-down incident, they also rebounded very quickly when Erdogan apologized for the incident the following June and a few weeks later when Erdogan saw Putin as more supportive of him than Western governments during the July 2016 coup attempt against the Erdogan government – despite continued Russian-Turkish differences over the SyrianKurds as well as the ongoing Azeri-Armenian dispute. Finally, although it is outside the area

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affected by the Arab Spring, Moscow has provided assistance to the US-backed Kabul government, but is also accused by US government officials of supporting its Taliban opponents.25 Despite Moscow’s claims to be the defender of the status quo against American-backed disruption in the Middle East, it appears that Putin is actually willing to work with everyone and anyone willing to work with him – and even to accommodate some of those who are not. Putin’s foreign policy toward the Middle East appears to be an enormous balancing act among rival actors designed to provide them all with an incentive to cooperate with Russia. The important criterion for Putin to cooperate with any of these governments or other actors is not whether they are “revolutionary” or even anti-American, as he has shown that he is willing to work with those that are “conservative”, pro-American, and even America itself. What seems to matter is that they are either powerful in their own right or they receive support from actors who are. Even the jihadists have value to Putin through providing a common enemy to point to that justifies Moscow supporting actors such as the Assad regime and Iran, whom the US and its allies in the region oppose. While the Arab Spring initially threatened to disrupt Moscow’s efforts to rebuild Russian influence in the Middle East through working with all the major actors there, its aftermath simply meant that there were more such actors – especially in those countries where the Arab Spring resulted in civil war – for Moscow either to cooperate with or at least make use of.

Strengths and weaknesses Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East since the Arab Spring has done rather well. Instead of presaging the decline or even expulsion of Russian influence in the Middle East that Putin had taken over a decade to rebuild, as was feared in Moscow during 2011, Russia’s influence in the region has actually increased since then. Putin’s policy of pursuing good relations with all governments and most militias and other opposition movements willing to work with Moscow has paid off. Instead of being a hindrance to Russian foreign policy, the fact that many of these governments and militias are at odds with one another means that they all have a strong incentive to seek good relations with Russia despite its ties with their opponents in order to get something from Moscow themselves. Since reducing or ending cooperation with Moscow risks Russia aiding their opponents even more, this is not something that they are likely to do – as Moscow appears to be well aware. While not designed to turn the Middle East into an exclusive sphere of Russian influence, Putin’s policy appears instead to position Russia as the indispensable great power that virtually all the opposing parties in the Middle East can turn to for support and must not offend in pursuit of their ongoing disputes with one another. Yet, as successful as it has been up to now, there are both limits to what Putin can accomplish with this approach as well as risks to its continued success. Moscow claims that it is in a better position to mediate among opposing parties in the Middle East because it has good relations with more of them than Washington, especially vis-à-vis Iran and its various allies. Being able to talk to all sides in a conflict, though, does not necessarily enable an external power to resolve or even mitigate conflicts. The US was able to persuade Israel and Egypt to sign the Camp David Accords of 1978 not just because it was able to talk with them both, but also because it was willing and able to promise them both substantial economic and military support that it has continued to provide now for decades. Putin does not appear willing or able to mount an undertaking such as this. Indeed, there is also the risk that if any particular Middle Eastern conflict is resolved, then the parties involved will have much less need for Russia than they do now. This may even be true in Syria: the defeat of Assad’s 160

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opponents and the restoration of his rule throughout the country might result in Tehran, no longer needing Russian assistance, competing with Moscow for influence in Damascus. There are risks for Russia, though, if it cannot or will not work for conflict resolution in the Middle East. One is that it risks losing influence to another great power that is willing and able to commit the resources needed to both bring a settlement about and maintain it. Another is that if a conflict is not resolved (whether by Russia or anyone else), it could expand beyond the point where Moscow can either contain it or continue to balance between opposing sides where the once relatively stable balance between them is rapidly changing or even ending. In case of a major conflict between Iran on the one hand and Israel and/or the Gulf Arabs on the other where the US acted forcefully to defend its traditional allies, Moscow’s choices would seem to be to (1) support Iran and thereby lose influence with Israel and/or the Gulf Arabs; (2) support Israel and the Gulf Arabs in conjunction with the US and thereby lose influence with Iran; or (3) avoid involvement and so risk being marginalized in the region. Similarly, in the case of Libya, even if General Haftar suddenly defeated his opponents and seized control of the entire country, it is by no means certain that he would become Russia’s ally just because he received Moscow’s support. He might well seek to maximize his independence through playing his existing benefactors (Egypt and the UAE in addition to Russia) and perhaps new ones still (including in the West) off against each other. Any attempt by Moscow to establish itself as primus inter pares in Libya would greatly complicate Putin’s efforts to maintain good relations with Egypt, which also wants to play that role there. Whether either of these scenarios develops is highly uncertain. What does seem certain, though, is that Moscow’s ability to avoid choosing between rival parties but maintain influence with both sides is dependent upon existing conflicts not expanding. Another risk for Russia is that while the counter-revolutionary forces that Moscow prefers has largely prevailed over the Arab Spring revolutionary ones, the conditions that gave rise to the Arab Spring have not disappeared. These include a large population of young people frustrated by poor economic opportunities and by corrupt authoritarian political systems, poorquality leadership which either refuses to undertake any kind of reform or unleashes poorly conceived reform programs that make matters worse, and the increased difficulty of seeking relief through emigration to a West that has become less and less welcoming. If and when a popular uprising suddenly erupts like it did in Tunisia after the self-immolation of one person whose cart was confiscated by the authorities, popular anger may be directed as much against Russia as against the West for having supported the authoritarian regimes that they wish to oust. Moscow may try again to do as Medvedev did in 2011 and work with the forces of change after they come to power, but Putin’s strong association with counter-revolutionary forces since then will give the forces of change pause to doubt whether Moscow will once again ditch them at the first opportunity. Of course, this is a problem that not just Russia but Western governments may also face. This could, as Putin has argued in the past, give Russia and the West a common interest in preventing the rise of Middle Eastern forces of change that are hostile toward both. But notwithstanding statements about how Russia and America should join forces against “terrorists” by Donald Trump both before and after he was elected president, it will be difficult for Western governments to cooperate with Putin in the Middle East when they see him as meddling in their own internal affairs.26 Yet another risk for Putin is that it may become increasingly difficult for him to keep the status of Muslims in the North Caucasus and elsewhere in Russia off the political agenda in the Middle East. Putin’s oppressive policies toward Muslims in Russia has led to increased radicalization among them. Because conditions at home are so oppressive, many young Muslim militants from Russia have gone to Syria to fight alongside jihadist forces there. This alone has led to 161

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increased knowledge and sympathy for the plight of Muslims in Russia among jihadists in Syria and elsewhere. The more that jihadists and others in the Middle East see Russia as an oppressive power in the Middle East, the more they may decide to strike back at Russia itself. And whether Muslim unrest in Russia receives much support from Middle Eastern jihadists or not, Middle Eastern governments that Moscow now cooperates with are hardly likely to be willing or able to help Moscow subdue it. These risks (expanded inter-state and intra-state conflict, renewed Arab Spring, rising Muslim unrest inside Russia) either may not arise or may arise in a form that Moscow is able to manage. There is one risk for Moscow, though, that it probably cannot avoid. Opposing sides in the Middle East’s many conflicts may not like the fact that Moscow tends to support them both to some extent, but they have little choice but to put up with this for fear that Moscow will aid their rivals even more if they curtail their ties to Moscow (or even strenuously object) in reaction to this Russian practice. In response, though, Middle Eastern actors will not see Russia as their principal ally, but will either ally more with the US in those cases where Washington sides with them against their opponents (as it does with Israel and Saudi Arabia both vis-à-vis Iran), or ostentatiously interact with Russia in order to induce Washington to do more for them (as Egypt’s al-Sisi has done). Where an actor has poor relations with the US, maneuvering between Russia and some other anti-American sponsor such as Iran (as the Assad regime has done) is a possibility. And Iran itself is large and powerful enough that Moscow may have to worry about the consequences of crossing Tehran. In short, the problem with Moscow not firmly allying with some actors against others but playing them off against each other is that these actors will reciprocate and hedge as well. Despite Putin’s fears about the potential impact of the outburst of the 2011 Arab Spring after it moved into Libya and Syria both on Russian interests in the Middle East and on Russia itself, the ebbing of the Arab Spring since then actually provided opportunities for Putin to expand Russian influence in the region. However, even though Moscow was able to take advantage of how the Arab Spring evolved after 2011, it would much prefer that there not be another one. The problem for Moscow (as well as others)is that the Arab Spring might not be a one-time event but instead (like with the seasons of the year) a recurring phenomenon.

Notes 1 T.A. Al Wahed, “Putin Vows to Prevent ‘Color Revolutions’,” Asharq Al-Awsat, 16 April 2017. https://english.aawsat.com/taha-abed-alwahed/world-news/putin-vows-prevent-color-revolutions. 2 G. Golan, Soviet Policies in the Middle East: From World War II to Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and R.O. Freedman, Moscow and the Middle East: Soviet Policy Since the Invasion of Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3 M.N. Katz, Russia and Arabia: Soviet Foreign Policy Toward the Arabian Peninsula (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 4 M. Heikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in the Middle East (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1978); and Y. Primakov, Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2009). 5 T. Nizameddin, Russia and the Middle East: Towards a New Foreign Policy (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1999). 6 A. Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 162. 7 T. Nizameddin, Putin’s New Order in the Middle East (London: C. Hurst & Co. 2013). 8 M.N. Katz, “Saudi-Russian Relations Since 9/11,” Problems of Post-Communism 51, no. 2 (March– April 2004): 3–11. 9 P. Baker, “Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter,” The New York Times, 2 March 2009. www. nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html.

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The Arab Spring and Russian foreign policy 10 D. Medvedev, “Dmitry Medvedev Addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos,” Presi dent of Russia Official Web Site, 26 January 2011. http://en.special.kremlin.ru/events/president/ transcripts/10163. 11 M.N. Katz, “Russia and the Arab Spring,” Middle East Institute, 2 April 2012. www.mei.edu/content/ russia-and-arab-spring; and D. Trenin, “The Mythical Alliance: Russia’s Syria Policy,” Moscow Carnegie Center, February 2013. http://carnegieendowment.org/files/mythical_alliance.pdf. 12 M. Zygar, “The Russian Reset That Never Was,” Foreign Policy, 9 December 2016. http://foreignpol icy.com/2016/12/09/the-russian-reset-that-never-was-putin-obama-medvedev-libya-mikhail-zygarall-the-kremlin-men/. 13 S. Rosenberg, “Why Russia Sells Syria Arms,” BBC News, 29 June 2012. www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-18642032. 14 A. Borshchevskaya, Russia in the Middle East: Moves, Consequences, Prospects (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2016), 20–23, 36–40. 15 Ibid., 41–47; M. Dubovikova, “Why Russia Sees Bahrain as a Partner in the Middle East,” Al Arabiya, 5 September 2016. https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/09/05/ Why-Russia-sees-Bahrain-as-a-partner-in-the-Middle-East.html; M.N. Katz, “Russia Maneuvers Between Opposing Forces in Yemen,” Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, 25 January 2017. www.agsiw.org/russia-maneuvers-opposing-forces-yemen/; A. Borshchevskaya, “After Syria, Putin’s Next Move Could Be Libya,” The Hill, 3 February 2017. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/ international/319272-after-syria-libya-could-be-putins-next-move; and K. Hille, “Russia Lifts Most Sanctions Imposed on Turkey After Downing of Jet,” Financial Times, 31 May 2017. www.ft.com/ content/38698b56-460c-11e7-8519-9f94ee97d996. 16 Al Wahed, “Putin Vows to Prevent ‘Color Revolutions’,” loc. cit. 17 I. Arkhipov and H. Meyer, “Russia Seeks Accord With U.S. on Iran Role in Syria Safe Zones,” Bloomberg, 11 May 2017. www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-05-11/russia-seeks-accord-with-u-son-iran-role-in-syria-safe-zones. 18 R. Eglash and W. Booth, “Israel Fears Russia’s Pullout from Syria Will Leave Dangerous Void,” The Washington Post, 16 March 2016. www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-fears-russias-pullout-fromsyria-will-leave-a-dangerous-void/2016/03/16/8a64a21a-eb7c-11e5-a9ce-681055c7a05f_story. htm; and E. Geranmayeh and K. Liik, “The New Power Couple: Russia and Iran in the Middle East,” European Council on Foreign Relations, 13 September 2016. www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/ iran_and_russia_middle_east_power_couple_7113#_ftnref56. 19 M. Katz and H. Ibish, “Can Moscow Be an Effective Mideast Mediator?” Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, 24 March 2017. www.agsiw.org/can-moscow-effective-mideast-mediator/. 20 B. Bibbo, “Can Russia Resolve the Conflict in Libya?” Al Jazeera, 16 March 2017. www.aljazeera. com/indepth/features/2017/03/russia-resolve-conflict-libya-170316094138550.html. 21 Katz, “Russia Maneuvers Between Opposing Forces in Yemen,” loc. cit. 22 J. Pothecary, “Russia a Fair-Weather Friend for Syria’s Kurds,” Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor, 2 June 2017. https://jamestown.org/program/russia-fair-weather-friend-syrias-kurds/. 23 M. Kofman, “The Misadventures of Russia and the United States in Syria: The Complete Strategy Implosion Edition,” War on the Rocks, 11 October 2016. https://warontherocks.com/2016/10/ the-misadventures-of-russia-and-the-united-states-in-syria-complete-strategy-implosion-edition/; R. Scarborough, “U.S. Finds Russia Focusing Fight on Syrian Rebels, Not Islamic State,” The Washington Times, 3 February 2016. www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/3/putins-forces-refuseattack-islamic-state-syria/; and R. Rahimov, “Russia’s Security Dilemma: To Fight the Islamic State in Syria or Not?” The Russia File blog, Kennan Institute/Wilson Center, 2 March 2017. www.wilson center.org/blog-post/russias-security-dilemma-to-fight-the-islamic-state-syria-or-not. 24 R. El-Kalyouby, “Presidents of Russia, Egypt Meet for Second Time,” Russia Beyond the Headlines, 23 April 2013. www.rbth.com/international/2013/04/23/presidents_of_russia_egypt_meet_for_sec ond_time_25317.html. 25 T. Gibbons-Neff, “Russia Is Sending Weapons to Taliban, Top U.S. General Confirms,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/04/24/russia-issending-weapons-to-taliban-top-u-s-general-confirms/?utm_term=.ae6da925909e. 26 M.K. McKew, “Trump’s Plan to Fight ISIS with Putin Isn’t Just Futile: It’s Dangerous,” Politico Magazine, 2 February 2017. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/trumps-plan-to-fight-isis-withputin-isnt-just-futile-its-dangerous-214743.

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13 CHINA’S FORAY INTO THE MIDDLE EAST From ambivalence to ambition? Michael Clarke

David Shambaugh eloquently argued in his 2013 book, China Goes Global, that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) remained a “partial power” whose diplomacy “often makes it known what it is against, but rarely what it is for” and that this made its foreign policy in many regions of the world “hesitant, risk averse and narrowly self-interested”.1 Such a characterization has accurately captured Beijing’s approach to the Middle East for much of the period since the foundation of the PRC in 1949. However, this chapter argues that Beijing’s calculus is now changing under pressure from developments in the Middle East that directly threaten core Chinese interests, ranging from the security of its far northwestern province of Xinjiang to the broader geopolitical goals of President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Central to this evolving posture has been Beijing’s perceptions of structural shifts in global and regional politics and its assessment of the potential implications for China’s own national interests and security. China’s approach to the Middle East exhibits clear consistency with the country’s broader foreign policy posture, which has arguably been increasingly defined by the convergence of systemic/structural factors with key domestic factors. At the structural/systemic level, China has sought two inter-related goals: combat what it perceives as the adverse geopolitical effects of American hegemony and construct a viable strategic and economic alternative to the current US-led international order. Domestically, the jettisoning of Maoist ideology in favor of “reform and opening” under Deng Xiaoping has also crucially informed the country’s foreign policy by placing a premium on encouraging external conditions that will assist the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to maintain its “performance” legitimacy (i.e., deliver continued economic growth and development). This concern for performance legitimacy has also been reinforced over the past decade by an emerging official discourse under both former President Hu Jintao and his successor Xi Jinping on restoring China to “national greatness”. These broad goals inform China’s evolving approach to the Middle East. Yet, as with Beijing’s foreign policy in other discrete regions of the world, its pursuit of these goals has often been both constrained and enabled by specific regional dynamics. Peter Van Ness noted over three decades ago that Chinese foreign policy had been characterized by the evolution of a number of successive “foreign policy lines”. Each line provided “an analysis of the global system, integrated both economic and political-strategic components into a consistent worldview and theoretical framework, and prescribed a particular role for China in global politics”.2 The evolution of Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East continues to exhibit the imprint of such 164

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an integrated approach. In this context, this chapter argues that three pairs of structural shifts have shaped China’s approach: (1) the First Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, (2) the events of 9/11 and the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and (3) the 2011 Arab Spring. On the domestic side of the equation, the chapter argues that the following major factors have shaped China’s pursuit of its overarching foreign policy goals in the Middle East: (1) economic/trade interests, (2) energy security, and (3) terrorism. As such, the chapter is informed by a neoclassical realist approach that highlights how the interplay between the key structural shifts and domestic factors identified here have shaped Beijing’s foreign policy in the region. The chapter concludes that while Beijing has still yet to fully overcome its legacy of non-intervention and aloofness toward the region, the broadening of China’s direct security concerns in, and stemming from, the region, its increasing economic presence/interests and perception of American geopolitical retrenchment is compelling it to chart a more ambitious agenda that actively seeks to shape regional dynamics in ways conducive to its interest.

Structural drivers and domestic imperatives in China’s foreign policy The evolution of China’s grand strategy since the “reform and opening” era in many respects conforms to neoclassical realist understandings of international relations. In contrast to structural realist frameworks that emphasize the primacy of the structure and architecture of the international system in determining state behavior,3 neoclassical realists define their research agendas by distinguishing between “relative power” as the primary independent variable, and unit-level factors as intervening variables such as decision-makers’ perceptions, domestic state structures, and political ideologies.4 A major assumption of neoclassical approaches is that “structural realism obstructs an appropriately complex understanding of the international system precisely because it eschews sociological inquiry into and a historical view of the state”.5 A starting point for much neoclassical realist analysis is the obvious but often under-appreciated fact that foreign policy, contra structural realism, is not the product of the “rational” responses of statesmen to external stimuli but rather a “two-level game” where statesmen not only respond to the moves of adversaries but also to “the will and needs of the homeland, whose concerns are primarily domestic”.6 Neoclassical realism therefore seeks to bridge the gap between the “second” (the state) and “third” (systemic) “images” of international relations by seeking to marry the empirical richness of second image studies of foreign policy with the theoretical parsimony of structural realism to create a theory of foreign policy behavior. A central focus has been to examine how various second image factors impinge upon policy-makers’ responses to incentives and constraints imposed by structural forces of the international system. As Arnold Wolfers noted over five decades ago, “it is the goals pursued by the actors and the way they go about pursuing them that determine whether and to what extent the potentialities for power struggle and war are realized” in the international system.7 In this context, structural factors (i.e., international anarchy) can be seen as “providing states with information about the costs and benefits of particular courses of action, but how that information is processed and weighed depends on the way states understand the world, their preferences, their ideas and their ethics”.8 In attempting to make sense of China’s grand strategy, it is therefore necessary to not only examine how Chinese perceptions of the distribution of power and relative strength of US hegemony have shaped its foreign policy behavior but also to identify the core domestic imperatives that have informed China’s response to such structural forces. The key structural factors at play since the 1980s have been Chinese perceptions of both the distribution of power and the 165

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geopolitical “resolve” of the US. As will be detailed in the following sections, while China has perceived continued US hegemony as a consistent constraint on its foreign policy – both in a global setting and in the Middle East – this has also been coupled with a recognition that US geopolitical resolve has fluctuated due to major structural changes such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the events of 9/11, and the global financial crisis. Beijing has modified its grand strategy in response to such fluctuations in order to either take advantage of weakening (or diverted) US resolve or to combat US reassertion in pursuit of core domestic imperatives related to the CCP’s quest for performance and nationalist legitimacy. The former (i.e., performance legitimacy) has required that the CCP look to encourage international conditions favorable to the continued economic development and modernization of the country, while the latter (i.e., nationalist legitimacy) has encouraged Beijing to become more assertive in the pursuit or defense of what it perceives as the country’s sovereign rights.9 In the Middle East, this has entailed for much of the PRC’s history a foreign policy that has sought to leverage the country’s position as a non-Western power with no significant legacy of interference to its advantage.

“Detached Generally and Involved Appropriately”: China in the Middle East during the unipolar moment, 1989–2001 During the Cold War, China’s strategic, political, and economic influence in the Middle East remained marginal. This marginality, as Yitzhak Shichor remarked in his seminal 1977 study of Sino-Middle East relations, was not a product of Beijing’s disinterest but rather due to structural and ideational/cultural constraints stemming from the domination of the region by the US and the Soviet Union and China’s adherence to radical Maoist ideology.10 Shichor persuasively argued that the Middle East was in fact identified by China as a region of strategic importance for its own national security and interests, but this was framed by CCP Chairman Mao Zedong’s “intermediate zone” theory. For Mao the prevailing “contradiction” in the post–World War II world was driven not by the bipolar struggle between the First World (i.e., the US and Soviet Union) for predominance but rather by the First World’s attempts to subject the intermediate zone of the Second and Third World states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their influence.11 In this schema, China was conceived of as providing both a successful model of “national liberation” and revolution that other states in the developing world might emulate and as thus possessing a unique leadership role in encouraging such states’ resistance to imperialism. China’s foreign policy in this context amounted to a form of national identity implementation, whereby Beijing’s official foreign policy discourse reflected its self-identification as a Third World state sharing with others in Asia, Africa, and Latin America a “common sense of deprivation and exploitation at the hands of the rich and powerful”.12 Beijing’s assessment of its interests in the Middle East, especially during the Maoist era (1949–76), was more often than not framed through this ideological prism or line. With this framework in mind, we can identify two broad phases in the evolution of Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East during the Cold War. The first phase from the PRC’s establishment in 1949 until 1968 was shaped by two core factors: Beijing’s evolving ideological positioning vis-à-vis both superpowers (i.e., the US and Soviet Union) and its desire to have New China recognized as the legitimate government of China to the detriment of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in Taiwan. The subsequent 1969–89 period was in turn defined by the intensification of Sino-Soviet tension and ultimately Sino-US rapprochement, which resulted in a restructuring of Beijing’s foreign policy in the Middle East away from revolutionary states and movements toward US allies and/or Soviet adversaries. Ultimately, China’s approach 166

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to the Middle East during the Cold War, as Enrico Fardella has argued, “was a function of antihegemonic struggle more than heroic product of revolutionary solidarity”, and the importance of the region rested on its impact on global developments that directly affected Beijing’s core interests.13 Thus, Beijing’s engagement in the region, whether framed through the ideological strictures of Mao’s “Three Worlds” construct of the 1960s or the overt opposition to “Soviet socialist imperialism” of the 1970s, “can be seen as a mere defensive posture for the sake of China’s own security”.14 It should also be noted here as well that during the Cold War the Uyghur issue remained marginal in the context of China’s foreign policy. This was due to three major factors: (1) the initially close Sino-Soviet ties during the 1950s, (2) the subsequent international isolation of China during the 1960s at the height of Maoist radicalism, and (3) a general lack of knowledge about Xinjiang and the Uyghur.15 In fact, the issue of Uyghur separatism was largely a function of Beijing’s relationship with Moscow. While the immediate post-1949 years of Sino-Soviet comity ensured that the issue effectively disappeared from the international spotlight, the souring of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s provided Moscow with the opportunity to meddle.16 However, the gradual improvement in Sino-Soviet relations by the mid-to-late 1980s saw Moscow ultimately shelve such efforts to undermine Chinese control in Xinjiang. Beyond this, China’s relative international isolation and its championing of national liberation movements in the Third World also made it very difficult for Uyghur exiles to gain significant traction for their cause.17 For these reasons, the Uyghur and Xinjiang issues were never truly embedded into the prevailing Cold War geopolitical divides. The trend toward a more pragmatic Chinese foreign policy line evident after Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to the leadership of the CCP in 1978 was accelerated by the effect of major domestic and international developments at the close of the 1980s. Domestically, the June 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre made Beijing the target of international opprobrium and of Western-led economic sanctions. In the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen, Beijing found itself isolated diplomatically to an extent it had not been since the early years of the PRC. Internationally, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 (and the subsequent Persian Gulf crisis) and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had an enormous impact on China’s foreign policy writ large. In the short term, China recognized the former as an opportunity to reverse its post-Tiananmen isolation through support for a US-led multilateral response. However, China’s perceptions of the longer-term implications of these twin developments were not as sanguine. With respect to the former, Beijing had to balance its desire to break out of the post-Tiananmen diplomatic isolation with the ideological and diplomatic positions it had taken in the Middle East from the late 1970s onward. The collapse of the Soviet Union simultaneously removed a pillar of the “strategic triangle” that Beijing had structured much of its foreign policy around since the late 1960s. A US-led resolution (peaceful or otherwise) to the crisis in the Persian Gulf and its emergence as the sole remaining superpower augured a “new world order” characterized by American predominance. With respect to the Gulf crisis, Beijing needed to resolve one major immediate dilemma: would it jettison its ideological and rhetorical commitment to the Third World in order to rehabilitate its standing as a major power after Tiananmen? The foreign policy line that Beijing took during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), for example, had been one of neutrality based on the logic of the Three Worlds theory (i.e., that conflict amongst Third World states only benefited the hegemony of the superpowers). Acquiescing to US-led military action against Iraq by not exercising its veto power in the UN Security Council thus ran the risk of undermining decades of diplomatic rhetoric in the Middle East. Beijing’s solution to this puzzle was to pursue two tracks. First, it simultaneously designated Iraq as an opportunistic “little hegemonist” that had 167

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taken advantage of the waning of the bipolar international order to pursue territorial aggrandizement and the US as a “big hegemonist” reasserting itself as “the predominant superpower”.18 Second, Beijing voted in favor of the first 11 UN resolutions that condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait but abstained from the 12th – UN Resolution 678 – on 29 November 1990, which set a deadline for Iraqi withdrawal and authorized UN members to adopt necessary measures (including force) to restore peace.19 This approach was guided not only by Beijing’s concern to protect its self-cultivated image in the Middle East (and throughout the Third World) but also by a desire to ensure that in the emerging “new world order” the UN would not be used “as a tool to interfere in regional affairs around the world or in other countries domestic affairs by the use of force”.20 From Beijing’s perspective, such “world order” anxieties proved to be justified as the Soviet Union collapsed and the US military displayed its harnessing of the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) against Iraq in 1991.21 The former demonstrated for Deng Xiaoping the necessity of simultaneously maintaining firm one-party rule and economic “reform and opening”, while the latter underlined for China’s military strategists the technological gap between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the US military.22 In this context, regime survival was now the pre-eminent concern of the CCP and had an immediate effect on China’s foreign policy. In order to achieve Deng’s goal of coupling one-party rule with continued “reform and opening”, China required a stable international environment. While prior to the Soviet collapse and the First Gulf War, China hoped that “multipolarization” would come to characterize international politics, the emergence of US unipolarity required a pragmatic foreign policy focused on developing multiple regional and global linkages to accelerate economic growth, resolve long-standing disputes with neighbors, and combat the perceived ill effects of continued US predominance.23 The prioritization of continued economic growth and international stability also significantly shaped China’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Indeed, Wu Bingbing has characterized China’s approach to the region for much of the 1990s as guided by the maxim “detached generally and involved appropriately” (zong ti chao tuo, shi dang can yu).24 In practice, this amounted to a strategy that acquiesced to constraints placed on Chinese freedom of action by American predominance in the Middle East. Thus, “detached generally” entailed that Beijing would “reach a compromise” with the US “on positions Washington resolutely opposed” in the region and “be tolerant about issues which did not threaten China’s core national interests”. Being “involved appropriately”, in contrast, suggested that Beijing would seize on those situations or issues that did not immediately conflict with American interests in order to advance its own core national interests.25 This did not, however, excise the ideological framing of China’s foreign policy. Rather, the continuation of American primacy in the Middle East was conceived of as a core obstacle to Beijing’s ability to build on the diplomatic inroads it had made in the 1980s and informed its “anti-hegemonist” foreign policy rhetoric throughout the 1990s.26 The interaction of Beijing’s prioritization of continued economic “reform and opening”, recognition of continued American predominance, and ideological commitment to “anti-hegemomism” crucially informed what many observers perceived as its core foreign policy interests in the region: the quest for energy security, arms sales, and consolidation of relationships with a number of “rogue” regimes.27 Chinese arms sales in the Middle East, as noted previously, had grown throughout the 1980s and been driven by a mixture of economic, strategic, and defense modernization incentives. Throughout the 1990s, while this incentive structure arguably persisted, the balance gradually shifted in favor of strategic considerations related to Chinese perceptions of their utility in shaping the regional balance of power. Finally, China’s relationships with a variety of 168

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Middle Eastern regimes identified by Washington (and others) as “rogue states” (e.g., Iran) most clearly demonstrated the interplay of this incentive structure. China’s successful post-1978 economic reforms had by the beginning of the 1990s resulted in a surge in demand for energy, outstripping the country’s domestic output. China became a net oil importer in 1993. The Middle East, accounting for 64%t of proven oil reserves, thus assumed pivotal importance in this context, and by 1996 the region accounted for half of all China’s oil imports.28 Chinese anxieties regarding this increasing dependence throughout the 1990s was exacerbated by two perceived qualities of the Middle East – that it was both geopolitically volatile and dominated by the US. For some Chinese observers, the US role in the First Gulf War, and the subsequent sanctions regime against Iraq, was in large measure driven by Washington’s desire to embed American hegemony as “who controls the oil resources of this region controls the lifeblood of the world”.29 Of more direct importance to China’s own national security, increasing reliance on the seaborne importation meant that Beijing could be exposed to the preponderance of US naval power in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in the event of a Sino-US conflict. These inter-related concerns fed into Chinese efforts to access and/or acquire new sources of supply throughout the Middle East. Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, together holding approximately 70% of the region’s oil, in particular emerged as particular targets for Chinese efforts.30 China’s approach towards both Iraq and Iran clearly demonstrated the logic of the “detached generally and involved appropriately” formulation. After the First Gulf War, both Iraq and Iran were subject to the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations’ strategy of “dual containment”. Both Baghdad and Tehran were perceived by Washington as threats to regional stability via their authoritarianism, support for international terrorism, and their efforts to acquire ballistic missile and/or weapons of mass destruction (WMD).31 With respect to Iraq, China for most of the 1990s adopted a position whereby it simultaneously urged Iraq to comply with relevant UN resolutions vis-à-vis the dismantlement of its WMD programs and criticized the economic sanctions regime as unduly punishing the Iraqi people.32 Beijing’s concern here was twofold: (1) it did not wish the UN to emerge as a vehicle for upholding American hegemony and (2) the sanctions regime inhibited its ability to access Iraqi oil reserves. This linkage was most overtly displayed in the latter part of the decade, when Chinese investment in a number of Iraqi oil fields were jeopardized by Iraqi obstruction of UNSCOM inspectors and Washington’s threat of military action in 1997–98.33 China’s relationship with Iran, as noted previously, had developed considerably in the 1980s as a result of Tehran’s anti-Sovietism and its demand for Chinese arms during its war with Iraq. Sino-Iranian relations were subsequently deepened through the 1990s via Beijing’s perception of Iran as a reliable source of energy, a customer for Chinese arms sales, and a staunch pillar of anti-Americanism in the region.34 With respect to the former, there was a clear complementarity of interests regarding energy security: Beijing’s quest to diversify sources of supply and Tehran’s fear that Western sanctions would choke off Iranian exports.35 China’s two largest energy companies – China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Sinopec – undertook negotiations from 1995 onward for joint prospecting, exploration, and production arrangements with Iranian entities. However, in a further display of the “detached generally and involved appropriately” formulation, China “was careful not to allow its companies to take the lead in oil cooperation with Iran less they become targets of US sanctions”.36 Indeed, it would not be until 2004 that CNPC and Sinopec would conclude their own major oil and natural gas acquisitions and investments in Iran.37 Throughout the 1990s, arms transfers – including ballistic missile and nuclear-related ­technology – rather than the energy relationship per se were often seen as the most significant 169

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aspect of Sino-Iranian relations. China, as noted previously, had been a major arms supplier to Iran during its war with Iraq. This relationship continued into the 1990s with arms sales constituting “an average of 50 per cent of total Iranian civilian imports during the ten years after the [Iran-Iraq] war”.38 China transferred a variety of weapons and materiel, including anti-ship missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, transport aircraft, and fighter aircraft. It also engaged in the transfer of potential dual-use nuclear technology to Tehran – from supply of uranium isotopes to designs for uranium enrichment facilities – that became an especial irritant in Beijing’s relationship with Washington throughout the 1990s.39 While such activities were viewed by Washington as not only detrimental to its policy of “dual containment” but also global nonproliferation efforts, Beijing perceived Iran’s nuclear program as a “response to US sanctions” and “efforts to overthrow the IRI regime and threats of attack on Iran”.40 China’s relationship with Iran in the 1990s was driven not only by pragmatic concerns visà-vis energy security or desire for economic linkages (important though each of these were) but also by Beijing’s overarching strategic goal in the Middle East to indirectly balance American predominance via strengthening Washington’s long-standing regional antagonists. This was consistent with China’s overall foreign policy throughout the 1990s, which was guided by the perception that the international environment was in fact characterized by a “one superpower, many great powers” (yichaoduoqiang) formulation that simultaneously recognized both China’s own rising power and the constraints placed on the exercise of that power by continuing US primacy.41 China’s posture was adequately captured in President Jiang Zemin’s own ­16-character formulation for the country’s foreign policy: “enhance confidence, decrease difficulty, promote cooperation and avoid confrontation” (zengjia xinren, jianshao mafan, fazhan hezuo, bugao duikang).42 The accuracy of this formulation was underlined by Chinese perceptions of Washington’s leading role in the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which, according to one Chinese analyst, demonstrated that Washington would “contain, besiege, and even launch preemptive military strikes against any country which dares to defy the US world hegemony or which has constituted a latent challenge to the United States”.43

A period of strategic opportunity: China in the Middle East from 9/11 to the Arab Spring The events of 9/11 intervened at this juncture to usher in a further phase in China’s approach to the Middle East. Some Western observers suggested that 9/11 could serve as a “circuit breaker” for Sino-US ties, whereby Beijing and Washington could find common ground for limited security cooperation in combating international terrorism.44 This assessment was given some weight by a number of early post-9/11 developments such as China’s support for the US invasion of Afghanistan and acquiescence to the establishment of major US military presence in Central Asia. Simultaneously, however, the dominant view of Chinese observers was that Washington’s insertion into Central Asia/Afghanistan would in fact accentuate rather than attenuate the constraints imposed on China by American global primacy. Washington, from this view, would simply seek “to take the advantage of anti-terrorism” to dominate Central and South Asia and “promote its plan of pushing for a unipolar world”.45 The subsequent US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 also did little to dispel this interpretation.46 However, a more optimistic scenario was also expressed by some Chinese observers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He Dalong, for example, suggested in 2002 that US intervention in Afghanistan and its “global war on terrorism” would ensure “the tip of the US spear is not all pointed at China” and that this would provide China with “a rare opportunity for us to concentrate on economic construction and create beneficial international and neighboring 170

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environments”.47 By 2004–05 as it became evident that the US was becoming bogged down in a spiraling insurgency in Iraq, and the view that the invasion had been a hubristic strategic misstep from Washington took root. Former Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen, for instance, argued in 2005 that the invasion had been an “optional war” driven by the “neo-unilateralism” of the “Bush doctrine” rather than by any threat posed by Iraq to American interests and security. For Qian, “The philosophy of the “Bush Doctrine” is, in essence . . . that the US should rule over the whole world with overwhelming force” and that this demonstrated a “Cold War mentality” of attempting to deal with “visible and invisible threats” by military means.48 This assessment that the unilateralism of the Bush administration provided China with a “strategic opportunity” played a major role in shaping China’s evolving foreign policy line throughout the remainder of the 2000s. It clearly informed China’s diplomacy under President Hu Jintao, where much emphasis was placed on the assertion that China’s core goal was to ensure its “peaceful rise/development” rather than to challenge American hegemony. The essence of “peaceful rise”, as articulated by one of the concept’s architects, Zheng Bijian, was that China would “independently” build “socialism with Chinese characteristics, while participating in rather than detaching from economic globalization”.49 Concern amongst China’s leadership that the term “rise” was unnecessarily provocative ultimately resulted in the term being shelved. Its replacement by the more anodyne term “peaceful development” in 2006 did not, however, alter the essence of the strategy. Indeed, Premier Wen Jiabao asserted in 2007 that a posture of “peaceful development” would send “a clear message to the world that China will achieve its development mainly through its own efforts” and mitigate “misgivings in the international community that China is bound to engage in external plundering and expansion when it reaches a certain stage of development”.50 This rationale was also evident in President Hu’s subsequent “harmonious world” rhetoric, in which harmony signified “the importance of the coexistence of diversified civilizations” and “consultation among all of the countries involved, rather than unilateralism driven by hegemonic ambitions”.51 The events of 9/11 also created a strategic opportunity for China to portray its struggle against Uyghur separatism in Xinjiang as part of the wider “war on terror”. This was an opportunity that Beijing immediately seized on through the release of an official white paper in 2002 on the extent of the “terrorist” threat in Xinjiang across the 1990–2001 period. This document identified the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a group China claimed was based in Afghanistan and directly supported by al Qaeda, as responsible for over 140 “terrorist incidents” in Xinjiang.52 While there has been little concrete evidence that ETIM ever mounted successful attacks in Xinjiang during that time, it is clear that the group had a limited presence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan from the late 1990s. Despite its apparent lack of operational success, ETIM’s presence in Afghanistan convinced the Bush administration to officially list the group as an “international terrorist” organization late in 2002. ETIM, after the US invasion of Afghanistan, retreated to Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier where its leader, Hasan Mahsum, was ultimately killed during a Pakistani military operation in October 2003.53 The question of China’s potential repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang in the name of the war on terror, however, tended to be overshadowed in the Middle East at this juncture. China’s continued enmeshment in economic globalization and the normative emphasis on the “coexistence of diversified civilizations” contrasted it favorably with many Middle Eastern states’ perceptions of the American agenda in the region. China emerged here not only as a major economic partner but also as a potential geopolitical counter-weight to the unilateralism of the Bush administration.54 Indeed, China’s diplomatic posture after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that promoted “stability” not only starkly contrasted it with its Maoist iteration of the 1960s that “thrived on instability” but also underscored an apparent switching of roles between Washington and 171

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Beijing.55 Of course, Beijing’s desire for stability in both the specific regional context of the Middle East and the broader global environment was driven by purely self-interested motives. In the global context, stability was deemed vital for the continued economic development of the PRC, whilst in the Middle East stability was a precondition for continued Chinese access to the region’s energy resources and other economic opportunities. The establishment of stronger economic linkages to the region also served as an entry point for Beijing for the development of broader relationships with a number of key states. A good example of the effects of this dynamic was the deepening of the Sino-Saudi relationship after 2003. Although Sino-Saudi ties had been officially normalized in 1990, it was not until the end of that decade that relations began to intensify. Of prime importance here was China’s burgeoning demand for oil and Saudi Arabia’s desire to hedge against the potential of declining American demand. In 1999, during an official visit to Riyadh, Chinese President Jiang Zemin announced the beginning of a Sino-Saudi “strategic oil partnership” under which “Saudi Arabia agreed to open much of its domestic oil and gas market to Chinese investment with the exception of upstream oil production and exploration” in exchange for China opening “its downstream sector to Saudi investment with special emphasis on upgrading China’s existing refineries”.56 A major outcome of this agreement was the penetration of China’s state-owned oil companies into Saudi Arabia with, for instance, Sinopec signing a deal in 2004 to jointly develop with Aramco (Saudi state-owned oil company) to develop a “38,800km concession in the Gahwar “Block B” fields located in the North of the Rub Al-Khali”.57 Sino-Saudi energy ties, as John Calabrese noted, were thus a “natural fit” not only due to the fact that “China’s search for supply security has risen to the highest level of priority in terms of statecraft and commercial activity” but also because the Saudis were “eager not just to lock in a long-term oil supply relationship with China, but also to expand their sales of refined products and to gain access to the Chinese retail gas market”.58 This “mutual attraction” contributed to China becoming, by the second half of the 2000s, the largest market for Saudi oil, importing 26.33 million tons of crude in 2007, 36.37 million tons in 2008, and 41.86 million tons in 2009. This latter figure in fact made China the largest importer of Saudi oil in the world.59 The energy relationship also provided an entry point for the development of greater economic, political, and diplomatic engagement. Economically, the 2000s saw an expansion of the relationship beyond the energy sector, with some 140 Chinese companies operating in Saudi Arabia by the close of the decade across the construction, communications, and infrastructure sectors of the economy.60 Bilateral trade meanwhile reached a high point of some US$43.18 billion in 2010.61 Political and diplomatic engagement also achieved some milestones in this period, with King Abdullah, for example, making the first official visit in January 2006 to Beijing by a Saudi king since the normalization of relations. President Hu Jintao subsequently reciprocated, visiting Riyadh in April 2006, concluding a number of accords and expanding bilateral economic cooperation with respect to energy, mining, health care, and a US$1.8billion public works agreement for the China Railway Construction Corporation to build a high-speed rail link between Mecca and Medina.62 Further high-level visits by then Vice President Xi Jinping in June 2008 and President Hu in February 2009 reaffirmed the momentum of the bilateral economic relationship.63 The bilateral security relationship, in contrast, was one area where greater depth proved elusive. As noted in the previous section, Saudi Arabia’s purchase of CSS-2 ballistic missiles from China in the late 1980s generated significant headlines and speculation that Beijing would become a major player in the Middle East arms market. Initially, such speculation appeared warranted as the region emerged by the mid-1990s as “Beijing’s largest and most lucrative weapons export market, accounting for over 50 percent of China’s deliveries” with principal customers 172

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in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, and Saudi Arabia purchasing “a wide variety of weapons to Middle Eastern countries including artillery, supersonic aircraft, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), anti-ship missiles (ASMs), and some surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs)”.64 Such an upward trend was however undercut by the demonstration of the technological superiority of US weaponry during both the First Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo intervention vis-à-vis Chinese-made alternatives and China’s increasing commitment throughout the 1990s to various non-proliferation agreements such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).65 While there has since then periodically been speculation of further Saudi interest in acquisition of advanced Chinese ballistic missile systems such as the DF-21, the only significant confirmed arms sale in the late 2000s was the conclusion of a contract for China to supply Saudi Arabia with 54 PLZ-45 155mm self-propelled howitzers in 2007.66 The key stumbling blocks to deeper Sino-Saudi ties in this context were (and remain) twofold: (1) Beijing is neither willing nor able to provide the Kingdom with the security commitments that Washington can; and (2) the continued development of Sino-Iranian ties.67 China’s approach to post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan also provided examples of the relative weight Beijing placed on its geopolitical and economic priorities in the Middle East. As noted earlier, China viewed the deposing of Saddam Hussein as a war of choice designed to embed American hegemony in the Middle East. As the US became bogged down in Iraq after 2003, however, it became clear that this cloud had a silver lining as far as Beijing was concerned because it (a) diverted US power and attention away from China, (b) irritated long-standing US alliance relationships, (c) stretched US military capabilities, (d) placed major financial strain on the US economy, and (e) eroded American “soft power”.68 Additionally, China leveraged its strategic approach to energy security to develop a major role and presence in Iraq’s post-Saddam oil industry. Here, China’s state-owned oil corporations, such as China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), have been prepared to wear the Iraqi government’s strict contract terms in order to lock in access and supply.69 As a former Pentagon official remarked to the New York Times in 2013, “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply”.70 In Afghanistan, meanwhile, China’s immediate security concerns and interests have been at the forefront of its arm’s-length engagement with the post-2001 order there. For Beijing, the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and root out al Qaeda was a contradictory development. On the one hand, it promised to remove both a source of instability on its western frontier and a safe haven for Uyghur militants from Xinjiang, whereas on the other hand, the insertion of a major American military presence into Afghanistan and a number of the Central Asian republics held the potential to weaken China’s position in Central Asia. Indeed, prior to 9/11 the perceived threat posed by the Taliban to China and the Central Asian states had played a major role in the solidification the China-led security multilateralism of the Shanghai Five (S-5) grouping of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in 1996 and its subsequent transformation into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2000.71 While China’s core concern for the security of its long-restive province of Xinjiang drove its agenda to have the S-5 and then the SCO focus on combating the “three evils” of “separatism, extremism and terrorism”, it also prompted it to deal directly with the Taliban. Beijing, via the intermediary of its long-time ally Pakistan, sought the Taliban’s cooperation in stemming the flow of heroin into Xinjiang, the trafficking of which the Chinese authorities asserted was helping to fund Uyghur extremists” there.72 Such was China’s concern on this front that Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s representative in Pakistan, reported in his autobiography that China’s then ambassador to Pakistan, Lu Shulin, met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar 173

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in Kandahar in December 2000 to obtain assurances regarding the harboring of Uyghur militants.73 According to Zaeef, Omar offered the ambassador the assurance that the Taliban “would not allow any group to use its territory” to conduct any such attacks on China, in return for Beijing’s recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and its assistance to blunt any potential UN sanctions against the regime.74 After the US and NATO removed the Taliban from Kabul in 2001–02, China adopted an aloof approach characterized by limited engagement in the economic sphere and a categorical refusal to become directly involved in the security sphere. This was dictated by a conflicted mindset that simultaneously viewed the containment of the Taliban as a positive for the security of Xinjiang but the presence of the US and NATO forces as a potential threat to the geopolitical thrust of its post–Cold War foreign policy in Central Asia. Andrew Small neatly captured the effects of this on mindset Chinese policy for the bulk of the 2000s when he argued that: China wanted neither a Western victory that might entrench a US military presence in its backyard, nor a Taliban victory that would pose risks to Xinjiang and the wider region. As a result, its financial and political contributions to Afghanistan were at best tokenistic, the minimum necessary to avoid alienating anyone.75 This calculus did not fundamentally change until US and NATO withdrawal from the country loomed as incoming US president Barack Obama undertook a review of Washington’s strategy between 2009 and 2011. Such a prospect presented Beijing with a dilemma: it would not only remove US military and political influence along its western flank but also simultaneously create the potential for Afghanistan to once more become a safe haven for radical Islamists. The former was viewed as a broadly positive development for China’s foreign policy agenda in Central Asia, whereas the latter raised the possibility of Uyghur militants using Afghanistan as a base from which to attack not only Xinjiang but also Chinese interests throughout the region. The inter-play of these considerations shaped Beijing’s approach to Afghanistan for most of the 2001–2011 period. China’s concerns regarding the potential security implications for Xinjiang after a US and NATO withdrawal contributed to a pragmatic political approach to relations with both Kabul and the Taliban. Beijing continued its pre-9/11 approach of “talking to the Taliban” by seeking assurances from the group’s leadership council in exile in Pakistan, the Quetta Shura.76 This was driven by Beijing’s judgment that the Taliban would remain a core political actor in the country and that its goals remain limited primarily to Afghanistan, and as such they posed no direct threat to Xinjiang. Indeed, prominent Chinese analyst, Zhao Huasheng, noted “China is not opposed to the organisation but is instead opposed to terrorism, separatism and extremism”.77 The elucidation of the Obama administration’s “Af-Pak” strategy prompted debate in Beijing about what this might mean for Chinese interests with the PLA, perceiving it as a strategy to embed US military bases and forces in the country for the “long haul”, while the Ministry for Foreign Affairs detected the shifting political winds in the US in favor of the ultimate withdrawal of US forces.78 The former view prevailed, and Beijing remained largely unresponsive to US requests for cooperation with respect to Af-Pak issues, such as entreaties to assist the US in developing alternatives to the increasingly fragile supply routes via Pakistan for the delivery of materiel to US and NATO forces.79 However, as the Obama administration’s staged withdrawal of its “surge” troops began in mid-2011, “Chinese officials . . . were using different language to talk about the prospect of the withdrawal of the US troops: instead of asking when it would happen, they started expressing concern that the United States should not leave too hastily”.80 174

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China, the Arab Spring, and after: toward an “active and constructive” posture in the Middle East? China, along with most of the other major external actors in the Middle East, was caught flatfooted by the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolutions throughout the region from late 2010 onwards. Beginning in Tunisia in December 2010, and ultimately spreading to Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, the Arab Spring overthrew or challenged long-standing authoritarian regimes. Anti-regime protests and movements in each of these cases, as Raymond Hinnebusch has remarked, produced varying outcomes including “state failure and civil war in Syria”, “ ‘restoration’ of a hybrid regime” in Egypt, and “democratic transition” in Tunisia.81 While the US engaged in a “juggling act” to decide whether and how to support or walk away from longterm allies such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak simultaneous with concerns regarding the ultimate allegiances and security implications (for the US) of their potential replacements,82 the Arab Spring presented China too with significant challenges. Specifically, the uprisings posed political, economic, and geopolitical challenges to China’s approach to the region. Politically, the overthrow of long-standing authoritarian regimes through popular uprisings raised the specter of potential flow-on effects for the CCP’s position (e.g., prospects of a so-called Jasmine Revolution).83 Economically, the Arab Spring increased potential risks to Chinese economic and trade investments throughout the region.84 Geopolitically, meanwhile, the uprisings gave both renewed impetus to regional power struggles and demonstrated the “exceptional permeability” of the Arab states by “a pan-Arab/Islamic public sphere”, which “reopened contests over identity rooted in substate, state and suprastate loyalties”.85 The former dynamic – perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the intervention of multiple competing external actors in the Syrian war – suggested the waning ability and willingness of the US to play a stabilizing role in the region, whereas the latter (including the rise of the Islamic State) held the potential to fundamentally remake the modern states system in the region.86 Strategically, China, as we have seen, had invested considerable effort into consolidating relationships with a number of key states in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt. Additionally, its focus on the maintenance of political, economic, and strategic “stability” made it inherently uncomfortable with the prospect of rapid regime change – peaceful or otherwise – throughout the region.87 Politically, for instance, Beijing initially supported the status quo by supporting the regimes of Presidents Ben Ali and Mubarak in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively, until they were removed. The Arab Spring and its aftermath also posed a number of problems to what one might term China’s narrow and broad security interests in the Middle East. In the narrow context, the prospect of the Uyghur issue becoming a topic of debate within the “panArab/Islamic public sphere”, and a complicating factor in China’s relations with the region, was also seen by Beijing as major potential challenge.88 Beijing’s broader security interest in stability meanwhile was undermined not only by events within the region but also by what it perceived as the meddlesome role of the US. For Beijing, as Jin Liangxiang of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies has argued, “China is a victim of regional instability as a result of the US’ reckless military actions and presence”.89 Economically, instability throughout the Middle East after the Arab Spring has constituted a threat not only to China’s energy security, with the country now importing nearly half of its oil from the region, but also to the security and safety of Chinese investments and nationals throughout the region.90 It has been China’s approach to the crises in Libya and Syria, however, that has been most emblematic of the manner in which its geopolitical, economic, and security interests have become increasingly entwined with the Middle East. Moreover, this entwinement 175

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has stimulated a reformulation of Beijing’s approach toward what it defines as an “active and constructive” one in the region.91 China’s response to the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi was defined by two major issues. First, the US and its NATO allies, France and Great Britain, gradual movement towards military intervention against the Qaddafi regime challenged a cornerstone of China’s global diplomatic posture. Beijing’s ultimate abstention from UN Security Council Resolution 1973 paved the way for NATO military intervention, raising doubts about the sanctity of Beijing’s principle of “non-interference”, upon which it had built much of its diplomatic successes since the end of the Cold War.92 Domestically, this episode also suggested that the rulers in Zhongnanhai had compromised core principles and acquiesced too quickly to Western pressure.93 However, Beijing’s decision to abstain was also influenced by perceived reputational costs of using its veto. China’s UN ambassador Li Baodong stated that China’s decision was in part motivated by the fact that while it was opposed to military intervention, it also “attached great importance to the requests of the Arab League and the African Union”, who supported Resolution 1973.94 Second, the NATO-led military intervention against Libyan government forces, which ultimately enabled Libyan rebels to overthrow Qaddafi, constituted a threat to the security of Chinese economic interests – to the tune of some $18 billion worth of investments in the infrastructure and energy sectors – and some 36,000 citizens in the country. While Beijing could do little immediately to protect its economic stake in Libya, it acted promptly to evacuate its citizens, dispatching the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) frigate Xuzhou into the Mediterranean Sea to assist.95 This, as Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson remarked, represented a demonstration of “Beijing’s growing capability to conduct long-range operations that it was both incapable of doing, and unwilling to do, only a decade ago”.96 Diplomatically, however, Libya demonstrated the limits of a non-intervention approach in a period of rapid expansion of Chinese interests in the Middle East. As Douglas Paal argued, ‘regional unity left Beijing with no place to hide’, and as a result ‘having failed to find diplomatic cover, China had to go along’ to the detriment of its rhetorical commitment to non-interference.97 While China’s repeated anti-interventionist declarations vis-à-vis Syria have been in part a direct result of Beijing’s perception of being “hoodwinked” in Libya,98 they have also been significantly affected by its assessment of the geopolitical balance in the region. Most importantly, China has ‘reached a strategic understanding’ with Russia to ‘constrain and balance the United States and minimize its ability to impose solutions on Middle East problems’.99 This has been demonstrated by Beijing and Moscow’s joint vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions in October 2011 and February 2012 that sought to condemn the Assad regime and Beijing’s vocal opposition to any US-led air strike on Damascus in retaliation for its alleged use of chemical weapons in August 2013.100 China’s muted response to Russia’s military intervention in support of Damascus in particular suggests that its commitment to the principle of non-intervention – so prominent in the lead-up to NATO-led intervention in Libya – is no longer absolute. As the Russian military began airstrikes in Syria, an editorial in China Daily opined that Moscow’s intervention was a ‘sensible strategic move’ that could ‘strengthen its image as a responsible stakeholder’ in combatting ISIS extremists. Moscow’s coordination of its strikes with Syrian government forces, it continued, would also make Russian’s efforts ‘more efficient and precise’ than those of the US-led coalition.101 Finally, the regional and international dimensions of China’s struggle against Uyghur separatism and terrorism in Xinjiang were also brought into starker focus by the Syrian crisis and the rise of ISIS. In 2013 China’s then Middle East envoy, Wu Sike, claimed that hundreds of Uyghurs were traveling to Syria, usually via Turkey, to fight with various anti-Assad groups. Claims of links between radicalized Uyghurs and the Syrian chaos have periodically resurfaced since then, 176

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including in connection to the Erawan Shrine bombing in Bangkok on 18 August 2018, in which a number of suspects arrested by Thai police were found to be traveling on Chinese and Turkish passports. Most recently, claims have been made that the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a group China has blamed for recent terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, has a battlefield presence in Syria and is aligned with al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.102 China has seized on this as proof that Uyghur terrorism in Xinjiang is ‘spiritually supported and commanded by foreign terrorist organizations’ and as a means to attack the West for its “double standard”, whereby ‘only terror attacks in their countries are acts of terror, while the killings against civilians in China are resistance with just cause’.103 This, as James Leibold has noted, underlines that terrorism in China, as both a concept and a rhetorical device, is about securing and legitimizing Chinese rule over the troubled regions of Xinjiang and Tibet . . . rather than any global scourge on humanity as Xi Jinping and other Chinese officials would now have us believe.104 This narrowly focused calculus, in tandem with Beijing’s wider geopolitical goal of balancing the US, also explains Beijing’s shifting position vis-à-vis the Assad regime in 2016. Whilst China has been one of the few powers to have maintained an embassy in Damascus throughout the crisis, Beijing’s engagements have until quite recently been fairly limited and mostly focused on the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MFA) attempts at inserting themselves into the peace process and occasional concerns around individual nationals who appear on the battlefield – a dynamic that has included visits to Beijing of Syrian opposition figures105 and the appointment of a Special Envoy to Syria, Xie Xiaoyan, in April 2016.106 This diplomatic focus was also augmented by a greater consideration of provision of Chinese military assistance to Damascus. On 14 August 2016, PLAN Rear Admiral Guan Youfei, Director of the Office of International Military Cooperation of the Central Military Commission (CMC), visited the Syrian capital, reportedly meeting with senior military officials and Russian officers, as well as pledging that the Chinese military would provide training for the country’s medical staff.107 Such steps suggest that Beijing may now have arrived at the conclusion that supporting Assad (or at least preventing his removal) is the most viable option to effectively combat the growth of TIP.

Conclusion: “Crossing the River While Feeling for the Stones”? Thus, while it is apparent that China is becoming more active in defense of its interests in the Middle East than has been the case in the past, the question remains as to how constructive it can, or is willing, to be? According to Jin Liangxiang, China’s constructive approach to the Middle East has been demonstrated in three core areas: as ‘a major economic contributor’, as a ‘low profile mediator’, and as a ‘provider of security public goods’.108 Evidence cited in support of this claim includes China’s (unsuccessful) efforts to broker a peaceful resolution to enduring conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria, Chinese participation in UN peacekeeping operations in Lebanon and Sudan, and Chinese anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. While such efforts may appear tokenistic and not commensurate with China’s growing power and economic and strategic footprint, they nonetheless represent a major advance on previous Chinese policy that viewed such activities as not only beyond its capabilities but as a cause of instability in the region. Now, as China’s actions and its release in January 2016 of its Arab Policy White Paper109 demonstrate, China perceives that its own approach to the Middle East can contribute positively to stability in the region. President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – that seeks to build and enhance trans-Eurasian economic connectivity 177

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to link the Chinese economy with those of Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe – is envisaged as playing a major role in framing China’s engagement with the region.110 For China, much of the unrest and instability in the Middle East has been caused by two major factors: the interventions of external powers (e.g., the US) and uneven economic development.111 BRI, in Beijing’s conception at least, is its contribution to mitigating these two factors. President Xi, for instance, during his February 2016 official Middle East tour, asserted that China’s promotion of BRI is not concerned with ‘seeking any sphere of influence, looking for proxies or trying to fill any power vacuum’ but with ‘building a cooperative partnership network for mutual benefit’.112 This is an ambitious and perhaps unrealistic goal in a region that has long compelled external powers to “take sides” in regional conflicts.113 China’s commitment to this balancing act between defense of its core strategic, security, and economic interests and broader diplomatic positioning in the Middle East now, however, appears entrenched. Yao Kuangyi of the China Institute for International Studies has thus characterized China’s contemporary approach as based on ‘the principle of being active . . . neither belittling itself nor behaving haughtily’.114 Thus, despite all the change in the Chinese approach to the Middle East since the end of the Cold War, such a description bears the imprint of the Chinese aphorism that is supposedly oft-cited by former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, of “crossing the river while feeling for the stones”.

Notes 1 David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10–12. 2 Peter Van Ness, “China as a Third World State: Foreign Policy and Official National Identity,” in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim eds., China’s Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 202. 3 For example, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1979); and John Mearshiemer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). 4 See Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51 (October 1998): 144–172; and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Steven E. Lobell and Norrin M. Ripsman, Neoclassical Realism, the State and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5 John Kurt Jacobsen, “Are All Politics Domestic? Perspectives on the Integration of Comparative Politics and International Relations Theories,” Comparative Politics 29, no. 1 (1996): 93–115. 6 Eckhart Kehr, Economic Interest, Militarism and Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 23. 7 Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 92. 8 Nicholas Kitchen, “Systemic Pressures and Domestic Ideas: A Neoclassical Realist Model of Grand Strategy Formation,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 152. Emphasis added. 9 Kuik Cheng-Chwee, “Explaining the Contradiction in China’s South China Sea Policy: Structural Drivers and Domestic Imperatives,” China: An International Journal 15, no. 1 (2017): 167–168. 10 Yitzhak Shichor, The Middle East in China’s Foreign Policy, 1949–1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1–2. 11 Ibid., 16–19. For Mao’s formulation, see “Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds is a Major Contribution to Marxism-Leninism,” Renmin Ribao 1 (November 1977). www. marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/theory-3-worlds/index.htm. 12 See Van Ness, “China as a Third World State,” 200; and Samuel S. Kim, “China and the Third World: In Search of a Peace and Development Line,” in Samuel S. Kim ed., China and the World: New Directions in Chinese Foreign Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 148. 13 Enrico Fardella, “China’s Debate on the Middle East and North Africa: A Critical Review,” Mediterranean Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2015): 8. 1 4 Ibid.

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China’s foray into the Middle East 15 For detailed discussion of the impact of the Uyghur issue on China’s foreign policy, see Michael Clarke, “The Impact Ethnic Minorities on China’s Foreign Policy: The Case of the Xinjiang and the Uyghur,” China Report 53, no. 1 (2017): 1–25; and Yitzhak Shicor, “Limping on Two Legs: Uyghur Diaspora Organizations and the Prospects for Eastern Turkestan Independence,” Central Asia and the Caucasus 48, no. 6 (2007). 16 Roostam Sadri, “The Islamic Republic of East Turkestan: A Commemorative Review,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 5, no. 2 (1984): 294–319; and Ablet Kamalov, “Uyghurs in the Central Asian Republics: Past and Present,” in Colin Mackerras and Michael Clarke., eds. China, Xinjiang and Central Asia: History, Transition and Crossborder Interaction into the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2009), 117–125. For example, when around 60,000 Uyghurs and Kazakhs fled Xinjiang for Soviet Kazakhstan in 1962 due to famine and persecution, Moscow attempted to incite further ethnic minority unrest in order to undermine China’s control of the region and encouraged the organization of Uyghur advocacy groups by Uyghur émigré leaders in Soviet Central Asia. 17 Yitzhak Shicor, “Ethno-Diplomacy: The Uyghur Hitch in Sino-Turkish Relations,” Policy Studies, no. 53 (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2009), 17–19. 18 Yitzhak Shichor, “China and the Gulf Crisis: Escape from Predicaments,” Problems of Communism 40, no. 6 (1991): 82. For an example of contemporary media reporting in Beijing’s efforts to balance these conflicting interests, see Robert Benjamin, “Beijing Neutral but Many Chinese Applaud Gulf War,” Baltimore Sun, 12 February 1991. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-02-12/ news/1991043071_1_gulf-war-chinese-china. 19 Hwei-ling Huo, “Patterns of Behavior in China’s Foreign Policy: The Gulf Crisis and Beyond,” Asian Survey 32, no. 3 (1992): 263. 20 Ibid., 271. 21 For the impact of RMA on the First Gulf War, see for example, Stephen Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict,” International Security 21, no. 2 (1996): 139–179; and for an analysis of RMA’s effect on Chinese military thinking, see John Arquilla and Solomon M. Karmel,“Welcome to the Revolution . . . in Chinese Military Affairs,” Defense Analysis 13, no. 3 (1997): 255–269. 22 For an example of Chinese military views, see Wang Pufeng, Information Warfare and the Revolution in Military Affairs (xinxi zhanzheng yu junshi geming) (Beijing: Military Sciences Publishing House, December 1995). 23 See, for example, Bates Gill, Rising Star: China’s New Security Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 22–25. 24 Wu Bingbing, “Strategy and Politics in the Gulf as Seen from China,” in Bryce Wakefield and Susan Levenstein, eds. China and the Persian Gulf: Implications for the United States (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011), 15–16. Wu is Professor of Arabic Studies at Peking University. 25 Ibid., 16. 26 See, for example, Barry Rubin, “China’s Middle East Strategy,” Middle East Review of International Studies 3, no. 1 (1999): 46–47; and Xiadong Zhang, “China’s Interests in the Middle East: Present and Future,” Middle East Policy 6, no. 3 (1999): 150–155. 27 See, for example, Toshi Yoshihara and Richard Sokolsky, “The United States and China in the Persian Gulf: Challenges and Opportunities,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 26, no. 1 (2002): 64–65; and Geoffrey Kemp, The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012). 28 See Yoshihara and Sokolsky, “The United States and China in the Persian Gulf,” 65; and Yitzhak Shichor, “Competence and Incompetence: The Political Economy of China’s Relations with the Middle East,” Asian Perspective 30, no. 4 (2006): 51–52. 29 Cited in Jon B. Alterman and John W. Garver, The Vital Triangle: China, the United States, and the Middle East (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008), 13. 30 Henry Lee and Dan A. Shalmon, “Searching for Oil: China’s Initiatives in the Middle East,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 49, no. 5 (2007): 14. 31 See Alex Miles, US Foreign Policy and the Rogue State Doctrine (London: Routledge, 2013), 41–48; and Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994): 45–55. 32 John Calabrese, “China and the Persian Gulf: Energy and Security,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 3 (1998): 361.

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Michael Clarke 33 Shichor, “Competence and Incompetence,” 51–52. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) committed to a “post-sanctions” agreements with Iraq to develop the al-Ahdab oil field in June 1997 and the Halfayeh oil field in 1998 – investments then projected to stand at approximately US$1.3 billion. See Amy Meyers and Steven Lewis, “Beijing’s Oil Diplomacy,” Survival 44, no. 1 (2002): 122–123. 34 Garver, China and Iran, 110. 35 Ibid., 265. 36 Ibid., 268. 37 Ibid; and Shichor, “Competence and Incompetence,” 54–55. 38 Garver, China and Iran, 178. 39 See Kenneth Katzman, “Iran: Arms and Technology Acquisitions,” CRS Report for Congress, 22 June 1998. http://nassauer.org/public/documents/iran/CRS-iranarms220698.pdf; and Daniel Byman and Roger Cliff, China’s Arms Sales: Motivations and Implications (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1999), 8–12. 40 John Garver, “China-Iran Relations: Cautious Friendship with America’s Nemesis,” China Report 49, no. 1 (2013): 74. Elsewhere, Garver has detailed that China’s cooperation vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s ‘was in compliance with the then-existing norms of the international nonproliferation regime’. See Garver, China and Iran, 160–161. 41 Zhou Jianming, “Zhengque renshi ‘yichaoduoqiang’ de guoji geju,” [Properly Understand the International Structure of ‘One Superpower, Many Great Powers’], Shehui Kexue 2 (1998), 34–37. 42 Lu Zhongwei, “On China-US-Japan Trilateral Relations – Comments on Their Recent Exchanges of Top-level Visits,” Contemporary International Relations 7, no. 12 (1997): 9. 43 Wang Jincun, “New Changes in International Situations Viewed from NATO’s Aggressive War against Yugoslavia,” Qian Xian, 5 July 1999. 44 See, for instance, David Lampton, “Small Mercies: China and America After 9/11,” The National Interest 66 (Winter 2000/2001): 106–113; and Aaron L. Friedberg, “11 September and the Future of SinoAmerican Relations,” Survival 44, no. 1 (2002): 33–50. 45 Rosalie Chen, “China Perceives America: Perspectives of International Relations Experts,” Journal of Contemporary China 12, no. 35 (2003): 295. 46 Peter Hayes Gries, “China Eyes the Hegemon,” Orbis 47, no. 4 (2005): 617–627. 47 He Dalong, “9.11 hou guoji xingshi d zhongda bianhua,” [‘Major changes in international situations after 9/11’], Shishi ziliao shouce [Handbook on Current Affairs] (Beijing) no. 4 (20 October 2002): 12–15. 48 Qian Qichen, “Bush’s Flawed Strategy,” New Perspectives Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2005): 56–57. 49 See Zheng Bijian, “A New Path for China’s Peaceful rise and the Future of Asia,” Speech to the Bo’ao Forum for Asia, reprinted in China’s Peaceful Rise: The Speeches of Zheng Bijian (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2005), 13–17. www.brookings.edu/fp/events/20050616bijianlunch.pdf. Zheng Bijian was a former vice president of the Central Party School of the CCP. 50 Wen Jiabao, “Our Historical Tasks at the Primary Stage of Socialism and Several Issues Concerning China’s Foreign Policy,” Beijing Review, 12 March 2007. www.bjreview.com.cn/document/txt/200703/12/content_58927_3.htm. 51 Suisheng Zhao, “Chinese Foreign Policy Under Hu Jintao: The Struggle Between Low-Profile Policy and Diplomatic Activism,” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 5, no. 4 (2010): 363. 52 State Council of the People’s Republic of China, “East Turkestan Terrorist Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity,” 21 January 2002. www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Jan/25582.htm 53 For detailed analysis of Chinese claims regarding the extent and scope of the threat of terrorism in or connected to Xinjiang in the 2000s, see Michael Clarke, “China’s ‘War on Terror’ in Xinjiang: Human Security and the Causes of Violent Uyghur Separatism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 2 (2008): 271–301; and Sean Roberts, “Imaginary Terrorism: The Global War on Terror and the Uyghur Terrorist Threat,” PONARS Eurasia Working Paper (Washington, DC: March 2012). www. gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/ponars/RobertsWP.pdf. 54 Chris Zambelis and Brandon Gentry, “China Through Arab Eyes: American Influence in the Middle East,” Parameters (Spring 2008): 60–72. 55 Yitzhak Shichor, “China’s Upsurge: Implications for the Middle East,” Israel Affairs 12, no. 4 (2006): 668. 56 Mohammed Turki Al-Sudairi, “Sino-Saudi Relations: An Economic History,” Gulf Research Center Paper, August 2012, 9. 57 Ibid.

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China’s foray into the Middle East 58 John Calabrese, “John Calabrese, Saudi Arabia and China Extend Ties Beyond Oil,” China Brief 5, no. 20 (27 September 2005). www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_ news%5D=3895&no_cache=1#.VlWfu4RnpBw. 59 Wu, “Strategy and Politics in the Gulf as Seen from China,” 20. 60 Mordechai Chaziza, “Strategic Hedging Partnership: A New Framework for Analyzing Sino-Saudi Relations,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 9, no. 3 (2015): 455. 61 Naser M. Al-Tamimi, Sino-Saudi Arabia Relations, 1990–2012: Marriage of Convenience or Strategic Alliance? (London: Routledge, 2014), 128. 62 Ibid., 131. 63 Ibid; and Wu, “Strategy and Politics in the Gulf as Seen from China,” 21. 64 Evan S. Meideros and Bates Gill, Chinese Arms Exports: Policy, Players and Process (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, August 2000), 7. 65 Ibid., 7–9. 66 Al-Tamimi, Sino-Saudi Arabia Relations, 174–175. For speculation to the contrary, see for example, Dan Blumenthal, “Providing Arms: China and the Middle East,” Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2005). www.meforum.org/695/providing-arms#_ftnref14; and Jeff Stein, “Exclusive: CIA Helped Saudis in Secret Chinese Missile Deal,” Newsweek, 29 January 2014. www.newsweek.com/exclusive-cia-helpedsaudis-secret-chinese-missile-deal-227283. Jeffrey Lewis presents a persuasive refutation of the Newsweek report, however, in Jeffery Lewis, “Why Did the Saudi’s But Chinese Missiles?” Foreign Policy, 30 January 2014. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/30/why-did-saudi-arabia-buy-chinese-missiles/. 67 Al-Tamimi, Sino-Saudi Arabia Relations, 175; and Joseph Kerchichian, “China and Saudi Arabia: The Security Connection,” Middle East Institute, 9 February 2016. www.mei.edu/content/map/ saudi-arabia-and-china-security-dimension#_ftnref7. 68 Mordechai Chaziza, “Ten Years Later: Who Won the Iraq War, the US or China?” Middle East Review of International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2013): 15. 69 Ibid; and Naser M. Al-Tamimi, “China in Iraq: Winning without a War,” Al-Arabiya, 16 March 2013. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/2013/03/16/China-in-Iraq-Winning-Without-a-War.html. 70 Quoted in Tim Arango and Clifford Kraus, “China Is Reaping the Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom,” New York Times, 2 June 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/middleeast/chinareaps-biggest-benefits-of-iraq-oil-boom.html. 71 For detailed discussion of China’s perception of the impact of 9/11 and the Afghan campaign on its position in Central Asia, see Michael Clarke, “China’s Strategy in Xinjiang and Central Asia: Toward Chinese Hegemony in the ‘Geographical Pivot of History’?” Issues & Studies 41, no. 2 (2005): 75–118; and Michael Clarke, Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia – A History (London: Routledge 2011), 12. 72 Ahmed Rashid, “The Taliban: Exporting Extremism,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 6 (1999): 31–33. 73 Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban (London: Hurst, 2011), 134–135. 74 Ibid. 75 Andrew Small,“From Bystander to Peacemaker: China, the Taliban and Reconciliation in Afghanistan,” Berlin Policy Journal, 27 April 2015. http://berlinpolicyjournal.com/from-bystander-topeacemaker/. 76 Andrew Small, “Why Is China Talking to the Taliban?” Foreign Policy, 21 July 2013. http://foreign policy.com/2013/06/21/why-is-china-talking-to-the-taliban/. 77 Zhao Huasheng, “Chinese Views of Post-NATO Afghanistan,” Asia Policy 17 (2014): 54–58. 78 Andrew Small, The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (London: Hurst & Co., 2014), 159. 79 See, for example, Andrew Kuchins and Thomas Sanderson, The Northern Distribution Network and Afghanistan: Geopolitical Challenges and Opportunities (Washington, DC: Report of the CSIS Transnational Threats Project and the Russia and Eurasia Program, 2010); and David Trilling, “Northern Distribution Nightmare,” Foreign Policy, 6 December 2011. http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/12/06/ northern-distribution-nightmare/. 80 Small, The China-Pakistan Axis, 160. 81 Raymond Hinnebusch, “Introduction: Understanding the Consequences of the Arab Uprisings – Starting Points and Divergent Trajectories,” Democratization 22, no. 2 (2015): 206. 82 Linda B. Miller, “The United States and the Arab Spring: Now and Then in the Middle East,” in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller and Mark Ledwidge, eds. Obama and the World: New Directions in US Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 233. 83 See Degang Sun and Yahia Zoubir, “China’s Response to the Revolts in the Arab World: A Case of Pragmatic Diplomacy,” Mediterranean Politics 19, no. 1/2 (2014): 6; and James Fallows, “Arab Spring,

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Michael Clarke Chinese Winter,” The Atlantic, September 2011. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/ arab-spring-chinese-winter/308601/. While such a threat appeared to be overblown, the CCP nonetheless took few chances, implementing heightened censorship of Chinese media reporting of events in the Middle East. 84 Mordechai Chaziza, “The Arab Spring: Implications for Chinese Policy,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2013): 73–80. 85 See Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Middle East Regional System,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. The Foreign Policies of Middle Eastern States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2014), 68–69; and Bassel F. Salloukh, “The Arab Uprisings and the Geopolitics of the Middle East,” The International Spectator 48, no. 2 (2013): 32–46. 86 Antonio Perra, “From the Arab Spring to the Damascus Winter: The United States, Russia, and the New Cold War,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East 3, no. 4 (2015): 363–386. 87 Michael Singh, “Chinese Policy in the Middle East in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings,” in Niv Horesh. ed., Toward Well-Oiled Relations? China’s Presence in the Middle East Following the Arab Spring (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 168–169. 88 See, for example, Mordechai Chaziza,“China’s Middle East Policy: The ISIS Factor,” Middle East Policy 23, no. 1 (2016): 25–33. 89 Jin Liangxiang, “China’s Role in the Middle East: Current Debates and Future Trends,” China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 42. 90 “China,” US Energy Information Agency, 14 May 2015. www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis. cfm?iso=CHN. 91 Yu Lintao, “Active and Constructive: President Xi Jinping’s Middle East Trip Embodies China’s Foreign Policy in the Region,” Beijing Review, no. 5–6 (4 February 2016). 92 Michael D. Swaine, “Chinese Views of the Syrian Conflict,” Chinese Leadership Monitor 39 (2015). 93 Yun Sun, “Syria: What China Has Learned from Its Libya Experience,” Asia-Pacific Bulletin 152 (27 February 2016). http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/22208/apb152. pdf?sequence=1. 94 Quoted in Douglas H. Paal,“China: Mugged by Reality in Libya, Again,” Asia-Pacific Brief, 11 April 2011. http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/04/11/china-mugged-by-reality-in-libya-again-pub-43554. 95 “Libya Evacuation: China Evacuates 12,000 Nationals via Naval Frigate,” Christian Science Monitor, 25 February 2011. www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0225/Libya-evacua tion-China-evacuates-12-000-nationals-via-naval-frigate. 96 Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson, “Implications of China’s Military Evacuation of Citizens from Libya,” China Brief 11, no. 4 (2011). www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=37633&cHash=7278cfd21e6fb19afe8a823c5cf88f07#.Vm-QAnluli4. 97 Paal, “China: Mugged by Reality in Libya, Again,”. 98 Andrew Garwood-Gowers, “China and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’: The Implications of the Libyan Intervention,” Asian Journal of International Law 2, no. 2 (2012): 375–393. 99 Mordechai Chaziza, “The Arab Spring: Implications for Chinese Policy,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2013): 79. 100 See “Why Has Russia Stepped Up Its Involvement in the Syrian Crisis?” Xinhua, 22 September 2015. http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2015-09/22/c_128251618.htm; Shannon Tiezzi, “Does China Approve of Russia’s Airstikes in Syria?” The Diplomat, 8 September 2015. http://thediplomat. com/2015/10/does-china-approve-of-russias-airstrikes-in-syria/; and “Countries Opposed to Syria Strike Must Speak Out,” Global Times, 29 August 2013. www.globaltimes.cn/content/807161.shtml. 101 “Sensible Strategic Move by Russia to Give Assad Support,” China Daily, 14 October 2015. http:// en.people.cn/n/2015/1014/c90000-8961578.html. 102 See Michael Clarke, “Uyghur Militants in Syria: The Turkish Connection,” Terrorism Monitor 14, no. 3 (2016). www.jamestown.org/programs/tm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=45067&tx_ttn ews%5BbackPid%5D=26&cHash=4c5a2b3135329c40a8c418a3ad2966c8#.VsJrGHluli4. 103 “Root Out External Links to Xinjiang Terrorists,” Global Times, 12 January 2015. www.globaltimes. cn/content/955826.shtml. 104 James Leibold, “How China Sees ISIS Is Not How It Sees ‘Terrorism’,” The National Interest, 7 December 2015. http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-china-sees-isis-not-how-it-sees-%E2%80%98ter rorism%E2%80%99-14523?page=2. 105 “Syrian Opposition Leader to Start 4-Day Beijing Visit,” China Daily, 1 May 2016. www.chinadaily. com.cn/china/2016-01/05/content_22932562.htm.

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China’s foray into the Middle East 106 “Chinese Government Envoy to Syria Xiao Yan Visits Syria,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 21 April 2015. www.fmprc.gov.cn/web/wjbxw_673019/t1357464.shtml. 107 Peter Wood, “Chinse Military Promises Aid to Syria,” China Brief, 22 August 2016. www.jamestown. org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=45724&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5 D=25&cHash=e5dfcad7960dfed9b732d1693faedeb3#.V8OIYXkkpi4. 108 Jin, “China’s Role in the Middle East,” 44–47. 109 “Full text of China’s Arab Policy Paper,” Xinhua, 13 January 2016. http://news.xinhuanet.com/ english/china/2016-01/13/c_135006619.htm. 110 Andrew Scobell, “Why the Middle East Matters to China,” in Niv Horesh and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. China’s Presence in the Middle East: The Implications of the One Belt, One Road Initiative (London: Routledge, 2017). 111 Yu, “Active and Constructive,”. 112 Quoted in Ibid. 113 Ilan Goldenberg and Eli Ratner,“China’s Middle East Tightrope,” Foreign Policy, 20 April 2015. http:// foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/20/china-middle-east-saudi-arabia-iran-oil-nuclear-deal/. 114 Yao Kuangyi, “China’s New Diplomatic Moves in the Middle East,” China International Studies (November/December 2014). www.ciis.org.cn/english/2015-02/15/content_7696806.htm.

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14 OIL PRODUCTION, INNOVATION, AND POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Hamid E. Ali and Nesreen N. Al Anbar

The Middle East (ME) countries’ economies are integrated into the world economy and subject to global shocks. Oil prices and rents vary according to global economic expansions, contractions, and conflicts. There is so much debate on natural resources role in development. The resources curse hypothesis is dominating the debate. According to this hypothesis, resources are either squandered on defense spending or means of suppressing the population. In earlier decades, governments in the ME used oil rents to grease the wheels of government bureaucracy and satisfy the public with a generous social welfare contract. The current circumstances of lower oil revenues, however, have rendered this social contract unsustainable. The welfare states in the ME are therefore in the process of changing their social contracts to address the fiscal imbalances, but these reforms stop short of meaningful political reform. Ending welfare states without changing the power structures might risk political instability in the whole region. The economies of ME countries have evolved around energy, in particular oil and natural gas. Oil production in the ME East in 2016, including crude oil, shale oil, and oil sands, was around 31.8 million barrels daily.1 As Figure 14.1 shows, oil production increased steadily from 23 million barrels per day in 1998 to 26 million barrels in 2008, and reached 32 million barrels by 2016. Worldwide economic growth and the rise of BRICS countries (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), particularly China and India, have increased the demand for oil. There is competition within the oil cartel of the ME countries; they have failed to keep enough of a grip on the oil supply to control market prices. This is a failure of collective action, as the self-interest of individual countries prevailed over the cartel practices of market control. However, the rise of oil production in ME is a double-edged sword: the oil-rent windfalls contribute to the accumulation of wealth but also leave the economy vulnerable to oil politics, regionally and globally. Domestic, regional, and global forces have always shaped the politics of oil, leaving the states in the region vulnerable in terms of national security. The politics of oil includes access to energy markets, hence the rivalry among the key producers in the region – Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries on the one hand and Iran on the other. Globally, the shale oil producers, with their innovation and technology, have placed tremendous pressure on conventional oil producers in the Middle East. ME countries are high-cost oil producers compared to shale-oil-producing countries. In addition, the increase in the aggregate oil supply not only depresses market prices but also leads 184

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Figure 14.1 Oil production in the Middle East (1000s of barrels per day) Data Source: US Energy Information Administration, 2015 (Figure by author)

the US to shift its focus away from the region, creating a vacuum for regional powers such as Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to emerge. The current friction within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is a result of the US retreat from the region as well as of the dwindling oil revenues needed to sustain the welfare state. In the ME, the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has not only diminished their capacities for innovation to meet the structural changes in the oil industry but also halted their efforts to embark on meaningful political and economic reform. Instead, these countries have focused their attention on Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, resulting in a regional arms race. Domestically, falling oil prices have resulted in budget deficits and economic recessions across the region, with unprecedented levels of unemployment, particularly among youth. Therefore, the new political forces, such as civil society organizations and activists within the ME countries, are seeking to take advantage of the political fissures and vacuums to shape the public discourse as the older systems become non-responsive to public demands. The major issue driving the crisis is oil politics. This chapter will address three issues: (1) the external political forces shaping oil politics, including oil production, technology, and innovation; (2) the internal forces shaping oil politics, such as economic growth, youth unemployment, political reforms, and the future of the welfare state; and (3) the geopolitical tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Oil politics Oil is a shared commodity, vital to every economy. As an economy grows, so does the need for oil to sustain this growth. External forces, including foreign governments, other oil producers, and financial markets all affect the price and availability of this essential commodity. Oil producers engage in long-term contracts with other nations to supply oil. This means that the national security concerns of oil-importing countries link them unavoidably with the ME countries that provide their oil. Although oil is owned by specific countries, its benefits are shared among many countries. The oil-producing countries in the ME have created partnerships as oil exporters; in return, 185

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they demand protection from the major powers. The security of these countries has historically been linked to the US in particular. The US has always pushed for lower oil prices, and the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) often responded to this pressure. Saudi Arabia alone restricted the flow of its oil and resisted all temptations to let it increase sharply, thus maintaining higher prices. Oil-purchasing countries seek to counter these high prices through technological innovations, because the price of oil, and the demand for it, have internal implications in terms of employment, economic growth, and the social contract.

Oil production, technology, and innovation The oil supply is driven by technology, innovation, and competition among the oil producers. The future of fossil fuel depends on technological innovation that drives down production costs and enhances efficiency. The rivalry between the conventional oil producers in the ME and technology-driven oil producers across the globe has just started. The new producers predict that they can sustain their operations at a world price of $25 per barrel, because they are more efficient than their counterparts in the ME. In addition, Oil production is determined by many factors, including the price of oil, the price of alternatives to fossil fuel, and technologies for alternative oil production. In recent years, the number of oil-producing companies has greatly increased. Instead of 40 big oil-producing corporations, today small companies with efficient technology can survive by maneuvering around the big companies such as Aramco, Petro China, and Exxon Mobil. The US, Canada, China, and Argentina produce shale gas and tight oil, with the US producing by far the largest commercial volumes.2 Expansion of production is determined by many factors, such as ownership of mineral rights, taxation, and civil society’s acceptance of the associated environmental costs. There is now considerable competition for market share. Figure 14.2 shows the US shale oil production between 2000 and 2017. From 2000 to 2009. it remained flat, but increasing production by 2014 caused oil prices to fall from more than $100 per barrel

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to $60. There is clearly an inverse relationship between shale oil production and the price of crude oil. Saudi Arabia’s tactic has been to keep oil prices low by increasing production, in order to drive out the US shale-oil-producing companies, but these companies have survived by developing better technology to lower their operating costs. Innovation and better production methods have deterred Saudi Arabia’s predatory practices. Moreover, given the rise of alternative clean energy such as hydro, wind, and solar, the market shares of oil-producing countries in the Middle East will decline, and so will their geopolitical importance. The US reliance on Middle East countries as energy sources will become a thing of the past. This reduction of US interest in the Middle East will create either an opportunity for political reform, as the significance of oil earnings diminishes, or more chaos, as political oligarchies fight for their survival.

Friction within GCC countries The current friction within GCC countries should be viewed in the context of dwindling resources and competition for regional influence. Most of the GCC countries are aware of the risk of reliance on oil, so their economies are transitioning to diversification. In order to secure food supplies, they need to find income from other sources. GCC countries are diversifying their international investment portfolios in real estate in Europe and the US and in land leasing in Africa and Latin America. Several Saudi firms have launched farmland investment abroad in places like Indonesia and Ethiopia. Qatar bought farmland in Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia. The UAE is aggressively moving to lease ports that will give them access to East Africa, such as Berbera in Somaliland and Eritrea’s Asaab, which has air and naval bases nearby. The UAE has also obtained control of Aden, the ports of Mukalla and Shihr, and islands in the Bab al-Mandab strait. This competition among the GCC countries for market share and regional influence has driven a wedge between Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Though on the surface, it might appear to be competition among different brands of political visions, in reality it is competition among new political classes for political and economic influence for decades to come. In addition, it is a struggle to have access to each other’s wealth, in particular Qatar. Saudi Arabia wants to see more financial support from Qatar and acts as a little sister. The earlier plans for the blockade and embargo were warning shots before invasion. The US State Department has played a role to thwart the plans. Saudi Arabia turns to more activism in regional matters. To protect its own interests, Saudi Arabia has started acting aggressively as a regional player against the Houthi in Yemen and against Iran. This regional role requires both alliances and resources, so Saudi Arabia has allied itself with the UAE in these conflicts. Although Qatar is expected to play the role of junior partner, it has much greater resources, though it was expelled from the coalition. It has $45 trillion in natural gas reserves, the equivalent of 173 times the Saudi budget ($260 billion as of 2018). These resources are significant and needed, given the level of conflict and instability in the region, as Saudi Arabia is going through financial distress. Saudi Arabia is spending an estimated $175 million per month for bombings in Yemen and an additional $500 million for ground incursions.3 As its war costs have increased in Yemen, it has created a budget deficit of $87 billion US.4 In addition, $56.8 billion – 25% of the total budget – was allocated for other military and security spending.5 Several additional factors, such as Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Syria and economic assistance to Egypt, also contribute to the shrinking of Saudi foreign reserves by $109 billion in less than 12 months in 2015. The decline in oil prices and mounting financial and political pressure led to a degree of isolation of Qatar that comes close to invasion. The politics of oil intensify regional conflict within the GCC as 187

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the countries look for alternative economic strategies, and these regional conflicts necessitate spending beyond the means of these countries, which can trigger further conflict. It appears that the conflicts among GCC countries will intensify as each country works to build coalitions beyond its conventional allies, to include countries like Turkey, Chad, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, and Somaliland. Recently, Turkey was given Suakin, Sudan’s Red Sea coastal city, to construct a naval dock to maintain civilian and military vessels. Iran is eager to have access to the Red Sea via Bab al-Mandab. The Red Sea coast has become the new front for regional conflict.

Stakeholders and emission reduction agreement It is well understood that meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement will require a swift and dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, barring unexpected advances in carbon capture and storage (SEI, 2018).6 While many parties are making important strides towards achieving their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), it is also widely recognized that the gap between expected global emissions levels and agreed emission reduction targets remains far too wide (SEI, 2018). Policy-makers, the private sector, and civil society are realizing that managing the transition away from fossil fuels is an essential element of achieving climate goals. Approximately 500 non-governmental organizations have signed the Lofoten Declaration, which highlights the need to put an end to fossil fuel development and manage the decline of existing production (UNEP, 2017).7 These stakeholders are calling on the government and different industries to curtail and eliminate all sources of pollution. We are seeing new fuel industries emerging and mounting pressure on major oil producers to look beyond the era of fossil fuel oil. Indeed, some countries in the ME are heeding the call and facing this reality by diversifying their economies. Recent initiatives in Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to invest in technology and the knowledge economy are driven by such external pressure groups. In addition, competition from the clean energy industries is placing so much cost on fossil oil producers to give up part of their market share at an increasing rate. However, as a result of pressure from the developing countries there was an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels extraction and to achieve net-zero emissions by the second half of this century. Fossil fuel emission is not only a responsibility of countries, but it is a collective responsibility to preserve the planet. Oil politics are a multiparty process and will intensify with time as technology is getting better to be viable alternatives to provide cheap and clean energy. For example, Saudi Arabia has committed to invest in solar and other renewable sources, to become nothing less than a solar powerhouse.

Friction between Iran and Saudi Arabia The geopolitical rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been extended and intensified by encompassing proxies: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Bahrain. The war in Yemen in particular has cost Saudi Arabia $5 to $6 billion a month while the Iranians supplying the Houthis with ballistic missiles costs a few million.8 Iran has succeeded at drawing Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and probably Yemen into its camp. Recently, Saudi Arabia has become even more aggressive in foreign policy issues, but as oil prices decline, it is hard to imagine that this aggressive foreign policy agenda can prevail. Saudi Arabia needs $70 per barrel to reach a break-even point, but those of Kuwait and Qatar were much lower in 2017 – $46.50 and $46.80 respectively, according to International Monetary Fund estimates. At the current price of $63, Saudi Arabia is adding to its deficit, while this price is just above the break-even point for Iran. If this trend of stagnating prices continues, Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy agenda will be restrained by fiscal considerations. 188

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In the ME, the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has not only diminished their capacities for innovation to meet the structural changes in the oil industry but also halted their efforts to embark on meaningful political and economic reform. Instead, these countries have focused their attention on Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, resulting in a regional arms race. Domestically, falling oil prices have resulted in budget deficits and economic recessions across the region, with unprecedented levels of unemployment, particularly among youth. Therefore, the new political forces, such as civil society organizations and activists within the ME countries, are seeking to take advantage of the political fissures and vacuums to shape the public discourse as the older systems become non-responsive to public demands. The major issue driving the crisis is oil politics.

Oil prices and budget deficits The price of oil is determined by market mechanisms, and one important factor is the amount of oil that producers are willing to supply. Because of fear of a gradual shift in the auto industry from oil to other fuel sources, and also because of competition from shale oil producers, the price of oil has recently dropped, causing a decline in oil revenue and driving up budget deficits in the ME countries. The budgets of all governments in the ME – oil and non-oil producers alike – are affected by cycles in oil prices. As shown in Figure 14.3, in the last two decades, governments in the ME faced budget deficits in 1991 due to the Gulf War and associated economic recessions. Another recession occurred in 1998 related to financial crises in Asia and Russia. The 2009 recession was related to the 2007–09 worldwide financial crisis that was the worst since the Great Depression. A number of crises ranging from civil wars to failed government transitions and succession issues caused deficits in 2015–17. Even though the GCC countries had amassed a combined $2 trillion in sovereign currencies, the decline in oil prices forced some countries, such as Saudi

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Arabia, to draw down these reserves to finance current expenditures. In 2015–16, these countries suffered from growing deficits that have implications for welfare states, to be discussed later.

Economic growth and oil rents Figure 14.3 shows that oil rents have an effect on economic growth for most of the ME countries. The patterns across the countries show that their economic growth is also linked with global financial and economic crises. In particular, the First Gulf War (1990), the Second Gulf War (2003), and the global financial crisis of 2008 reduced economic growth in oil-exporting countries in the ME. It is conventional wisdom to assert that ME economies are tied to the global economy and vulnerable to external shocks. This is why the oil flow from the Gulf countries is linked to security and protection provided by the US. The economic growth of these economies has relied on both the flow of oil and the level of protection provided by the global powers. Examining the trend of oil rents and real economic growth, Figure 14.3 shows that Iran’s economic growth is very responsive to global shocks, including the years-long sanctions on the country. The movements of economic growth mirror those of oil rents. The sharp fall in economic growth in 2008–09 and 2014 was related to the global financial crisis and oil price shocks. An agreement on nuclear power was reached in 2015 between the Islamic Republic of Iran, the P5 + 1 (the US, the UK, Russia, France, China, and Germany), and the European Union. One of the key concessions granted to Iran in this deal was to lift all nuclear-related economic sanctions, freeing up tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue and frozen assets, with the result of double-digit economic growth despite the fallen oil prices. Saudi Arabia’s economic growth is just as prone to shocks as Iran. Surprisingly, despite rising oil rents, its economic growth declined in 2004–08, due to structural economic issues such as an entrenched bureaucracy and a failure to diversify the economy. Oil revenue alone could not reverse the downward trend. In 2012, when growth was finally picking up, oil rents slowed it down, and eventually it began to fall again. In the smaller gulf countries of Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, economic growth tracked oil rents. The engine of growth is more strongly influenced by oil rent in these countries; they are small economies with small populations, and their consumption patterns can be sustained for years. However, the competition among them is fierce, and economic gains are viewed as a zero-sum game. Overall, the findings indicate that oil and natural gas rents have positively affected economic growth in Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Youth unemployment Oil rents are associated not only with the level of economic growth but also with the level of youth unemployment. As shown in Table 14.1, from 1991 to 2017, youth unemployment remained in double digits for Iran, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. It was double-digit for Qatar from 2001 to 2004 and for the UAE from 2008 to 2017. For the Middle East countries in aggregate, the average of youth unemployment is 20%. Oman has the highest unemployment among youth, at 46%. From 2014 to 2017, it was in the range of 48–49%. Saudi Arabia had the second highest rate, ranging from 25% to 27%. Iran is third, at 25–27% for the same period as Saudi Arabia from 2014 to 2017. The decline in oil rent has increased unemployment. Even in the smaller countries, such as Kuwait and the UAE, unemployment remains in double digits.

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Oil production, innovation, and politics Table 14.1 Youth unemployment in the Middle East (% of total labor force ages 15–24) Year

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1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

5.30 5.20 5.10 5.10 5.20 5.20 5.50 5.50 5.50 5.50 5.40 5.20 5.20 5.40 5.40 5.40 5.40 5.50 5.60 5.00 5.70 5.30 5.30 5.30 5.40 5.60 6.00

24.10 24.30 26.40 27.90 28.80 27.00 28.70 34.20 23.30 24.40 24.90 27.20 27.80 29.50 31.20 33.90 29.70 28.90 29.60 29.80 29.70 27.40 28.70 30.20 29.10 30.80 32.60

21.90 24.20 24.20 22.80 23.00 25.70 23.40 22.80 22.70 22.80 23.40 25.00 23.80 20.10 23.90 22.80 21.90 22.70 24.40 28.40 26.60 26.80 23.20 24.30 25.20 26.40 26.70

3.40 1.70 1.60 1.50 1.40 1.40 23.00 1.80 1.50 8.90 13.70 19.00 15.20 12.20 9.50 6.50 1.70 1.10 1.30 1.40 1.40 1.20 1.10 0.70 0.50 0.80 1.10

8.50 8.30 9.30 5.40 4.80 6.90 6.70 9.40 9.80 6.10 9.10 8.90 7.00 8.00 8.00 8.30 8.60 13.30 11.70 11.90 11.90 11.90 11.90 11.90 12.20 11.80 11.70

45.50 45.50 45.50 45.80 46.50 46.40 46.50 46.30 46.20 46.60 46.70 46.70 46.80 47.20 47.40 46.70 46.00 45.80 45.40 45.30 44.60 45.10 45.20 45.70 46.90 47.70 48.70

4.60 4.30 4.00 3.60 12.60 3.90 3.90 3.90 3.90 4.50 4.30 5.80 6.80 9.00 11.20 7.10 8.20 10.00 9.00 10.50 15.30 15.20 15.10 15.20 16.70 14.30 12.90

Data source: The World Bank

Economic reform versus political reform The ME countries are going through political and social changes; the Arab Spring was the tip of the iceberg. Their economies cannot rely on oil to fuel growth and sustain a welfare state where the government is the biggest employer of citizens, particularly in the GCC countries. The private sector has grown in recent years, but there is a mismatch between jobs and skills, resulting in higher unemployment among youth. Political reform in the ME is driven by the dwindling of oil resources; this is why the governments are scrambling to initiate economic reforms and privatization of state-owned enterprises. However, focusing on economic reform without political reform will not address the underlying forces responsible for the Arab Spring and civil strife. Steps such as breaking up Aramco, building entertainment industries, and giving women the right to drive do not address the core issues. The systems need structural changes. Ending the welfare state should be accompanied by civil liberties, governing reform, and universal suffrage. The political systems must go through these changes gradually, allowing a new system to emerge with the least disruption possible. Moreover, lack of innovation in the oil industry in the ME, with the rise of new sources of energy, will greatly reduce the importance of fossil fuels as sources of energy. In the last two 193

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centuries, oil has replaced coal as the main source of energy. Today, cleaner energy, including hydro, wind, and solar, are shaping the future of energy demand and supply. As long as the trend for energy innovations continues, the smaller the oil receipts will be, and the more pressure there will be for wider political and economic reforms.

Conclusion The ME region is endowed with natural resources including oil, and in this region the world is viewed through the lens of oil and autocracies built on oil. Oil earnings generate wealth, but the resulting prosperity has been unequally distributed, worsening economic inequality and leading to conflicts. In recent years the oil cartel has failed to enforce oil quotas to prevent the market price from falling. Recent technological innovation in the US, China, and Canada has further depressed oil prices, resulting in slowed economic growth and higher levels of unemployment. The governments in the region are reacting by initiating economic reforms to minimize the state’s involvement in the economy. The idea of promoting the private sector must also entail political freedoms and eventually political reform. Otherwise, economic reforms without political reform will only create a new political class that will follow the example of their predecessors by liquidating state enterprises for individual enrichment, leading to further public dissatisfaction.

Notes 1 US Energy Information Administration. “Shale Gas and Tight Oil Are Commercially Produced in Four Countries,” 13 February 2015. www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=19991. 2 US Energy Information Administration, “Shale Gas and Tight Oil Are Commercially Produced in Four Countries,”. 3 Mehmood Hussain,“Saudi Intervention in Yemen and Its Impact on Saudi’s Economy,” Foreign Policy News, 11 December 2016. http://foreignpolicynews.org/2016/12/11/saudi-intervention-yemen-impactsaudis-economy/. 4 Amal Nasser, “How Long Can Saudi Arabia Afford Yemen War,” Al Monitor, 10 March 2016. www. muslimpress.com/Section-world-news-16/83780-how-long-can-saudi-arabia-afford-yemen-war. 5 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Asia and the Middle East Lead Rise in Arms Imports,” 22 February 2016. www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2016/asia-and-middle-east-leadrise-arms-imports-united-states-and-russia-remain-largest-arms-exporters. 6 SEI, “Aligning Fossil Fuel Production with Paris Agreement,” 2018, Stockholm Environmental Institute. 7 UNEP, “The Emissions Gap Report 2017,” 2017. United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya. http://uneplive.unep.org/theme/index/13#egr. 8 Bruce Riedel, “In Yemen, Iran Outsmarts Saudi Arabia Again,” Brookings Institute, 6 December 2017. www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/12/06/in-yemen-iran-outsmarts-saudi-arabia-again/.

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15 QATAR An ambitious small state Matthew Gray

Qatar is a tiny Gulf emirate that plays an outsized international role, activist in both its diplomatic and commercial dealings with the Middle East region and the wider world, and audacious in its use of soft power, especially Al-Jazeera media network but also its airline, major sporting and cultural events, and suchlike. Qatar’s activist and quite unique foreign policy has been both motivated and funded by the enormous hydrocarbon wealth that it possesses: in 2016, Qatar produced almost 693 million barrels of crude oil and 181 billion cubic meters of natural gas.1 Given its tiny population of some 2.3 million people, only about 310,000 of whom are citizens, Qatar is now the wealthiest country in the world per capita, and its government has enormous resources to devote to its domestic survival and consolidation, and to that end, to engagement in the international arena. This has enabled it to play a strong role in regional peace-making, support an array of political forces in the region, enhance its international image, and even commit military forces abroad, as it did during the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya and over 2015–17 in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. While Qatar has been activist, at times even aggressive, in its foreign policy since the late 1990s, it has made miscalculations as well, especially in its bolder support for Islamist opposition groups since the 2011 Arab uprisings. This has angered its Arab neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia but also the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and at times others, and led to diplomatic crises in 2014 and again in 2017. What follows is an analysis of Qatar’s foreign policy, and particularly its ambition since the mid-1990s of being a major regional power. It addresses and explains the overarching foreign policy imperatives, drivers, setting, and dynamics that have seen the tiny emirate become an important regional and international actor under Emirs Hamad (r. 1995–2013) and then Tamim (r. 2013–). The discussion here is primarily a foreign policy analysis, grounded in both international relations and political economy arguments. The argument propounded is that Qatar has developed a sophisticated foreign policy that mixes diplomatic, military, and economic components, each reinforcing the other in the ultimate goal of regime maintenance and consolidation. It is impossible to separate its rentier and state capitalist economic structures from its ambitious, soft power-driven foreign policy, it is argued, while foreign policy actions that sometimes seem enigmatic are, in fact, a manifestation of the same dynamic; an attempt to use diplomacy and international economic engagement to ensure the survival of both the regime and the country, and to build the regime’s and state’s wealth through an incorporation of key states and commercial actors into its political and economic system. The chapter begins by highlighting some 195

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of the difficulties involved in explaining Qatari foreign policy through traditional international relations (IR) theories and approaches, showing that only a tailored realist framework, while still not comprehensive, can go very far in explaining the foreign policy goals and imperatives of this small, ambitious emirate. While it seemingly frustrates attempts to explain it, and elements of its foreign policy are unique and at times have faltered in their goals, Qatar nonetheless possesses a rational, determined, considered, and farsighted foreign policy.

Explaining Qatar’s international role One of the key challenges in explaining the foreign policy of any Arab Gulf monarchy is the limited utility of IR theoretical literature in the subregion, a failing of both theorists in the IR discipline and Middle Eastern area studies specialists.2 Qatar is no exception to the rule that studies on Middle Eastern states’ foreign relations tend to be one of policy advice, examinations of past conduct or policies, or descriptions of trends in regional affairs.3 This is perhaps the product of the region not fitting neatly into the main IR approaches, because of either unique historical experiences or an assumption of regional “exceptionalism”,4 or alternatively because of the differences in approach and methodology between IR and area studies.5 That Qatar is a small state6 – even a microstate by some definitions7 – and has such unique and extraordinary wealth makes it all the more tempting, arguably, to make the claim about exceptionalism with respect to Qatar. Nonetheless, there have been exceptions to these policy-focused and exceptionalist tendencies. Some scholars have attempted to create an explanatory framework or structure for contemporary Gulf, including Qatari, foreign relations. Most common are variations on the realist and neorealist schools of IR theory. In some of the broader works on the region, systemicmaterialist approaches,8 as varieties of realism, are common. These focus on material factors that stem from or arise out of the various systems – global, regional, subregional – in which Middle Eastern states operate. The system being focused upon may establish actors’ capacities for action, inform their conduct, or shape the patterns that arise from their behavior. Such arguments are attractive because of the penetration of the region by outside actors and forces, the focus on the state as primary actor, and the rationality which actors are assumed to afford primacy in their decision-making. Legrenzi’s study of the international relations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is an example of this literature, which essentially takes a systemic approach, albeit one that goes beyond (neo)realism and is refined through conglomeration with an analysis of subregional-level identity.9 Another example is Hinnebusch and Ehteshami, who in one of the key works on Middle Eastern foreign policies, describe their approach as “complex realism”:10 a realist approach that accepts multilayered levels of analysis, particularly domestic angles, beyond the usual state-state focus. The chapter on Qatar, by Kamrava, arguably follows this line, arguing that the Qatari leadership is driven by the twin goals of seeking external protection from the US and domestic stability through elite cohesion.11 Kamrava’s book on Qatar offers a similar argument; a more detailed systemic argument based on the relative rise of the Gulf and decline of traditional Arab powers, and a global shift that he argues has changed the nature of international power to give greater influence to small but smart, wealthy actors such as Qatar that are able to leverage “subtle” power.12 Ulrichsen, another keen observer of Qatar, offers a similar argument for the ambitions of Emir Hamad and Doha’s use of soft power and branding, including highlighting its unique economic strategies in key high-value and emerging sectors.13 Gray, with a focus on political economy, also privileges economic goals and concerns when discussing foreign policy.14 What these scholars also emphasize is the balancing act by Hamad. As much as he wanted the US to act as security guarantor for 196

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Qatar, he (and now Tamim, as successor) also consolidated that relationship by seeking relationships with a range of state and non-state actors, from the GCC to Iran, Turkey, emerging economic powers such as China, and non-state groups such as some of the region’s Islamists. This balancing attempt, under Tamim, has caused Qatar some trouble, illustrating a limitation of realist approaches that have claimed, arguably prematurely, that Qatar has been successful in this strategy. These works, and some others, also touch upon omnibalancing. Omnibalancing was originally proposed by David in 1991,15 in reference to alignment in the developing world, but it arguably has utility in Gulf studies, too. The argument is that regimes, dominating the state, face both external and internal threats, and that they balance this range of threats. This idea goes beyond the usual realist focus on an anarchic external environment to include the domestic, making it somewhat like-minded with the complex realism already discussed. It also looks beyond the state as the main actor, to consider leaders and regimes instead; that is, cases where a regime dominates the state. This is a valid approach to many Middle Eastern states, where state institutions are often weak but repressive and rulers dominate, if subtly, over formal political institutions and mechanisms. David’s argument that leaders put their own survival ahead of that of the state might not be applicable to the Gulf, but certainly there is overlap between regime and state, and bearing this in mind is important. Qatar under both Hamad and Tamim ultimately has been ruled by a very small inner circle of elites: under Hamad, this was the Emir himself, his wife Sheikha Mouza, the prime minister, and Tamim as crown prince, whereas under Tamim it is himself as Emir, the Deputy Emir, the (new, post-2013) prime minister, and a couple of others, by some accounts with former emir Hamad still having behind-the-scenes influence. Omnibalancing is also attractive because it explains the seeming paradox of Qatar aligning closely with the US while also maintaining ties with Iran and with Sunni Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and likewise also balancing its domestic and international imperatives. Some pieces on the Gulf, including Qatar, make explicit reference to omnibalancing,16 whereas others offer arguments that are similar. Nonneman’s “structured approach”17 to foreign policy analysis, which Roberts draws upon,18 has close parallels with omnibalancing. Finally, there have been basic attempts at incorporating constructivist explanations into studies of the Gulf, if only to a limited extent thus far. Constructivism argues that the international system is a set of cultural norms and expectations rather than just material concerns, and that this system shapes the identities, perceptions, and behaviors of states. It eschews power approaches, and often actor rationality. Its usefulness comes from its ability to transcend material aspects and to explain cases in which norms seem clearly framed by identities rather than simple power calculations, as well as from its ability to be combined relatively easily with other approaches. At the regional level, Barnett’s work remains the pre-eminent constructivist piece,19 while at the Gulf-wide level Adib-Moghaddam’s work20 is of this ilk. It has also been incorporated by Legrenzi, when arguing that there is a Khaliji, or “Gulf-y” identity, in the subregion.21 On Qatar specifically, however, little has been done: Kamrava touches on it, to a limited extent, when he assesses Qatari attempts through foreign engagement to shape and frame symbols and meanings.22 Hard-power norms and imperatives dominate Qatari thinking, albeit not exclusively. The arguments herein are consistent with these main explanations and are in effect complex realist ones, adding a modified omnibalancing argument that sees domestic regime security goals as the key drivers of Qatari foreign policy, above all political economy goals and mechanisms. There is some room to accept identity as a force in Qatar’s engagement with the world, moreover: Legrenzi’s argument for a Khaliji identity has some cogency, even with the 2014 and 2017 GCC-Qatari disputes, and Qatari attempts at defining their own identity and shaping Arab identity, as Kamrava argues, add a measure of constructivism to an otherwise multilayered 197

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but fundamentally realist argument that conglomerates foreign and domestic regime goals and constraints.

The sources of Qatari foreign policy Qatar is both a small state and a relatively newly created one, becoming independent only in 1971, and is operating in an environment where there has been extensive major power interventionism, regional power rivalry among Saudi Arabia, Iran, and until 1990 Iraq as well, and in which there is little security architecture or economic interdependence acting to stabilize the subregion. This regional political and security environment has thus been a major driver of Qatari foreign policy.23 Yet so too has Qatar’s state-society relationship, especially the Al Thani dynasty’s ultimate goal of regime maintenance and legitimacy enhancement, and as a result, there are also a range of domestic linkages to Qatar’s external engagement and strategic outlook. Foreign policy ultimately serves domestic regime survival and legitimization, particularly through economic means and for economic as well as political ends. At the external or exogenous level, Qatar’s security perceptions are shaped less by existential threat or fear of invasion – although there is a certain underlying anxiety towards Saudi Arabia and Iran among some Qataris – but more by the perceived risks to Qatari security from external intervention, hostile acts against its economic interests and capabilities, and coercion on it to act in certain ways. Sobered by the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and with Saudi Arabia and Iran its main security concerns (even if unlikely to threaten it existentially), the Qatari leadership has not tried to achieve military self-sufficiency. Rather, it has relied on its alliance with the US: the two main US bases in Qatar ‘constitute the largest pre-positioning bases outside the United States’.24 Yet as Kamrava notes,25 this not a case of “bandwagoning”, or hitching Qatar unconditionally to a global power. Doha recognizes US hard-power dominance in the region, and gains from the relationship it has with the US military, but it also pursues its own foreign policy goals, often differentiating its policies from those of the US. Qatar also uses various means to engage with other Sunni Arab monarchies. As its foreign policy grew increasingly ambitious and activist, it still maintained a broad consistency with the Gulf monarchies and their interests. This was and is reflected in its membership of the GCC, which is an important component of its regional foreign policy, but also one that should not be overstated: Doha engages with the GCC as much as necessary to protect its interests and in pursuit of specific economic and security goals. However, despite Qatar and Saudi Arabia being firmly in the same camp on certain matters – both are conservative Arab and Sunni majority societies, both are aligned to the US, both share interests in a secure international energy trade – Doha and Riyadh are intermittent rivals, increasingly so in recent years, through their pursuit of regional influence, economic power, and sometimes varying political outcomes in the region, as after the 2011 Arab uprisings. At the same time, Qatar has sought to build a relationship with Iran that is sufficient to give Tehran a disincentive to meddle in Qatari affairs and a motivation to want Qatar to be stable. Qatar was careful to agree to its maritime border with Iran, to maintain trade between the two economies, and to have ties that are cordial if not especially close. Qatar acts this way towards regional powers because of the nature of Gulf international politics. There is no overarching security architecture, nor multilateral security processes that incorporate all eight of the states that have a coastline on the Gulf. The GCC is an important regional body in a part of the world where intraregional blocs have met with little success, yet it is flawed by its exclusion of Iran and Iraq, and its potential is constrained by the lack of interdependence among its member states and the economic and political rivalries among some of them (especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar).26 Furthermore, Qatar cannot completely 198

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rely on the bloc for collective defense against, say, Iran. This makes it much more likely to invite the US into a security relationship, which indeed is what not only Qatar but all GCC member states have done to various extents. This is also why it has tried to balance regional powers, dissuade them from hostility towards Doha, and offer them a stake in Qatar’s political and economic status quo.27 Important as regional security imperatives are to Qatar, for its leadership the ultimate goal is regime survival and an expansion of the royal family’s wealth, legitimacy, and power. To this end, as omnibalancing arguments stress, there is a conflation of the state and regime, with the regime dominated by an inner circle of the ruling Al Thani dynasty and some elites from other key families. Other actors, such as members of the wider royal family, officials, and businesspeople have some power, but only in discrete areas and to a controlled extent. These actors are mostly managed through a network of patron-client relationships, in which they are sometimes consulted on economic or political matters, but they are rarely given genuine autonomy or political power.28 This extends into the state’s, and ultimately regime’s, control of the economy and the means of production: Qatar is state capitalist, but “new”29 state capitalism in that its state capitalism is risk-tolerant, profit-driven, entrepreneurial, and linked to its political and foreign policy goals. This is combined with the societal-level “rentier” bargain, in which oil and gas rents are distributed to the population in the forms of an absence of taxation, state jobs, subsidies, and free government services, in exchange for political acquiescence and (ideally) loyalty.30 When these political strategies are combined, so that rents provide both a capacity for broad societal cooptation by the state, and for elite cooptation by the leadership, and when consolidated through new state capitalist mechanisms and soft authoritarianism, a fairly robust system exists. What strengthens it further, however, is when these dynamics are linked into foreign policy; in particular, as in Hamad’s and Tamim’s Qatar, when rents and state-owned firms are deployed as soft power, to influence international attitudes towards Qatar and to raise foreign awareness of it, while the economic and diplomatic spheres are combined, so that foreign policy can be seen as serving, in effect, business development goals, and state business activity serves security interests and in turn national and regime survival. Whether protecting its energy reserves and assets, enhancing state-owned firms’ capacity, or even funding national branding efforts, there is a powerful economic imperative to Qatari foreign policy – much more than is the case for most states. Economic success abroad, and an outsized Qatari role in the world, both serve to boost the regime’s position at home: the former by expanding and diversifying its economic strength, and thus the resources available for utilization back home; and the latter by associating the state and leadership, in the mind of popular opinion, with international influence and national pride. The development of national culture and identity, and anything that spreads the image of a culture and identity both domestically and overseas, are therefore a source both of legitimacy and security31 for the state and, at its summit, the regime. This diverse foreign policy environment, and the linkages between the regime’s domestic and international security concerns and strategies, accounts for the seeming contradictions and variances in Qatari foreign policy. What may appear to be bandwagoning is a more complex strategy of conditional engagement with the main global power. Pursuing relations with both Washington and Tehran is not contradictory, but about spreading risk by linking its interests, at least partially, to those of the major regional powers. Providing support for non-state actors such as regional Islamist groups is about using popular diplomacy, at home and abroad, for regime legitimacy. Qatar’s foreign policy is not inconsistent; it only seems so, perhaps, to those who expect it to be driven by ideology or set by abstract geopolitical calculations. It is in fact a realist design in response to a complex set of internal and external risks to the regime, and is driven 199

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by powerful ambitions. How this has unfolded, first under Hamad and then Tamim, and the outcomes of this strategy, are laid out in the following sections.

Foreign policy in the Hamad era (1995–2013) In his rule of just under 18 years, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani transformed Qatar from a prosperous but quiet, even dull, place into an economically active, selectively globalized, and tremendously affluent political economy. It was a substantial departure from the era of his father, Khalifa (r. 1972–95), who had been a far more reserved leader. Although he introduced some government reforms and developed public infrastructure, in the international realm his rule was far less noteworthy. His era was marked by territorial disputes with Bahrain, over the Hawar Islands, and for a time with Saudi Arabia over territory along their shared border, but for the most part he yielded to Saudi Arabia on foreign policy, recognizing it as the dominant power on the Arabian peninsula at the time. Moreover, Qatar was relatively weak in that period, and Gulf politics were tumultuous, shaped by the 1978–79 Iranian revolution, the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, the 1990–91 Gulf War, and an expanded US involvement in the region.32 The broad and profound changes under Hamad are beyond the scope of this chapter, but in the domestic realm included the massive expansion of the natural gas sector, state-led economic diversification, a massive improvement in economic and social infrastructure, a strategy of national “branding”, and long-term economic investment through a large sovereign wealth fund.33 Internationally, Hamad was just as transformational, and it was under him that Qatar’s foreign policy and international engagement were so deeply linked to the regime’s economic and political strategies. A number of salient relationships were strengthened, and new foreign policy strategies formulated, including stronger ties with the US, but also new links with Iran, Israel, the Palestinians, and others. Hamad also used initiatives in transnational broadcasting, conflict mediation, and engagement in proxy conflicts such as the post-2011 Syrian civil war to expand Qatar’s diplomatic and security reach, enhance its international role, and build its name. He was more successful in some of these initiatives than others, and he left a complex legacy when he abdicated to his son in 2013, but all of these initiatives highlight Hamad’s foreign policy imperatives, goals, and activism. Under Hamad, the US relationship expanded to become a cornerstone of Doha’s security strategy. This marked a shift from the British protection prior to independence and in the 1970s, and a sympathy for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) under Khalifa.34 Hamad’s policy did not mean that it unconditionally aligned with the US and followed Washington’s every whim – as mentioned, the aim was to construct a more independent and diverse set of international relationships than that – but whatever frustrations the US and Qatar had with each during Hamad’s reign, Doha ultimately relied on Washington to underwrite its external security. Qatar began moving closer to Washington after the 1990–91 Gulf War, with an agreement signed in 1992 on basing, US prepositioning, and joint exercises.35 The post-2001 War on Terrorism and the 2003 Iraq War further solidified relations, with a mutual defense pact signed in 2002. US Central Command (CENTCOM) made Qatar the main center of its Gulf operations around the same time, and Qatar was a key US ally in the 2003 war against Iraq. By this point, Qatar’s regional role and economic power were both expanding, and in 2003 it effectively outmaneuvered Saudi Arabia, which had supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks and refused to support the 2003 Iraq War. At the same time as moving closer to the US, Hamad also built links with other states, most notably with Iran. The Gulf has had a difficult relationship with Iran in the modern era, and especially in the Khalifa period, when relations were complicated by the Iranian revolution 200

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and the Iran-Iraq War.36 Qatar has been something of an exception to this, however, given the historical trade and cultural links between the two countries in the twentieth century and the relative lack of sectarian tensions faced by Qatar. The two sides have shared interest, above all, in their shared sovereignty over the world’s largest non-associated natural gas field, what Qatar calls North Dome and Iran calls South Pars.37 This provided an incentive for them to delineate their maritime border and to pursue a stable and functional relationship, to attract investment and maintain predictable gas incomes. Their ties were strengthened under Hamad by regular highlevel visits, a quiet foreign policy approach by Qatar to Iran, and a focus on boosting their trade and investment relationship. The two even signed a defense cooperation agreement in 2010 which, while modest and far short of, say, the US-Qatar defense relationship, was nonetheless the most substantial defense relationship that Iran had with any Arab state apart from its close ally Syria. Iran provides perhaps the clearest example of how Hamad positioned Qatar uniquely, balancing relations with the US and US allies on the one hand with closer links to Tehran on the other. The centrality of gas in the Iran-Qatar relationship also is a reminder, as noted, of the importance of economic drivers in Qatari foreign policy calculations. As an aside, it is notable that gas is a core foreign policy tool for Qatar: Doha has deliberately sought to invite a variety of joint venture partners into its gas sector and to construct a set of relationships that give most of the world’s major economies a stake in Qatar’s extant political and economic order.38 Hamad also pursued a unique approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, seeking engagement with the Palestinians, even as he sought also, at least for a time, to establish ties with Israel.39 The Israeli relationship was driven heavily by Qatar’s trade and investment ambitions – an Israeli trade office operated in Doha over 1996–2000 – but it was informed by a much wider set of goals. Hamad likely saw it as a way to brand Qatar as uniquely open and liberal, and to impress this image on Washington not least of all, while also displaying the independent nature of its foreign policy and its willingness to pursue ties with a range of states even in the face of pressure. At the same time, and again in a diplomatic balancing act, Hamad also built closer ties with the Palestinians, and was vocal in its condemnation of Israeli actions such as the 2008–09 Operation Cast Lead strikes in Gaza. This was something of a turning point, in fact, as afterwards, relations with Israel were suspended, and Qatar moved closer to the Palestinians, especially to the Hamas leadership controlling the Gaza Strip. Hamad’s October 2012 visit to Gaza is the only one to date by a serving head of state since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007.40 These relationships set Qatar apart from other Gulf States to a considerable extent, and not least of all from Saudi Arabia, which has been critical of the Israeli-Qatari relationship, as well as towards Doha’s ties with Iran. In fact, it was probably part of Hamad’s strategy to differentiate Qatar, in Washington’s eyes, from Saudi Arabia. Qatar and the GCC need each other, as already noted: it is too important for Doha to be linked into the free trade and other liberalization measures that the GCC has pursued, and it does not hurt their interests to engage at the security level as well, while for the GCC it would be a severe setback for a major economic actor and US ally to be excluded from the body. However, Saudi Arabia remains a rival of which Qatar has long been wary. Hamad ended Qatar’s practice under Khalifa of playing a submissive and secondary role to Saudi Arabia, and moreover, as Qatar’s economy boomed in the 2000s, the two became economic competitors. Other foreign policy decisions and actions under Hamad stem from these same goals of asserting foreign policy independence, balancing external actors, giving a range of actors a stake in Qatari stability and the political status quo, and perhaps above all, using diplomacy to deliver positive impacts on the economy and on the leadership’s image at home. Qatar has sought closer ties with China and India, as emerging economic powers, for these reasons, pursuing not only stronger trade links but deeper investment ones as well. Qatari investment in China provides 201

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the opportunity to invest downstream in energy and to diversify as well – the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, which for the sake of diversification does not invest in the energy sector, has looked to China as a place to invest in both the agricultural and finance sectors41 – while Doha has sought Chinese investment in Qatar for its economic value but also to give the Chinese an interest in Qatari stability and development.42 In a very different vein, Qatar’s role in mediation and multilateral fora have not been about economic aims – not overtly or primarily, at least – but rather about, again, showing Qatari autonomy in foreign policy-making and demonstrating its ability to play an outsized role on the world stage. Sometimes this has included hard power, as with Qatar’s military commitment of airpower and some specialist ground forces to the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya.43 It also provided forces for peacekeeping operations, sending some 300 troops to southern Lebanon after the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.44 At other times, Qatar has played an activist diplomatic role, as it did, for example, as a non-permanent member on the UN Security Council in 2006–07 and through various mediation efforts in regional conflicts such as those in Yemen, Sudan, and Eritrea.45 These diplomatic initiatives may serve particular purposes, such as improving Qatar’s image in certain countries or with particular actors, but more generally and more importantly, they are part of the wider strategy of “branding” and creating a positive image of Qatar internationally. This is perhaps the element of Qatari foreign policy that has gained the most attention from scholars since the early 2000s, and therefore is well explained elsewhere.46 What is important to reiterate here is that there was and is a clear link and overlap in Qatar’s strategy in diplomacy, hard power, and soft power. The last of these includes branding, which has been a salient aspect of Qatar’s foreign policy; its various international initiatives nearly all have had a branding element. The creation of the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel was an early and central strategy,47 introducing new openness to political discourse in the Arab world,48 and fashioning, in the eyes of many, a liberal impression of Qatar. Important too, however, were major events such as Qatar’s hosting of the 2006 Asian Games,49 its winning bid to host the 2022 Soccer World Cup,50 and other large sporting and cultural events. The development of its education sector is also, arguably, linked to branding, even if it primarily serves domestic political and development goals.51 Hamad’s transformation of Qatar’s foreign policy and its international relations, like its transformation in the economic, social, and cultural realms, occurred and was possible due to a particular combination of factors. One was the willingness of Hamad himself to make such changes, including against some opposition from within the Qatari system. So too was his ability to change things, a product of the very small political inner elite that controlled Qatar during his reign, the small but effective bureaucracy he possessed, and the flexible, rapid decision-making processes he adopted. As head of a royal dynasty, Hamad was not only able to think in the long term, but had an incentive to do so. At the same time, the small size and informal nature of the political order was probably a weakness as well. It worked to amplify the advantages of an activist and ambitious foreign policy, but it also amplified the impacts of mistakes and miscalculations. Arguably, Hamad overplayed Qatar’s hand during and after the 2011 Arab uprisings, laying the groundwork for the tensions that emerged with other Arab states under his son Tamim.

Qatar curtailed? Challenges to Qatar’s foreign policy under Tamim (2013–) On 5 June 2017, one of the most serious diplomatic crises among the Arab Gulf monarchies for many years erupted between, on the one hand, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, reinforced 202

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by Egypt and Yemen, and Qatar on the other, backed by various other regional states. Riyadh closed its land border with Qatar, and all five of the states lined up against Qatar, except for Egypt, evicted Qatari citizens from their countries and required their citizens to leave Qatar. All cut off air and shipping routes to and from Qatar and banned overflights by Qatar Airways. The source of the dispute was a set of accusations by the five states that Qatar was supporting Islamic extremist groups, aiding nefarious Iranian designs in the region, and meddling in the internal affairs of those and other Arab states.52 This was in fact the second time, since Hamad had transferred power to Tamim on 25 June 2013, that Qatar had faced a diplomatic crisis with its Arab Gulf neighbors: in 2014, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar in protest over Doha’s support for some regional Islamist groups and for its claimed breach of a November 2013 agreement not to intervene in its neighbors’ affairs.53 That dispute had ended slowly and quietly after Tamim appeared in various speeches to tone down Qatar’s regional ambitions and acknowledged some of the grievances made against it. Qatar’s role in the region had not changed markedly after 2013, certainly not in its orientation or fundamentals. What, then, were the sources of the 2014 and 2017 crises? Was it Tamim’s responsibility, or something that dated to Hamad’s reign? Had Qatar been too assertive and independent in its foreign policy for too long? Or was Qatar the victim of timing, in 2017 at least, with Riyadh in particular taking advantage of a sympathetic new president in the White House? Tamim made some not-inconsequential changes to Qatari foreign policy after assuming power, although the overarching nature and strategic goals did not fundamentally alter. His inaugural address promised a foreign policy along the same strategic lines as under his father, but implied that he would adopt a more restrained, less provocative style.54 In practice, however, some of Qatar’s actions under Tamim had the same effect of upsetting its neighbors as had the more aggressive policies of Hamad. In Egypt, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, was removed from power in early July 2013. Qatar had been a strong backer of Morsi, and their hesitation in embracing the new military leadership in Cairo, and the lack of financial support (after having previously committed aid to Morsi’s government of some US$12 billion), sent a strong message as to where the Qatari leadership’s political sympathies lay.55 This was in stark contrast to the position of the other GCC states, which quickly showed support for the new Egyptian regime. Qatar also faced increased anger from Arab governments towards Al-Jazeera, especially its Arabic-language service, which remained highly critical of many of the region’s leaderships.56 This was a key source of both the 2014 and 2017 crises, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and others having construed the 2013 “non-intervention” agreement as including no media interference in their policy debates and domestic politics. A similarly conspicuous source of regional anger at Qatar has been its claimed support for extremist militant groups, first under Hamad but then continued under Tamim, especially in Syria but also more widely. The evidence on what Qatar has, and has not, done in this regard is much contested.57 Certainly, Doha has engaged with Islamist governments and key parties: it supported the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood when it was in power in Egypt, and Hamad visited the Gaza Strip in 2012, both as already noted, and which frustrated Washington, Riyadh, and others. It has held talks with the Afghan Taliban as well, and backs the Islamist opposition in the post-Qaddafi Libyan civil conflict, in contrast to the UAE’s support for more secular former regime elements. Less plausibly, Saudi Arabia has accused Doha of supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen; their linkage of this claim to Qatar’s relations with Iran suggests that dampening that relationship is actually the motivation behind the claim. Perhaps most implausibly, some in Washington have accused Qatar of supporting the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. While this is a ridiculous claim, given the risks involved and the lack of shared ideology or values between 203

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Qatar’s leadership and ISIS, Doha’s support for the al-Qa’eda-linked Jabha al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, in Syria, arguably invited some such allegations.58 At the time of this writing (December 2018), Qatar’s dispute with its various Arab neighbors was still playing out, and it was the most serious and substantive dispute that Qatar had faced in a long time. Doha had clearly overplayed its hand and become excessively emboldened, the result of both the leadership’s relative lack of internal opposition and dissent, and the aggressive stance that it decided to take towards the 2011 Arab uprisings.59 The uprisings were a watershed moment, in fact, because they marked a shift by Doha, at that time still under Hamad’s rule, from the balancing act of earlier to a set of policies that, while still attempting to include some balance towards key regional actors, became more overt in its support of particular groups, especially populist Islamist groups. In Doha’s calculation, this arguably reflected the popular mood in the Arab world, where a critical mass of people hoped for a more Islamic-oriented political order (although a radically politically Islamist one in far fewer cases). This broad strategy continued under Tamim, too, even as he spent most of 2014 dealing with the first crisis between Qatar and the Saudi-led group of states angry at Doha’s prooppositionist, often pro-Islamist stance. That dispute was settled grudgingly by both sides, and to neither’s ultimate satisfaction.60 The 2017 crisis, therefore, was in large part a revivification of the 2014 one. It was a challenge, and ultimately a failing in foreign policy, because apart from any diplomatic repercussions, ultimately it represented an inability of the state to deliver domestic economic benefits to the population through foreign policy and international ­engagement – one of the most important and predominant goals of the regime in formulating and implementing foreign policy. While the size and power of the states arrayed against Qatar were imposing – Saudi Arabia as the region’s largest economy, Egypt as its most populous state, and other important regional actors such as the UAE – Doha was not powerless in reply. The blockade of Qatar’s airspace was a blow to its airline, but did not ground it. The more serious closure of the Saudi-Qatari border was a problem, but one bypassed by the supply of foods from Iran, Turkey, and other states. At the diplomatic level, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, and others faced the risk of needing to be careful not to overplay their own cards either. A particular risk for them was, and remains, that if they show too much inflexibility or are too punitive towards Qatar, they will drive it into the arms of Iran and Turkey, boosting the relative power of those two states at their own expense. There are limits shared by both Qatar and those states aligned against it in the dispute. Most certainly neither side wants a military conflict to arise from it. Nor does either side want to see Qatar leave the GCC, which would threaten the bloc’s legitimacy and even its viability, which is already coming into question. Neither side wants Qatar to lose the 2022 World Cup, which will likely be a boon for the Gulf in general. Neither side wants the US to leave its facilities in Qatar; not least of all Qatar, but not other GCC states either if it means that the US facilities are subsequently leased to a regional actor such as Turkey. The key issues in the dispute – economic rivalries, tensions over Al-Jazeera, Qatar’s relations with Iran, the Doha’s populist foreign policy tendencies – will almost certainly be core components of its foreign policy in the future, absent a major shift in circumstance that would obligate a dramatic foreign policy shift, such as an abrupt change in US Middle East policy or a crisis in the global energy sector. Saudi-Qatari rivalry will continue to be stoked by these imperatives and the scope of action they allow.61 This does not mean that Tamim will not face other pressures on the international stage. He is on notice, as a result of the crisis with Saudi Arabia and others, that Washington will not automatically come to his rescue, although this can equally be seen as something that validates the long-standing Qatari balancing of its foreign relations. Qatar is likely to have to continue to fight off negative press about the conditions of foreign workers in the emirate, 204

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which it has been facing on a sustained basis for several years, and which will continue, or even increase, in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup. Doha’s popular leverage may decline, too, if it reduces some of its support for Islamist and other oppositionist groups in response to pressure from other Arab governments, and as Al-Jazeera – as least its Arabic service – increasingly gains a reputation for being less oppositionist and editorially independent than it once was. Ultimately, Tamim also faces the same broad constraints, and rules with the same type of small inner elite, as his father did; he may in fact still have significant input from his father, too. His challenge after the June 2017 crisis will be whether he should, or even can, return Qatari foreign policy to the economically oriented, activist foreign policy of a few years ago. If he instead decides to reconfigure it, the shape it should take, and what shape is even possible, remains to be answered.

Conclusion Whether under Hamad or Tamim – or even further into the past, for that matter – the basic foreign policy imperatives of the Qatari leadership have been the same. Qatar is a small state, unable to defend itself alone against regional powers. It occupies a geographically important but vulnerable position in the Gulf, a region with scant security architecture and shaped by multiple intense middle power rivalries. Despite its small size, underwriting and protecting the large per capita wealth of Qataris requires a considered security strategy. What did change under Hamad, and continued under Tamim, is how Qatar has addressed these challenges. Its central foreign policy outcomes have been a security and defense relationship with the US, a balanced array of relationships with other major actors, a strong national branding effort, an outsized diplomatic role, an economic basis to nearly all its engagement abroad, and a foreign policy that is ultimately informed by, and seeks to serve, the domestic goals of regime maintenance and legitimacy-building. Since the mid-1990s, Qatar has defied easy categorization and explanation in a number of respects, not least of all in foreign policy. The sheer ambition and activism of its foreign policy has surprised most observers. As shown here, however, this activism derives from a complex set of sources, and in that context its policies typically have not been contradictory or irrational as some observers assume. The regime’s need to ensure elite solidarity and popular legitimacy and support has meant that there is a powerful economic driver behind its foreign policy, while it has been especially clever in building economic aspects into its engagement with other states, ultimately strengthening the position and legitimacy of the regime at home. It is best understood, it has been argued here, through variations on the realist argument in international relations theory, but traditional realist interpretations alone are insufficient. Qatar’s unique regional setting, its political economy, and the nature of its regime all demand an approach that also places at its center the domestic political urgencies and goals of its ruling elite.

Notes 1 Figures are calculated from the data available on the BP Statistical Review of World Energy website. www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/down loads.html, accessed 14 July 2017. 2 A point made in a number of works, but see for example, Fred H. Lawson, “From Here We Begin: A Survey of Scholarship on the International Relations of the Gulf,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 3 (2009): 337–338. 3 Ibid., 337.

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Matthew Gray 4 Morten Valbjørn, “International Relations Theory and the New Middle East: Three Levels of a Debate,” in The Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), ed. POMEPS Studies 16: International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, 2015), 74–79. 5 Brent E. Sasley, “Studying Middle Eastern International Relations Through IR Theory,” Ortadoğu Etütleri 2, no. 2 (2011): 11. 6 Andrew F. Cooper and Bessma Momani, “Qatar and Expanded Contours of Small State Diplomacy,” The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs 46, no. 3 (2011): 113–128, especially 113–117. 7 See, for example, Matthew Gray, Qatar: Politics and the Challenges of Development (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), 11–13, 159–161; and J.E. Peterson, “Qatar and the World: Branding for a MicroState,” The Middle East Journal 60, no. 4 (2006): 732–748. 8 Sasley, “Studying Middle Eastern International Relations Through IR Theory,” 17–18. 9 Matteo Legrenzi, The GCC and the International Relations of the Gulf: Diplomacy, Security and Economic Coordination in a Changing Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), see especially 41–56. 10 Raymond Hinnebusch, “Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2014), 1. 11 Mehran Kamrava,“The Foreign Policy of Qatar,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2014), 158. 12 Mehran Kamrava, Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 2–3. 13 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Qatar and the Arab Spring (London: Hurst, 2014), especially 1–10. 14 Gray, Qatar, 185–213. 15 Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1991): 233–256. 16 Hillel Frisch, “Why Monarchies Persist: Balancing Between Internal and External Vulnerability,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 167–184. 17 Gerd Nonneman, “The Three Environments of Middle East Foreign Policy Making and Relations with Europe,” in Gerd Nonneman, ed. Analyzing Middle East Foreign Policies: A Conceptual Framework (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 6–18. 18 David B. Roberts, Qatar: Securing the Ambitions of a Global City-State (London: Hurst, 2017), especially 5–8. 19 His main work is Michael N. Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998). 20 Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 21 Legrenzi, The GCC and the International Relations of the Gulf, especially 50–55. 22 Kamrava, Qatar, 41–42. 23 Emma Soubrier, “Evolving Foreign and Security Policies: A comparative study of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates,” in Khalid S. Almezaini and Jean-Marc Rickli, eds. The Small Gulf States: Foreign and Security Policies Before and After the Arab Spring (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 124–125. 24 Kamrava, “The Foreign Policy of Qatar,” 164. 25 Ibid., 164. 26 Gray, Qatar, 186–191. 27 This has been widely argued, but see, for a recent piece noting it: David B. Roberts, “Securing the Qatari State,” in Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (AGSIW) Issues Paper No. 7 (Washington, DC: AGSIW, 2017). www.agsiw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Roberts_Qatar_ONLINE.pdf, accessed 28 July 2017. 28 Ibid., 56–64, 70–74. 29 On this topic, the seminal work is Ian Bremmer, The End of the Free Market? Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? (New York, NY: Portfolio, 2010). See also Joshua Kurlantzick, State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016). Qatar gets little discussion in these works, but the concept applies to it as much as to the case studies used in these books, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, etc. 30 Ibid., 8–10, 53–55, 82–89. See also Matthew Gray, “A Theory of ‘Late Rentierism’ in the Arab states of the Gulf,” in Center for International and Regional Studies Occasional Paper No. 7 (Doha: Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, 2011). https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bit stream/handle/10822/558291/CIRSOccasionalPaper7MatthewGray2011.pdf, accessed 14 July 2017.

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Qatar 31 Roberts, Qatar, 113–116. 32 Soubrier, “Evolving Foreign and Security Policies,” 125–127. 33 On these and other economic, social, and political reforms under Hamad, see among others: Gray, Qatar; Kamrava, Qatar; Roberts, Qatar; and Ulrichsen, Qatar and the Arab Spring. 34 Roberts, Qatar, 25–27. 35 Ibid., 28. 36 Ibid., 71. 37 On this field, see for example, Siamak Adibi and Fereidun Fesharaki, “The Iranian Gas Industry: Upstream Development and Export Potential,” in Bassam Fattouh and Jonathan Stern, eds. Natural Gas Markets in the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 272–305; Andy Flower, “LNG in Qatar,” in Bassam Fattouh and Jonathan Stern, eds. Natural Gas Markets in the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 343–385; and Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011), 310–324. 38 Gray, Qatar, 185–186, 198–200. 39 On the Qatar-Israel relationship under Hamad, see Uzi Rabi, “Qatar’s Relations with Israel: Challenging Arab and Gulf Norms,” The Middle East Journal 63, no. 3 (2009): 443–459. 40 Gray, Qatar, 203. 41 Ibid., 205. 42 Ibid., 205–206. 43 Ulrichsen, Qatar and the Arab Spring, 121–131. 44 Rabi, “Qatar’s Relations with Israel,” 454. 45 Kamrava, “The Foreign Policy of Qatar,” 173. 46 See, for example, Gray, Qatar, 159–184; Roberts, Qatar, 93–122; and Kamrava, Qatar, 46–68 on what he calls “subtle power”; plus specific articles on branding such as J.E. Peterson, “Qatar’s International Role: Branding, Investment and Policy Projection,” in Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre Policy Brief (Oslo: Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, February 2013); Peterson, “Qatar and the World,”; David B. Roberts, “Understanding Qatar’s Foreign Policy Objectives,” Mediterranean Politics 17, no. 2 (2012): 233–239; and Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, “Small States with a Big Role: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the Wake of the Arab Spring,” HH Sheikh Nasser Al-Sabah Programme Discussion Paper No. 3 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), http://dro.dur.ac.uk/10011/, accessed 21 July 2017. 47 There are a number of works on Al-Jazeera now; as one example on its formation and earlier years, see Mohammed al-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network That Is Ratting Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003). 48 Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), 79–83. 49 On the Asian Games, see Mahfoud Amara, “2006 Qatar Asian Games: A ‘Modernization’ Project from Above?” Sport in Society 8, no. 3 (2005): 493–514. 50 Gray, Qatar, 172–175; Roberts: Qatar, 103–122 passim, 153–156. 51 Gray, Qatar, 132–140. 52 Anne Barnard and David D. Kirkpatrick, “5 Arab nations Move to Isolate Qatar, Putting the U.S. in a Bind,” New York Times, 5 June 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/world/middleeast/qatar-saudiarabia-egypt-bahrain-united-arab-emirates.html, accessed 14 July 2017. 53 Roberts, Qatar, 151–152; also Elizabeth Dickinson, “How Qatar Lost the Middle East,” Foreign Policy, 5 March 2014. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/05/how-qatar-lost-the-middle-east/, accessed 19 July 2017; see also David D. Kirkpatrick, “Qatar’s Support of Islamists Alienates Allies Near and Far,” The New York Times, 7 September 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/world/middleeast/qatarssupport-of-extremists-alienates-allies-near-and-far.html, accessed 19 July 2017. 54 Ulrichsen, Qatar and the Arab Spring, 178–179. 55 Ibid., 180. 56 Ben Hubbard, “Arab Nations Demand Qatar Shut Al Jazeera, Cut Islamist Ties and Detail Funding,” The New York Times, 23 June 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/world/middleeast/qatar-saudiarabia-al-jazeera.html, accessed 19 July 2017. 57 On the various claims and their veracity, see Tom Keatinge, “Why Qatar Is the Focus of Terrorism Claims,” BBC News, 13 June 2017. www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40246734, accessed 20 July 2017.

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Matthew Gray 58 Kirkpatrick, “Qatar’s Support of Islamists . . .,” n.p. The group changed its name in July 2016 to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (or the “Levantine Conquest Front”), although it is still routinely referred to as the Nusra Front, especially in international media reporting. 59 Roberts, “Securing the Qatari State,” 5–7. 60 Ibid., 7–8. 61 Max Fisher, “How the Saudi-Qatar Rivalry, Now Combusting, Reshaped the Middle East,” The New York Times, 13 June 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/world/middleeast/how-the-saudi-qatarrivalry-now-combusting-reshaped-the-middle-east.html, accessed 19 July 2017.

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16 GCC FOREIGN POLICY The struggle for consensus Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

This chapter examines the drivers of foreign policy in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and analyzes the points of convergence and divergence in regional approaches to major external issues. It opens with a brief history of the GCC that documents how the six member states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have frequently failed to reach consensus on key regional issues such as policies toward Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, region-wide security and defense cooperation, or progress toward monetary union and a single currency. Section two explores the reasons behind the difficulties in unifying foreign policies, including the highly personalized nature of decision-making in each individual state, persistent bilateralism in national policy-making approaches, and lingering mistrust of Saudi intentions by the smaller members. Episodes of cooperation that have occurred largely have done so in technocratic areas that do not impinge on matters of national sovereignty or pooling of resources; clearly, regional and foreign policies do not fall into this “safe” category. The chapter ends with the impact of the post-2011 regional upheaval on prospects for regional coordination as individual GCC states emerged as assertive and interventionist regional actors, albeit in significantly different ways, as the visceral diplomatic standoff between Qatar and its neighbors has illustrated.

Origins and evolution of the Gulf Cooperation Council The Gulf Cooperation Council was created in haste within the span of four months and was launched formally at a summit in Abu Dhabi on 25 May 1981. For years prior to the spasm of activity that propelled the GCC into being, competing proposals for integrative projects of varying kinds had tried – and failed – to gain traction among the six monarchical rulers in the Arabian Peninsula. Enduring rivalries among emirates, a core-periphery imbalance between Saudi Arabia (and, to a lesser degree, Oman) and the four smaller coastal states, and uncertainty over the nature of future relations with Yemen (the seventh state on the Arabian Peninsula), Iraq, and Iran all contributed to a lack of consensus on regional integration. An additional complicating factor was the very different circumstances of the six states that eventually came together to form the GCC in response to the Islamic revolution in Iran and the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Britain had established treaty relations with the small sheikhdoms along the eastern coastline of the Arabian Peninsula between 1820 and 1916. Beginning with the signing of a General 209

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Treaty of Peace in 1820, continuing with a “perpetual” Maritime Truce in 1835, and motivated by imperial considerations of safeguarding the coastal flanks of the maritime route to India, British officials representing the (British-controlled) Government of India concluded individual treaties with the seven Trucial States (which became the United Arab Emirates in 1971) in 1835, Bahrain in 1861, Kuwait in 1899 and again in 1914, and Qatar in 1916. Together, the agreements enmeshed the emerging proto-state entities into an inward-oriented, subregional unit in which British “protection” was extended in return for exclusive political and economic relations.1 A slightly different set of circumstances prevailed in Oman and Saudi Arabia, although the politically conservative end result was broadly similar. In Oman, British influence was informal yet pervasive, as opposed to the formal establishment of protected state relations with Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the Trucial States, yet it maintained a determined grip over the regime of Sultan Said bin Taimur Al Said (ruled 1932–1970), and British support later was instrumental in the palace coup of July 1970 that replaced Said bin Taimur with his son, Sultan Qaboos bin Said.2 British officials in the early decades of the twentieth century also sought to build relationships among the competing claimants of power in the Hejaz and Nejd. However, Britain’s backing of the Sharif of Mecca during and after the Arab Revolt during World War I failed eventually to prevent the Hashemite leader from being defeated decisively by Ibn Saud (Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud) in 1925. The expansion of Ibn Saud’s rule across the Arabian Peninsula culminated in the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and the subsequent development of close relations with the US. In February 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the defense of Saudi Arabia was vital to American security, following Italian bombing raids against oil installations in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and his administration designated Saudi Arabia eligible for Lend Lease assistance. On Valentine’s Day 1945, shortly before his death, Roosevelt journeyed from the Yalta conference to the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt for the meeting with Ibn Saud that formed the cornerstone of the “oil-for-security” bargain between the US and Saudi Arabia.3 After 1945, the growing web of political and military ties between Saudi Arabia and the US constituted a strategic challenge to Britain’s regional primacy. Initially, British officials tried to resist the growth of American influence in the Gulf only to come closer together in the early 1950s as the shared sense of Cold War threat increasingly preoccupied American and British attention, although differences in approach remained a factor in regional policy-making, particularly toward Yemen.4 While the gradual transition from British to American influence was far from seamless and unfolded over a period of four decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Western political and security umbrella did provide shelter for Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States, and buffered their rulers from the political cross-currents of Arab nationalism and socialism.5 Internal and external considerations therefore reinforced a conservative political stance that distinguished the Gulf States from many other developing countries during the post-colonial period following the end of World War II. The divergence in worldviews became clear during the Marxist-supported rebellion in the Omani province of Dhofar from 1965 to 1975. Officials from the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY – the only Marxist state ever to exist in the Arab world) – supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) in its struggle against the Omani Sultanate. Oman eventually defeated the rebellion, but only after high levels of British political and military assistance, including deployment of SAS battalions that extended well beyond Britain’s formal military withdrawal from the Gulf on 30 November 1971. Such high levels of external assistance – which also came in the form of Iranian military support provided by the Shah – enabled PDRY officials to portray the Dhofar 210

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campaign as a ‘war of liberation against foreign occupation’ from the ‘puppets of colonialism in Oman’ and its ‘client Government’, propped up by British (and Iranian) assistance.6 The bifurcation between the Gulf States and much of the developing world, including other Arab and Islamic states, was reinforced by a Saudi-led policy of actively resisting the political currents sweeping the region in the post-war years. The Al Saud led the way in the 1960s and 1970s in encouraging the formation of Islamic organizations to counter left-wing or secular oppositional alternatives. Under King Saud (ruled 1953–64) and King Faisal (ruled 1964–75), Saudi Arabia engaged also in an “Arab Cold War” broadly pitting the region’s conservative monarchies against its revolutionary republics led by Egypt’s charismatic President Gamal Abdul Nasser as Saudi and Egyptian military forces backed competing proxy factions in Yemen.7 Moreover, the inflow of oil revenues into Saudi Arabia facilitated the creation of an array of international Islamic institutions and networks that extended transnationally the Kingdom’s “soft power”. Notable examples were the creation of the Muslim World League in 1962, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth in 1972, and the International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO) in 1975.8 The unification of Saudi Arabia into the modern Kingdom it is today was completed in 1932. Oman accelerated into the twentieth century after Sultan Qaboos took power in 1970. For the other four smaller Gulf States that had been under British protection, Kuwait became an independent state in June 1961 and Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States (as the UAE) a decade later, between September and November 1971. For the newly sovereign Gulf States, the 1970s was a dangerous decade, as the loss of British-protected status in 1971 removed their external security guarantee and rendered them vulnerable to their larger and more powerful neighbors. Each of the newly independent countries faced a struggle for survival as a small state in a volatile region marked by three much larger powers (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran) with designs to become a regional hegemon, as well as occasional expansionist claims on the smaller neighbors in their midst. The core-periphery imbalance that developed among Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran and the four coastal states (with Oman belonging to neither camp) was magnified by the fact that none of the regional rivalries ran in the same direction. For Qatar, Saudi Arabia was the traditional external threat while Iraq performed this function for Kuwait and Iran did so for Bahrain and the UAE. Ibn Saud conquered the Eastern Province for Saudi Arabia in 1913 and maintained an informal tribal and territorial claim on the Qatari peninsula that jutted northward into the Gulf. In 1935, Ibn Saud “informed” the ruler of Qatar, Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, that the inhabitants of the peninsula were part of his tribal territory and thus owed allegiance to the Saudi state.9 Armed skirmishes on the Saudi-Qatari border took place as late as 1992 and 1993, and Qatari officials implicated Saudi Arabia in coup attempts in 1996 and 2005 as bilateral tensions remained high.10 In Kuwait, British troops had to be rushed back into the state just six days after independence in June 1961 to forestall a potential Iraqi invasion after Iraq’s President Abd al-Karim Qassim massed Iraqi troops on the border. This act, together with a subsequent border incident in 1973 that left two Kuwaiti soldiers dead, four wounded, and eight missing, meant that Kuwaiti leaders looked to Iraq as their primary external threat long before their fears materialized in Saddam Hussein’s invasion in August 1990.11 For Bahrain and the UAE, however, Iran played the role of external aggressor, rather than Saudi Arabia (for Qatar) or Iraq (for Kuwait). The Shah of Iran pursued an interventionist policy in the Gulf in the run-up to (and immediate aftermath of ) Britain’s military withdrawal from the region in 1971 (which was announced, without warning and to the consternation of Gulf rulers, in 1968). This included a renewal of a long-standing territorial claim to Bahrain, going back to the islands’ conquest by the Al Khalifa ruling family, 211

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from a period of Persian control in 1783. The issue was settled by a fact-finding mission organized by the United Nations in 1970 that demonstrated overwhelming Bahraini preference for a fully sovereign, independent Arab state rather than any attachment to Iran.12 While the Shah’s claim on Bahrain was never actualized, Iranian forces seized three islands claimed by the emirates of Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah in November 1971, the day before Britain’s formal withdrawal from the Gulf and the establishment of the UAE.13 The occupation of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, together with the Iraqi threat to Kuwait a decade earlier and the resurrection of the Iranian claim on Bahrain, highlighted the dangers facing the small, newly independent Gulf States as they sought to adapt to a volatile regional environment dominated by large and periodically expansionary powers.14 The young Gulf States’ sense of vulnerability was further heightened by Iraqi involvement in the coup against the ruler of Sharjah in 1973,15 and in Baghdad’s support for, and hosting of, revolutionary cells of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf until 1975.16 Toward the end of the 1970s, regional threats escalated dramatically. The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978–79 resulted in the overthrow of the Shah and his replacement by a radical clerical regime that was intent, at least initially, on exporting its revolution to neighboring states. This posed a direct threat to both the domestic security and regional stability of the states of the Arabian Peninsula, although its ideological dimension was less pronounced in Qatar, Oman, and the UAE than in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait owing to their much smaller Shia populations. Nevertheless, the new Islamic Republic did reject the regional status quo and presented a challenge to the legitimacy of the ruling families in the Gulf. Ayatollah Khomeini himself stated that monarchical and secular-nationalist forms of governance were incompatible with the requirements of “Islamic governance”. For Gulf rulers, the threat from Iran was therefore multifaceted and operated at the transnational and inter-cultural, as well as at the traditional inter-state, levels.17 Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran also signaled the ignominious end of the US’ “Twin Pillars” policy of ensuring the stability of the Gulf by working with the conservative and monarchical bulwarks of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 reinforced the need to reorder a regional system that had irretrievably broken down. Relations between Iraq and the Gulf monarchies had, in fact, undergone a gradual rapprochement after 1975 as Iraqi foreign policy shed its revolutionary socialist strand and became more pragmatic, as Saddam Hussein prioritized pan-Arabism in a bid for regional leadership. The normalization of Iraq’s relations with its Arab neighbors also accelerated following the ostracism of Egypt in the Arab world after the Camp David accords in 1979, and as the perception of a common threat from revolutionary Iran drew them closer together.18 In response to this worrying turn of events, the four smaller Gulf States (plus Oman) joined with Saudi Arabia to establish the GCC in a meeting in Abu Dhabi on 25 May 1981. Numerous proposals for a regional organization had been made in the late 1970s, some of which included Iraq and even Iran, but no consensus could be reached on whether the organization should be a political or economic union, or focus primarily on security. All eight states – the six future GCC members plus Iraq and Iran – met in Muscat in November 1976 to discuss potential arrangements, but the meeting broke up without agreement. A particularly wide gap separated Iran’s expansive proposal for a unified Gulf army, navy, and air force and Iraq’s narrow preference for a defense treaty that would safeguard international shipping routes through the Gulf.19 Even after the six Gulf States decided to proceed without Iran and Iraq, they encountered a three-way split as Saudi Arabia proposed a collective security agreement, Kuwait supported a common market and economic integration, and Oman favored a purely military alliance.20 What changed the calculus of the six Gulf States and propelled the GCC into formation was the twin shocks of the Iranian Revolution in 1978–79 and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 212

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September 1980. Both developments posed an immediate and serious threat to the security of the Gulf States, as the new clerical regime in Iran initially sought to export its brand of revolutionary Shia militancy to neighboring states through the Movement of Vanguard Missionaries and the Shiraziyyun movement, which had influence in Kuwait and Bahrain. The Shiraziyyun were heavily involved both in the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, which tried to mount a coup in 1981, and in Saudi Arabia, where the Organization for the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula was the most important Shia militant group in the Gulf in the early 1980s.21 Meanwhile, Kuwait came under rocket and mortar fire from November 1980, less than two months into the Iran-Iraq War, as attacks (from both sides) on oil infrastructure and commercial shipping in the Gulf escalated and illustrated the Gulf States’ vulnerability to any disruption to the export of oil and import of goods that underpinned the social contract and political and economic stability.22 The formation of the GCC represented therefore an immediate and ad hoc reaction to the situation of profound uncertainty confronting the region. After years of procrastination and an inability to agree on the shape of any organization, the GCC took shape at extraordinary speed in 1981. Between February and May, the six countries agreed on its broad goals and objectives, its founding charter, and institutional design. Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla has noted how the typically recalcitrant and normally conservative Arab Gulf States took less than three months to unanimously agree on the broad ideas and goals of the GCC, approve of its final charter, sign many intricate documents on rules and structures, and hastily announce its formal birth. Such extraordinary speed is practically unheard of in the history of regional integration and is particularly uncharacteristic of the rulers of the six Arab Gulf states whose normal tendency is to procrastinate on a decision with potential ramifications on their sovereignty.23 The new body was neither a political nor a military alliance, and it lacked an integrative supranational decision-making institution for the sharing of sovereignty, akin to the European Commission. It had no explicit treaty-based foreign policy-making power, as the Charter called only for a coordination of foreign policy and political cooperation. Its member governments retained responsibility for almost all aspects of political and economic policy, and resisted any putative limitations on their sovereignty.24 Saudi Arabia apart, the other five members were still in the process of state formation and bureaucratic consolidation, and they were also wary of the potential for Saudi dominance or hegemony within the new organization, whether in terms of population, size of armed forces, intraregional trade flows, and geostrategic importance.25 In part to obviate this imbalance of power, the GCC presented itself from the beginning as a cautious status quo entity that intended to shield its member states and societies from the transnational and unconventional threat of the spillover of instability from Iran and Iraq.26

Obstacles to integration Until the diplomatic rupture between Qatar and three of its GCC neighbors in June 2017, which was accompanied by a series of economic measures and a war of words unprecedented in the modern history of the Gulf, the GCC had endured as an entity precisely because it was more a loose collection of states than a purposefully integrative political or economic project. Efforts to align policies behind a common approach were fiercely resisted by the governments of member states if they were perceived to encroach upon their political authority or national 213

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sovereignty. Most progress was made instead on purely technocratic issues – such as the harmonization of technical standards – that had little, if any, political dimension, in contrast to “big-ticket” issues such as monetary union, security coordination, or foreign policy approaches to regional affairs.27 Multiple reasons lay behind the failure of centralization initiatives within the GCC to gain traction among the member states. At its heart is the basic fact that the governments themselves constitute little more than bureaucratic extensions of ruling family control, with senior members of ruling families populating all key decision-making positions (with only the partial exception of Oman). As such, the conduct of domestic and foreign affairs is restricted to a tightly drawn circle, and governance is top-down instead of bottom-up, with institutions such as Ministries of Foreign Affairs responsible for implementing decisions that have already been made, rather than participating meaningfully in the policy-making process.28 Qatar’s approach to the unfolding rebellion in Libya in 2011 is a case in point, as policy was decided by Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, who doubled as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, and largely bypassed Qatar’s foreign ministry and diplomatic corps. Another example, from 2013, was Saudi Arabia’s sudden announcement that it would not take up the rotating seat on the UN Security Council that it had spent two years (successfully) campaigning for, owing to King Abdullah’s anger at the UN’s perceived inaction toward the Syrian conflict.29 Although the GCC has a Supreme Council at the top of its organizational structure, which consists of the six Heads of State who meet in Summit every December, the fact remains that the leaders have shown themselves reluctant to share power with their own citizens, and still less with each other. While decisions on procedural matters are taken by a majority vote of the rulers, unanimous agreement is required for more substantive issues (which are not themselves defined). This requirement for unanimity has held back almost every major decision that has come before the GCC since its inception, beginning with a proposal for a unified internal security mechanism that was vetoed by Kuwait first in 1982 and again in 1994.30 As the conduct of foreign (and security) policy lies at the core of national sovereignty issues, the GCC has been unable to reach consensus on a bloc-wide approach to regional affairs, as members states have put national interests first. Differing threat perceptions and foreign policy approaches became immediately apparent during the Iran-Iraq War that propelled the GCC into being. Their geographical position in the northern Gulf and greater intermixing of Sunni and Shia communities exposed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain to a range of material and ideological threats to their security, which highlighted the interlocking transnational threats to their security, both directly through attacks on maritime shipping and oil installations and indirectly through acts of political violence and terrorism. Conditions in the lower Gulf lacked the immediate threat to security found in the northern states. Policy-makers in Qatar, the UAE, and Oman sought to balance limited financial and declaratory (through GCC communiqués) support to Iraq with continuing commercial relations with Iran. This delicate equilibrium reached extreme proportions in the UAE, where Dubai, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain supported Iran and maintained close trading ties with Teheran, while the other four emirates of Abu Dhabi, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, and Fujairah all sided with Iraq, with Ras al-Khaimah even offering Baghdad the opportunity to establish air bases on its territory.31 Subsequent regional crises only deepened the national approaches to foreign policy that prevented the GCC as a bloc from playing a part in policy-making debates. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent liberation of Kuwait by a US-led multinational coalition resulted in (bilateral) integration into the US military and security umbrella in the 1990s. For 214

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leaders of the smaller Gulf States, the paramount lesson of the Gulf War was that the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK and France were the ultimate guarantors of regional stability. This trumped efforts immediately after the war to build a regional defense force that would have included Egyptian and Syrian forces in an expanded Peninsula Shield Force that the GCC had set up as its joint military arm in 1984, but which had not played a role in the Gulf War. Under the Damascus Accord in March 1991, Egypt and Syria agreed to station troops in the GCC in return for economic aid, but Kuwait then signed separate defense agreements with the US and the UK that overrode any region-wide approach to collective security.32 A strong and enduring preference for bilateralism – both in security and defense networks and in trade relationships – has consistently undermined attempts to unify or even align policymaking at the GCC level. Each individual GCC member state followed Kuwait in signing their own bilateral Defense Cooperation Agreements with the US (and the UK) in the 1990s, while Bahrain and Oman broke ranks in the 2000s with a GCC attempt to negotiate a collective Free Trade Agreement with the US and signed their own bilateral trade deals with the George W. Bush administration. Saudi officials responded with fury to the bilateral US trade deals with Oman and Bahrain (together with ultimately unsuccessful US negotiations for bilateral agreements with Qatar and Kuwait), and Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal Al Saud stated that the separate agreements were not compatible with the spirit of the GCC charter, and added that ‘they diminish the collective bargaining power and weaken not only the solidarity of the GCC as a whole but also each of its members . . . what is more important, these agreements impede the progressive steps needed to achieve full Gulf economic integration’.33 In addition to the deep-rooted resistance in GCC capitals to anything that might impinge on national sovereignty, the Gulf ’s international partners have also preferred, for different reasons, to engage bilaterally with individual GCC states rather than with the bloc. European Union– GCC negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement were hampered for years by the reluctance of European nations to work with the Gulf on a multilateral basis.34 A “competitive bilateralism” undermined bloc-to-bloc negotiations as the UK, France, and Germany jostled for contracts in pursuit of closer bilateral economic and commercial ties with individual Gulf partners. This was very evident in 2005 when the newly elected German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, visited the Gulf in her capacity as the President of the European Council, only to emphasize the opportunity for Germany to ‘expand its energy ties with the Persian Gulf region’.35 The trend toward bilateralism and the reluctance to engage with the GCC as a bloc was even more pronounced during the George W. Bush presidency from 2001 to 2009, which refused to negotiate with the GCC as a trade bloc, borne in part out of a desire to dilute its collective bargaining power.36 Residual tensions between Saudi Arabia and the other five Gulf States constitute the third main reason for the lack of cohesion in GCC policy-making. Its far greater territorial size, population, and history of conquest in the Arabian Peninsula means the Saudi shadow has loomed over the coastal states ever since Ibn Saud completed the unification of the modern-day Kingdom in 1923. Kuwaitis still base their citizenship laws on being able to prove ancestral residence in Kuwait at the time of the Battle of Jahra in 1920, when Kuwait, with British support, repelled an attempt by forces loyal to Ibn Saud to invade and take over the sheikhdom. Three decades later, Abu Dhabi and Oman (again with British assistance) faced down an expansive Saudi territorial claim on the Al-Ain/Buraimi oasis region that would have stripped them of large areas of their interior. A fresh border dispute between Saudi Arabia and the newly created UAE in 1974 caused years of ill feeling in Abu Dhabi, while mention already has been made of the Saudi-Qatari border skirmishes in 1992 and 1993. Qatar’s evolution of a highly distinctive set of regional policies in the 2000s reflected a desire by Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, after he took power in 1995, to escape from the Saudi 215

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shadow and develop Qatar’s own links with security and commercial partners worldwide. Qatar and Saudi Arabia supported opposite sides during the brief Yemeni civil war in 1994, and Doha went ahead with plans for a region-wide gas cooperation project (“Dolphin”) against Saudi wishes, which led to the dropping of plans to include Kuwait as Saudi officials refused to allow the pipeline through its territorial waters.37 The launch of Al-Jazeera in 1996 created additional friction in the Qatari-Saudi relationship and contributed to the withdrawal of Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador from Doha from 2002 to 2007 as Saudi anger mounted at the network’s airing of interviews with political dissidents.38 Two more recent incidents illustrate the tensions at the heart of the unbalanced coreperiphery relationship within the GCC. In May 2009, the UAE, suddenly and without warning, withdrew from the monetary union and single Gulf currency planned for 2010. Whereas Oman had pulled out of the project in 2007, citing an inability to meet the technical convergence criteria, the UAE withdrawal came shortly after Riyadh was chosen over Abu Dhabi as the site of the GCC Central Bank. Emirati officials had campaigned hard for the bank to be based in Abu Dhabi, in part to offset the Saudi-heavy structure of the GCC with its secretariat in Riyadh, and reacted with anger at ‘the non-selection of the UAE for hosting the GCC Central Bank [that] did not take into consideration the state’s importance and its economic development’.39 Indeed, many officials in the UAE apparently believed that an informal undertaking had been given in 2004 when the UAE proposed Abu Dhabi as an ideal site for a common bank.40 Despite the strong support hitherto given to the monetary union project by the Governor of the UAE’s own well-regarded Central Bank, Sultan Nasser al-Suwaidi, the sudden Emirati withdrawal left the monetary union project floundering and unable to meet its self-imposed 2010 deadline.41 After the shock of the Arab Spring political upheaval in 2011, Saudi attempts to transform the GCC into a more politically integrated Gulf Union failed to make headway in the face of stiff opposition from other member states. King Abdullah announced his vision for a closer “Gulf Union” at the GCC Summit in Riyadh in December 2011, reportedly taking his fellow rulers largely by surprise with the unilateral announcement that did not appear to have been coordinated with other leaders or indeed the GCC Secretariat. Despite then-Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal Al Saud subsequently expanding the proposals for an integrated military and regional security policy, neither a mid-year GCC Consultative Summit in Riyadh in May 2012 nor subsequent annual Summits in Bahrain (December 2012) or Kuwait (December 2013) reached a consensus on the move towards a closer political union. Indeed, the May 2012 Bahrain mid-year Summit fizzled out after only two of the other five heads of state attended in person, while in December 2013, Yusuf bin Ali, Oman’s Minister Responsible for Foreign Affairs, rejected the Saudi initiative in an unprecedentedly open and direct manner, telling the attendees in a security conference in Bahrain that ‘We are against a union. We will not prevent a union, but if it happens we will not be part of it’.42 Against the backdrop of consistent obstacles in the “big ticket” items, the most progress toward the articulation of a GCC-wide policy has occurred in the technocratic arena and has resulted in creating a degree of “economic citizenship” across the bloc.43 One of the earliest acts of the newly formed GCC was to announce a Unified Economic Agreement that pledged to coordinate oil policy, standardize industrial policy, and establish a uniform system of tariffs. However, translating words into actions proved tortuously slow and difficult in practice, despite the creation of institutions such as the Arab Gulf Organization for Industrial Consultancy and the Gulf Investment Council.44 It was only in 2003 that the GCC launched a customs union, followed by a common market in 2008, and it was at the 2014 annual Summit – 33 years after the Unified Economic Agreement – that the heads of state agreed to impose a unified tariff of 216

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5% on foreign imports from 1 January 2015 and create a single port of entry dedicated to collecting the unified customs fees.45

Struggle for relevance in an era of assertive member states Since 2011, several GCC members have emerged at the forefront of attempts to influence the pace and direction of political and economic change in regional states impacted by the Arab Spring. Led by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, Gulf actors mobilized significant reserves and varying mixes of hard and soft power in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, in a range of policy responses that ranged from propping up a fellow ruling family (Bahrain) and managing a political transition (Yemen and Egypt) to seeking to overthrow autocratic leaders (Libya and Syria). The emergence of Gulf States as active participants in regional politics left the GCC marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as Qatar backed different sides from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and none of the states acted within the framework of the GCC itself. The emergence of the Gulf States as visible global actors predated the Arab Spring but accelerated and acquired a potent new dimension once the initial shock of the upheaval had subsided. After 2011, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE aligned their growing capabilities (in the political, economic, and security arenas) with a far more expansive policy intent. The scope and scale of Gulf assistance to Egypt provided a clear example of the practical and policy implications of this process in action as first Qatar and, later, Saudi Arabia and the UAE backed different sides in the post-Mubarak maelstrom of Egyptian politics. Yet, the Egyptian example also highlighted how Gulf actors were not impartial actors that did not take sides in choosing how and to whom to provide aid, in a pattern since repeated in Libya and Yemen. Instead, support was linked indelibly to preferred political currents rather than being tied to outcomes such as reforms to governance or improvements in transparency.46 The case of Egypt is worthy of closer study as it was not only the largest and most direct recipient of GCC states’ assistance but also because it illustrates the complexities and competing agendas embedded within such support. After the 2011 revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Saudi Arabia and the UAE backed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) with financial support and diplomatic recognition. Officials in both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi opted for regime-type continuity in a bid to limit the impact of such rapid and unexpected political change. The UAE pledged US$3 billion in aid to Egypt in 2011 while Saudi Arabia approved US$430 million in assistance from the Saudi Fund for Development, and gave Egypt access to a US$750 million line of credit to import oil products in June 2012, shortly before the Egyptian presidential election resulted in victory for the Muslim Brotherhood.47 Following the victory of Mohammed Morsi, relations with the UAE and Saudi Arabia abruptly cooled while Qatar stepped in to provide the new Egyptian government with more than US$7.5 billion in emergency loans, direct financial aid, and shipments of liquefied natural gas.48 On a visit to Cairo in September 2012, the Qatari Prime (and Foreign) Minister, Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, announced plans to invest US$18 billion in Egypt over five years and stated that there would be “no limits” to Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood–ruled country struggling to find conventional funds to balance the budget, However, it is unclear whether any of the investments materialized before the July 2013 coup that toppled Morsi and marked the end of Qatar’s leverage in Egypt.49 The sudden removal of President Morsi and the return of military-led rule to Egypt in July 2013 was followed by immediate and large-scale pledges of assistance by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE. Over US$12 billion was promised in the week after the coup alone, and was quickly disbursed, as the three countries stepped in to replace the Qatari aid to the ousted 217

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government. By late October 2013, the UAE had, for example, assembled a comprehensive economic package totaling US$4.9 billion, consisting of a US$1 billion grant transferred to the Egyptian government in July, US$1 billion in petroleum products to help meet Egypt’s fuel and hydrocarbon needs, and US$2.9 billion in aid for development and infrastructure projects.50 By the time that Emirati policy-makers took the lead in early 2015 with a major international investment conference (the Egypt Economic Development Conference), the UAE had provided more than US$14 billion in aid to Egypt, which constituted by far the largest share of the more than US$20 billion in financial support from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.51 Officials from the UAE also assisted their Egyptian counterparts in devising economic reforms and putting together packages of investment from major Emirati public and state-owned enterprises, although they began in 2016 to express frustration at the Sisi government’s slow implementation of the reforms.52 Even as its member states squared up on opposite sides in Egypt, and in Libya where Qatar and the UAE backed competing militias that split the country into Islamist and secular camps, the GCC as an institution was almost entirely absent from the policy-making framework. Even the intervention in Bahrain in 2011, packaged as the deployment of the GCC’s Peninsula Shield Force to assist the Bahraini government to restore order after a month-long uprising, was more of a Saudi and Emirati initiative, and a group of Kuwaiti medics was left stranded in Saudi Arabia after they were denied entry to Bahrain.53 Saudi Arabia and the UAE additionally led the way in assembling the military coalition that commenced airstrikes and ground operations in Yemen in 2015 after Houthi rebels aligned with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh captured the capital, Sana’a, and much of the country. However, there was little operational coordination between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which resulted in the de facto partition of Yemen into Saudi and Emirati spheres of influence, and clashes by proxy groups that claimed the support of either Riyadh or Abu Dhabi.54 Two diplomatic ruptures among three GCC states – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – and Qatar, in 2014 and 2017, illustrated further the powerlessness of the GCC to prevent individual members from acting unilaterally and bypassing GCC structures and dispute mechanisms. Qatar’s autonomous foreign policy prior to 2011 and assertive support for the Muslim Brotherhood during and after the Arab Spring had put the country at odds with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In November 2013, five months after Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani handed power to his 33-year-old son, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, US media reported that Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood were regrouping in Doha following the toppling of President Morsi and the reinstatement of military rule in Egypt. In fury, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia summoned Emir Tamim to Riyadh and presented him with an ultimatum to ‘change Qatar’s ways and bring the country in line with the rest of the GCC with regards to regional issues’. Tamim also was told to sign an additional security agreement that stipulated ‘non-interference’ in the ‘internal affairs of any of the other GCC countries’ and sign a pledge of compliance that he would do so.55 Tensions peaked in March 2014 when Saudi Arabia and the UAE judged that Qatar was not in full compliance with the November 2013 agreement and, together with Bahrain, withdrew their Ambassadors from Doha. For the UAE, whose leadership was engaged in the pursuit of Muslim Brotherhood both domestically and regionally, a particular flashpoint was the revelation that several Emirati members of Al-Islah, the UAE-affiliated branch of the Brotherhood, had been given refuge in Doha after escaping arrest and fleeing the UAE in 2012. Months of acrimony followed with periodic attempts at negotiation mediated by Kuwait, whose Emir, Sheikh Sabah, had reportedly struck up a close relationship with Emir Tamim, but the dispute ended in November 2014 after a series of Qatari concessions. These included relocating to Turkey 218

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Muslim Brotherhood figures hitherto resident in Doha and ordering the Emirati dissidents to leave Qatar, closing the Egyptian branch station of Al-Jazeera, and cooperating closely with Saudi Arabia and the UAE on matters of intelligence and policing.56 Diplomatic tensions between Qatar and its three fellow GCC states exploded again in May 2017 when Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a media campaign that depicted Qatar as a destabilizing actor with murky connections to international terrorist groups and Iran. Two weeks later, on 5 June, Bahrain joined the Saudis and Emiratis in withdrawing its Ambassador from Doha, just as the three had done in 2014. The trio, along with Egypt, also imposed economic and trading sanctions on Qatar and presented Doha with a list of 13 conditions that – had they been accepted – would have turned Qatar into little more than a vassal state. After US officials at the State Department and Pentagon – if not the White House of President Donald Trump – signaled their opposition to the Qatari “ultimatum”, the Anti-Terror Quartet (as the four states called themselves) whittled down their demands to six general principles but ratcheted up the media and lobbying war in a bitter campaign to influence “hearts and minds” in Western capitals such as Washington, DC.57 The Qatar crisis – both in its 2017 iteration and in the years of tension that had built up to it – may prove to be a blow too far for the GCC, which is split in at least three ways, with Kuwait and Oman seeking a middle ground between Qatar and its three detractors. Key decisions – from the sudden withdrawal of Ambassadors to the presentation of the list of demands – were taken in national capitals rather than by the GCC, and both the GCC Secretary General and the Secretariat in Riyadh were silent as the standoff escalated. Furthermore, the attempts to mediate the crisis have emanated from Kuwait and the US and bypassed GCC mechanisms in a pattern consistent with the absence of the GCC voice from the policy-making debate. Increasing numbers of Qataris have started to question the utility of belonging to an organization that appears powerless to prevent or control the application of bilateral pressure among its members. Moreover, as power within the Gulf coalesces around the hawkish Crown Princes Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud in Riyadh and Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi, it remains to be seen how far the GCC will be able to remain relevant in the face of the assertive new spine in regional policy-making. For nearly four decades, the GCC has endured largely because it is a loose collection of individual states that have their own distinct sets of political and security (less so economic) interests. The risk for the GCC going forward is that the regionally assertive backbone provided by the Riyadh–Abu Dhabi “axis” will upset the delicate equilibrium and drive other GCC states farther apart. At best a two-tier GCC may evolve, consisting of the inner core of Saudi Arabia (and, by extension, Bahrain) and the UAE, and an outer grouping of Kuwait, Oman, and, should it remain a member, Qatar. However, with both Kuwait and Oman approaching a leadership transition, ruling elites in both countries may look at the pressure applied on Qatar to move toward the hawkish Saudi-Emirati line, and wonder if similar leverage might be put on them in the future. If the future of the GCC is a “take it or leave it” choice between adopting the hard-line Riyadh–Abu Dhabi approach or facing unprecedented political and economic pressure, then the 2017 Qatar crisis may finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the GCC.

Notes 1 James Onley, “Britain and the Gulf Shaikhdoms, 1820–1971: The Politics of Protection,” Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar: Occasional Paper No. 4 (2009), 10. 2 Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout, A History of Modern Oman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 145–147.

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Kristian Coates Ulrichsen 3 Joel Migdal, Shifting Sands: The United States in the Middle East (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014), 3. 4 Jeffrey Macris, The Politics and Security of the Gulf: Anglo-American Hegemony and the Shaping of a Region (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 99; W. Taylor Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 133. 5 Ibid. 6 Letter from the Permanent Representative of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen to the Secretary General of the United Nations, 26 November 1973. London: The National Archives, file FCO 8/2037. 7 Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics, and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 122–123. 8 Roger Hardy, “Ambivalent Ally: Saudi Arabia and the ‘War on Terror’,” in Madawi Al-Rasheed, ed. Kingdom Without Borders: Saudi Arabia’s Political, Religious and Media Frontiers (London: Hurst & Co., 2008), 101. 9 Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Creation of Qatar (London: Croon Helm, 1979), 82–83. 10 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, “Qatar: The Gulf ’s Problem Child,” The Atlantic, 5 June 2017. 11 Robert Jarman, Sabah Al-Salim Al-Sabah: Amir of Kuwait, 1965–77: A Political Biography (London: London Centre of Arab Studies, 2002), 232; Mary Ann Tetreault, “Kuwait’s Unhappy Anniversary,” Middle East Policy 7, no. 3 (2000): 67–68. Tetreault makes the point that memories of 1961 and 1973 meant that many in Kuwait and the region initially believed that Saddam Hussein would cross the border and annex only a portion of northern Kuwait, rather than occupy the entire country. 12 Wm. Roger Louis, “The Withdrawal from the Gulf,” in Wm. Roger Louis, ed. Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 902. 13 The United Arab Emirates was formed from the seven Trucial States of Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain. Only six of the Trucial States joined the UAE when it was established in 1971, as the Ruler of Ras al-Khaimah harbored hopes of discovering oil and going it alone. After initial exploration efforts proved fruitless, Ras al-Khaimah belatedly joined the UAE in February 1972. 14 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, “The Gulf States and the Iran-Iraq War: Cooperation and Confusion,” in Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson, eds. The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 112. 15 Christopher Davidson, Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success (London: Hurst and Co., 2008), 251. 16 Marc Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (London: Hurst and Co., 2009), 60. 17 Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy (London: Routledge, 2006), 29. 18 Charles Tripp, “The Foreign Policy of Iraq,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. The Foreign Policies of Middle East States (London: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 175–176. 19 Jones and Ridout, Oman, 185–186. 20 Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, “The Gulf Cooperation Council: Nature, Origin and Process,” in Michael Hudson, ed. Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 154. 21 Hasan Tariq al-Hasan, “The Role of Iran in the Failed Coup of 1981: the IFLB in Bahrain,” Middle East Journal 65, no. 4 (2011): 604–606. 22 Abdul-Reda Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy: City-State in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 72. 23 Abdulla, “Gulf Cooperation Council: Nature, Origin and Process,” 154. 24 Abdulla Baaboud, “Dynamics and Determinants of the GCC States’ Foreign Policy, with Special Reference to the EU,” in Gerd Nonneman, ed. Analyzing Middle Eastern Foreign Policies (London: Routledge, 2005), 148. 25 Anthony Cordesman, quoted in Ibrahim Suleiman al-Duraiby, Saudi Arabia, GCC and the EU: Limitations and Possibilities for an Unequal Triangular Relationship (Dubai: Gulf Research Centre, 2009), 89. 26 Interview with Abdulla Bishara, Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council 1981–1993, Kuwait City, 21 October 2009. 27 Christian Koch, “GCC Confronted by Dichotomy,” Gulf Research Center, 22 December 2012. 28 Anoushiravan Ehteshami, “Reform from Above: The Politics of Participation in the Oil Monarchies,” International Affairs 79, no. 1 (2003): 55. 29 Anon, “Saudi Arabia Officially Rejects UN Security Council Seat,” Gulf News, 13 November 2013.

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GCC foreign policy 30 Joseph Kechichian, “The Gulf Security Pact: Another GCC Dilemma,” Al Jazeera Online, 24 February 2014. 31 Christopher Davidson, The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival (London: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 206. 32 “Foreign Ministers of the Eight Arab States of the Coalition Meet,” Gulf States Newsletter 17, no. 436 (18 May 1992): 5. 33 Prince Saud al-Faisal cited in Abdulla Baaboud and Geoffrey Edwards,“Reinforcing Ambivalence: The Interaction of Gulf States and the European Union,” European Foreign Affairs Review 12 (2007): 548. 34 Matteo Legrenzi, “Gulf Cooperation Council Diplomatic Coordination: The Limited Role of Institutionalization,” in Jean-Francois Seznec and Mimi Kirk, eds. Industrialization in the Gulf: A Socioeconomic Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 117. 35 Baaboud and Edwards, “Reinforcing Ambivalence,” 549. 36 John Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah and Mohammed Al-Mutawa, “The Arab Gulf Region: Tradition Globalized or Globalization Traditionalized?” in John Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah and Mohammed Al-Mutawa, eds. Globalization and the Gulf (London: Routledge, 2006), 24. 37 Justin Dargin,“Qatar’s Natural Gas: The Foreign-Policy Driver,” Middle East Policy 14, no. 3 (2007): 140. 38 See Louay Bahry, “The New Arab Media Phenomenon: Qatar’s Al-Jazeera,” Middle East Policy 8, no. 2 (2001); Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, “How Saudi Arabia and Qatar Became Friends Again,” Foreign Policy, 21 July 2011. 39 “Withdrawal from GCC Single Currency ‘Final’,” Emirates 24/7, 22 May 2009. 40 “Abdullah Woos the UAE After Central Bank Split Highlights Lack of Trust in the GCC,” Gulf States Newsletter 33, no. 854 (29 May 2009): 14. 41 Ibid. 42 “GCC Unity Questioned as Summit Begins,” Gulf States Newsletter 37, no. 960 (12 December 2013): 7. 43 Matteo Legrenzi, The GCC and the International Relations of the Gulf: Diplomacy, Security and Economic Coordination in a Changing Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 58–59. 44 Fred Lawson, “Transformation of Regional Economic Governance in the Gulf Cooperation Council,” Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Center for International and Regional Studies Occasional Paper No. 10 (2012), 6–7. 45 “Gulf States in Final Push Towards Customs Union,” Al Shorfa, 16 December 2014; “GCC Customs Union Fully Operational,” The Peninsula, 3 January 2015. 46 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, “The Gulf States in Regional and International Politics,” James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Research Paper, 8 January 2014, 15–16. 47 “Difficult Geopolitical Context,” Gulf States Newsletter 36, no. 926 (21 June 2012): 2. 48 “Qatar Hails New Egypt Leader in Apparent Policy Shift,” Reuters, 4 July 2013. 49 “Qatar Seeks to Invest – and Secure Its Footing – in the New Egypt,” Gulf States Newsletter 36, no. 932 (27 September 2012): 9–10. 50 “UAE Signs $4.9 Billion Aid Package to Egypt,” Reuters, 26 October 2013. 51 “Dubai’s Emaar Says Not Part of Egypt’s Capital City Project,” Reuters, 16 March 2015. 52 Author interview, Washington, DC, March 2016. 53 “Kuwait Medical Team Hope for Bahrain Clearance,” Associated Press, 23 March 2011. 54 “GCC Unity Questioned as Summit Begins,” Gulf States Newsletter 37, no. 960 (12 December 2013): 7. 55 Coates Ulrichsen, “Qatar: The Gulf ’s Problem Child.” 56 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, “What’s Going on in Qatar?” Washington Post, 1 June 2017. 57 James Dorsey, “Managing Reputations in the Gulf,” Fair Observer, 29 July 2017.

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17 EU POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST Unfulfilled aspirations Christian Koch

The track record of European policies in the Middle East is a disappointing one. On the surface, here is a rich continent with in-depth experience in promoting economic growth and overcoming historical animosities and conflict. Yet, with regard to the Middle East, its most prominent geographic neighbor, European policies have had virtually no impact on the trajectory of the Middle East towards greater stability and prosperity. From a broad perspective, it can be argued that Europe is largely a bystander that deals with the symptoms of the various crises but without fundamentally impacting on any of its developments. There is no single explanatory or conceptual approach that can be put forward for illuminating Europe’s approach to the Middle East and its associated shortcomings. Instead, European policies when it comes to the Middle East are caught between several dichotomies. First, a realist interpretation of international relations prevails. While Europe through the EU and Brussels attempts to frame its policies within a multilateral approach, it is in fact the individual European states that continue to construct their relationship with Middle Eastern partners primarily from a national interest–based perspective. Similarly, the normative approach of the EU in which the principles of rule of law, human rights, and overall liberal democracy are put forward as the cornerstones around which policies are constructed, compete and often contradict against the pure national economic and security interests of individual European states. This, in turn, leads to frictions and inconsistencies in the way European policies in the region are applied, pursued, and implemented. It also results in the clear discrepancy between Europe as an actor and Europe as largely a spectator. Second, Europe has found it difficult to balance its policies in the Middle East between its own internal European priorities and those other external relationships that Europe pursues, primarily, the US and within the context of the transatlantic alliance.1 Although much more directly impacted by developments in the Middle East, the inability and unwillingness of Europe to match the US or other external actors such as Russia in their strategic reach means that Europe finds itself in a mostly reactive position and therefore unable to show that it can play a more determining role in the Middle Eastern region. The US decision to launch the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is one poignant example. A direct consequence of this balancing act is the increased securitization of policies whereby efforts to promote medium- to long-term change and reform in the Middle East give way or are sacrificed by the priorities tied to establishing order and stability. This creates a discrepancy 222

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between what Europe says and what Europe does in the Middle East. As Europe finds its impact being negligible on the ground, a growing fatigue has begun to set in when it comes to the turmoil of its neighboring region. This can be seen since the events of 9/11, the reverberations of the Arab Spring since 2011, and especially the migration wave of 2015 and 2016. A direct result is a Europe that is more concentrating on the protections of its borders rather than trying to influence developments in its near-abroad. Europe also becomes more concerned about stabilizing its neighborhood rather than transforming it. The emphasis in the EU’s Global Strategy of 2016 on “the security of Our Union” is symptomatic of this trend.2 Third, Europe simply seems overwhelmed when it comes to the Middle East. Without a doubt, the Middle East represents the most strategically challenging arena for European foreign policy-making, and there is also little dispute that the challenges that the Middle East poses to Europe have increased substantially both geographically and thematically over recent decades. While the Middle East for Europe used to be largely confined to North Africa and the Levant, it now stretches to the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and into sub-Saharan Africa. Equally, no longer just confined to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the region’s security agenda has broadened to include terrorism, issues of proliferation, sectarianism, state failure and decay, refugee and migratory flows, to renewed forms of authoritarianism, just to highlight the more obvious developments. Competition is also increasing at the international level in what is already one of the most externally penetrated regions of the world, as can be seen by Russia’s recent role in Syria and China’s advancement through its One Road, One Belt initiative.3 With suggestions at the same time that the US might be considering some form of strategic drawback from the Middle East, the tools and instruments available at Europe’s disposal appear increasingly inadequate due to the shifting dynamics taking place.4 This chapter will try to shed light on how the changing nature of the political challenges in the Middle East interact with the more reactive nature of the EU as an international actor and what this means for the assumptions commonly made about European foreign policy. It will further examine what is likely to be a more complex and individual set of relations emerging that will question some of the assumptions of the past in terms of current and future trajectories of Europe–Middle Eastern ties. A core question to be addressed is to what degree Europe can still play a role in the strategic environment of the Middle East region and what this implies for the involvement of other powers.

An overview of European policies in the Middle East Under European imperialism, the modern Middle Eastern state system was created. Hollis describes three distinct phases into which to divide European policies, starting with the period and decline of European imperialism stretching across the two world wars, the period of the Cold War, and Europe’s approach post-1990 with the emergence of the EU as a foreign policy actor trying to formulate a broader and more principled approach. In terms of the imperial legacy, Hollis states that: ‘European imperialism came to take the blame for dividing up the Arab world and setting up a competitive state system that undercut Arab unity and produced militarist, undemocratic, and client regimes thereafter’, citing the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration that provided the basis for the creation of the state of Israel.5 Ultimately, it would not be until 1971 that the age of imperialism came to an end with the British withdrawal of its territories ‘East of Suez’, although it ended earlier for France with its defeat in the Algerian civil war of 1954–62.6 Within the context of the Cold War, access to energy resources and security considerations begin to play an overarching role, as evidenced by the 1973 oil crisis and the numerous 223

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Arab-Israeli conflicts spawning the period from 1948 to 1973. The critical year of 1979, which witnessed the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan followed by the eightyear-long Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, ensured that security considerations remained predominant when designing and framing European policies towards the Middle East. With the EU mostly restricted still to economic and internal issues, foreign policy towards the Middle East was largely a single nation or bilateral effort. France and Great Britain remained in the forefront. Any direct intervention was left primarily to the US to carry out. Meanwhile, Europe did engage in the Euro-Arab Dialogue beginning in 1974 in order to provide European policies with some form of institutional basis. But by the end of the 1980s, this dialogue had been put mostly on the back burner given the events mentioned earlier and the fact that Europe became caught up in the end of the Cold War era and the demise of the Soviet Union by the end of the decade. As long as the Iron Curtain ran through Europe, Middle Eastern developments and its associated security concerns were not considered of primary importance. The end of the East-West divide was accompanied by the growing process of European integration. The Single European Act of 1987, the first major revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, not only set the objective of establishing a single market by the end of 1992, but it also codified European political cooperation, in essence the forerunner of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Thus, in addition to the UK and France maintaining their historical links to the Middle East, the EU as an institution begins to push forward with numerous initiatives on the Middle East following the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 (to be followed further by the European Security and Defense Policy in 1998 and the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, which created the current external policy set-up of the EU). This resulted in the introduction of two new elements: the attempt at formulating and then putting forward a unified European position towards the foreign policy challenges in the immediate neighborhoods of the Union and a move away from the very restricted balance-of-power security-centric point of view to a broader, more inclusive emphasis on social, economic, and political issues as focal points of European interests. Starting in the 1990s, one thus begins to witness a series of initiatives being put forward in the name of Europe. This included in particular the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (known as the Barcelona Process), the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), and the push for greater cooperation on the EU-GCC front.7 The foundations for this approach were grounded in the belief that security in Europe would be enhanced by economic growth and prosperity in the neighborhood regions of Europe and that through comprehensive, structured cooperation on the political/security, the economic/financial, and the socio/cultural front, the political transformation and institution-building process in the Middle East could be significantly enhanced. There were two additional aspects. The first was that with the removal of trade barriers and through the pursuit of enhanced trade arrangements, Europe would also benefit due to deeper market penetration in the economies of the Middle East. This has always been a key objective, but with the EU taking the lead on trade-related matters, new initiatives gave the policy approach a new twist. The second was that following up on the Middle East peace process started with the 1991 Madrid conference, and the EU also wanted to carve itself a role in terms of conflict resolution mechanisms for the region and thus extend a broader role for Europe’s ability to influence its neighborhood through the application of non-military means. Building on the experience of European integration and the lessons learned coming out of the ashes of two world wars, the core belief was that an emphasis on regional cooperation and integration would ultimately contribute to a more secure and stable neighborhood. Given the nature of interdependence, Europe placed its emphasis on “soft power” tools as well as numerous socio-economic strategies. On the political side, the stated emphasis was 224

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on reform promotion through gradualism and a step-by-step approach, building cooperative partnerships by utilizing arguments of persuasion, and promoting democracy through the advocacy of the rule of law and economic liberalization but also indirectly through education and culture programs. On this front, the EU wanted to showcase its approach based on economic interdependence, rule of law, and role of institutions as a contrast to the military power and interventionist approach of the US. European initiatives would soon show their limitations, however. The fact that much of the emphasis was placed on economic ties, an area where the EU has central power over that of its member countries, meant that promoting broader economic relations did not in fact represent a new approach to structuring Europe’s relations with the states of the Middle East given that Europe remained the core while the Middle East became the periphery.8 The result was that Europe became integrated into the economic fabric of the Middle East as aid donors and suppliers of products rather than as dynamic equal trading partners.9 It would soon become apparent that one of the key limitations of this approach was its reliance on the concept of the neoliberal capitalist economy, which in the Middle East fostered vested interests by an economic elite and led to greater corruption and centralization of power rather than the opposite. Moreover, while economic ties fostered a level of integration with Europe, they did not lead to any levels of integration within the Middle East, instead resulting in a combination of the EU as the highest trade-integrated region of the world with the Arab world as being the least integrated. As such, the stated goal of the Barcelona Process of the establishment of a Mediterranean Free Trade Zone by 2010 was never realized. Outside of the economic realm, the Barcelona Process also failed to fulfill other stated aspirations. As Neugart has pointed out: ‘In spite of the establishment of a considerable institutional apparatus, the Partnership [Euro-Mediterranean] has neither succeeded in stimulating a regional security structure nor in sparking a political reform process in the partner states’.10 Instead of regional integration, the Barcelona system led to a hub-and-spoke system of bilateral deals between the EU and individual southern neighborhood countries.11 Little progress was made on ending corruption, promoting accountability, or exporting European norms. Following the event of 11 September 2001, Europe began to shift its emphasis for a more fundamental reform of the Arab state system, although this cannot be defined as an overarching paradigm shift given that many of the policy instruments to support reform efforts were already in place. But in addition to past efforts, what evolved were the 2004 European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), the 2004 Strategic Partnership with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the 2005 European Initiative on Democracy and Human Rights. The ENP was considered the cornerstone and became the chosen mechanism through which to enhance stability and prosperity in the EU’s periphery. It was put forward as a flexible and differentiated approach to bilateral relations built around action plans and the core concept of strategic partnerships. However, EU enlargement also meant that within Europe there was an enlargement in the diversity of interest, which ultimately meant that regional initiatives were based more on pragmatism rather than vision. Thus, while the ENP was developed ‘with the objective of avoiding the emergence of new dividing lines between the enlarged EU and our neighbors’,12 the fact that it sought to propose a single coherent policy that would apply to all 16 countries on the eastern and southern neighborhood soon exposed the limitations of the proposed approach. Here, the ENP in fact stood in direct contrast to the Strategic Partnership Document from just one month later ( June 2004), which emphasized that “there is no basis for a one-size-fits-all approach”.13 The outbreak of the Arab Spring revolts beginning at the end of 2010 highlighted the fact that while the EU had put forward a variety of instruments to promote greater prosperity, 225

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stability, and security in its immediate neighborhood, the mechanisms had failed to provide the sufficient foundation for a gradual and sustainable reform process to take hold. By 2015, the EU acknowledged that ‘events of recent years have demonstrated the need for a new approach, a re-prioritization and an introduction of new ways of working’.14 Even immediately after the Arab Spring events in March 2011, the EU had put forward an approach to focus on institutionbuilding and promoting transformation through a “more for more” approach, i.e., recipient countries would qualify for more EU aid and support for the greater amount of economic, political, and social reforms they would implement. This was defined in detail in the “Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the southern Mediterranean” document and its three elements of (1) democratic transformation and institution-building, (2) stronger partnership with the people, and (3) sustainable and inclusive growth.15 In terms of a partnership with the people, the EU also proposed a Civil Society Neighborhood Facility, as well as a series of mobility packages, especially in terms of education and training. Yet, similar to previous approaches, it soon became clear that while the stress on implementing reforms required an indirect bottom-up approach, what the EU pursued was mostly elite-guided reform measures to be largely imposed from the top. The EU tended to accord the regimes in the region the benefit of the doubt with the positive democratic conditionality that formed the core of the European stated approach applied loosely and inconsistently in both design and principle. As Youngs points out, it was “reform with caveats”.16 Proposals thus became referred to as old wine in new bottles. The more-for-more concept also suffered from the same shortcoming as the conditionality principle would prove to have little impact given that there was little active response from the other side. The EU’s reform-based approach also failed to improve on the short-term stability of the region. The relationship between the maintenance of stability alongside the promotion of democracy was once again exposed as one of Europe’s most persistent dilemmas. The more immediate consequence was that stabilization soon emerged as the key focus and concern and began to replace the principle of enacting transformation. The 2003 European Security Strategy was the first step towards a more securitized approach by the EU towards the Middle East. In this context, Barcelona and the ENP became defined as relics of the past that were more a ‘description of risks and threats than a clearly defined strategic concept’.17 Finally, on 23 June 2016, the EU unveiled its Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS) document. The EUGS was the result of a year-long process in which the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Frederica Mogherini, consulted with member states and the larger expert and academic community in an effort to give EU foreign and security policy greater coherence and strategic direction. Upon its release, the Global Strategy document was judged to be a far more realistic and therefore less ambitious attempt at defining and outlining the EU’s role in the world than previous attempts. It places a strong emphasis on unity (“unity of purpose and unity of action”) alongside a determination to place the security of the EU at the forefront of concerns. As such, the strategy calls for greater cooperation in strategic communication among its members to focus on key areas such as counterterrorism, energy security, and cyber security. At the same time, the document acknowledges that ‘security at home depends on peace beyond our borders’ and therefore calls for pre-emptive peacebuilding and diplomacy efforts alongside multilateralism as the key principle to be followed. While it is recognized that current developments on the international scene have brought about an existential crisis for many regions, the EU also sees this as an opportunity to refocus its energies and adjust the tools it has available to encourage conflict resolution and stability mechanisms. But instead of a focus on

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democratization and producing changes in neighboring regions, the emphasis in the EUGS lies on “balanced engagement” and “resilience”. The benchmark by which the EU hopes to achieve its objectives is defined as “principled pragmatism”. By this the EU means less grand and global one-size-fits-all ideological strategies meant to demonstrate European values and more focus on individual cases and the specific requirements that are needed to resolve certain crises on the ground. Instead of strategic partnerships or the need for a comprehensive European Neighborhood Policy, the Global Strategy speaks of managing interdependence and promoting tailor-made partnerships. It can be argued therefore that in this context, European policies in the Middle East have come full circle in that numerous approaches have been tried before, coming back to a less idealistic and less common consideration. At the same time, what can be said two decades plus after the initial Barcelona Process is that Europe has failed to provide answers to the key questions that have been around from the outset; i.e., what is Europe’s capacity and willingness to re-structure its relations with the Middle East?; what distinguishes Europe’s policies from those of other countries?; and how can Europe devise a policy that operates on the interface of security, stability, and domestic change? Instead of Europe having considered and undertaken a paradigm shift, there have merely been adjustments to policy approaches. While one can argue that there possibly were too many initiatives, as most have suffered from a wide gap between the stated intention and the ultimate delivery, the result is also one in which Europe has shifted from positive incentives of expanding prosperity and promoting integration to the more negative approaches of avoiding chaos, containing radicalization, and prioritizing stabilization. If the Middle East was supposed to be a test case for a different application of international relations, then European policies failed miserably.

Factors limiting European effectiveness The shortcomings in Europe’s approach to the Middle East and the inability of its policies influencing developments on the ground in the direction of seeing European interests being implemented can be traced back to a number of limitations and structural factors. Three particular elements can be identified here: (1) the individual vs. collective action dichotomy between the activities of the EU as a single actor and the policies pursued by the individual member states; (2) the discrepancy between the EU’s normative approach and the realpolitik factors that determine both European policies and Middle Eastern responses, including the prioritization given to the developments in the Middle East in light of challenges being faced within the EU itself; and (3) the competition between the actions taken by Europe vs. the policies pursued by other external powers in the Middle East. With regard to all of these factors, Europe has found itself to be an inhibited actor. In addition, the shifting and more complex security environment in the Middle East over the past two decades has provided an additional obstacle that Europe has found it difficult to adjust to. What is clear is that unless the incompatibilities remain in place and unless the structural factors are dealt with, European policies will continue to fall short of their pronounced expectations. While European integration has proceeded on the economic and social level, the EU does continue to grapple with the four fundamental questions in terms of its common foreign and security policy, particularly as far as the Middle East is concerned. This includes (1) how to construct a policy approach that properly reflects the interests of all 28 member states; (2) what role to play apart from that of the US or how to ensure a European stamp on policy outreach; (3) whether to deal with the Middle East as a whole or divide policies into the different

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constituent parts and regions; and (4) how to combine short-term interests that necessarily are a response to the ever-changing events in the region with the long-term prerogatives that are required for stability and security for both Europe and the Middle East. The hope of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty to provide the EU with a broader institutional basis with which to promote its value-based foreign policy approach has not been fulfilled. One could even raise the question that based on the developments not only in the Middle East but in international relations as a whole, whether the European approach is still applicable and whether Europe is not being transformed by external influences as much as Europe has aspired to transform its neighbors earlier. The EU and its member states suddenly find themselves on the defensive in this regard.

Individualism vs. collectivism A key impediment of European policies in the Middle East is the fact that Europe as a multilateral actor in the form of the EU and the European Union’s member states often work at crosspurposes. Europe does not speak with one voice, despite the fact that under the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, EU member states committed themselves to a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In most cases, regional multilateralism has never been seriously attempted, with Europe promoting multilateralism while practicing bilateralism. On the functional level, the EU tends to lead on overall trade issues and some economic policies, but member states continue to pursue their own individual commercial interests vis-à-vis each other. This can clearly be seen when it comes to competition for contracts in the Gulf region, for example. Rosemary Hollis has in fact referred to Europe’s approach to the Gulf as a “competitive business”, highlighting that commercial considerations and access to business contracts are in fact leading European countries to compete with one another in this part of the Middle East.18 The competition can also be witnessed in terms of individual European countries keeping certain files for themselves rather than putting the issue forward in Brussels in order to create a common European approach. Thus, on foreign policy issues, policy results in the EU are often compromises reached on the basis of the lowest common denominator. The split among northern, southern, and eastern European countries is illustrative here. While the southern countries tend to focus on their immediate neighborhood of the Mediterranean region, Eastern European countries have a great deal of more concern as far as Russia and developments to its east are concerned. Northern EU countries, meanwhile, voiced their initial opposition to the establishment of the Union of the Mediterranean and its replacement of the Barcelona Process, seeing this as an attempt by the southern EU countries to impose their agenda on the subject issue.19 Similar in terms of the Gulf Region, Richard Youngs notes that Spain blocked a Dutch attempt in 2004 to reinvigorate the EU’s relations with the Gulf, as it saw this as taking attention away from the Mediterranean focus.20 As Luciani and Schumacher have pointed out, the UK and France have never ‘perceived a benefit in the Europeanization of relations with the GCC states’.21 Overall, there is little structural congruence outside the European Neighborhood Policy and the Euro-Med framework. What has been missing from the European policy approach is a broad regional approach that links its various regional parts, i.e., the EU’s Mediterranean policy, its position on the Arab-Israeli conflict, its “East of Jordan policy”, and other bits and parts. This has resulted in a multitude of European policies in the Middle East.22 Youngs states that ‘threads of a standard European approach developed in the Middle East, but this was injected with varied elements specific to the distinctive nature of the trends and challenges in different parts of the region’.23 While Palestine and the wider Mediterranean region saw the most collective “Europeanized” approach, EU engagement was far more sporadic and least structured in the GCC states, Iraq as well in the lead-up and immediate aftermath to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 228

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All of this results in what Schumacher has argued is a ‘continued absence of a commonly shared understanding of the EU’s strategic interest in the region’.24 Jörg Monar has referred to this as the duality of European foreign policy, as the EU stands as the clearing house of different interests devoid of a common direction.25 The direct result is a lack of consistency due to the absence of political will by individual member states to engage with other EU states to forge a broader and more consensual approach and the overall lack of readiness to see the EU as an institution take the leading role. And as Hiltermann has written, ‘their diverging policies to the region’s crisis and conflicts undermine the possibility of effective solutions while at the same time undermining the EU as an institution with a coherent approach’.26 All of this can also be understand within the context of the complex nature of European actorness.

The EU’s normative approach vs. realpolitik The dichotomy between the EU as a collective foreign policy actor and the individual European states pursuing their national interests separately has direct implications for how European policy is conducted on the ground. Thus, while Europe as a whole tends to look at its security from a broad perspective, individual European policies are much narrower focused. Instead of just imminent and potential military threats, other aspects such as economic deprivation, population growth, environmental pollution, and migration are considered to come under the security umbrella for the EU. European documents have always laid out the argument that by promoting economic development in its neighborhood, Europe is in fact reducing the threat to its own security. In contrast to what is often referred to as a normative approach to international relations, a more realist interpretation is put forward and practiced by the individual European states in terms of border security, direct threats, and securing economic benefits. This contrast is most visible when it comes to the issue of political reform. Europe crafted the EU-Mediterranean Partnership in order to encourage greater reform in its southern neighborhood on the basis of democratic accountability, the necessity of institutions, and the promotion of a liberal economic model, seeing this as the precondition for greater stability and less volatility. A core concept advanced after the Arab Spring revolts of 2011 was the “3M” approach in which Europe would offer monetary support, market access, and increased mobility through a reinvigorated European Neighborhood Policy.27 A few years later, it became clear that Europe did not deliver on these promises. Money was made available but way too little to have a real impact, market access was granted only selectively and when only on EU terms, and mobility was offered restrictively and only to small segments of the population. The result was greater chaos and instability and the EU and its member states reduced to “being bystanders”.28 The European approach to civil society development in the Middle East is equally illustrative as it can be argued that this aspect of democracy promotion has in fact never been taken very seriously as far as European policy officials are concerned. Democracy Assistance provided by Europe is often done through governments and thus distributed to those parts of civil society that exist with government acquiescence. The dilemma has come to the forefront in the current move towards some form of postmodern autocracy in the Middle East, whereby a shell of democratic institutions is left in place but hollowed out of its pluralist essence, i.e., the free press, the independent judiciary, a fair electoral playground, and civil society. As has been pointed out: ‘the flow does not lie in the methods, instruments or means utilized by the EU but in the prioritization of security to the detriment of political reform, termed as the democratizationsecuritization dilemma’.29 Europe’s approach to the Middle East has also been one focused more on conflict management rather than on conflict resolution. As far as the latter is concerned, Europe has relied 229

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mostly on declaratory policies rather than implementable strategies such as direct interventions or concerted mediation efforts. Three examples underline this approach. In the fight against the Islamic State, Europe engaged largely without post-conflict stabilization strategies or peacebuilding requirements. In Iraq, the EU has supported Kurdish parties but without addressing Sunni Arab grievances within the state-rebuilding process taking place there. And as far as Libya is concerned, the EU focuses on handling migration flows but has done little to impact the actual stability situation in the country. The discrepancy between stated policy and its result has become more readily apparent in recent years as issues closer to home have also impacted the way Europe operates. While those working in Brussels tend to take a longer-term view and can argue for stabilization policies to put in place in stages and over time, policy officials inside member states are often required to respond to current developments with voter sentiment on their minds. Along with all the challenges that the Middle East has experienced, Europe has had to deal with a mounting refugee crisis, an unresolved Eurozone financial crisis, and discussions about the future direction of the EU given the UK’s impending exit, just to name the most obvious examples. At the same time that the Middle East is dwelling deeper into chaos, Europe finds itself in the midst of a crisis of identity. While public opinion mostly continues to support the project of an ever-closer EU, populist parties throughout the continent have begun to push back on certain idealist notions in the wake of the refugee crisis and economic uncertainty. In light of developments occurring in Europe proper, events in the Middle East have to compete for prioritization despite the fact that many of the current geopolitical and geoeconomic issues that dominate European headlines are directly tied to Middle Eastern stability. While Brussels and individual European capitals recognize that Europe needs to foster its engagement with Middle Eastern countries on a broader strategic level in order to promote regional peace and security, Europe as a whole remains hesitant and unsure of how to structure those relations in a mutually beneficial way or how to push forward with an engagement agenda. The result is that ties between the two regions remain stuck in simple cooperation with no consensus either within Europe or the Middle East where the relationship should be heading. There are also structural limitations that play a role. On the GCC front, the main obstacles are (1) that the EU and the GCC are institutionally two quite different organizations trying to build an institutional set of ties; (2) that the bilateral approach to relations of individual member states on both sides tends to dominate the multilateral approach; and (3) that there are often different expectations put forward vis-à-vis the other side regarding policy priorities. The EU sees the GCC as an incomplete partner with no real integration, a weak organization, an opaque decision-making process, and an overall lack of capacity. Each of these factors plays a role in determining the effectiveness and forward movement of building relations between the EU and the GCC. These differences have played a role in preventing a functional partnership from emerging. The GCC-EU dialogue in existence since the late 1980s has as a result produced nothing more than fruitless emphatic final declarations without concrete results in terms of effectiveness. Taken together, the EU has not lived up to its image of a normative power. When it comes to following through on its stated policies and implementation, Europe has remained largely risk averse, and a contradiction has ensued between the gradualist approach to enact political change on the one side and the actual results being produced on the other end. The autocratic nature of many Middle Eastern governments, in particular the often dismal human rights record, makes the EU hesitant and indecisive when it comes to dealing with countries of its southern neighborhood. While conflict resolution, human rights, and democracy promotion are mentioned in the official documents, they are often not pursued and generally do not have the full support 230

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of the EU member states. The result is a strong discrepancy between words and deeds, meaning that in the end, the need for stability won over the need for reform. The EU’s bottom-up approach thus tends to clash and pull back from the predominant top-down approach prevalent in the Middle East. What this contributes to is a widening gap between Europe’s self-proclaimed ambition of a fully fledged political actor and that of a passive spectator. Moreover, one sees the ‘calibration of a value-based EU strategy to material-based interest calculation’.30

Europe vs. the US in the Middle East The third factor that impacts heavily on European effectiveness when it comes to the Middle East is the role being played by outside powers in the region. For Europe, this primarily concerns the transatlantic relationship and the policies being pursued by the US in the region. In most instances, it can be argued that Europe has tended to second its Middle East approach to that of the US and that the importance of transatlantic relations tends to outweigh the readiness by Europe to pursue more independent policies in the region outside of the US umbrella. While this notion might be changing under the current US Trump administration given the way Washington has begun to question transatlantic relations, for the moment the prerogative of not jeopardizing ties with the US remains in place. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the one issue whether clear divergences between Europe and the US exist and where the predominance of the US relationship with Israel has resulted in Europe repeatedly seeing its policy initiatives being undermined. Through the Venice Declaration of 1980 and the European acknowledgment of the right of the Palestinian people for self-determination, Europe intended to inject the peace process with needed momentum while limiting the territorial policies of Israel. Europe supported its policy with concrete assistance and soon became the largest donor of financial assistance to the Palestinian people, a position the EU holds to the present day. But the EU’s policies of large-scale financial aid, support to institution-building and governance at the local and national levels, various programs to promote private sector and economic development, as well as numerous developmental projects, have in the end not resulted in any positive movement in the peace process and in bringing about a political solution to the conflict. Instead, Europe has found itself consistently blocked by the US support for Israel, the use of the US veto in the UN Security Council on resolutions deemed too critical on Israel, and by US hesitancy to move decisively against Israeli settlement policy, which is seen as being detrimental to the peace process. Thus, while Europe has been at the table, whether through the EU or its member states in virtually all diplomatic engagements regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, it has never pushed its policies to the point of risking a rift with the US. Numerous other examples can be cited, including prominently the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, a decision vigorously opposed by France and Germany, and the more recent case of the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( JCPOA) as it is officially known. In the case of the Iraqi invasion and subsequent fall of Saddam Hussein, Europe was deeply divided, with some supporting the US plans while others made their objections very clear. In the end, the US had to fall back on the coalition-of-thewilling concept for the invasion, as it was unable to gain enough support for a UN Security Council resolution. The toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime nevertheless went ahead, and soon Europe found itself confronting an increasingly unstable Middle East region that was the direct result of the US decision to carry out the invasion. Leaving the Middle Eastern political field to the US is of course the result of the fact that the EU simply does not have all the tools necessary to apply to the general strategic situation in the 231

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region. Given the hard security nature of the Middle Eastern security environment, the EU is simply not a strong security actor that can provide a real alternative to the US role, despite the fact that there is concern and uncertainty about the US policy direction in the region. Thus, on military matters, Europe has tended to follow the US’s lead not out of conviction but largely due to the unwillingness to deploy military assets for the pursuit of political objectives. Yet, the dilemma for Europe is that when US policies in the region fail, as they have in Iraq and with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Europe has to deal with the mess left at its own border. The past few years have seen the competition over the region once again escalate on a larger geopolitical level, including the re-introduction of Russia as a key player. In this context, the direction of the US when it comes to the Middle East is a main concern for Europe. The US Trump administration has clearly de-prioritized political reform and human rights as pillars of US policy in the Middle East, although it can be argued that these issues were never a real priority to begin it. Nevertheless, Europe finds itself once again alone in terms of advocating the rule of law, an institutional process of decision-making, and strong support for human rights, all items fundamental to the future stability of the region. More worrisome is increased securitization of all issues related to the Middle East, with the US seeing developments first and foremost through the lens of extremism and terrorism. This means a reactive rather than a proactive policy environment in which there is a general inability and failure to address root causes. In addition, the re-entry of Russia into the geopolitical considerations of the region also indicates a return to a balance of power distribution when it comes to spheres of influence in the greater Middle East. This is a fundamental challenge to the European approach, which has sought to apply diplomatic skill and open doors in an effort to avoid a further escalation of violence and instability in the region. The US withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear accord is a clear example of the different points of view held in capitals such as Washington and Moscow as opposed to the thinking still prevalent in Brussels and Berlin. And while Europe has maintained an initial front of unity when it comes to trying to keeping the JCPOA with Iran alive, it is equally clear that European companies will succumb to the US dictate on sanctions given the significantly higher stakes involved in terms of risking business opportunities in the US as opposed to those in Iran. While the different positions on the future of the Iran nuclear deal have once again underscored the calls for greater European autonomy when it comes to their own national interests, the current distribution of power still means that when it comes to the Middle East, Europe will find it difficult to pursue a more independent path than that of the US.

Outlook and the way ahead The 2018 Munich Security Conference Report stated that the EU ‘has yet to become a strategic actor’.31 While the EU is certainly a player in terms of trade, economic development, and climate change, it struggles on aspects such as military force and other strategic questions. Daniel Keohane has argued that as a result ‘others will determine Europe’s strategic future’.32 Or as Marc Otte, the former EU envoy to the Middle East Peace Process, has put it: ‘If Europe wants to voice in the reduction of instability and the political solution of the problems, it urgently needs to give itself the means to be a strategic player instead of being a simple spectator of the fate that others are ready to assign to it’.33 The incentive of economic assistance and trade is here insufficient ‘in the absence of a coherent and common EU vision of the regional order that should emerge’.34 As the world enters a new era of turbulence with a fraying international order, questions will continue about Europe’s capacity and willingness to reorient itself when it comes to the Middle 232

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East. In the context of all of the initiatives that Europe has put forward, Europe has found itself moving from overestimating its influence (through the Barcelona Process) to underestimating (the present situation) its political influence. What is important to realize is that Europe can influence but not dictate the various processes taking place in the region. As it stands, there is no confidence within the Middle East that Europe is ready to undertake the necessary investment in long-term regional security. While there is clear awareness that Europe is potentially the only actor able to work with all political players in the region in the search for potential solutions, the lack of a broader long-term focus on the outline of a stable regional economic, social, and security order in the Middle East has led to that awareness being undermined by a lack of political will and hesitancy in the approach to take. Within this context, the model character of the EU in terms of regional integration has begun to fade, also due to the fact that Europe appears to be eroding from within. Until recently, the European integration experience was viewed largely positively by most of the countries in the Middle East. Given the history of antagonistic regional relationships and the existing mutual (mis) perceptions among countries of the region, Europe was seen as potentially having something valuable to offer the Middle East that could provide lessons to overcome its own history of strife and national animosity. But as Marc Otte has argued: ‘Europe’s failure to change the status quo eventually turned out to be a disappointment and a threat against the European model itself ’.35 The inability to produce tangible results in bilateral ties has resulted in the GCC, to some degree, turning away from the EU and looking at other models of regional integration such ASEAN and MERCOSUR. While the GCC has moved on to capture the momentum of change and globalization, Europe has treaded mostly in the same place. The result is that whereas in the past the Middle East has looked toward Europe for a variety of reasons – from trade, technology, and education to even foreign policy issues – the level of determination to build and maintain wide-ranging strategic ties with Europe has declined. For its part, Europe must understand clearly that the Middle East is going through multilevel transitions that are bound to be disruptive and that whatever happens in the region will have an impact beyond the regional borders. It is thus imperative that Europe begins to engage with all regional actors in a more systematic and strategic manner than has been the case so far. To be sure, the Middle East is very much a focus of European policy, as it is seen as a litmus test for the future of the international system. The EU also still represents the most advanced experiment in multilateral cooperation and integration. Yet, the Middle East presents new challenges to outside actors in terms of its political debate, open contestation, violent conflict, and resurgent authoritarianism. There is a clear connection between the turmoil in the Middle East and the refugee flows toward Europe or terrorist incidents being carried out on European soil. Overall, the balance of power in the region is shifting without a clear idea of how it will shift. As was stated in a recent report: ‘The EU will have to equip itself to deal with a more diverse geopolitical scenario, more assertive governments and an increasingly aware and audacious population’.36 From a normative perspective, Europe continues to struggle with how to promote political transitions without this leading to chaos or retrenched authoritarianism. Europe is at present unsure how to respond to the developments in Egypt, Libya, Syria, the Gulf region, and Yemen, while on the Arab-Israeli front there has been “no tangible impact”.37 One has already seen the abolition of the EU Special Representative for the Middle East Peace Process, although Special Representatives remain in place for Syria and Libya. There also appears to be no strategy on how to deal with the phenomenon of Violent Non-State Actors (VNSA). With a view to the Gulf region, Europe struggles with the transition of Gulf governments being active rather than passive actors. As a result,‘Europeans have been largely reduced to ad hoc partners in crisis interventions 233

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of multinational alliances and to shouldering parts of the humanitarian fallout of violence and war’.38 Europe has also largely been reduced to being a payer instead of being a player.39 In such an equation, the danger exists that Europe will find itself further distanced from this part of the world and that as issues become more difficult to deal with, it will switch to strategies of containment rather than engagement. From the economic angle, Europe is fast being replaced by Asia as far as the Middle East is concerned. In the Gulf region, the GCC’s trade with the EU totaled €138.6 billion, which was slightly less than the GCC trade with China alone.40 The month-long trip of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman to Asia in March 2017 clearly underscored the direction in which the GCC states are looking as far as their economic future is concerned. Equally, the impending exit of the UK from the EU and the crisis with Qatar over the future direction of the GCC has added two more developments to the list of issues confronting Europe. Given these issues, it is unlikely that many of the dilemmas faced by EU policy in the region will be solved any time soon. Relations are as a result headed to becoming more contentious and fractured. Given the volatile environment in the entire Middle East, alongside the relatively dim prospects for conflict resolution in the region, Europe’s ties are likely to experience greater periods of tension rather than moments of constructive engagement. Instead of an effort to come to similar trajectories, the likelihood is one of increased divergences in outlook and policy priorities. This does not mean that some of these trends cannot be reversed. But in order to do so, Europe and the Middle East must begin to better understand the limitations which impact their relationship and focus on concrete areas of cooperation that can give their ties a better foundation. To state that relations can develop into the institutional equivalent of a strategic partnership ignores the realities on the ground. Nevertheless, given that the EU and the Middle East do share common interests, including a commitment to the stability and security of the Middle Eastern region, a determined effort to divide those interests into functional parts should be undertaken in an attempt to regain the initiative. Such an effort can include working at both the bilateral as well as multilateral levels to structure ties: for example, (a) better coordination of aid programs to support economic development in particular in the Mediterranean region; (b) devoting more human resources to strengthening the overall relationship; and (c) focusing on areas of cooperation such as renewable energy, education and research, and business-to-business ties. Yet, the true effectiveness of Europe–Middle Eastern relations will be measured on the issue of foreign policy and regional security. On this front, coming to an understanding on the steps to be taken to de-escalate tensions and return the Middle East region to a more positive forward trajectory will prove much more difficult. Overall, the Middle East remains unsure of where the EU stands, whether the EU has the right approach, or whether Europe is in fact ready to make the necessary investment to ultimately achieve a strong, viable, secure, and prosperous neighborhood.

Notes 1 See Rosemary Hollis, “Europe and the Middle East,” in Louise Fawcett, ed. International Relations of the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 348. 2 The Security of the Union is listed as first among the identified priorities of the EU’s External Action. See European External Action Service (EEAS), “Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe: A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy,” June 2016. http://eeas. europa.eu/archives/docs/top_stories/pdf/eugs_review_web.pdf, accessed 17 May 2018. 3 On the Middle East as a penetrated region, see L. Carl Brown, International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

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EU policy in the Middle East 4 See, for example, Amitai Etzioni, “The United States’ Retreat from the Middle East and Pivot to the Far East Is Likely to Intensify,” Defense & Security Analysis 30, no. 4 (2014): 304–310 or Pankaj Mishra, “America’s Inevitable Retreat from the Middle East,” New York Times, 23 September 2012. www. nytimes.com/2012/09/24/opinion/americas-inevitable-retreat-from-the-middle-east.html, accessed 8 December 2017. The debate has intensified under the US Trump administration, with President Trump describing the Middle East as a “troubled place” and vowing to withdraw US troops from Syria, for example, where they have been engaged in battles against the Islamic State. 5 Hollis, in Fawcett, op. cit., 334–335. 6 See Glen Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in the Middle East: Britain’s Relinquishment of Power in Her Last Three Arab Dependencies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the French precipitous withdrawal, see Alistair Horne, A Savage War for Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977). 7 There was a plethora of other initiatives, including the Forum for the Mediterranean, the 5+5 Grouping of European and Arab States (also known as the Western Mediterranean Group), and the Global Mediterranean Policy. A description of each can be found in Bichara Khader, “The European Union and the Arab World: From the Rome Treaty to the Arab Spring,” European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed) Papers 17, March 2013. 8 Hollis, in Fawcett, op. cit., 383. 9 Ibid., 347. 10 Felix Neugart, “The EU, the Middle East and Iraq,” in Marcin Zaborowski, ed. Friends Again? EU-US Relations After the Crisis (Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 2006), 125–139. 11 Hollis in Fawcett, op. cit., 340. 12 European Commission, “European Neighborhood Policy: Strategy Paper,” Brussels, 12 May 2004, 3. https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/sites/near/files/2004_communication_from_the_ commission_-_european_neighbourhood_policy_-_strategy_paper.pdf, accessed 17 May 2018. 13 European Commission, “EU Strategic Partnership with the Mediterranean and the Middle East – Final Report,” Euromed Report, no. 78, 23 June 2004, 3. https://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/final-reportapproved-european-council-june-2004-eu-strategic-partnership-mediterranean-and-middle_en, accessed 17 May 2018. 14 See European Commission,“Joint Communication of the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: Review of the European Neighborhood Policy,” Brussels, 18 November 2015, 2. http://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/enp/ documents/2015/151118_joint-communication_review-of-the-enp_en.pdf, accessed 17 May 2018. 15 See European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Council, the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: A Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean,” Brussels, 8 March 2011. https://ec.europa.eu/research/iscp/pdf/policy/com_2011_200_en.pdf, accessed 17 May 2018. 16 Richard Youngs, Europe and the Middle East: In the Shadow of September 11 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 224. 17 European Union, “A Secure Europe in a Better World,” European Security Strategy, Brussels, 12 December 2003, 22. www.consilium.europa.eu/en/documents-publications/publications/europeansecurity-strategy-secure-europe-better-world/, accessed 6 June 2018. 18 Rosemary Hollis, “Europe and Gulf Security: A Competitive Business,” in David E. Long and Christian Koch, eds. Gulf Security in the Twenty-First Century (Abu Dhabi: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 1997), 75–89. 19 See Timo Behr and Teija Tiilikainen, eds. Northern Europe and the Making of the EU’s Mediterranean and Middle East Policies: Normative Leaders or Passive Bystanders (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 29–32 and 203–204. 20 Youngs, op. cit., 180. 21 Giacomo Luciani and Tobias Schumacher, “Relations Between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council States: Past Record and Promises for the Future,” Gulf Research Center Research Papers, January 2004, 10. 22 Youngs, op. cit., 224. 23 Ibid., 226. 24 Tobias Schumacher, “The EU and the Arab Spring: Between Spectatorship and Actorness,” Insight Turkey 13, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 117.

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Christian Koch 25 Jörg Monar, “Institutional Constraints of the European Union’s Middle Eastern and North African Policy,” in Sven Behrendt and Christian-Peter Hanelt, eds. Bound to Cooperate – Europe and the Middle East (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, 2000), 229. 26 Joost Hiltermann, “Tackling the MENA Region’s Intersecting Conflicts,” International Crisis Group, 22 December 2017, 29. www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/eastern-mediterranean/syria/ tackling-mena-regions-intersecting-conflicts. 27 European Commission, “The EU’s Response to the Arab Spring,” Press Release, Brussels, 16 December 2011. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-11-918_en.htm, accessed 26 May 2018. 28 Muriel Asseburg, “The EU in the Middle East and North Africa,” SWP Comments 50, November 2014. www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/the-eu-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/, accessed 26 May 2018. 29 Khader, op. cit., 31. 30 Youngs, op. cit., 226. 31 Munich Security Conference, “Munich Security Report 2018: To the Brink and Back,” 6. www. securityconference.de/fileadmin/images/MSR/MSC_MunichSecurityReport_2018.pdf, accessed 6 June 2018. 32 Daniel Keohane, “Europe’s Geo-Tactical Trap,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 14 February 2018. http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/75543, accessed 6 June 2018. 33 Marc Otte, “The Quest for Regional Order in the Middle East,” Egmont Security Brief No. 94, February 2018, 3. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Richard Youngs, “Living with the Middle East’s Old-New Security Paradigm,” FRIDE Policy Brief No. 152, March 2013, 5. 37 Asseburg, op. cit., 1. 38 Ibid. 39 Joost Hiltermann, “Europe’s Middle East Myopia,” International Crisis Group, 12 August 2015. www. crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/europe-s-middle-east-myopia. 40 For GCC-EU trade statistics, see http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/regions/ gulf-region/.

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18 OLD AND NEW CHALLENGES FOR ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST Jordi Tejel In the wake of the Arab Spring,1 many observers and scholars noted that the popular uprisings of 2010–11 had ushered in a new era in the Middle East. The cooperation between different groups in Tunisia and Egypt – liberals and Islamists, youths and their elders, Christians and Muslims, men and women, and so forth – provoked the fall of Ben Ali, and eventually, of Mubarak’s regime and made claims for a new social contract. However, over time, reports from the region revealed a gloomier picture: Copts were attacked in Egypt, Islamist parties took over the elections in Tunisia and Egypt, whilst secular groups were politically marginalized. In Syria, the Sunni Arab opposition failed to meet the demands of official recognition of the Kurdish national identity;2 and in Bahrain, Shiites were severely repressed by the Sunni monarchy with the support of the neighboring Sunni states.3 Three years later the situation further deteriorated, in particular in Syria where the popular revolt of March 2011 turned into a civil war allowing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to establish a transnational “Caliphate” with two capitals, namely Raqqa (Syria) and Mosul (Iraq). Critically, reports on burnt Christian churches and villages, as well as the mass kidnappings of Yazidi sex slaves in northern Iraq, seemed to confirm the relevance of what some authors labeled as an “Islamic Spring”.4 Ultimately, the lack of congruence between states and nations due to the extreme ethnic and religious diversity in this part of the world would appear as a long and lasting “problem” that Middle Eastern elites and, arguably, societies cannot resolve. A century after the tragic unfolding of the “Eastern Question” in the late nineteenth century and particularly during World War I, ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East are again depicted either as a problem or as “oppressed groups” or “victims”5 caught between authoritarian rulers and Islamist groups, following Albert O. Hirschman’s responses to a deterioration of political and social conditions,6 forced into either tacit submission (loyalty) or a slow, yet unchecked, process of diasporization (exit), particularly in the case of religious minorities. The strategy of mobilization (voice), although not uncommon, is said to be unlikely in most cases due to the risks that minorities would encounter. Either way – minorities as victims and/or obstacles to state-building and democratization processes – these grids of analysis show a remarkable degree of continuity with an important bulk of academic publications that uncritically categorize minorities as endangered and passive groups, thereby downplaying their capacity of

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agency within different national contexts, as well as their role in the international relations of the Middle East and beyond.7 The irrelevance of minorities’ agency in IR scholarship is also due to the traditional statocentered approach adopted by social scientists in dealing with Middle Eastern issues – from realism to historical sociology, as elaborated by Fred Halliday.8 All in all, as Fred H. Lawson points out, “mainstream theories focus on the ways that states interact with one another . . . under conditions of anarchy”.9 The prominence given to the state in IR literature leaves no room for infra-state dynamics and actors, except for some specific “conflicts” – e.g., the Palestinian and Kurdish issues – which have been over-analyzed mainly through “security” lenses, that is, as a challenge or a threat both to Middle Eastern states and the regional system.10 These ongoing conflicts would ultimately confirm the idea that the existing lack of congruence between the states and nations in the Middle East accounts for the exceptionally high incidence and severity of conflicts in this part of the world.11 Notwithstanding the traditional lack of in-depth studies that take into account the actual role of minorities (and more largely of non-state actors such as diasporas, refugees, and migrants) within the shaping and transformation of the international relations in the Middle East, increasing numbers of scholars drawing from different disciplines have turned our gaze towards the role that “small actors” (including minorities) have been playing in the region.12 In addition, in recent years, historians and anthropologists have insisted on problematizing the very notion of a “minority” as opposed to a “majority” by demonstrating the constructed, as well as the dynamic and situated character of such categories, thereby allowing for a new interpretation of the minority issue in the contemporary Middle East.13 Drawing from this strand of literature, the paper asks for a reassessment of the ethnic and religious minorities’ position in the Middle East, as well as a reconsideration of both old and new challenges they encounter. Because minorities are historically situated, they need to be studied from a dynamic perspective; minority groups may shift their position over time and, more importantly, they ‘are not passive victims living under the iron rule of an all-powerful majority’.14 On the contrary, minorities find more often than not a way to prove their ability to mobilize internal and external resources to meet the challenges they may face. Critically, this chapter posits that the (re)examination of the actual role that “minorities” as well as individuals play in essential issues such as property, decision-making, and governance could allow IR scholars to depart from both stato-centered and security approaches while studying minority politics in the Middle East. The first part of the article will thus provide a quick historical overview of the development of minority rights’ law in the Middle East, from the emergence of the so-called Eastern Question until the formation of the League of Nations, as well as the factors that account for the shared distaste among state elites and ethnic group leaders for the term itself – unlike religious representatives who, by and large, accommodated themselves to a neo-millet system15 in the post-imperial era. It will also address the debate on the definition of “minority” and the historical context in which this notion became relevant in Middle East politics. In the second part, after highlighting the rise of identity politics that affected different regions across the world in the 1990s, the chapter will address the old challenges that minorities still have to face, such as the numerical decline of religious groups and the survival of the neo-millet system. Finally, the third part will argue that notwithstanding these continuities, IR scholarship should not overlook the ongoing transformation of the minority sphere in the Middle East, which allows for growing visibility (religious revivalism both in the region and among the diaspora), political empowerment, and social activism seeking to secure the “right to difference”. This is a notoriety that, like in the past – e.g., the role of minority members in the development 238

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of Arab nationalism and/or the leftist movements in the twentieth century – presents simultaneously opportunities and challenges for Middle Eastern minorities, e.g., tensions amid religious minorities between church representatives and secular wings, on the one hand, and the negative impact of traditional links with external actors (diasporas, kin-states, Western powers), on the other.

The origins of “minority politics” in the Middle East The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 recognized fixed territorial boundaries among the states in Europe and established the principle that the religion of a state’s ruler would be the religion of the state. The Europe that emerged at the end of the Thirty Years’ War was permanently divided into a number of competitive sovereign states that sought both to defend themselves against each other and to gain advantage over their adversaries, in particular through a series of strategic alliances. Significantly however, the Peace of Westphalia also established a new paradigm as it inserted religious minority clauses into international agreements. In future treaties, state parties would assert the right to claim an interest in the status of given religious minorities in a co-signatory state. Such assertions would frequently imply a unilateral right of intervention on behalf of a religious minority.16 This new paradigm took on its full meaning as the Middle East became one of the places where the competition among European powers played itself out, thereby paving the way to what came to be known as the “Eastern Question”. Since its creation, the Ottoman Empire had been playing a role in the European balance of power. As early as the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire pushed forward its borders in Southeastern Europe at the expense of the Habsburg Empire. From that moment on and over the years, the Ottomans made alliances with different European powers in order to secure its expansion. Nevertheless, as the Ottoman Empire became more fragile, both economically and militarily, the Great Powers reacted with the minority protection formulae that they had elaborated first in Westphalia and then in Vienna in 1815. Over the years, the Great Powers compensated defeated parties, usually the Ottoman Empire, by imposing national minority guarantees disguised as religious guarantees and limited to detached areas or to newly autonomous or independent former Ottoman provinces.17 As a result, Ottoman communities associated to the millet system18 came to be seen as key tools for political, humanitarian, and military intervention in the Middle East.19 Critically, imposition of minority guarantees on the Ottoman authorities went hand in hand with the emergence of armed humanitarian intervention by the Great Powers in different regions of the Empire in order to protect solely “Christian subjects”. Thus, the first Western humanitarian interventions in Greece (1821–33), Lebanon and Syria (1860–61), Crete (1866– 69) and again from 1896 to 1900, and Macedonia (1903–08) only served to singularize these communities and to convince the Sublime Porte and, more broadly, Muslim elites, that justifications of European involvement in the Ottoman Empire did not originate in legal doctrines but rather in civilizational, as well as geostrategic, agendas.20 In that respect, the Treaty of Berlin was to provide the most detailed set of minority guarantees to resolve the Eastern Question before 1919 and which, by imposing these guarantees as a condition for recognizing Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Rumania, inter alia, was deemed to have provided the Great Powers with a right to intervene collectively on behalf of the minority populations in the new states and the Ottoman Empire. Finally, it also provided a precedent for the principle that minority rights are a matter of international concern, for the Sublime Porte was to enact reforms favoring the Armenian communities and to take the measures necessary to protect them from Kurdish and Circassian tribes. 239

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Yet the dramatic consequences of the growing European intervention in Ottoman domestic affairs in the name of the “sacred” duty of monitoring the “protection” of helpless groups in the face of “despotic” authorities unfolded between 1894 and 1915, in particular at the periphery of the Empire. In the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78,21 the Ottomans tried to prevent further territorial losses by safeguarding the Empire’s eastern frontier, where Armenian nationalist activities were on the rise. Although the establishment of the Hamidiye Light Cavalry, mainly made up of select Kurdish tribes originating from the borderlands of the Empire, was not only due to the “Armenian threat”22 and its Russian ramifications, it quickly appeared that these paramilitary units could allow the Sultan to accomplish the goal of ‘weakening the “internal enemy” by depriving them of their means of subsistence and causing them to emigrate elsewhere so as to diminish or disperse their numbers’.23 Between 1894 and 1896, and again between 1914 and 1915 – under the new name of Tribal Light Cavalry Regiments and alongside the Unionist government – these irregular forces played a relevant role in the massacres perpetrated against Armenians in the Ottoman borderlands. While the demise of the Concert system in the late nineteenth century significantly compromised the ability of the Great Powers to prevent the episodes of extreme violence against a Christian community, massacres against Armenians contributed to fuel the image of the Ottomans as “barbaric” and subsequently reinforced the idea that Europeans had the “moral” duty to press on Ottoman authorities to guarantee further protection for “minorities”. Furthermore, European policy-makers, even in countries such as Britain, which had traditionally supported the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, started to formulate plans for the partition of the latter.24 Admittedly, “the responsibility to protect” endangered groups, heralded by the Great Powers throughout the nineteenth century, did not determine European agendas with regard to the fate of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I. Nevertheless, this principle not only survived within the diplomatic agenda in the aftermath of World War I, but also provided a major systematic protection of minority rights in the peace settlement concluded at the end of the War and in the subsequent agreements reached then and later under the auspices of the League of Nations – the so-called Minorities Treaties – that applied to the former Ottoman territories.

From “millets” to “minorities”? Although there is a large consensus around the idea that some Ottoman millets (in particular those in which language and religion overlapped, e.g., Armenian and Greek) asked for certain particular rights and developed an early sentiment of belonging to a separate group (religious and secular – and subsequently to their elites), the precise definition of “minority”, as well as the actual historical juncture in which groups defined themselves as “minorities” as opposed to “majorities”, remain controversial and deserve attention. All experts on minority rights point out that there is no internationally accepted definition of a “minority” despite numerous attempts made in different forums.25 Indeed, the United Nations has undertaken to define a “minority” in an international legal sense on several occasions through its Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. In that respect, the most consistent effort to provide such a definition was made in the Capotorti Report in 1979. In that report, a minority was defined as a: [G]roup numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-­dominant position, whose members – being nationals of the State – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if

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only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language.26 Criticized by some but praised by others, the Capotorti Report still constitutes a reference in the field of International Law despite subsequent attempts, albeit similarly infructuous, to put forward a thorough and consensual definition of a “minority”.27 However, in the last decades, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists have challenged the very notion of “minority” as a given. In that regard, it appears that relations between religious or ethnic majorities and minorities are not only a matter of religion or ethnicity; they are also shaped by factors external to religion and culture, among them domestic and international politics, power relations, shifting historical contexts, the economy, and class. Therefore, historical formation of various communities in the Middle East seems to be central to understanding how these communities are attached to or severed from power bases, which, in turn, determine their “minority” status.28 In that sense, the second point – that is, when Middle Eastern elites and communities started to be viewed and categorized as “minorities” – appears to be tightly connected with the emerging international system made up of nation-states after World War I. Local, regional, and global dynamics intersected and paved the way for a new era in international relations. Elie Kedourie considers that along with the ideology of nationalism, the ideas of “minority” and “majority” came to the Middle East from the West. In the era of the nation-state, as well as of the popular suffrage as the basis of authority, those who had been considered as “millets”, with a well-defined and recognized subordinate status in the Muslim body politic, were suddenly transformed into “minorities”.29 Yet the link between the “new minorities” and “old millets” is not always straightforward. Based on quantitative criteria, Ma’oz and Sheffer offer a three-fold typology of minorities expanding the groups (they) considered “minorities”: 1

Groups that are ethnically and culturally Arabs (e.g., linguistically) but are not Sunni Muslim: various Christian denominations – Copts, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Maronites, Latins, and Protestants – as well as various heterodox Muslim sects such as Shias, Alawis, Druze and Ismailis; 2 Ethno-cultural groups which are Sunni Muslim but are not Arabs, such as Kurds, Turkomans, Berbers, and Circassians; 3 Groups that are neither Arab nor Muslim, such as Jews, Armenians, Assyrians, Christian and animist Southern Sudanese tribes.30

Yet, whilst Eva Pföstl and Will Kymlicka acknowledge the value of these categories so as to provide at least a provisional sense of the universe of possible cases to explore, they also admit that they tell us ‘nothing about the significance of salience of these distinctions to people’s lives or to society’s politics’.31 In the same vein, Martti Koskenniemi points out that ‘by imposing a conceptual category such as “minority” on a society, we may obscure more than we reveal, losing sight of how the social and political groups these categories describe, appeared and developed’.32 Benjamin T. White argues that state intervention, structural dynamics, and modernizing projects played a central role in that respect. To put it differently, the nation-state form created the objective conditions in which people began to consider themselves as majorities and minorities; however, these remained subjective categories. Ultimately, ‘the term “minority” became meaningful precisely because being a numerical minority was what made certain groups subordinate’.33

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Historically, in international legal documents the term appeared for the first time in the socalled Minorities Treaties that accompanied the 1919 Peace Settlement. While some nationalist and anti-colonial movements in the Middle East (e.g., in Turkey and Egypt) were allowed to establish themselves as formally independent nation-states, most of them saw how the League of Nations imposed a Western oversight over their “national groups” either as traditional colonies or as “international mandates” (Transjordan, Iraq, and Palestine under British Mandate, and Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate). The aim of these Minorities Treaties was twofold: to guarantee equality with the majority population for the members of the minority group, and to ensure that the minority could preserve its characteristics and traditions, for without the latter, the former amounted to little more than assimilation.34 Although the Minorities Treaties represented an advance in the protection of religious and ethnic groups in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the minority regimes system failed for different reasons. According to Andre Liebich, the term “minority” was rejected both by state elites and representatives of some minority groups (in particular ethnic movements), and it also showed a general distaste for the notion altogether. While the former viewed “minority rights” as an attack on the respective “just aspirations” to build homogenous nation-states, the latter considered that the term “minority” appeared as ‘tantamount to inequality and inferiority, not merely numerical but substantial’ inferiority.35 To Mark Mazower, the problem was the ambiguity of the system enshrined by the League of Nations for, on the one hand, it accepted the nation-state as the norm in international relations and, on the other, it made a concerted effort to tackle the minority issues that were thus created. While it accepted minorities as collective entities and helped “nationalities” to publicize their plight, it was actually difficult to bring cases to the League’s attention and even more difficult to push them through the Geneva machine.36 While acknowledging the shortcomings of the mandatory administration and the failure of the League of Nations to meet claims by populations originating both from “majorities” and “minorities” with conciliation rather than with repression, Susan Pedersen proposes a much more nuanced assessment of the League, and in particular the role played by the Mandates Commission, which centralized issues concerning the minority rights regime. To this author, if indeed ‘the League oversight could not force the mandatory powers to govern mandated territories differently; instead, it obliged them to say they were governing them differently’.37 As a consequence, the mandates system was ‘a vehicle for what we might call “internationalization” – the process by which certain political issues [among which the minority issue] and functions were displaced from the national or imperial, into the international realm’.38 Notwithstanding this qualitative change with regard to the functioning of international relations after World War I, in the post-1945 order, the minority rights regime took a completely different direction. The question at the heart of the debate within the UN was whether the human rights to be enshrined in the new post-war order should be individual or collective. While the League of Nations had chosen the latter in its system of protection for ethnic minorities, the UN was more inclined to pick up the former, since the major Allied powers (Britain, France, and the US) showed little enthusiasm for reviving a system that had succeeded in internationalizing the most serious source of tension in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, without finding adequate means of resolution.

Globalization and “minorities” In the post–World War II context, two diverging constitutional choices shaped state-­society relations in the Middle East in different ways:39 the first one was the government of the 242

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demographic majority, and the second that of “consensus democracy”, namely the government of coalition of identity groups acknowledging specific constitutional rights for the minorities (Lebanon, and Iraq since 2005). Indeed, majority and minority groups in this region have not been opposed always and everywhere. In that sense, a long-term perspective allows us to identify periods in which minority members participated in the economic and political life of their respective states and sometimes cooperated with other political forces, both within the government and the opposition. Yet as the “government of the demographic majority” came to dominate minority policies, most of the newly independent states in the Middle East strived for artificial homogeneity over the years and viewed any other identities as divisive, counter-productive, externally sponsored, or unpatriotic. Despite episodes of sounding cooperation between “minority” and “majority” individuals and even political parties in certain countries, these chapters of “national consensus” did not avoid periods of extreme state violence against those same minority groups (Halabja). Internationally, “minority claims” put forward by the diverse Kurdish political groups or by the Berber cultural movements received limited attention by the superpowers as well as by the UN until the end of the Cold War. In the early 1990s, however, the ethnic and sectarian strife in former Yugoslavia pushed states and international organizations to rethink the issue of minorities altogether.40 More generally, debates on issues of ethnic minorities gained a global dimension reflected in a series of declarations and statements, such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992); the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007); and UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001). The awakening of ethnic and religious “minorities” was also tangible in the Middle East. Thus, for instance, Vivian Ibrahim has convincingly proved a slow but steady transformation in how Coptic identity was articulated and expressed in Egypt in the 1990s. Whilst in the past Copts were careful not to challenge a particular narrative of national unity which formally included Copts in the Egyptian nation, but which in practice imposed a kind of public invisibility on them, in the post–Cold War era, a growing number of activists started to challenge old strategies by seeking a “visibility” for Copts.41 The claim for “visibility” unfolded among other religious minorities such as the Alevis in Turkey, who engaged in forms of cultural affirmation beyond the constraints of the Turkish national unity narrative, anchored in an implicit, albeit compulsory, definition of Turkish citizenship as “Turkish and Sunni Muslim”. In the same vein, the Kurds in Syria joined the political opening of Bashar al-Assad between 2000 and 2001 to voice their ethnic claims. The new era of “visibility” of the Kurdish question in Syria was confirmed in March 2004 following the riots in the Kurdish enclaves. For the first time in contemporary Syria, the Kurdish “minority” issue was placed at the heart of the political debates between 2004 and 2005.42 Yet the “awakening” of the “minority” issue in the Middle East, like elsewhere, cannot be fully apprehended by paying attention to local dynamics alone; the latter interacted with wider transformations. Thus, for instance, the new era of the Kurdish struggle in Syria between 2002 and 2005 was also linked to trans-border and international dynamics, such as the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, along with the rapid deterioration of relations between Syria and the US, which accused Damascus of supporting terrorism. Furthermore, the fall of the Iraqi regime reinforced the Kurdish autonomy gained in 1992 and the role of the Kurdish parties within the Iraqi political arena. Significantly, Article 117 of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution came to recognize the region of Kurdistan as a federal region, thus enshrining the principle of federalism in the country’s basic law. Subsequently, Kurdish parties in Turkey, Iran, and even in Syria started to put forward political demands inspired by the “Iraqi model”. 243

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Beyond specific political developments, as Leïla Vignal suggests, the acceleration of the globalization process has affected the Middle East in several ways, such as the densification of transnational movements and networks in the region allowing for the transformation of market scale (from local to regional), of private initiatives, informal or illegal practices, or the movement of people, ideas, representations, and goods.43 Being an active part of Middle Eastern societies, “minority” communities have also played a role in these processes. Arguably, this phenomenon was not completely new. After 1948, Palestinian communities scattered in different Arab countries as well as across the world mobilized at different times against Israel’s policies in Palestine and Lebanon.44 More fundamentally, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) formed a government-in-exile that sought the total claim of power. Although the PLO did not fully succeed in obtaining its demands, the Palestinian case shows how transnational communities, despite internal fragmentation and economic marginalization, may challenge “home” politics.45 That development nonetheless has been invigorated by the increasing involvement of the Middle East in the globalization process in the last three decades, as well as by the diversity of the transnational actors who practice and build the regional and global space. Thus, for instance, both Copts and Kurds have exploited external linkages to put pressure on their respective national governments. The Copt Diaspora, for example, has become increasingly active in highlighting the plight of Copts from Egypt in the US, thereby opening the door to subtle American intervention in Egyptian domestic affairs.46 The Chaldo-Assyrians in Iraq, through their diasporic representatives in the US, followed suit after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime by financing hospitals and churches in the region, as well as reporting human rights abuses in their “homeland”. The Kurdish issue being already “visible” in Turkey since the 1980s, “pro-Kurdish” activists working in Turkey, Europe, and across national borders produced a new phase of transnational contention that critically altered the terms of negotiation between Turkish officials and Kurdish activists throughout the 1990s. As Nicole F. Watts puts it, ‘linked by ideas, institutions, technology, and travel, Kurdish activists had constructed a transnational advocacy community . . . that could not be located on any political map but had become a persistent presence in international affairs’.47

Minorities and the Arab Spring In the wake of the Arab revolts and, even more so in the post-2011 context, minorities seem to be once again disproportionally affected by political dynamics in the Middle East. While the Middle East has historically been a diverse society, to some this notion is increasingly being relegated to the past, becoming indeed a “relic”, because minority groups either leave, assimilate, or are collectively targeted (e.g., Christians and Yezidis in Iraq in 2014). As a result, the Middle East, and particularly the Arab countries, is becoming progressively homogenous.48 In sum, if at first many had depicted the Arab Spring as a “revolution”, from a minority group perspective, the Arab revolts have fatally led to a “devolution”. However, scholarship on minority politics in the Middle East should avoid overall assumptions about the challenges these communities have faced and still encounter in the region. On the one hand, although insecurity and marginalization against Christian communities have been factors that may help us to explain the slow but steady departure of these groups from the Middle East, historically these reasons have not always been equally relevant. While it is indeed important not to diminish the importance of these populations’ displacements and suffering, migrations of Christian minorities should also be studied within the framework of a 244

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broader history of global processes. In that sense, Dawn Chatty reminds us that dispossession and forced migration has been a significant element of contemporary Middle East at least since the nineteenth century. More importantly, these experiences affected a wide array of communities, including Muslim minorities such as Circassians, Chechyans, Palestinians, Kurds, and Albanians.49 Likewise, John Tafik Karam points out that the crucial frame of analysis of the Levant migration towards Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the wider capitalist economy. Because regions such as Mount Lebanon had been connected to the capitalist economy thanks to its silk production in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when East Asian sericulture strongly entered the world market in the late nineteenth century, the price of Lebanese silk sank to nearly half its value. As a result, dozens of thousands of young peasants – between 120,000 and 330,000 before World War I, according to different estimates – decided to undertake a long journey from Beirut ports towards Latin America, in particular Brazil and Argentina, in search of new opportunities. Crucially, until the 1950s, these first communities attracted subsequent waves of Lebanese migrants, mostly Christians.50 More recently, falling birth rates among Christian communities, which accelerated a demographic imbalance with regard to Muslim groups, were not directly related to sectarian strife, but rather to economic and sociological factors.51 On the other hand, certain scholars point out that while the rise of political Islam as a dominant force throughout the region raises obvious challenges to the status of non-Muslim minorities in their own societies, the dramatic developments in the region have also served to motivate their greater participation in public and political life. According to Paul S. Rowe, two general motivations bolster the renewal of Christian activity. The first one, a basic survival strategy, is a driving force for mobilizing Christian communities. The ongoing political crises in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt have deepened the malaise of Christians, who are in a dilemma whether to support central authoritarian states barring the rise of Islamist forces, or to side with anti-authoritarian, highly fragmented, and sometimes violent movements. Growing numbers of Christian activists attempt to reassert their ‘right to remain in their homeland and bring their concerns to bear on public policy, the resolution of conflict and the place of pluralism in political discourse’.52 Secondly, the Middle East is witnessing a renewal of Christian social awareness that has arisen out of “revivalism” and the influence of an Arab Christian diaspora deeply linked to the “homeland” developments. As a result of both dynamics, the conflict has eventually served as a cauldron for the development of an organized Christian response in the form of advocacy for liberal and peaceful solutions to the persistent armed conflict within civil society. In that sense, Copts in particular have been increasingly vocal since 2011. Despite regular and deadly church bombings, Copts seem to have moved ‘beyond a debate over equality of citizenship and rights to one of freedom to difference, a discourse that does not subordinate Egyptian minorities to the national unity debate but encourages specific minority rights and pluralism’.53 In addition, the increasing “citizen” awareness had led to a shift in the demands of some groups in the Coptic community, from “communitarian” to “societal” claims.54 This vision, however, while containing the seeds of a potentially transformative minority politics, remains contested, both within the Coptic community and between Copts, Muslims, and the state.55 While the latter does not appreciate the increasing visibility of Copt activists, which manifested itself in several ways, including public demonstrations to protest the burning of churches, the reaction of the former is understandable since Copt activists have played a vocal role in criticizing the neo-millet partnership between the state and the church, in which the state has become the “protector” of Copts and the church the “unique” representative of the Coptic community. 245

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Finally, the Arab revolts and their aftermath – territorial fragmentation, loss of sovereignty over the whole country, warfare, a power vacuum – have also allowed ethnic minorities to gain relevance both at national and regional levels. Thus, the sudden uprising and international intervention that put an end to Moammar Qaddafi’s rule in Libya paved the way for the Amazigh minority to go through a cultural spring.56 Crucially, the current power vacuum has allowed the Amazigh to assert their Berberness, to introduce the Berber language into schools, to start broadcasting opposition news, and to advance their claim to collective recognition within the envisaged democratic post-Qaddafi order.57 Like Coptic activists, however, the Amazigh movement in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, due to its older cultural and political struggle in Europe, continues to be much more active in the transnational sphere than in Libya. Interestingly, the territorial fragmentation and the power vacuum created by the Arab revolts and, in particular, the war in countries such as Syria has also provided a unique opportunity for the elaboration and implementation of new forms of governance that depart from traditional models and challenge IR modernist approaches that hold the (Western) nation-state framework as a universal and indeed inevitable model in international relations. The case of Kurds in Syria offers in that sense a striking example. As the Syrian army pulled out of several towns in the north and northeast of the country in July 2012, Kurds seemed to emerge “out of nowhere”58 and found themselves masters of their own destiny after more than 40 years of dictatorship and political marginalization. Ever since then, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) – a Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – and its military force, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), have been exercising state-like power in the Kurdish regions of Syria. In addition, the establishment of a de facto autonomy in Syria’s Kurdish majority areas has seen the Kurds become the key actors in the conflict both at national and regional levels as, at the time of this writing, the YPG are actively taking part in military operations alongside the US against ISIS around Raqqa, the second “capital” of its self-proclaimed Caliphate in 2014. Freed from any significant opposition, the PYD alone promoted the declaration of a local administration followed by the appointment of three governments in the “cantons” of Jazira, Kobane, and Afrin in January 2014. Moreover, two years later, the PYD established a federal administrative system throughout the areas under PYD control, in which its principles – “democratic autonomy” and “democratic confederalism” as formulated by PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan – were to prevail. In the proposed system of “democratic autonomy” and “democratic confederalism”, the former refers to a re-grounding of the political status of people on the basis of self-­government, rather than on people’s relations with the state. “Democratic confederalism” aims at strengthening local administrative capacities organized in the form of councils at the very local level, of streets and then neighborhoods, through districts/villages and towns/cities to regions. Crucially, the PYD claims that a decisive break from centralized and representative systems is needed; the Kurds, as well as all peoples in the Middle East, should abandon the nation-state system to embrace a kind of communal self-organization, following Murray Bookchin anarchist theory, among other sources of inspiration.59 In theory, in the “Rojava Laboratory”, to use Leezenberg’s expression, the “minority” issue seems to be transcended as the “Social Contract of the Democratic Federalism of Northern Syria” guarantees the participation of ‘all individuals and groups, on equal levels, in the discussion, decision, and implementation of affairs’. In so doing, it takes ‘ethnic and religious differences into consideration according to the characteristics of each group based on the principles of mutual coexistence and people’s “fraternity” ’.60 The “Rojava Model” reveals itself, however, as a mélange of two traditions. On the one hand, it assures individual participation and equality based on an anarchist tradition and, on the other, it guarantees collective rights within a 246

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“consensus democracy”, which indeed recalls the Lebanese system (namely the government of coalition of identity groups acknowledging specific constitutional rights to different religious groups). Thus, for instance, Article 16 guarantees ‘fair representation of all ethnic components in all the administrative institutions related to federalism . . . according to demography of the region’.61 Finally, Article 33 allows cultural, ethnic, and religious groups and components to name their self-administration, preserve their cultures, and form their democratic organizations. Some scholars have pointed out that, while ethnic and religious diversity seems to be acknowledged within the “democratic confederalism” framework, this system has proved to be an extremely partisan one. In that sense, the PYD has effectively established one-party rule, which stands in sharp contrast with the declared break with the Marxism-Leninist party’s tradition.62 In addition, one should not forget that the Rojava Laboratory is indeed a model in “becoming” and not a model of “being”. In other words, internal dynamics (intra-Kurdish power relations, alliances with Arab rebel groups) as well as external dynamics (Turkey’s potential intervention in Northern Syria, opposing regional alliances with the US or Russia) are both entangled in the current Syrian warfare context. Its aftermath will have an influence on the actual “minority policies” in Rojava, provided that self-administration succeeds in safeguarding its durability.

Conclusion Minority politics in the Middle East have traditionally been considered as a problem, or indeed, as one of the main reasons for the “unsuccessful” consolidation of the nation-state and/or an obstacle to a broader process of democratization in the region. The historical overview of the emergence of the “minority” issue in international relations has allowed us to apprehend how the Great Powers greatly contributed to discredit the very notion of minority rights in the eyes of first the Ottoman authorities, and then the new nation-state elites. The exploitation of “minority” claims by colonial powers, as well as by kin-states or simply by competing countries, has indeed contributed to the perception of “minorities” as a potential fifth column against the respective national elites’ projects, be they strictly national or pan-national. Historically, however, this view needs to be nuanced. Firstly, as I have argued earlier in this chapter, the terms “majority” and “minority” became meaningful only gradually. Not all ethnic and religious groups living in countries placed under mandatory oversight were legally recognized as “minorities” throughout the mandates. Significantly, ethnic entrepreneurs seldom claimed to be the representatives of a “minority group”; on the contrary, they presented themselves as the vanguard of national groups that deserved to be treated as equals alongside the demographic majority. Minority claims were neither the “natural” outcome of a historic conflict between religious and ethnic groups, nor the consequence of imperialist designs in the Middle East. “Minority” and “majority” groups, as international as well as transnational actors, interplayed in a triangular relationship that in some cases has lasted for two centuries. Secondly, whilst lawmakers and state elites envisioned either “demographic majority” or “consensus democracy” as the two main viable political arrangements, in order to meet “national” challenges, diverse indigenous actors (e.g., intellectuals, religious representatives, political parties, and state officials) sought at different times to put forward alternative solutions to the “minority issue” drawing from a wide range of schools of thought: from Islamic and Ottomanist, to liberal and socialist. Furthermore, as identity politics in the Middle East witnessed a revival, state actors and oppositional forces have been compelled to redefine official state ideologies over the twentieth century. The debate on how the “fragments” of the Middle Eastern societies would fit in within the respective “nations” has not been closed with the accession to political independence of their countries: it remains open today. 247

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In that sense, this chapter has argued that ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East are living a crucial juncture in this early twenty-first century that asks for a reassessment of their position. The ever-expanding process of globalization as well as the Arab revolts of 2010–11 have paved the way for an empowerment of certain ethnic and religious minorities, despite the fact that the latter have witnessed a dramatic decline from a numerical perspective. Today, like yesterday, diverse sectors from Middle Eastern societies, including minorities, are calling for new forms of governance beyond the “primitive” versions of nationalism and communitarianism. As in other regions across the world,63 minority groups seek to modify the content of their cause in ways that empower ordinary people to gain more control over the resources as well as the decision-making processes at all levels. As in the past, however, this capacity of “agency” provides at once new opportunities – publicity for their concerns and influence (and old challenges) – and a “visibility” that forces minority groups not only to respond to those challenges in order to maintain their place and even new relevance, but also to avoid being associated as allies of “fifth columns”. Finally, against this backdrop, the (re)examination of how “minorities” have shaped (and continue to shape) international relations in the Middle East asks for a less stato-centered vantage point in the IR field. The growing visibility (religious revivalism both in the Middle East and among the diaspora), social activism seeking to secure the “right to difference”, and the political empowerment (particularly the Amazigh movement in North Africa, as well as the Kurdish movement both in Syria and Iraq) need to be analyzed not as marginal dynamics, but as potential forces of transformation in the Middle East. After all, political claims on behalf of “minorities” have frequently been claims not for separation but for more liberal politics with implications for the majority as well.

Notes 1 The article adopts Larbi Sadiki’s definition of the Arab Spring: ‘a bottom-up ground swell of activism accompanied by cultural, political, and social transformation; or in the absence of transformation, a novel revolutionary or rebellious impulse, taking peaceful and violent forms, to exert pressure for change bottom-up’. Larbi Sadiki, “The Arab Spring: The ‘People’ in International Relations,” in Louise Fawcett, ed. International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 325. 2 The president of the Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghalioun, compared Syrian Kurds to immigrants in France during an interview for German TV. http://www.mesop.de/2011/10/29/kurds-aregenuin-migrants-kurden-sind-wie-geborene-immigranten/ (accessed on 25 November 2011). 3 Jessie Moritz, “The Easy Enemy: The Shia and Sectarianism in the Arab States of the Gulf and Yemen during the Arab Spring,” in K. Scott Parker and Tony E. Nasrallah, eds. Middle Eastern Minorities and the Arab Spring: Identity and Community in the Twenty-Frist Century (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017), 227–257. 4 John R. Bradley, After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Nonie Darwish, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons); Raphael Israeli, From Arab Spring to Islamic Winter (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books, 2013). 5 Jordi Tejel and Benjamin Thomas White, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation? Minorities in the Modern Middle East and North Africa,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 135. 6 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 7 Ofra Bengio and Gabriel Ben-Dor, eds. Minorities and the State in the Arab World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999); Habib Malik, Islamism and the Future of the Christians of the Middle East (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2010); Nisan Mordechai, Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002); Maya Shatzmiller, ed. Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Milton Esman

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Challenges for minorities in the Middle East and Itamar Rabinovich, eds. The Study of Ethnic Politics in the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), Andrea Pacini, ed. Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East: The Challenge of the Future (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999). 8 Giacomo Luciani, ed. The Arab State, Beyond Coercion, the Durability of the Arab State (London: Routledge, 1990); Raymond Hinnebusch, The International Politics of the Middle East (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Tareq Y. Ismael and Glenn E. Perry, The International Relations of the Contemporary Middle East (London, New York, NY: Routledge, 2014); Fred H. Lawson, Constructing International Relations in the Arab World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Louise Fawcett, ed. International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds. The Foreign Policies of the Middle East States (Boulder, CO, London: Lynne Rienner, 2014). 9 Fred H. Lawson, “International Relations Theory and the Middle East,” in L. Fawcett, ed. International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20. 10 Henri J. Barkey and Fuller Graham, Turkey’s Kurdish Question (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Ben-Yehuda Hemda and Shmuel Sandler, The Arab-Israeli Conflict Transformed: Fifty Years of Interstate and Ethnic Crisis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); Stephen C. Pelletiere, The Kurds: An Unstable Element in the Gulf (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984); Thomas G. Fraser, The Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1995). 11 See Benjamin Miller, “Balance of Power or the State-to-Nation Balance: Explaining Middle East War-Propensity,” Security Studies 15, no. 4 (2006): 658–705. 12 Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Bernard Heyberger, Les Chrétiens au Proche-Orient: De la compassion à la comprehension (Paris: Payot and Rivages, 2013); Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011); Leïla Vignal, ed. The Transnational Middle East: People, Places, Borders (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Anthony Gorman and Sossie Kasbarian, eds. Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualising Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 13 Soheila Shahshahani, “Today, Is ‘ethnicity’ the Most Important Topic in the Middle East?” Anthropology of the Middle East 8, no. 2 (2013): v–vi; Jordi Tejel, “Beyond the Dichotomy of Accommodation Versus Resistance: The Kurdish Minority in Iraq and Syria in Long-Term and Comparative Perspectives, 1920–2015,” in Michael Gunter, ed. Kurdish Issues: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Olson (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers), 258–282; Benjamin T. White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Stefan Winter, A History of the “Alawis”: From Medieval Aleppo to the Turkish Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 14 Nga Longva and Sofie Roald, eds. Religious Minorities in the Middle East: Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation (Leiden, London: Brill, 2012), 3. 15 Paul S. Rowe, “Neo-Millet System and Transnational Religious Movements: The Humayun Decrees and Church Construction in Egypt,” The Journal of Church and State 49, no. 2 (2007): 329–350. 16 Andre Liebich, “Minority as Inferiority: Minority Rights in Historical Perspective,” Review of International Studies 34 (2008): 251. 17 Ibid., 257. 18 The first exemptions from the Ottoman legal system and equality for the Christians before Ottoman courts were recognized within the framework of the Capitulations; that is, trade concession granted by treaty to citizens of other empires – Western empires, in general – by the Ottomans from the late fourteenth century onwards. A century later, under the millet system, the Ottoman Empire recognized that the other monotheistic “peoples of the Book” – particularly Christian and Jews – were entitled not only to tolerance but also to a degree of self-government and internal autonomy. Ottoman millets were an interpretation of the Koranic principle of dhimmi, or protected religious minorities. 19 Geoff Gilbert, “Religio-Nationalist Minorities and the Development of Minority Rights Law,” Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 401. 20 Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire 1815–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 21 The Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 was a diplomatic disaster for the Ottomans. The Russians forced the Sublime Porte to sign the San Stefano Treaty of 3 March 1878, by which not only Russia was

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Jordi Tejel awarded certain territorial gains, but it also granted independence and additional territory to Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia. 22 According to Janet Klein, the reasons for the establishment of the Hamidiye Light Cavalry were manifold: to protect the eastern frontier of the Empire from Russian penetration; to suppress Armenian activities; to bolster the ties of Islamic unity in the Empire by creating a special bond between the Sultan and the Kurds; and finally, to bring the Eastern vilayets into the Ottoman fold. Janet Klein, The Margins of the Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 4. 23 Ibid., 5. 24 Mehmed S. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 131. 25 François Rigaux, “Mission Impossible: la définition de la minorité,” Revue trimestrielle des droits de l’homme 30 (1997): 155. 26 Capotorti Report, 1979 (document E/CN.4/Sub.2/384/Rev.1, para. 568). 27 See among others, Compilation of Proposals Concerning the Definition of the Term “Minority” (document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1987/WG.5/WP.1); Document de travail sur la définition des minorités (E/CN.4/Sub.2/ AC.5/1996/WP.1); Rapport du Groupe de travail sur les minorités sur les travaux de sa cinquième session (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/21). 28 Joshua Catellino and Kathleen Cavanaugh, Minority Rights in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 183. 29 Elie Kedourie, “Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East,” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 276–282. 30 Moshe Ma’oz and Gabriel Sheffer, eds. Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas (Sussex: Sussex University Press, 2002), 8–9; P.R. Kumaraswamy, “Problems of Studying Minorities in the Middle East,” Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations 2, no. 2 (2003): 2. 31 Will Kymlicka and Eva Pföstl, eds. Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. 32 Martti Koskenniemi, “International Law and Hegemony: A Reconfiguration,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2004): 199. 3 3 White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East, 209–210. 34 Geoff Gilbert, “Religio-Nationalist Minorities and the Development of Minority Rights Law,” 401–403. 35 Andre Liebich, “Minority as Inferiority: Minority Rights in Historical Perspective,” 246. 36 Mark Mazower,“Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe,” Daedalus 126, no. 2 (1997): 51. 37 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4. 38 Ibid., 4–5. 39 Elizabeth Picard, “Conclusion: Nation-building and Minority Rights in the Middle East,” in Anh Nga Longva and Anne Sofie Raold, eds. Religious Minorities in the Middle East: Domination, Self-­Empowerment, Accommodation (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 330. 40 Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17–38. 41 Vivian Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt: The Challenges of Modernisation and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011). 42 Jordi Tejel, Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 43 Leïla Vignal, ed. The Transnational Middle East: People, Places, Borders, 7. 44 See among others, Dawn Chatty, Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 180–230; Mohamed Kamel Doraï, “Palestinian Emigration from Lebanon to Northern Europe: Refugees, Networks, and Transnational Practices,” Refuge 21, no. 2 (2003): 23–31; John Tofik Karam, “Crossing the Americas: The U.S. War on Terror and Arab CrossBorder Mobilization in a South American Frontier Region,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 2 (2011): 251–265. 45 Fiona B. Adamson, “Mobilizing for the Transformation of Home: Politicized Identities and Transnational Practices,” in Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser, eds. New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (London: Routledge, 2002), 155–168.

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Challenges for minorities in the Middle East 46 Grégoire Delhaye, “La réponse des Etats à la dissidence diasporique: Le cas de l’Egypte face au militantisme copte aux Etats-Unis,” in Stéphane Dufoix, Carine Guerassimiff-Pina and Anne de Tinguy, eds. Loin des yeux, près du cœur: Les Etats et leurs expatriés (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2010), 323–341; Grégoire Delhaye, “Les racines du dynamisme de la diaspora copte,” EchoGéo, 2008. http://echogeo. revues.org/index6963.html, accessed 13 April 2017. 47 Nicole F. Watts, “Institutionalizing Virtual Kurdistan West: Transnational Networks and Ethnic Contention in International Affairs,” in Joel S. Migdal, ed. Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121–147. 48 Tony Nasrallah and Scott Parker, eds. Middle Eastern Minorities and the Arab Spring: Identity and Community in the Twenty-First Century (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017). 49 Dawn Chatty, Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East. 50 John Tofiq Karam, “A Cultural Politics of Entrepreneurship in Nation-Making: Phoenicians, Turks, and the Arab Commercial Essence in Brazil,” The Journal of Latin America Anthropology 9, no. 2 (2004): 322–323. 51 Gavin Jones, “A Demographic Perspective on the Muslim World,” Journal of Population Research 23, no. 2 (2006): 243–265. 52 Paul S. Rowe, “Neo-Millet System and Transnational Religious Movements: The Humayun Decrees and Church Construction in Egypt,” 332. 53 Vivian Ibrahim, “Beyond the Cross and the Crescent: Plural Identities and the Copts in Contemporary Egypt,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 14 (2015): 2586. 54 Paola Pizzo, “The ‘Coptic question’ in Post-Revolutionary Egypt: Citizenship, Democracy, Religion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 14 (2015): 2598–2613. 55 Ibid., 2586. 56 The Amazigh are present in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mali under different denominations. 57 Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, “A Turning Point? The Arab Spring and the Amazigh Movement,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 14 (2015): 2499–2515. 58 Michael Gunter, Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War (London: Hurst, 2014). 59 Personal written contacts between Bookchin and Öcalan seemed to be established in 2004. See Joost Jongerden and Ahmed Hamdi Akkaya, “Democratic Confederalism as a Kurdish Spring: The PKK and the Quest for Radical Democracy,” in Michael Gunter and Mohammed M.A. Ahmed, eds. The Kurdish Spring: Geopolitical Changes and the Kurds (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2013), 163–185. 60 “Social Contract of the Democratic Federalism of Northern Syria,” Preamble, The Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Federalism of Northern Syria, 29 December 2016. 61 Ibid. 62 Eva Savelsberg and Jordi Tejel, “Re-Considering Minorities’ Position in the Middle East: The Kurdish Case in Syria,” in Middle Eastern Minorities and the Arab Spring (forthcoming); Michiel Leezenberg, “The Ambiguities of Democratic Autonomy: The Kurdish Movement in Turkey and Rojava,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 11–12. 63 Carole Paterman, “Participatory Democracy Revisited,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (2012): 7–19. On transnational networks working for new forms of participation and representation, see Teivo Teivainen and Silke Trommer, “Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-State Politics,” Globalizations 14, no. 1 (2017): 17–31.

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19 UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1325 A framework for women’s peace activism in the Middle East?1 Sophie Richter-Devroe The UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, which was unanimously passed on 31 October 2000 by the United Nations Security Council, calls for women’s increased participation in conflict prevention, resolution, and management, as well as their protection and empowerment during conflict. It represented the first official document in which the UN Security Council dealt specifically with women’s experiences in conflict.2 UNSCR 1325 opens with ten pre-ambular paragraphs referring to broad normative standards embraced by the international community through legal principles, human rights, and humanitarian law, as well as previous UN resolutions, declarations, and documents, such as the Beijing Platform for Action, the United Nations Charter, the Windhoek Declaration, and the Namibia Plan of Action. Its 18 operational paragraphs cover three main themes. Firstly, the Resolution recognizes women’s peace and anti-war activism and calls for their increased participation at all decision-making levels in national, regional, and international conflict prevention and resolutions initiatives. Secondly, it highlights the gendered aspects of war and armed conflict demanding the protection of women’s rights, including shielding women and girls from genderbased violence and other violations of international law. Finally, the Resolution calls upon local actors, member states, but also the UN itself to adopt a gender perspective in peace operations, negotiations, and agreements, including measures that empower local women. Nearly two decades have passed since the adoption of UNSCR 1325, and wide-reaching efforts to ensure its implementation have been made at international, governmental, and nongovernmental levels all over the world.3 To date 79 countries have created National Action Plans (NAPs) on UNSCR 1325, and seven other UN resolutions were adopted to further support and protect women in peace and conflict.4 Together they constitute the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. The last of these, resolution 2242, was adopted in 2015 and called specifically for an improved implementation of the WPS Agenda, initiating a comprehensive review process.5 The Resolution, and the WPS Agenda more broadly, has been praised by many. Feminist scholars and activists have lauded 1325 as path-breaking and highly significant for women’s anti-war and peace activism, and the UN heralded it as a landmark document that promises to protect women’s rights and guarantee their equal participation in peace processes.6 In its recent review the UN commends a number of successes of the WPS Agenda.7 Among these are the 252

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international community’s adoption of a normative framework recognizing and combatting sexual violence in war, an increase in peace agreements that mention and integrate references to women, as well as in bilateral aid on gender equality to fragile states. Yet, the same report also acknowledges that there have been major impediments to the implementation of UNSCR 1325: less than 10% of peace negotiators are women, prosecutions of sexual violence in war remain few, and not all countries have formulated, let alone implemented or allocated budget to, their NAPs on 1325. More importantly perhaps, evaluations by analysts outside the international community’s institutional framework, and by women activists themselves, show that UNSCR 1325 has had little impact on women’s actual experiences of conflict on the ground.8 This also is true for the Middle East, where the WPS Agenda and UNSCR 1325 have made little difference to women’s everyday life under war, siege, conflict, and occupation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with women activists, this chapter traces and evaluates the implementation and perception of 1325 and the wider WPS Agenda in the Middle East. I focus in particular on Palestine, where women have had to cope with and resist political violence exercised by the Israeli settler-colonial regime for more than 70 years now. Countering celebratory stances which tend to reify women as ‘natural peacemakers’,9 I argue that many, if not most, of the peacebuilding initiatives based on 1325 constitute an attempt not to strengthen, but rather to discipline women’s political activism in the region within the limits of the liberal WPS agenda.

UNSCR 1325 in the Middle East The implementation of UNSCR 1325 and its WPS Agenda in the Middle East has been sparse and largely uncoordinated. In 2014, the General Secretariat of the League of Arab States, together with the Arab Women Organization and UN Women issued a regional strategy document calling for the comprehensive implementation of the WPS Agenda in the Middle East, and the drafting and adoption of a Regional Action Plan, as well as NAPs for all Arab countries.10 But not all Arab states have adopted the WPS Agenda and developed a NAP. So far, Iraq adopted its NAP in 2014, South Sudan followed in 2015, and Palestine and Jordan adopted their NAPs in 2017.11 Tunisia drafted a NAP but has not officially adopted it yet.12 In terms of actual implementation of the provisions stipulated by UNSCR 1325 also much remains to be hoped for. In Yemen, for example, women were represented in the 2014 Nation Dialogue Conference with approximately 28% ( just under the 30% quota), where they pushed for the inclusion of gender issues,13 but the outcomes of the conference have largely remained unimplemented. Yemeni women’s participation in negotiations and peacebuilding remains weak, despite their continuous lobbying. Yemen is not an exception; peace talks on the conflicts in Syria and Libya also did not include women at all, or only very few.14 Women activists have criticized this poor empirical record15 and are campaigning for a stronger, more coherent and comprehensive adoption of UNSCR 1325 in the Middle East. Their activism after 2000 is, if not determined, certainly strongly guided by the mainstream WPS Agenda. Resolution 1325 has been added to the agendas of most organizations active in the field of conflict resolution and/or women’s rights, and many are lobbying their governments and ministries to do more to operationalize the WPS Agenda on the ground. The reasons identified for the weak empirical record on 1325 in the Middle East include the lack of will on behalf of national governments, lack of understanding, and a lack of funding.16 It is certainly true that national representative bodies need to do more to ensure the equal inclusion and participation of women in peace and conflict resolution initiatives, and to acknowledge and combat gendered and sexual violence in war and conflict. Yet, not everyone 253

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supports the liberal WPS Agenda. While several Arab women leaders have lobbied for the implementation of 1325 in their countries, ordinary women, whose everyday life the Resolution is supposed to protect and whose daily peacebuilding efforts it should strengthen, often do not know about 1325. Some also prefer not to be associated with what either they themselves or their societies at large might perceive ‘to be part of a Western plot to destroy [their] society’s traditional culture and values’.17 Since women are often reified as bearers of cultural authenticity,18 interventions by the international community that press links between women’s empowerment and conflict resolution can be viewed skeptically by local societies, particularly in contexts of foreign invasion and occupation, such as Iraq or Palestine.19 Many activists in the Middle East consider 1325 and the mainstream liberal WPS Agenda not only irresponsive to their real needs under occupation, but also a derivative of “colonial feminism”.20 The fact that local actors, particularly in countries with a history of foreign occupation and colonization, remain skeptical of 1325 should raise critical questions, such as those proposed by Chinkin and Charlesworth: ‘Can an international legal framework be applied for the empowerment of women in the Third World that is not open to rejection as a further form of intervention and neo-colonialism?’21 In the following section, I take up Chinkin and Charlesworth’s question by taking a closer look at the work of one particular women’s organization, the International Women’s Commission (IWC) in Palestine. Focusing on this one case should, I hope, shift the discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of UNSCR 1325 in the Middle East to the concrete level of implementation. What sort of obstacles did Palestinian women activists in the IWC face in their efforts to implement UNSCR 1325, and what does their experience say about the wider functioning of the WPS Agenda?

UNSCR 1325 and the International Women’s Commission in Palestine There are several organizations working on implementing UNSCR 1325 and the broader WPS Agenda in Palestine. Among them is the IWC, on which I focus in this section. Other Palestinian organizations, such as Miftah, the Jerusalem Center for Women, the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre Wi’am, the General Union of Palestinian Women, the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, the Women’s Affairs Technical Committee, or Wisal are also engaged in implementing 1325. In 2017 Palestine adopted its NAP for 2017–2019. It came about as a result of a five-year collaborative process among different Palestinian ministries and non-governmental organizations, led by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.22 More than a decade earlier, in 2002, just shortly after the UN adopted 1325, Palestinian and Israeli activists Maha Abu Dayyeh Shamas and Terry Greenblatt called upon the UN Security Council to establish the IWC in Israel and Palestine. It was established in 2005 at an international conference in Turkey convened by UNIFEM. As a tripartite body comprising Palestinian, Israeli, and international high-level female delegates, it was tasked with monitoring the implementation of 1325 in Israel and Palestine. The Commission worked for five years, but eventually was closed in 2010 due to unbridgeable differences among its members. These differences crystallised in particular around the issue of the Israeli military incursions and aggressions under Operation Cast Lead from 2008 to 2009.23 Nevertheless, the IWC constituted a prominent example of a high-level institutional attempt to operationalize the mainstream WPS Agenda in Palestine. In line with the aims of the Resolution, the IWC strived to introduce a gender and feminist perspective to peacebuilding, lobby for increased participation of women in formal and informal negotiations, and advocate the protection of women and their rights in the Palestinian-Israeli 254

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conflict. The IWC unquestionably was a progressive model lending high-level institutional support to Palestinian and Israeli women’s peacebuilding initiatives. It received a lot of international attention, with the UN, for example, praising it as ‘the first-ever global commission working to guarantee women’s full participation in formal and informal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations [which] will ensure implementation of the groundbreaking 2000 Security Council resolution 1325’.24 On the Palestinian side, however, few people I spoke to were aware of the Commission and many doubted that joint Palestinian-Israeli women’s peacebuilding and Resolution 1325 could offer ways forward to resist Israeli colonization and occupation. For example, Jumana, whose women’s organization also works to implement 1325 in the Palestinian context, asked herself (and me): ‘For women on the ground, why should 1325 be more important than any other resolution - like 194, for example? How can it work without Israel ending the occupation? Israel doesn’t abide by any UN resolution, why this one?’25 Doubts about the potential of 1325 to fulfill its double promise of advancing Palestinian women’s social and political struggle are not only raised by those who question the effectiveness of international law and UN resolutions more generally, but also by those who use such a rightsbased framework for their activism. The Palestinian members of the IWC struggled severely in their attempts to make use of 1325, and, as stated earlier, the Commission eventually had to close down in 2010 due to intractable political differences between its Israeli and Palestinian members. I conducted interviews with the Palestinian members of the IWC in 2008–10. Already then the Palestinian members of the IWC faced severe difficulties to challenge the mainstream Israeli and international narrow feminist reading of 1325. They were unable to establish their more rights-based interpretations of the Resolution’s main three themes: participation, protection, and empowerment.

Participation UNSCR 1325 ‘[u]rges Member States to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict’.26 Following this call, several countries established women quotas for governmental positions and peace negotiations in the hope that a gender-balanced representation would help in drafting and installing more gender-friendly post-conflict agreements and legal structures. The participation of Palestinian women in the Oslo “peace process” has been limited,27 but as far as their representation in government is concerned, women have succeeded in establishing a legally recognized women’s quota in the local and national legislative elections. Established in 2005, the IWC was tasked with strengthening women’s participation in peace negotiations. This task, however, is not as straightforward as it might sound. With the so-called “peace process” not having achieved any tangible results for Palestinians on the ground, there is limited confidence among the Palestinian public in the format of negotiations as a path to independence. Negotiations are seen to be devoid of content, and their format highly stylized. The ways in which the IWC, as a body comprising international, Israeli, and Palestinian members, could participate was never fully clarified. After extended discussions on the format of their participation in the 2007 Annapolis conference, for example, the IWC members eventually assumed a compromise position as a watchdog,28 thus falling short of 1325’s call for gender balance in formal and informal negotiations and demonstrating its marginal impact on high-level politics. Women’s inclusion in formal and informal negotiations and peace initiatives is often justified by biological-essentialist and/or maternalist arguments claiming women’s alleged ‘peaceful 255

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nature’.29 In the Palestinian/Israeli context too, some argue that women are particularly suited for peacebuilding initiatives.30 Galia Golan, an Israeli member of the IWC, for example, finds that ‘women tend to listen, rather than engage in monologues. They both listen and often are more willing than men to reveal emotions, fears or concerns, as well as to hear what others are saying’.31 Such essentialist arguments hardly capture the widely varying experiences of women in war and, moreover, risk emotionalizing and decontextualizing political conflict.32 Women’s equal participation in peace initiatives is also supported by constructivist arguments that find that women experience conflict differently than men, and thus bring different, gender-specific perspectives and demands to the negotiation table. Palestinian women activists, when lobbying the Palestinian Authority for increasing women’s representation in negotiations and decision-making, often stress this point. One of the Palestinian IWC members, for example, told me: We [the IWC] think that there is a difference between the view of women and the view of men in negotiations. It is true that the national cause unifies [women’s and men’s positions], but I see for example a difference in how women and men talk about water, or the case of Jerusalem, where women might attach more significance to the issue of family reunification.33 If women’s standpoints and experiences can usefully be contrasted to that of men, one must, however, also enquire about the different experiences among women: do Palestinian and Israeli women have a similar experience of the conflict? Do they bring a similar “women’s” perspective to negotiations? All Palestinian IWC members I interviewed were united in their answer to this question: they all stressed that their everyday life under Israeli occupation differs decidedly from that of Israeli women and that consequently they also hold diverging ideas and political positions. One interviewee expressed this poignantly: Everywhere in conflict you see that women have more the tendency to listen, to understand, to talk about the details, to try to find solutions, etc. but this doesn’t mean that a Palestinian woman sitting with an Israeli woman would have a different position than a Palestinian man. Because the basics have to be solved, the rights have to be recognized. . . . That is why always the political issue is the main issue. I cannot go and do an activity with you when you don’t recognize my rights. It doesn’t work. I cannot promote the IWC in my society when I see that some [of the Israeli IWC members] don’t recognize my rights. . . . It is not a woman’s or man’s issue – it is always a matter of interests.34 Palestinian women’s political positions, as this quote demonstrates, are dominated by national rather than gender-specific concerns. It is thus not in isolation, but in its intersection with class, ethnicity, race, nationality, political affiliation, etc. that gender identity impacts upon political positions and viewpoints.35 Palestinian women activists, such as the ones quoted here, aim at establishing the differences in experiences, standpoints, and perspectives between men and women, not the similarities between Palestinian and Israeli women. In line with critical postcolonial feminist scholars,36 they reject a fixed standpoint theoretical account, which claims a single universal women’s experience. Instead, they highlight the strong formative impact that Palestinian political cultures and national identity have on gendered subjectivities. The need to provide a political understanding of gender was stressed by most Palestinian activists I interviewed. Such a political understanding would refrain from relying on the single 256

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variable of biological sex, and instead take into consideration the influences that other political structures such as nationality, ethnicity, occupier/occupied, or political party affiliation have on women’s identities and political practices. The most significant dividing line between Palestinian and Israeli women activists – which cannot be easily bridged by gender – is that of occupier and occupied and, relatedly, nationality. The great majority of Palestinian women cannot – and do not want to – disassociate themselves from their national narrative and grouping. Abandoning the focus on Palestinian political and national identity and rights in favor of female dialogue, empathy, and understanding is seen as a form of normalization, collaboration with the occupier, or even defeat.

Protection UNSCR 1325 calls upon all parties to the conflict to ensure the protection of women and girls in conflict from gender-based violence and rape, but also from all other violations of their rights under international law, particularly as set out in the Fourth Geneva Convention. By calling for the protection of women in times of war, 1325 continues a dominant trend in mainstream literature which emphasizes that women are particularly hard-hit by the devastating impact of war and crisis. Most aid agencies, particularly those focusing on relief rather than development, deal with women as victims of war. Such a reductionist conceptualization of gender identities and women’s roles in conflict risks robbing women of their social and political agency. Many feminist scholars have criticized a narrow focus on protection, finding that this might infantilize women by reducing and homogenizing their wide-ranging experiences and forms of agency under the category of “womenandchildren”.37 Reducing women to nothing but victims, it is argued, might assign women a passive, apolitical role and leave the domain of politics and decision-making reserved for men. Such reasoning has also been brought forward in the Palestinian-Israeli context, particularly by Israeli feminists. Knesset and IWC member Naomi Chazan, for example, argues that ‘the emphasis placed on protecting women in times of violence may contribute to the stereotypical image of women as victims and thus undermine their credibility as problem-solvers’.38 Yet, the Palestinian members of the IWC I interviewed unanimously found that amongst the three themes dealt with in the Resolution, its call to ensure the protection of women and their rights under international law is most significant to their experience. Read from such a rights-based perspective, 1325, as one member clearly stated, ‘is not just [a way] to tackle the role of women in the negotiation process, pre-, during, and post-conflict. No! 1325 also talks about the protection of women under conflict. It has many more components that advocate women’s rights under conflict’.39 Palestinian members of the IWC found it imperative to anchor their IWC Charter in international law, UN resolutions, and past Israeli-Palestinian agreements. The Charter, and the legal frameworks it refers to, however, have been interpreted very differently by Palestinian and Israeli IWC members, as the following account by a Palestinian member illustrates: The [IWC] Charter refers clearly to recognising our rights, international law, UN resolutions, and the two-state solution. We thought it was clear enough, [but] after three years, now we are reviewing the Charter. We discovered that some of the Israelis, members [of IWC] who signed the Charter, are talking about Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. If you agree to the 1967 borders, then you cannot say that these are neighbourhoods. These are colonial settlements. This is Palestinian land. . . . So it is either 257

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that they haven’t read the Charter or that they don’t understand it. They have different interpretations of the Charter.40 The Palestinian members’ difficulties to establish their rights–based interpretation of 1325 as authoritative highlights a major shortcoming of international law: its lack of monitoring and enforcement.41 The difficulty of enforcement is even heightened in the case of 1325 because, compared to other international legal documents, UNSCR 1325 has a weak standing, depending on the good will of member countries to ensure its implementation.42 Although the Knesset issued a law calling for the implementation of 1325 and the Palestinian Authority adopted a NAP on 1325, the question remains: who is responsible for the enforcement of 1325 and who can be held accountable for its violations? The recurrent military attacks on Gaza, but also the daily infringements and violations of Palestinian basic rights in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, illustrate painfully that the Palestinian Authority has no means to enforce 1325, let alone guarantee its demand of providing protection for women. Palestinians cannot rely on their own (quasi-)government to shield them from Israeli violations of their basic rights. The lack of enforcement of 1325, but also other UN resolutions, has fostered disillusionment among Palestinians with the political commitment of the UN and the international community. Palestinians have turned repeatedly to the UN and other multilateral and international bodies to seek protection, but their calls have generally been disappointed. Haneen, who is not a member of the IWC but a prominent activist critical of joint Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives, expressed her disillusionment poignantly, when she asked: ‘How many times did we send letters to the UN calling for ceasefires, resolutions, etc. but nothing happened? There have been so many resolutions since ‘48, but they are never implemented. We need something very practical, not that abstract’.43 Her call for ‘something very practical’ is perfectly justified. Multiple Security Council resolutions have been issued since 1948 on various aspects of the Palestinian cause, but the UN has altogether failed to enforce the implementation of international law and its own resolutions. Since not even those resolutions which make strong political claims have been properly addressed, let alone implemented, it should not come as a surprise that most Palestinians do not pin their hopes on 1325, a resolution that risks, in the eyes of many, prioritizing women’s rights over political rights. If Palestinian women (and men) agree to use UN resolutions, international law, and human rights at all as frameworks for their activism, most would refer to the Geneva Conventions, human rights, and those UN resolutions which directly acknowledge Palestinian national rights (e.g., 242, 338 or 194) or condemn Israeli violations of international law (e.g., 1322, which was issued just a few weeks before 1325 and criticized Israel’s use of excessive force against Palestinians), rather than 1325. Most Palestinians with whom I spoke had never heard of 1325 or, if they had, perceived it as irrelevant or even harmful to their real needs and priorities under Israeli colonization and occupation. UNSCR 1325 leaves space for reductionist liberal feminist interpretations, such as Chazan’s cited earlier,44 which prioritize the Resolution’s call for women’s empowerment over the protection of their (national and other) rights, by arguing that the Resolution’s call for protection risks reducing women to nothing but victims. Yet, activists such as the Palestinian IWC members insist on a political interpretation of 1325 with a focus on the protection of their rights. For them it is the protection clause, rather than the theme of empowerment, that holds the most potential in 1325. Projects and agendas based on 1325 that prioritize women’s empowerment over national, economic, and social rights (rather than establishing the close connection between them) are – as the following section will show – perceived by the great majority of

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Palestinians as a way to hide political agendas under the cloak of feminist aspirations for social gender change.45

Empowerment The third theme dealt with in the UNSCR 1325 concerns the incorporation of a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations in the wider UN system, as well as in negotiation and implementation processes of peace agreements. The Resolution contains little specification as to what exactly a gender perspective means or entails in this context.46 Besides paying attention to women’s special needs and guaranteeing their protection during conflict, 1325 also stresses that a gender perspective would include ‘[m]easures that support local women’s peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution, and that involve women in all of the implementation mechanisms of the peace agreements’.47 Women’s access to formal and informal conflict resolution processes and/or their (so-called) indigenous peace-building initiatives here then becomes linked to a “gender perspective” and women’s “empowerment”. Israeli IWC member Naomi Chazan in a similar vein argues that ‘women’s participation in conflict resolution is integrally related to the empowerment of women’.48 Such a perspective, however, is problematic. For the Palestinian women I interviewed empowerment constitutes a political issue that cannot be achieved through mere inclusion of women in conflict resolution processes. One Palestinian IWC member explained: When we discuss issues of how we see peace and negotiations, we want a women’s perspective, but it is not our intention to turn . . . to the issue of what the situation of women in Israeli society is, and what they are facing. No, this is not the issue! Because first of all this is political. Now we talk about politics, but from women’s point of view.49 Her argument makes clear that for Palestinian women in the IWC, UNSCR 1325’s call for empowerment concerns the entire Palestinian population under occupation, women and men, rather than women only, singled out from the broader community. While women’s or feminist perspectives must be added to negotiations, this should not result in women’s issues being dealt with independently of, or even prioritized over, political change. This is not to say that women’s rights and social gender change are not a major concern for Palestinian activists. To the contrary, it highlights that women’s empowerment in the Palestinian context and their struggle for equal rights is closely linked to their political and economic empowerment, which can only be achieved by ending Israeli settler-colonization and occupation. UNSCR 1325 makes no mention of social or economic rights, such as the right to basic living conditions or right to housing, i.e., rights that are constantly violated by Israeli house demolitions and other settler-colonial policies.50 This reminds us that political, economic, and social needs cannot be treated in isolation from each other, but need to be recognized as intersectional structures; so-called women’s issues and their empowerment cannot be separated from the broader context of occupation, disenfranchisement, and settler-colonial violence in Palestine. The Palestinian and Israeli IWC members’ conflicting interpretations of international law, UN resolutions, and even their own Charter, however, reveal that even in a peacebuilding initiative such as the IWC, the Israeli side does not fully support the realization of Palestinian women’s political, economic, and social rights. For example, the reference by an Israeli member to ‘Israeli neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem’ mentioned earlier stands in violation of Palestinian

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rights and empowerment. For Palestinian women living in East Jerusalem, the Israeli settlements have devastating and strongly disempowering effects: economically, politically, and socially. If maintained under the pretext that they are mere ‘neighbourhoods’, Palestinian women’s (and men’s) empowerment will continue to be blocked.51 It is as a result of such disagreements on basic political details that many Palestinians are skeptical of joint Palestinian-Israeli women’s conflict resolution initiatives. Abu Dayyeh Shamas, a Palestinian member of IWC, concedes: As feminists, we tend to adopt a global perspective – we have worked hard on joint meetings and gained much prominence addressing international bodies beyond our respective communities. However, this has limited the dialogue to a small group of people. We have really only reached out to friends within a relatively narrow circle.52 Most ordinary Palestinian women to whom I spoke were unaware of both the UNSCR 1325 and the IWC, and stressed that they preferred not to be involved and associated with such women’s peacebuilding initiatives. If women’s peace and conflict resolution initiatives are joint projects between Palestinians and Israelis, and focus on women’s empowerment without clearly establishing their political and economic empowerment as a precondition, they receive even more skepticism from the Palestinian public. Often they are condemned as an attempt to weaken Palestinian resistance, as an attack on Palestinian society’s integrity and culture, or as a way of re-packaging and legitimizing foreign intervention. Such joint initiatives, based on the mainstream liberal interpretations of the WPS agenda, thus hardly constitute “indigenous” Palestinian women’s conflict resolution initiatives, and it remains highly questionable whether and how they could contribute to women’s empowerment. At the same time, Palestinian women involved in implementing the WPS agenda do experience empowerment in some way. The form that this empowerment takes, however, needs to be scrutinized. Palestinian participants in international women’s peace conferences tend to be invited as representatives of the Palestinian people, but they are not locally elected. Rather, as Islah Jad argues convincingly, ‘international actors handpicked Palestinian women’s representatives to promote peace and mutual understanding’.53 Jad shows in her analysis how, after Oslo, a shift took place in Palestinian society from women leaders (in the First Intifada, for example) transferring power to the grassroots, to the post-Oslo globalized feminist (including ‘peacewomen’) NGO elite now practicing a form of power over ordinary women.54 The globalized peacewomen elites thus in fact are not representative of “indigenous” local trends in female political discourses and practices in Palestine, nor do they empower Palestinian women. They are few, lack domestic legitimacy, and – although they try to operationalize the WPS Agenda – they themselves often remain skeptical of its effectiveness and applicability in Palestine. If the empowerment that this globalized peacewomen elite experiences is to translate into broader collective empowerment, a shift needs to take place from the currently predominant narrow access-based liberal to a more comprehensive rights-based interpretation of the WPS Agenda.

Conclusion The UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security has rightly been celebrated as a landmark in women’s struggles to mainstream gender in conflict resolution and prevention. However, the Resolution faces serious challenges in its implementation. In this chapter, I have taken the example of one women’s peace initiative in Palestine, the International Women’s 260

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Commission, to illustrate the difficulties women activists face when trying to put the WPS Agenda into practice on the ground. The major obstacles that hinder 1325 from constituting a conducive framework for Palestinian women’s peace activisms lie in the dominant (Israeli and international) narrow liberal interpretations of 1325 that prioritize access to over transformation of the unequal and unjust status quo. Women are invited to participate in and contribute to “peace” negotiations which do not challenge, but rather preserve and even give legitimacy to the maintenance of Israeli colonization and control over Palestine. In such narrow access-based interpretations, gender issues are presented and prioritized as “connecting points” between the two national groups. But gender here is de-contextualized and de-politicized: the ways in which gender discrimination is related to and reinforced by political and economic oppression – an aspect which all of the Palestinian women I interviewed identified as most pertinent in their lives – is lacking. Palestinian women’s struggles for empowerment take place under continuous and prolonged Israeli settler colonialism and occupation, which strangles their entire society politically, economically, and socially, rendering it dependent on foreign aid and without the protection of a sovereign state. By detaching women’s empowerment from this broader context, using vague language, and making no mention of social or economic rights (such as the right to basic living conditions or right to housing), the Resolution holds little relevance for women’s actual lives, concerns, and needs. Most Palestinians today, both men and women, have lost faith in the liberal peace paradigm and would rather follow the paradigm of resistance, which at least (and in contrast to the liberal peace and negotiation agenda) acknowledges and tries to directly tackle the material realities of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism in Palestine. The liberal WPS Agenda must be understood as integral part of the failing post-Oslo “peace orthodoxy”.55 Rather than empowering women, the WPS Agenda functions as a disciplining and taming mechanism that establishes certain forms of political activism (women’s peacebuilding preferably in joint Palestinian-Israeli initiatives) as desirable and normative, while rendering all other forms of political engagement, such as different forms of resistance activism, as deviant. These findings are drawn from the specific context of occupation and settler colonialism in Palestine, but they are not unique. Women activists all over the Middle East are trying to make use of 1325 to strengthen their involvement in conflict resolution and highlight the specific gendered impact that war, conflict, and occupation has for women. But there is little point to simply add women to existing – largely failing – peace negotiations, without addressing the root causes of conflict and contextualizing these within the broader geopolitical situation in which conflicts such as those in Syria, Yemen, Libya, or Iraq come about. UNSCR 1325 without doubt is path-breaking in taking up gender and women’s issues in times of war, conflict, and peacebuilding. Yet, it remains firmly embedded in the mainstream liberal peace paradigm and its tradition of conflict resolution. It adds gender and women, but does not question, let alone try to change, the existing status quo of political power structures in the region. As such, neither the underlying assumptions concerning the relationships of gender constructions to established institutions, such as family, state, military, or the international system,56 nor the role of the Western powers, historically and today, in stirring, maintaining, meddling with – and then “resolving” – conflict are sufficiently addressed. If the status quo remains unchanged, and is merely remodeled by adding women (and sometimes gender) to existing projects, initiatives, and agendas, it should not come as a surprise that many local women (and men) remain wary of conflict resolution initiatives that target women especially, viewing them as attempts by ‘white men [and women] saving brown women from brown men’.57 While the liberal access-based and depoliticized reading of 1325 holds little promise to realize women’s rights and social justice in the Middle East (as elsewhere), the Resolution itself 261

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should, I would argue, not be dismissed entirely. If interpreted, contextualized, and put to work from a political perspective that recognizes and addresses the historical and (geo-)political root causes of conflict and the inter-linkages between social (/gender) and political (/national) rights, the Resolution can hold the potential to strengthen, rather than discipline, women’s struggles for a just future in the Middle East.

Notes 1 This article relies on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2010 in the framework of my PhD research on Palestinian women’s political activism in peacebuilding and resistance in the West Bank. Parts of it draw and are revised from my book: Sophie Richter-Devroe, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018); from a short online article: Sophie Richter-Devroe, Sophie. “UNSCR 1325 in Palestine: Strengthening or Disciplining Women’s Peace Activism?” E-International Relations (2012); and from a jointly authored article: Nicola Pratt and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Introduction to Special Issue on Critically Examining UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 4. All interviewees’ names are anonymized. I thank my research assistants Abdulrahman Abohajeb, Mohammad al-Aila and Mohanad Yaqoub for their valuable background research on UNSCR 1325 in the Middle East and their help with editing the chapter. 2 The Council had condemned violations of women’s rights under conflict and called for their protection from rape and other forms of gender-based violence before, but such calls were made in the framework of other resolutions. 3 These include the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, Country-specific Action Plans, UN System-wide Action Plans, a Peace Commission, and subsequent UN resolutions dealing with gender and conflict. 4 UNSC resolutions 1820 (passed in 2008), 1888 (in 2009), 1889 (in 2009), 1960 (in 2010), 2106 (in 2013), 2122 (in 2013) and 2242 (in 2015) followed UNSCR 1325, stressing the need to recognize sexual violence as weapon of war, increase women’s representation in decision-making positions to manage and solve disputes, and ensure the implementation of UNSCR 1315 and subsequent resolutions of the WPS Agenda. See the website of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom for updated information www.peacewomen.org, accessed 3 January 2019. 5 The review process resulted in the publication of the review report: United Nations. Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (New York, NY: UN, 2015). 6 See, among others, the writings by: Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters (Boulder, CO, London: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007); Carol Cohn, “Feminist Peacemaking,” The Women’s Review of Books 21, no. 5 (2004): 8–9; Carol Cohn, H. Kinsella and S. Gibbings, “Women, Peace and Security,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 1 (2004): 130–140; Felicity Hill, et al., “Nongovernmental Organizations’ Role in the Buildup and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 4 (2003): 1255–1269; UNSG Report of the Secretary-General on Women, Peace and Security (New York, NY: UN, 2002). www.un.org/womenwatch/ods/S-2002-1154-E.pdf, accessed 3 January 2019. 7 United Nations, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace. 8 See, for example: Nicola Pratt and Sophie Richter-Devroe, eds., “Special issue”; Vanessa Farr, “UNSCR 1325 and Women’s Peace Activism in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 4 (2011): 539–556; Nicola Pratt,“Reconceptualizing Gender, Reinscribing Racial – Sexual Boundaries in International Security: The Case of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security,” International Studies Quarterly 57 (2013): 772–783; Richter-Devroe, “UNSCR 1325 in Palestine,”; Nadje Al-Ali, “Reconstructing Gender: Iraqi Women Between Dictatorship, War, Sanctions and Occupation,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 4–5 (2005): 739–758; Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, eds. Women & War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (London: Zed Books, 2009); Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Najwa Adra, “Women and Peacebuilding in Yemen: Challenges and Opportunities,” Open Democracy, 2014. www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/najwa-adra/women-andpeacebuilding-in-yemen-challenges-and-opportunities, accessed 3 January 2019.

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UNSCR 1325 9 There is a wide literature that reifies women as “natural peacemakers”. For some examples in the context of Palestine, see, e.g.: Galia Golan and Zahira Kamal, “Women’s People-to-People Activities: Do We Do It Better?” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 12, no. 4 & 13, no. 1 (2005/2006); Galia Golan, “Women and Conflict Resolution,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 11, no. 2 (2004); Janet M. Powers, Blossoms on the Olive Tree: Israeli and Palestinian Women Working for Peace (Westport, CT, London: Praeger, 2006); Katz, Sheila, Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalism (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003). 10 See the Regional Strategy Document here: General Secretariat of the League of Arab States, Arab Women Organization, UN Women, Regional Strategy: Protection of Arab Women: Peace and Security (Egypt, 2012). www.arabwomenorg.org/Content/Publications/strpeceng.pdf, accessed 3 January 2019. 11 See http://www.peacewomen.org/member-states, accessed 3 January 2019. 12 See www.peacewomen.org/action-plan/national-action-plan-tunisia, accessed 3 January 2019. 13 Kristine Anderson, “Now Is the Time: Research on Gender Justice, Conflict and Fragility in the Middle East and North Africa,” 2017. OXFAM. www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attach ments/cs-yemen-gender-justice-conflict-fragility-mena-050617-en.pdf, accessed 3 January 2019. 14 Ibid. 15 See footnote 8 for literature on women’s activism and their voices on 1325. 16 See, e.g., the online discussion by women activists on the Middle East: “The implementation of UNSCR 1325 in the Arab States: taking stock and moving forward,” 2016, iknowpolitics. http://iknow politics.org/sites/default/files/consolidated_reply_ikp_e-discussion_unscr_1325_arab_region_en.pdf, accessed 3 January 2019. 17 Al-Ali, “Reconstructing Gender,” 743. 18 Nira Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias, Gender, Nation, State (London: Sage, 1989). 19 See Al-Ali and Pratt, What Kind of Liberation? and Al-Ali, “Reconstructing Gender,” for a discussion of 1325 in the context of the US invasion of Iraq. 20 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 21 Christine Chinkin and Hilary Charlesworth, “Building Women into Peace: The International Legal Framework,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 5 (2006): 943. 22 In 2012 a high-level institutional body, the Higher National Committee for the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325, was established by a Palestinian Cabinet decision. Chaired by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, it brought together women activists, professionals, and experts from different Palestinian ministries and non-governmental organizations to develop and implement Palestine’s National Action Plan. In 2015 a National Strategic Framework for Implementing UNSCR 1325 was adopted, which laid the groundwork for the drafting and issuing of the National Action Plan for Palestine 2017–2019. Both the National Action Plan and the National Strategic Framework can be accessed here: www.peacewomen.org/action-plan/national-action-plan-palestine, accessed 3 January 2019. 23 See also Farr, “UNSCR 1325,” 545. 24 UN “Palestinian and Israeli Women Create Global Panel to Work for Just Middle East Peace,” UN News Centre, New York, NY: UN, 2005. www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=15201&Cr= middle&Cr1=east&Kw1=women, accessed 3 January 2019. 25 Author interview, Jumana, 2008. 26 UNSC, “UNSCR Resolution 1325,” New York, NY: UN, 2000. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/ doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/720/18/PDF/N0072018.pdf?OpenElement, accessed 9 January 2019 27 The nomination of Hanan Ashrawi, Zahira Kamal, and Suad Amiry as female members of the Palestinian delegation should not be overestimated. Although they gained their place as a result of their persistent struggle for women’s rights during the First Intifada, their appointments could also be seen as a ‘strategy of using women to sell international politics’, Simona Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 19. 28 Author Interview, Palestinian IWC member, 2008. 29 The literature that takes the nature vs. nurture debate to women and gender studies, and specifically to women’s peace activism, is vast. See among others: Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (London: Women’s Press, 1995); Betty Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993); Elise Boulding, “The Gender Gap,” Journal of Peace Research 21, no. 1 (1984); Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992). 30 See footnote 9 for some examples of such literature.

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Sophie Richter-Devroe 3 1 Golan, “Women and Conflict Resolution,” 94. 32 The biological-essentialist argument has been much critiqued and disproven. See, among others: Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007); Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992). 33 Author interview, Palestinian IWC member, 2008. 34 Author interview, Palestinian IWC member, 2008. 35 For further analysis that adopts an intersectional approach, stressing the heterogeneity of political positions between (but also among) Palestinian and Israeli women peace activists, see among others, Cockburn, From Where We Stand. 36 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in C. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). 37 Cynthia Enloe, “Women and Children: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf War,” Village Voice 25, no. 9 (1990). 38 Naomi Chazan, “Strategies for the Inclusion of Women in Conflict Resolution,” in S. Aharoni and R. Deeb, eds. Where Are All the Women? U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325: Gender Perspectives of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Haifa: Isha L’Isha and Kayan, 2004), 55. 39 Author interview, Palestinian IWC member, 2008. 40 Author interview, Palestinian IWC member, 2008. 41 See also Chinkin and Charlesworth, “Building Women into Peace”. 42 See also Netta Amar, “U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325: Declaration or Reality?” in S. Aharoni and R. Deeb, eds. Where Are all the Women? U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325: Gender Perspectives of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Haifa: Isha L’Isha and Kayan, 2004). 43 Author interview, Haneen, 2008. 44 Chazan, “Strategies for the Inclusion”. 45 For a discussion on how the issue of (Muslim) women’s rights was instrumentalized in US foreign policy discourse, but also in transnational feminist and political agendas during the Iraq invasion, see: Lila Abu Lughod, “Saving Muslim Women or Standing with Them? On Images, Ethics, and War in Our Times,” Insaniyaat 1, no. 1 (2003); Al-Ali and Pratt, What Kind of Liberation?; Al-Ali, “Reconstructing Gender,”. 46 The annotated version of 1325 prepared by UNIFEM also does not provide a definition of the UN’s understanding of a gender perspective. See: UNIFEM (n.d.), Security Council Resolution 1325 Annotated and Explained (New York, NY: UNIFEM). http://peacewomen.org/assets/file/BasicWPSDocs/ annotated_1325.pdf, accessed 3 January 2019. 47 UNSC, UNSCR Resolution 1325. 48 Chazan, “Strategies for the Inclusion,” 55. 49 Author interview, Palestinian IWC member, 2009. 50 See N. Hazan, “The Implications of an Ongoing Conflict,” in S. Aharoni and R. Deeb, eds. Where Are all the Women? U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325: Gender Perspectives of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Haifa: Isha L’Isha and Kayan, 2004). 51 For an in-depth study on the difficult economic and political situation that Palestinian women face in East Jerusalem, see Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Nahla Abdo, Acknowledging the Displaced Palestinian Women’s Ordeals in East Jerusalem ( Jerusalem, NC: Women’s Studies Center, 2006). 52 Maha Abu Dayyeh Shamas, “Feminist Strategies to Get International Initiatives Back on Track: A Palestinian Perspective,” in S. Aharoni and R. Deeb, eds. Where Are all the Women? U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325: Gender Perspectives of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Haifa: Isha L’Isha and Kayan, 2004), 51. 53 Islah Jad, “Women at the Cross-Roads: The Palestinian Women’s Movement Between Nationalism, Secularism and Islamism,” PhD diss., SOAS (University of London, 2004), 193. 54 Ibid. 55 Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, On Palestine, ed. Frank Barat (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 7. 56 See Enloe’s seminal work, which traces the intersections among the personal, political, and international: Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989). 57 Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak, 297.

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20 THE DEMISE OF THE ARAB STRONGMAN? Authoritarianism and the future of the Middle East Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta Introduction Since the mid-1970s, democratization processes took place in most regions of the world, but they did not seem to affect political authoritarianism in countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As Lust observed in 2011, the “third wave”1 of democratization seemed to miss the Arab world.2 Searching for an explanation for the absence of democracy and the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the MENA region has long characterized scholarly debate because it constituted a considerable academic puzzle with significant policy implications. More than four decades on from the beginning of the third wave, and despite the upheaval that the Arab uprisings produced in 2010–11, only Tunisia can claim to have truly democratized.3 If anything, some observers argue, authoritarianism in the region has not only survived, but it has strengthened. In addition, in Yemen, Libya, and Syria – to an extent – chaos and civil war replaced the authoritarianism of old, not democracy. Thus, academics continue to frame the politics of the region through the paradigms of democratization and authoritarian resilience, often “looking back” for explanations of Arab authoritarian “exceptionalism”. Some argue that religion and Arab political culture are responsible, emphasizing the incompatibility between democracy, Islam, and the Arab notion of tribal chieftains having to provide for the wellbeing of the tribe/clan. In their opinion, countries where Muslim beliefs are entrenched in political life are unlikely to experience democratization. The idea of the backwardness of Arab societies and citizens, whose attitudes are not conducive to liberal democracy, is rooted in what Edward Said defined as Orientalism,4 which is the process of ascribing inherent natural traits to the peoples of the Orient and thereby explaining political and institutional outcomes. One of the strongest proponents of the exceptionalism thesis is Bernard Lewis, whose historical analysis of the Muslim world more broadly points out the absence of crucial moments that did not create the conditions for modernization and democracy.5 In fact, Lewis reinforces his argument by claiming that the religion – Islam – is instrumental for opposing the core values of democracy such as the rule of law, freedom of speech, and the right of dissent. Indeed, Islamic law constrains people to God’s will, and the fear of division democracy triggers provokes fitna (chaos and divisions within the community of believers). More importantly, this approach allows for an “easy” explanation for the figure of 265

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an authoritarian strongman because it clarifies that the impossibility of democracy necessitates a leader embodying the whole community while ordinary citizens refrain from overtly criticizing him and demanding democratic accountability insofar as such demands would create communal chaos. This Orientalist approach has been extensively criticized, and other scholars have developed different arguments to explain the lack of political pluralism. Eva Bellin argued for instance that Arab authoritarianism has nothing to do with culture. Rather, the main reason for authoritarian rule in the Arab world rests on the ruthless repression of the opposition on the part of regimes’ security services.6 A reliable security apparatus is what allows Arab autocrats to rule. The threat or actual employment of violence to shut down opposition and to disempower social activism to prevent challenges to the ruler, who sits atop the security pyramid he created, are not connected to culture but to specific political and economic dynamics that have linkages to how the state obtains revenues or to its geostrategic position. The figure of the strongman is central to this approach as well, with scholars often noting that Arab dictators are “military men” in civilian clothes, exuding charisma and capable of commanding fear because of their institutional role in the armed or security services. Other scholars still prefer to focus on structural explanations such as the level of economic and social development. Following Lipset,7 when indicators measuring the health of a country are low, democracy emerges with low legitimacy or does not emerge at all. With its rather problematic – and at times dramatic – socio-economic indicators, the Arab world seems to fit perfectly within this explanation, although it does not take into account the considerable variations among Arab countries. Other scholars still explain the absence of democracy focusing on the leaders’ capacity to manage the country’s revenues. As the majority of countries across the region are rich in natural resources, the revenues are distributed among citizens to buy off dissent and/or strengthen the security apparatus. This model  –  the “rentier state”8  –  allows regimes to fulfill the basic needs of their people and to create complete deference to their leaders, ultimately triggering detachment from political affairs. Despite their structural approach, the notion of leadership on the part of the strongman is also present in these explanations because regimes are often “personified” in a ruling monarch or executive president who seems in charge, for instance, of the distribution of rents or socio-economic policies. In summing up the debate on democracy and authoritarian rule in the Arab world, Hinnebusch stated that: The Middle East remains in “transition” to modernity; hence the obstacles to democratisation typical of the transition persist today. The combination of increased social mobilisation (notably literacy) and population growth with increased economic inequality amidst states suffering from unconsolidated political identity makes for a particularly democratic-unfriendly environment.9 The Arab uprisings, a surprise for many scholars, policy-makers, ruling elites, and Arab citizens alike, seemed to challenge both the notions of resilient Arab authoritarianism and the inevitable survival of the strongman. The collapse of Arab autocracies in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen together with powerful challenges against authoritarianism in Bahrain, Morocco, and Syria seemed to signal that the Arab world was about to experience its “1989” moment.10 In a very short time, theories about authoritarian survival were dismissed in favor of explanations of imminent and inevitable democratization, which would also see the end of the strongman as citizens realized that personal individual accountability was the true bedrock of a plural polity

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and democratic society. No need to rely any longer on a chieftain who would deliver material and moral goods; citizens would do that through democratic mechanisms and, notably, political parties that had been previously confined to irrelevance. However, six years after the revolts, democracy has taken hold only in Tunisia, whereas counterrevolution gradually spread to every country across the Arab world. The demise of the Arab autocrats  –  long embodying the essence of the political system in the region  –  and the dream of liberal democracy lasted for a very short span of time. The retrenchment to authoritarianism, state collapse, and security concerns led back to the “positive” role that a strongman can play in stabilizing divided and in some cases traumatized societies. This chapter explores some of the dynamics that have allowed Arab dictators to hold on to power and to remain central figures in Arab politics. It demonstrates that the issues that ensured the resilience of dictatorship have not disappeared following the Arab uprisings, and it reflects on how new and old authoritarian regimes have strengthened their survival strategies, adapting their behavior to a changing domestic and international political scene. In addition, it discusses the paradox between what ordinary Arab citizens think about their own political systems and the reality they have to contend with. Finally, it considers some challenges for the political systems in the region. It briefly presents the unique case of Tunisia, focusing on the ingredients that have, hitherto, determined its successful democratization process and undermined to an extent the received wisdom that only a strongman can rule Arab societies.

From decolonization to the Arab revolts: the Arab strongman journey The first generation of Arab leaders emerging from the independence struggle built their success on the project to define the boundaries of national identity. The decolonization process turned into an opportunity for nationalist movements to take full control of their domestic affairs. Indeed, the majority of the leaders of the newly independent states claimed the empowerment of neglected internal domains such as education, health, infrastructures, and local trade to strengthen national identity.11 The idea of the Arab strongman taking action against colonial powers inspired people across the region and increased its appeal, in particular following the demise of King Faruq in Egypt, replaced by Nasser. Nasserism coincided with the hope of dismissing foreign influence on the newly independent Arab states and provided the necessary legitimacy to strongmen across the region to build a new domestic order. Against this backdrop, some regional leaders encouraged the elites of neighboring countries to fight to achieve genuine independence. The Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stood at the forefront of the pan-Arabic commitment in the fight against colonialism, sparking hope across the region. His fierce intervention at the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference Bandung in 1955 urged other leaders to move away from the resilient pattern of subordination to colonial powers. Nasser for instance directly supported the Algerian Front de Liberation National during the war against France, as well as northern Yemen’s battle for independence. Once in power, many Arab Republican Presidents in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Nasser, Bourguiba, and Ben Bella, accumulated a degree of power that elevated them to semi-gods. In addition to historically favorable conditions, this phenomenon occurred through an osmotic process between the rulers and their citizens, with the former stressing their role of inevitable leaders, while the latter were won over by the leaders’ charisma. Leaders achieved such deification through centralization  –  and personalization  –  of political power and the creation of a selected entourage of trusted people. Additionally, strategic appearances in public and massive iconographic propaganda spread the sense of superiority as the “sole leader”, or “l’homme

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providentiel”. Opposition was marginalized and repressed and their discontent sacrificed on the altar of the nationalist project. In the words of the historian Roger Owen: From 1952 onward, Arab republics began to be ruled by strongmen of a certain type who used their growing powers to entrench themselves firmly in office. . . . Such men saw themselves as national unifiers, had little time for political pluralism, and saw their main task as lifting their (largely peasant) populations out of their alleged backwardness through expanded programs of education and welfare.12 Thus ultimately, this process of deification worked because material benefits appeased the citizens of the new states. When wholly in control of power, the Arab Republican Presidents seemed to hold the same divine legitimacy of the monarchs in Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain or the sheiks across the Persian Gulf. For their part, the kingdoms across the Middle East and North Africa always relied on strong and sacred legitimation. The active involvement of the monarchs in the independence struggle further strengthened their leadership. For instance, in the early 1950s Mohamed V was a prominent supporter of Moroccan independence from France. What occurred across the Arab world after decolonization was not particularly exceptional, as the appeal of the strongman characterized a number of post-colonial societies across the globe. There was in a way a degree of inevitability to the rise of the strongman because newly independent states needed to create institutions and a national legitimating narrative that would buttress the construction of a new country. This process of nation and state-building required the fiction of “unity”, and in turn unity had to be embodied by a father figure who would know best when it came to making socio-economic and political choices. It should also be noted that the strongman was then not associated necessarily with Arab culture or Islam, as the figure of the caudillo for instance long dominated Latin American politics, and duce-like figures were crucial in understanding political dynamics in Southern Europe. The success of the early post-colonial years in terms of social and economic progress, as well as a newly found assertiveness in foreign policy, should not obscure three significant dimensions of Arab politics at the time. First are the challenges that strongmen – presidents and monarchs alike – had to face despite their popularity, legitimacy, and material successes. The idea of national unity was a fiction after all, and dissent needed to be repressed through the security services, leading monarchs and presidents to establish similar patterns of resilience built around the notion of political opponents as traitors. For instance, the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan lived through a troubling succession following King Adbullah’s murder in 1952. When the young Hussein inherited the crown, he immediately faced a coup d’état. Pressured by external threats and rising domestic discontent, Hussein curbed press freedom and tightened security. The king pushed aside any tolerance for political opposition, holding the government in his hands. Morocco had less turbulent geostrategic variables to deal with, and legitimization of the kingdom progressed more smoothly, but in the 1970s the country also experienced two significant coup attempts. Hassan II foiled two assassination plots and increased repression to minimize any space for political pluralism and avoid further challenges. This leads us to the second dimension of Arab politics, which is the increasing authoritarianism of the strongmen over time. While it can be argued that soon after independence the new men in charge enjoyed considerable popular legitimacy, they had to increasingly rely on repressive measures to remain in power, sweeping aside any dissent and entrenching their power. Both republican Presidents and monarchs employed similar strategies to retain power, ranging from outright political violence to constitutional politics in order to increase their executive powers and from cultivating a cult of personality to relying on kinship ties in order to ensure 268

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loyalty, as the masses grew disillusioned with how countries were governed. The most striking example was probably Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but other Arab autocrats altered their constitutions to rule endlessly. Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia directly named himself president for life and showing such confidence in his unlimited power to state: “system . . . what system. . . . I am the system”. His successor Ben Ali extended the two-term constraint the constitution imposed to go on for a further three before being toppled. Sadat in Egypt moved in the same direction, amending article 77, which limited presidential terms to six years. In Algeria, after the long struggle for independence, military strongmen dominated the scene. All of them used amendments to the Constitution to remain in power, culminating with Bouteflika dismissing the Constitutional limit to ensure his hold on power with the assent of the powerful intelligence and security services. Such extension of powers highlights the third dimensions of Arab politics at the time, which is the short-term nature of the post-colonial success of the Arab state. Despite being achieved through authoritarian practices and controversial economic policies, the Arab state was able to deliver initially a degree of socio-economic progress to vast swathes of the population after decolonization. When “success” began to falter, the Arab strongmen shifted away from being drivers of development and progress to become the embodiment of survival for the sake of remaining in power and ensuring its continuity for family and kin. Differences of course remained between monarchies and republics regarding the dynamics of succession in power, but incumbent autocrats were replaced by new strongmen who had the opportunity to gain popular support by initially displaying openness, granting amnesties, and increased political freedom to emphasize that they were breaking from past practices. For instance, when Ben Ali replaced Bourguiba in 1987 ‘through a medical coup’, the new leader inaugurated a period of political openness, releasing prisoners and increasing pluralism. This honeymoon period lasted generally a very short of time. Two years later, this openness was retracted, and authoritarianism came back with a vengeance.13 In Egypt, the succession between Sadat and Mubarak presented similar dynamics. After Sadat’s assassination, Hosni Mubarak began his term by opening up the political system, but soon after this tentative opening his regime ‘progressively limited opportunities for the dispersal of power beyond the president’.14

The authoritarian formula: foreign support, security apparatus, and petrodollars The second generation of leaders who took power in the 1970s and 1980s lacked the strong legitimacy of their predecessors, as socio-economic progress came to a halt, and significant structural problems in Arab economies and societies began to appear. The failure of state-led economic development, rising inequalities, the success of Israel in regional politics, growing corruption, and the progressive rise of militant Islamism to counter imported “cultural norms” were the significant challenges that the second generation of strongmen had to contend with. The “new” strongmen buckled down and employed even more aggressive measures to remain in power, playing, where possible, the sectarian card to divide and rule and employing widespread violence when other strategies failed. For instance, Hafiz al-Assad’s power takeover in Syria – rooted in the difficulties the country experienced after failure of the union with Egypt – is paradigmatic of how the new strongmen consolidated their rule. A former minister of defense, Assad rapidly amassed consensus within the military ranks and to an extent with the Syrian people, at least initially. In 1970 Assad took power into his own hands as the pragmatic leader of the Alawite faction within the neo-Ba’ath party. He embodied the need to revitalize the party and voiced the discontent for the lack of national sovereignty and 269

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unity in Syria.15 While couched in the language of pan-Arabism and socialism, Assad’s arrival to power coincided with the rise of Alawite influence both within the Ba’ath party’s highest body  –  the Regional Command  –  and the top ranks of the military. While sectarianism did not feature in official discourses, Assad’s rule allowed the minority Alawites to dominate the security services and top bureaucratic posts as the president believed that the protection of his rule could be better guaranteed through the delivery of significant social and economic benefits to the members of his minority group. It is important to note that Assad built alliances with other sects, notably Christians and the Sunni middle class, especially the new kulaks, ‘the rural middle classes’,16 but the regime came to be perceived as catering only for a small minority of Syrians. Challenges to Assad rule rather quickly arose, and in the early 1980s large crowds of demonstrators voiced their discontent. The Muslim Brotherhood, the leading opposition organization, directly challenged the regime militarily and was violently repressed. The regime subsequently increased repression over the whole of society, creating a de facto police state as the only solution to preserve national unity. The Iraqi case presents some similarities to the Syrian case. Created in 1921 from the unification of three cities  –  Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, formerly hubs of the Ottoman Empire – Iraqi history was crisscrossed by sectarian rivalries. Saddam Hussein succeeded in centralizing power through the elimination of his rivals and employed pan-Arabism to “unify” the country, with himself attempting to become the symbol of national unity and identity. However, as Dawisha noted, Saddam’s survival depended on the masterly use of the multi-faced Iraqi confessional background: he overcame sectarian disputes, while still using confessional claims according to the circumstances.17 He empowered his own Tikriti kin ties to solidify his rule and relied on many Sunni tribes and employed tribalism to recover consensus among ordinary people when the upper classes were hit with international sanctions in the 1990s. In Libya, Qaddafi used the large amount of oil reserves to de-escalate the internal conflict and to build a united Libya under his charismatic authority, but also played tribes against one another to remain the undisputed political arbiter of the country’s politics. Gulf States sheikhs did not refrain from employing the sectarian card to strengthen their rule in addition to delivering material goods to citizens. In short, the Arab strongmen during the 1970s succeeded in fending off challengers amidst simmering crises. Even though some of them benefited from oil rents to shore up mismanaged and corrupt economies, strongmen became increasingly reliant on repressive practices and narrower social bases usually linked to sect, tribe, or kin to remain in power. They tried to be perceived as nation-builders and peacekeepers both at the national and international level, but the reality of governing divided and increasingly poorer societies meant that they eventually gave up on offering genuine development and focused on “looting” the country’s wealth.Thus, over time, strongmen were able to refine their strategies of survival, but the socio-economic and political failings of the societies they ruled over eventually caught up with them, and by the early 2000s their legitimacy to rule had all but evaporated, paving the way for the uprisings of 2011. The rise of new strongmen during the 1970s took place in a region that was going through massive socio-economic and political transformations. In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Arab debacle against Israel, pan-Arabism no longer held sway among citizens despite their leaders still clinging to this ideology. In reality, Arab strongmen had long set aside any dream of pan-Arab unity and were competing with each other for primacy in the region, focusing therefore on building stronger national institutions. This could not be done in isolation, and to secure their power, they became increasingly reliant on foreign support and patrons. Thus, the new Arab leaders learnt the lesson from the defeat of Nasserism and established a new pattern of “patron and client” vis-à-vis the superpowers –  the US and the Soviet Union . In this regard, Bassam Tibi explains that ‘the two superpowers functioned as patrons of the respective 270

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belligerent regional state actors, who were their client but not their proxies’.18 The two superpowers not only allowed strongmen to lead military coups at the domestic level when necessary, but they encouraged incumbent autocrats to trigger regional conflicts, even supplying their respective allies with weapons. In this way the US and the Soviets profited by strongmen across the Middle East region confronting each other during the Cold War. The Soviet Union had more limited room to maneuver because it could count on few regional allies, but the Soviets too had very few qualms in encouraging conflicts and rivalries while shoring up the power of their “own” strongmen. Thus, it can be clearly argued that international actors played a crucial role in the survival of the Arab strongman, which is often a forgotten dimension when discussing the prevalence of strongmen in the region. Again, rather than being the simple manifestation of local culture, the emergence and resilience of the figure of the Arab strongmen is the result of complex historical and political dynamics. It follows that the survival of strongmen through the Cold War and in its aftermath has both local and international dimensions. Some scholars19 argue convincingly that enduring authoritarianism in the Middle East relied on the constant support from international states to incumbent regimes. While international donors encouraged non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups to play their role of democratic agents, the direct pressure on regimes was low, and they were guaranteed significant economic and political support. The US and the European Union, in spite of a multitude of pro-democracy programs put in place, undertook contradictory policies when dealing with the complex issue of security dilemma. Thus, even a “civilian power” such as the European Union, although supporting the idea of a more democratic Middle East, saw a zero-sum trade-off between democratic promotion and security, ultimately ‘preferring the status quo and siding with strongmen believed to be the only political actor capable of ensuring stability’.20 Together with foreign help, the capacity of authoritarian leaders to shape national institutions to ensure the support of a winning coalition explains authoritarian survival. As mentioned earlier, the failure to deliver the socio-economic progress that had characterized the early postcolonial period left strongmen in a comparatively weaker position compared to their predecessors, and they therefore became even more reliant on the army and/or security forces. Many Arab armies played a prominent role in seizing power from the civilian regimes established after independence and continued to preserve Arab autocrats from domestic and external threats. Eva Bellin explains how the repressive apparatus employs different strategies according to the different national contexts, but it is always central. It remains the bulwark to protect the leaders.21 However, the loyalty of the higher ranks within the security apparatus presents complex dynamics. As mentioned, the relation between the Arab strongman and the security apparatus differs according to context. According to Willis, in three countries of the Maghreb  –  Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco – the strategy authoritarian leaders employed to secure their hold on power followed different trajectories.22 In Algeria the national army was incorporated within the state since independence in 1962. It belonged to the ruling elite itself to the extent that some scholars call it ‘an army within the state’.23 In Tunisia, Bourguiba excluded the army from political affairs, fearing that interference and aggressive actions could jeopardize his uncontested grip on power. Instead, he empowered the National Guard (under the control of the Interior Minister) to keep domestic security and enjoyed French protection to defend Tunisian borders from external threats. Ben Ali, his successor, employed a similar strategy and favored the Interior Ministry over the army. In Morocco, the FAR  –  Forces Armées Royales  –  undoubtedly played a supportive role in the consolidation of the kingdom after independence, as well as ensuring its survival. However, though they served as gatekeepers for internal security, the unconditional trust that some generals benefited from the kingdom eventually led them to plot against the 271

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monarchy. Following such attempts, the Moroccan monarchy began to rely increasingly on special security forces in the Interior Ministry. Whatever the differences, what clearly emerges is that wherever the Arab strongman rose to power, it created a powerful system of repression, composed of a number of domestic corps  –  the mukhabarat  –  working as intelligence and security services tasked with maintaining pervasive control over internal affairs. Domestic control increased with the rise of the perceived threats, leading leaders to privilege internal security above all else. As the deterioration of socio-economic conditions for the majority of the population continued during the 1990s and 2000s, regime stability and security became the only objectives strongmen – and their cliques – strived for. At this point, it is important to underline again that strongmen do not rule alone and uncontested. They are the apex of a complex pyramid that includes different actors and sectors of the population – depending on national context – and the stability of this winning coalition is crucial for survival. When threats to the regime emerge, what occurs within this winning coalition will determine the fate of the strongman. Declining living standards and economic problems more broadly have been at the heart of political disputes in the Arab world since the mid- and late 1980s, when profound crises hit the region. Strongmen responded to this crisis with a mix of outright repression and façade liberalization, but many also simply tried to solve the crisis by using oil and gas revenues. A crucial challenge to ensure the survival of the Arab autocrats always rested on keeping their people politically disengaged while mobilizing them at specific times for the purpose of demonstrating the regime’s popularity in order to strengthen legitimacy both at a national and international level. Therefore, a primary concern has been to fuel the mechanism through which people offer “trust” in the leader. Most countries across the Middle East and North Africa have a massive amount of natural resources, whose revenues help ruling elites “buy off ” dissent by providing material benefits to citizens. Hinnebusch explains that in the many cases where large amounts of rent accrue to the state and are distributed as jobs and welfare benefits, ordinary people become highly dependent on the state for their livelihoods and, not being required to pay taxes, are deterred from mobilisation to demand representation.24 Undoubtedly the successful management of the economy was a winning strategy across the region. Qaddafi, Mubarak, Assad, and Saddam were respected for their capacity to assume the role of nation-builders, but also for providing the ‘financial resources necessary to feed the elite patronage networks that, in turn, distribute money and opportunities to those lower down in society’.25 Despite the strength of the rentier state, the political system did not enjoy any widespread legitimacy by the end of the 2000s, and rentier resources had simply pushed the crisis further down without solving it. The Arab uprisings of 2011 were the long-term outcome of the inevitable explosion of the socio-economic, cultural, and political malaise of the majority of citizens, who were now demanding the dismantlement of the institutions that “revered” strongmen had built.26 The time of democratic governances seemed to have come.

The Arab revolts: new hopes, old issues When revolts exploded across the region in late 2010 and 2011, Qaddafi had been in power since 1969 in Libya, the Yemeni President Abdullah Saleh since 1978, the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak since 1981, Ben Ali since 1987, the Assad family since 1970, the Algerian military establishment since 1962, and the monarchies of Bahrain, Jordan, and Morocco since 272

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independence. There had been a degree of turnover at the helm of the state, but strongmen from the same family or close circle had always ruled. In addition, some of the leaders in power were preparing their sons to take over, as the cases of Egypt, Yemen, and Libya demonstrate.27 The uprisings shook the entire region, and for awhile it seemed that the time had come for the Arab world to get rid of dictatorship. It appeared that societies were finally sufficiently mature to embrace liberal democracy. There was for instance great domestic and international enthusiasm for the rounds of free and fair elections that took place in Egypt and Tunisia, while significant concessions seemed to be granted to the people of Morocco and Jordan. In Yemen, Saleh was removed from power, and the international community helped anti-Qaddafi rebels to oust him from power and ultimately kill him, opening the door for democratic elections. However, the illusion of the Arab world embracing liberal democracy did not last long. In Egypt, General Al-Sisi seized power through a counter-revolutionary coup and imposed a de facto military regime in 2013, albeit one buttressed by elections. Yemen and Libya became quickly mired in civil conflicts when their transition stalled. The concessions that the monarchs of Morocco and Jordan made turned out to be cosmetic only. The Syrian revolt turned into a brutal civic conflict. The Arab uprisings failed therefore to deliver democratic governance. Rather, they have given way to conflicts, instability, political violence, and seemingly entrenched sectarianism. This has led scholars to reconsider the role of the strongman as well as to revive the debate about the suitability of democracy in the region. A comparative analysis of the political and social outcomes of the Arab revolts opens the door to two main reflections.

The democracy/security dilemma The issue of domestic security has often served as a prominent argument for authoritarian leaders legitimizing their hold on power. Likewise, many Arab citizens have been convinced that repressive attitudes and human rights abuses can be tolerated in order to achieve internal stability and to prevent threats undermining security and plunging countries into conflict. In short, a “fierce state” is better than no state.28 As Owen points out, ‘a preoccupation with stability . . . is part and parcel of authoritarian structures, which abhor controversy, division, and anything that is beyond state control’.29 The failed transition to democracy in the 1990s in Algeria, for instance, is highly instructive in explaining why many believed that strong regimes and authoritarian leaders enhance security maintenance, while liberalization and efforts towards democratization open the doors to instability, power struggles, and unpredictability in the region. From 1962 to 1988, the FLN (National Liberation Front) ruled the country, establishing an oligarchy that successfully employed many of the traditional authoritarian survival strategies: marginalization of opposition, harassment of activists, delivery of material goods, and violent repression. In the late 1980s, the country faced mounting demands for political reform and liberalization due to a massive economic crisis that had hit the country. When the regime gave in and opened the door to democratic politics, a successful transition to democracy began. However, this attempt at democratization failed, plunging the country into a terrible civil war, which lasted until a new strongman, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, won the elections and set about pacifying the country. In exchange he was able to obtain a virtual life-long presidential mandate, and his regime began re-employing many of the strategies that had worked before 1988. The failed Algerian transition seemed to demonstrate that democratic politics was too divisive for Arab countries, particularly when political Islam was such a central and controversial actor in the transitional process. In the early 2000s, the Arab 273

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barometer provided the following evidence: while there was a genuine support for democracy and its values of freedom, concern of political Islam remained a divisive issue.30 This was and still is to a large extent the core of the problem. Democracy and liberalization open the gate to political Islam and the related dilemma of security. The fear of mounting political Islam was sufficiently widespread domestically and internationally that autocrats emphasized this narrative to convince secular opponents that their survival was instrumental to deter the Islamic threat. The Arab uprisings took place more than two decades after the failed Algerian transition, but in time they produced a similar security dilemma for both domestic and international audiences. At the heart of this dilemma is a seeming contradiction between what ordinary Arab citizens would like to have and what then reality delivers. A cross-national survey led in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq between 2013 and 2014 demonstrates this “new” paradox. The findings are illustrative of the “bind” that ordinary Arab citizens find themselves in. In Egypt 69.8% of people declared that the most suitable political regime for the country is a parliamentary system where nationalist, leftist, right-wing, and Islamist political parties compete in free and fair elections. Only 12% thought that a strong authority making decisions regardless of election results is the most suitable type of regime for their country. However, 72% of respondents were positive about the Al-Sisi government’s performance in ensuring national security, which remains the highest concern.31 In Algeria, only 3% of the population believe that authoritarianism is a suitable political system for the country, while 56.1% state that secular and Islamic parties competing for elections in a parliamentary system is the most appropriate type of government. Yet, only 10% feel that the Bouteflika government is performing badly in providing security.32 In Morocco, people evaluated negatively the performance of the government in creating jobs, reducing inequality, and controlling prices (all below 25%), but indicated overall high satisfaction with the government’s provision of security. Likewise, in Morocco, 88.2% of people think their country is most suitable to an inclusive model of the parliamentarian system.33 Even in Iraq, 87.2% of people believe that ‘with all its faults, democracy is the best form of Government’.34 Again a parliamentary system with parties of all ideological persuasions participating in free and fair elections is seen as the most suitable political regime according to 78.1% of Iraqi respondents, while only 1 person in 10 backs a strong authority making decisions regardless of election results. As elsewhere, in Iraq 60% of people think the main challenges for the country are its stability and security, with a striking majority of people, 80.2%, believing that the elected government is not providing adequate security, and a strongman approach may be a solution. The authoritarian regime in Jordan is assessed as providing adequate security by 88.3% of the people, while more than three out of four respondents (76.6%) think that a parliamentary system with parties of all ideological tendencies competing for office is the most suitable type of political regime.35 In some ways the data are reassuring and unsurprising. First, it is notable that Arab citizens believe in political systems that are broadly inclusive, where all ideological persuasions should be represented in the political game. It is also important to note that free and fair elections in the context of a parliamentary system enjoy significant support, suggesting that Arab citizens are unconvinced by the idea that a strongman can solve the socio-economic problems of the country, which are the priority governments should focus on. Second. it is necessary to highlight that the findings of the survey are not particularly “original” insofar as Arab support for democratic governance has always been strong. The findings, however, tell us also something new and interesting. While support for democracy and parliamentarism is indeed high and even very high in some countries, it should be noted that democracy is often equated with 274

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greater socio-economic rights and not as much with civil and political rights. For Arab citizens, democracy should bring about economic benefits, namely creating jobs, ending corruption, and favoring redistribution of wealth. This is why Arab citizens – with the partial exception of Iraq – rated the performance of their strong leaders and authoritarian governments very poorly both before and after the uprisings when it came to the ability to fight unemployment and economic inequality, provision of basic needs, and ending corruption. When democracy was then “put in place” in some of the countries after the Arab uprisings, the material benefits of its adoption did not materialize. Instead, there seemed to be only chaos and disruption, the rise of political violence and, crucially, worsening living standards. The increasing lack of security, both internal and external, as wars rage in their own or in neighboring countries with significant spillover effects, brings the issue back at the top of citizens’ concerns. It follows that the return of the strongman becomes acceptable and accepted because it is seen as the only alternative to further chaos. In conclusion, the survey reveals that Arab citizens believe the most important characteristic of a democracy is the distribution of wealth, raising doubts over whether there is a shared understanding about what real democracy is. The survey also highlights that people reject the idea of authoritarian regimes, but state that security is the main threat to their daily lives and think that it can only be dealt with through the strong hand of a ruler. The Tunisian case, the only country in the region with a functioning democracy, presents an interesting insight and confirms the analysis provided here precisely because the country no longer has a “traditional” strongman. When it comes to Tunisia, the survey shows that people enjoy liberal democracy and the political freedoms on paper, but security problems remain very high on the agenda, with 33.9% of people believing security conditions worsened between 2012 and 2013, and 38.1% that they have remained unchanged. Only 13.2% of people declare feeling safe and secure within the country, and only 29% of people received assistance from public security.36 Tunisians, like their Arab counterparts, are also profoundly disappointed with the state of the economy. All of this suggests that the security dilemma does not disappear once a country democratizes because democracy is accepted and acceptable if socio-economic rights come with it, otherwise it is seen as divisive and undermining security. Tunisians have not yet rolled back on democracy, but there is increasing evidence that they support the strong-handed tactics of the government if this delivers increased security.

The way ahead: what political future for the Middle East? The return of the Arab strongman in the region suggests that the issues related to the authoritarian survival are still unresolved. There is no doubt that the failure of the uprisings to deliver reasonably democratic structures to at least a small number of countries has had a depressing impact on local and international actors. The descent into violence of Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq, together with rising sectarianism and political violence both domestically and regionally, paint an even grimmer picture of the state of the Arab world. In this context, it is unsurprising that there are efforts in place to provide for the return of the strongman as the linchpin of renewed regional stability. The Syrian uprising was initially lauded in the West, while Bashar al-Assad was scorned and pressured into leaving office. Through a combination of domestic and international resources he has, however, managed to remain in control of his divided country, and the long civil war has strengthened paradoxically his hand with many of his former detractors. The West now overtly hopes for an outright military victory of the regime so as to return to the status quo ante. Ordinary Syrians at this stage do not probably care much about who is in power as long as the fighting stops. 275

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The fractionalization of Libya into violence has had a powerful effect on both local and international actors, who are now hoping for a new strongman to emerge and fulfill the role that Qaddafi held for so long. Thus, the emergence of a new strongman, General Haftar, seems to be increasingly backed by a heterogeneous coalition of national and international actors who have undermined the legitimacy of the country’s Government of National Accord. The attempt to transform post-Qaddafi Libya into a democracy has not only failed, but it created the conditions for the re-emergence of dormant historical contentions. Each territory is pursuing political and diplomatic strategies aimed at ensuring the survival of a multitude of tribal elites’ interests that are a vehicle through the setting up of militia and “local” strongmen. The chaos of democratic Egypt could seemingly be solved only through the intervention of the military with the blessing of Egypt’s international allies and partners. In short, the Arab revolts and the initial demise of dictators, or at least their contestation, created a political void that shortly thereafter revived some of the key elements conducive to the emergence of the Arab strongmen in the first place. Issues such as the internationalization of terrorism and massive migration flows across the region are, for instance, just some of the problems that democratic governance is believed to be unable to tackle and can be exploited by a “would-be saviour” strongman with the open or tacit backing of the international community. In fact, aside from the rather traditional Western hypocrisy regarding the promotion of democracy in the Arab world, an important element indicating how democratization has lost its momentum is a change of the return/arrival of other prominent actors in the region. New players such as China and Russia have economically and politically penetrated Arab countries to achieve their economic interests and to consolidate their geopolitical positions, regardless of human rights abuses and repression. Dealing with strongmen is not particularly problematic for them either. Likewise within the region, growing influential countries such as Turkey, Qatar, and the UAE are helping to subvert recent political transformations and openly supporting dictatorship and authoritarian attitudes across MENA. Finally, the path to democratization in 2010–11 coincided with the global economic downturn, leading to economic indicators dramatically decreasing. In some countries, people associated the worsening of economic conditions with the demise of the strong leader and the absence of his management skills of the national economy. The economic distress and the lack of wealth redistribution, core reasons for the outbreak of the Arab revolts, have paradoxically become part of the argument leading to the return of the Arab strongman and his regenerative ability. Tunisia is the only country in the MENA region that has achieved a successful transition to democracy. Even though some scholars37 and international observers38 outline the flaws of Tunisia’s fragile democratic system, the country is undoubtedly experiencing a period of liberal democracy. Such isolated success relied on the ability of domestic actors to overcome their differences in a context where Tunisia has the advantage of being a rather small, homogenous and hydrocarbons-less country. In 2013 Tunisia’s domestic turmoil indicated that regression to secular authoritarian regime could have occurred just like in Egypt. The two main political parties representing the historical cleavage between secularists and Islamists in Tunisia  –  Nidaa Tounes and Ennahdha  –  reached a compromise to enhance the democratization process, providing the necessary momentum to continue on the path of national reconciliation.39 Civil society, labor, and the trade unions had a crucial role in managing this process and preventing the return of authoritarianism as the solution to apparently unsolvable disputes. With the exception of Tunisia, the Arab world is now going through a phase of what can be called “reinvigorated authoritarianism”. The failed demise of the Arab strongmen, in this sense, might have re-established the conviction that democracy and internal dissent jeopardizes stability and security, ultimately strengthening the “robustness” of authoritarian regimes for years ahead. 276

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Notes 1 Huntington Samuel Paul, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Vol. 4 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 2 Lust Ellen, “Missing the Third Wave: Islam, Institutions, and Democracy in the Middle East,” Studies in Comparative International Development 46, no. 2 (2011): 163–190. 3 Stepan Alfred, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 2 (2012): 89–103. 4 , Said Edward, Orientalism 1978 (New York, NY: Vintage, 1979). 5 Lewis Bernard, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2003). 6 Bellin Eva, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics (2004): 139–157. See also: Bellin Eva, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics 44, no. 2 (2012): 127–149. 7 Lipset Seymour Martin, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105. See also: Lipset Seymour Martin, “The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited: 1993 Presidential Address,” American Sociological Review (1994): 1–22. 8 Beblawi Hazem, “The Rentier State in the Arab world,” Arab Studies Quarterly (1987): 383–398. 9 Hinnebusch Raymond, “Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East: An Overview and Critique,” Democratization 13, no. 3 (2006): 378. 10 Kaldor Mary, “Civil Society in 1989 and 2011,” Open Democracy 7 (2011). 11 Owen Roger, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life: With a New Afterword (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 12 Ibid., 26. 13 Hibou Béatrice, La force de l’obéissance: économie politique de la répression en Tunisie (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). 14 Brownlee Jason, “The Decline of Pluralism in Mubarak’s Egypt,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 4 (2002): 6. 15 David Warren, Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 16 Yahya M. Sadowski.“Ba’thist Ethics and the Spirit of State Capitalism: Patronage and Party in Contemporary Syria,” in Peter J. Chelkowski and Robert J. Prange, eds. Ideology and Power in the Middle East: Studies in Honor of George Lenczowki (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 168. 17 Dawisha Adeed, “Identity’ and Political Survival in Saddam’s Iraq,” The Middle East Journal (1999): 553–567. 18 Tibi Bassam, Conflict and War in the Middle East: From Interstate War to New Security (Berlin: Springer, 1998), 121. 19 Brownlee Jason, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); See also, Soest Christian, “Democracy Prevention: The International Collaboration of Authoritarian Regimes,” European Journal of Political Research 54, no. 4 (2015): 623–638. 2 0 Carapico Sheila, Political Aid and Arab Activism: Democracy Promotion, Justice, and Representation, Vol. 44 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67. 21 Bellin, “Robustness, Middle East,”. 2 2 Willis Michael, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 3 H · arbī Mohammed, Le FLN mirage et réalité: Des origines à la prise du pouvoir, 1945–1962 (Paris: Edition Jeune Afrique, 1980), 372. 24 Raymond, “Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory,” 379. 2 5 Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab President, 120. 2 6 Achcar Gilbert, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 27 Sadiki Larbi, “Whither Arab Republicanism? The Rise of Family Rule and the End of Democratization in Egypt, Libya and Yemen,” Mediterranean Politics 15, no. 1 (2010): 99–107. 28 Ayubi Nazih, Overstating the Arab States (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). 29 Owen. The Rise and Fall of Arab President, 175. 30 Tessler Mark, “Religion, Religiosity and the Place of Islam in Political Life: Insights from the Arab Barometer Surveys,” Middle East Law and Governance 2, no. 2 (2010): 221–252.

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Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta 31 C. Luguzan, P. Abbott, A. Teti, et al., The Arab Transition Report on Political, Economic and Social Attitudes, 2014: Egypt (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2016). 32 P. Abbott, A. Teti, V. Lomazzi, et al., The Arab Transition Report on Political, Economic and Social Attitudes, 2013: Algeria (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2016). 33 R. Sapsford, P. Abbott, A. Teti, A., et al., The Arab Transition Report on Political, Economic and Social Attitudes, 2014: Morocco (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2016). 34 P. Abbott, C. Luguzan, A. Teti, et al., The Arab Transition Report on Political, Economic and Social Attitudes, 2014: Iraq (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2016), 57. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Marzouki Nadia, “Tunisia’s Rotten Compromise,” Middle East Research and Information Project (2015). 38 See,for instance: International Crisis Group Blocked Transition: Corruption and Regionalism in Tunisia,Report N 177/Middle East & North Africa, 10 May 2017. www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/ north-africa/tunisia/177-blocked-transition-corruption-and-regionalism-tunisia. 39 Kasper Ly Netterstrøm, “The Islamists’ Compromise in Tunisia,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 4 (2015): 110–124.

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21 ARMED NON-STATE ACTORS AND STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING Wietse van den Berge

The Arab uprisings (2010–11) ignited a process that changed Middle Eastern regional politics. New non-state entities emerged, and two fierce rivals benefitted most from that situation: the Islamic State (IS)1 and the Kurds.2 In Iraq, after capturing Mosul in June 2014 from the Shiadominated Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), IS’ main thrust initially seemed to advance towards the country’s capital Baghdad. On 1 August 2014, IS unexpectedly attacked the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI) as well.3 This attack might have sought to expose the weakness of the KRI’s Peshmerga militia, which up until then was regarded as the only ground forces potentially capable of stopping IS forces.4 Lacking heavy weaponry and air support, the Peshmerga initially were not strong enough to withhold the IS fighters. Still, IS’ attack on the KRI not only seemed to unify the Kurds there, but triggered an American-led international coalition to provide air support for the Peshmerga.5 Eventually, with international support, the ISF and the Peshmerga were able to push back IS.

Armed non-state actors’ strategic decision-making Starting from the observation that non-state actors also have their own foreign policies,6 this study tries to explain the strategic decisions taken by both sides during the conflict between IS and the KRI. The Rational Actor Paradigm is a traditional analytical framework to analyze strategic decision-making processes among states, usually applied in the field of Foreign Policy Analysis.7 This study focuses on three key events during the conflict: the withdrawal of ISF from northern Iraq in June 2014, the advance of IS towards Sinjar and Erbil in August 2014, and the KRI support to relieve the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobanî (Ayn al-Arab)8 in November 2014. Battlefield successes of IS and the Kurds in Iraq and Syria9 might cause a new dynamic in which regional state actors feel threatened by these non-state actors or the effects these might have. Turkey, for example, fears secessionist tendencies among its own Kurdish population.10 This study argues that such non-state actors generally behave as any (state) actor within international politics. Although sometimes argued differently,11 both IS and the KRI act independently, pursuing their own interests.12 In doing so, they sometimes act in alliances – like the KRI would – but do not operate as proxies.13 Both actors make their own cost-benefit calculations regarding strategic decisions. A better understanding of decision-making processes within IS and the KRI might 279

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allow observers to anticipate future developments concerning these two actors in particular, and similar Middle Eastern armed non-state actors in general. External validity remains limited to the two cases under study though. With respect to the conflict between IS and the KRI, academic attention has thus far focused primarily on the struggle against IS.14 This study aims to analyze the conflict between IS and the KRI by applying the Rational Actor Paradigm as described by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow. It concerns a classical rational-choice model for strategic decision-making, which considers cost-benefit calculations among the actors involved, based upon the threats and opportunities they perceive.15 Applying the model to IS and the KRI should provide insight into the question whether, or to what extent, these non-state actors react ad hoc and spontaneously, or whether they apply long-term, strategic goals to their decisions, and whether these have strategic depth. Some authors wonder whether it is necessary to develop ‘a new paradigm to classify and understand the changing geopolitical reality of the Middle East’.16 It is also claimed that ‘ISIS [sic] has established itself as a new paradigm’ by its brutal behavior.17 Allison and Zelikow claim that the Rational Actor Paradigm is applicable in other contexts than state-level decisionmaking.18 This implies that the model should hold when analyzing the actors in the conflict between IS and the KRI, and no new paradigms need to be developed.

Rational Actor Paradigm The Rational Actor Paradigm is a straightforward model that regards actors as unitary entities.19 Therefore, it will treat the KRI, or its executive power the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and for that matter Iraq’s Kurds as one political actor, disregarding the internal fragmentation. Likewise, IS will be regarded as a unitary entity.20 The study will consider the actors’ perceived strategic threats and opportunities, goals, different options, cost-benefit calculations, and decision-making.21 The data for the analysis will be the actors’ ‘intentions, statements, and actions . . . directed toward the external world and the response of other actors to these intentions, statements and actions’.22 Problematic with most non-state actors compared to most state actors is that data is not always available. States usually have some form of accountability that non-state actors lack.23 For the KRI, not being a state, but being part of a state structure, much information is available. For IS there is less open-source data available, as the organization is very hostile towards outsiders given its Jihadi-Salafist ideology.24 Despite that, some sources actually are available, and these can help to construct IS’ worldview, from which its strategic decisions can be deduced. 25 The three key events will be described using publicly available reports, which on an almost day-today basis describe political and military events in Iraq and Syria. Before starting the analysis, the context will be sketched through the provision of a brief history of both the KRI and IS. Next is a section on the Rational Actor Paradigm. From there, the key events during the conflict between IS and the KRI are analyzed using this paradigm, which lead to the conclusion.

The KRI’s and IS’ backgrounds The Kurdistan Region in Iraq: de facto state Having a history of indirect rule by different rulers,26 the idea of an independent state for Kurds came into being after World War I (1914–18).27 However, it was not until after 280

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World War II (1939–45) and the formation of new nation-states that ethnicity among Kurds became important in reaction to the territorial possessive attitudes of these states.28 Currently, Kurdish territories are scattered over Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds have suffered a history of repression and instigated rebellion against Iraqi regimes. Kurdish rebels benefitted from the mountainous area to seek shelter and as a base for staging attacks. This is reflected in a local saying: ‘Level the mountains, and in a day the Kurds would be no more’.29 A series of coups d’état within Iraq finally brought the pan-Arab nationalist Ba’ath party to power in 1968. Ba’ath longed for a strong Arab nation-state and regarded Kurdish nationalism as a threat to this ideal. Iranian support for rebellious Iraqi Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) seemed to confirm this perceived threat of Kurdish nationalism, as Iran tried to weaken its enemy from within by igniting a Kurdish revolt. Some Kurds until 1984 negotiated with the Iraqi regime.30 Iraq fiercely repressed the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, even using chemical weapons.31 Following the 1991 Gulf War, United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 established a safe haven for Kurdish refugees. Iraqi authorities withdrew civil administration in the area, leaving ‘Iraqi Kurdistan [KRI] to function de facto independently’32 as a ‘de facto state’.33 Tensions among the two dominant Kurdish political parties led to civil war from 1992 to 1995. During the 2003 Gulf War, the KRI proved an ally for the United States and Great Britain. As one of the allies that defeated Saddam Hussein, ‘[t]he Kurds entered post-Saddam national politics on an equal footing with Iraq’s Arabs’.34 The new Iraqi Constitution contained the KRI in a federal setting: allowing the KRI to maintain their own security forces and embassies abroad. The KRI’s aim in its publicly available 2020 vision document is that ‘[i]n the Kurdistan Region – Iraq [sic], all people will enjoy the benefits of freedom, health, welfare, and economic security and opportunity’.35 In the same document a reference to the post-World War I plan for a Kurdish state is mentioned.36 The KRI’s official narrative is not to strive for independence; however, an implicit undertone seems to claim otherwise. That undertone became semi-official in July 2014 when the KRI initiated preparations for a referendum on independence. This move was mainly a reaction to the failing policy of the Iraqi central government to deal with IS effectively and a conflict over oil revenues between the KRI and Iraqi central government.37 Within Syria, the Kurds mainly lived along the Turkish border. Under the Syrian Ba’ath party, Syrian Kurds faced repression and were rendered ineffective as a political power.38 Eventually, the policy did not work, and Syria’s Kurds proved to be a political force capable of organizing itself.39 At the start of the Syrian civil war, three separate cantons along the Turkish border formed the Syrian Kurdish territories. When Syrian regime forces withdrew from these territories, Syrian Kurds took control and became one of the successful actors within the Syrian civil war (2011–present).40 Relations between the KRI and Syrian Kurds are tense though, perhaps due to the role of Turkey: Turkey fears Syrian Kurdish secession might ignite similar movements in Turkey,41 while Turkey is KRI’s most important economic partner.42

The Islamic State: lasting and expanding The history of the Islamic State starts around 1999,43 although its roots can be traced back earlier.44 IS’ strategic goals are reflected by its motto of remaining and expanding45 by applying a Jihadi-Salafist interpretation of Islam.46 It targets in particular Shia Muslims and the government regimes in Iraq and Syria,47 which according to IS should be replaced by a Caliphate based upon Islamic law. It is suggested that IS’ aggressive tactics are intended to limit the threats it perceived and exploit the opportunities it recognizes,48 suggesting IS behaves as a calculating actor. 281

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IS has adopted a strict Jihadi-Salafist interpretation of Islam, arguing that they can only succeed by applying the concept of jihad (struggle).49 Jihadi-Salafists claim that jihad is only possible by making use of the sword, or talwar, indicating a violent interpretation of jihad.50 JihadiSalafism operates under the assumption that punishment against every non-believer or apostate is allowed.51 Whether non-practicing Muslims or non-Salafist Muslims should be regarded as non-believers or apostates remains contested among Jihadi-Salafists.52 Jihadi-Salafists do agree upon the conviction that non-practicing Muslims weaken the Muslim community, whom the Jihadi-Salafists therefore have to dispose of. Thus, they call upon their followers to fight all (Muslim) infidels. 53

The KRI and IS advance towards each other During 2014, IS and the KRI gained in importance at the cost of the Iraqi central regime, up to the moment that these two non-state actors were engaged in armed conflict against each other.

Rational Actor Paradigm: unified cost-calculating entities The rise of IS and the KRI illustrates that within the Middle East armed non-state actors become more important compared to state actors.54 Non-state entities such as IS and the KRI pursue foreign policies, too.55 Adopting Carl von Clausewitz’ dictum that war is politics by other means,56 armed non-state actors even wage war at the extreme end of the spectrum of their strategic options. Usually traced back as far as Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), the Rational Actor Paradigm assumes that actors within world politics are unitary actors – ­typically nation-states – behaving according to plausible cost-benefit calculations within an anarchic environment.57 Such rational decision-making happens along four consecutive steps: (1) specify the goals, (2) decide which alternatives could achieve these goals, (3) evaluate these alternatives, and (4) choose the most efficient alternative.58 Because the calculations are based upon perceived threats and opportunities, it is claimed that the Rational Actor Paradigm is a valid prism to view security issues.59 Therefore, the model is commonly used to analyze nationstates, whose main concern traditionally is ‘military and territorial security’.60 Only one reality exists within the model; the Rational Actor Paradigm does not allow for different interpretations of reality. Also, the decision-maker is assumed to be apolitical. This means the decision-maker – personifying the actor – chooses whatever is the best option for the actor and does not take into account any political considerations.61 It creates the circumstances for rational behavior: ‘consistent, value-maximizing choice within specified constraints’.62

Criticizing the Rational Actor Paradigm: too simple Some scholars argue that the Rational Actor Paradigm held pretty well while being applied to different cases, as it is ‘comparatively well-developed, and whose advantages in clarity, parsimony, and operationalization are obvious’.63 Critics argue the model is too simple by leaving out uncertainty and ‘strategic interactions’,64 paradoxically as if strategic decision-making happens within a vacuum. Also, the model personifies – ‘anthropomorphized’65 – to government level the basic assumption that people behave rationally, which itself is under discussion.66 The Rational Actor Paradigm uses a totem pro parte approach in which decisions by key individuals are presented as decisions by the whole entity.67

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Operationalization: costs versus benefits Sometimes argued differently,68 operationalization of the analytical model strictly speaking is not possible as it concerns a paradigm, a framework describing a general way of thinking and not a theory with independent and dependent variables. Allison and Zelikow state general questions belonging to the Rational Actor Paradigm that should be asked as guidance: 1 2 3 4 5

‘What are the objective (or perceived) circumstances that the [actor] conceives as threats and opportunities . . .? What are the [actor’s] goals . . .? What are the objective (or perceived) options for addressing this issue? What are the objective (or perceived) strategic costs and benefits for each option? What is the [actor’s] best choice given these conditions . . .?’69

Rather paradoxically given the fact that it concerns a rational actor model, Allison and Zelikow argue that the questions ‘yield two intuitively evident but powerful propositions’.70 These propositions concern either an increase or a decrease in the perceived costs of the alternative. Whereas an increase in perceived costs will probably lead to not choosing that option, a decrease makes it likely that the specific option is preferred.71 What to do in case of a third possible outcome – neither an increase nor a decrease – Allison and Zelikow do not mention. In their literature review on strategy and rational choice, Allison and Zelikow conclude that actors fight when they perceive war is beneficial.72 That calculation is based upon ‘(1) information (on the basis of which he [the adversary] acts), and (2) interdependence (my best choice depending on his choice)’.73 More guidance on what an actor’s threats and opportunities constitute is offered by individual studies in which different factors such as geography, economy, military, motivation, and allies are included. 74 Hindsight or cultural bias, however, might lead to wrong assumptions. Being aware of such biases might help the analyst to position him- or herself in the role of the actor as accurately as possible.75 As such, both actors – IS and the KRI – will be analyzed, and for each three options will be addressed that reflect the possible choices for states when confronted with armed conflict: ‘do nothing, attack with their own forces, entirely delegate conflict to a rebel organization’.76 A fourth option concerns a combination of either.77 As Allison and Zelikow claim that the Rational Actor Paradigm can be applicable in other contexts than state-level strategic decision-making,78 these options can be applied to non-state actors as well. Delegation to another organization would then translate to pulling back and leaving the issue to an allied organization. In the remainder of this study, the three main options will be referred to as hold, attack, and delegate, respectively. IS’ option of holding would mean maintaining its positions thus far. The option of attack would mean advancing into the territories previously under control of other actors, be it ISF or the KRI. The option of delegation means IS would leave the conflict to be fought by an ally or proxy, probably a Jihadi-Salafist group that pledged allegiance to IS or local tribes.79 For the KRI, holding and attacking would have similar meanings. Delegation for the KRI would mean the conflict would be fought by another actor, probably ISF, a regional ally, or local tribes. Historically, ‘the Peshmerga [sic] have always been a defensive force, retreating back into the mountains in very small groups, absorbing the punishment inflicted upon them by the Iraqi Army, and then undermining their opponents over a long period of low-intensity warfare’.80It illustrates that different options can be combined: after withdrawing first, holding, followed by attacking.

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Before conducting the actual analysis, the key events will shortly be introduced, starting from the moment that IS – then still Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – advanced in northern Iraq in the first half of 2014, pushing back the ISF, leaving behind a power vacuum.

Key event 1: IS and the KRI take control of territory While still operating under the name ISIS, the IS was able to conquer a vast territory in northern Iraq and advance towards Mosul, which it reached on 6 June 2014. According to Gareth Stansfield, ISIS was able to do so due to a combination of extreme unhappiness in Sunni Arab lands and outright hostility in the diplomatic relations between Erbil and Baghdad [that] gave ISIS – which had been building up its strength over the previous year – an opportunity in the form of a security vacuum in Sunni Arab regions and a political vacuum caused by governmental stagnation across Iraq as a whole.81 In response, the KRI took control over Kirkuk and its direct surroundings and over the areas west, north, and east of Mosul.82 According to the KRI, it was to protect people living in these areas from IS.83 The areas under control of ISIS – IS by then – and the KRI moved closer to one another. A shared border – or frontline – was established between the two of approximately 1,050 kilometers long.84 Occasionally, clashes were reported along the frontier,85 which would serve as a prequel for the events of August 2014.

Key event 2: IS attacks the KRI, and the KRI eventually pushes back IS with international support IS attacked the KRI early August 2014 in two directions from Mosul: Westwards towards Sinjar and eastwards towards Erbil. Although the attack occurred unexpectedly,86 at the time it was already noted that ‘ISIS [sic] has been setting an offensive against the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Sinjar and Mosul Dam areas for nine weeks, since June 11, 2014’.87 On 4 August 2014, reports appeared that Syrian Kurdish militias supported Iraqi Kurds in the area of Sinjar.88 Kurdish forces conducted a counter-offensive against IS in the vicinity of Mosul on 5 August 2014. This counter-attack is reported to have occurred in close coordination with the Iraqi central government.89 The next day, media suggested that KRI’s capital of Erbil might be in danger.90 On 7 August 2014, KRI’s forces focus on defending Erbil, securing the Mosul Dam, and protecting the Sinjar pocket. Here many people belonging to the Yezidi minority were trapped, leading to a humanitarian catastrophe.91 As IS seems to take control over contested areas, such as the Mosul Dam, fears of an imminent attack on Erbil grow. Apart from the Syrian Kurdish militias, the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK; Kurdistan Workers’ Party) joins the fight against IS in Sinjar.92 Also, American fighter planes conducted the first bombing sorties against IS.93 Clashes continued over several days. Air support for the KRI by ISF fighter planes illustrated a response against IS coordinated between the KRI and Iraqi central government.94 With the help of the airstrikes, the KRI was able to counter IS attacks and push back IS gradually.95 The KRI came under existential threat by the IS attack. The Peshmerga were forced back initially, but they were able to hold and gradually advanced until the areas regarded to be Kurdish were seized again. In November 2014, the KRI was no longer under direct existential threat of IS. However, a new frontline emerged between IS and the KRI in northern Syria.

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Key event 3: IS expelled from Kobanî, but tension still exists between the KRI and Syrian Kurds Between 26 September and 2 October 2014, IS headed towards Kobanî, a Kurdish town in Syria along the Turkish border. Despite an IS siege of Syrian Kurdish militias in the city, Turkey initially rejected any reinforcements through Turkey. An American-led coalition conducted airstrikes in support of the Syrian Kurdish militias.96 The week after that, IS further advanced to an extent that IS controlled approximately 40% of Kobanî.97 On 2 November 2014, 150 KRI Peshmerga reached Kobanî and joined Syrian Kurdish militias in the fight against IS.98 IS attacked Kobanî, and the KRI chose to join the fight. With the help of the international coalition’s air support and KRI’s Peshmerga, IS was eventually forced back. The following analysis section will focus upon the strategic decisions taken by IS and KRI regarding these three key events, using the Rational Actor Paradigm as the analytical framework. Therefore, for each actor the perceived threats and opportunities, strategic goals, options, and cost-benefit calculations for each of the options are considered.

Analysis Threats to IS Kurdish aspirations include an autonomous Kurdistan. According to some maps that have appeared on the Internet, based upon the post-World War I proposals for an independent Kurdish state, the area of so-called ‘greater Kurdistan’ would reach into the city of Mosul,99 regarded as key Sunni territory by IS. The KRI might fill the vacuum left behind by ISF, perhaps even moving further into what by IS are considered Sunni areas. As these areas contain large oil reserves, the capture of these areas by any rival of IS would make these rivals stronger and thus IS, relatively, weaker.100 IS’ worries about the KRI’s military capabilities might have been confirmed by Peshmerga advances in June 2014. The KRI controlled more than half of the Nineveh province surrounding Mosul and about 70% of the Kirkuk area.101 Perhaps IS expected the Kurds to advance even further into IS-held territories,102 as KRI had contacts with local Arab tribal leaders.103 With regard to Kobanî, Syrian Kurds proved to be one of the most powerful actors in the Syrian civil war (2011–present). As a fierce opponent of IS, Syrian Kurds threatened IS’ position in northern Syria.

Opportunities for IS The power vacuum after ISF left created an opportunity for IS to take control of Sunni Arab territories without putting up much of a fight. IS’ fierce reputation added to the idea that IS could not be stopped, creating the momentum that IS could take over territories from ISF.104 Not only do these areas contain large oil reserves, which could form the economic backbone for IS’ Caliphate, but capturing them would also contribute to achieving the establishment of a Caliphate. Controlling a potentially viable territory would be a huge boost for IS’ morale and potentially attract many supporters. The Kurdish mountains could have been a potential IS stronghold, as they have historically been for the Kurds themselves.105 However, the Kurds’ reputation with respect to the mountains

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and the background of many IS members in Iraq’s military fighting Kurds in the mountains, might have made IS reluctant of entering the Kurdish mountains.106 Another opportunity is that IS could use its battlefield momentum after capturing Mosul.107 This seems to be in line with the analysis that IS used strategic surprise. In August 2014, IS was expected to advance on Baghdad. Instead, IS attacked the KRI and took the Kurds relatively unprepared.108 The KRI was expected to be more concerned about issues with the Iraqi authorities on oil revenues.109 By capturing the middle of three Syrian Kurdish cantons – Kobanî – IS might take out the Syrian Kurds as a rival: eliminating the possibility of one unified Kurdish area within Syria, thus weakening Syria’s Kurds. As Kobanî is situated along the Syria-Turkey border, controlling the town means controlling a border passage between Syria and Turkey through which men and equipment might be transferred. IS might look to Turkey as a potential ally, in particular sharing the Kurds as perceived enemies.110 Another opportunity for IS is northern Syria’s flat landscape, which makes attacking a city easier compared to a city within a mountainous area. Apart from the strategic benefits, capturing Kobanî might pose a considerable symbolic opportunity as well. The Arab name for the town is Ayn al-Arab, or “Spring of the Arabs”. As such, the town might be considered to be the focal point of the Arab world in Syria.111

Strategic costs and benefits for IS’s hold option The costs of the hold option for IS during each of the key events would include delay in conquering non-believers and expanding the Caliphate;112 IS would remain, but – at least temporarily – would not expand. Holding would provide a (potential) rival – KRI – the opportunity to recuperate, thus becoming even more of a threat. Moreover, IS would lose its battlefield momentum and in the case of northern Iraq would lose the opportunity to seize the oil- and gas-rich areas surrounding Kirkuk. By holding, IS could recuperate and would not risk overstretch.113 Also, it could create strong defensive positions.114 It might use the lull in fighting to establish itself in the region as a potentially legitimate actor,115 perhaps even looking for allies.116

Strategic costs and benefits for IS’ attack option The attack option in each of the key events would mean IS would have to control additional territories, which need to be governed and might house potential rivals, thus risking overstretch.117 With its limited resources, it might have to fight too many battles on different fronts.118 Also, rivals – who then become threatened by IS – might defend their territories, turning an easy conquest into a potential quagmire by attrition warfare.119 Due to the vacuum after ISF left, IS could advance with relatively few resources into an area with strategic assets such as oil and natural gas. The areas could serve as a buffer between key Sunni Arab territory and that of potential rivals, while IS could collect revenue there, too.120 Attacking would fit in IS’ momentum, as morale is assumed to be high due to previous conquests, like Mosul, in line with IS’ goal of ‘lasting and expanding’. Apart from the objections, IS could benefit from overwhelming a potential rival in a surprise attack, using the momentum that IS’ forces gained in early 2014 and the focus on the Iraqi central government as a main rival by KRI.121 IS could gain resources – in particular oil, but mountainous layouts, too – by controlling Kurdish areas.122 In line with the statements in its Dabiq magazine, IS might have hoped to fulfill a Jihadi-Salafist goal by fighting – and conquering – infidels and gaining support.123 IS might have hoped for more support among the Kurdish 286

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population, based upon the Kurdish IS members,124 the fact that many Kurds have adopted the Sunni interpretation of Islam and the shared rival of the Shia-controlled Iraqi regime.

Strategic costs and benefits for IS’ delegation option Delegation for IS in each of the key events would include a loss of reputation; despite its momentum, IS would leave a fight to a proxy or ally. Arguably, that would not fit its goal of ‘lasting and expanding’. The other actor needs to be strong enough and reliable. As IS’ history with Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria has shown, a strong proxy – in that case the Syrian branch of then ISIS – might choose to make its own decisions instead of following orders from IS.125 If the proxy or ally would prevail in the conflict, IS would only be able to indirectly control the territory with its oil and gas reserves. Delegation would allow IS to recuperate and avoid the risk of overstretch,126 as IS would not lose many resources, compared to the attack option.127 Depending on how the relationship between IS and the proxy or ally is presented, IS could establish itself in the region as a potentially legitimate actor, too.128

IS’ best choice: attack Given IS’ ambitions, the option to attack would be most beneficial for IS, as without using much resources, there are many gains in line with IS’ overall goals and interests, which mostly are directly opposite of the KRI’s goals and interests. Simply stated, for a Jihadi-Salafist, who believes a goal can only be reached by means of the sword, fighting is usually the only option to achieve a political or religious goal.129 As such, the option would be beneficial.130 However, some analyses of IS show that IS does save its resources when it faces a threat,131 implying that IS does not waste its resources easily. The eventual choice to fight and advance into Kurdish territory can be considered a tactical offense that fits within a defensive strategy to protect Sunni Muslims from perceived or potential Kurdish aggression and to gain economic resources to make the Caliphate viable. Concerning Kobanî, IS’ best option from a cost-benefit calculation is to attack Kobanî. At the time that IS advanced towards the town, support for the Syrian Kurds was lacking. The isolated position of Syria’s Kurds might be beneficial for IS.

Threats to the KRI Until IS captured Mosul, the primary focus of the KRI was directed towards Baghdad due to disputes over territories and oil revenues.132 However, IS’ rise in northern Iraq did concern the KRI, due to IS’ non-acceptance of anyone different from IS’ visions on religion or society. That IS did pose a serious threat towards the KRI was already clear before the August 2014 attack. Several incidents within the KRI were either attributed to or claimed by IS or its predecessors. Examples are the suicide attack on Kurdish security services in Erbil on 29 September 2013 and a series of bombs exploding at offices of political parties on 8 and 9 June 2014.133 In response to IS’ maneuvers in June 2014, KRI moved its Peshmerga into the oil-rich areas surrounding the city of Kirkuk. Further north, Peshmerga took defensive positions by advancing into the Nineveh governorate, which brought the KRI closer to Mosul.134 The KRI was confident as in the minor clashes with IS so far, Peshmerga had fought well. The fact that Peshmerga was able to withstand IS, while the ISF collapsed, was interpreted as proof that the KRI was strong enough an entity, unlike Iraq.135 287

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After the August 2014 attack of IS on the KRI, it became clear that IS posed a truly existential threat towards the KRI.136 Apart from IS’ attacks on Kurdish territories, this was acknowledged by executions of IS-held Kurdish people and IS’ propaganda.137 IS’ official media outlet, the magazine Dabiq, referred to KRI as ‘Kurdish secularists’.138 While IS appeared to regard PKK forces present in northern KRI and Peshmerga as one apostate enemy,139 later it distinguished between PKK and Peshmerga. 140 IS also states: Our war with Kurds is a religious war. . . . We do not fight Kurds because they are Kurds. Rather we fight the disbelievers amongst them. . . . As for the Muslim Kurds, then they are our people and brothers wherever they may be.141 Other threats include societal disruption within the KRI on religious grounds; approximately 500 Kurds have joined the ranks of IS,142 also acknowledged by IS and used in their propaganda.143 Related to IS’ rise was the increase of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) who fled to the KRI, by 2015 estimated to be around 2 million people. 144 Authorities are concerned that such relatively high numbers could easily offset the delicate ethnic balance in the region.145 By the time that IS attacked Kobanî, the KRI was relatively secure. IS had been pushed back from Erbil. and slowly the Peshmerga were able to advance into IS-controlled territory. The threat of IS for the KRI concerned the application of terrorist tactics, in particular (suicide) bomb attacks, mainly aimed at the KRI’s governmental institutions and allies.

Opportunities for the KRI Kurdish aspirations include an autonomous Kurdistan, which covers all areas thought to be Kurdish inhabited or historically part of so-called greater Kurdistan.146 These areas include the necessary oil and gas fields for a viable economy. Controlling these areas – what ISF could no longer do – would also show that the KRI was ready for autonomy.147 Facing IS could increase foreign support for the KRI and its Peshmerga forces in particular. Especially Western donors regarded the Peshmerga as a local fighting force that could counter IS with coalition air support, as is acknowledged by Kurdish president Barzani.148 The foreign support for the KRI could be interpreted as international recognition of the KRI as a de facto independent entity of Iraq. At least it did provide the opportunity for the Peshmerga of no longer being weakened by sanctions imposed by the Iraqi regime.149 Some analytical ambivalence exists when it comes to another opportunity that might be recognized: IS as an external enemy would unify the historically fragmented Kurds. On the one hand, the Rational Actor Paradigm assumes the unit of analysis is already a unified actor, thus neglecting the internal fragmentation. Although Kurds seem unified in the struggle against IS, it can be argued that they remain fragmented as well: tensions are still present between the main political parties in the KRI, causing some analysts to warn for intra-Kurdish conflict.150 Apart from this, approximately 500 Kurds have joined the ranks of IS.151 One could also argue that an external enemy further strengthens that unified actor, in this case by Kurdish identity, making it more determined than ever before to become independent.152 Perhaps that is what IS feared after attacking the KRI and, therefore, it used its propaganda against this possible outcome to send a message to Kurdish Sunnis.153

Strategic costs and benefits for the KRI’s hold option Actualization of an autonomous KRI will be delayed in case of holding during the key events. The areas it regarded as historically Kurdish and claimed by the KRI, rich of oil and natural 288

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gas, would still be controlled by another entity. The KRI would leave the tactical initiative with IS, which would give the KRI no other options than to react to IS’ future moves. Even if Peshmerga would be able to withhold the initial attacks, IS might attack next time everywhere along the frontline. Such a defensive posture costs much effort and might still run the risk that many Kurds would come to live under IS control, which might lead to repression of Kurds, as IS would regard many of them as secularists.154 As a (potential) rival might seize the areas left by ISF, that entity would become relatively stronger and the KRI relatively weaker.155 It might give the impression to regional and international actors that the KRI is weak, perhaps too weak to become autonomous, let alone be independent. With respect to helping out in Kobanî, the downside of holding would be that IS would not be further exhausted, running the risk of more attacks in the KRI if IS’ position in northern Syria is held. KRI would also run the risk that its reputation might be that of self-interest, not showing interest in the suffering of fellow Kurds, who did help the KRI when it was in need during August 2014. Holding might make the KRI appear weak, while it might also lead to sympathy from regional and international actors as the KRI is not an aggressor – or at least not anymore, since it took large swaths of land in June 2014. The KRI might save essential resources compared to the attack option. As such, there would not be an additional burden to the KRI’s already fragile economic situation.156 Also, this option would keep it easy for the KRI to maintain good relations with Turkey, its most important regional economic partner.157

Strategic costs and benefits for the KRI’s attack option The cost of attacking would mean that the KRI would lose many resources, not only due to the attack itself but also for controlling territory with potentially hostile inhabitants. The already battered economy158 would further suffer from the financial burden of waging war. Towards regional and international actors, the KRI might appear aggressive, trying to conquer territories within Iraq. Attacking also might create some benefits. The KRI might rely on the reputation of its Peshmerga militia as fierce fighters to boost the KRI’s own morale and lower that of rivals, although the areas left behind by ISF were potentially easy to conquer. The will to put up a fight might show that the Kurds are ready for independence,159 fighting for what the KRI perceived as Kurdish lands, unlike Shia-dominated ISF that fled from Sunni-dominated areas during IS’ advance.160 It might also acknowledge that the KRI has the only forces capable of fighting IS. A huge benefit for the KRI to advance is that it enables the KRI to gain control over all of the disputed territories. The maneuver to enter the areas surrounding Kirkuk and Mosul shows how eager the KRI is to gain control over these swaths of land.161 Finally, the KRI might have anticipated on IS focusing its advance towards Baghdad, as the Shia-dominated Iraqi central regime was expected to be IS’ main enemy,162 as was the KRI’s. The downside of joining the fight in Kobanî would be risking overextension. 163 Since IS’ attack on the KRI, the Kurds in Iraq suffered from economic decline, mostly due to halted investments.164 Also, the KRI’s relation with Turkey would be jeopardized by attacking IS in support of a group that Turkey considers dangerous – Syria’s Kurds.165 Attacking IS in Kobanî means luring IS further into a battle, thus providing IS with fewer options to conduct attacks in KRI. Also, by showing solidarity with Syria’s Kurds, the KRI would greatly benefit internationally; the KRI would show not only to be capable of defending its own territory, but also to be able to contribute to international coalitions and negotiate with international partners such as Turkey. Perhaps a sentiment of returning solidarity played a role 289

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as well, as both Syrian Kurds and the PKK responded and fought IS during the August 2014 attack on the KRI.

Strategic costs and benefits for the KRI’s delegation option The delegation option would imply that the KRI would leave conflict with IS to another actor. It means that it cannot access possible gains directly, leaving essential resources such as oil and gas under control of a proxy or ally. More important, the ultimate goal of an autonomous KRI might be further away than ever, as the KRI might give the impression of not being capable of acting by itself. By delegation, Kurdish resources might be saved. Also, regional and international actors might see the KRI as non-aggressive, depending on how the delegation is organized. The benefit of delegation would be that the KRI would save resources and the Peshmerga would be able to recuperate. Delegation would mean that the KRI is only indirectly involved in the conflict against IS in Kobanî. Costs would be limited to providing money, equipment, and training to Syrian Kurdish proxies or allies. This could potentially disrupt the KRI’s good relations with Turkey, which considers Syrian Kurds a potential threat. Also, the extent of money, equipment, and training delivered would seriously damage the KRI’s battered economy.166 The KRI would save its own human resources by applying delegation and avoid overstretching. Depending on whether the support is offered secretively or not, the KRI’s reputation might become that of a helping partner for fellow Kurds.

The KRI’s best choice: attack According to the Rational Actor Paradigm, the KRI’s best choice concerns attacking IS. With relatively few costs, the KRI’s Peshmerga could take over areas previously held by the KRI’s main contender, the central Iraqi regime. It would be a next step in solving the issue regarding the so-called disputed areas, which are claimed by both the KRI and the Iraqi central government. In particular, the capture of oil-rich areas would boost the KRI’s economy. With regard to IS’ attack in August 2014, in addition to the factors mentions earlier, comes the existential threat that IS poses towards the KRI. By joining the fight in Kobanî, the KRI could show solidarity with fellow Kurds, while maintaining relations with Turkey, the KRI’s most important economic partner. Holding would damage the KRI’s reputation among fellow Kurds, while delegating the conflict to Syrian Kurds would seriously damage the KRI’s relation with Turkey.

Table 21.1 Rational Actor Paradigm: aspects concerning key event 1, filling the void left behind by the ISF167 KEY EVENT 1

Islamic State

Kurdistan Region in Iraq

Threats

– KRI advancing – Coalition KRI–Arab tribes – Seize oil resources – Establish Caliphate – Continue advance/momentum

– IS advancing – Existential threat – Gain disputed territories – Show Kurdish strength – Foreign support – Unify Kurds

Opportunities

290

KEY EVENT 1

Islamic State

Kurdistan Region in Iraq

Goals Options

– ‘Lasting and expanding’ – Hold (option 1) – Attack (option 2) – Delegate (option 3) – Delay establishing Caliphate – Rivals might benefit – ‘Lasting’, not ‘expanding’ – Recuperate – Avoid overstretching – Gain legitimacy and allies – Resources for controlling areas – Enemies within areas – Potential attritional warfare – Few resources needed – Oil and gas reserves – Create buffer area – Fits in momentum – ‘Lasting and expanding’ – Appear weak: ‘lasting’, partly ‘expanding’ – Proxy/ally might become rival – No control over oil and gas – Recuperate – Avoid overstretching – Gain legitimacy and allies Option 2, attack

– Autonomy/independence – Hold (option 1) – Attack (option 2) – Delegate (option 3) – Delay establishing independence – Rivals might benefit – Appear weak – Save resources – Gain legitimacy and allies

1 Hold

Costs

Benefits

2 Attack

Costs

Benefits

3 Delegate

Costs

Benefits

Best choice

– Resources (lives, money) – Appear aggressive – Few resources needed – Gain disputed territories (oil, gas) – Show strength – Peshmerga reputation – IS’ focus on Iraqi regime – No disputed territories (oil, gas) – Appear weak – Recuperate – Gain legitimacy and allies Option 2, attack, then hold

Table 21.2 Rational Actor Paradigm: aspects concerning key event 2, IS’ attack on the KRI168 KEY EVENT 2

Islamic State

Kurdistan Region in Iraq

Threats

– KRI advancing – KRI–Arab tribes coalition

Opportunities

– Seize resources (oil, gas) – Seize territory (mountains) – Continue advance/momentum – ‘Lasting and expanding’ – Hold (option 1) – Attack (option 2) – Delegate (option 3) – Delay establishing Caliphate – Rivals might benefit – No ‘expanding’ – Not seizing Kirkuk – Recuperate – ‘Lasting’

– IS advancing – Existential threat – Societal disruption – Refugees, IDPs – Show Kurdish strength – Gain legitimacy, support – Unify Kurds – Autonomy/independence – Hold (option 1) – Attack (option 2) – Delegate (option 3) – Loss of initiative – No opportunity seizing land – Resources for defensive posture – Appear weak – Save resources

Goals Options

1 Hold

Costs

Benefits

(Continued)

Table 21.2 (Continued) KEY EVENT 2 2 Attack

Costs Benefits

3 Delegate

Costs Benefits

Best choice

Islamic State

Kurdistan Region in Iraq

– Risk overstretch (attrition) – Resources; ‘lasting’ jeopardized – Use momentum – Surprise KRI – Seize oil and gas – Seize territory (mountains) – Seize potential support – ‘Lasting’ and ‘expanding’ – Dependent on proxy or ally – No access to oil or gas – Partly ‘expanding’ – Recuperate – ‘Lasting’ – No loss of resources – Gain legitimacy Option 2, attack

– Resources – Gain international sympathy – Gain support – Show independence-ready – Peshmerga reputation – Fight for Kurdish grounds – Seize oil and gas – No access to possible gains – Appear weak – Not independence-ready – Recuperate – No loss of resources Option 2, attack

Table 21.3 Rational Actor Paradigm: aspects concerning key event 3, the KRI’s involvement in Kobanî169 KEY EVENT 3

Islamic State

Kurdistan Region in Iraq

Threats Opportunities

– Syrian Kurds advancing – Permissive geography – No Syrian Kurdish unity – Turkey as ally – ‘Ayn al-Arab’

Goals Options

– ‘Lasting and expanding’ – Hold (option 1) – Attack (option 2) – Delegate (option 3) – Delay in conquering infidels – Potential recovery of enemies – Appear weak; ‘lasting’ without ‘expanding’ – Long frontline – Siege victory – Save resources – Risk overstretch

– IS terrorism – Exploit IS’ overstretch – Show solidarity with Kurds – Show Kurdish strength – Foreign support – Unify Kurds – Autonomy/independence – Hold (option 1) – Attack (option 2) – Delegate (option 3) – IS not exhausted – Bad reputation

1 Hold

Costs

Benefits 2 Attack

Costs Benefits

3 Delegate

Costs

Benefits Best choice

– Prevent Syrian Kurdish unity – Implicit Turkish support – Symbol of Ayn al-Arab – Permissive geography – ‘Lasting’ and ‘expanding’ – Delay in establishing Caliphate – Rivals might benefit – Appear weak; neither ‘lasting’ nor ‘expanding’ – Recuperate – Avoid overstretching – No loss of resources Option 2, attack

– Maintain resources – Maintain relation with Turkey – Resources away from KRI – Risk overstretch – Jeopardize relation with Turkey – Gain international sympathy – Gain support – Show to be independent – Tie IS in battle – Remain acceptable for Turkey – Minimum of resources – Reputation – Relation with Turkey – Maintain resources – Avoid overstretching Option 2, attack

Strategic decision-making of non-state actors

The KRI versus IS: the KRI slowly progresses, and IS is pushed back Since the August 2014 attack, along the northern Iraqi frontline IS has been gradually pushed back by the Peshmerga, supported with air attacks by the international coalition against IS. Apart from air support, sometimes joint operations are conducted,170 and the Peshmerga are being trained and equipped. IS proved difficult to defeat, and along the frontline, for example near Kirkuk, IS still managed to frequently conduct attacks. The ISF recaptured Mosul and Tal Afar by ISF in Summer 2017, supported by the international coalition and the Peshmerga; the Hawija pocket southwest of Kirkuk remains IS’ last area under control in Iraq. Iraq’s Arab-Sunni population faces an uncertain future, without political leaders to rebuild a society that was controlled by IS for three years. Within the KRI a political crisis erupted in late 2015. President Barzani did not want to leave office, according to him due to the threat of IS. Some analysts feared tensions might lead to a new inter-Kurdish civil war.171 At the time of this writing, the political crisis within KRI seems to have calmed down as attention is focused on a referendum to vote for independence on 25 September 2017.172 Due to the referendum, tensions between Baghdad and Erbil have risen again.

Conclusion: conflict inevitable This study analyzes the strategic decisions taken by IS and the KRI in the context of their mutual conflict. With troops of the Iraqi central government pulling back in the first half of 2014, a power vacuum emerged in northern Iraq. This provided opportunities for two emerging armed non-state actors active in that area: IS and KRI.

Understanding strategic decisions IS pushed back the ISF and took over huge swaths of land. It saw the KRI take over land as well in the vicinity of Kirkuk and the IS bulwark Mosul. While there were only minor skirmishes between IS and KRI before August 2014, the attack of IS on the KRI can be interpreted as a pre-emptive strike against the Kurds: IS conducted a tactical offensive in light of a defensive strategy, aimed to prevent the Peshmerga from further advancing in the direction of IS. IS is often regarded merely as an aggressive actor.173 However, despite aggressive tactics, the analysis shows that a calculated strategic defensive posture should be taken into consideration too for understanding IS’ strategic decisions. This explains, for example, why IS chose to attack KRI in a pre-emptive measure against a perceived threat posed by the KRI. Given the implicit goal of Kurdish autonomy, advancing in the oil-rich areas surrounding Kirkuk – considered by the Kurds to be Kurdish areas anyway – was the logical path to follow for the KRI. Perhaps the KRI anticipated that IS would focus on the Iraqi central government. From a Rational Actor Paradigm perspective, the conflict between IS and the KRI was almost inevitable, as both actors tried to control the areas from which ISF pulled back in a zerosum situation. One side would consider the other side’s advance as weakening its own position, especially as the areas are rich of natural resources. Starting from the Rational Actor Paradigm’s assumption that the KRI and IS conduct rational behavior, the analysis shows that these Middle Eastern armed non-state actors take calculated strategic decisions. The model applied for this analysis can be too simple. Issues like internal fragmentation or the influence of public opinion are neglected, for example, the political disputes among the 293

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Kurds in 2015 cannot be explained, and neither can the approximately 500 Kurds who joined IS. As is the case for analyzing states’ foreign policies, the analyst has to be aware of the flaws of this model and decide whether the Rational Actor Paradigm is indeed the best model to use, most likely in security-related assessments.

Further research using alternative paradigms needed From an analytical point of view, a known shortcoming of the Rational Actor Paradigm is its assumption that actors are unified and rational. Future research would benefit from applying other analytical models, such as the Organizational Behaviour Paradigm or Governmental Politics Paradigm as described by Allison and Zelikow, which incorporate organizations and their procedures and power play among individuals, respectively.174 Nevertheless, the Rational Actor Model does provide a useful analytical approach to analyze Middle Eastern armed non-state actors. This is an important observation in a time of flux – at the time of this writing, IS seems to be on the verge of collapse, while the KRI seems closer to autonomy than ever – to analyze strategic decisions taken by non-state actors.

Notes 1 The different names for IS will be treated here as synonyms: Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/Shams (ISIS), Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and Ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ’l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām (Daesh or Daash). However, where applicable, the chronological correct name will be used. Before applying the name IS, the organization operated under the name ISIS. 2 Michael M. Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds: Geostrategic Concerns for the U.S. and Turkey,” Middle East Policy 22, no. 1 (2015): 102; Michael M. Gunter, “The Kurds in the Changing Political Map of the Middle East,” Kurdish Studies 3, no. 1 (2015): 65, 78; cf. Christian Caryl, “The World’s Next Country,” Foreign Policy (2015). http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/21/the-worlds-next-countrykurdistan-kurds-iraq/, accessed 30 September 2015. 3 Gareth Stansfield, “The Islamic State, the Kurdistan Region and the Future of Iraq: Assessing UK Policy Options,” International Affairs 90, no. 6 (2014): 1337. 4 David Gardner, “Isis: Armed and Dangerous,” Financial Times, 2014. www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b7f9f98222fb-11e4-8dae-00144feabdc0.html#axzz4K20EgL4c, accessed 12 September 2016; Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 105; Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1337. 5 Charles Lister, “A Long Way from Success: Assessing the War on the Islamic State,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015): 3–13. www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/439/870, accessed 10 August 2015; Kenneth M. Pollack, “Iraq: Understanding the ISIS Offensive Against the Kurds,” Brookings – Markaz Middle East Politics & Policy, 2014. www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/ posts/2014/08/11-pollack-isis-offensive-against-iraq-kurds, accessed 17 October 2016. 6 Cf. Michael M. Gunter, “The Foreign Policy of the Iraqi Kurds,” Journal of South Asia and Middle Eastern Studies XX, no. 3 (1997): 1. 7 Graham T. Allison and Philip D. Zelikow, Essence of Decision. Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Longman, 1999), 13–26. 8 To enhance readability, the name Kobanî will be used for the remainder of this study. Where relevant, the name Ayn al-Arab will be mentioned. Using the Kurdish name is not meant to be a political statement here. 9 Cf. Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 102. 10 Henri J. Barkey, “What’s Behind Turkey’s U-Turn on the Islamic State?” Foreign Policy, no. July 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/29/whats-behind-turkeys-u-turn-on-the-islamic-state-kurdssyria/, accessed 10 August 2015. 11 Charles Lister, “Profiling the Islamic State,” Brookings, 2014. www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/ Files/Reports/2014/11/profiling-islamic-state-lister/en_web_lister.pdf?la=en: 20, accessed 10 August 2015. 12 Cf. Gunter, “The Foreign Policy of the Iraqi Kurds,” 1.

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Strategic decision-making of non-state actors 13 Cf. Idean Salehyan, “The Delegation of War to Rebel Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 493 (2010): 494. doi:10.1177/0022002709357890. 14 Burak Kadercan, “This Is What ISIS’ Rise Means for the ‘Kurdish Question,’ ” The National Interest (2015), n.p. http://nationalinterest.org/print/feature/what-isis-rise-means-the-kurdish-question%E2 %80%9D-13798, accessed 20 October 2015. 15 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 13–75. 16 Gunter, “The Kurds in the Changing Political Map,” 78; cf. Jeremy Black, Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 243; cf. Gareth Stansfield, “The Unravelling of the Post-First World War State System? The Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the Transformation of the Middle East,” International Affairs 89, no. 2 (2013): 259–282. 17 Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (New York, NY: Harper-Collins, 2015), 235. 18 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 7, 53–54. 19 Ibid., 7, 18; cf. Gunter, “The Foreign Policy of the Iraqi Kurds,” 1. 20 Cf. Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 21–23. 21 Ibid., 389–390. 22 D.J. Gerner, “The Evolution of the Study of Foreign Policy,” in L. Neack, J.A.K. Hey and P.K. Haney, eds. Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in Its Second Generation (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1995), 18. 23 Rainer Baumann and Frank A. Stengel, “Foreign Policy Analysis, Globalisation and Non-State Actors: State-Centric After All?” Journal of International Relations and Development 17, no. 4 (2013): 492, 502–503. 24 Cf. Michael Knights, “Conducting Field Research on Terrorism in Iraq,” in A. Dolnik, ed. Conducting Terrorism Field Research. A Guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 119. 25 Fawaz A. Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 23–49; Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, no. March (2015). 26 Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 210. 27 Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), 39–45; Aylin Ünver Noi, “The Arab Spring, It’s Effects on the Kurds, and the Approaches of Turkey, Iran Syria and Iraq on the Kurdish Issue,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 16, no. 2 (2012): 15–16. 28 Jordi Tejel, Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 16–17. 29 Cited in Harff and Gurr, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, 40. 30 Mahir A. Aziz, The Kurds of Iraq: Ethnonationalism and National Identity in Iraqi Kurdistan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 5–6. 31 Ibid., 130. 32 Noi, “The Arab Spring,” 21. 33 Aziz, The Kurds of Iraq, 5; Gunter, “The Foreign Policy of the Iraqi Kurds,” 9. 34 Noi, “The Arab Spring,” 22. 35 Kurdistan Regional Government – Ministry of Planning, “Kurdistan Region of Iraq 2020 A Vision for the Future,” 2013, 1. www.ekrg.org/files/pdf/KRG_2020_last_english.pdf, accessed 12 September 2016. 36 Ibid., 2. 37 Caryl, “The World’s Next Country”; Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1333. 38 Tejel, Syria’s Kurds, 65. 39 Ibid., 136–137. 40 Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 102. 41 Barkey, “What’s Behind Turkey’s U-Turn”. 42 Lina Abdallah et al., Economic and Social Impact Assessment of the Syrian Conflict and ISIS Crisis (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015). https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/940320KRG0 Econ0Box0385416B00PUBLIC0.pdf: 21, accessed 8 January 2016. 43 “The Return of Khilafah,” Dabiq 1 (2014): 34–40. http://media.clarionproject.org/files/09-2014/ isis-isil-islamic-state-magazine-Issue-1-the-return-of-khilafah.pdf, accessed 12 September 2016; Lister, “Profiling the Islamic State,” 6; T.H. Tonnessen, “Heirs of Zarqawi or Saddam? The Relationship Between Al-Qaida in Iraq and the Islamic State,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015): 48; Stern and Berger, ISIS, 13–15; Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York, NY: Regan Arts, 2015), 1–10, 26. 44 Stern and Berger, ISIS, 233.

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Wietse van den Berge 45 “Remaining and Expanding,” Dabiq 5 (2014): 3. http://media.clarionproject.org/files/islamic-state/ isis-isil-islamic-state-magazine-issue-5-remaining-and-expanding.pdf, accessed 12 September 2016. 46 Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” 81; Gerges, ISIS, 23. 47 Gerges, ISIS, 5–6. 48 “Senior Kurdistan Official: IS Was at Erbil’s Gates; Turkey Did Not Help,” Rudaw, 2014. www. rudaw.net/english/interview/16092014, accessed 10 April 2016; Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1340–1341n23. 49 Stern and Berger, ISIS, 271–272. 50 Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29, no. 3 (2006): 208. 51 Ahmad Moussalli,“Wahhabism, Salafism and Islamism: Who Is The Enemy?” Conflicts Forum Monograph, Beirut (2009): 17–18. www.conflictsforum.org/2009/wahhabism-salafism-and-islamism/, accessed 31 August 2016. 52 Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam. Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York, NY: Random House, 2003), 40–41; Wiktorowicz, “Anatomy of the Salafi Movement,” 228. 53 Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, 12; Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, 29–38; Moussalli, “Wahhabism, Salafism and Islamism,” 17–18. 54 Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 103; cf. Moisés Naím, The End of Power (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2013), 235. 55 Gunter, “The Foreign Policy of the Iraqi Kurds,” 1. 56 Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 108. 57 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 27; D.A. Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect,” International Security 17, no. 2 (1992): 114. Allison and Zelikow describe in Essence of Decision two other models: the Organizational Behaviour Paradigm and the Governmental Politics Paradigm, which focus on organizations and their procedures and power play among individuals, respectively. These models can offer alternative explanations for strategic decisions compared to the Rational Actor Paradigm. Applying the two alternative models is beyond the scope of this study. 58 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 24; Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” The American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 (1992): 305. The four steps mentioned here are reflected in the tables at the end of this chapter. 59 Nicolas Guilhot, “The Kuhning of Reason: Realism, Rationalism, and Political Decision in IR Theory After Thomas Kuhn,” Review of International Studies (2015): 18. doi:10.1017/ S0260210515000054. 60 J.M. Rothgeb, “The Changing International Context for Foreign Policy,” in L. Neack, J.A.K. Hey and P.K. Haney, eds. Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in Its Second Generation (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 37. 61 B. Ripley, “Cognition, Culture, and Bureaucratic Politics,” in L. Neack, J.A.K. Hey and P.K. Haney, eds. Foreign Policy Analysis: Continuity and Change in Its Second Generation (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 87. 62 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 18; cf. Ripley, “Cognition, Culture, and Bureaucratic Politics,” 87. 63 Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms,” 138. 64 Bendor and Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” 302, 305; cf. Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms,” 119. 65 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 24. 66 Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2008), 243–244. 67 Cf. ibid., 21–23. 68 Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms,” 138. 69 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 389–390; cf. Bendor and Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” 305. 70 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 25. Italics added. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 46. 73 Ibid., 41. 74 Cf. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), xxiv. 75 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 19–20, 25. 76 Salehyan, “The Delegation of War,” 503.

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Strategic decision-making of non-state actors 77 Ibid. 78 Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 7, 53–54. 79 Lister, “Profiling the Islamic State,” 20. 80 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1346. 81 Ibid., 1334. 82 Ibid. 83 Kurdistan Regional Government, “President Barzani Asks Parliament to Begin Work on Referendum,” http://cabinet.gov.krd, accessed 4 September 2015. 84 Gerges, ISIS, 2; Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1336. 85 Ahmed Ali, Heather L Pickerell and ISW, “Iraq Situation Report: June 17, 2014,” http://iswresearch. blogspot.nl/2014/06/iraq-situation-report, accessed 17 October 2016; Ahmed Ali, Jennifer Cafarella and ISW, “Iraq Situation Report: July 22, 2014,” http://iswresearch.blogspot.nl/2014/07/iraq-situa tion-report, accessed 17 October 2016. 86 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1329. 87 ISW and Jessica D. Lewis, “Iraq Situation Report: August 3, 2014,” www.understandingwar.org/sites/ default/files/2014-08-03%20Situation%20Report1.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 88 Ofra Bengio, “The Islamic State: A Catalyst for Kurdish Nation-Building,” Tel Aviv Notes 8, no. 18 (2014). http://dayan.org/content/tel-aviv-notes-islamic-state-catalyst-kurdish-nation-building, accessed 4 November 2015, 3; ISW and Nichole Dicharry, “Iraq Situation Report: August 4, 2014,” www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/2014-08-04%20Situation%20Report.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 89 ISW, Lauren Squires and Nichole Dicharry, “Iraq Situation Report: August 5, 2014,” www.understand ingwar.org/sites/default/files/2014-08-05%20Situation%20Report_0.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 90 ISW, Jessica D. Lewis, Lauren Squires and Nichole Dicharry. 2014. “Iraq Situation Report: August 6, 2014,” www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/2014-08-06%20Situation%20Report_0.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 91 ISW, Lauren Squires, Nichole Dicharry and Jennifer Cafarella, “Iraq Situation Report: August 7, 2014.” www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/2014-08-07%20Situation%20Report_0.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 92 Bengio, “The Islamic State,”, 3. 93 ISW, Lauren Squires and Jennifer Cafarella, “Control of Terrain in Iraq: August 8, 2014,” www.under standingwar.org/sites/default/files/2014-08-08%20Situation%20Report.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 94 ISW and Lauren Squires, “Iraq Situation Report: August 9, 2014,” www.understandingwar.org/ sites/default/files/2014-08-09%20Situation%20Report.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016; ISW, Jessica D. Lewis and Jennifer Cafarella, “Control of Terrain in Iraq: August 10, 2014,” www.under standingwar.org/sites/default/files/2014-08-%2010%20Control%20Zone%20Map.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 95 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1329–1330. 96 Jennifer Cafarella, Jessica D. Lewis and Th-eodore Bell, “Syria Update: September 24-October 2, 2014,” www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Syria%20SITREP%2002%20OCT.pdf, accessed 17 October 2016. 97 Jennifer Cafarella and Theodore Bell, “Syria Update: October 02 – October 10, 2014,” http://iswre search.blogspot.nl/2014/07/iraq-situation-report, accessed 17 October 2016. 98 Mariam Karouny and Omer Berberoglu “Heavy Fighting In Kobani After Peshmerga Join Battle,” Huffington Post, 2016. www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/0, accessed 17 October 2016. 99 Lyuba Lulko, “The Great Kurdistan about to Be Created,” Ekurd Daily. http://ekurd.net/mismas/ articles/misc2012/11/state6620.htm, accessed 17 October 2016; Hakan Özoglu, “Lessons From the Idea, and Rejection, of Kurdistan,” New York Times. www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/ where-do-borders-need-to-be-redrawn/lessons-from-the-idea-and-rejection-of-kurdistan, accessed 17 October 2016; “The Wars of the Kurdish Unification,” Energeopolitics.com, 2013. https://energeo politics.com/2013/09/06/the-wars-of-the-kurdish-unification/, accessed 9 December 2016. 100 Cf. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xxii. 101 Mahmoud Nawzad, “Peshmerga Control All Kurdish Territories in Iraq,” Rudaw. http://rudaw.net/ english/kurdistan/170620141, accessed 12 January 2017. 102 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1340. 103 Ibid., 1340–1341n23. 104 Lister, “Profiling the Islamic State,” 19.

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Wietse van den Berge 1 05 “Senior Kurdistan Official”; cf. Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1340–1341n23. 106 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1340–1341n23. 107 Ibid. 108 Pollack, “Iraq,” 2. 109 “KRG Briefs Diplomats on Security Developments and Humanitarian Emergency,” Kurdistan Regional Government, 2014. http://cabinet.gov.krd/a/d.aspx?l=12&a=51951, accessed 4 September 2015; “Arming Iraq’s Kurds: Fighting IS, Inviting Conflict,” International Crisis Group (2015): 25–26. www. crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/arming-iraq-s-kurdsfighting-inviting-conflict. accessed 4 November 2015; Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1334. 110 Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 103, 106. 111 Cf. Ziad Haydar, “How Important Is Kobani’s Battle?” Al-Monitor. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/poli tics/2014/10/syria-kobani-turkish-kurdish-implications.html, accessed 7 December 2016. 112 “The Flood,” Dabiq 2 (2014): 12–13. http://media.clarionproject.org/files/09-2014/isis-isil-islamicstate-magazine-Issue-2-the-flood.pdf, accessed 12 September 2016; Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, 12; Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, 29–38; Moussalli, “Wahhabism, Salafism and Islamism,” 17–18. 113 Cf. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xvi. 114 “The Looming Assault on Mosul,” The Soufan Group, 2016. http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbriefthe-looming-assault-on-mosul/, accessed 7 October 2016. 115 Stephen M. Walt, “What Should We Do If the Islamic State Wins? Live with It,” Foreign Policy, 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/10/what-should-we-do-if-isis-islamic-state-wins-containment/, accessed 10 August 2015. 116 Cf. Lister, “Profiling the Islamic State,” 20. 117 Cf. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xvi. 118 Gerges, ISIS, 43. 119 “Senior Kurdistan Official”; cf. Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1340–1341n23. 120 Ibid., 21–24. 121 Pollack, “Iraq,” 2; Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1334. 122 “Senior Kurdistan Official”. 123 “The Return of Khilafah,” 37; “The Failed Crusade,” Dabiq 4 (2014): 9. http://media.clarionproject. org/files/islamic-state/islamic-state-isis-magazine-Issue-4-the-failed-crusade.pdf, accessed 12 September 2016. 124 “The Failed Crusade,” 9; “Remaining and Expanding,” 12. 125 Lister, “Profiling the Islamic State,” 13–14. 126 Cf. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xvi. 127 Cf. “The Looming Assault on Mosul,”. 128 Walt, “What Should We Do”. 129 “From Hypocrisy to Apostacy: The Extinction of the Greyzone,” Dabiq 7 (2015): 21–24. https://clar ionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-dabiq-magazine-issue-7-from-hypocrisy-to-apostasy.pdf, accessed 12 September 2016. 130 Cf. Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 46. 131 “The Looming Assault on Mosul,”. 132 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1333. 133 Isabel Coles, “Rare Bomb Attack in Iraqi Kurdish Capital Kills Six,” Reuters. www.reuters.com/arti cle/us-iraq-kurds-explosion-idUSBRE98S06820130929, accessed 12 September 2016; “Multiple Bombings Target Kurds in Iraq,” Al-Jazeera English. www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/06/ multiple-bombings-target-kurds-iraq-2014689857332677.html, accessed 12 September 2016; “Iraqi Kurds Targeted by Twin Car Bomb Blasts,” Al-Jazeera English. www.aljazeera.com/news/middle east/2014/06/iraqi-kurds-targeted-twin-carb-bomb-blasts-201469141237775108.html, accessed 12 September 2016. 134 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1334. 135 Ibid., 1337. 136 Ibid., 1338. 137 Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” 83. 138 “The Return of Khilafah,” 37. 139 “The Flood,” 12–13. 140 “The Failed Crusade,” 41–42.

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Strategic decision-making of non-state actors 141 Ibid., 9. 142 Alice Speri, “Not All Kurds Are Fighting Against the Islamic State – Some Are Joining It,” VICE News. https://news.vice.com/article/not-all-kurds-are-fighting-against-the-islamic-state-some-arejoining-it, accessed 12 September 2016. 143 “Remaining and Expanding,” 12. 144 “Iraqi Kurdistan: IDPs Now Number 2 Million,” UNPO. http://unpo.org/article/18260, accessed 12 September 2016. 145 Nawzad Mahmoud, “Iraqi Kurds Worry About Ethnic Balance from Waves of Refugees,” Rûdaw. http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/11082015, accessed 12 September 2016. 146 Lulko, “The Great Kurdistan”; Özoglu, “Lessons From the Idea”; “The Wars of the Kurdish Unification”. 147 Cf. Bengio, “The Islamic State,”, 1–3. 148 “Confidence in the Future,” Invest in Group. http://investingroup.org/exclusive-interview/187/, accessed 7 April 2016. 149 Ibid. 150 Winston Harris, “Chaos in Iraq: Are the Kurds Truly Set to Win?” Small Wars Journal (2014). http:// smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/chaos-in-iraq-are-the-kurds-truly-set-to- win, accessed 7 April 2017. 151 “250 Kurdish Militants within Daesh Ranks Killed: Official,” Press TV (2015). www.presstv.ir/ Detail/2015/10/01/431471/Iraq-Kurds-militants-Daesh-Takfiris-Kurdistan, accessed 12 September 2016; Speri, “Not All Kurds Are Fighting Against the Islamic State”; cf. Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds,” 104. 152 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1346. 153 “The Failed Crusade,” 9. 154 “The Return of Khilafah,” 37. 155 Cf. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xxii. 156 Abdallah et al., Economic and Social Impact Assessment, 111–113. 157 Ibid., 21. 158 Ibid., 111–113. 159 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1336. 160 Pollack, “Iraq,” 2. 161 Stansfield, “The Islamic State,” 1334. 162 Gerges, ISIS, 24. 163 Cf. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xvi. 164 Abdallah et al., Economic and Social Impact Assessment, 18. 165 Cf. Bengio, “The Islamic State,” 3. 166 Abdallah et al., Economic and Social Impact Assessment, 111–113. 167 The table is developed by the author, based on Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 389–390. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Bill Roggio, “US Special Forces, Kurdish Troops Raid Islamic State Prison in Iraq,” The Long War Journal (2015). www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/10/us-special-forces-kurdish-troops-raidislamic-state-prison-in-iraq.php, accessed 12 September 2016. 171 Patrick Martin, “Political Crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan Escalates into Violence,” Institute for the Study of War, 2015. http://iswresearch.blogspot.com/2015/10/political-crisis-in-iraqi-kurdistan.html, accessed 3 February 2017. 172 “The Kurdish Vote for Independence,” http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrief-the-kurdish-vote-forindependence/, accessed 25 September 2017. 173 Cf. Stern and Berger, ISIS, 234–235; Weiss and Hassan, ISIS, 238–239, 242. 174 Cf. Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 389–390.

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22 ISLAMIC STATE Aberration, or accelerant of system-wide changes to come? Michael S. Smith II1

What is the Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, DA’ISH, Daesh, or whatever one wishes to call the entity whose namesake echoes its leaders’ claim of having revived a system of governance that was once a substantial force in the international system? The existence of which Islamic State members perceive to be necessitated by religious texts and a corpus of ancient authoritative reference materials that – according to both literalist mainstream and “radical” interpretations of select contents thereof – prescribe actualization of Islam’s earliest traditions in perpetuity. When fielding this question before even the most knowledgeable audiences, one may receive a different answer from each intrepid respondent. Nearly three years after the Islamic State declared it had established a “caliphate”, this was the case when the author posed this question while delivering a keynote address during a Global Coalition to Counter Daesh practitioners conference hosted at the UK Foreign Office headquarters in London.2 Certainly, when it comes to answering this question, space constraints guarantee a failure to comprehensively satisfy the expectations of terrorism studies scholars. Nevertheless, it is important to explore what Islamic State is, and with a focus on how it is defining perceptions of the group among key segments of its worldwide audience whose members’ behaviors it aims to influence: acquired supporters, prospective supporters, and adversaries. For, without doing so, we may fail to consider any number of important aspects of Islamic State’s multifaceted effort to alter the international order, thus the array of measures required to more effectively manage threats posed to global security by it.

Defining Islamic State Reasonable cases can be made that Islamic State is best described as of this writing ( July 2017) using such terms as insurgency, movement, or proto-government. Yet, above all else, Islamic State is a terrorist organization. Its worthiness of other descriptions is derived from the employ of terroristic tactics to foment “maximum chaos” in areas of Iraq and Syria, rendering power vacuums its members could quickly fill and secure resources required to expand their operations.3 Subsequently, through an array of intimidatory and coercive activities, Islamic State has deterred dissent among most lesser-equipped cohabitants thereof. Meanwhile, by fashioning theirs as a terrorist group, even if denied capabilities to govern, Islamic State’s leaders could preserve the perceptibility of the group as a legitimate enterprise that is worthy of continued support. If, that 300

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is, group members continue executing attacks in the Muslim world, while persuading individuals not trained by the group to do the same here in the West. Indeed, unlike many entities which have been designated as terrorist organizations by global powers, Islamic State members have explicitly defined themselves as terrorists within official propaganda.4 Islamic State has also explicitly embraced its status as a terrorist group in other ways. Notably, in the fourteenth issue of its flagship publication, Dabiq, the group asserted such expressions as “Terrorism is not Islam” and “Terrorism has no religion” should be viewed as “slogans of apostasy”.5 In other words, according to the group’s takfirist logic, Muslims who deny that Islamic State’s terrorism campaigns reflect adherence to their professed faith and early traditions of the “faithful” are themselves legitimate targets for attacks.6 Since 2014, the group’s members have also more aggressively employed terrorism to advance their agenda than any other terrorist group active today. Through its terrorism campaigns in the Middle East, Islamic State has modeled the way for its members to launch similar initiatives in other regions. At this writing, an important example of this ripple effect is seen in the southern Philippines. An infographic produced by Islamic State’s Amaq Agency news service notes the group’s members executed 1,112 “martyrdom operations” in Iraq and Syria during 2016.7 From the group’s diligent reporting on attacks across “historically Muslim lands” we see that, despite perpetual coverage of the group by major media organizations, a relatively small number of these attacks have been reported on by journalists. For example, while many international news organizations covered one of the group’s attacks in Bangladesh as it unfolded in Dhaka on July 1, 2016, the author has been unable to identify an example of major television news organizations having noted that Islamic State claimed responsibility for two other attacks executed in Bangladesh during the previous 24 hours. Further, compared to this attack, little coverage was provided for more than a dozen other attacks Islamic State members previously executed in Bangladesh, most of which the group repeatedly reported on, eventually publishing an infographic focused on these and subsequent attacks.8 Similarly, aside from spectacular attacks in Egypt like those targeting two churches on Palm Sunday 2017, little coverage has been provided of the group’s steady claims of responsibility for attacks on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula targeting security personnel, which an Amaq infographic notes killed 172 soldiers during the first 100 days of 2017.9 Also among those targeted by the group in the northern Sinai are civilians, including a Coptic priest who was assassinated in Arish just before Islamic State supporters murdered a Catholic priest in France during the summer of 2016.10 Nor has significant coverage been provided for the group’s claims of responsibility for attacks targeting Israelis prior to the Islamic State–claimed attack in Jerusalem on June 16, 2017, such as the Grad rocket attacks that Islamic State claimed responsibility for in February and April 2017.11 Further, in relation to the frequency with which the group has executed attacks in Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Caucasus, news coverage of the group’s activities in those environs has been limited, at most. As Islamic State has been endeavoring to mobilize attacks in the West since 2014, it is important to consider that Islamic State’s trainees and supporters have executed more than a dozen attacks in Europe, the US, Australia, and Canada, with the damage, in aggregate, dwarfing that of the single attack executed by al-Qa’ida supporters in the West during this period (i.e., the January 2015 attack executed at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo). That its original spokesman, Abu Mohamed al-Adnani (d. 2016), was simultaneously managing the group’s “external operations” when he declared Islamic State had established a “caliphate” indicated terrorism campaigns beyond Iraq and Syria would factor importantly in his work shaping perceptions of the group. 301

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In an address posted online in September 2014, al-Adnani called for attacks in Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia – targeting police, intelligence and security personnel, as well as civilians, using, among other things, cars and knives to execute attacks.12 Months later, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi converted a set of action items that were already echoed throughout Islamic State’s recruitment-cum-incitement program into an official set of directives issued by Islamic State’s so-called Emir al-Muminin (Commander of the Faithful): “And we call upon every Muslim in every place to perform hijrah [emigrate] to the Islamic State or fight in his land wherever that may be”.13 More recently, while petitioning Islamic State supporters in Europe and the US to target civilians at home during his 2016 Ramadan address, al-Adnani advised that Islamic State’s leadership considers “the smallest act” undertaken against civilians in the West to be “more beloved to us than the biggest act done here”.14 From these and other messages contained in the group’s official propaganda, analysts may reasonably infer that Islamic State’s leaders, much like al-Qa’ida’s leaders before them, view executing attacks and inciting violence in the West as a means of endearing the group to residents of the Middle East and other majority-Muslim regions who view Western powers as sources of adversities encountered in their homelands. Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify what is meant with the use of the terms terrorism and terrorist herein: terrorism A term used to describe unlawful, intimidatory, and/or coercive actions, especially the public use of force or violence, or threats of such actions against a government, civilian populace, or any segments thereof, through which the actor (terrorist) seeks to achieve any array of behaviormodifying psychological effects within specific audience segments for the purpose of advancing agendas typically characterized by either political, economic, or social (i.e. religious) interests, or any combination thereof.15 Given the orientation of interests among international relations professionals towards the gestalt, it is also useful to consider that the effects of terrorist attacks executed by Islamic State trainees and supporters may include: •

•

•

Fear that fosters accommodation among non-sympathetic cohabitants of its primary areas of operation, which have extended far beyond Iraq and Syria, to include other areas of the Middle East, North, West, and East Africa, the Caucasus, South and Southeast Asia Anger manifesting in military reprisals from major world powers, which, counterintuitive as it may seem, can enhance perceptions of the group’s legitimacy (additional discussion to follow) Admiration manifesting in varying forms of support, including additional attacks attributed to the group

As noted in a report prepared to help inform then US Special Operations Command Central Commander Major General Michael K. Nagata’s understanding of, as he put it, Islamic State’s “intangible power”, “success breeds success”.16 Meanwhile, as executing terrorist attacks can help Islamic State outbid other terrorist groups who share the same enemies for support, increased instances of attacks attributed to Islamic State may serve to motivate al-Qa’ida and other non-aligned terrorist groups to orient more of their resources to execute attention-­ winning attacks in the West, as well as, more easily, to target the interests of “apostate” governments in the Muslim world.17 Certainly, inasmuch as Islamic State is endeavoring to be an agent for change in the international system, it has likewise become one within a movement whose members have long been 302

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striving to achieve the same basic goal that Islamic State claims to have achieved: restoration of the caliphate. As a result, Islamic State’s effort to attain leadership status in the imaginations of individuals who share its aspirations, or who may be convinced they should, has yielded a paradigmatic shift within a wider movement whose agenda al-Qa’ida has been striving to advance on a global scale since 1988 as that movement’s original vanguard in the domain of international terrorism. Until 2014, al-sira (ideological struggle) was the raison d’être for al-Qa’ida and other elements comprising this movement.18 Now, the most capable fighting forces within this movement are not only striving to undermine the influence of the movement’s “un-Islamic” enemies within the international system, and with particular focus on regions comprising “historically Muslim lands”; they are engaged in an unprecedented movement-wide competition for the hearts and minds of all who support, or may be convinced to support, their respective programs focused on reviving the caliphate.19 When he declared Islamic State had established a “caliphate”, al-Adnani advised that all other groups striving to revive the caliphate were rendered illegitimate by this feat, adding those groups’ members must pledge allegiance to the “caliph”, al-Baghdadi.20 Since then, in official Islamic State propaganda, there have been persistent pejorative references to foremost influential al-Qa’ida–affiliated clerics like Abu Mohamed al-Maqdisi and al-Qa’ida’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom the vociferously anti-Semitic group referred to as “Jews of Jihad” in the April 2017 issue of its online magazine, Rumiyah (Rome).21 While it has at times resembled the 2016 and 2017 presidential contests in the US and France, the stakes are much higher than would be the case if this competition for favor were limited to rhetorical discourses alone. As the volume of violence attributed to these groups is an important metric for measuring a group’s worthiness of support relative to others (further discussion to follow), this competition for movement dominance is yielding unprecedented implications for global security. Meanwhile, implications of this competition are greatest for security in the Middle East and proximate regions home to fragile and failed states, where these elements enjoy sanctuaries and wide-ranging maneuverability. Here, it is useful to acknowledge that Islamic State is the most competent marketer among transnational terrorist groups active today. In other words, Islamic State has been managing the most effective global influence operation of any terrorist group in history.22 Left unchecked, this may enable Islamic State to defy some analysts’ expectations that al-Qa’ida will prove the more durable source of terrorist threats. Indeed, since 2014, the surge in terrorism-related casework in Europe and North America indicates Islamic State’s incitement-focused propaganda program, paired with its aggressive exploitations of social media platforms and encrypted communications applications to amplify key incitement-focused narratives, while also identifying and more actively engaging with prospective recruits around the world, has enabled Islamic State to achieve greater capacity to persuade a resort to violence than al-Qa’ida. Leveraging international broadcasting tools in the cyber domain, each day Islamic State distributes videos (of varying lengths and formats), photo packets, and reports on the group’s operations. Through this program, Islamic State has grown awareness of its accomplishments with a volume of content and speed and scope of distribution that would almost certainly render such luminaries from the history of terrorism’s nexus with insurgency as Robespierre and Che Guevara green with envy. Further, by comparison, the group’s propaganda program renders al-Qa’ida’s ongoing distribution of videos and online publications like Inspire to appear to occur at a snail’s pace. Each day, this torrent of propaganda typically consists of more than a dozen spot reports on important events. These materials are produced by not only Amaq, but also media offices 303

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belonging to the group’s 35 wilayat (provinces), 16 of which are located beyond Iraq and Syria.23 In addition to the group’s daily distribution of propaganda pieces documenting activities in battle spaces, along with daily life in the “caliphate”, other official propaganda continues to be produced at a higher frequency than the group’s lengthier videos featuring staged executions and calls for attacks in the West. An important example being Islamic State’s weekly Arabiclanguage newspaper, al-Naba, which is distributed both online and in print form within several of the group’s wilayat.24 Functionally, Islamic State propaganda is also used to demonstrate it is meeting operational expectations set for acquired and prospective supporters within the group’s publications designed to inform understandings of its agenda, along with objectives it must meet to advance this agenda, such as waging jihad in Europe, North Africa, Bangladesh, the Caucasus, and Turkey.25 This pattern of building expectations concerning what the group has subsequently strived to accomplish emerged in July 2014 with the first issue of Dabiq. Therein, Islamic State telegraphed its intention to “purify” Dabiq, a small town in northern Syria.26 Shortly thereafter, the group seized control of the town, fulfilling the expectation it would ‘raise the flag of the Khilafah over its land’, as had been written in Dabiq.27 Months later, a prime example of persistent threats in Islamic State propaganda against countries in which the group’s operatives and supporters eventually executed attacks emerged in a video distributed in April 2015, titled “Fisabilillah” (For the Sake of Allah).28 Therein, the group presented plot concepts for attacks in France, Germany, Australia, and the UK, culminating with a suicide bombing in New York City.29 The claim in this video that sleeper cells were waiting in Germany was later affirmed following the arrests of one such cell’s members, including a bomb maker who was deployed to Germany from Syria in October 2014.30 As of this writing, other important examples of Islamic State operationalizing newsworthy plots in countries where it provided ample advanced warnings of its intentions to do so are seen in the Philippines and Iran. This pattern of foreshadowing evinced by Islamic State’s propaganda can enhance the group’s capacity to build and reinforce support. Here, terrorism analysts will recognize a terrorist group’s provision of overt signals of intent to execute attention-winning attacks – signals which later serve to bolster perceptions of a group’s credibility after attacks occur – is not without precedent. For instance, warning that Osama bin Laden was “Determined To Strike in US”, an article within The President’s Daily Brief on 6 August 2001 began with discussion of bin Laden’s public-facing comments concerning plans to ‘follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America” ’.31 Meanwhile, leadership studies scholars would note the perceptibility of a leader’s capacity to match words with deeds is an essential tool used to build confidence, which, in turn, can enhance a leader’s capacity to motivate others to commit to additional actions in furtherance of an organization’s agenda.32 By flooding the Internet with a torrent of easy-to-access propaganda materials, the group has simultaneously achieved its objective of terrorizing its near and far enemies who would not otherwise be immediately impacted by its operations. This has been accomplished vis-à-vis an array of gruesome spectacles in high-quality videos documenting executions, which can dually function as tools used to psychologically condition would-be terrorists who may require repeated exposure to graphic scenes of violence to develop comfort levels sufficient to prepare them to commit similar violent crimes. Another important aspect of Islamic State’s strategic communication program is the persistent incorporation within its propaganda of scenes of children executing prisoners, undergoing terrorist training, as well as undergoing ideological indoctrination, as documented in a lengthy video released in June 2017 that includes scenes of prepubescent boys being taught about the corruptive influence the West achieved in the Middle East vis-à-vis the Sykes-Picot 304

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Agreement.33 Much like Islamic State’s slavery and sex slave trade programs, this material helps further stimulate outcries among human rights activists who are capable of influencing policy in the West. Meanwhile, much like the omission of setbacks encountered by the group in most of its propaganda, use of children in propaganda helps engineer the perceptibility of Islamic State as a durable enterprise – one capable of challenging “apostate” governments of the Middle East for generations to come. Even for those who are not tracking the group’s online recruitment and incitement campaign, it is virtually impossible to avoid encounters with Islamic State. Its enormously effective propaganda program and the high frequency of attention-winning attacks attributable to the group have secured Islamic State a place in almost every news cycle since July 2014. Importantly, a persistent presence in news cycles can help the group achieve another objective: eclipsing the specter of al-Qa’ida in the imaginations of those whom Islamic State’s leadership seeks to both terrorize and elicit responses from deemed advantageous for the group. Among these responses are military operations. According to the strategic logic discernible within Islamic State propaganda, such responses may be converted into tools used to enhance perceptions of the group’s legitimacy. For example, in the aforecited fourth issue of Dabiq, while paraphrasing deceased al-Qa’ida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (d. 2011), whose mantle – much like that of Osama bin Laden (d. 2011)34 – Islamic State has attempted to appropriate, the group advised: if one wants to know the people of truth, then let him observe where the enemies’ arrows are aimed. Most of them – if not all – are now pointed at the Islamic State, its leaders, soldiers, and subjects.35 Islamic State leaders’ aspirations to provoke a war between the “disbelievers” and the “faithful” meanwhile reflect an effort to fashion the group as an agent of eschatological features of their professed faith. According to a prophecy attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, Judgment Day will follow an end times battle between Muslims and their enemies around either al-Amaq or Dabiq, two towns in Syria located near the border with Turkey.36 Islamic State’s inducement of military responses of varying form and intensity from an evergrowing list of countries brings into focus a variety of dichotomous roles played by the group, notable among which are roles that may have dissuaded some countries from more rapidly and aggressively pursuing its disruption. Indeed, in Syria, Islamic State has posed as an agent for changes which, on some levels, have conformed to agendas of the Middle East’s most powerful governments. As a competent force combating Bashar al-Assad’s military, Islamic State was a de facto force for advancing the Erdogan government’s previously stated interest in regime change in Syria. Additionally, it has posed as the foremost threat to the Erdogan government’s Kurdish enemies. Perhaps as a result, for years, the Erdogan government’s Syria policies – notably, allowing use of Turkey as a primary ingress and egress route to the Syrian Jihad – resembled that which Middle East political analyst and terrorism expert Daniel Byman defined as ‘passive state sponsorship of terrorism’.37 In other words, Islamic State, which presently poses as the most competent source of terrorist threats to NATO-member states, has enjoyed an important form of support from one.38 Meanwhile, with propaganda reflecting a vastly higher quotient of animus towards the Shia than is expressed by other terrorist groups, which similarly channel intensely sectarian works by the Damascus-based Hanbali jurist and theologian Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), Islamic State has served as a de facto force multiplier in Saudi Arabia’s Cold War with Iran. At the 305

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very least, the group’s activities in Syria and Iraq are diverting resources that Iran could orient towards efforts to secure control-by-proxy of areas of Yemen. In the author’s view, when evaluating how Islamic State’s enemies may have enabled the group, it is important to consider the US has yet to develop regulations which the author has argued are more likely disrupt terrorists’ exploitations of American companies’ technologies to recruit and incite violence over the Internet than the ongoing attempts to resolve these issues made by such companies as Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet (the parent company of YouTube and Google Drive). Referencing both the author’s assessment that responses to the Islamic State’s online recruitment and incitement campaigns by the US government and these American companies have demonstrated “a penchant for deficient strategic analysis against Salafi-jihadist groups’ online activities” in public and private sectors in the US, and the author’s assertion the US government should impose regulations on these companies that would require them to introduce policies which could more effectively disrupt and deter terrorists’ abuses of their technologies than their ongoing content removal and accounts suspension programs in Smith, “Containing ISIS’ Online Campaigns After Manchester:The Simple Tools We Can Use But Choose Not To.” Note: Following the authorship of this chapter, the author conveyed both this assessment and assertion concerning corrective measures that could be taken by the US government in testimony during the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism’s public hearing titled “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online:Working with Tech to Find Solutions,” 31 October 2017. Hearing footage and Smith’s written testimony archived by the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary at https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/­extremistcontent-and-russian-disinformation-online-working-with-tech-to-find-solutions, accessed 6 February 2019. The announcement made during President Donald Trump’s May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia that the country’s newly established Ideological Warfare Center will focus on countering Islamic State’s online influence operations highlighted the accounts suspension and content removal campaigns touted by American social media companies have had limited impact on Islamic State’s influence capacity in the cyber domain.39 Meanwhile, US policy-makers have resisted calls for the impositions of regulatory regimes on largely self-regulated American giants of social media and associated file-sharing industries that could help to more effectively mitigate many of the threats presently emanating from spaces of the Internet managed by them. For example, US policy-makers could call on the Federal Communications Commission to impose policies that limit access to social media and file-sharing sites which have been used by terrorist elements to increase their capabilities to threaten the US and its allies when account managers are simultaneously using a variety of technologies that mask their physical locations.40 This would significantly increase risks associated with the employ of these companies’ powerful technologies to support not just terrorist groups’ recruitment and incitement programs, but also an array of other illicit activities, including political election influence operations. It is also noteworthy that governments of the Middle East (and Europe) have not threatened to block access to sites managed by Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet if they refuse to implement such policies. Turning the coin, we see Islamic State’s activities in Syria have increased the al-Assad regime’s dependency on, and thus the regional influence capabilities of, both the Iranian regime and Russia. The same can be seen for Iran in Iraq. More abstract analysis might examine whether Islamic State is an unwitting agent of Russian and Iranian economic interests, as both countries’ energy markets–dependent economies can benefit from turmoil in the Middle East. Cynically, some might suggest that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states could have similarly benefited from Islamic State’s jihad in the region, and the destabilizing effects of its operations elsewhere, particularly in Libya. Further, as threats posed by the group have been used by the Trump administration to help rationalize a multi-billion-dollar sale of 306

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defense technologies to Saudi Arabia, it bears mention we may reasonably anticipate this deal will stimulate interest within the Iranian regime in more purchases of Russian-made defense technologies due to fears the Saudis may use such weaponry against the Iranian military and its various proxies. Meanwhile, due to concerns about Islamic State’s potential influence capacity in Jordan, the al-Qa’ida-affiliated cleric Abu Mohamed al-Maqdisi was propped up as an anti–Islamic State mouthpiece. In other words, Jordanian authorities apparently perceived Islamic State’s growth potential to be so great in Jordan that it was worth risking a scenario in which al-Maqdisi might divert support from Islamic State to al-Qa’ida.41 More importantly, Islamic State is simultaneously striving to revive an illiberal system of governance while enhancing the power of authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Indeed, Islamic State is an excuse for governments across the region to resist accommodating structural reforms advocated by Western democracies. As if reading from a GCC talking points memo, during discussions with the author, diplomatic and security officials from various Arab states have noted their governments can more efficiently manage threats posed by Islamic State than would be the case if their systems resembled those of Western governments. At the same time, the increasingly strongman-styled Erdogan government may use similar arguments concerning the threat environment to rationalize further consolidation of power. Therefore, terrorism analysts might wish to examine whether Islamic State is a foremost effective force multiplier for the phenomenon of terrorism writ large in the Middle East. Because, if we apply nomothetic causal analysis which holds that authoritarian (i.e., repressive) governments nurture anomie that manifests in terrorism to intelligence estimates aiming to calculate what may unfold in the Middle East in the near term, and if we do not anticipate Islamic State will be “defeated” in this period, increased terrorism should be on our list of future concerns.42

A clearer view to Islamic State While the prior discussions may help inform understandings of what the Islamic State is and the implications of its activities on some levels, to more richly inform understandings of what it truly is, thus why it is engaging in these activities, possibly a trajectory of future events – perhaps even Islamic State’s durability – it is necessary to offer greater specificity concerning the defining qualities of the group than is afforded by such terminology as terrorist organization, or even “radical Islamic terrorists”, as the Trump administration has deemed useful. Like the organization it was once a branch of, Islamic State is a Salafi-Jihadist group. In other words, like al-Qa’ida, Islamic State’s agenda is informed by Salafiyya-Jihadiyya, which is an intensely orthopraxic ideology. Not unlike Salafis, adherents of this ideology perceive their faith as one compelling an array of actions in conformance with the manhaj (methodology) of the Salaf (first three generations of Muslims), or manhaj as-Salaf.43 For Salafi-Jihadis, notable among these actions is jihad, or that which we call terrorism. Indeed, in the pamphlet which outlines Islamic State’s aqida and manhaj, the group advised: ‘Every believer should wage jihad against the enemies of Allah, even if he is alone’.44 Setting aside circumstances which consensus among authoritative Salafis point to as demanding “defense” of the faithful vis-à-vis military force – with recent examples including Muammar Qadhafi’s and Bashar al-Assad’s brutal responses to the Arab Spring uprisings – scholars have often suggested that important variance in the aqida (creed) of Salafis and the aqida of SalafiJihadis is exposed by the former’s tendency to eschew a resort to violence for the purpose of effectuating changes aiming to bring political systems, thus laws, thus Muslim societies, closer to the model of life provided by the Salaf. Yet differentiating Salafis from Salafi-Jihadis in such a manner as this can serve to impede understandings of the original revolutionary programs of two giants among the various Salafist movements active in the world today, the Wahhabis and 307

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the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, it is important to consider deviations from those original militant programs have been pointed to by Salafi-Jihadis as indicators of “hypocrisy” on the parts of those movements’ current stewards – thus a means of rationalizing why conservative Sunnis should support groups like Islamic State. To be sure, al-sira is an essential factor in the modi operandi of Salafis and Salafi-Jihadis alike. Meanwhile, as is denoted by the term Salafi-Jihadi, violence is central to the aqida of al-Qa’ida and Islamic State. For instance, in its charter, one finds waging jihad is listed as al-Qa’ida’s sole mission. Therefore, violence attributed to it is the primary metric used to assay whether alQa’ida is a legitimate steward of Salafi-Jihadis’ aspirations. Now, as Islamic State’s leadership claims al-Qa’ida’s current leaders have deviated from this mission, and Islamic State claims to have assumed responsibility for stewarding the jihad charted bin Laden, the same metric for measuring legitimacy applies to Islamic State.45 Additionally, inasmuch as actualization of the faith vis-à-vis imposition of what Islamic State leaders consider sharia (Islamic law) is demanded by an effort to emulate the manhaj as-Salaf, so too is territorial conquest. Hence the Islamic State’s slogan “Remaining and Expanding”. Furthermore, it is also important to recognize that, like al-Qa’ida, Islamic State is one of many groups comprising the Global Jihad movement. Although most scholars from the terrorism studies community have pointed to this movement’s emergence as having occurred in the mid- to late-twentieth century – with influential figures in academe having categorized elements thereof as part of a “wave” of “religious terrorism” whose momentum should by now have ebbed46 – for those assessing its durability, this movement may be better understood as the latest manifestation of a persistent trend which has spanned Islam’s history – one that has for centuries yielded violent religiopolitical revolutions aiming to redefine order within the Muslim world. Moreover, as relevant actions have been expressly oriented around the goal of achieving primacy for the “pure” faith in all domains, thereby quashing non-adherents’ influence, we may reasonably infer an objective of those engaged in this “activism” – be they “quietest” Salafis or suicide belt–donning jihadis – is to (re)shape the international order itself. Thereby, ensuring actualization of the faith is not impeded by “un-Islamic” influence asserted by “disbelievers” whose corruptive influence within the Muslim world may, in the views of many Salafis and Salafi-Jihadis alike, lead Muslim societies to deviate from the model of life provided by the Prophet Mohammed, his companions, and the Salaf.

A view to the Global Jihad movement’s ancient and contemporary accelerants Elements comprising the Global Jihad movement are among the greatest sources of threats to global security. If we are to assume this movement’s devotees are motivated by truisms of the faith their leaders have rigorously leveraged to both incite and legitimize violence, then we see the defining character of Islamic State’s terrorism campaigns reflects a powerful tradition in Sunni Islam that has for centuries sparked recurrent efforts to restore practice of the “pure” faith in the Muslim world. Indeed, when we compare guidance furnished by ancient luminaries from jihadism’s legacy in Sunni Islam with guidance proffered by Salafi-Jihadist groups of our day, we see that – not unlike such Salafist-styled elements as the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose agendas have been shaped by the same ancient militant exemplars – Islamic State is but the latest manifestation of successive and complementary revivalist programs aiming to promote adherence to the “pure” faith vis-à-vis a variety of coercive and intimidatory measures. Albeit, here in the West, despite this tradition being highlighted by the sword emblazoned on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s very standard, there has been a prevailing tendency to disaggregate our 308

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consideration of militancy from polite discussions about Islam’s defining qualities dating back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. It is perhaps therefore that, in Dabiq, Islamic State rebuffed those who insist Islam is a religion of peace, invoking the writings of one of Sunni Islam’s most authoritative figures, the aforementioned mufti Ibn Taymiyyah, to proclaim ‘Islam is a religion of the sword’.47 Regrettably, space provided is not sufficient for rigorous exposure of a continuum of violent revolutions in the Muslim world spanning to Islam’s earliest years – jihads from which terrorists of our time derive inspiration, perhaps while also providing inspiration for future stewards of the “pure” faith through their attempts to emulate militants of old. Still, the author seeks to provide readers lacking expertise with these elements and issues some guidance for further evaluation of ways both pious exemplars of old and influential Sunni Islamist movements of our day, whose founders looked to those ancients for guidance on how to revive and preserve the “pure” faith, have nourished the modi operandi of terrorists presently striving to redraw the map of not just the Middle East, but also regions home to majority-Muslim populaces spanning from West Africa to Southeast Asia. For the imperative of actualizing the “pure” faith discernible in mainstream Salafist spheres might help us infer much about the Global Jihad movement’s durability, which has been, whether wittingly or not, bolstered by the most powerful forces in Sunni Islam today. Specifically, the Muslim Brotherhood and their on-again-off-again Saudi benefactors, who have wedded Brotherhood thought with their Wahhabi school to form – while promoting globally – the most influential Salafi doctrine of our day. That set of issues is one which the economics of diplomacy are likely to continue deterring the international community from more meaningfully addressing in the near term, leading some to ask: might their neglect serve to validate intelligence products that have suggested we may witness restoration of the caliphate in the early twenty-first century, such as a “fictional scenario” included within a collection of estimative products published by the US National Intelligence Council in 2004?48 In most open-source literature of the post-9/11 era, there has been a tendency to treat threats posed by Salafi-Jihadist groups as a newer challenge for the liberal international order than certain spirits of authoritarianism that history tells us are corollaries of communism. Certainly, most terrorism studies scholars acknowledge such concepts leveraged by Salafi-Jihadis to legitimize their terrorism campaigns as “defensive jihad” and takfir are centuries old. Meanwhile, they cannot help but to acknowledge the unparalleled influence on groups like Islamic State of the three anti-Mongol fatawa (religious edicts) and other works by Ibn Taymiyyah, who is not only history’s most impactful proponent of those aforementioned concepts that have fueled jihads of our time, but who was also a key source of inspiration for the founder of the Wahhabi school and his followers as they undertook a decades-long violent revolution-cum-puritanical statebuilding project that culminated in establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, many terrorism studies scholars have pointed to an infamous jihadist manifesto produced by Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Council official Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), titled Signposts on the Road (alternatively Milestones), as providing the Global Jihad movement its playbook. A careful comparison of Signposts and treatises by the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan alBanna (d. 1949), reveals that Qutb was not prescribing a new program when he wrote a “vanguard” should be organized to restore Islam’s role as a source code for governance in the Muslim world – ‘followed, sooner or later’, Qutb reasoned, ‘by their conquest of world domination’.49 Rather, Qutb was amplifying the very narratives which both characterized and were used to build support for the Brotherhood’s original manhaj. Deviation from which, it seems, Qutb presciently anticipated as being in the cards due to circumstances which had befallen the Brotherhood’s leadership in Egypt during the mid-twentieth century. Pursuant to his examinations of al-Banna’s largely ignored treatises, such as those published in English by Charles Wendell, Islamic studies scholar Bassam Tibi has effectively challenged 309

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analytic judgments concerning the perceived paramountcy of Qutb’s works for the Global Jihad movement that have been repeated so frequently as to become treated as facts by the terrorism studies community – explaining global jihadism was prescribed by al-Banna.50 As covered in exquisite detail by Islamic political studies scholar Richard P. Mitchell in his book, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (1969), al-Banna explicitly endorsed and employed terrorism in an effort to undermine Western and Zionist influence in Egypt and beyond. An important example of alBanna’s employ of takfirist logic to encourage violent revolutionary activism across the Muslim world is found in his treatise titled “On Jihad”, in which he advised: Today the Muslims, as you know, are compelled to humble themselves before nonMuslims, and are ruled by unbelievers. Their lands have been trampled over, and their honor besmirched. Their adversaries are in charge of their affairs, and the rites of their religion have fallen into abeyance within their own domains.51 Further, in al-Banna’s treatise titled “Between Yesterday and Today”, one finds a brief history on foreign corruptive influence in the Muslim world, culminating with Europe ‘dismembering the Islamic empire, annihilating the Islamic state and erasing it, politically speaking, from the roster of powerful living nations’.52 Indeed, like the works of many jihadist theoreticians of the modern era, Sayyid Qutb’s merit categorization as tautological versus groundbreaking. Despite acclaim heaped on the tasfir (exegesis) contained in his best-known work, In the Shade of the Quran, he offered little more than a crisp, contemporary set of analyses concerning the state of affairs before the umma (worldwide body of Muslims) in accordance with a supremacist worldview, which had been sustained by other “Salafist” thought leaders in the Middle East for centuries. Meanwhile, for Sayyid Qutb, who elected not to decamp from Egypt alongside his brother, Mohamed Qutb (d. 2014), and other influencers from the Brotherhood who found refuge in Saudi Arabia after the Nasser government released them from prison camps in the mid-1960s, Signposts’ provocative tone guaranteed its author could further draw attention to that mission once the Nasser government responded by making him a “martyr” for the cause. Thereafter, the Saudis guaranteed prescriptions for expunging corruptive secularist Western influence in the Muslim world that were so lucidly amplified in Sayyid Qutb’s writings would continue reaching audiences in the Middle East and beyond. Not only did they provide Mohamed Qutb with a prominent role in academe in the Kingdom, but from Saudi Arabia, Mohamed oversaw the ongoing publications of his deceased brother’s works.53 For decades, the Saudis used Sayyid Qutb’s and similarly spirited works produced by other thought leaders from the Brotherhood as tools to encourage opposition to the secularist Pan-Arab program promoted by the likes of Egyptian strongman Gamal Nasser, which stood to diminish Saudi influence in the Middle East. Today, Sayyid Qutb’s incitement-oriented works may be found in the inventories of most Islamic bookstores and online book sales websites, as well as archived in university libraries throughout the West. While thought leaders in the Brotherhood have cautioned readers of Sayyid Qutb’s works to consider the harsh conditions he was living in when he began writing Signposts, senior-most Brotherhood officials like Mahmud Ezzat have continued drawing attention to his publications by fashioning themselves as “Qutbis”.54 Here, it is important to consider that, in the original model for the study of radicalization developed for the US intelligence community several years after the 9/11 attacks, titled The Ziggurat of Zealotry, then CIA senior counterterrorism analyst Cynthia Storer and her colleagues highlighted the following: while the Muslim Brotherhood is not an “escalator” for membership in Salafi-Jihadist groups, one’s adoption of the ideology promoted by it can enhance the ease 310

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with which one may be recruited by them.55 More recently, in an essay written to help inform counterterrorism practitioners’ understandings of Islamic State’s influence capacity, Islamic studies scholar Jocelyne Cesari noted that the Salafi doctrine promoted globally by the Wahhabis provides ‘the same religious framework that is used by radical groups such as al-Qa’ida and ISIL’. Cesari further explained, as most materials provided to teach about Islam in Europe follow the Salafi doctrine, countries in the West have ‘thus paradoxically proven to be fertile ground for the growth of puritanical and intolerant interpretations of Islam’.56 Although they have received less interest from the terrorism studies community than his brother’s writings, works by Mohamed Qutb that were produced with Saudi support also became important sources of guidance for leaders of the Global Jihad movement. For instance, in a lengthy rebuke of Arab rulers broadcasted in abbreviated form in January 2004 by Qatar’s Al Jazeera television news service, Osama bin Laden commended to his audience both a work by Ibn Taymiyyah and one of Mohamed Qutb’s books, titled Concepts that Should be Corrected, as important sources for an explanation of Quranic verse 9:31.57 This verse was invoked by bin Laden to concomitantly decry while highlighting consequences of Muslim rulers accommodating “un-Islamic” influence. Indeed, this is but one of many examples of “blowback” linked to a variety of programs supported by the Saudis, ranging from direct and indirect support of jihad theaters during recent decades to support for “scholars” whose works can be converted into tools used to diminish perceptions of the House of Saud’s credibility among the very puritanical zealots it has both passively and actively empowered. As acknowledged by al-Qa’ida’s current leader, who is a fierce critic of the Brotherhood, both al-Banna and Qutb are rightly regarded as important figures among the ideologues who cultivated enthusiasm for reviving a caliphal model of governance during the twentieth century.58 Yet, as highlighted in the works of the founding leaders of the Brotherhood, al-Qa’ida, Islamic State, and a long list of other Salafi and Salafi-Jihadist movements, efforts to revive the “pure” faith – to guide Muslims back to the militant manhaj as-Salaf – repeatedly emerged in history before the Brotherhood and similar movements in South Asia were formed in the early twentieth century to counter Western influence in the Muslim world, with substantial support provided to the Brotherhood in particular by Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, as we see with the Wahhabi school’s inception in the eighteenth century, and as we see with the jihad called for by Ibn Taymiyyah centuries earlier, the formula for galvanizing support for jihad which (a) entails framing adversities encountered by the “faithful” as manifestations of “un-Islamic” influence that is allegedly leading Muslim societies astray – perhaps rendering a pervasive state of jahiliyya (ignorance of the faith) akin to that which the Prophet Mohammed and his companions strove to resolve – and which (b) leverages takfir to legitimize a resort to violence to usurp powerholders emerged centuries before the twentieth century. Here, it is important to consider the caliphate that grew out of the original Islamic state has throughout Islam’s history been viewed as a symbol of the faith’s practice par excellence. The political, military, social, and other policies imposed by Islam’s founding leader enabled his followers to actualize Islam’s defining doctrine of tawhid (discussion following). Hence the model of the Salaf, who preserved those policies, is viewed as the embodiment of the “pure” faith’s practice in the post-Mohammed era. Thus, we see that, as evinced by the policies of, for example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, as well as those the Islamic State claims to have imposed, for Salafis, Salafi-Jihadis, and those whom they wield power over, orthodoxy and orthopraxy are two sides of the same coin. An entry in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam explains tawhid ‘declares absolute monotheism – the unity and uniqueness of God as creator and sustainer of the universe’, adding that it has been used by ‘Islamic reformers and activists as an organizing principle for human society and the 311

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basis of religious knowledge, history, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as social, economic, and world order’.59 Notables among these ‘reformers and activists’ are Ibn Taymiyyah and the Wahhabi school’s founder, Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792).60 That this concept remains a source of inspiration for revolutionary activism is evinced by Islamic State’s primary marketing tool, known as the “flag of tawhid”. Further, literally meaning Islamic monotheists, in the lingua franca of Islamic State propaganda, those who subscribe to its conceptualization of tawhid, as defined, for example, in a June 2016 issue of al-Naba, are referred to as muwahhidin.61 Centuries earlier, al-Wahhab and his followers used this term to distinguish themselves from other Muslims who did not ascribe to their manhaj. As noted by Islamic studies scholar Esther Peskes, the concept of tawhid and its opposite, shirk, was the “very core” of al-Wahhab’s teachings, ‘on which’, Peskes explained, ‘he based a radical criticism of his contemporaries’ religious behaviour’.62 Peskes added that al-Wahhab asserted that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, not only in Nadjd but in the whole Muslim world, had fallen into a state of religious ignorance no better than that of the jahiliyya. The reason for this he saw in the ignorance of the real meaning of tawhid as prescribed by God and exemplified by His prophet Mohamed.63 Today, Islamic State – like al-Qa’ida before it and like the Brotherhood before it – similarly levels criticisms against powerholders in the Muslim world for refusing to ensure the actualization of tawhid in manners deemed consistent with the model of Islam’s earliest practitioners. Notable among the targets of Islamic State’s critiques are the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites and the heirs of al-Wahhab’s jihad, the House of Saud and their kingdom’s clerical establishment, as well as Brotherhood officials who briefly held power in Egypt following the Arab Spring.64 In an apparent effort to galvanize the “faithful” in Saudi Arabia, Islamic State has been appropriating al-Wahhab’s mantle. In a July 2016 issue of al-Naba, Islamic State invoked the works of the founder of the Wahhabi school, from which the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia derives its religiopolitical doctrine, to answer the question, “What is Tawhid of Worship?”: Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab said, ‘It is sincerity of worship, in all its forms, to Allah. So only Allah is supplicated, hoped for, sought for aid, relied upon, made vows to, and presented sacrifices of slaughter. Only him, without partner. The evidence are noble ayat. And such is the meaning of La Illah Illallah [There Is No God But Allah]’ (Ad-Durar as-Saniyyah). And its opposite is shirk of worship. Additionally, Islamic State has published numerous specially prepared versions of al-Wahhab’s works.65 Here, as al-Wahhab’s works have been appropriated by radical elements who derive inspiration from the movement he helmed, students of extremist movements might be reminded of Robert Taber’s accounting of communism’s spread in Latin America years after the death of its cause célèbre in the region: ‘Fresh sparks are glowing, and Che dead proves even more potent than Che alive, a heroic figure giving vitality to unconquerable ideas, raising banners of insurrection even in western capitals’.66 Of particular interest to Salafis and Salafi-Jihadis is the Salaf’s preservation of sharia, which their literature points to as the sine qua non of tawhid. For example, in one of his most important works, Kitab al-Tawhid (Book of Tawhid), al-Wahhab treated sharia as a tool used to deny accommodation of un-Islamic beliefs and traditions that may corrupt Islamic societies, explaining,‘The wisdom of Islamic Law lies in its forbidding everything which may lead to shirk’.67 312

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Salafi-Jihadis in particular insist that failure to impose sharia in a manner consistent with what they claim were the policies of Islam’s earliest practitioners constitutes a form of apostasy. One that, according to their takfirist logic, warrants punishment of not only the apostates responsible for such deficiencies in adherence to the model of governance provided by the original Islamic state, but also their enablers.68 For Salafi-Jihadis, the sense of urgency to combat governments that are unwilling to enforce sharia in manners deemed consistent with the program of Islam’s earliest believers is largely derived from Ibn Taymiyyah’s works. In his recent book about the Global Jihad movement, Byman noted these works ‘form the core of the modern jihadist ideology’.69 As discussed by anthropological historian Denise Aigle in her detailed review of Ibn Taymiyyah’s proclamations, so vital is sharia’s imposition that the mufti prescribed waging jihad against not only the invading Mongols who seized control of the Abbassid Caliphate’s epicenter, and who claimed to have converted to Islam, yet failed to impose sharia in a manner consistent with his literalist interpretations of history, but also those who enabled their apostasy by bolstering their power.70 Specifically named among these accomplices of the Mongols’ offenses against the faith were the Shia and Christians. As observed by Middle East political studies scholar Vali Nasr, Ibn Taymiyyah’s formal refutation of Shiism ‘set the tone for much of the sectarian conflict even to this day’, and has been leveraged by the Wahhabis and other puritanical movements as ‘part of their prescriptions for reforming and reviving Islam and reversing its gradual decline in power as a world civilization’.71 Indeed, in the brief pamphlet outlining Islamic State’s aqida and manhaj, the group noted its members regard the Shia to be a ‘faction of shirk, apostasy, and hirabah (armed transgression)’.72 Concerning Ibn Taymiyyah’s treatment of Christians, in a book written to legitimize alQa’ida’s tactics in response to the repudiation of al-Qa’ida’s manhaj published by a reformed, previously prominent jihadist theoretician, al-Zawahiri noted the mufti called for Christians to be targeted due to their collusion with Ghazan Khan: Ibn Taymiyyah issued a fatwa that the Christians of the east should be attacked because they had helped the enemy of the Muslims fight them and had supplied them with money and weapons, although they themselves had not attacked us or waged war on us.73 More recently, several weeks after the aforementioned dual bombings of churches in Egypt on 9 April 2017, the mufti’s guidance concerning both the employ of violence against Christians and destruction of churches was cited extensively in the cover story for the ninth issue of Islamic State’s publication Rumiyah, titled “The Ruling on the Belligerent Christians”.74 In the fourteenth issue of Dabiq, Islamic State published an article focused on Ibn Taymiyyah’s guidance that compared conditions which merited waging jihad against Ghazan Khan’s forces with conditions meriting defense of Medina during the Gazwah al-Ahzab (Battle of the Confederates), as chronicled in the Quran.75 Therein, Islamic State advised Ibn Taymiyyah’s ‘lessons for the believers’ will ‘continue to remain relevant and crucial until the camp of iman [belief] defeats the camp of kufr [disbelief] once and for all’.76 Elsewhere in this issue of Dabiq, one finds a prime example of Ibn Taymiyyah’s takfirist logic being harnessed to legitimize terrorist attacks within an article calling for assassinations of Muslim religious leaders in the West.77 Here, we would be remiss in not considering that, as noted by authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, takfiri has widely been used in Arab media as a pejorative term to refer to SalafiJihadis, and this is not without much irony.78 As observed by Islamic studies scholar David Cook, a notable aspect of how Wahhabism varies significantly from prior movements in the history of 313

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Islam can be seen in the ‘extremely promiscuous use of takfir’.79 Similarly, Islamic studies scholar Bernard Haykel has observed that, embedded in Salafis’ pursuit of “theological purity” is the ‘potential for direct action against individuals or institutions’, for they ‘engage in exclusionary practices that can attain the level of excommunication (takfir) of fellow Muslims’.80 Given that Salafi-Jihadis are not only competing for dominance of the Global Jihad movement, but also calling into question the legitimacy of contemporary Salafist movements, it is notable that, whereas al-Qa’ida’s current leader dubiously counted applying the moniker takfiri among the “falsehoods” used to try to dissuade support for al-Qa’ida, Islamic State criticized all others who claim to be striving to revive the caliphate for allegedly abandoning takfir’s employ in the first issue of Dabiq.81 Further, in leveling this criticism, Islamic State advised takfir is an “undeniable” fundament of sharia. While there is much debate among Salafis and Salafi-Jihadis over just what the earliest form of sharia encompassed – with governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as Islamic State championing forms of sharia which conform to the punitive Hanbalist doctrines championed by Ibn Taymiyyah – what is indisputable is that the Salaf rapidly transformed the original Islamic state into one of the most expansive empires in world history. In his indispensable work on the history of jihad traditions in Islam, Cook explained: The most apt comparison is the conquests undertaken by Alexander the Great, whose victories over the Persian Achmenaeid Empire (330s B.C.E.) similarly heralded longterm religious and linguistic shifts (the spread of Hellenistic culture and the Greek language) in the territories he conquered at lightning speed.82 In his expansive treatise on tawhid, Mohamed Abduh (d. 1905), whose work reviving interest in the Salaf in Egypt was harnessed by al-Banna, wrote: the intelligent observer of human events is left in utter amazement at the way in which Islam gathered the whole of the Arab nation from end to end into its allegiance in less than thirty years, and then embraced other nations from the western ocean to the borders of China in less than one century.83 Here, Abduh was idealizing the expansion of the original Islamic state in a manner which, although common, defies credulity when we see it is meant to imply the Salaf did not violate tenets of the faith by coercing conversions to Islam vis-à-vis the specter of military conquest in the name of religion. The question of whether force majeure was a driver in the umma’s growth following the Prophet Mohammed’s death is a delicate topic within both mainstream and Salafi-Jihadist spheres, albeit less so in the latter than the former. For example, in a video titled “Upon the Prophetic Methodology”, Islamic State cleric Turki al-Bin’ali (d. 2017) discussed the specter of militancy bolstering the earliest Muslims’ evangelism: Al-Mustafa made dawa in Makkah and was not answered. . . . Then when he made dawa with the sword strong in his palm, they submitted to him fully. It is true. Just like Shaykul-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah (rahimahullah) said, ‘The basis of this religion is a book that guides and a sword that supports’.84 It is from the earliest Muslims’ territorial conquest-cum-civilizational reformation program that Islamic State derives justification for its expansionary program. Given such, it is useful to 314

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note it was during the early years of this conquest that a member of the Salaf, Abdallah Ibn al-Mubarak (d. 797), wrote his Kitab al-Jihad (Book of Jihad). After the Quran, which contains accounts of militant jihad waged during the time of the Prophet, as well as discussion of its salvific qualities – as we see in verse 9:111, which “Salafis” like Hassan al-Banna and SalafiJihadis have invoked to motivate participation in terrorist operations likely to result in terrorists becoming “martyrs”85 – al-Mubarak’s Kitab al-jihad is the next earliest known work that serves to define the role of militant jihad in Islamic traditions.86 It inspired a genre of works that emerged in subsequent centuries known as Kitub al-Jihad, including a Kitab al-Jihad by al-Wahhab.87 Extolling Ibn al-Mubarak for his contributions within his treatise titled “On Jihad”, al-Banna explained ‘the cannon lawyer and ascetic’ was ‘a volunteer in jihad for most of his life’.88 Adopting this program of global conquest helps Islamic State engineer a façade of striving to emulate the manhaj as-Salaf in a manner which further contrasts the group with more powerful elements that have fashioned themselves as stewards of the “pure” faith, as is claimed by Saudi Arabia in the brief history of the nation provided on its Washington, DC embassy’s website.89 This also offers aspirant jihadis who are unable to join the group in Iraq and Syria opportunities to become stakeholders in Islamic State’s bold state-building program far beyond the Levant, as well as in such proximate environs as Saudi territory, upon which Islamic State claims to have constituted several wilayat. Strategically, this meanwhile increases the difficulty of undermining al-Baghdadi’s most inspirational claim – as echoed with the titles his supporters have bestowed upon him – without waging a global counterterrorism campaign to disrupt and dismantle the group’s networks wherever it claims to have constituted wilayat across the Muslim world. Indeed, just as it is unlikely that killing al-Baghdadi will generate a significant disruptive effect on the group, which has for years been grooming acquired and prospective supporters to anticipate senior leaders will be killed, denying Islamic State control of Mosul and Raqqa without disrupting its operations in other regions of the world is unlikely to diminish Islamic State’s abilities to pose a threat to global security.

Durable threats to regional and global security Indicators suggesting Islamic State can cultivate broad support within the umma required to restore the caliphate are notable by their absence. Yet an absence of support sufficient to enable Islamic State or competing Salafi-Jihadist groups to achieve this goal should not be interpreted as an indication that the Global Jihad movement will be incapable of threatening the integrity of the Westphalian system during the years ahead. In the post–Arab Spring era, Salafi-Jihadis have proven their abilities to undermine this system vis-à-vis the destabilizing effects of their operations in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. As concerns the appeal of Islamic State’s operations among Muslims who share its aspirations to expunge “un-Islamic” influence in the Muslim world, the longer conflict persists in the Levant in particular, the greater the perceptibility of Islamic State’s efforts to erase borders drawn by Western powers in the Muslim world as being manifestations of divine providence is likely to become for its acquired and prospective supporters. Meanwhile, an absence of policies which serve to more effectively deter Salafi-Jihadis’ persistent exploitations of popular social media and file-sharing websites to build and reinforce support on a global scale will enable Islamic State to continue recruiting and inciting violence far beyond the Levant. Indeed, Islamic State’s propaganda proliferation and international networking campaigns in the cyber domain have been used to engineer perceptions of the group as being the most dedicated and competent force for opposition to Western influence in the Muslim world. This bolsters the group’s capacity to 315

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persuade a resort to violence among individuals who are susceptible to its influence in the West. Not only attacks executed by them in Europe, North America, and Australia, but also Western civilian populaces’ and their governments’ responses to these events can help Islamic State build more support among inhabitants of the Muslim world whose worldviews are shaped by decades-old grievances concerning impacts of Western influence in their homelands. It is also reasonable to anticipate that Islamic State – like competing Salafi-Jihadist groups – will continue capitalizing on the Saudis’ “evangelical” and the Muslim Brotherhood’s “educational” programs, attracting support from Salafis the world over who share similar aspirations to erase the influence of “disbelievers” in the Muslim world. Of course, the vast overlap of fundaments of the ideologies promoted by these foremost influential forces within Sunni Islam and the fundaments of Salafiyya-Jihadiyya suggests that “ideological warfare” aiming to constrain the influence of terrorist groups like Islamic State will have limited effects in the Middle East. With respect to the influence Salafis – especially Wahhabis – aspire to achieve for the “pure” faith and its adherents, analysts may reasonably infer that preserving the status quo in the international order has been, and for the foreseeable future will be, anathema to their interests. For international relations professionals, there should be no doubts that the Salafi doctrine promoted by the Wahhabis’ global influence operation has oriented aspirations among the “faithful” towards attainment of hegemonic status for the members of the umma who ascribe to their views of how to actualize the faith. Whether manifesting in global terrorism campaigns waged by Salafi-Jihadis, or tensions among not only governments of the Middle East, but also Salafi communities and their respective governments, the takfirist logic preserved by Sunni Islam’s dominant doctrine is almost certain to serve as a durable destabilizing force for both regional security in the Middle East and the international order. Given the decades-old, persistent efforts of Salafi-Jihadis to undermine confidence in Saudi religious and political leaders, analysts should not rule out the possibility that an effort to redraw the map of the Middle East led by Muslims who are not branded as terrorists may emerge in response to Islamic State’s exploits. History reveals a centuries-old tradition of revolutionary elements’ activities in the Middle East motivating others to pursue similar goals. Indeed, an important question for analysts of Middle East politics is: will Islamic State’s and other Salafi-Jihadist elements’ persistent and increasingly high-profile efforts aiming to undermine perceptions of the Wahhabis and the House of Saud as legitimate stewards of the “pure” faith be perceived by Wahhabi leaders as necessitating more than counterterrorism initiatives to preserve their influence?

Notes 1 The author is grateful for feedback on earlier drafts of this entry provided by Dr. Carl Jensen, Dr. Lani Kass, Dr. Daniel Byman and Dr. James J.F. Forest. He also acknowledges insights on various topics provided by counterterrorism analysts Cynthia Storer and Ronald Sandee. 2 Michael S. Smith II, The Recruitment-Cum-Incitement Campaign, Global Coalition to Counter Daesh Practitioners Conference (London: United Kingdom Foreign Office), 1 March 2017. 3 Citing the group’s discussion of its employ of a strategy pursued by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an article focused on the establishment of Islamic State’s so-called “caliphate,” in Dabiq 1, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), July 2014, 36. 4 For example, in the video titled “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them,” (Al-Hayat (Islamic State)) that features missives from several participants in the November 2015 Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud (d. 2015), who helped guide this and earlier plots in Europe advises: “So if you have sent your ‘Hunter’ fighter jets to bomb the Muslims, then know that the Islamic State has sent to you ‘hunters’ who thirst for the blood of the disbelievers, hunters who will not hesitate to slaughter you. For we are terrorists.” 5 Dabiq 14, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), April 2016, 14.

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Islamic State 6 Takfir is the controversial practice of one Muslim accusing another of apostatizing, which may warrant capital punishment. Dissenting views on this practice, particularly the question of whether it is a “principle of the religion,” have emerged within Islamic State. 7 Amaq Agency infographic, archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http://insidethejihad. com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-01-16-at-10.24.47-PM-copy.png. 8 English version in Rumiyah 2, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), October 2016, 7. Infographic archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http://insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ Screen-Shot-2017-04-19-at-2.55.41-PM.png. 9 Amaq Agency infographic dated 11 April 2017, archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http://insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-18-at-11.09.10AM-copy.png. 10 Amaq Agency report dated 30 June 2016, archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http:// insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-19-at-2.06.42-PM-copy.png. 11 Amaq Agency report dated 9 February 2017, archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. https://insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Screen-Shot-2017-06-24-at-11.17.32AM.png. Amaq Agency report dated 10 April 2017, archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http://insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-19-at-2.47.07-PM. png. See also photo from Sinai wilayah photo packet report on the April attack, archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http://insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot2017-04-19-at-2.48.56-PM-copy.png. 12 Abu Mohamed al-Adnani. Indeed Your Lord Is Ever Watchful. Al-Furqan (Islamic State), Trans. Al-Hayat (Islamic State). 21 September 2014. 13 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, March Forth Whether Light or Heavy, Al-Furqan (Islamic State), Trans. Al-Hayat (Islamic State), 14 May 2015. 14 Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, That They Live By Proof, Al-Furqan (Islamic State), Trans. Al-Hayat (Islamic State), 21 May 2016. 15 Michael S. Smith II and Cynthia Storer, Competition and the Threat: Anticipatory Analysis of the Islamic State’s Agenda in the West (Unpublished manuscript). 16 Citing Michael K. Nagata, In Eric Schmitt, “In Battle to Defang ISIS, U.S. Targets Its Psychology,” The New York Times, 28 December 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/12/29/us/politics/in-battle-todefang-isis-us-targets-its-psychology-.html, accessed 15 June 2017 Subsequently citing Sarah Canna, Findings and Observations, In Hriar Cabayan and Sarah Canna, eds, Multi-Method Assessment of ISIL (US Special Operations Command Central, 2014), 22. http://kronosadvisory.com/U_SMA.SOC CENT.White.Paper.Final.Dec2014.pdf, accessed 15 June 2017. 17 Smith and Storer, Competition and the Threat: Anticipatory Analysis of the Islamic State’s Agenda in the West. 18 Noman Benotman, Gioria Forster and Roisin Blake, It’s Salafi-Jihadist Insurgency, stupid!, Quilliam Foundation, 28 January 2013. 19 Smith and Storer, Competition and the Threat: Anticipatory Analysis of the Islamic State’s Agenda in the West. 20 al-Adnani, This Is the Promise of Allah. 21 Rumiyah 8, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), April 2017, 42–43. 22 Michael S. Smith II, In Michael S. Smith II, “Containing ISIS’ Online Campaigns After Manchester: The Simple Tools We Can Use But Choose Not To,” Foreign Affairs, 27 May 2017. www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/2017-05-27/containing-isis-online-campaigns-after-manchester, accessed 15 June 2017. 23 The Structure of the Khilafah, Al-Furqan (Islamic State), July 2016. 24 See, for example, a photo packet distributed by the Jazirah wilayah in April 2017 documenting distribution of printed copies of al-Naba. Excerpt archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http:// insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-14-at-7.04.06-PM.png. 25 Michael S. Smith II, In Rukmini Callimachi,“Turkey, a Conduit for Fighters Joining ISIS, Begins to Feel Its Wrath,” The New York Times, 29 June 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/world/middleeast/ turkey-a-conduit-for-fighters-joining-isis-begins-to-feel-its-wrath.html, accessed 15 June 2017. 26 Dabiq 1, 5. 27 Ibid. Also see discussion of Islamic State’s campaign around Dabiq in William McCants, “ISIS fantasies of an apocalyptic showdown in northern Syria,” Markaz/Brookings Institution, 3 October 2014. www. brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2014/10/03/isis-fantasies-of-an-apocalyptic-showdown-in-northernsyria/, accessed 15 June 2017. 28 Fisabilillah, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), April 2015.

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Michael S. Smith II 29 See summary of video in Michael S. Smith II, “DA’ISH Video ‘Fisabilillah’ Calls for Attacks in the West,” DOWNRANGE, 15 April 2015. http://insidethejihad.com/2015/04/daish-music-video-fisa bilillah-calls-for-attacks-in-the-west/, accessed 15 June 2017. 30 Anton Troianovski and Zeke Turner, “Germany Arrests Three in Suspected Islamic State Plot to Attack Düsseldorf,” The Wall Street Journal, 2 June 2016. www.wsj.com/articles/germany-arrests-3-syr ians-over-terror-attack-plot-on-busy-dusseldorf-street-1464872522, accessed 15 June 2017. 31 “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” The President’s Daily Brief, Central Intelligence Agency, 6 August 2001. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf, accessed 15 June 2017. 32 For example, see discussions in James M. Kouzes and Barry K. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, 5th ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (Wiley imprint), 2012), 27, 41, 62, 74, 76. 33 One Umma, Furat wilayah (Islamic State), June 2017. 34 For example, see Dabiq 4, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), October 2014, 43–44. See also Dabiq 7, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), February 2015, 25. Note: In this article published in the seventh issue of Dabiq, Islamic State is referencing al-Adnani’s assertion that al-Qa’ida under its current leadership is no longer the “base of jihad” in Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, This Is Not Our Manhaj, Nor Will It Ever Be, Al-Furqan (Islamic State), 17 April 2014. 35 Dabiq 4, 43. 36 William McCants, “ISIS Fantasies of an Apocalyptic Showdown in Northern Syria,” Markaz/Brookings Institution, 3 October 2014. www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2014/10/03/isis-fantasies-of-an-apoc alyptic-showdown-in-northern-syria/, accessed 15 June 2017. 37 Daniel Byman, “The Changing Nature of State Sponsorship of Terrorism,” Saban Center for Middle East Policy/Brookings Institution, 16 May 2008. Note: This analysis which leverages a term coined by Dr. Byman does not reflect analysis of the Erdogan government’s policies published by him. 38 Michael S. Smith II, “On a NATO-Member State’s Sponsorship of Terrorism,” DOWNRANGE, 13 March 2014. http://insidethejihad.com/2014/03/on-a-nato-member-states-sponsorship-of-terror ism/=, accessed 15 June 2017. 39 Katie Paul, “Saudi to Open Militant-Monitoring Center During Trump Visit,” Reuters, 20 May 2017. www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-gulf-centre-idUSKCN18G09P, accessed 15 June 2017. 40 Concept discussed in Smith, “Containing ISIS’ Online Campaigns After Manchester: The Simple Tools We Can Use But Choose Not to,” See also Michael S. Smith II, “How to Beat ISIS on Twitter,” The Christian Science Monitor, 27 May 2016. www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/PasscodeVoices/2016/0527/Opinion-How-to-beat-ISIS-on-Twitter, accessed 15 June 2017. 41 Discussion in Michael S. Smith II and Cynthia Storer (Contrib), “Target: Jordan,” DOWNRANGE, 6 February 2015. http://insidethejihad.com/2015/02/target-jordan/, accessed 15 June 2017. 42 Here, prudence welcomes acknowledgment that, even if Islamic State is “defeated” in the near term, these governments may finger a myriad of other threats of mutual concern to their democratic allies in the West as reasons for resisting quiet insistence they allow structural reforms to occur, ranging from al-Qa’ida’s to Iran’s to Russia’s influence operations in the Middle East and proximate regions. 43 There is much scholarly literature which provides distinctions between the various Salafi doctrines promoted today, which space provided does not allow in sufficient detail. The author has focused on those of the Wahhabi school and the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, the author wishes for the reader to consider there is far more which unites the doctrines promoted by the Wahhabis, Brotherhood, and most other Salafi-styled movements active in the modern era than divides them. 44 This Is Our ‘Aqidah and Our Methodology (Al-Maktabat Al-Himmah (Islamic State), n.d.).   Arabic version archived at Jihadology. http://jihadology.net/2015/07/20/new-dawah-literaturefrom-the-islamic-state-this-is-our-creed-and-our-methodology/, accessed 15 June 2017.   English version archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. https://insidethejihad.com/ wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IslamicStateAqidahManhaj.pdf. 45 al-Adnani, This Is Not Our Manhaj, Nor Will It Ever Be, Referenced in Dabiq 7, 25. 46 See, for example, David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in Audrey Kurth and James M. Ludes, eds. Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 46–68. 47 Dabiq 7, 20–24. Here, as noted later, the group was amplifying a narrative already developed in the group’s propaganda by one of Islamic State’s senior-most religious authorities, Turki al-Bin’ali. 48 “Fictional Scenario: A New Caliphate,” in Mapping the Global Future: Report on the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Projection (National Intelligence Council (US), 2004), 83–91. www.futurebrief.com/ project2020.pdf, accessed 15 June 2017.

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Islamic State 49 Citing translation in Gilles Kepel, Trans. Jon Rothschild, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 45. 50 Charles Wendell, ed. Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: From Jihadist to Institutional Islam (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 99. 51 Hassan al-Banna, In “On Jihad,” Wendell, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), 150. 52 Hassan al-Banna, In “Between Yesterday and Today,” Wendell, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna (1906– 1949), 24. 53 Useful background in Stéphane Lacroix, Trans. George Holoch, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), Chapter 2. 54 Eric Trager and Marina Shalabi, “The Brotherhood Breaks Down: Will the Group Survive the Latest Blow?” Foreign Affairs, 17 January 2016. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/egypt/2016-01-17/brother hood-breaks-down, accessed 15 June 2017. 55 Smith II and Storer, Competition and the Threat: Anticipatory Analysis of Islamic State’s Agenda in the West. 56 Jocelyne Cesari, “Understanding the Dynamics of ISIL Mobilization: The Challenge of Foreign Fighters,” in Hriar Cabayan and Sarah Canna, eds. Multi-Method Assessment of ISIL (US Special Operations Command Central, 2014), 114–119. 57 Message transcript in Bruce Lawrence, ed. Trans. James Howarth, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (New York, NY: Verso, 2005), 229. 58 See discussion of al-Banna in Ayman al-Zawahiri, The Bitter Harvest: The Muslim Brotherhood Group in 60 Years, 2nd ed. (The As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication (al-Qa’ida), 2005). See discussion of Qutb in Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, 2nd ed. (The AsSahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication (al-Qa’ida), 2010). 59 Tawhid, In John L. Esposito, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford Islamic Studies Online. www. oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e2356, accessed 15 June 2017. 60 Ibid. 61 In, Al-Naba 33, Islamic State, March 2016, 16. English version of this infographic concerning tawhid later published in Rumiyah, 3, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), November 2016, 27. Archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. http://insidethejihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Screen-Shot2017-04-19-at-4.48.21-PM.png. 62 Esther Peskes, “The 18th and 19th Centuries,” In Esther Peskes and W. Ende, Wahhābiyya. In P. Bearman et al, eds. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Brill Reference Online), accessed 15 June 2017. 63 Ibid. 64 For example, of Islamic State leadership calling for supporters to wage jihad against the government of Saudi Arabia, see Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Even if the Disbelievers Despise Such, Al-Furqan (Islamic State). Trans. Al-Hayat (Islamic State), 13 November 2014. For example, of Islamic State’s persistent leveling of accusations of apostasy against both Saudi government leaders and top Saudi religious figures, see article titled “Kill the Imams of Kufr,” in Dabiq 13, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), January 2016, 6–8. For example, of criticisms of the Brotherhood, see the cover story, titled “The Murtadd Brotherhood,” in Dabiq 14, 28–43. 65 Among special issues of works by al-Wahhab produced by Al-Maktabat Al-Himmah (Islamic State) are the following: The Disbelief of the One Who Abandons the Unicity of God; The Three Fundamental Principles, The Six Fundamental Principles, and the Four Foundations of Polytheism; The Duties: The Knowledgeable Obligations Upon All Muslim Men and Women; Clarification of the Doubts, First Edition; A Short Biography of the Prophet, Second Edition; Issue of the Age of Ignorance, First Edition. Archived by Jihadology. http:// jihadology.net/category/muh·ammad-ibn-abd-al-wahab/, accessed 15 June 2017. 66 Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerilla Warfare Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1970), 16. 67 Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Trans. Sameh Strauch, The Book of Tawheed: Explained by Imam Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab (Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1998), 137. 68 For an example of Islamic State explicitly linking non-Muslim influence in the Muslim world to failures to impose sharia, see “Our War with the Polytheists Will Remain,” in al-Naba 33, Islamic State, May 2016. English translation archived by Michael S. Smith II at DOWNRANGE. https://insidethe jihad.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IS_OurWarwiththePolytheistsWillRemain_Naba33.pdf. 69 Daniel Byman, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), 77. 70 Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality (Boston: Brill, 2015), Chapter 13.

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Michael S. Smith II 71 Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 94, 96. 72 This Is Our ‘Aqidah and Our Methodology (Al-Maktabat Al-Himmah (Islamic State), n.d.). 73 Ayman al-Zawahiri, Exoneration: Exonerating the Ummah of the Pen and Sword from the Unjust Allegation of Feebleness and Weakness (The As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication (al-Qa’ida), 2008). 74 Rumiyah 9, Al-Hayat (Islamic State), May 2017, 8–10. 75 Dabiq 14, 44–49. 76 Ibid., 44. 77 Dabiq 14, 8–17 (See citation of a section of one of Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatawa focused on apostasy on pages 15–16). 78 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Ed) (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 54. 79 David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 74. 80 Bernard Haykel, Salafis, In Gerhard Bowering, ed. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 484. 81 al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet. Dabiq 1, 39. 82 Cook, Understanding Jihad, 12. 83 Mohamed Abduh, Trans. Ishaq Musa’ad and Kenneth Cragg, The Theology of Unity (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966), 142. 84 Upon the Prophetic Methodology, Al-Furqan (Islamic State), July 2014. 85 Sûrah 9, At-Taubah, verse 111:   Verily, Allâh has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties for (the price) that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allâh’s Cause, so they kill (others) and are killed. It is a promise in truth which is binding on Him in the Taurât (Torah) and Injeel (Gospel) and the Qur’ân. And who is truer to his covenant than Allâh? Then rejoice in the bargain which you have concluded. That is the supreme success. In Muhammad Taqî-ud-Dîn Al-Hilâlî and Muhammad Muhsin Khân, The Noble Qur’an: English Translation of the meanings and commentary (Madina: King Fahd Complex For The Printing Of The Holy Qur’an, n.d.), 264. www.gph.gov.sa/qurantrans/files/6_PDFDownloadLinkFull.pdf, accessed 15 June 2017.   Hassan al-Banna, In “On Jihad,” Charles Wendell, ed, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 137. 86 Cook, Understanding Jihad, 14. 87 Feryal Salem, The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism (Boston: Brill, 2016), 43. 88 In Wendell, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), 151. 89 Country Information: History, Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia Washington, DC website. www.saudi embassy.net/history, accessed 15 June 2017.

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23 PROXY RELATIONS Iran and Hezbollah Shahram Akbarzadeh

Relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah are sometimes presented by commentators as a Shia alliance. The Shia affiliation of both parties is an obvious manifestation of their shared religious identity. This has fed into the paradigm of study that views Iran as a unique religious state, driven by an ideological agenda. Iran’s revolutionary declarations about supporting the oppressed against oppressors reinforces that image. It is the contention of the author that the notion of a pariah state that challenges the unjust status quo and advocates for Muslim interests is central to Iran’s view of itself, one that it actively cultivates. The idea that Iran is unique and stands on moral grounds is promoted by the ruling regime and is presented as justification for Iran’s external behavior. This exceptionalism is used to present the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah as a partnership against the regional embodiment of evil. Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution in Iran, called the US ‘the Great Satan’. Israel was next on Khomeini’s list and continues to be the target of venomous diatribes for its occupation of Palestinian land. From that point of view, Iran’s partnership with Hezbollah has a clear and tangible purpose: to resist Israel’s occupation of Muslim lands. Upholding the “axis of resistance”, as the Iranian leadership proudly declares, is Iran’s revolutionary mission and a response to the historical injustice that befell Muslims under the watch of colonial powers in the mid-twentieth century. Beneath ideological declarations, however, lie calculated assessments of security threats to Iran. This threat assessment relates primarily to the hostile relationship between Iran and the US, which took a turn for the worse following the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, accompanied by loud noises in Washington for regime change in Iran. The stationing of US troops on either side of Iran was seen in Tehran as a warning sign of impending action. This existential threat facilitated the rise of firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005, leading to escalation of tensions in the region. Iran has frequently been singled out by the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia as a regional threat and a source of instability. In this hostile environment, to which Iran contributed, Iran lacked conventional military power to respond to threats. Years of international sanctions have allowed its military hardware to age and become seriously depleted. This author argues that Iran seeks to make up for its limited conventional firepower by sponsoring sub-state actors and gaining an ability to potentially project influence through its allies. The relationship with Hezbollah is pivotal for Iran. As a tried-and-tested fighting force with a popular backing amongst the Lebanese Shia community, the Hezbollah offers Iran the ability to extend its reach into Levant, threaten Israel and US interests with retaliation in case of an 321

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attempt at regime change, while reiterating its ideological mantra of defending the oppressed. Hezbollah’s significance for Iran was highlighted in the Syrian civil war. The mobilization of Hezbollah troops to push back the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS), also known as Daesh by its Arabic acronym, and other anti-Assad fighters close to Turkey and Western powers appeared to vindicate the Iranian calculation. This intervention, coupled with the deployment of Iranian volunteers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was instrumental in keeping Iran’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power. Iran’s cultivation of proxy relations proved very effective in pushing back the threat to Iran’s regional presence. This chapter begins with an examination of the official worldview in Iran. Exploring the revolutionary ethos of the Islamic Republic of Iran highlights the ideological underpinnings of Iran’s relations with Hezbollah in Lebanon and its relevance for the latter. Subscribing to the same worldview has helped cement ties in this proxy relationship, making Hezbollah a willing and committed player. Iran’s worldview is reinforced by the hostile regional and international scene and security risks that the regime feels could pose existential threats to its survival. Following the examination of the ideological foundations of the relationship, this chapter examines the development of Hezbollah as a viable fighting force under Iran’s patronage. The growing capabilities of Hezbollah to withstand Israeli operations and mount a successful campaign to save Bashar al-Assad against rebel groups in neighboring Syria have demonstrated that Iran has gained an ability to project power in the region in spite of its military limitations. The chapter then turns to the propaganda value that Iran draws from this proxy relationship. Hezbollah’s tenacity against the might of the Israeli army is juxtaposed with the defeat and political incompetence that characterizes the response of most Arab states in relation to Israel. From Tehran’s point of view, Hezbollah’s fighting capacity against Israel puts Iran in a good light. Iran’s patronage of an Arab militia has allowed it to withstand against Israel, serving Iran’s propaganda of championing the Muslim cause against Israel and the US. The ideological underpinnings and propaganda value of Iran’s patronage of Hezbollah are immediately evident. Furthermore, this proxy relationship has already proven effective in protecting Iran’s interests in Syria and serving as a reminder to deter hostile actions against Iran.

Worldview Iran’s worldview, promoted by the founders of the Islamic Republic, is a mix of Marxist revolutionarism, Third World anti-colonialism, and Islamic evangelism. Rohullah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution of 1979, defined the Islamic state in absolute contrast to the deposed Pahlavi regime. The Shah was rejected for opening Iran to Western influences, and more specifically for taking his orders from the US. The image of the Shah as an American puppet harked back to the role the US played in the 1953 coup which secured the Shah’s throne. That image was systematically promoted by leading figures of different political persuasions. Even the proMoscow communist party (Tudeh) adhered to this line. The revolution and the emerging Islamic Republic, therefore, were as much against the Pahlavi monarchy as the US. Chants of ‘down with the Shah’, ‘down with America’ were inseparable in the heady days of the revolution. And when Khomeini dubbed the US the ‘Great Satan’, he was articulating an already established paradigm. The US was seen as the source of evil on a global scale, and the post-­revolutionary Iran was destined to stand up to it. Iran’s inevitable battle with the US was depicted as the battle of justice against injustice. Iran saw itself as the champion of the ‘downtrodden masses’ (Mustazafin) against the arrogance and domination of the ‘oppressors’ (Mustakberin). This worldview allowed the leaders of the newly established Islamic republic to project a grand vision for the future that was not bound by territory and national borders. The revolutionary constitution 322

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adopted in 1979 captures this worldview. Constitutional articles on foreign policy, therefore, are not about defining national interests in Iran’s external relations, but about the promotion of a universal vision that applies to all oppressed people. Article 152 of the Iranian Constitution makes all humanity, especially all Muslims, its point of reference for Iran’s foreign policy: The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is founded on the basis of ending any type of domination, safeguarding the complete independence and integrity of the territory, defending the rights of all Muslims, practicing nonalignment with respect to the dominating powers and maintaining mutual peaceful relationships with nonbelligerent nations. Iran’s global mission is reiterated in article 154: The Islamic Republic of Iran considers its goal to be the happiness of human beings in all human societies. It recognizes the independence, freedom and rule of right and justice for all people of the world. Therefore, while practicing complete self-restraint from any kind of influence in the internal affairs of other nations, it will protect the struggles of the Mustazafin against the Mustakberin, in any part of the world. In the context of the Middle East, this vision meant rejecting most, if not all, regional governments as part of the machinery of oppression against the Muslim masses. However, revolutionary Iran kept its venom for Israel, which it labeled the Zionist entity and the occupier of Muslim lands. Anti-Israel propaganda served an important purpose for the construction of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the champion of Muslim interests. The Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in 1982 offered Iran a timely opportunity to invest in its anti-Israel agenda by sponsoring the formation of Hezbollah. Iran’s message proved contagious in the context of the Lebanese civil war. The Shia population in Lebanon was already at a political disadvantage and felt alienated with a confessional system that privileged the Christian Maronite, based on an outdated snapshot of the demographic composition. The 1932 census put the Shia community as the third largest confession in Lebanon and served as the basis for the allocation of political power, something the Shia contested as not representative of their true size.1 Coupled with the low level of socio-economic standing and Israel’s aggression, the Shia in Lebanon were ready to be mobilized, and Iran’s message of resistance to oppression proved a lightning rod to channel that energy.2 Iran’s revolutionary ideology gave Hezbollah an edge over other Shia militia, most notably Amal. With the help of Iran and Syria, Hezbollah soon gained ascendancy over other Shia organizations in Lebanon and proved to be an effective fighting force against Israel and a reliable ally for Iran. Neither Iran nor Hezbollah hides its ideological affinity. Hezbollah’s logo is clearly inspired by that of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp in Iran, and it utilizes the same terminology used by the Islamic regime. Its founding document, released in 1985, is titled: ‘Open Letter to the Downtrodden of Lebanon and the World’. In this document, Hezbollah declares allegiance to the Iranian version of the Islamic state under the rule of the most learned jurisprudent: vilayet-e faqih.3 Furthermore, this document adheres to the familiar demarcation of the world between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed”, echoing the worldview espoused by Khomeini. This shared worldview and its purported universal value of justice have proven to be potent and inspiring. This sentiment was captured by Subhi al-Tufayli, secretary general of Hezbollah (1989–91): ‘We do not work or think within the borders of Lebanon, this little geometric box, which is one of the legacies of imperialism. Rather, we seek to defend Muslims throughout the world’.4 323

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Iran’s uncompromising stance in relation to liberating Jerusalem from Israeli occupation proved to be very popular among the Lebanese Shia and beyond.5 Having witnessed the failure of other Arab states in pushing back against Israel, Iran appeared to inject energy and enthusiasm into the anti-Israel camp. However, this stance also created problems for Iran, as its Arab neighbors saw the revolutionary government of Iran as a source of instability. Statements by Iranian officials targeting the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq were especially provocative. Khomeini’s fateful boast to ‘liberate Jerusalem via Kabala’ was widely seen in Baghdad and other Arab capitals as a declaration of war, leading to a devastating eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. As the war dragged on and Iraq managed to secure support from Arab states in the Persian Gulf and the US, Iran felt isolated and vulnerable. The war fed into Iran’s sense of insecurity and gave force to the view that Iran needed to look for alternative allies to circumnavigate, and ideally undermine, hostile neighbors.6 At the same time, Iran doubled its provocative postures by way of projecting strength. The Iranian leadership maintained the fanciful claim of liberating Jerusalem from Israeli occupation to galvanize popular support. Ayatollah Ali Mashkini, a Friday prayer leader in Qom, exhibited the Iranian regime’s acute awareness of the potency of the message, especially for the Shi’a, when he remarked in 1982, ‘I am hopeful that soon we will go through Karbala and hand-inhand with Shiites of southern Lebanon liberate Jerusalem’.7 Such determination, in the face of significant odds, proved inspirational for Hezbollah. According to Naim Qassem, deputy leader of Hezbollah, ‘in Lebanon, religious scholars and Islamic groups detected a source of hope and support in the nascent Iranian state’.8 Throughout 1980s and beyond, Iran sponsored the formation, expansion, and battle-readiness of Hezbollah in the face of repeated Israeli attempts to destroy it. Hezbollah’s survival, to be explored in a later section, made it the stuff of legends in the Arab streets and vindicated Iran’s commitment to it as the “flagship” of the revolution.9

Proxy relations Hezbollah proved its worth as a serious fighting force by surviving repeated Israeli attempts to destroy it. In July 1993, Israel launched an assault on Hezbollah in South Lebanon to destroy its infrastructure and render it ineffective in response to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks across the border. This operation was an obvious failure, as Israel felt it necessary to repeat it three years later. The 1996 operation saw massive Israel airpower against Hezbollah strongholds in South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, as well as Beirut. This operation was as ineffectual in curbing Hezbollah as the earlier one. In 2000, Israel gave up on trying to keep Hezbollah out of South Lebanon. This policy reversal was seen as a major victory for Hezbollah and its determination to resist the military might of Israel. Tensions along the border continued, with all-out hostilities flaring up again in 2006 after Hezbollah carried out a cross-border raid to capture Israeli soldiers. Israel’s response was overwhelming. According to Avi Kober, the Israeli air force carried out over 11,000 combat missions, slightly more than the air sorties against the combined Egyptian and Syrian forces in the 1973 war, and double the number of Israeli sorties during the 1982 war in Lebanon.10 Despite this firepower, Hezbollah continued to fire rockets across the border at Israeli targets. It is therefore not surprising that the 2006 war was hailed as a victory by Hezbollah and its backers in Tehran. Hezbollah has demonstrated adaptability and resilience by engaging in asymmetrical warfare, by utilizing hit-and-run tactics, and by avoiding conventional confrontation with the immeasurably superior Israeli armed forces. This strategy has allowed it to maintain a threat factor on Israel, forcing Israel into a ‘state of quasi-permanent alert’.11 The value of Hezbollah as an instrument of Iranian retaliation is significant for Iran. Given the hostile international environment, 324

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Iranian leaders have maintained an unwavering commitment to Hezbollah, and they constantly remind the US and Israel that any attack on Iran would be very costly for them. For a time, such an attack appeared to be a possible scenario. President George W. Bush’s depiction of Iran as a member of the ‘axis of evil’, and the stationing of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, put Iran in a pincer. Washington’s penchant for “regime change” made the Iranian regime very uncomfortable. Iran was constantly reminded that ‘all options are on the table’.12 And Israel persisted on a lobbying campaign to urge action against Iran, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu warning world leaders at the United Nations in September 2012 that Iran was on the verge of building nuclear bombs. Threats against Iran’s nuclear facilities and scientists were taken seriously in Tehran, making its patronage of Hezbollah all the more important in Iran’s security assessment. Iranian leaders were quite forthcoming about retaliatory options in the event of a US or Israeli attack. For example, Ayatollah Jafar Shoujouni, a member of the Combatant Clergy Association, boasted that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had assured him of Hezbollah’s commitment to Iran’s security. Shoujouni retold Nasrallah’s promise: ‘If Israelis come near Tehran, we will destroy Tel Aviv’.13 Nasrallah confirmed this account on a later occasion when he warned Israel that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would invite Hezbollah’s ‘enormous response’.14 Presenting Hezbollah as part of Iran’s defense mechanism has become a standard position in Tehran and a significant pillar of what President Rouhani calls Iran’s military doctrine of deterrence.15 Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah is a key strategic factor for Iran. According to Iran’s Defense Minister Brigadier General Hoseyn Dehqan, Iran remained committed to supplying Hezbollah, amongst other militias, with the weapons necessary to take the fight to Israel: ‘strengthening the resistance movement and Hezbollah to fight against the murderous and occupying Zionist regime is the general and firm policy of Iran’.16 The rise of Daesh and the serious risks it poses to the Assad regime in Syria have further elevated the strategic value of the Iran-Hezbollah-Syria triangle. This has resulted in mobilizing Hezbollah to prop up the Assad regime. From Tehran’s point of view, Syria is a lynchpin of the “axis of resistance”. Syria is the only Arab state to have a security alliance with Iran. DamascusTehran relations have endured over three decades and are highly valued in Tehran.17 According to Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, from the office of the Supreme Leader, Syria has played the role of a communication bridge between Iran and Lebanon. . . . During the [Iran-Iraq] war, when some tried to portray the war as an Arab war against Persians, Syria contradicted this picture and stood side by side with Iran.18 This assessment is shared across the factional divide in the Iranian leadership, to the extent that Foreign Minister Javad Zarif admitted in May 2015: ‘we are supporting the legitimate government of Syria. If we had not provided that support, you would have had Daesh sitting in Damascus now’.19 Continued pressure on the Assad regime has made it necessary for Hezbollah and Iran to become directly involved in the Syrian war. While this was not initially acknowledged, the pace of the conflict drew both more firmly into the theater of war.20 According to a New York Times report, Hezbollah operatives have assumed command of some military operations.21 Hezbollah forces have also engaged rebel groups inside Syria to bolster the regime’s defenses.22 This involvement has been important to stem the tide of anti-Assad rebels. The recovery of al-Qusayr from rebels in 2013, for example, was an important tactical win for Hezbollah. Hassan Nasrullah has justified Hezbollah’s actions as essential for defending ‘the backbone of resistance’.23 This perspective is also dominant in Iran, as Daesh and other rebel groups are seen as the direct or 325

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indirect products of US policy aimed at bolstering Israel’s security by undermining Syria. Israeli airstrikes against the Hezbollah unit in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights, as well as Iranian bases in Syria, tend to vindicate this perspective.24 According to Nasarallah, Syria was the subject of ‘a political plan led by America and the West, and its tools in the region’.25 In other words, the Syrian war is another chapter in the struggle against US imperialism and Israeli oppression. The Iranian leadership feels encircled in a hostile environment. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran (signed in 2015) and the resumption of a hostile tone towards Iran are seen by many in the Iranian leadership as a sign of US deceit and untrustworthiness. The matter is made worse by open contempt in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for Iran. Tensions have heightened as regional Arab states have moved to bolster their military capabilities. The 2010 deal to purchase $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons by Saudi Arabia was dubbed the biggest arms sale in the history of the US.26 This is a source of concern in Tehran. Thomas Juneau notes that Iran’s conventional military power is limited, not only in comparison to the US, the pre-eminent military presence in the region, but also compared to the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey (all of whose individual military expenditures since 2001 dwarf that of Iran).27 To remedy this power imbalance, Iran has resorted to bolstering its asymmetrical capacity. Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, head of the IRGC, has admitted that Iran has been engaged in an ‘asymmetric battle with the enemy’. He boasted that such strategy has frustrated Israel and the US: ‘they saw Iran’s abilities in the 33-day [in 2006] and 22-day [in Gaza in 2008–9] wars against a Zionist army that was armed to the teeth’.28 Hezbollah is a key player in Iran’s national security strategy. Sponsoring Hezbollah allows Iran to compensate for limits on its conventional military power and project power through its proxy. For that reason, Hezbollah’s value for Iran’s security plans is unchallenged by competing factions within the Iranian state.

Propaganda value The Iranian leadership routinely boasts about Hezbollah’s capacity to take the war to Israel and remain defiant in the face of its military might as evidence of its “victory”. Hezbollah is lionized for its performance during the 2006 war, when it continued to fire Katyusha rockets at Israel despite the best efforts of the Israeli armed forces to thwart and eliminate it. The following depiction in the conservative daily Kayhan captured the tone of the political discourse in the wake of the 2006 war: These days, the camp of the infidels and the arrogant powers is charged with feelings of anger and sorrow, but the atmosphere in the Muslims’ camp is filled with joy, pride, and self-confidence. In fact, the victory of Seyyed Hasan Nasrallah and his resistance movement against the armed-to-the-teeth Zionists alleviated the Muslims’ heartache after 58 years of defeat and humiliation and boosted morale among the despairing people of the Muslim and Arab Middle East.29 Kayhan was referring to the repeated military defeats of Arab armies and the shame that Israel has brought to Arabs and Muslims by its occupation of Palestinian lands. These are emotive concepts in a region where honor is valued so highly. In the Iranian narrative, Hezbollah was reclaiming Arab’s honor by achieving what no other Arab army had achieved. This was the first time an Arab military force had not capitulated to Israel’s military campaign.30 The Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani captured the enormity of this episode by declaring that Hezbollah has destroyed the ‘myth of Israel’s invincibility’.31 This was cause for celebration and pride in 326

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Iran, especially since Tehran had been the long-standing sponsor of Hezbollah. In the words of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: Heroic Lebanon and Hezbollah showed that one can stand up against and defeat Israel with resistance and firm determination. This is something that some politicians in Islamic countries could not at all imagine, but it happened. Israel was defeated because Hezbollah and the people of Lebanon showed steadfastness and resistance, because they relied on Allah the Exalted and because they utilized all their capabilities.32 The evocation of the concept of honor and dignity that Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran was reclaiming for the Muslim world offered a significant publicity edge. The Iranian leadership openly urged the Palestinians and other Arabs to follow the example of Hezbollah, raising alarms among many observers. One such anxious account was presented by Robert Baer, who argued, Hizbullah and Nasrallah have inspired the alienated and disenfranchised throughout the Muslim world, stretching across sectarian lines. These successes are critical milestones in Iran’s long-term imperial plans. Next stops: the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Egypt. . . . Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians are inexorably succumbing to Iran’s sway.33 This interpretation may be alarmist, but it was far from what the Iranian leadership was hoping to achieve. By emphasizing Muslim unity and pointing to Israel as the common enemy of all Muslims, Iranian leaders were trying to avoid sectarian divisions and not to be seen as a purely Shi’a player. This message continues to be played out today, against the backdrop of the worst Muslim sectarian conflict in modern times. Ali Larijani, noted earlier, continues to call Hezbollah the ‘honour of the world of Islam’.34 With the Syrian war and the raging sectarian conflict, the propaganda value of Hezbollah for Iran has suffered a setback. Iran’s relations with Sunni groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have deteriorated significantly due to Tehran’s support for the Assad regime. Iran’s policy on Syria has effectively cut it off from other (predominantly Sunni) Arab organizations and the Arab streets. The sectarian war has shattered Iran’s efforts to foster and lead a united Muslim front. What seemed like an imminent possibility is now a battered concept with little chance of resurrection. But the Iranian leadership refuses to give up on its vision and rejects Daesh and other rebel groups in Syria as tools of oppression, serving the interests of Israel and the US by challenging the “axis of resistance”. This narrative is so central to Iran’s worldview that it is advanced by all factions. The rebels are called terrorists and takfiris (due to Daesh labeling of its opponents as kafir), by the IRGC, President Rouhani, and Hassan Nasrallah. Rejecting the conflict as a war of Sunni vs. Shia and pointing to Israel as the real enemy is the only way that Iran can maintain its grand narrative and justify its involvement and that of Hezbollah’s in Syria. The fact that Nasarallah has also utilized the same justification to explain Hezbollah’s direct conflict with rebels in Syria points to the tightly knit nature of the three-way alliance among Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria, and the significance of a shared worldview in maintaining the relationship.

Conclusion There is a symbiosis between ideology and strategic assessment in Iran. They are mutually reinforcing and difficult to disentangle. Iran’s ideological outlook has guided its actions in sponsoring 327

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the formation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the alliance with Syria against Israel and the US. The notion of resistance against Israel (seen as the occupier of Muslim lands) and the US (seen as the oppressive superpower and sponsor of Israel) served an important purpose in the formation of the “axis of resistance”. This worldview was appealing to the Shi’a militants in Lebanon who subscribed to Iran’s fusion of Islamic revolutionary ideology. The subsequent consolidation of this relationship and arms shipments proved instrumental in Hezbollah’s ability to withstand Israeli onslaught. The benefits were mutual. Iran could bask in the glory of Hezbollah’s victory and reaffirm its role at the helm of the anti-Israel campaign in the Muslim world. Iran’s ability to remind Israel and the US that it has a willing partner on Israel’s doorsteps serves an important strategic purpose. It acts as an important deterrent against Israeli or US airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure and gives Iran an edge to project power. The importance of Hezbollah as a strategic asset was highlighted in recent years following the growing Daesh threat to Assad’s regime. Iran’s risk assessment in relation to Daesh has led to a doubling of its commitment to Hezbollah as a viable and reliable fighting force. Iran views Daesh as a strategic threat to its only state ally in the Arab world, and sees Israel’s hand behind its rise. Given the heightened risk factors, Iran has reaffirmed its commitment to Hezbollah to address the threat to the Assad regime and deter future threats to its territory. In this geopolitical framework, both factions in the Iranian regime are guided by the same mix of ideological and strategic imperatives that have sustained the relations with Hezbollah. The latter is a willing partner in this relationship as Hezbollah relies heavily on Iranian patronage to maintain its fighting capabilities. This willingness is an important feature of a robust proxy relationship, serving Iran as a model to be replicated in other parts of the Middle East to compensate for limitations on its conventional force projection.

Notes 1 A.R. Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 12. 2 Rodger Shanahan, The Shi’a of Lebanon: Clans, Parties and Clerics (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 108. 3 Hezbollah’s Open Letter, 1985. www.cfr.org/terrorist-organizations-and-networks/open-letterhizballah-program/p30967. 4 Cited in Martin Kramer, “Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 47, no. 8 (1994): 30. 5 Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Perpetual Struggle: The Significance of Arab-Israeli Conflict for Islamists,” in Shahram Akbarzadeh, ed. Routledge Handbook of Political Islam (London: Routledge, 2012), 243. 6 Frederic Wehrey et al., Dangerous But Not Omnipotent (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2009), 49–55. 7 Cited in Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71. Karbala is the site of the battle which ended in the slaughter of Imam Hussein (the third Imam for the Shia) and his 72 companions in 680AD. 8 Naim Qassem, Hizbullah: The Story from Within (London: Saqi, 2005), 235. 9 David Menashri, “Iran’s Regional Policy: Between Radicalism and Pragmatism,” Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 157. 10 Avi Kober, “The Israel Defense Forces in the Second Lebanon War: Why the Poor Performance?” The Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 23–24. 11 Sam Razavi, “Iran’s Levantine Ambitions,” in Thomas Juneua and Sam Razavi, eds. Iran’s Foreign Policy Since 2001: Alone in the World (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 127. 12 See, for example, Reuters, 19 June 2007. “Bush Says All Options on Table on Iran,” www.reuters.com/ article/2007/06/19/us-usa-iran-idUSN1945300920070619. 13 The Daily Star 27 September 2011, “Ayatollah: Hezbollah Will Respond to Attack on Iran,” www. dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2011/Sep-27/149810-ayatollah-hezbollah-will-respond-toattack-on-iran.ashx. 14 Al Jazeera, 17 August 2012, “Iran and Hezbollah Issue Warnings to Israel,” www.aljazeera.com/news/ middleeast/2012/08/201281717556151270.html.

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Proxy relations 15 Fars News, 24 August 2014. www.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=13930602000445. 16 Iranian Students News Agency, 27 January 2015. www.isna.ir/fa/news/93110703750/%D9%88%D8%B 2%DB%8C%D8%B1-%D8%AF%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B9-%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B8%D8%B1%D9%81%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D 8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%AA%D8%B3%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%AD-%DA%A9%D 8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%87. 17 Jubin Goodarzi, Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and power politics in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 18–23. 18 Kayhan, 12 September 2014. http://kayhan.ir/fa/news/23898/. 19 Der Speigel, 16 May 2015. “Interview with Iranian Foreign Minister: We Will Have Differences with US No Matter What,” www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-iranian-foreign-ministermohammad-javad-zarif-a-1033966.html. 20 Marisa Sullivan, “Hezbollah in Syria,” Middle East Security Report 19 (2014), Institute for the Study of War, 11. 21 New York Times, 29 April 2015. “An Eroding Syrian Army Points to Strain,” www.nytimes.com/ 2015/04/29/world/middleeast/an-eroding-syrian-army-points-to-strain.html?_r=0. 22 Randa Slim, “Hezbollah and Syria: From Regime Proxy to Regime Savior,” Insight Turkey 16, no. 2 (2014): 68. 23 Quoted in Armenak Tokmajyan, “Hezbollah’s Military Intervention in Syria,” Approaching Religion 4, no. 2 (2014): 105–114. 24 BBC, 19 January 2015. “Iran General Died in Israeli Strike in Syrian Golan,” www.bbc.com/news/ world-middle-east-30882935. 25 Reuters, 25 May 2013. “Nasrallah Says Hezbollah Will Bring Victory to Syrian Ally Assad,” www. reuters.com/article/2013/05/25/us-syria-crisis-hezbollah-idUSBRE94O09120130525. 26 Iran Black. 13 September 2010. “Barack Obama to Authorise Record $60bn Saudi Arms Sale,” The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/13/us-saudi-arabia-arms-deal. 27 Thomas Juneau, “Iran: Rising but Unsustainable Power,” in T. Juneau and S. Razavi, eds. Iranian Foreign Policy Since 2001: Alone in the World (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 20–26. 28 Fars News, 10 December 2013. www.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=13920919001701. 29 Kayhan, 19 August 2006. www.magiran.com/npview.asp?ID=1177362. 30 Mohsen Milani, “Why Tehran Won’t Abandon Assad(ism),” The Washington Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2013): 79–93. 31 Cited in Shahram Chubin, “Iran’s Power in Context,” Survival 51, no. 1 (2009): 172. 32 Website of Sayyid Ali Khamenei (English), “Supreme Leader’s Speech in Meeting with Offi cials and Ambassadors of Islamic Countries,” 24 October 2006. http://english.khamenei.ir//index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2017&Itemid=4. 33 Robert Baer, “Iranian Insurrection,” The National Interest, November/December 2008, 40. 34 Fars News, 17 January 2014. “Larijani: Iran Will Sacrifices Its Life for Hezbollah if It Is Needed,” www. farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=13921024001552.

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24 THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND AN-NAHDA AFTER THE ARAB SPRING A failed project Alison Pargeter One of the consequences of the Arab Spring was the catapulting to the fore of Islamist opposition movements that for decades had been operating in the shadows. Although the widespread popular protests that erupted across the region in 2011 had no real ideological underpinning or direction, they ended up delivering an Islamist victory at the ballot box. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt scored a stunning victory, winning both parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011–2012, while in Tunisia, An-Nahda, which although not formally part of the Muslim Brotherhood was born out of the same ideological tradition, achieved electoral success, going on to head up the new troika government. Although the Libyan Brotherhood, which had never been able to root itself very strongly into Libyan society, failed to achieve the same kind of successes in the elections of 2012, it still went on to play a prominent role in the country’s new power structures. Yet within just one year what had appeared as the dawn of a new Islamist age had been completely shattered. Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown by the military on the back of large-scale protests, plunging the movement into arguably its deepest crisis ever; the Libyan Brotherhood found itself dwarfed by more powerful forces, including other Islamist currents, as the country fell apart around it; and although An-Nahda managed to weather the storm, its experience in power left it weakened, with its credibility severely damaged. This turn of events has had profound consequences for the Muslim Brotherhood in its various incarnations. It has seen the “mother branch” decimated and seemingly unable to digest its fate, while other branches and affiliates are dealing with the fallout by doing their utmost to distance themselves from the Egyptian branch, fearing further damage by association. An-Nahda has struck out even further, declaring that Tunisia has moved into a ‘post-Islamist age’.1 All this has raised serious questions not only about the future of the Muslim Brotherhood but about the future of political Islam more widely. As Osman has described, ‘political Islam in the region, despite a brief moment of ascendancy, has returned to its earlier status: marginalized, mistrusted, or persecuted’.2 This chapter will examine some of the key reasons why the Brotherhood and its Tunisian affiliate’s time in power proved to be so calamitous. It will argue that while the Brotherhood’s failings were the result of a combination of both objective and subjective factors, the primary reasons for its downfall were its inability to articulate or implement any political vision and 330

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its failure to turn itself from a force of the past to one that could rise to the challenges of the contemporary era. Furthermore, in its desire to be in power, the movement ended up watering down its own ideology to the point where it wasn’t clear what it stood for, or what political Islam, as articulated by the Brotherhood, actually meant.

A failed project: the mother branch Of all the countries that experienced the Arab Spring, it was in Egypt where expectations were highest. Although the Brotherhood had long been a transnational Islamist movement, Egypt has always held a special significance in the eyes of its members. It was the founding place of the Brotherhood, which was established in 1928 by school teacher Hassan Al-Banna, before it went on to expand outwards across the Middle East and beyond. In veneration of its special significance, the Brotherhood’s Murshid or Supreme Guide has always been Egyptian and has served as a spiritual reference for the movement’s branches worldwide. The coming to power of the Brotherhood in Egypt, therefore, was imbued with a particular symbolism, and by the time Morsi stepped up to power in June 2012, it looked as though after decades in the shadows, the Brotherhood finally had the country in its hands and was poised to put political Islam, of which it had been the vanguard, into practice. The euphoria proved to be short lived, however, and within a year, the Brotherhood had been brought to its knees. The reasons for its downfall are multifaceted and complex, and cannot all be laid at the door of the Brotherhood. However, one of the movement’s most deadly errors was taking ownership of the revolution only to cut this same revolution short before it had run its full course. Indeed, the Brotherhood was a late entrant to the protests, throwing its weight behind the revolution only when it was clear that they had gathered sufficient momentum to endure. This reluctance to participate was partly a result of the Brotherhood’s natural distrust of revolutionary action in preference for a gradualist approach. The movement had always advocated reforming society from the bottom up, with the aim of preparing it for the eventual establishment of an Islamic state. The reticence was also about self-preservation, driven by a fear of the possible repercussions of engaging in such protests should they not succeed. Once the movement’s leadership made the decision to take part, however, it used both its power and organizational strength to drive the protests forward, effectively carrying the revolution on its shoulders. Yet it was not willing to see this revolution through until its end. Even before Mubarak had agreed to step down, the Brotherhood was looking to use its newfound power to cut some sort of deal with the regime in return for certain concessions. Although the Brotherhood had proclaimed on a number of occasions that it would not deal with what it described as the “illegitimate regime”, on 5 February its leadership announced (to the disquiet of many of its youth) that it was accepting the offer made by Vice President Omar Suleiman to all political forces to take part in a dialogue to calm the streets. Even at this early stage, therefore, the Brotherhood had chosen appeasement over real change. The movement’s preference for appeasement with the existing powers increased following Mubarak’s departure on 11 February 2011. With the president gone, the Brotherhood was keen to get down to the business of negotiating the transition, as if simply taking the lid off this military-backed dictatorship was change enough. According to senior Egyptian Brotherhood member, Mohamed Soudan, ‘After 11 February most leaders of the Brotherhood said “let’s go and calm the country down and let’s stop the protests and make a deal with the army” ’.3 Thus, while the revolutionaries were still in Tahrir Square, the Brotherhood turned away from the protests and began negotiating with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which took power after Mubarak stepped aside, and that was looking for a way to put an end to the 331

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unrest. Or, as one retired General reflected, ‘The SCAF’s goal at the time was to calm down the streets, and with the Brothers being the most organised and numerous group, they naturally felt it made sense to let them have a critical say’.4 That the Brotherhood was willing to negotiate with the SCAF at this time was reflective of its traditional conservatism. The Brotherhood had always preferred to strike deals with whatever regime happened to be in power at any given time, regardless of its credentials. The movement’s history is littered with compromises and deals struck with the most autocratic of regimes in the interests of carving out the greatest possible space for itself.5 As the late Hossam Tammam observed, ‘By virtue of their history, the Brotherhood were always with the regime, even when they confronted it and took part in a revolution against it’.6 For the Brotherhood, therefore, the revolution was always a vehicle rather than an end in itself. Once the opportunity arose, it jumped at the chance to try to craft the transition, believing it could maneuver its way around the SCAF, and in so doing, breathing new life into the very power that would cut it down so brutally a little over two years later. This course of action turned out to be a mistake of the greatest proportions. Although the transition worked to the Brotherhood’s advantage, enabling it to sweep to power in parliamentary elections and to take victory in presidential elections, the SCAF turned out to be a far cannier operator than the Brotherhood had anticipated. The SCAF remained a powerful force throughout the Brotherhood’s time in power, repeatedly putting obstacles in its way and never allowing it free rein to rule. As Investment Minister in Morsi’s government Yahyia Hamid described, The military always sent the message: If you have the executive, I want the legislative. If you take the legislative, I will undermine your executive power and I will create problems in the state so you can’t move on. You won’t be able to achieve progress or real development.7 As such the Brotherhood found itself in a kind of cat and mouse game with the SCAF, with the latter repeatedly moving the goalposts, and issuing declarations and decrees to hem the movement in.8 It wasn’t only the SCAF that placed obstacles in the Brotherhood’s path. There were large sections of the state, including the judiciary and the police, which were, if not openly hostile to the Brotherhood, deeply suspicious of it. Although the institutions of the Egyptian state were not monolithic bodies and contained more pro-reformist currents that were equally happy to see the end of Mubarak, these institutions and particularly those in the security sector had nonetheless been brought up on a diet of anti-Islamism and viewed the Brotherhood’s coming to power with alarm. As one former high-ranking member of the state security services commented, ‘Inside the police they wanted to choke them [the Brotherhood] to death’.9 Furthermore, many in the state had an image of themselves as modern and progressive, this being at odds with what they perceived to be the Brotherhood’s outdated, reactionary outlook. They also feared that Morsi would implement policies that would directly affect their own interests. These forces were determined, therefore, to see the Brotherhood fail. The Brotherhood, then, was always constrained within the environment in which it was operating. However, these external limitations are not sufficient to explain the Brotherhood’s downfall. Other factors related to its own inherent weaknesses and failings were at play. Perhaps most strikingly, the movement came to power completely unprepared for governing and seemingly without any tangible project or vision. Despite the decades in opposition, the Brotherhood arrived in power looking as though it had barely considered what it would do once it got there. As former Foreign Minister and Arab League chief Amr Moussa described, ‘They weren’t 332

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ready to rule Egypt and they hadn’t prepared themselves to do so. Even coming to power was a surprise for them’.10 This lack of preparedness was a manifestation of the fact that the Brotherhood had never claimed to want to rule and had never expected to be in a position to be able to do so. During its long years in opposition, it had always resisted forming a political party, because this was going against the teachings of its founder, and it was always more focused on gaining acceptance within the existing system than on trying to attain power. Even the series of reform platforms that the movement issued in the 2000s, and which read rather like election manifestos, were related more to making the movement appear more acceptable internationally in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC on 9/11, which shone a new spotlight on Islamist movements worldwide, than to any attempt at a deep-seated change in the framework of the movement’s ideology.11 More importantly, the Brotherhood had never been able to articulate exactly what it was or what it stood for. Although not a political party, it was always more than just a socio-religious movement, blurring the line under the banner of political Islam. This lack of clarity was not a problem while it was in semi-clandestine opposition, where it could hide behind slogans and loose definitions. Its own supporters certainly appeared unconcerned by such vagueness, with many supporting the Brotherhood because they saw in it a morally untainted force that represented Islam itself. Once the 2011 revolution forced it out into the open, however, the Brotherhood had a much wider audience to play to, and it was faced with trying to articulate exactly what it was and what it stood for. This attempt was encapsulated in its political program, the Renaissance Project, which it used as its campaign platform. Yet despite being many years in the making, this Renaissance Project demonstrated the movement’s inability to translate its slogans into concrete policy ideas. This program was a cobbled-together set of vague ideas and commitments that promised everything from improved sanitation to near-divine salvation. A leaflet issued at the time of Morsi’s election campaign even went as far as to state that the Renaissance project was based on ‘the project of the Prophet (pbh) which is about transforming shepherds and idol worshipers into the patrons of nations and the makers of the greatest civilisation known to mankind’.12 Despite these lofty ideals, the project was strikingly light on detail; in the words of prominent Islamic thinker Mohamed Salim Al-Awa, ‘This project doesn’t respect our minds. They are selling us air’.13 Its naivete gave the strong impression that the Brotherhood had arrived in power with no clear vision or grasp of the challenges ahead. This same naivete prompted the movement to opt for Mohamed Morsi as its presidential candidate once its first-choice candidate, Khairet Al-Shatter, had been disqualified over a disputed criminal conviction related to alleged money laundering and funding a banned group. Morsi was a bumbling and unremarkable character, who in the eyes of many was far from presidential material. This view was even shared by some former senior Brotherhood members. Former Deputy Supreme Guide Mohamed Habib complained about Morsi’s poor public speaking capabilities, and also bemoaned the fact that he ran the state as if it didn’t have ‘a history or status or tradition’.14 Abul Futuh meanwhile accused, ‘He talks in generalities and slogans and he talks in a way that is closer to a preacher than a president. His speeches are not clear’.15 The Brotherhood’s choice in this respect was symptomatic of its general lack of awareness about how it was perceived, as well as its long-standing conviction that the movement, and by extension Islam, was bigger than the individual. This poor cognizance of the effect of its own choices dovetailed with the movement’s inability to comprehend that the lack of proper separation between it and its political party was also problematic. Although the Brotherhood insisted that the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), 333

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established in April 2011, was a separate entity to the movement,16 the reality demonstrated otherwise. The Brotherhood seemed to see no contradiction between its insistence and the fact that three heavyweights from its Guidance Office were appointed to lead the FJP,17 and that it wrote the party’s platform and approved its bylaws.18 In addition, while membership of the FJP was not obligatory for the movement, Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie forbade all Brotherhood members from joining any other political party. It was no surprise then that when it applied for official recognition on 18 May 2011, it already boasted some 9,000 founding members.19 By continuing to insist that the movement was completely independent from the party, the Brotherhood further undermined its credibility and trustworthiness. Its credibility was also damaged by its tendency, born out of long years of repression, to only trust its own. As former member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Office Abdelmonem Abul Futuh observed, ‘The nature of the Brotherhood’s leadership is closed. They don’t trust anybody but themselves. Even when they brought in people outside of the Muslim Brotherhood they chose them on the basis that they would be followers’.20 Likewise, Islam Al-Kattatni, the brother of FJP chairman Saad Al-Kattatni, commented, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood doubt everyone other than themselves. They don’t trust anyone’.21 This reliance on only the most trusted individuals resulted in the Brotherhood governing through personal connections and informal politics to the point where Morsi’s own appointed officials were unclear about what was really going on. Mohamed Seif El-Dawla, a member of Morsi’s advisory team, complained, ‘The decision making process is like walking in a minefield without a map’.22 Ayman Al-Said, another of Morsi’s advisors commented, ‘He [Morsi] listens to a very wide circle of advisers and experts. Yet, decision taking is different. I don’t know who makes final decisions’.23 As such, the Brotherhood failed to shake off the mentality of being a semi-clandestine opposition power, and failed too to demonstrate that it had the necessary tools and vision to carry Egypt through such a critical time in its transition.

Veneration of the state To those who had hoped for real change, the Brotherhood was disappointing in other ways, too. It proved that just like the nationalist regime before it, it considered the state as the center of everything. Or, in the words of Tunisian Islamist Jalal Ouerghi, it demonstrated that the ‘culture of veneration of the state and its historical role as vanguard is at the heart of Islamist thought just as it sits at the heart of the secular, liberal and nationalist forces of the region’.24 Within this context, controlling the state became paramount, hence the movement’s reluctance to share power or to work consensually with other political forces in a genuine spirit of collaboration and partnership. This reluctance became evident very early on. Morsi’s first government may have been Brotherhood-light, with only five FJP ministers and the remainder of posts being divided among independents, technocrats, and members of the former regime, but it was notably lacking in representatives of the main political parties and forces that had supported the revolution. This was not the partnership government that forces had hoped for when they attended the Fairmont Hotel meeting on 21 June 2012. At this gathering, Morsi had reportedly given his word to the tens of opposition leaders who attended, that if he got to power, he would include all political forces in a national unity government and launch a comprehensive national project in return for their willingness to back his bid for the presidency. These leaders agreed because they saw supporting Morsi as the best way to prevent his rival and the SCAF’s candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, from winning the second round of the presidential elections. Yet once Morsi had taken power, such promises seemed to fizzle into thin air, and the Brotherhood dismissed these other opposition forces, preferring to keep Egypt’s transition 334

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as a battle for the state between it and the SCAF, or between what were two forces of the past, both born out the same authoritarian tradition. Furthermore, rather than try to remold or reform the state, the Brotherhood opted to try to win it over and tame it. To this end, the movement relied on goodwill and a belief that clearing out those individuals who were at the top of state institutions would be sufficient to bring about change. As the Brotherhood’s Secretary General Mahmoud Hussein explained, ‘Dr Morsi and his presidential team thought that large numbers of the institutions of the deep state were nationalist and that we could rely on that. . . . Morsi looked at problems in a sincere way and if there had been enough sincere people he would have solved them’.25 Similarly, former FJP MP Gamal Heshmat posited, ‘We wanted the police to be better and to give them the chance to repent and change for the better but none of them took up that opportunity’.26 Such an approach was more akin to a socio-religious movement seeking to reform individuals through example and guidance than that of a contemporary political party navigating its way through a difficult transition in which expectations for change were high. Even Morsi’s attempt to clear out senior members of the SCAF, including Field Marshal Mohamed Hussain Tantawi and Lieutenant General Sami Anan in August 2012, as well as the General Prosecutor Abdel Megid Mahmoud in October 2012, proved to be clumsy and half-hearted, more opportunistic than part of any considered strategy.27 Indeed, these expulsions were more like reactive gestures, seized upon in the moment and born out of a belief that by replacing corrupt individuals with more morally upright ones, things would improve. Despite the fact that Morsi had a popular mandate to bring about change, the Brotherhood stopped short of engaging in policies that would herald real reform. The same was true of its economic policies, and there was no real attempt to distinguish these policies from those of the Mubarak regime, other than some efforts to strengthen ties with investors in Qatar and the Gulf, or to make more space for Brotherhood-affiliated businessmen. As Dalacoura has argued, the FJP was ‘comfortable with a neo-liberal agenda’ and was ‘unwilling to challenge socioeconomic structures’, seeking little more than a ‘change of elites within pre-existing socioeconomic structures’.28 The Brotherhood was even willing to continue to negotiate a US$ 4.8 billion loan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an institution it had dismissed before coming to power as a tool of US interventionism.29 Although this loan that was initiated by the SCAF prior to Morsi’s presidency was never signed off, this was due to Morsi’s unwillingness to face the repercussions of implementing the IMF’s demands that he implement reductions in fuel subsidies and increases in taxes rather than any ideological rejection to borrowing from such an institution. In the end, therefore, the Brotherhood failed to deliver a clear economic policy or to implement any policies that would mark it out as different from its predecessors. It also shied away from tackling the endemic corruption that had eaten through the Egyptian state and that was one of the key drivers of the 2011 revolution. While the enormity of such a task should not be underestimated, the movement failed to initiate any serious plan or roadmap to deal with the problem and again seemed to be relying on its ability to reform those who were guilty of such vices. As Senior Brotherhood member Ashraf Abdel Gaffar explained, ‘The party offered a very decent civilised and human alternative for corrupt bureaucrats by asking them to stop what they were doing or else be taken to court. Or they had to show us their willingness to fix their mistakes and we would let them go after that’.30 FJP member Abdelmawgud Dardery reiterated the same idea explaining, What the FJP did was they offered a very decent, very humane, very civilised alternative. These corrupt bureaucrats, we asked them to stop it or we would take them to 335

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court or if they were willing to fix some of the problems they created we would let them go . . . that was the theory but now I think it was naïve thinking because it seems that the deep state needed a harsh hand.31 The Brotherhood’s foreign policy proved to be no more inspiring. Although anti-Westernism had always been a cornerstone of its rhetoric, when it came to ruling there was no tangible attempt to reorient Egypt’s foreign relations away from the West other than a few faint gestures. These included Morsi’s efforts to deepen relations with Iran and his visits to China and Russia that were meant to demonstrate a more independent foreign agenda. Even over Palestine, which had always been one of the Brotherhood’s most prominent rallying causes, the movement ended up acting as mediator rather than agitator. In November 2012, Morsi opted for the path of pragmatism rather than ideologue when he helped to broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas, achieving rare international acclaim in the process. The need to be acceptable and to engage in realpolitik trumped any ideological concerns. As Shadi Hamid told the Financial Times, Morsi’s ‘foreign policy could not be as confrontational or as anti-Israeli as he might have liked. . . . He had to portray himself as a responsible leader on the international stage’.32 To some Egyptians, this movement that had always spiced its rhetoric with anti-Israeli and anti-Western sentiment was far more preoccupied with making itself acceptable to Western powers. As Nabil Fahmy, Egypt’s former ambassador to Washington and a member of the AlDustour party, observed, ‘Morsi’s foreign policy moves to send a message to the world that the Islamist current is moderate and could be dealt with’.33 While such an approach was entirely understandable within the realm of realpolitik, it alienated some of the movement’s base, raising questions over what it really stood for. Islam Kattani, the brother of Saad Kattani, described, ‘They [the Brotherhood] brought us up on a hatred for the West and suddenly we were now part of that camp that we used to hate because they relied on the US and Western powers. I couldn’t square it’.34 To some, therefore, it was starting to look as though the Brotherhood had shed some of the principles that had been at its core for decades and that distinguished it from its predecessors. Even in the Islamic arena, the Brotherhood’s ideology seemed to dissolve once it got to power, and there was little to mark it out as a specifically Islamist party. Although the FJP tried to introduce a bill to bolster Islamic Finance that was disrupted when the parliament was dissolved in 2012, it did little to introduce Islamic laws or to impose itself regarding public morality. Its approach to the constitution drafting process was a case in point. Although the Brotherhood’s long-held motto included the words ‘the Quran is our constitution’, and while Morsi had promised to build ‘the Islamic State in Egypt on the same principle of the first Islamic state that was established in Al-Medina’,35 when it came to it, the Brotherhood employed its usual cautious approach. In its bid to placate all constituencies simultaneously, the Brotherhood ended up in the somewhat anomalous position of trying to rein in the Salafists in their bid to bind the text of the constitution more directly to Sharia. The Salafists demanded that Article 2 of the 1971 constitution, which states ‘Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic its official language. Principles of Islamic Sharia are the principal source of legislation’, be amended to specify that ‘Sharia’ rather than the ‘principles of Sharia’ be stipulated as the source of legislation. The Salafists called, too, for the modification of Article 3 to read ‘Sovereignty is for God and it is the source of authority’ rather than ‘Sovereignty is for the people alone and they are the source of authority’.36 Such an overt approach was too much for the Brotherhood, which had long had a wooly approach to Sharia, arguing that it was something to be applied gradually, or that it was a

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“general framework” with elements such as the application of hudud (punishments) to be postponed, or interpreted to reflect the contemporary reality. Moreover, the Brotherhood had been involved in a long process of watering down, or “secularising”, its ideology in a bid to make itself more acceptable. Its reformist platforms of the 2000s had moved away from advocating the implementation of an Islamic state to calling for a civil state run along Islamic lines. Although the Brotherhood never articulated exactly what it meant by this term, and while it never filtered such ideas down through the grass roots of the movement, it had already begun the process of trying to present itself as a more progressive entity that could work within a contemporary political setting. The Brotherhood had few qualms, therefore, in deciding not to meet the Salafists’ demands regarding the constitution. Rather, it opted to steer its usual middle course. Article 2 was not amended, but an additional article was added stating that senior Al-Azhar scholars were to be consulted in matters pertaining to Islamic law. Another article was also added defining the ‘principles of Islamic sharia’ stipulated in Article 2 as including ‘general scriptural bases [the Quran and the Hadith] and the main bases of jurisprudence and sources accepted by Islamic scholars’. While many liberals were deeply uneasy about the addition of this article, for the Brotherhood, it served as enough of a sop to get the Salafists to support the text of the constitution without giving in to all their demands. As such, the Brotherhood ended up as an Islamist party that showed few inclinations to Islamicize Egyptian society or even to push it in that direction if doing so would frustrate its political ambitions. As El-Sherif has argued, the Brotherhood proved to be ‘too willing to sacrifice elements of its ideology for short-term political victories’.37 The Brotherhood seemed content to sit in the middle, being neither one thing nor the other. In fact, this ambiguous stance encapsulated the Brotherhood’s very being. It had always emphasized that it represented the wasati current, or middle way, a term the Brotherhood used to distinguish itself from other Islamist strands, particularly those that espoused violence. But to many, especially those who were waiting for the movement to fulfill its promise to reconnect society with its “authentic self ”, this middle path gave the impression that the movement was feeble and its ideology muddy. To make matters worse, this approach did not succeed in convincing the Brotherhood’s detractors either, who saw only deceit and doublespeak, and who believed that this lukewarm approach hid far more sinister intensions. As such, the Brotherhood ended up failing to meet the expectations of those who wanted real change on the political, economic, and social fronts, while further alienating those who were already suspicious of the movement and its motives, and who believed Morsi was the president of Islamists rather than the president of Egyptians.

Decline and fall As its time in power continued and the difficulties of ruling became ever more apparent, the Brotherhood entrenched itself increasingly in reactive policy-making, and in the absence of any concrete political vision or program, the only tool left to it was the street. The Brotherhood had used mobilization from the outset as a means of pressurizing the SCAF into meeting its demands. Whenever things got tough, the Brotherhood called its supporters back into Tahrir Square, pulling them out again once their demands were met. In the run-up to the parliamentary elections, for example, the Brotherhood called on its members to protest in full force after the SCAF announced a series of supra-constitutional principles, awarding itself far-reaching powers related to the drawing up of a new constitution.

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However, the more difficult the challenges became, the more the Brotherhood took refuge in mobilizing its supporters against the very state it was meant to be leading. This was particularly evident following Morsi’s issuing of his controversial Constitutional Declaration on 22 November 2012, a move that was to mark the beginning of the end for the Brotherhood. This declaration gave the President sweeping new powers, effectively placing him above judicial oversight.38 It was issued primarily as a response to the Brotherhood’s belief that the judiciary, hand-in-hand with the SCAF, was about to deal it another blow by dissolving the Shura Council and Constituent Assembly, and that this was part of a wider conspiracy to bring Morsi down.39 It was a frantic and ill-conceived attempt by Morsi to protect his position and to strike out against those he believed were trying to make him fail. Yet through it, the Brotherhood demonstrated just how far it had failed to understand that this Constitutional Declaration would be perceived as nothing less than a naked power grab. Despite the Brotherhood’s efforts to explain its move in revolutionary terms, claiming that the declaration had been an attempt to protect what Brotherhood Guidance Office member Mahmoud Ghozlan described as ‘the original demands of the revolution’,40 its issuing provoked immediate uproar. There was an outpouring of accusations that Morsi had staged a coup against constitutional legitimacy. ‘An absolute presidential tyranny’41 was how liberal politician Amr Hamzawy described it, while head of the Constitution Party Mohamed Al-Baradei accused Morsi of having appointed himself as Egypt’s new pharaoh.42 Angry Egyptians also took to the streets to protest, while some of the Brotherhood’s offices were attacked and set alight. Worse for the Brotherhood, the opposition closed ranks against it, forming the National Salvation Front, which made a series of demands, including that Morsi rescind the decree and that he appoint a new Constituent Assembly that was more representative than the Islamist-dominated body that was drawing up the new constitution. The Brotherhood responded by calling on its supporters to come out into the street to voice their support for Morsi’s decree.43 It also called for a million-man march and demonstration in Abdeen Square on 27 November, although it later put off this march in order to avoid bloodshed. On 1 December 2012, it encouraged a mass show of force, as tens of thousands of its supporters amassed near Cairo University and in other cities. The next day, Brotherhood supporters descended on the Constitutional Court, chanting slogans against it and in support of Morsi. In the heat of the moment, therefore, the Brotherhood, seemingly not knowing what else to do, fell back on its own constituency. Or, in the words of Abdelmonem Abul Futuh, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood tried to break the will of institutions by mobilisation. Getting people out into the street became an aim in itself ’.44 This strategy was to prove fatal. By 5 December, the situation had become completely out of hand. The opposition convened a sit-in in front of the Presidential Palace at Ittihadiya, while the Brotherhood called on its supporters to launch a counter-demonstration outside the palace. In the inevitable showdown that took place, 10 people were killed and more than 700 were injured. This incident saw any confidence that was left in the Brotherhood drain away, while the SCAF took the opportunity to intervene more overtly in political affairs. Following the Ittihadiya clashes, the then Defense Minister Abdelfatah Sissi called for a meeting of ‘national unity for the love of Egypt to bring together partners of the country in the presence of the president of the republic’.45 Even more ominously, the SCAF began to make common cause with some of the opposition groups from the National Salvation Front. As Egypt became gripped by rising instability and anti-Brotherhood protests, it was only a matter of time before Morsi was brought down by a combination of people power and the military, which struck its fatal blow on 3 July 2013. 338

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Within the space of just one year, therefore, the Brotherhood proved itself utterly incapable of dealing with the challenges of ruling. Rather, the movement seemed like a lost body, reacting to events around it and still unable to articulate what it really stood for, as the country fell apart around it.

An-Nahda in power If the Brotherhood’s time in power in Egypt was a disaster, the experiences of An-Nahda in Tunisia were little more encouraging. Although An-Nahda, which had always positioned itself on the more progressive end of the wasati current, proved to be a far shrewder operator than the Brotherhood, it still fell into many of the same trappings as its Egyptian counterpart. After achieving victory in the October 2011 elections to the Constituent Assembly, taking 89 out of 217 seats, An-Nahda formed a troika government with two secular parties, the Congrès pour la République (CPR) and the Forum Démocratique pour le Travail et les Libertés, known as Ettakatol. Although sharing power in this way should have set An-Nahda up to work in a more consensual fashion, the reality proved to be somewhat different. Given its electoral success, An-Nahda naturally took the most important post – that of Prime Minister, with Hamadi Jebali being appointed to the job. However, An-Nahda made use of the weakness of its partners in the troika to ensure its domination of the new government. The party took most of the sovereign ministries, including the Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Justice ministries, for itself, although the defense ministry went to Abdelkarim Zbidi of the outgoing interim government. The remainder of government posts were divided up between other An-Nahda members, its troika partners, and independents. AnNahda ensured therefore that it was very much in the driving seat. An-Nahda was also accused of stuffing the administration with its own members. Abu Yaareb Marzouki, an advisor to Jebali, who resigned in 2013, accused An-Nahda of treating power as if it were a “spoil of war”, distributing government posts among ‘its friends, its allies and others who were close to it’ despite the fact these individuals had ‘no competence’.46 Abu Yareeb Marzouki also complained bitterly that despite his entreaties to Jebali to bring others on board, the prime minister listened only to those advisers who were from An-Nahda with whom he had surrounded himself.47 An-Nahda shura council member Jalal Ouerghi leveled similar complaints, stating, ‘An-Nahda chose to give priority to its members when appointing posts. This was in order to use its own people and to secure loyalty’.48 Just like the Brotherhood in Egypt, therefore, An-Nahda seemed to only place real trust in its own. It also used its newfound power to distribute posts as a kind of compensation for the years its members had suffered in the prisons of the former regime. The Culture Minister in Jebali’s government, Mehdi Mabrouk, explained how An-Nahda member ministers were ‘not the best qualified in the party’ but were chosen ‘because of personal relationships and the need to uphold a regional balance, as well as the compensation principle i.e., the number of years spent in prison’.49 In direct contravention of its own rhetoric about the need for consensus politics, therefore, An-Nahda appeared to be engaged very early on in a power grab that it justified partly on the suffering it had undergone prior to coming to power. The party also gave the strong impression that it was prioritizing its own interests above those of the country. Even Jebali acknowledged the problem, explaining in 2014, What I take against An-Nahda is the fact that they are not sufficiently interested in public affairs. The ruling party has to be open, not to close itself. It has to change its organisational mentality, i.e., the concept of affiliation. All Tunisians are our people.50 339

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Equally damaging was An-Nahda’s failure to dispel the image that Ghannouchi was really in control. The local media frequently drew attention to Ghannouchi’s ambiguous role, with one local journalist asking, Who out of Ghannouchi and Marzouki [President Moncef Marzouki] or even Jebali is really running Tunisia? This is not a working hypothesis as this question has continued to be asked because the leader of the An-Nahda movement gives the impression that he is guiding the actions of the government, the head of which seems to obey him completely.51 Even Hamadi Jebali admitted that he was not free to make decisions for himself. As he explained, The head of the government should be for all Tunisians. An-Nahda as a party entrusted me as head of the government not to put the state in the service of the party. . . . So I wanted all ministers especially those from An-Nahda to respect the rule of the state, its laws, institutions, the auditing institutions, administrative courts. And I saw that it was difficult for the ruling parties to accept that ministers should follow the head of the government and the government and not anyone else. The party can expel the head of the government but when it trusts someone to head it he has to be in the service of the state not the service of the party. So I wasn’t free to choose ministers. I also wasn’t free to do what I wanted. I felt the ministers belonged to their own parties more than the government. I wanted to reform that. I couldn’t.52 It was clear therefore, that An-Nahda struggled to separate the party from the state. Like the Brotherhood, An-Nahda also struggled to come up with tangible policies. Although it produced a more sophisticated and comprehensive electoral platform than its Egyptian counterpart, once it got to power, it seemed lost. As Tunisian scholar and progressive Islamist Saleh Jourchi observed, Tunisians came to discover that An-Nahda ‘suffered from a complete absence of political thought about how to run the transition’.53 More damningly, he continued, ‘It dealt with state affairs as if they were a hobby’.54 Even Sheikh Abdelfatah Moru, An-Nahda’s second in command, commented, ‘The Islamists had a partial understanding of the reality they were living in. They had no idea about economics or about the international scene. And most importantly they didn’t know why our people are backward’.55 An-Nahda also appeared to share the Egyptian Brotherhood’s faith in the idea that if more morally upright men were in charge, things would improve. The party certainly didn’t engage in any real attempts at reforming the state or the underpinnings of the old regime, including its hated security sector. Although Interior Minister Ali Larayedh declared that the security sector needed to be brought in line with the requirements of a democratic regime, there was no real attempt to undertake structural reforms or even to set out a roadmap for such reforms.56 Rather, An-Nahda employed a few half-hearted gestures, such as removing senior personnel, although it was not always successful even in this regard. In January 2012, for example, Ali Larayedh tried to expel the head of the Intervention Brigades, Moncef Laajimi, who had been accused of issuing orders to fire on protestors during the revolution and during previous unrest. However, after several hundred Laajimi supporters staged a protest in front of the Interior Ministry, An-Nahda backtracked, even going on to promote Laajimi to the post of deputy chief of the cabinet of the Interior Ministry. Larayedh’s willingness to backpedal in this way gave rise to suspicions that An-Nahda had no real backbone and that it had entered into a kind of alliance with remnants of the old regime to the advantage of both parties.57 Once again, it was looking 340

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as though two old forces of the past were carving things up between themselves in order to serve their own interests. That is not to say that An-Nahda wasn’t up against deep-seated challenges, including an elite that was avowedly hostile and determined for it to fail. Although An-Nahda was not as constrained as the Brotherhood in Egypt, there were still powerful forces at play who sought to undermine it wherever they could. Where the Brotherhood had the military to contend with, An-Nahda was faced with the secular left, who were just as determined to put obstacles in the way of rule by Islamists. However, rather than prioritizing working with other political actors to push for change, An-Nahda preferred to retain the state in its existing format. Despite Ghannouchi talking repeatedly during his time in opposition about the need to strengthen society, once An-Nahda came to power, it shifted its focus entirely on the state and on ruling, betting on the state ‘as a tool to achieve everything’.58 There was little evidence of An-Nahda engaging in any concrete attempts to change things on the economic front either. An-Nahda continued to pursue the previous regime’s neoliberal, pro-business agenda while trying not to alienate the poorer segments of society, whose grievances had driven the revolution.59 Yet An-Nahda, which had based its economic planning on the misplaced expectation of accessing significant financial assistance from both Libya and the Gulf, struggled to deliver. It soon found itself facing strikes and protests in the impoverished regions of the interior and beyond. In August 2012, for example, angry protests erupted in Sidi Buzid (the birthplace of the revolution) because of the government’s failure to alleviate economic hardships, while a few months later, protests broke out in Siliana at the lack of jobs and opportunities. The heavy-handed response of the police, which left at least 300 young people wounded, many of them blinded, prompted protestors to accuse An-Nahda of ‘reproducing the behaviour of the Ben Ali regime’.60 The anger against An-Nahda was intensified because in June 2014 it introduced a public sector recruitment law that stipulated the direct recruitment of one member of the family of each martyr of the 2011 revolution, as well as all beneficiaries of the general amnesty that was accorded to all political prisoners after the revolution.61 Most of the political prisoners released under this amnesty were Islamists, many of them An-Nahda members. Such moves, especially at a time when the country was undergoing acute financial difficulties, did little to endear AnNahda to the wider Tunisian public. As such, there was little to distinguish An-Nahda as a specifically Islamist party in its political or economic approach and An-Nahda was to prove willing to water down its ideology to make itself acceptable enough to remain in power. This dilution of its core Islamic principles was not something new. Prior to the revolution, Ghannounchi had been known for his progressive theories of “Islamic Democracy”, while the party’s political wing had long been advocating a more “secular” approach, calling for a civil state run along Islamic lines. While such calls were not shared by some of the more hard-line elements within the party, the power of Ghannouchi’s personality, as well as the strength of this political wing, meant that pragmatism and politics trumped ideological concerns. This was especially evident in An-Nahda’s approach to the role of Sharia in the constitution. Although many Tunisians who supported An-Nahda at the polls wanted and expected it to ensure that at the very least, Sharia was enshrined in the constitution, the party stopped short of pushing for Sharia being cited as a source of legislation. Not that it didn’t try. Under pressure from Salafist groups, as well as more hard-line elements within the party, the An-Nahda bloc in the Constituent Assembly proposed in March 2012, that Sharia should be included as a source among other sources of legislation. However, following the uproar that ensued, An-Nahda quickly changed tack. Ghannouchi held a press conference on 25 March 2012, 341

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in which he announced that the party still supported retaining Article 1 of the constitution, which read, ‘Tunisia is a free, independent, sovereign state; Islam is its religion; Arabic is its language; and the Republic is its form of government’. Meanwhile, the party’s executive bureau issued a statement confirming that it had voted against including sharia in the constitution in the interests of uniting rather than further dividing Tunisians. As senior An-Nahda member Walid Bannani explained, ‘We in An-Nahda didn’t want any commotion about the concept of sharia’.62 This ultra-pragmatic stance may have been sufficient to quell the concerns both of the international community and of other parts of Tunisian society for the time being at least, but it put An-Nahda at odds with many of its own grass roots, who felt the party was sacrificing some of its principles and purity. Head of An-Nahda’s bloc in the Constituent Assembly, Amar Larayedh, explained, We debated long with those youth who demanded sharia. . . . I met a lot of them and I told them that religious freedom is part of other freedoms like freedom of expression, freedom to move, and that we have to protect these freedoms in all their types.63 He also acknowledged, At the grass roots of An-Nahda there is a concern that An-Nahda is compromising more than it should. But on the level of the leadership and the elite of the movement, we believe that compromise is in the interests of the country. We are very keen not to behave in a partisan way.64 Such compromises also put An-Nahda increasingly at odds with the powerful Salafist currents that were mushrooming across the country. An-Nahda’s relationship with these currents was complex, but the movement started out believing it could tame them and bring them over to its side. It invested considerable efforts, therefore, in courting the Salafists. As Walid Bannani explained, the party had ‘tried very hard to encourage the Salafists to get engaged in politics. . . . We told the Salafists: recognise the state and the law and then do whatever you like. That right has been guaranteed’.65 Such hopes proved to be short lived, and the Salafists became an increasingly problematic and potent force that opposed what they viewed as An-Nahda’s selling out on core Islamic principles for the sake of political power. Not only were the Salafists’ repeated protests disruptive, but their increasingly emboldened attacks on places and people they deemed morally unacceptable were fomenting an air of insecurity. More importantly, the Salafists’ calls for the application of Islamic law enabled the Salafists to posit themselves as the real protectors of Islam. The Salafists’ insistence on holding so tightly to Islamic principles struck a powerful chord among some of An-Nahda’s grass roots. Walid Bannani commented, Our grass roots are more radical than the leadership. They lived under Ben Ali for 25 years in prison, without jobs, with difficulties in life. And therefore there are ramifications. . . . An-Nahda is open but they insist on their views. . . . They see that in our dialogue we gave away a lot of political concessions to the opposition.66 Mehdi Mabrouk, meanwhile, described how many An-Nahda youth have a “Salafist mentality”, remarking how ‘the elite of An-Nahda are secularised but those below are not. The discourse may give the impression that the party has moved on but its base has not’.67 342

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An-Nahda’s inability to tame the Salafists, combined with its poor political and economic performance, and its failure to live up to the demands of even its own supporters, were all starting to take their toll. However, things took a decided turn for the worse in February 2013, when opposition figure and outspoken An-Nahda critic Chokri Belaid was assassinated, plunging the country into crisis. Many pointed the finger directly at An-Nahda, while others saw in Belaid’s killing a country that was unraveling and a government that was unfit to govern. The toppling of the Brotherhood in Egypt just a few months later catapulted the crisis to a whole new level. With Morsi’s overthrow, An-Nahda suddenly felt itself exposed. It had come to power at a time when the wasati current looked unstoppable, but now it was bereft of an ally in Egypt, while in Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood had become subsumed in the wider crisis that had engulfed the state and that had created a whole new set of problems for Tunisia, including not only dealing with an uncontrollable influx of Libyans fleeing the conflict, but also with the security concerns associated with having what was fast becoming a failed state on its border. More importantly, Morsi’s toppling galvanized An-Nahda’s opponents into making a more concerted and organized effort to bring it down. Members of the Tunisian opposition formed their own protest movement and started collecting signatures across the country in a call to disband the Constituent Assembly and all the institutions it had spawned. The assassination of another opposition politician, Mohamed Brahimi, on 25 July 2013, fanned the flames further, with thousands of protestors taking to the streets to demand the dissolution of the government. The day after his death, secular and leftist opposition parties pulled together under the banner of the National Salvation Front and called for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the troika government and the establishment of a government of national salvation. Yet despite the crisis, An-Nahda was unwilling to step aside. Notably, following Belaid’s assassination, Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali announced to the media that his government should be dissolved and a government of technocrats appointed in its place. His doing so provoked fury inside An-Nahda, while Ghannouchi lashed out and accused Jebali of being a “traitor” who had tried to stage a bloodless coup against the movement.68 Indeed, An-Nahda had no intention of giving up power, despite the disaster that was unfolding around it. The same mentality prevailed following the coup in Egypt and Brahimi’s assassination. A few days after Brahimi’s killing, Ali Larayedh, who had replaced Jebali as Prime Minister following the former’s stepping down, told the media that his government had every intention of remaining in place until the holding of elections, which he announced were to take place in December, while stating, ‘We are not clinging to power, but we have a duty and a responsibility that we will exercise to the end’.69 It was also at this time that An-Nahda turned to mobilization. Unlike the Brotherhood in Egypt, An-Nahda had largely refrained from calling its supporters out into the streets, but the depth of the crisis was such that during August 2013 the movement mobilized its supporters to rally in large demonstrations in support of its ‘legitimacy to govern’. An-Nahda also sought to make a number of last-ditch concessions aimed at saving its own skin, including agreeing in August 2013 not to pursue the proposed political isolation law that would bar former ruling party members from running for office, and declaring in the same month that the militant Islamist group, Ansar Al-Sharia, was to be categorized as a terrorist organization. Yet the damage had been done, and An-Nahda could not claw things back. Rather, it was forced to accept that it had no choice but to step aside and make way for a caretaker government. After a long, drawn-out negotiation process mediated by the National Dialogue Quartet,70 in which An-Nahda dragged its feet as far as was possible, on 9 January 2014, An-Nahda finally and reluctantly stepped down from power. 343

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Although An-Nahda’s ousting from power was less brutal than that of the Brotherhood in Egypt, the party was left considerably weakened and with its credibility severely damaged. As former An-Nahda member Riyadh Chaibi summarized, ‘An-Nahda should have adapted itself to the new reality. But it didn’t succeed in coming up with a political program, or in ruling with other political parties. It wasn’t even able to protect its symbolic presence in society’.71

Whither the Brotherhood? The Arab Spring and its aftermath have been crushing for the Brotherhood and its affiliates, and the movement has yet to recover from the ordeal. The Egyptian branch has been particularly badly hit. With most of its senior cadres either in prison or exile and with the movement labeled as a terrorist organization in Egypt, its energies are still focused primarily on its own survival. In the face of such severe repression, it has also been forced to focus on trying to maintain internal cohesion. Various disputes have come to the fore over recent years, as members of the Brotherhood inside Egypt have challenged what is left of the historical leadership, which is now based abroad, for control of the movement. Indeed, a group of Egyptian brothers who had gravitated around the figure of Mohamed Kamal, who was killed by security forces in 2016, sought to posit themselves as the real leadership of the movement, appointing alternative leadership structures and issuing statements and counter-statements through their own rival media outlets. This group has also sought to challenge the historic leadership’s approach towards the current Egyptian regime. While the old leadership has upheld its traditional pacific stance, taking the moral high ground and sitting it out until the regime of President Abdelfatah Sissi fails, some of the younger, hotter-headed elements have pressed for a more confrontational response. The head of the Brotherhood’s international organization, Ibrahim Mounir, acknowledged as much when he told Al-Jazeera in November 2016 that there was a minority in the movement who do not subscribe to the Brotherhood’s general principle that ‘peacefulness is stronger than bullets’.72 This minority has certainly employed more revolutionary rhetoric than the traditional leadership. Magdi Shalash, one of the group’s most prominent members, who is now living in Turkey, proclaimed in 2016, for example, ‘There is a time when “our peacefulness is stronger than bullets” is appropriate and another when “our peacefulness is stronger with bullets” ’.73 However, the leadership has largely been able to contain these more ardent elements, who are also restrained by the repressive environment in which they are operating. Despite the rhetoric, there has been little concrete evidence of members of the Brotherhood engaging in violence against the regime despite the ferocity of the repression it is facing. Rather, this group has focused its efforts on attacking the historic leadership for its past failings. This upstart group issued an evaluation document in 2017 that was titled ‘Assessment Before Vision: A Look Back at the Past’. Like many other Brotherhood documents, this evaluation is typically ambiguous in its language. However, it is deeply critical of the old leadership, with the general thrust being that the Brotherhood failed because it was not sufficiently revolutionary and because it had always been far too focused on charitable and dawa activities at the expense of political work. The document also criticized the movement for having adopted an approach that ‘was limited to disciplined political battles within the limits permitted by the regime’.74 Yet this evaluation was more about analyzing tactics and strategy than any deep-seated analysis or assessment of the movement’s core ideological principles. Much of the focus was on the Brotherhood’s relationship to the regime rather than on its own philosophy or tenets. The evaluation also concluded that the movement was mistaken in departing too far from the founding principles of its leader, Hassan Al-Banna, despite the fact that Al-Banna established the 344

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movement in response to a specific set of circumstances almost one century ago. Furthermore, despite being issued by this group, the arguments made in this evaluation are not dissimilar to those voiced by the traditional leadership, who also sought to explain away the mistakes of the Brotherhood’s time in power by arguing that the movement had been too reformist and not sufficiently revolutionary.75 It is clear, therefore, that its catastrophic time in power has not heralded a new approach or shift in thinking inside the Egyptian Brotherhood. Although the movement has acknowledged that it made mistakes, it has preferred to view its toppling as a conspiracy cooked up by its detractors rather than as a crisis linked to its own making or to any of the fundamental principles of its own ideology. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the movement is still undergoing a crisis of such proportions. Pinning down a concrete reform program that would challenge the very tenets of the movement at this time could see it unravel completely. More importantly, the Brotherhood has never been a movement inclined to self-criticism or self-review, this being in line with its authoritarian tendencies. Furthermore, the Egyptian Brotherhood carries a special burden in serving as the leader of the movement worldwide. This means that it cannot undertake any major shift in its ideology without repercussions across the region and beyond. Despite being severely weakened by its experiences, therefore, it is highly unlikely that the Egyptian Brotherhood will depart from its old way of doing things. Rather, it will continue to sit it out until it can find a way to return to Egypt and carve out space for itself again, viewing its fall from grace within the framework of its long history of oppression and ordeal. The Brotherhood’s cataclysmic failure in Egypt has had a major impact on other branches of the movement, some of which are doing their utmost to distance themselves from the mother branch. This includes the Libyan Brotherhood, which has long been embroiled in a debate over the way ahead. One faction within the movement is seeking to cut itself off completely from what it views as a toxic association with the Egyptian Brotherhood, and is pushing to rebrand the Libyan branch in a way that prioritizes Libyan identity. For the time being, however, this is a step too far for others in the movement. Unfettered by not being officially part of the international Muslim Brotherhood movement, An-Nahda has been even bolder. In May 2016, the movement announced that it was separating its political and religious work, proclaiming that it was no longer a party engaged in the struggle for identity but now considered itself as a “national democratic party”.76 Ghannouchi declared in 2016, ‘We set up a movement that is as comprehensive as Islam itself. But times have changed. We are moving towards being a modern party that is specialised in the affairs of state’.77 More explicitly, senior An-Nahda member Said Ferjani explained, We came to the conclusion that Islamism could be moulded to defend the identity of Muslims both intellectually and philosophically, yet might not be very useful in terms of building a flourishing state and prosperous society. . . . Therefore, Islamism has become irrelevant for us, and one could say we are living in the “post-Islamist” era.78 Although it is not clear what this separation between politics and religion means in practical terms, and whether it represents anything more than a rebranding exercise aimed at attaining both national and international acceptance, An-Nahda certainly appears to have digested both its own experience in power and that of the Egyptian Brotherhood. However, its response has been to secularize itself to the point where it seems to have dropped Islamism altogether. This poses certain challenges for the movement; in addition to the fact that such moves do not sit well with large sections of the party’s grass roots, the more that An-Nahda sheds its Islamism, the more it becomes indistinguishable from other parties on the scene. Indeed, it seems less clear 345

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than ever what these Islamist movements stand for and what they actually want, other than a place at the table. As Saleh Jourchi commented, When you talk to the leadership you feel there is a moral crisis between their discourse and their practice. The advanced cadres of the movement started asking questions: where is our identity as an Islamic movement? We came to implement Islam but what happened to us?79 The experience of the Arab Spring, therefore, has left political Islam as articulated by the wasati current severely damaged and looking like a spent force. It has also made political Islam appear even more of a fuzzy concept than it was before. When put to the test, the political Islamist project certainly seemed to be devoid of both politics and Islam. Yet none of this means that political Islam is finished. The Muslim Brotherhood may have been dealt a heavy blow and its transnational aspect may have been weakened, but it and its affiliates are mass social movements built up over generations that are not going to disappear overnight. More importantly, the conditions that spawned and sustained groups such as the Brotherhood over the decades have not fundamentally altered. The region is still caught up in the same old dilemma it has been facing for decades, namely, how to face modernization and Westernization and how to find a sense of itself. The region has also been locked for generations in a vicious cycle of authoritarianism and repression, while the lack of political culture has created a zero-sum kind of politics that is reliant on slogans and flimsy ideologies, but that is primarily concerned with control of the state. The failure of the Brotherhood is not only a reflection of the failings of political Islam, therefore, but is also the tragedy of a region unable to translate its own revolutions into a better future.

Notes 1 Said Ferjani, “The ‘End of Islamism’ and the Future of Tunisia,” Hudson Institute. 28 March, 29 April 2016. www.hudson.org/research/12349-the-end-of-islamism-and-the-future-of-tunisia. 2 Tarek Osman,“Failings of Political Islam,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Fall 2015. www.thecairoreview. com/uncategorized/failings-of-political-islam/. 3 Interview by author with Mohamed Soudan, London, 2014. 4 International Crisis Group, Lost in Transition: The World According to Egypt’s SCAF, Middle East/ North Africa Report No. 121, 24 April 2012. www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20 East%20North%20Africa/North%20Africa/Egypt/121-lost-in-transition-the-world-according-toegypts-scaf.pdf. 5 The Syrian Brotherhood was willing to take refuge in Ba’athist Iraq during the 1980s, for example, despite the fact that Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood members were being mercilessly repressed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. 6 “Egypt: Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to Join Second Round of Talks With Govt,” Adnkronos International, Rome, 10 February 2011. http://www1.adnkronos.com/IGN/Aki/English/Security/EgyptIslamist-Muslim-Brotherhood-to-join-second-round-of-talks-with-govt_311664031177.html. 7 Tafasil Alkhira Lihukm Morsi (The last Moments of Morsi’s Rule), Al-Jazeera, Bila Hadoud, Episode 1, 11 December 2013. www.aljazeera.net/programs/withoutbounds/2013/12/11. 8 Just two days before the second round of presidential elections, for example, the SCAF dissolved the parliament after the Supreme Constitutional Court – still the domain of Mubarak-era judges – ruled that the House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament, was unconstitutional because onethird of members had been elected illegally. The SCAF followed this move by issuing a Supplementary Constitutional Decree on 17 June 2012, which limited the President’s powers and handed legislative authority over to the SCAF. 9 Interview by author with state security official who wished to remain anonymous. Cairo, June 2014. 10 Interview by author with Amr Mousa, Cairo, June 2014. 11 See Alison Pargeter, The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition (London: Saqi, 2010).

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The Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda 12 Ikhwan Alfyum: Mashrue Alnnahda hua Mashrue Alnabi Muhammad (Brothers of Fayoum: The Renaissance Project is a Project of the Prophet Muhammad), Shorouk, 15 May 2012. www.shorouknews. com/news/view.aspx?cdate=15052012&id=0f5a36a4-49a6-4e8a-9ce8-6abec1e2fbbb. 13 Awa: Min Yadaei Tanfidh Mashrue An-Nahda fi Arbe Sanawat la Yahtarim A’aKoulina (Awa: Those Who Claim That An-nahda Project can be Implemented in Four Years don’t respect our Minds), Ahram, 20 May 2012. www.ahram.org.eg/archive/Al-Mashhad-Al-Syiassy/News/150293.aspx. 14 Dr. Mohammed Habib, Al-Ikhwan Almuslmun: Bayn Alsueud Walriasa Watakul Alshareia (The Muslim Brotherhood Between the Rising, The Presidency and The Erosion of Legitimacy) (Cairo: Sama Nashar, 2013). 15 Abdelmonem Abul Futuh li “Watan”: Morsi Yuhdth Alnas Waezaan Bi’akthar min Hadith Rayiys Dawla (Abdelmonem Abulfutuh to Watan: Morsi Speaks to People More as a Preacher than the Head of State), Al-Watan, 12 November 2012. http://alwatan.kuwait.tt/articledetails.aspx?id=232993. 16 “A Talk with Muslim Brotherhood’s Rashad al-Bayoumi,” Asharq Al-Awsat, 27 February 2011. http:// english.aawsat.com/2011/02/article55247368/a-talk-with-muslim-brotherhoods-rashad-al-bayoumi. 17 Mohamed Morsi was appointed as party head, Issam Al-Arian as party deputy, and Saad Al-Katatni as Secretary-General. 18 Nathan J. Brown,“The Muslim Brotherhood as Helicopter Parent,” Foreign Policy, 27 May 2011. http:// foreignpolicy.com/2011/05/27/the-muslim-brotherhood-as-helicopter-parent/. 19 Khalil Al-Anani,“Egypt’s Freedom & Justice Party: To Be or Not to Be Independent,” Carnegie Endowment, 1 June 2011. http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/?fa=44324. 20 Interview by author with Abdelmonem Abul Futuh, Cairo, June 2014. 21 Interview by author with Islam Al-Kattatni. Cairo, June 2014. 22 Alaa Bayoumi, “The Many Faces of Mohamed Morsi,” Al-Jazeera, 13 December 2012. www.alja zeera.com/indepth/features/2012/12/2012121371332920740.html. 23 Ibid. 24 Jalal Ouerghi, Al-Islamiyoun Fi Dawla: Tajribat Harakat An-nahda Tounisia fi Siaq Aldawla Alhaditha (The Islamists in the State: The Experience of the Tunisian An-Nahda Movement in The Context of The Modern State) (Beirut, Al-Difaf publishing, 2014). 25 Interview by author with Mahmoud Hussain, Doha, April 2014. 26 Interview by author with Gamal Heshmat, Istanbul, February 2014. 27 For a description of these events, see Alison Pargeter, Return to the Shadows. 28 K. Dalacoura, “Islamism and Neoliberalism in the Aftermath of the 2011: The Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt and Nahda in Tunisia,” in Emel Ackali, ed. Arab Uprisings: Neoliberal Governmentality and the Future of the State in the Middle East and North Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 29 Ibid. 30 Interview by author with Ashraf Abdel Gaffar, Istanbul, February 2014. 31 Interview by author with Dr. Abdelmawgud Dardery via SKYPE, 2014. 32 Financial Times, “Morsi Praised for Role in Gaza Crisis,” 22 November 2012. www.ft.com/content/ db1c443a-34c1-11e2-99df-00144feabdc0 33 “Morsi’s Foreign Policy Record Reviewed,” Al-Jazeera, 27 June 2013. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ features/2013/06/2013625114318963367.html. 34 Interview by author with Islam Kattatni, Cairo, June 2014. 35 Mohamed Elsayed Saleem, “Al’da Alsiasi Liltayarat Al’islamia fi Misr Mundh Thawrat 25 Yanayir,” (The Political Performance of the Islamic Currents in Egypt since The Revolution of 25 January (in Al-Islamiyoun wa Nizam al-Hukum al-Democrati (The Islamists and The Democratic System: Trends and Experiences) (Beirut: Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, September 2013), 432. 36 “Salafists Battle for a Religious State in Egypt,” Ahram Online, 12 July 2012. http://english.ahram. org.eg/WriterArticles/NewsContentP/1/47554/Egypt/Salafists-battle-for-a-religious-state-inEgypt.aspx. 37 Ashraf El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures,” Carnegie Endowment, 1 July 2014. http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/07/01/egyptian-muslim-brotherhood-s-failure. 38 Article 2 stipulated: “Previous constitutional declarations, laws, and decrees made by the president since he took office on 30 June 2012, until the constitution is approved and a new People’s Assembly is elected, are final and binding and cannot be appealed by any way or to any entity. Nor shall they be suspended or cancelled and all lawsuits related to them and brought before any judicial body against these decisions are annulled”. Article 5 declared that no judicial body could dissolve either the Shura

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Alison Pargeter Council (upper house of parliament) or the Constituent Assembly. See English text of Morsi’s Constitutional Declaration, Ahram, 22 November 2012. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/58947.aspx. 39 Mohamed Habib has related how Morsi claimed he had issued the Constitutional Declaration because there was a conspiracy ‘to shatter him and bring him down.’ Dr. Mohammed Habib, Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoun: Bayn Alsueud Walriasa Watakul Alsheria (The Muslim Brotherhood the Rising: The Presidency and The Erosion of Legitimacy (Cairo: Sama Nashar, 2013). 40 “Ghozlan: Morsi Constitutional Declaration in Line with Popular Will and Revolutionary Demands,” Ikhwan Web, 23 November 2012. http://ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=30413. 41 Citing Deadlock, “Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power and Plans Mubarak Retrial,” The New York Times, 22 November 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/world/middleeast/egypts-president-morsi-giveshimself-new-powers.html?_r=0. 42 “Mohamed Morsi Bars Court Challenges and Orders Hosni Mubarak Retrial,” The Guardian, 22 November 2012. www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/22/mohamed-morsi-mubarak-retrial-egypt. 43 “Muslim Brotherhood Statement on Events of Friday November 23,” Ikhwan Web, 25 November 2012. www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=30419. 44 Mustafa Bakri, Suqut Al-Ikhwan: Lahazat Alakhira bayn Morsi wa Sisi (The Fall of the Ikhwan: The Final Moments between Morsi and Sisi) (Cairo: Al-Dar al-Misria al-Lubnania, 2013). 45 Ibid. 46 Abou Yaâreb Marzouki: “Ennahdha est débile, hypocrite et assoiffé de pouvoir,” Kapitalis, 6 March 2013. www.kapitalis.com/politique/14860-abou-yaarebmarzouki-Ennahda-est-debile-hypocrite-et-assoiffedepouvoir.html 47 Interview by author with Abu Yaareb Marzouki, Tunis, June 2013. 48 Jalal Ouerghi, Al-Islamiyoun Fi Dawla: Tajribat Harakat An-Nnahda al-Tounsia fi Siaq Aldawla Alhaditha (The Islamists in the State: The Experience of the Tunisian An-Nahda Movement in The Context of The Modern State) (Beirut, Al-Difaf publishing, 2014). 49 Interview by author with Mehdi Mabrouk, Tunis, June 2014. 50 Interview by author with Hamadi Jebali, Tunis, July 2014. 51 “Politique: Rached Ghannouchi dirige-t-il ‘de fait’ la Tunisie?” webmanagercenter, 16 February 2012. www.webmanagercenter.com/actualite/societe/2012/02/16/116249/politique-rached-ghannouchidirige-t-il-de-fait-la-tunisie. 52 Interview by author with Hamadi Jebali, Tunis, July 2014. 53 Interview by author with Salehedinne Jourchi, Tunis, July 2013. 54 Ibid. 55 Abdelfatah Mourou . . . Tajribat al-Harakat al-Islamia (Abdelfatah Mourou . . . The Experience of the Islamic Movement) Al-Jazeera. Bila Hadoud, 19 March 2014. www.aljazeera.net/programs/without bounds/2014/3/19/%D8%B9%D8%A8%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D8%AA%D8%A7 %D8%AD-%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%88-%D8%AA%D8%AC%D8%B1%D8%A8%D8%A9%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D 8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8 %B3%D9%84%D8%B7%D8%A9-%D8%AC1. 56 Derek Lutterbeck, “After the Fall: Security Sector Reform in Post-Ben Ali Tunisia,” Arab Reform Initiative, September 2012. www.arab-reform.net/sites/default/files/After%20the%20Fall.%20SSR%20 in%20Post-Ben%20Ali.pdf. 57 Derek Lutterbeck, “After the Fall: Security Sector Reform in Post-Ben Ali Tunisia,” Arab Reform Inititaive, September 2012. www.arab-reform.net/sites/default/files/After%20the%20Fall.%20SSR%20 in%20Post-Ben%20Ali.pdf. 58 Jalal Ouerghi, Al-Islamiyoun Fi Dawla: Tajribat Harakat An-Nnahda al-Tounsia fi Siaq Aldawla Alhaditha (The Islamists in the State: The Experience of the Tunisian An-Nahda Movement in The Context of The Modern State) (Beirut, Al-Difaf Publishing, 2014). 59 K. Dalacoura, “Islamism and Neoliberalism in the Aftermath of the 2011 Uprisings,” in Neoliberal Governmentality and the Future of the State in the Middle East and North Africa (Basingstroke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 60 “Protests in Tunisian Town Show Anger at Islamist Government,” Reuters, 2 December 2012. www. reuters.com/article/us-tunisia-protests-idUSBRE8B108620121202. 61 Domenica Preysing, Transitional Justice in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia 2011–2013 (Germany, Springer, 2016), 144. 62 Interview by author with Walid Bannani, Tunis, June 2013.

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The Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda 6 3 Interview by author with Amar Larayedh, Tunis, July 2014. 64 Interview by author with Amar Larayedh, Tunis, July 2014. 65 Interview by author with Walid Bannani, Tunis, July 2013. 66 Interview by author with Walid Bannani, Tunis, July 2013. 67 Interview by author with Mehdi Mabrouk, Tunis, July 2014. 68 Interview by author with former cabinet minister in the Jebali government, Tunis, July 2014. 69 “Tunisia Government Will Not Quit – PM Ali Larayedh,” BBC Online, 29 July 2013. www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-africa-23496929. 70 The quartet comprised the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH), and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. 71 Interview by author with Riyadh Chaibi, Tunis, July 2014. 72 Al-Jazeera, “Ibrahim Mounir: Jama’at al-Ikhwan Haya Walan Tantahi” (“Ibrahim Mounir: The Brotherhood Jama’a is Alive and Will Not End”), 24 November 2016 www.aljazeera.net/programs/ today-interview/2016/11/24/%D8%A5%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%87%D9%8A%D9%85%D9%85%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B9%D8%A9%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AD%D9%8A%D8% A9-%D9%88%D9%84%D9%86-%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%AA%D9%87%D9%8A 73 Mokhtar Awad, “The Rise of the Violent Muslim Brotherhood”. The Hudson Institute. Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 6 November 2017. www.hudson.org/research/13787-the-rise-of-the-violent-muslimbrotherhood 74 Mohamed Hamama, “An Internal Review of the Muslim Brotherhood: Reform, Militancy or Politics?” Mada Masr, 22 March 2017. www.madamasr.com/en/2017/03/22/feature/politics/an-internalreview-of-the-muslim-brotherhood-reform-militancy-or-politics/ 75 Interviews with various senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood during 2014 and 2015. 76 “Why Tunisia’s Top Islamist Party Rebranded Itself,” Al-Monitor, 23 May 2016. www.al-monitor. com/pulse/originals/2016/05/tunisia-ennahda-islamist-party-rebranding-congress.html. 77 “Harakat An-Nahda al-Tounsia: Makhad Fasl Aldin ean Aldawla (The Tunisian An-Nahda Movement . . . The Trials of Separating Religion from The State),” Elaph, 10 March 2016. http://elaph. com/Web/News/2016/3/1075637.html. 78 The “End of Islamism” and the Future of Tunisia. Said Ferjani. The Hudson Institute, 28 March 2016. www.hudson.org/research/12349-the-end-of-islamism-and-the-future-of-tunisia. 79 Interview by author with Salehedinne Jourchi, Tunis, July 2014.

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25 TRANSITION AND THE ARAB SPRING George Joffé

From the standpoint of 2018, the outcome of the Arab Spring or Arab Awakening – the term preferred by its participants – seems profoundly disappointing. The hopes that were raised in North Africa, the Levant, and Yemen seem to have been dashed in the welter of violence and repression that has engulfed Syria, Yemen, and Libya, not to speak of the reversal in Egypt where the aspirations of the Tahrir Revolution have been submerged in the autocratic regime that replaced the failed Muslim Brotherhood government in July 2013. In the Gulf, too, aspirations for political change in Bahrain have been crushed by Saudi Arabian and Emirati intervention. Only in Tunisia and, to a lesser extent, in Morocco does any evidence of the hopes of 2011 remain a political reality, whilst in Algeria protest was swiftly bought off with government concessions.1 The question is, however, whether this depressing conclusion is an accurate assessment of what has occurred since 2011 and, if so, why this should have occurred. Or should the events of the last six years be set in a much wider context, given the massive changes taking place within the region in terms of regional hegemony and external actors? Are we actually observing a paradigm shift2 in regional and local events and, if we are, what are the implications? It is, perhaps, important to note that, contrary to the conventional narrative, the Arab Awakening did not suddenly emerge unexpectedly into a placid, if repressive, world of tolerated autocratic governance, for the argument of Arab exceptionalism – namely, that the Arab world was temperamentally unsuited to and therefore uninterested in democratic or participatory governance – was never true. Indeed, ever since the advent of independence after the end of World War II, there had been repeated examples of popular rejection of the models of governance foisted upon the region alongside the authoritarian and traditionalist ideologies that its countries had generated, whether secular or religious in nature. Thus, traditionalist-based patterns of neo-patrimonialism or neo-pebendalism3 or more contemporary visions of holistic ideologies such as Arab Nationalism or political Islam, whether in their original form or corrupted by exploitation through the “deep state”,4 can be contrasted with informal patterns of participatory governance harking back to pre-colonial paradigms5 or to the precepts and implications of “liberalised autocracy”.6 In fact, traditional patterns of formal and informal governance have frequently involved issues of communal consent and legitimization of authority, even if political action was not necessarily its primary objective and a formal identification with Western concepts of democratic 350

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governance did not apply. Instead, consultation and consensus paralleled what eventually became the essential institutions of liberal democracy. Thus, although the primary purpose of the early caliphate was to create and maintain the appropriate conditions for the collective practice of Islam, it embodied the concept of communal sanction as an integral part of its self-recognition and its acceptance by the Islamic community – the ‘umma – as legitimate.7 It is true that the caliphate subsequently developed hierocratic characteristics, and the community was normatively required to accept its authority irrespective of its nature, but its legitimacy could always be challenged on the grounds that it had failed to fulfill its primary purpose.8 There was, therefore, the ultimate threat of legal and moral sanction to parallel Western constraints on aberrant political behavior embodied in its concept of the rule-of-law and the role of a constitution. The insurmountable distinction between the two systems was, however, the locus of sovereignty – a divine attribute in the traditional political structure of the Islamic world but a communal possession in the developed Western democratic system. Nonetheless, this apart, the Islamic tradition of patterns of governance did involve communal participation and thus a form of “government by consent” which itself was subject to a generally agreed ultimate legal sanction through shari’a law, even if this did require submission to divine authority. And it was complemented by an assumption that governance involved social justice as the essential mark of its moral status. Informal patterns of governance manifested similar features, whether in the urban or rural settings, whether through the village jma’a or ‘arsh or in the urban guilds and religious orders (tariqa-s). Tribal and religious mechanisms for the diffusion of power, which sometimes achieved the status of creating quasi-states – as with the Sanussi in Libya in the nineteenth century, for example – also involved patterns of communal engagement associated with moral sanction.9 Against such a background, then, it is difficult to argue that the Arab or Islamic worlds were not capable of or interested in participatory governance, even if the institutions through which this was manifested differed from the Western democratic ideal. And, of course, that political model – apart from Britain, Holland, and the US, only became generalized throughout Europe in the twentieth century. Yet, if this is the case, how then can we understand the almost universal failure of the revolutions that ushered in the Arab Awakening? Quite apart from its failures since 2011, there is the evidence of earlier failures as well, from April 1980 – the date of the Berber Spring in Algeria, which marks the real beginning of the political liberalization process in North Africa – onwards to the revolutionary upheavals of 2011. What caused them, and have the failures that occurred, whether apparent or real, proven to be definitive, in that they have marked the termination of what was to be no more than a moment of liberal aberration? And how can they be distinguished from even earlier upheavals – the riots of 1965, 1981, or 1984 in Morocco; the crises of 1978 and 1984 in Tunisia; or the 1977 bread riots and the 1986 conscript riots in Egypt, for example. Perhaps the key distinction is that the events of 2011 throughout the Middle East and the earlier events of 1980 and, subsequently, 1988 in Algeria involved real political projects. In other words, they were not merely protests but also potentially revolutionary in that they offered an alternative vision of social and political organization.10

What remains? The project was encapsulated in two of the slogans that the crowds of demonstrators chanted in 2011 – “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāt· an-niz·ām” (The people want to bring down the regime) and “Aish, hurriya, adala ijtimai’yya” (Bread, freedom, and social justice).11 It was a project that was revolutionary in that it sought the removal of a political system from which the mass of people was alienated and its replacement by one based on egalitarian economic, political, and social 351

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institutions that would enjoy popular legitimacy. Yet, despite such sanguine ambitions, the initial promise of revolutionary change was to remain unfulfilled; although there may have been a ‘democratisation of discourse’,12 there has been little real change, even in Tunisia. Apart from Tunisia, there has been no meaningful change in political institutions either and, even in Tunisia, although a new constitution and parliamentary process is in being, with regular elections contested by a large number of political parties and the media have been able to shake off many of the constraints formerly placed upon them, the underlying structure of the state has not been fundamentally altered, thus providing a sad comparison with the aspirations at the time.13 Indeed, the revisionist approach of the president, Beji Caid Essebsi, towards the provisions of the new constitution, backed up by the stealthy return to formal politics of many former activists in the Rassemblement Constitutionelle Démocratique, the dominant – effectively single – political party of the former regime through the political movement the president himself originally created, Nida Tounes, has significantly contributed towards blocking social revolutionary change as defined by the leading theoreticians of the subject.14 And some political institutions, such as the security services, have not even been formally reformed,15 a failure justified by the ongoing instability along Tunisia’s borders with Libya and Algeria, particularly around Ben Guerdane and Kasserine, respectively. There has, indeed, been a dramatic change in terms of social justice, for the media operate without censorship, individual freedoms have been reinforced, and civil society functions without let or hindrance under constitutional guarantee.16 But even here, care must be taken; thus, the president’s well-known distaste for “transitional justice” – an important aspect of social justice in Tunisia – has meant his opposition to continuing with the Instance Verité et Dignité, Tunisia’s own truth and justice commission instituted to provide transitional justice to 62,000 victims of the former regime. This commission has been attacked by the president, who dislikes its head, Sihem Bensedrine, and sees it as a challenge to his own chosen formulation of a reconciliation law to integrate former supporters of the Ben Ali regime into the new environment, even though the commission had, by the start of March 2017, settled 23,000 of the cases brought before it. A year later, however, the parliament, at presidential behest, refused to extend its term beyond 31 May 2018.17 The picture is equally ambivalent in economic terms; even though overall unemployment has dropped from a peak in December 2011 of 18.9% to hover at around 15% today, according to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank has reported that youth unemployment remains at between 30% and 50%. Quite apart from the degree of change as a consequence of the events of December 2010– January 2011, however, there is also a question of their timing. Thus, there have been similar degrees of social and political change in both Algeria and Morocco, but in both cases, they effectively predated these events. Political and social change in Algeria began in 1988 and in Morocco in 1996.18 During 2011, the Moroccan government responded to the demands of the February 20 movement by making cosmetic changes to the constitution but preserving the monarchy’s position as beyond constitutional sanction.19 Since 2011, furthermore, the monarchy has rowed back from even the very modest concessions it made then, as economic conditions in Morocco have become ever more difficult and have begun to disturb the social order. In Algeria, the situation remains as it appeared to be in 2013, marked by total stasis under a sclerotic and disabled leadership.20 [Algeria] is not fully democratic; although the deep state has retired from the forefront of political life, its arbitrary potential still remains. Corruption remains a reality, alongside autocratic repression and neglect; but the rights of citizens are relatively well respected and freedom of expression is, on the whole, unhindered. The economic 352

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crisis continues; to great and growing popular disgust and anger but the state, despite its inertia and inefficiencies, also continues.21 The other major state that was profoundly affected by the events of 2011 was, of course, Egypt, where the outcome initially appeared to be an uncomfortable accommodation between the resurgent Ikhwan Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) and the army command.22 However, within a year of a Muslim Brotherhood government coming to power, an army-backed coup, promoted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was to overthrow it, restoring military control over the Egyptian political process once again.23 Of course, the actual situation in Egypt was far more complex than a question of simple external intervention, as the Morsi government and its Ikhwan Muslimun backers had made a series of fundamental errors, which had severely compromised their popular support. Nonetheless, at the same time, the UAE intervention underlined the role of the new policy developed in the wake of the Arab Awakening that was to culminate, after a bungled intervention in Syria, in the subsequent intervention in Yemen, led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In fact, the aftermath of 2011 in the other three states that were significantly affected by the Awakening movement – Libya, Syria, and Yemen – has ended in extreme violence. The reasons for this are essentially twofold. Firstly, the regimes in place in two of them – Libya and Syria – were essentially absolute autocracies, incapable of conceding any space to popular discontent or of understanding that reform was an essential part of the process of maintaining the status quo. In the case of the third – Yemen – the state was inherently weak, given traditional tribal antagonism towards central government, the aftermath of the 1994 civil war, and the corrupt repressiveness of the regime run by Ali Abdullah Salih. Furthermore, its real domestic problems – the Houthi rebellion and the Hirak al-Janūbi (Southern separatist) movement, together with a non-state actor, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (Tanzim al-Qa’idah fi’l-Jazirat al-Arab or Jama’at Ansar al-Shari’ah) in the Hamdramawt – long predated the Awakening itself. Secondly, all three states suffered from significant external intervention as their domestic crises developed – by the Gulf States in Syria, abetted by Iran and Turkey and then complicated by Russia, together with the US and its allies ostensibly against the Islamic State (Da’ish or ISIS) there, and by Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Iranian influence in Yemen. In Libya, once again the Gulf States, namely the UAE and Qatar, were involved, this time supported by Turkey, Britain, and France and, at one remove, by the US.24

The role of the Gulf Little remains, in short, of the aspirations of the Tahrir Revolution, although its defeat has highlighted this other notable aspect of the reaction to the events of 2011. The revanchist activism of the leading Gulf States reflects a novel engagement by them in regional affairs that is reshaping the alliance patterns there in fundamental and unexpected ways. It is an activism that has found an echo in both the crises in Yemen and Syria, and stretches even further afield, in an eerie repeat of the collusion between Saudi Arabia and the US which, in the 1980s, produced the mujahidin in Afghanistan and eventually, of course, al-Qa’ida and ISIS (Da’ish, the Islamic State), even if the two movements now seem to be on opposite sides in the terrorist spectrum. It is an extension, too, of a much older geopolitical confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran that stretches back to the 1970s, although that represents a second and largely separate pole of conflict in the region. That confrontation was provoked by Britain’s decision, in 1968, to withdraw its forces “east of Suez” and, in effect, cede its direct engagement in the affairs of the Middle East to the US. 353

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The British decision was a direct consequence of both its failure in the Suez Crisis in 1956 and of its earlier loss-of-control of the Iranian oil industry in 1951–53. In both cases, the US had been the ultimate beneficiary, as it built upon the position it had chosen in Gulf affairs in 1945, at the end of World War II, when it committed itself to the defense of Saudi Arabia in return for the exclusive right to exploit that country’s oil reserves. The result was that, by 1971 and the British withdrawal from Gulf affairs, the US had two regional allies there: Saudi Arabia and Iran. The problem was that both had competing perceptions of their future roles inside the region, for each wished to be the regional hegemon in succession to the departing British forces. President Nixon, on the basis of the principles enshrined in the Nixon Doctrine, selected Iran as the appropriate American partner for Gulf security in 197225 and, subsequently, his successor, President Carter, in his State-of-the-Union address in 1980 when, confronted with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, he enunciated the Carter Doctrine, replaced the new Islamic republic with Saudi Arabia instead, thus entrenching the future competition between the two aspirants to regional hegemony.26 The experiences of both presidents provide interesting examples of what Mearsheimer and Walt have recently described as “off-shore balancing”27 – the co-option of local powers to generate regional security in areas deemed relevant to America’s national and global interests, thus obviating the need for direct intervention by the US itself. American experiences in Afghanistan after the events of 11 September 2001 or in Iraq after the invasion in 2003 demonstrate the wisdom of the off-shore balancing approach. Yet, the experience also highlighted the potential danger of unintended consequences, in the context of the Gulf, for the competition among America’s surrogates has now hardened into the sectarian divide that sets Iran and Saudi Arabia at loggerheads with each other. Past American policy, however, is only part of the story, as is the long-standing geopolitical competition between the two states or their implicit competition over the religious statuses of their political systems, for the factor that has made the issue so acute has been the sequelae of the Arab Awakening in 2011. Both the crises in Yemen and Syria and, to a lesser extent, in Libya – the three states directly implicated in the violence associated with the Awakening movement – and the newfound activism of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf ally, the UAE, have been catalyzed by the unexpected outcomes of those events. It found its first expression in the combined Saudi and Emirati intervention in Bahrain in early 2011, in order to protect the Sunni minority elite there. Yet, in one respect, this activism on the part of Saudi Arabia and the UAE was surprising for the whole tenor of Gulf security policy up to 2011 had been to influence intra-Arab affairs but to avoid too great a direct involvement in them unless partnered and sanctioned by an outside power such as the US. During the Cold War, in particular, the main objective of the Gulf States had been to exclude great power intervention despite the consequences of the Nixon and Carter doctrines and the subsequent development by the Clinton administration of the policy of Dual Containment in 1993.28 Indeed, during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the dominant policy of the Gulf Cooperation Council appeared to be one of preserving the status quo within the Gulf itself, accommodating reluctantly to the reality of the Islamic Republic and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, seeking to condition wider Arab society into an acceptance of its vision of Salafi Islam. Saudi Arabia, too, sought to dominate the Gulf Cooperation Council as part of this vision, although Kuwait and Oman quietly demurred, and Qatar began to develop its own activist approach to regional engagement, to considerable Saudi irritation. Nonetheless, the predominant concern was to preserve existing social and political structures and to preserve the existing compact between ruling elite and the population at large – political loyalty in return for economic benefit. 354

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A whole series of factors have now called that compact into question, but the potentiating event has undoubtedly been the Arab Awakening, particularly the consequences that this had in Egypt and Bahrain. Each event highlighted a different aspect of Saudi Arabia’s concerns: in Bahrain, the attempt to exploit Sunni-Shi’a divide and force concessions from the ruling Sunni minority, and in Egypt, the removal of President Mubarak by popular demand and his replacement by a government with an overtly religious ideology. Its success, after all, would have implicitly challenged Saudi Arabia’s self-image as the legitimate and dominant Sunni religious state and, furthermore, would have fed into the Qatari challenge to its hegemony inside the Gulf and in the wider Arab regional arena. It would have also implicitly lent support to Iranian pretensions, both as an alternative model of religious governance and as the alternative dominant regional power. No wonder, then, that Saudi Arabia, backed by the UAE with its inveterate distrust of political Islam, particularly in its Ikhwani variant, suddenly discovered the truth of Di Lampedusa’s famous epigram “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”29 and became an active proponent of resistance to the objectives of the Awakening movements throughout the region! There is no doubt that Qatar had been a major irritant in this respect, which had predated the Awakening movement. It was not just that Qatar had, in the 1990s, begun an increasingly independent regional policy, thus sapping Saudi Arabia’s long-standing dominance in the Gulf, and amongst conservative and traditionalist Arab states, it was also a question of the increasingly Islamist cast to Qatari policy and of the role it sought to play as a mediator in Arab affairs. It had, for example, tried to mediate in the crisis in Yemen in 2011. In 2012, the Emir of Qatar visited the Gaza Strip and pledged $400 million in reconstruction aid, thus befriending Hamas and implicitly undermining Saudi Arabia’s traditional role in brokering at one remove, along with Egypt, the Middle East peace process. The previous year, during the Tahrir Revolution, the Arabic service of Qatar’s own satellite television, Al-Jazeera, had been considered as little more than a partisan voice in support of the revolutionary process and of the role of the Ikhwan Muslimun within it. Al-Jazeera had, in any case, long been a source of irritation to revolutionary and traditionalist regimes alike in the Arab world. Qatar, too, had deliberately supported moderate Islamists in Libya during the country’s civil war in 2011 with finance and arms and was to do the same in the early stages of the civil war in Syria, an initiative that Saudi Arabia itself was to parallel to counter Iranian support for the Assad regime until Russia intervened in 2015. Qatari attitudes, therefore, openly challenged Saudi Arabia’s dominance within the Gulf Cooperation Council and undermined the normative unity of the Gulf States. Qatar also threatened Saudi Arabia’s position in American regional strategy, since it had replaced the Kingdom as the key location for American force projection in 2002 with the opening of the al-Udaid base on the Qatari peninsula as a replacement for the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia. In this respect, it was quite unlike Oman, which also had reservations about Saudi policies, or Kuwait, where there were long-standing tensions with the Kingdom going back to 1920 despite Kuwaiti dependence on Saudi support after the Iraqi invasion in August 1990.30 Saudi Arabia and the UAE had originally reacted against Qatari policy in March 2014 when they, together with other Gulf States, withdrew their ambassadors until Qatar agreed to persuade members of the Muslim Brotherhood on its territory to leave. The crisis erupted again in June 2017 with fresh accusations of Qatari support for terrorism and open hostility towards the Kingdom. This time, however, the country was blockaded and sanctioned in a barely disguised attempt to force “regime change”, a move which merely forced it closer to Iran and Turkey. The crisis over Qatar within the Gulf Cooperation Council was both an expression of long-standing Saudi and Emirati irritation with Qatar’s foreign policy initiatives, particularly its attempts at becoming a regional mediator and, latterly, a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood – identified by both as a threat to Arab regional political order – and a facet of the new Saudi 355

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activism in maintaining that order in being, unruffled by the Arab Awakening. Yet this “activism to avoid change” was not only a political and geopolitical objective. It was also a statement about religious culture and its political implications. Saudi Arabia has long been a proponent of a salafist version of Sunni Islam in which respect for established political authority, however repressive it might be, is a religious obligation in order to avoid fitna (disorder, rebellion). In contradistinction to Qatar, with its support for moderate Islamist movements, the Kingdom has actively sought to propagate such beliefs throughout the region. Given such views of the moral status, desirability, and authority of political order, there can be little wonder at its distaste for the outcomes of the Awakening movement. It was an expression, too, of Saudi Arabia’s failure to convert the Gulf Cooperation Council into its own vehicle for achieving this purpose as well. It has long been clear that the Kingdom dominates the Council’s policies and objectives, but its attempts to convert it into a vehicle for the preservation of a traditionalist regional political order have been frustrated by Qatar’s independent initiatives over the past decade. In May 2011 and again in March 2014, the Council proposed that Jordan and Morocco should join it as part of a new region-wide military bloc designed to defend the existing regional order. In 2014, it was suggested that Egypt should join the new body as well.31 The invitation was tactfully ignored, although Egypt – no doubt because of the aid from the Gulf on which it depended – had been prepared to cede territory in the Straits of Tiran to Saudi Arabia and to collaborate with the UAE over suppressing extremists in Libya, as well as supporting both in their intervention in Yemen. Three other considerations have also contributed to the new activist dimension of Saudi policy and reinforced its determination to preserve a regional status quo. The first is that the other driver behind Saudi regional policy is its insistence on confronting Iran, ostensibly because it wishes to challenge the Islamic republic’s hegemonic ambitions for regional dominance but which it expresses in overtly sectarian terms. This, again, reflects the Kingdom’s determination to avoid fundamental change, in this case in terms of the control of the security field, as opposed to that of governance. Yet it was also linked to a cultural concern – the threat that it perceived Iran to offer to the traditional Sunni cultural and religious hegemony of the Arab world. It was a concern that had significantly intensified the sectarian hue of the rhetoric of the Saudi-Iranian confrontation and endowed it with a sense of urgency and immediacy that had come to characterize Saudi activism. Thus, it was the concept of the ‘Shi’a arc of extremism’,32 not the geopolitical reach of Iran’s alliances with Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, that dominated the Saudi discourse. The final factor behind Saudi Arabia’s sudden burst of activism is personal; the advent of Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to the throne in January 2015 turned out to presage a major reordering of the Kingdom’s domestic and foreign priorities, as leadership there began a profound process of generational change. The new king has, in essence, handed his leadership responsibilities over to his son, Mohammed bin Salman, who was to become the crown prince, and he, in turn, clearly wished for things to change so that they could stay as they are! He seemed to appreciate that the Al Saud could only perpetuate their dominant position if a new compact could be forged between the ruling elite that they represented and the population-at-large, even if this had to occur at the expense of the alliance between that elite and the clerical class, the Al-Shaykh, that had legitimized their power ever since the mid-eighteenth century. The new domestic agenda, of necessity, required a similar activism in foreign affairs as well, directed towards the same ends but played out on a much wider canvas. Thus, Saudi determination to confront Iran became more acute, as did the willingness to challenge old shibboleths, such as the continued isolation of Israel from the Arab world until the Palestinian issue were resolved. The emergence of a new strategy towards the Middle East in the US as the Trump 356

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administration came to power encouraged this renewed activism as well, for now Saudi Arabia’s major external ally was prepared to distance itself from direct regional engagement yet fully endorsed Saudi objectives. And, finally, there was personal support and a guiding hand for this new agenda from Mohammed bin Salman’s counterpart in Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayid, who has played a dominant role in government there for the past twenty years.33 Both men have been determined to preserve the political order in the Gulf and wider afield and both profoundly distrusted Iran’s role in the region. Indeed, the UAE has been most active in condemning the political role of moderate as well as extremist Islam and has encouraged Saudi Arabia to abandon its previous quiet support for moderate political Islam – in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, it had offered refuge to members of the Muslim Brotherhood displaced from Egypt. However, this is not to say that the two leaders or their countries agree on all matters, even if they have been close collaborators over suppressing the consequences of the Arab Awakening. There have been tensions between them in the past, over the Buraimi oasis (the original home of the bin Nayans, the ruling family in Abu Dhabi), over their common border, and over policy within the Gulf Cooperation Council.34 Indeed, the same tensions persist; despite their cooperation on the intervention in Yemen, the UAE has espoused the objectives of the Hirak al-Janūbi movement, which seeks independence for Southern Yemen, whilst Saudi Arabia supported the Hadi government which aimed to prevent this.35 Nonetheless, apart from such atavistic disagreements, the personal bond between the two men and the coincidence of their countries’ analyses and objectives in the region has played a significant part in dynamizing Saudi determination to actively prevent a revival of the spirit of 2011, alongside its objective of isolating Iran as well.

The future Yet, even if we allow that much of the enthusiasm and aspiration for political change that emerged throughout the Awakening movement in 2011 has been crushed by the external interventions imposed upon it, it is still legitimate to pose the question as to what degree those events were revolutionary in reality. It is clear that none of them then or since corresponded to the classic definition of a revolution, as proposed by Teresa Skocpol in 1979: ‘Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’.36 Even if, as the leader of the “third-generation” structural-functionalist school of analysts,37 Skocpol’s definition is now considered inadequate because of its exclusion of individual actors and groups, so that agency amongst participants together with the insights of historical sociology cannot be included in the analysis, the Tunisian example can still hardly be considered to have been “revolutionary” in the classic sense of the term.38 At most, Tunisia experienced a political, not a social revolution and, given the slow return to the political fold of former activists in the RCD, the dominant pro-regime party under the Ben Ali regime, it could not be called a radical revolution either. Instead, it was what Goldstone has described as a “color revolution” of the kind that occurred in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet system there.39 As such it was akin to the liberal or constitutional revolutions of 184840 and embodied a partial revolution involving negotiation and bargaining between elite and protestors. If this is the case, then perhaps a more complex definition of what a political revolution might be is needed, as Goldstone has suggested: Nonetheless, these events still have a common set of elements at their core: (a) efforts to change the political regime that draw on a competing vision (or visions) of a just 357

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order, (b) a notable degree of informal or formal mass mobilization, and (c) efforts to force change through non-institutionalized actions such as mass demonstrations, protests, strikes, or violence. These elements can be combined to provide a broader and more contemporary definition of revolution: an effort to transform the political institutions and the justifications for political authority in a society, accompanied by formal or informal mass mobilization and non-institutionalized actions that undermine existing authorities. This definition is broad enough to encompass events ranging from the relatively peaceful revolutions that overthrew communist regimes to the violent Islamic revolution in Afghanistan. At the same time, this definition is strong enough to exclude coups, revolts, civil wars, and rebellions that make no effort to transform institutions or the justification for authority. It also excludes peaceful transitions to democracy through institutional arrangements such as plebiscites and free elections, as in Spain after Franco.41 Indeed, as Derya Akder has pointed out, the processes of 2011 may mark a new stage in the acquisition of agency amongst informal groups and social movements in such situations, in which issues of social media use alongside informal and single-issue groupings can exert as much agency and power as was the case previously for more formal movements and political parties.42 Now the state and its elites must negotiate with its opponents to achieve or block political change, and the revolutionary process may be much longer drawn-out than classical theorists, such as Skocpol, have suggested.43 Indeed, in many respects, the “revolutions” of the Arab Awakening recall the events of 1848 in Europe, when profound political change affected virtually every country on the continent but where, in the subsequent two years, virtually all the tangible gains were reversed.44 Yet the experiences of 1848 also created an anticipation of change and an awareness of what it could mean, despite the reversals. There was, therefore, a populist pressure that, over the next 50 years, lead to a social and political transformation. What would this then mean for the future of those radical political processes that occurred in 2011? Of course, history never repeats itself exactly and, between 1848 and today, there has been vast social and political change, including the end of colonial empires and the democratization of autocracies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the pattern of evolution that the experiences of 1848 describe seems remarkably similar to that which occurred in North Africa, at least. And, furthermore, the earlier experience of Algeria as it moved from being a single-party state, through political pluralism between 1988 and 1992, via a civil war during the rest of the decade to become a diminished “façade democracy”45 since 2000 may provide a guide to what may eventually happen in Syria and Libya, whilst Egypt may have to face a much more difficult transition process. Yemen, of course, stands outside these experiences because, as stated earlier, its status as a failed state emerges from a different pattern of events. Yet, quite apart from historical parallels, there is no certainty that the Arab region that will ultimately evolve will necessarily reflect the Western experience of “democratic transition”. There is, after all, the role of political Islam to consider, and participatory political culture in the region is very different from the European experience. Social media and the internet, too, are constructing a very different world from that in which Samuel Huntington’s ‘third wave of democratisation’ took place, and that, too, will impact differently on the region as political change develops.46 Beyond that, there is always the possibility that autocracy so entrenches itself within the body politic of the Middle East and North Africa that it becomes almost impossible to eradicate. What does seem to be clear, however, is that Saudi Arabia and the UAE can only fight a delaying action, not reverse a political and historical process. 358

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In other words, Di Lampedusa’s epigram might not apply so closely to the situation in those states which actually experienced the Awakening movement, as compared with those states which merely observed them, admittedly with increasing alarm. Yet he, of course, was observing the consequences of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi’s enforced construction of modern Italy, from Sicily in 1860, itself a consequence of the drivers behind the revolutionary wave of 1848. And Italy, too, was to undergo its own reversion to autocracy in the first half of the twentieth century before achieving its evolution towards democracy thereafter. Perhaps, then, the Middle East and North Africa are launched on a lengthy process of social change that Fernand Braudel has characterized as “la longue durée”, in which the individual actions of states can only hinder and delay, but not prevent, the social forces that challenge them.

Notes 1 Joffé G (2013), “North Africa’s Arab Spring revisited,” in G. Joffé, ed. North Africa’s Arab Spring (London: Routledge), 210. 2 The term originates with Tomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962 (1969)), 150, who argued that, in science, progress occurs through radical shifts in structures of interpretation. Furthermore, such shifts are incommensurate – the new structure of meaning cannot be interpreted in terms of its predecessor. His concept has since been applied to the political and social sciences, although the requirement of incommensurability does not apply as different structures of meaning can and do coexist and can be interpreted, the new by the old. 3 Neo-prebendalism: the exploitation of institutions of the state for personal enrichment; a form of rent-seeking. The concept of prebendalism was first used by R.A. Joseph to describe the sense of neo-patrimonial elite entitlement to access to state revenues in Nigeria (R.A. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Neo-prebendalism is used here in a wider sense to indicate the exploitation of state resources by politically relevant elites as an entitlement of political position.   Neo-patrimonialism: patterns of patronage and clientage reified into structures of access into the framework of power within the state (G. Erdmann and U. Engel, “Neo-Patrimonialism Revisited: Beyond a Catch-All Concept,” GIGA Working Papers 16 German Institute of Global and Area Studies (Leibnitz, 2006): 18). As such, it is a challenge to the concept of the state as a set of disinterested institutions treating its citizens on the basis of equality in the provision of its services, irrespective of personalized access to individualized manipulation of power through the institutions of the state. 4 The term “deep state” was originally coined in Turkish as “derin devlet” to describe the military’s control of politics in Turkey and refers to the occult, unaccountable power structures, usually military in nature, although really a nexus of army, security services, criminal elites, and judiciary as well as, often, economic elites, which ultimately control the formal institutions of governance. 5 G. Joffé, “Traditions of Governance in North Africa,” Journal of North African Studies 20, no. 5 (December 2015): 730. 6 D. Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 4 (October 2002): 56–68; D. Brumberg, “Democratization Versus Liberalization in the Arab World: Dilemmas and Challenges for US Foreign Policy,” SSI Monographs (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, July 2005). “Liberalised autocracy”: the concept of autocratic regimes tolerating theoretically autonomous civil society sectors provided that they are monitored and ultimately controlled by the state to ensure that they pose no threat to its hegemonic political control. However, such sectors formed the basis for social movements opposed to regimes in 2011 (G. Joffé, “The Arab Spring: Origins and Prospects,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (December 2011), 517–532). 7 A.K.S. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam – An Introduction to the Study of Islamic Political Theory: The Jurists (Oxford, London, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981). 8 H. Munson, Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 1993), 35–36, 54. 9 Joffé, “Traditions of Governance in North Africa,” 722, 729. 10 Joffé, “The Arab Spring: Origins and Prospects,”. G. Joffé, “North Africa’s Arab Spring Revisited,” in G. Joffé, ed. North Africa’s Arab Spring (London: Routledge, 2013), 196–212.

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George Joffé 11 The first slogan was widely used in Tunisia and, later, in Syria and Yemen while the second was widely adopted in the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo. It was often modified as “Aish, karama insaniyya, hurriyya” (bread, human dignity, freedom). There were, of course, many other slogans, some of them variants on the two cited here. The word Aish (“life”), rather than the more usual khubz for bread underlines its crucial role in the Egyptian diet. See: www.alaraby.co.uk/english/blog/2016/12/18/toprevolutionary-phrases-for-un-arabic-language-day and http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/fawwaz.pdf (F.A. Al-Haq and A. Hussein, The Slogans of the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Leiden: Leiden University, n.d.) 12 Lahlali El-M., “The Discourse of Egyptian Slogans: From ‘Long live Sir!’ to ‘Down with the Dictator!’ ” Arab Media and Society 19 (Fall 2014). www.arabmediasociety.com/post_issue/issue-19-fall-2014/, accessed 11 April 2018. 13 M. Mabrouk, “A Revolution for Dignity and Freedom: Preliminary Observations on the Social and Cultural Background to the Tunisian Revolution,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (December 2011), 625–636. 14 G. Tiruneh, “Social Revolutions: Their Causes, Patterns and Phases,” Sage Open, 18 September 2014. www.journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244014548845, accessed 11 April 2018. Table 1. See also, for example: S.P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968): 24; T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 4; S.A. Arjomand, “Iran’s Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective,” World Politics 38 (1986): 383–414; T. WickhamCrowley, Exploring Revolution (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), 152 and J. Paige, “Finding Revolutionary in the Revolution: Social Science Concepts and the Future of Revolution,” in J. Foron, ed. The Future of Revolution (London, New York, NY: Zed Books, 2003), 24. 15 N. Jebnoun, Tunisia’s National Intelligence: Why Rogue Elephants Fail to Reform (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2017). 16 G. Joffé, “Government-Media Relations in Tunisia: A Paradigm Shift in the Culture of Governance?” Journal of North African Studies 19, no. 5 (December 2014): 615–638. 17 A. Essabiti, “Transitional Justice in Tunisia, a Mined Course,” Anadolou Agency, 10 April 2018. https:// aa.com.tr/en/politics. 18 C.R. Pennell, Morocco Since 1830: A History (London: Hurst, 2000), 376, 380. 19 D. Maghraoui, “Constitutional Reforms in Morocco: Between Consensus and Subaltern Politics,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (December 2011): 679–700. 20 The president suffered a disabling stroke in June 2013 but remained in post, even being re-elected in 2014! A collective presidency, as a result, became the ruling institution instead, under the effective control of the president’s (unelected and unaccountable) younger brother, with the result that political life was in suspension, with fears growing that the president would stand for reelection and win, for a fifth time in 2019, whatever the cost to Algeria’s political evolution. 21 Joffé, “North Africa’s Arab Spring Revisited,” 210. 22 A. Alexander, “Brothers in Arms? The Egyptian Military, the Ikhwan and the revolutions of 1952 and 2011,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (December 2011): 533–554. 23 The UAE seems to have funded the Tamarroud Movement, which was the vehicle through which the Egyptian army actually ousted the Morsi government (Kirkpatrick D, “Recordings Suggest Emirates and Egyptian Military Pushed Ousting of Morsi,” New York Times, 1 March 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/ world/middleeast/recordings-suggest-emirates-and-egyptian-military-pushed-ousting-of-morsi.html, accessed 21 April 2018). The UAE also used Egypt as a pathway for the delivery of weapons to Khalifa Haftar, the military leader in Cyrenaica (Anon, “UAE Funded Egyptian Anti-Morsi Group, Leaked Conversation Suggests,” The New Arab, 2 March 2015. www.alaraby.co.uk/english/politics/2015/3/2/uaefunded-egyptian-anti-morsi-group-leaked-conversation-suggests, accessed 21 April 2018). 24 G. Joffé, “The Impact of the War on Libya,” in D. Henricksen and A.K. Larssen, eds. Political Rationale and International Consequences of the War in Libya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 287–304. 25 S. McGlinchey, “Richard Nixon’s Road to Tehran: The Making of the U.S.-Iran Arms Agreement of May 1972,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 4 (2013): 848. 26 The Nixon Doctrine: The United States would honor its existing defense commitments [to Vietnam], but it would not commit troops anywhere else. (Iran, therefore, was selected to provide regional security in the Gulf for the United States.)   The Carter Doctrine: Any attempt by a foreign power to control the Gulf would be treated as an attack on the vital interests of the United States itself. (Iran was now seen as a threat to Gulf security, hence the need to mobilize Saudi Arabia in its place.)

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Transition and the Arab Spring   J. Stork, “The Carter Doctrine and US Bases in the Middle East,” MERIP Reports 10, no. 90 (September/October 1980): 1–5. 27 J.J. Mearsheimer and S.M. Walt, “A Case for Offshore Balancing,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4 ( July–August 2016): 70–83. 28 A. Edwards, Dual Containment Policy in the Persian Gulf: The USA, Iran and Iraq 1991–2000 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The policy emerged in the wake of the American intervention to expel Iraq from Kuwait and was heavily criticized because it perpetuated the American presence in the region and reinforced American engagement with the Gulf States, allowing them to avoid responsibility for regional security. See, G. Gause III, “The Illogic of ‘dual containment’,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 2 (March–April 1994): 31–44. 29 G. Joffé, “States and Caliphates,” Geopolitics (2017). doi:10.1080/14650045.2017.1349111; 1–20. In 1920, Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan forces attempted to occupy Kuwait in order to incorporate it into the new kingdom that he was creating in the peninsula until Britain intervened. Two years later, in 1922, Britain unilaterally awarded the new Saudi kingdom two-thirds of Kuwait’s territory in the border delimitation that it imposed on the Emirate. 30 Di Lampedusa G.T, 1958: Il Gattopardo: Colquhoun A. (trans)(1960), The Leopard, Pantheon (Random House, New York NY) 31 R. Curtis, “Jordan, Morocco and an Expanded GCC,” MERIP, 15 April 2014. www.merip.org/ jordan-morocco-expanded-gcc. 32 In Tony Blair’s reformulation of King Abdullah of Jordan’s encapsulation of Iran’s regional objectives. See House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs 2007; “Section 8: British Diplomacy and the Region,” Eighth Report, HM Stationary Office (London). https://publications.parliament.uk/ pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmfaff/363/36311.htm. Paragraphs 210–216. 33 The significance of his position was recognized as early as 2004, in an evaluation of the succession process in the UAE. US Embassy UAE, “UAE Succession Update: The Post-Zayed Scenario,” Wikileaks, 28 September 2004. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/04ABUDHABI3410_a.html. 34 US Embassy UAE, “Long Hot Summer for UAE-Saudi Relations,” Wikileaks, 15 October 2009. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ABUDHABI981_a.html. 35 Thus, in early May 2018, a UAE-backed force occupied the island of Socotra and expelled the administration there organized by the Yemeni premier in the Hadi government, supported by Saudi Arabia (Al-Jazeera 2018)! 36 Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, 4. 37 J.A. Goldstone, “Theories of Revolution: The Third Generation,” World Politics 32, no. 3 (April 1980): 441, 444. 38 J.A. Goldstone, “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science, no. 4 (2001): 147, 150. 39 J.A. Goldstone, “Rethinking Revolutions: Integrating origins, Processes and Outcomes,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 1 (2009); 31. 40 Goldstone, “Toward a Fourth Generation,” 144. 41 In the original: Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è bisogna che tutto cambi. 42 P.G. Akder, “Theories of Revolutions and the Arab Uprisings: The Lessons from the Middle East,” Ortadoğu Etütleri 4, no. 2 ( January 2013): 100, 108. 43 With respect to the role of the media in Egypt in 2011 see, for example, N. Nanabhay and R. Farmanfarmaian, “From Spectacle to Spectacular: How Physical Space, Social Media and Mainstream Broadcast Amplified the Public Sphere in Egypt’s ‘Revolution’,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (December 2011): 573–604. 44 M. Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (London: Abacus, 2009). 45 This is the term that Algerians use to describe a governance system which, despite being controlled by a relatively autocratic executive presidency, nonetheless offers them restricted rights, including formal political participation. Deficiencies in access to political engagement are compensated by recourse to demonstration and riots to attract administrative attention and correction – 9,000 in 2009, 10,910 in 2011, and 14,000 in 2015. R.E. Parks, “Algeria and the Arab Uprisings,” in C.M. Henry and J. JiHyang, eds. The Arab Spring: Will It Lead to Democratic Transitions? (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 120; R.E. Parks, “Voter Participation and Loud Claim-Making in Algeria,” Middle East Report 281 (Winter 2016). www.merip.org/mer/mer281/voter-participation-loud-claim-making-algeria. 46 S.P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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26 SHOCK ABSORPTION Palestinian–Israel status quo 2009–17 Philip Leech-Ngo

The self-immolation of a Tunisian street seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, in December 2010 set off a series of demonstrations which challenged long-standing authoritarian regimes from across North Africa and the Middle East. Three were overthrown and several others were at least temporarily embattled. While the notion of a singular and exclusively “Arab” Spring is ­disputable – particularly given the significant differences among the various uprisings as well as the fact that several non-Arab societies also endured significant turbulence at that time – there is no question that the language and methodologies of protest were contagious.1 Both Palestine and Israel were affected. At a domestic level, in both societies protesters who took to the streets were motivated, primarily, by economic concerns. In Israel, there were calls for reductions in wealth inequality, while in the West Bank demonstrators demanded an end to a period of punishing austerity that had been driven by fiscal uncertainty for the Palestinian Authority (PA). Politically, this led to the removal of a particularly influential Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, who had acted as a check on the increasingly authoritarian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and had enjoyed the favor of Washington. In Israel, on the other hand, the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu endured and eventually consolidated their dominance with a tight election victory four years later. The impact of the turbulence was also evident in terms of the international relations of the Israel-Palestine conflict. With the overthrow of the Egyptian regime and the devastating civil war in Syria, all three main actors in the conflict, Israel, the PA – the non-sovereign interim government that administers parts of the West Bank – and Hamas – an Islamist group which controls the Gaza Strip and rejects negotiations with Israel in principle – all lost important allies. While the PA sought to divert attention from its internal weaknesses and shake up the stagnant peace process by seeking external validation of its statehood (thereby attempting to shake up the tired status quo), both Israel and Hamas looked inward, each appealing to more a nationalistic and ethnocentric element within their respective polities. Moreover, the re-emergence of Iran as a major actor, with influence far beyond its borders, as well as the relative decline of the US as the regional hegemon, has encouraged the development of new – previously unexpected – relationships, especially between Israel and an array of Sunni monarchies. While some hope that these developments will make new peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians (or even between the two Palestinian rivals) more likely, there is little certainty that the 50-year-long occupation will come to an end soon. 362

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This chapter assesses these dynamics and presents an overview of the potential for successful negotiations in this context. It argues that while the turbulent events of 2011–12 were highly significant in terms of disrupting the regional status quo, they are not the only dynamics relevant to the international relations of the Palestine-Israel conflict in recent years. Rather, the impact of the 2011–12 demonstrations in the region are better understood as demonstrating the shockabsorption capacity of the status quo in Israel and Palestine. Indeed, some five years on from the uprising there is little to show in terms of significant developments on any side. In particular, this chapter presents the case that the status quo in Palestinian-Israel dynamics is highly shock absorbent by presenting an overview of the relationship throughout the whole period from 2009 and 2017. Evidently, this period includes the peak of the uprisings in 2011–12, but covers far more than that as well. By focusing on this longer stretch, this chapter seeks to achieve two goals. First, it reduces the range of variables the could otherwise account for the stagnation or movement in Palestinian-Israel dynamics by focusing on a period when all three of the main actors have been led consistently by one leader (the US under Obama, 2009–17; Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu, since 2009; and the PA under Mahmoud Abbas, since 2005). Second, it highlights the conclusion that in terms of its direct impact on disrupting the status quo, the uprisings were not immediately significant. Instead, the paper examines the domestic politics of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories during the period 2008–16 and finds that all three of the primary actors involved – Israel, the PA, and Hamas – were shaken by several major events both internal and external, of which the 2011–12 uprisings were only one. However, in each case the level of disruption was not sufficient to alter the status quo significantly, although we can acknowledge some important strategic shifts for each actor that may have longer-term effect. To present this argument effectively, this chapter divides the period in question into six broad phases, the divisions between which are grounded in an analytical reading of empirical data. The primary purpose of this discussion of six phases is to highlight major shifts in the diplomatic and political environment affecting the dynamic between Palestine and Israel at the highest levels. Put simply, this refers primarily to the nature of the relationship among the PA, the US government, and Israel, but also takes into account the impact on Hamas. So, for example, when the three main actors engaged in a period of concerted negotiations (as they did twice, between January 2009–December 2010 and March 2013–April 2014), for our purposes these time periods delineate distinct phases. In total, we identify six major phases as follows: the two periods characterized by US-led negotiations, already noted; three periods after US-led negotiations had failed, when the PA took their diplomatic activity to international organizations either unilaterally (December 2010–11 and April 2014–April 2015) or multilaterally ( January 2012–March 2013); and the eight-month period at the end of President Obama’s second term in office, which was characterized by stagnation and the US government’s frustration and its withdrawal of diplomatic leadership. Of course, our categorization of events into these phases does not, and cannot, tell the whole story of the period. Rather, our hope is that this analytical framework helps highlight two conclusions: first, despite the wide array of events and processes ongoing throughout this period, the fundamental nature of the dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians was unaffected. Second, specifically referring to the effects of the Arab uprisings, there was no significant impact in the immediate term on the structure of Israeli-Palestinian relations, though in the longer term, indirect effects are still unfolding. This chapter presents this argument in the following way: first. it offers a brief historical background that describes the structure of relations among the major actors involved in the conflict that led up to the period in question (2009–16). Second is a more detailed discussion of the six phases that are relevant to this period. Finally, the 363

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chapter articulates in more depth the conclusion that the Palestine-Israel dynamic has proven remarkably shock absorbent throughout this period.

Historical context The politics of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship territories was transformed dramatically by events that took place some five years prior to Bouazizi’s self-immolation. In 2007 the two main Palestinian parties faced off against each other in a power struggle that followed Hamas’ unexpected victory in the 2006 legislative elections. The schism brought to a head a longrunning rivalry between the two sides that had been both encouraged and also condemned at various times, by a range of Israel and other outside powers.2 Hamas, an Islamist party with its roots as a Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood during the first major Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s, had grown in prominence by rejecting the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)’s engagement in negotiations with Israel throughout the 1990s, often seeking to disrupt the process – and undermine the PLO – with the use of extreme violence against Israeli targets (including civilians).3 Yet while these military methods won Hamas few friends internationally, among Palestinians the movement appeared to offer an intriguing alternative to the dominant Fatah movement (which is aligned with Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas that was the dominant power in both the PLO and PA). This was partly because, notwithstanding widespread enthusiasm for the peace process at the beginning, public trust that negotiations would achieve independence and end the occupation waned dramatically during the 1990s, a fact which can possibly be read as the success of Hamas’ disruption tactics. But the reasons for this also stem from the fact that Hamas is in fact a large, complex, and multifaceted entity with elements of its work extending far beyond the military sphere into the provision of social and community services. For many Palestinians then, especially in Gaza, their major interaction with Hamas during the 1990s was more likely to be with it as a civil society organization rather than as terrorists.4 But Hamas’ ability to continue and ramp up this community support role during the 2000s – and throughout the second, much bloodier, intifada (2000–07) –enabled it to extend its base of support into the West Bank. At the time, the larger and generally more affluent of the two Palestinian enclaves was politically dominated by the PA – a limited interim government established as a product of the negotiations with Israel which, in practice, absorbed most of the structures, culture, and personnel of the PLO5 –whose rule was based on the distribution of foreign aid toward a mixture of clientelism and outright corruption.6 Yet under the additional strain imposed by the outbreak of the second intifada, and Israel’s overwhelming reaction – which often directly targeted PA institutions – the PA’s foreign-aid-dependent and risk-averse social services struggled to cope. This, in turn, left Hamas’ civil society network as the only place to turn for many Palestinians during the crisis.7 The intifada gradually came in the second half of the 2000s (Israel did not end its siege of the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin until 2007), and in 2006 the Palestinian population went to the polls to elect a new legislative assembly. From Ramallah to Tel Aviv and Washington, where the Bush administration had advocated for elections taking place as part of their ‘democratization agenda’,8 the outcome of the vote took all sides – including the victorious Hamas – by surprise.9 Immediately after, and despite the fact that there were competing views on what the appropriate response should be, a hard-line aid embargo was imposed on any government that included Hamas by the US.10 Though this move was evidently as anti-democratic as it was 364

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anti-Hamas, the embargo had a complex impact on Palestinian domestic politics.11 It helped strengthen Hamas’ popular image as a real alternative to the compromises embodied by Fatah and its support for fruitless negotiations with Israel. At the same time, it weakened the already enfeebled PA by taking away much of the international support for social services, upon which it was so dependent, while maintaining indirect support for the PA security forces (which were directly answerable to the President).12 Thus, the result was even greater polarization. Hard-liners in both movements profited while moderates and reformers lost out.13 Despite efforts to form a “unity” government, the crisis came to a head in late 2006 when an MI6-supported plan for Fatah loyalists to overthrow Hamas’ base of control in Gaza backfired.14 Hamas responded by routing their opponents from the strip while Abbas’s government reciprocated against them in West Bank. In the decade that followed, Palestine’s two governments have pursued very different methods in relation to the occupation, yet both have suffered similarly from a precipitous decline in popular legitimacy. Even though both Hamas and Fatah did their best to capitalize on the rhetoric of uprisings in neighboring countries that began in 2011–12, the ongoing crises of legitimacy for both of the main political factions – as well as Israeli and US interactions with it –provide the leitmotif for the following decade of politics.

Analytical framework Immediately prior to the first phase relevant to our discussion, Israel unleashed a massive military bombardment of the Gaza Strip known as Operation Cast Lead. At the time this military campaign was unprecedented in terms of the scale and speed of destruction route on the Palestinian territories, though it reflected similar tactics used in the bombardment of Lebanon in 2006 and would be matched by later attacks on Gaza. According to official Israeli pronouncements, the goal of the campaign was to put an end to indiscriminate rocket fire emanating from the Strip. However, there was evidently more to the campaign than this, and indeed then foreign minister Tzipi Livni, had suggested a vaguer goal in an interview with the BBC, which was ‘to change realities on the ground’.15 Livni’s words are telling; the military campaign did change the realities on the ground, but not in entirely the way the Israeli government would have wanted. For a start, while it had been rushed to be completed in the last days of George W. Bush’s administration – and before the untested Obama presidency began – this did not preserve Israel from international opprobrium. Moreover, the campaign did not – as it seems likely was an intention – strengthen public support for the then government sufficiently to guide it to victory in the forthcoming Israeli elections.16 But, finally, and perhaps most damning of all for the government that had, just days previously offered a compromise offer to Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas emerged from Cast Lead bruised but not defeated. Moreover, its aura of resistance was bolstered by withstanding the Israeli onslaught and emerging, relatively, intact. The PA responded to the crisis by distancing itself from events in Gaza and using its own security forces to suppress public outrage. Thus, the first phase of the 2009–17 period began with new governments in Israel and the US, but for the Palestinians, the division between the two main parties was further reinforced.17

January 2009–December 2010 President Obama entered office in January 2009 on the back of an election campaign that promised “hope and change” on all fronts. Though the situation in Palestine-Israel was never likely to be his top priority, many interested observers inferred from his opposition to the 365

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policies of the preceding Bush administration – particularly regarding the war in Iraq – that there might be some cause for hope that the US would pursue a different direction in the Middle East. Such optimism seemed to be confirmed by Obama when, just months into office, the new president went to Cairo and delivered a speech that apparently outlined a new vision for US foreign policy in the region. Most relevant to this issue, Obama expressed sympathy for Palestinians who were under occupation or in exile as refugees, and that was highly unusual for an American official (not least a President): It is . . . undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.18 Obama’s speech went some way to resetting the relationship between Washington and Arab capitals, particularly those that had been frozen out by the Bush administration. The speech was also welcomed by Abbas,19 members of the Israeli political left – including former prime minister Ehud Barak and president Shimon Peres – and even some elements of Hamas (though it was rejected by other prominent members of the organization).20 Netanyahu, however, was riled by the speech and also the slight that he perceived from Obama’s decision not to visit Israel on his trip to the region. The Israeli prime minister’s formal response came later that month with a speech of his own, delivered at Bar Ilan University, in which he – for the first time – accepted the goal of creating a Palestinian state. This concession came at a price, however. Netanyahu spent much of the speech retelling the narrative of the conflict from an Israeli perspective, including a bold new reading of the core of the conflict that would inform Israel’s negotiation position from then on. According to Netanyahu: ‘The simple truth is that the root of the conflict has been – and remains – the [Palestinian] refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish People to its own state in its historical homeland’.21 Though the Cairo speech might have been the high watermark of Obama’s rhetoric, the administration took further, more tangible steps toward reframing the Palestine-Israel dynamic. Specifically, Obama’s Special Envoy for Middle East Peace – a former senator with experience in the Northern Ireland peace process – orchestrated a program of shuttle diplomacy, which led to indirect and then direct talks between the two sides, in March and September 2010, respectively. These talks enjoyed some initial successes in terms of deescalating flashpoints; for example, the Palestinians accepted a delay in the publication of a critical UN report on Operation Cast Lead,22 and Netanyahu agreed to a ten-month partial freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.23 Mitchell’s success was short lived, however. After only two rounds of direct talks (at the State Department, Virginia, and then at Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, in September 2010), this first phase ended as negotiations fell apart.

December 2010–December 2011 During the second phase, the PA pursued a different approach. In the absence of any progress through negotiations with Israel, the PA leadership sought to internationalize the goal of achieving a two-state solution. There had always been a strong international element to the 366

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conflict, and the then chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat, had already declared independence at the UN in the late 1980s.24 But this effort, adopted somewhat opportunistically by Abbas,25 represented a distinct effort to shake up the stagnant negotiation paradigm by seeking recognition for a Palestinian State (alongside Israel and within the internationally recognized borders) from international institutions and through bilateral agreements with other governments. During this second phase, the Palestinians enjoyed some rapid successes in this respect. Several governments in Latin America and Europe offered some form of recognition to the State of Palestine by the end of January 2011.26 Moreover, via the Lebanese delegation, the Palestinian leadership took the complaint to the UN Security Council, in the form of a draft resolution that condemned Israeli settlement activity as “illegal”. Yet, like in the previous phase, success was short lived. The US delegation vetoed the Security Council resolution, but while that setback was to be expected,27 three other – more surprising – factors shook the Palestinian leadership significantly. First was the leaking of a dossier of secret documents detailing the PLO’s negotiation position during previous rounds of talks with the Israelis. The leaks came out at the end of January and appeared to emanate from the PLO’s Negotiation Support Unit.28 They highlighted a range of significant compromises on the part of the Palestinian leadership and also, particularly embarrassingly, they exposed an apparently comfortable and friendly relationship between Palestinian and Israeli officials. Second, the initial phase of the Arab uprisings had already toppled the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, leading to increased uncertainty for all sides. While the Israelis planned for the potential breakdown of the 1979 peace agreement and Abbas’ government suppressed popular demonstrations against his long-standing and arguably most important ally, Hosni Mubarak, Hamas celebrated the prospect of an Islamist ascendency in North Africa.29 The third element of the crisis was perhaps the most damaging to the PA, however. This took the form of a severe fiscal crisis that would spark popular protests throughout the West Bank, eventually bringing about the downfall of the unusually powerful and largely independent Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and bringing the PA to the brink of near collapse.30 All three of these crises, as well as the West Bank leadership’s tone-deaf responses to them – which comprised repressive suppression of dissent and the heavy-handed implementation of austerity measures31 – combined to reinforce the public perception that the upper ranks of the PA was detached from both the reality of life in the West Bank and the popular will among Palestinians. In response, Abbas took some steps toward a rapprochement with Hamas, including a high-profile unity agreement signed in Cairo in May,32 and adopted a hard line on seeking full membership as a State at the UN.33 Given the US’ veto power (which Ambassador Rice had made clear it would use as early as 26 July), it is unlikely that Abbas’ gambit was intended to be taken at face value. But even if the true motive was to force the US into a repeat of its embarrassing veto in February, this would not come to pass. Instead, the issue was sidelined by the Security Council, who handed it off to a special commission, where it would remain until 2014.34

January 2012–March 2013 The Arab uprisings continued to impact Palestine-Israel throughout 2012. Particularly relevant was the escalation of the civil war in Syria and its impact on Hamas. While the leadership of movement had juggled their response to fluctuating events in 2011 without having to make any major shifts in policy themselves, this changed in January 2012. Caught between an alliance of convenience with the Iranian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad and pressure from Egypt 367

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and the Sunni-Gulf monarchies, the movement found itself in a steadily worsening situation. So when, in late February 2012, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, told worshippers at Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, ‘I salute all the nations of the Arab Spring and I salute the heroic people of Syria who are striving for freedom, democracy and reform’, he seemed to confirm that which was already widely understood, that Hamas was abandoning Assad and siding against the regime.35 In practice, this shift had already been completed. Throughout the end of January, Hamas’ top leadership based in Damascus – including Khaled Mashal, then chairman of the politburo – had already left for Qatar.36 Elections in Egypt appeared to offer more hope for Hamas. After nearly a year of direct rule by a Supreme Council of Armed Forces, following Mubarak’s ouster in early 2011, Egyptian authorities announced the rules for presidential elections, to take place in a two-round process, starting 23–24 May and concluding 16–17 June 2012. In the first round, a wide array of 23 candidates was whittled down to two. These were Mohammad Morsi of the Freedom and Justice Party – which had been founded by the Muslim Brotherhood – and Ahmed Shafik, who was running as an independent, but had been Mubarak’s final prime minister. Hamas, which as an Islamist political movement had its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, saw the prospect of Morsi’s success as a potential boon for itself and as part of a broader ascendency for Islamist movements in the region. As Senior Hamas official Ahmad Yousef explained on the eve of the June vote,‘we are mainly interested in stability in Egypt regardless of who takes power, yet Morsi will be helpful for us and for the Palestinian people . . . the Islamists have become the choice during the present era’.37 At the same time, popular protests continued to challenge the legitimacy of the West Bank government, though alongside anger at the PA’s austerity measures the demonstrations also focused on Abbas’ agreement to negotiate with Israeli leaders on the growing authoritarian nature of the Palestinian security apparatus.38 However, unlike during the previous phase, the PA received more support from outside – including the Quartet39 – and talks with Israel continued, albeit in secret apart from some technical matters that lead to an agreement designed to facilitate further trade.40 These developments were driven, at least in part, by a concern on all sides that the PA was struggling to survive under the harsh conditions of an ongoing fiscal crisis, popular discontent, and in the context of the broader Arab uprisings. Thus, when Israel moved to transfer tax revenue it collected on the PA’s behalf (from Palestinian workers in settlements and Israel proper) ahead of schedule – despite the PA’s continued efforts to win recognition at the UN – Netanyahu identified the fiscal crisis in his rationale and stated: ‘we are making efforts to help the Palestinian Authority survive this crisis. I hope that they will succeed in doing so; this is our in our common interest’.41 In November, Israeli attention swiftly returned to Gaza in the form of a week-long military assault on the territory, known as Pillar of Defense.42 Again, the official Israel rationale for the campaign was to cease rocket fire emanating from the Gaza Strip. International reactions were not as sympathetic to Israel’s case as they had been previously, however, and just days later the Palestinian delegation to the UN General Assembly won recognition as a “non-member observer state” in a landslide vote in late November. Though “non-member observer state” was a lesser status than “full membership” in the UN would have been – the goal that Abbas had set out in his 2011 speech to the General Assembly – it still represented a major step forward for the PA, putting it on a par with the Holy See. Moreover, the victory played well domestically for Abbas, as it went against stated US and Israeli objections and opened the possibility of further steps, like involving the International Criminal Court to intervene in the conflict (though Abbas had eschewed this prospect for the immediate term). In response, Netanyahu announced a vast expansion in settlement construction in East Jerusalem, a move that brought even more 368

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opprobrium from international allies – including the US – but also played well to his domestic audience, in the run-up to Israeli elections in January 2013.43

January 2013–April 2014 Another vote in November 2012 re-elected President Obama. This second presidential term began with renewed vigor to restart negotiations and, after confirming John Kerry as the new secretary of state, the US set about conducting shuttle diplomacy. The administration was clearly aware of the changed regional context in the wake of the Arab uprisings, though it still sought to reign in Palestinian ambitions to seek international recognition, as Obama made clear during a visit to Israel in March: I understand that with the uncertainty in the region, people in the streets, changes in leadership, the rise of nonsecular parties in politics, it’s tempting to turn inward because the situation outside of Israel seems so chaotic. But this is precisely the time to respond to the wave of revolution with a resolve and commitment for peace, because as more governments respond to popular will, the days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders – those days are over.44 Kerry’s efforts to restart talks appeared to offer some initial successes. The PA – now calling itself the State of Palestine – backed away from its internationalization efforts,45 and Netanyahu approved a “silent” settlement freeze.46 However, talks began to fall apart again in October as tensions rose around Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a particularly holy site for both Muslims and Jews.47 Israel quickly restarted settlement construction, and the Palestinians threatened a return to the international forums.48 Hamas’ fortunes worsened during this phase. Hamas’ hopes that the rise of a sympathetic government in Egypt would ease the blockade on Gaza were soon dashed as it became clear that the Morsi government had no such intention. But worse was to come. The difficulties facing the Cairo government mounted throughout the year, and it seemed that the kind of political Islam exemplified by the Brotherhood – which reflected a similar ideology as that held by Hamas – would not be easily accepted by other regional actors.49 The government’s inability to exercise domestic authority would be its ultimate undoing, however. After three days of massive protests against the government, the Egyptian military deposed and arrested Morsi in acoup d’état. The outcome was the return of military rule in Israel and the dashing of any remaining hopes that Hamas had a shift in Egyptian policy toward it.50

April 2014–March 2015 Shunned by the PA and having lost allies in Damascus and Cairo, the situation for Hamas seemed bleak, but it was about to get much worse for them and for the population of Gaza. When, on 12 June, three teenaged Israeli hitchhikers were kidnapped near the settlement of Gush Etzion (near Hebron, in the West Bank), it soon emerged that rouge Hamas activists – acting independently of the organization itself – were behind the kidnapping. Israeli’s military response was forceful and swift, with widespread raids, closures, and detentions. Five Palestinians were killed in the process. Moreover, Netanyahu broadened the blame out to include the PA, even though PA security forces had swung in behind Israel to help search for the missing boys.51 The bodies of the three teenagers were found at the end of June. Israel destroyed the homes of the two main suspects but also used this opportunity to expand its military assault on Hamas 369

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through a seven-week campaign against Gaza known as operation Protective Edge.52 Protective Edge inflicted a devastating toll on an already battered Gaza Strip (it had yet to fully recover from the effects of Cast Lead in 2008–09). According to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in the ‘worst escalation of hostilities since 1967: over 1,500 Palestinian civilians were killed, more than 11,000 injured and some 100,000 remain displaced’.53 Moreover, even three years after the end of the campaign, the Strip remained on the brink of total humanitarian disaster.54 Back at the UN General Assembly, the Abbas criticized Protective Edge harshly from the podium and announced that the PA would seek to impose a timeline on ending the occupation through a Security Council resolution.55 Despite having this measure blocked in late December, the PA was bolstered by moral support from symbolic votes of recognition by the French, Irish, and EU parliaments and from an offer of financial support for its bid from Egypt. Riding this wave, the Palestinians quickly joined the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 31 December and then asked it to investigate the occupation on 1 January 2015. They then asked the US to pressure Israel to keep to its commitments over transferring tax revenue (which Israel had withheld as a punishment for Palestinian accession to the ICC). The phase ended with Netanyahu’s unexpected victory in another round of Israeli elections. Perhaps because he feared defeat by the Zionist Union – a center-left coalition led by former minister Isaac Herzog and former chief negotiator with the Palestinians, Tzipi Livni – Netanyahu was more outspoken about the potential outcome of negotiations. In the last days before the vote, the prime minister told reporters that if he were re-elected, no Palestinian State would be realized.56 These statements enraged the Obama administration, and Netanyahu was forced into a retraction soon after the results were called.57

April 2015–December 2016 The final months of the period were characterized by two major themes. The first was that, despite some early signals of a renewed interest, the Obama administration effectively withdrew its interest from the issue. Second, the PA’s longer-term efforts to achieve shifts in the international environment appeared to bear fruit. In particular, the State of Palestine was formally recognized by the Vatican, and it was also awarded the privilege to raise its flag at the UN. More importantly, however, the EU commission decided to enforce the relabeling of products imported from Israel that had been produced in settlements in the West Bank. This was both a blow to Israeli producers based in West Bank settlements and also represented a rejection of Israeli claims to the occupied territories. The Palestinian leadership remained frustrated with progress, however, evidenced by it publicly rebuffing an Israeli offer to negotiate on Twitter.58 The PA did engage in a round of talks with Hamas in February 2016, though progress was not forthcoming. Hamas entered a period of flux in 2016. There were three important outcomes: first, it began with indirect cooperation with Egypt and Israel over addressing an emergent threat from the Islamic State, in the Sinai. Second, the group’s leader, Khalid Meshaal – now based in Qatar – signaled his desire to step down, setting in motion an internal election, which Ismail Haniyeh – then leader of Hamas in Gaza – eventually won (Haniyeh was replaced in that position by Yahya Sinwar, a figure with roots in the group’s military wing). Third, it prepared for release a revised “Document of General Principles and Policies” (published in May 2017). With this document, Hamas has effectively ‘shifted the movement’s positions and policies further toward the spheres of pragmatism and nationalism as opposed to dogma and Islamism’,59 and in so doing the movement 370

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creates areas of positive ambiguity that can be considered as openings to facilitate the emergence of new creative and inclusive approaches for other actors to deal with the movement, whether to end the blockade on Gaza or to resolve the conflict as a whole.60 In the final weeks of the Obama administration, the US returned to the issue; this time, however, American inaction caused something of a stir. Just weeks after finalizing a Memorandum of Understanding that increased its military aid support to Israel significantly over the next ten years,61 the US delegation to the UN elected to abstain on a Security Council resolution that condemned Israeli settlements.62 This tacit acceptance of a censure for Israel was defended by John Kerry in a relatively frank speech at the US State Department, where he spoke of the need to ‘preserve and advance the prospects for the just and lasting peace that both sides deserve’.63 Taken as part of the US’s broader record on the conflict, and its specific support for Israel during the period 2009–17, the main discernible outcome has not been the preservation and advancements of prospects for peace, but rather the preservation of a status quo wherein bringing the two sides together for talks is considered an achievement, regardless of whether those negotiations lead anywhere.

Shock absorption When the Arab uprisings began, in December 2011 then, the reverberations in the two Palestinian enclaves were distinct. In Gaza, the political culture was shaped not only by the dominance of Hamas – which was struggling to complete the transition from resistance organization to a party of governance, cut off from international aid – but also by the harsh blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt. The Arab uprisings shook the organization, forcing its leadership out of Syria, while it offered hope of an Islamist ascendency in North Africa. As Milton-Edwards points out, Hamas ‘maneuvered and attempted to strengthen its domestic position, upstage political rivals and concurrently elevate its regional status’.64 But in the end, Hamas’ hopes were dashed; in reality, however, not much really changed in terms of its strategic calculus as a direct result of the uprisings. Indeed, following the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the tSrip, the so-called convergence plan in Israel, with Egyptian help, imposed a strict blockade on Gaza. Even with a revolution and a Muslim Brotherhood president in Cairo, Egypt never allowed that blockade to relax. Throughout the entire period, the territory was surrounded by military forces (Israeli forces to the North and East, and an Egyptian blockade on the southern border), and its airspace was patrolled by the Israeli air force, and even Gaza’s access to the Mediterranean Sea was cut back by the Israeli navy. Hamas’ leadership may have decamped to Qatar, but its recent rethinking of its charter is more likely to be a result of longer-term trends than as a direct impact of the uprisings. Similarly, the PA was also buffeted by the uprisings – both from without, particularly with the loss of Mubarak as a key ally of Abbas – and also in the form of popular anti-austerity protests in the West Bank. It also attempted to take advantage of the language and fervor of the moment by seeking international recognition at the UN. Yet the strategic envelope created by Israel’s occupation, domination, and penetration of the Palestinian government came into play time and again to both restrict the PA’s agency, particularly through its leverage of its relationship with the US to blunt Palestinian maneuvers at the UN, but also to prop up the PA when it faced a financial abyss in 2013. It is highly pertinent to note that in the final days of the Obama administration, the US’ abstention in a vote to condemn Israeli settlements – for a resolution 371

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that directly reflected the US’ stated position on the issue – which came just days after an agreement to provide a significant increase in American military aid to Israel could have been such a departure from the norm. In spite of the Arab uprisings, an unprecedented rift between Washington and Tel Aviv and a novel approach by the PA to seek international recognition, the status quo in Palestinian-Israeli relations has been proven highly shock absorbent.

Notes 1 Shabnam Holliday and Philip Leech, eds. Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle East (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). www.rowmaninternational.com/books/political-identities-andpopular-uprisings-in-the-middle-east. 2 Lisa Taraki, “The Islamic Resistance Movement in the Palestinian Uprising,” Middle East Report, no. 156 (1989): 30–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/3012813; Ishaan Tharoor, “How Israel Helped Create Hamas,” Washington Post, 30 July 2014. sec. WorldViews. www.washingtonpost.com/news/ worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/. 3 Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 4 Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 5 Nigel Parsons, The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa (London: Routledge, 2005); Brynjar Lia, Building Arafat’s Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories After the Oslo Agreement (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Adam Hanieh, “Palestine in the Middle East: Opposing Neoliberalism and US Power Part 2,” MRZine, 19 July 2008. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/ hanieh190708a.html. 6 Chris McGreal, “Palestinian Authority ‘May Have Lost Billions,’ ” The Guardian, 6 February 2006. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/06/israel; Sawsan Ramahi, “Corruption in the Palestinian Authority,” Middle East Monitor, December 2013. www.middleeastmonitor.com/downloads/reports/ 20131214_CorruptioninthePalestinianAuthority.pdf; Philip Leech, The State of Palestine: A Critical Analysis (Hardback) – Routledge, 2017. www.routledge.com/products/9781472447760. 7 Neve Gordon and Dani Flic, “The Destruction of Risk Society and the Ascendancy of Hamas,” in A. Ophir, M. Givoni and S. Hanafi, eds. The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2009), 457–487. 8 “Full Text of George Bush’s Speech,” The Guardian, 25 June 2002. www.theguardian.com/world/ 2002/jun/25/israel.usa; Thomas Carothers et al., “Toward Democracy in Palestine: Learning from Other Countries,” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 10 July 2002). http://carnegieendowment.org/2002/07/10/toward-democracy-in-palestine-learning-from-othercountries-event-504. 9 Mahjoob Zweiri, “The Hamas Victory: Shifting Sands or Major Earthquake?” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1 May 2006): 675–687. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590600720876; Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2007). 10 One of the most surprising of these views came from then Senator and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who according to an audio recording unearthed in 2016 reportedly suggested rigging the Palestinian election: Ken Kurson, “2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election | | Observer,” The Observer, 28 October 2016. http://observer. com/2016/10/2006-audio-emerges-of-hillary-clinton-proposing-rigging-palestine-election/. 11 Notably, the embargo has recently been disavowed by Tony Blair, one of its main advocates at the time. See Donald Macintyre, “Tony Blair: ‘We Were Wrong to Boycott Hamas After Its Election Win,’ ” The Observer, 14 October 2017, sec. World News. www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/14/ tony-blair-hamas-gaza-boycott-wrong. 12 For a very detailed overview of the differences between European and US responses to the election, see: Dimitris Bouris, The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories: State-Building Without a State (London, New York, NY: Routledge, 2013). 13 Yezid Sayigh, “Inducing a Failed State in Palestine,” Survival 49, no. 3 (2007): 7–39. https://doi. org/10.1080/00396330701564786. 14 David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, 1 April 2008. www.vanityfair.com/politics/fea tures/2008/04/gaza200804; Seumas Milne and Ian Black, “Palestine Papers: MI6 Plan Proposed

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Shock absorption Internment – and Hotline to Israelis,” The Guardian, 2011. www.theguardian.com/world/2011/ jan/25/mi6-palestinian-papers-rejectionists-plan. 15 BBC, “Israel Strikes Key Hamas Offices,” 29 December 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_ east/7802515.stm. 16 The Editors, “Cast Lead in the Foundry,” Middle East Research and Information Project, 31 December 2008. www.merip.org/mero/mero123108. 17 Daniel Byman, “How to Handle Hamas: The Perils of Ignoring Gaza’s Leadership,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 5 (2010): 45–62; Yezid Sayigh, “Hamas Rule in Gaza: Three Years On,” Middle East Brief 41 (2010). 18 Barack Obama, “Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo,” The New York Times, 4 June 2009, sec. Politics. www. nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html. 19 David Rothkopf, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear (New York, NY: Public­ Affairs, 2016). 20 BBC, “Reaction: Obama’s Cairo Speech,” 4 June 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/ 8083171.stm. 21 Benjamin Netanyahu, “Address by PM Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University,” (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 14 June 2009). 22 This concession proved costly to Abbas’ standing domestically (and was apparently a significant factor behind his public statement that he would not seek reelection as president on 5 November 2009). 23 Roni Sofer, “Cabinet Votes on 10-Month Building Freeze,” Ynetnews News, 25 November 2010. www. ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3810640,00.html; Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, “Jerusalem’s Gilo Neighborhood Up in Arms over De Facto Freeze,” Israel National News, 17 November 2010. www.israelnational news.com/News/News.aspx/140694. 24 Laleh Khalili, “The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2010): 413–433. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743810000425. 25 Leech, The State of Palestine. 26 Palestine was also accepted to join UNESCO on 31 December. See Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare, “Unesco Accepts Palestinians as Full Members,” The New York Times, 31 October 2011, sec. Middle East. www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/world/middleeast/unesco-approves-full-membership-forpalestinians.html. 27 This episode made for something of an embarrassment for Ambassador Susan Rice, who was forced to defend the US rejection of the draft resolution despite the fact that it had been carefully worded to reflect previous US language on the issue. Footage of Dr. Rice’s interview can be found online at Al Jazeera English, US Vetoes UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements, 2011. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Fucpus065C4. 28 Clayton E. Swisher, The Palestine Papers (London, UK: Hesperus Press Ltd, 2011). 29 Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Hamas and the Arab Spring: Strategic Shifts?” Middle East Policy Council, 2013. www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-archives/hamas-and-arab-spring-strategic-shifts. 30 Philip Leech, “Who Owns ‘the Spring’ in Palestine? Rethinking Popular Consent and Resistance in the Context of the ‘Palestinian State’ and the ‘Arab Spring,’ ” Democratization, 2014, 1–19. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2014.899584; Tahani Mustafa, “Damming the Palestinian Spring: Security Sector Reform and Entrenched Repression,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9, no. 2 (9 April 2015): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015.1020738. 31 Leech, “Who Owns ‘the Spring’ in Palestine?” 32 Marwa Awad, “Palestinians End Four-Year Rift at Cairo Ceremony,” Reuters, 4 May 2011. www. reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-reconciliation/fatah-hamas-in-cairo-for-palestinian-reconciliationidUSTRE7431VM20110504. 33 Following his speech to the UN General Assembly on 22 September 2011, the Palestinian delegation circulated a formal request for full membership to the UN while Abbas asked the Secretary-General to transmit it on to the Security Council; see “Palestine (State Of ),” General Assembly of the United Nations, 22 September 2011. https://gadebate.un.org/en/66/palestine-state. 34 When the issue did return to the Security Council, the US managed to win enough support from the rest of the council members to avoid the need for a veto at all. See Associated Press at the United Nations, “UN Security Council Rejects Palestinian Statehood Bid,” The Guardian, 30 December 2014, sec. World news. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/30/un-security-council-rejects-palestinian-statehood-bid. 35 Omar Fahmy and Nidal Al-Mughrabi, “Hamas Ditches Assad, Backs Syrian Revolt,” Reuters, 24 February 2012. www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-palestinians/hamas-ditches-assad-backs-syrian-revoltidUSTRE81N1CC20120224.

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Philip Leech-Ngo 36 Fares Akram, “Hamas Leader Khaled Meshal Abandons Damascus Base,” The New York Times, 27 January 2012, sec. Middle East. www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/world/middleeast/khaled-meshalthe-leader-of-hamas-vacates-damascus.html. 37 Maan News, “Hamas Curiously Awaits Elections in Egypt,” Maan News Agency, 11 June 2012. www. maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=494028. 38 Amnesty International, “ ‘Shut Up We Are the Police’: Use of Excessive Force by Palestinian Authority in the Occupied West Bank,” (Amnesty International, 23 September 2013). 39 The Obama administration overrode a congressional block on funds for the Palestinians in April 2012. See Associated Press, “Obama OKs $147M in Palestinian Aid,” Politico, 28 April 2012. www.politico. com/news/stories/0412/75711.html. 40 Moti Bassok, “Israel, Palestinian Authority Sign Bilateral Trade Agreements,” Haaretz, 1 August 2012. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-palestinian-authority-sign-bilateral-trade-agreements-1.455067. 41 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “PM Netanyahu Orders Transfer of Funds to the Palestinian Authority,” 11 September 2012. http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/PressRoom/2012/Pages/PA-funds-transfer11-Sep-2012.aspx. 42 Haaretz, “TIMELINE: Israel Launches Operation Pillar of Defense Amid Gaza Escalation,” Haaretz, 20 November 2012. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/timeline-israel-launches-operation-pillar-ofdefense-amid-gaza-escalation.premium-1.479284. 43 Karl Vick, “The West Bank’s 2012: The Year of the Israeli Settlement,” Time, 31 December 2012. http://world.time.com/2012/12/31/the-west-banks-2012-the-year-of-the-israeli-settlement/. 44 “Transcript of Obama’s Speech in Israel,” The New York Times, 21 March 2013, sec. Middle East. www. nytimes.com/2013/03/22/world/middleeast/transcript-of-obamas-speech-in-israel.html. 45 Evidence that these proposals formed the basis of action came later that month when the PA agreed to postpone five resolutions condemning Israeli actions to UNESCO. Also according to leaks, Abbas insisted to Kerry that Israel must detail proposed future borders in the form of a map. Barak Ravid, “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Suspend Unilateral Moves at UN to Give U.S. Mediation a Chance,” Haaretz, 4 April 2013. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/palestinian-president-mahmoudabbas-to-suspend-unilateral-moves-at-un-to-give-u-s-mediation-a-chance.premium-1.513306. 46 Raphael Ahren, “Danon: Government Has Frozen Settlement Expansion Plans,” Times of Israel, 19 May 2014. www.timesofisrael.com/danon-government-has-frozen-settlement-expansion-plans/. 47 Dalia Hatuqa and Mohsin Ali, “Timeline: Al-Aqsa Mosque,” 27 July 2017. www.aljazeera.com/news/ middleeast/2014/04/timeline-al-aqsa-mosque-2014413111757867796.html. 48 Jerusalem Post,“Palestinian Official Threatens to Take Settlement Issue to Int’l Bodies,” 21 August 2013. www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Palestinian-official-threatens-to-take-settlement-issue-to-intl-bodies323851?fb_comment_id=1408341182713828_90177. 49 Heba Saleh and Camilla Hall, “Morsi Attempts to Ease Saudi Concerns,” Financial Times, 11 July 2012. www.ft.com/content/cb9f85ac-cb45-11e1-b896-00144feabdc0; Mary Fitzgerald, “Strategic Regional Alliances in Disarray after Mohamed Morsi’s Precipitous Eviction,” The Irish Times, 8 July 2013. www. irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/strategic-regional-alliances-in-disarray-after-mohamed-morsi-sprecipitous-eviction-1.1456078; Bruce Riedel, “Saudi Arabia Cheers the Coup in Egypt,” Brookings (blog), 7 July 2013. www.brookings.edu/opinions/saudi-arabia-cheers-the-coup-in-egypt/. 50 Shlomi Eldar, “Hamas Isolated After Coup in Egypt,” Al-Monitor, 4 July 2013. www.al-monitor.com/ pulse/originals/2013/07/fall-egyptian-brotherhood-trouble-hamas.html. 51 Jodi Rudoren, “Netanyahu Says Three Were Taken by Hamas,” The New York Times, 15 June 2014, sec. Middle East. www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world/middleeast/netanyahu-blames-hamas-in-kid napping-of-israeli-youths.html. 52 According to a Reuters report that Israel had wanted to use this as a pretext: an Israeli government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Israel was looking to leverage the search into a wider clampdown on Hamas in the West Bank and was also looking at legal aspects of deporting West Bank Hamas leaders to Gaza. Ali Swafta, “Israel Expands West Bank Hunt for Missing Teens, Palestinian Killed,” Reuters, 16 June 2014. www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinian-israel/israelexpands-west-bank-hunt-for-missing-teens-palestinian-killed-idUSKBN0ER05F20140616. 53 UN OCHA, “Fragmented Lives: Humanitarian Overview 2014,” (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2015). www.ochaopt.org/documents/annual_humanitarian_overview_2014_ english_final.pdf. 54 Bethan Mckernan, “Three Years After Its Last War with Israel, Gaza Is on the Brink of a Humanitarian Crisis,” The Independent, 25 August 2017. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/

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Shock absorption gaza-palestinians-humanitarian-situation-worsening-three-years-after-2014-hamas-israel-wara7912866.html. 55 “Full Text of Mahmoud Abbas’s Speech to the UN,” Times of Israel, 26 September 2014. www. timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-abbas-speech-to-un/. 56 Ravid, “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Suspend Unilateral Moves at UN to Give U.S. Mediation a Chance,” 57 Rudoren, “Netanyahu Says Three Were Taken by Hamas,” 58 Another example was an Arabic-only statement released by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry that was “relieving” the international community from “issuing useless condemnations against Israeli settlement” activities, that was issued in response to several announcements of settlement expansion. 59 Khaled Hroub, “A Newer Hamas? The Revised Charter,” Journal of Palestine Studies 46, no. 4 (1 August 2017): 10. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.46.4.100. 60 Ibid., 10. 61 The White House, “Fact Sheet: Memorandum of Understanding Reached with Israel,” whitehouse. gov, 14 September 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/14/factsheet-memorandum-understanding-reached-israel. 62 United Nations Security Council, “United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016),” Pub. L. No. 2334, S/RES/2334 (2016) (2016). www.un.org/webcast/pdfs/SRES2334-2016.pdf. 63 John Kerry, “Remarks on Middle East Peace,” U.S. Department of State, 28 December 2016. www. state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/12/266119.htm. 64 Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Hamas and the Arab Spring: Strategic Shifts?” Middle East Policy Council, 2013. www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-archives/hamas-and-arab-spring-strategic-shifts.

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27 THE RISE AND FALL OF TURKEY IN THE ARAB SPRING Paul A. Williams

Introduction Turkey’s voters, who had just elected the Justice and Development Party or AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) to fix the country’s 2001 economic crisis and bring it into the European Union (EU), feared that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq would prevent realization of those objectives. Indeed,“favorable” Turkish opinion of America fell from 30% in 2002 to 15% – third lowest among countries polled – the following year.1 However, the new government started curbing the military’s political powers, widening freedom of expression and further liberalizing the economy, while Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s advisor Ahmet Davutoğlu oversaw a new expansion of commercial and diplomatic ties with other countries. Thus, although the Iraq War further undercut Turks’ trust in the US, it did little to stunt the growth of Turkey’s economy and “soft power” (i.e., attractive culture, political values, and foreign policies),2 as discussed in voluminous scholarly output.3 Aptly illustrating this point, over 1 million Turks, including Erdoğan family members, attended the 2006 premiere of Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, an anti-American action film with a cast including US actors Gary Busey and Billy Zane. Turkey’s transformation served to inspire the early 2011 Arab Spring, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, but by 2016, these uprisings had largely failed, and Turkey itself had lost many of its “model” democratic qualities along with influence in the Middle East. Revolt provoked backlash – like the July 2013 coup against Egypt’s first elected president – and internecine conflict in Libya, Yemen, and Syria that allowed Salafi jihadists, especially the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or IS, for short), to take root. Ankara’s prominent shift from cooperating with, to opposing, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime initially matched Western objectives, but toppled a core pillar of Turkish soft power – Davutoğlu’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy. Erdoğan’s strident denunciation of Egyptian post-coup military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Sisi formed a visible part of his winning campaign for Turkey’s first direct presidential election in August 2014, but weakened Ankara’s capacity to unite pro-coup Gulf monarchies against Assad. Purported Turkish assistance to jihadists in Syria also alienated Assad backers Tehran, Moscow, and (to a lesser extent) Beijing, politicians in Shi’a-majority Iraq, many Kurds, and Turkey’s NATO partners. Erdoğan spokesman İbrahim Kalın blamed Ankara’s growing isolation not on his increasingly powerful boss’s policies, but on Turkey’s morally principled

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“precious loneliness”.4 In an inverse analogy to the prior example, 2017 Erdoğan docudrama Reis (“Chief ”) had a dismal gala showing.5 Many Realist accounts plausibly point to the Syrian conflict as a key external factor that weakened Turkey’s democracy and soft power. One suggests that soft power could never advance Turkey’s interests in highly “securitized” settings (like the Arab Spring),6 while another asserts that Syria-origin terror and refugee crises reproduced Turkey’s one-dimensional Cold War “buffer state” profile.7 Still another account, which asserts that Turkey’s post–Arab Spring security crises aggravated ‘statist fear for survival among the ruling political elite’ and a ‘psychology of constant state of emergency in the domestic arena and militarization in regional policy’,8 tellingly refers to Steven David’s modified Realist concept of “omnibalancing” without elaborating on a core aspect of that concept – that “weak and illegitimate” leaders may align with foreign powers to counter-balance domestic threats to their rule.9 This last point hints at how domestic factors and personal agency reduced Turkey’s influence. Certainly, a rising power’s capacity to exert force (and commit unforced errors) also grows,10 tempting leaders – especially those facing fewer checks and balances – to dismiss realpolitik counsels of self-restraint.11 To borrow one Realist’s distinction between “permissive” and “efficient” (motivating) causes of war,12 Turkey’s increased clout permitted greater AKP indulgence in discourses of “grandeur” in foreign policy – shaped both by moral umbrage at the Assad regime’s perceived atrocities against Syria’s Sunni majority and belief in Turkey’s capacity to rectify the situation13 – and escalation from condemning Assad to fighting him via proxies, many of them jihadists. Erdoğan concurrently exploited Sunni sectarianism and Turkish nationalism to dominate domestic and foreign policy alike. Yet, ‘Turkey’s steady descent into authoritarian rule under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been accompanied by an erratic foreign policy’,14 meshing with the notion that Erdoğan was not merely a victim of, but also a contributor to, ‘existential insecurities that have precipitated Turkey’s exit from democracy’.15 Eventually, Ankara and Erdoğan had to revert to recognizable balance-of-power calculations. At home, Turkish security forces restarted war with the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) and began taking on IS after the June 2015 election that saw the People’s Democracy Party or HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi) emerge as Turkey’s first Kurdish-origin party to win seats in parliament. In November 2015, Turkey downed a Russian plane that momentarily entered its airspace from Syria, but by June of the following year, Erdoğan was expressing “regret” for this act to obtain Moscow’s green-light for Turkey’s August intervention into Syria, described as a “masterstroke” aligning the president’s political ambitions with national goals and “transatlantic” objectives.16 By year’s end, Ankara had even agreed with Moscow and Tehran to enforce the Syrian ceasefire and rebel evacuation of Aleppo, as well as oversee the ensuing Astana peace process between Syrian rebels and regime. Repair of relations with Moscow also seemed to lessen the urgency of heeding EU demands, with Ankara further ratcheting up threats to use Turkey’s “gatekeeping” on the Syrian refugee issue if EU member states did not cease criticism of anti-democratic trends in Turkey following the failed coup of 15 July 2016 and extradite accused coup-plotters seeking asylum. This chapter surveys Turkey’s rise as a model for the Arab Spring before analyzing how Ankara’s responses to these uprisings impacted its regional influence. The second section addresses how Erdoğan’s personalization of Turkey’s national interest fostered conditions conducive to error, in turn forcing realpolitik and “defensive” security perspectives17 back into his own personal calculi. The third part examines how Ankara’s weakened soft power increased both the necessity and costs of using harder power. The last part offers concluding remarks.

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Turkey’s soft power before the Arab Spring In many ways, Turkey’s influence in the Middle East peaked during the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria in early 2011. A decade earlier, EU acceptance of Turkey as a candidate member in 1999 boosted the latter’s prestige, with the AKP using its initial majority win in 2002 to accelerate harmonization with the acquis communautaire (i.e., EU law). In the context of this accession process, party founders, including Erdoğan, appeared to sever themselves from their Islamist roots in the 1970s National Outlook movement of Necmettin Erbakan, whose parliamentary parties were closed after the 1980 and 1997 coups. The AKP strengthened freedoms of association and assembly, widened the scope for public expression of Islamic sentiment and Kurdish identity, reformed the penal code (as epitomized by abolition of the death penalty), and curbed the military’s political powers.18 The AKP also accelerated economic liberalization. Turkey’s transformation into a “functioning market economy” not only met one of the EU’s four Copenhagen criteria,19 but it also benefited smaller enterprises run by “pious” Anatolian capitalists. Growth reached 9% in 2004, 2010, and 2011, putting Turkey’s per capita income up to USD $10,500 in 2010 and propelling it into the G20.20 Exports quadrupled during 2003–2008 to USD $136 billion, inflation fell sixfold to 9%, and foreign direct investment inflows expanded to nearly 20% per annum after 2005, allowing Turkey to spurn new International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans in 2008.21 Economic reform after the 2001 crisis and decreasing trade with Europe – from 56% of total trade in 2002 to 38% in 201222 – enabled Turkey’s relatively quick recovery from the 2009 eurozone recession.23 In June 2012, Turkey pledged USD $5billion to the IMF’s European debt-relief package, and nearly one year later Erdoğan was asserting that Turkey had paid off its own IMF debt.24 As advisor to Erdoğan until 2009, foreign minister between 2009 and 2014, and prime minister until mid-2016, IR scholar Ahmet Davutoğlu revamped Turkish foreign policy in an analogous spirit. Influenced by a blend of idealism and realpolitik,25 he applied a “strategic depth” doctrine, which saw Turkey’s improved ties with states sharing a common Ottoman heritage in part as leverage with the EU.26 His notable principles of “zero problems with neighbors” and “multi-dimensional” relations drew on older legacies. One came from Turgut Özal, Turkey’s politically conservative but economically liberal post-coup prime minister (1983–89) and president (1987–93), who viewed ‘the historical legacy of the Ottoman past and flourishing Islamic culture’ as a source of national soft power.27 Davutoğlu’s policy of avoiding mutually exclusive choices among the US, China, EU, and Former Soviet Union (FSU) states including Russia and various other countries28 also echoed Erbakan’s post–Cold War “multi-dimensionalism” and matched pro-AKP business interests in resolving Turkey’s bilateral disputes and getting Ankara to mediate resolution of others so as to open up new export and investment markets. Measures to realize such objectives commenced with the AKP’s first electoral victory. Opposed to US intervention in Iraq for fear that it would fissure that country and embolden Kurdish independence movements, Davutoğlu worked during the initial post-election period, during which time Erdoğan’s earlier ineligibility to stand for election barred him from the prime ministry, to deny a requisite majority of votes for a parliamentary bill allowing US troops to cross into Iraq. However, he also brought Saudi, Iranian, Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Turkish foreign ministers to Istanbul in January 2003 to urge Saddam Hussein to comply with international arms inspections.29 This effort, as well as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül’s May 2003 call on Muslim leaders at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Tehran to focus more on internal reform than on blaming outside powers, reflected a neo-Ottomanist proclivity to tutor Arab regimes.30 In a similar reflexive vein of foreign policy, Ankara threatened to intervene if Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) used Iraq’s first democratic election in 378

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January 2005 as a pretext to annex oil-rich Mosul and Kirkuk provinces – from which Turks attribute their 1926 withdrawal to British pressure – and further marginalize ethnic Turkmen, but Davutoğlu did bring Iraq’s Sunni insurgent groups to Turkey to get them to reconcile and participate in this election. He also underscored Turkey’s participation in 2007 efforts to bridge Shi’a-Sunni divides in Iraq and, nearly two years into the Syrian war, was still professing faith in the value of working with Iran to ‘prevent possible tensions between Sunnis and Shiites’.31 AKP governments acted to better relations with Syria and Iran. Though Hafez al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime had since 1984 been sponsoring attacks by Abdullah “Apo” Öcalan’s PKK in part to slow Turkey’s construction of the massive Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates River, Turkey’s overt 1998 threat to invade Syria forced Damascus to close the PKK’s Bekaa Valley base and expel its chief.32 This event and the intra-Assad family regime transition in 2000 seemed to end this “Cold War”. By early 2005, the two capitals had signed many bilateral accords; a Turkish parliamentary group had visited Damascus to discuss terrorism and the disputed province of Hatay; Assad had made Syria’s first head-of-state trip to Ankara in over half a century – an occasion on which Erdoğan passed a message to Assad on behalf of Israel – and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer had journeyed to Damascus ostensibly to press for withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.33 Amelioration of relations with Syria also enhanced Turkey’s moves to widen regional integration. By 2012 Ankara had waived visa requirements for 70 countries including Syria, initiated a new border crossing as well as railway and electricity connections to Syria, and foresaw merging customs posts with Syria, extending the Arab Gas Pipeline from Egypt via Syria to Turkey, and creating pan-regional free-trade areas and power grids.34 Turkey also sought to build on one of Erbakan’s policy legacies by cementing ties with Iran on the basis of shared religious perspectives, security concerns, and trade interests. Ankara and Tehran have opposed Kurdish independence and the most radical embodiment of that movement in the PKK and its Iranian wing PJAK (the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan), respectively, though each state has ironically courted rival factions of semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan (Ankara backs Massoud Barzani’s KDP and Tehran has supported the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)) to gain approval for attacking these militants in northern Iraq.35 The AKP government also sought to promote gas exports from Iran (Turkey’s second largest supplier) to Europe via Turkey, again in potential violation of the US government’s 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act.36 Erdoğan visited Tehran in July 2004 to sign agreements on energy and security, and in 2006, the two countries’ security forces agreed to coordinate counter-PKK operations, paving the way for Iran’s shelling of the PKK’s Qandil Mountain redoubts in northern Iraq.37 In 2008, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Turkey, with Erdogan’s reference to the Iranian leader as “brother” and his well wishes following the Iranian leader’s controversial 2009 reelection further warming the relationship.38 Some aspects of Turkey’s pre-Arab Spring “axis shift” – that is, a perceived distancing from its Western foreign policy orientation – did sow doubts among traditional allies about where the AKP was going. Turkey’s reform efforts had already begun slowing after the EU’s December 2006 decision to suspend negotiations on new acquis chapters due to Ankara’s refusal to apply certain obligations vis-à-vis new EU member Cyprus. Moreover, relations with Israel suffered from Hamas official Khaled Mashal’s 2006 and 2009 visits to Ankara, Erdoğan’s “one minute” denunciation of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead campaign against Gaza at the 2009 World Economic Forum, and the Israel Defense Forces’ May 2010 shooting of nine Turkish activists aboard the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara flotilla. Turkey’s effort with Brazil to negotiate a transfer of Iran’s plutonium stocks outside of the P5 + 1 framework and its related vote as rotating UN Security Council member against a fourth round of UN sanctions on Iran also incurred US disapproval.39 Yet, Turkey’s economic success amplified the positive impact of the AKP’s 379

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pan-Islamic and pro-Palestinian policies on Turkey’s prestige in the Muslim world, such that by 2011, two-thirds of respondents in an Arab public opinion poll saw Turkey as a model for the Middle East.40

Weakening of the Turkish model during the Arab Spring Apart from Tunisia’s relative progress, two years after the spring of 2011, democratization was foundering in the Middle East and losing steam in Turkey as well. The Bahrain monarchy rapidly quashed a restive Shi’a opposition, General al-Sisi toppled Mohammed Morsi in July 2013, and civil war broke out in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. With the two latter wars escalating into proxy conflicts between Iran and US-backed Saudi Arabia, Ankara’s gravitation to the Sunni camp bolstered trends that strengthened Erdoğan’s power at home but weakened Turkey’s influence abroad. Its NATO membership and pro-Western orientation played ironic roles in setting Ankara down a difficult path. Following a conference of Syrian opposition leaders in Istanbul and establishment of the US- and Saudi-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Hatay,41 Foreign Minister Davutoğlu’s last meeting with Assad in August 2011 preceded a dramatic downturn in bilateral relations in 2012, marked by Ankara’s severing of diplomatic ties in May, the downing of a Turkish jet in June, and the shelling of Şanlıurfa in October.42 Ankara dropped “constructive engagement” with Damascus in favor of protecting Syrians.43 Denying his country’s Muslim “big brother” aspirations, President Abdullah Gül nonetheless called on Turkey to act as a ‘virtuous power’ standing ‘behind what’s right’.44 This fueled hope that Ankara would forcefully promote a “model” of democracy that had inspired both Muslim Brotherhood proponents of the Arab Spring and early Western backers of Turkish leadership of these uprisings.45 Ankara stepped up to meet the humanitarian needs of Turkey’s growing Syrian refugee population. Syrians who began fleeing to Turkey in April 2011 exploited Ankara’s “open door” policy and initial ‘free pass for an unlimited stay in Turkish territories’.46 Their numbers swelled from 8,000 by the end of 2011 to 600,000 two years later, 1 million in September 2014, and nearly 2.8 million by the end of 2016.47 Together with Hakan Fidan, an ex-military officer with an IR doctorate who headed Turkey’s official aid agency in 2003–06 before leading the National Intelligence Service (MİT for Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı), Davutoğlu turned foreign aid into a dynamic tool of Turkish soft power.48 Yet the Syrian war refocused Ankara’s aid policy on crisis management.49 During 2009–16, humanitarian aid rose from 7.5% of Turkey’s official development assistance (ODA) to 71%, and aid to Syria (most of Turkey’s humanitarian ODA) rose from 0.7% to 70%, totaling USD $7.8 billion over 2011–15.50 President Erdoğan’s calls for fairer burden-sharing51 led to the March 2016 EU-Turkey “readmission” agreement that helped cut refugees reaching Europe from the Greek islands by 80%.52 Conversely, Ankara’s efforts to help oust Assad had an escalatory effect on the violence in Syria. The US reportedly backed arms and equipment deliveries from Qatar and Saudi Arabia as early as January 2012 via Turkish airports to groups ostensibly linked to the FSA,53 while Tehran exploited American troop withdrawal from Iraq to step up its own counter-supply of weapons, materiel, and personnel to Damascus via Iraqi airspace,54 leading to Davutoğlu’s rebuke of Iran for “the amount of Muslim blood spilt during the month of Ramadan” and Erdoğan’s freighted reference to the 680 AD battle of Karbala.55 President Obama agreed in June 2013 to supply small arms (never heavier weaponry) to Syrian rebels in response to the Assad regime’s use of sarin gas, but he failed to enforce his “red line” on the regime’s large-scale use of chemical weapons in August 2013. In the context of AKP dismay at this inaction, Turkey turned into a bridge of material support for jihadists.56 This aspect of AKP’s Syria policy, however, aggravated 380

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divisions within Turkey. Historical memory of the state’s implication in gross injustices committed against them57 and powerlessness to stop grand mosque-building drives and other Islamicization projects associated with Erdoğan’s New Turkey vision58 left Turkey’s Alevi Muslim minority receptive to suggestions of Turkish state collusion with IS.59 Opposition Republican People’s Party or CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) began demanding investigations into the arms shipments,60 with Alevi-origin party head Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu faulting Erdoğan for a May 2013 bombing in a Turkish border town that the government blamed on Assad.61 Suspicions deepened after publicization of the Turkish gendarmerie’s search in January 2014 of three MİTescorted truckloads of Syria-bound heavy weapons and munitions disguised as aid.62 Erdoğan’s personalization of Ankara’s response to another watershed event in the “wintering” of the Arab Spring undermined even Turkey’s effort to create a united Sunni front against Assad. Likening the May–June 2013 Gezi Park (Istanbul) protests to the July 2013 Egyptian coup against Muslim Brotherhood member Mohammed Morsi, Erdoğan used AKP rallies to display his signature four-fingered gesture of symbolic solidarity with anti-Mubarak protesters killed in Cairo’s Rabaa Square.63 However, this stance distanced Ankara from the Gulf monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, which had backed Morsi’s ouster.64 Rising threats from IS and Iran did bring Sunni powers closer together. Near the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2015, Erdoğan denounced Iran for ‘trying to chase Daesh from the region only to take its place’.65 Under Turkey’s leadership, the OIC also condemned attacks against Saudi missions in Iran, Iran’s ‘interference in the internal affairs’ of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen as well as Hezbollah activities in Bahrain, Kuwait, Syria, and Yemen.66 Qatar, however, complicated Turkey’s efforts to influence the Mashreq. In 2014 Doha had agreed to fulfill an earlier pledge to restrict Al-Jazeera news-network attacks on al-Sisi and expel Brotherhood officials to whom Turkey reportedly offered refuge. Davutoğlu agreed later that year to establish a military base in Qatar, solidifying growing bilateral ties. Thus, US President Trump’s May 2017 Saudi Arabia visit, an ensuing embargo by the so-called AntiTerror Quartet of Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE on Qatar for an allegedly hacked website news item expressing Doha’s affinity for Hamas, the Houthis, Israel, Iran, the al-Nusra Front (Syria), and the Muslim Brotherhood, and Trump’s seeming endorsement of that action67 stoked conspiracy theories in Ankara, where AKP officials appealed for dialogue while also seeking to accelerate deployment to Turkey’s base in Qatar. Turkey’s actions in connection to the spread of the Syrian war via the 2014 IS invasion of Iraq also had largely negative effects on Ankara’s relations with regional Kurdish populations. On the one hand, Assad’s leaving of parts of Syria’s northern territory to the PYD had emboldened the PKK to step up attacks on Turkish troops in 2011, which preceded Ankara’s March 2013 ceasefire with this group.68 In February 2015, the PYD’s military wing, known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG), reportedly secured the Suruc-to-Kobani route that the Turkish army used to evacuate units guarding the IS-threatened Tomb of Suleiman Shah in Eshme, Syria.69 Even after the 2013 ceasefire ended in summer of that year and campaigning began for the snap November 2015 election, Ankara was still expressing willingness to cooperate if the PYD allied with the FSA, ‘did not discriminate against the Arabs and Turkmen living in Kurdish controlled areas and did not seek an independent state of its own’.70 These terms proving impossible to meet, Moscow’s September 2015 intervention in Syria and the entry of US special forces into Syria via Iraq during the campaign to liberate Raqqa from IS encouraged westward expansion of the PYD’s Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (or “Rojava”) to link its Kobani and Jazeera cantons with Afrin via al-Bab, triggering Turkish artillery and airstrikes on the YPG. Ankara has retained good ties with at least one key Kurdish figure. Turkey’s opposition to an independent Kurdish state and even its inadvertent killing of five and wounding of nine 381

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allied peshmerga during April 2017 airstrikes on respective YPG and PKK sites in Syria’s Hasakeh province and Iraq’s Sinjar area did not undermine Ankara’s close alliance with Massoud Barzani.71 The Sunni head of the KDP and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has shared Ankara’s antipathy to the PKK and exported oil outside of Baghdad’s control via Turkey and influential Turkish intermediaries like PowerTrans.72 Erdoğan spokesman Ibrahim Kalin pointed out that Ankara permitted KRG peshmerga forces in 2014 to cross Turkey to help liberate IS-occupied Kobani.73 Erdoğan and AKP officials have also insisted that the KRG invited Ankara to base troops north of Mosul at Bashiqa in December 2015 to train peshmerga forces and Sunni Arab troops (those under Ninevah governor Atheel al-Nujaifi’s command) for the campaign to liberate Mosul from IS as well as to protect Sunni Turkmen populations in Tal Afar from reprisals by Hashid al-Shaabi or Population Mobilization Units (PMU).74 However, close ties with the KRG alienated Ankara from Baghdad. Reacting to President Haider al-Abadi and other Baghdad officials’ warnings that Ankara should stay out of the Mosul campaign and evacuate Bashiqa, Erdoğan denigrated his Iraqi counterpart for failing to ‘know his place’75 (an increasingly familiar refrain of his) and referred to the PMU as “terrorists”.76 Ankara’s strong ties with the KRG did not stop the AKP from losing support among Turkey’s own Kurds. Though Kurdish-origin Selahattin Demirtaş lost his contest for Turkey’s first direct Presidential election of August 2014, the PKK’s role in rescuing Yezidis who fled IS to Iraq’s Sinjar Mountain, Ankara’s rumored release of IS prisoners to secure freedom for Turkey’s Mosul consulate staff, and perceptions that Turkey was blocking Kurds from joining the fight to liberate Kobani from IS while also harboring IS fighters in that battle77 helped Demirtaş’s HDP exceed the 10% vote threshold to enter parliament despite serial attacks on HDP venues during its campaign for the June 2015 general election. However, rising tensions after the AKP’s first loss of its ruling majority proved conducive to IS-linked mass suicide bombings of an HDP event in Suruc in July (which triggered the PKK’s killing of two Turkish policemen that broke the ceasefire) and a peace rally near Ankara’s central train station in October, as well as retaliatory PKK bombings in Ankara and Istanbul in 2016.78 Starting after the November 2015 election and continuing with the post-coup imposition of emergency rule, democratic and Kurdish rights underwent further erosion. Presiding over a state that restricts academic freedom through legal measures and Higher Education Council oversight of universities, Erdoğan criticized the 1,000-plus “Academics for Peace” who had petitioned the government in January 2016 to investigate claims of human rights abuse and to restart negotiations with the PKK as traitors, leading to their criminal prosecution for “insulting” the state and spreading “terrorist propaganda”, the arrest of four academics and deportation of another for expressions of solidarity, administrative dismissals, and later firings by decree.79 Starting in May of that year, Turkey’s parliament, already under Erdoğan’s sway, made prosecution of military and police officials suspected of committing security abuses within the scope of counterterrorism operations subject to administrative discretion while lifting immunity on 148 of its own members, including 53 from the HDP.80 By year’s end the government had ejected 69 elected HDP mayors in Southeast Anatolia, detained nearly 6,000 party members, and arrested another 1,500, among them 11 MPs, including co-leaders Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, moving even Barzani to appeal for their release on his February 2017 trip to Ankara.81 Syria’s spillover corroded other institutional qualities behind Turkey’s soft power. Under Erdoğan’s domination, AKP governments imposed “media blackouts” on controversial Syrian war-related events, including the IS occupation of Turkey’s Mosul consulate, the battle for Kobani, suicide bombings in Suruc and Ankara, and even narrative reportage on IS’s Turkishlanguage video-recorded burning of two Turkish soldiers captured in Syria during Operation Euphrates Shield.82 The government also ratcheted up pressure on independent media (via 382

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fines, denial of broadcasting platforms, appointment of pro-government personnel, confiscation, and the purging and arrest of journalists), began blocking or tracking social media, and cracked down on defamation of Erdoğan as well as anti-government demonstrations.83 A post-2013 split among Turkey’s Islamists generated a more lethal source of domestic opposition to Erdoğan. The AKP’s very rise to power was aided by US-exiled imam Fethullah Gülen, whose legions of followers in the bureaucracy played key roles in arresting and trying prominent military officials and Kemalists in 2007–10. However, to forestall confiscation of the movement’s lucrative “cram schools” – a likely Erdoğan-backed ruse to bring suspect officials out into the open – they turned on Erdoğan, charging 52 people, including the prime minister, three cabinet ministers, and various family members with corruption in December 2013, but parliament quashed that case, and the government began purging suspected Gülenists from the police, shutting down movement-linked schools and businesses, and seeking Gülen’s extradition for terrorism, all of which intensified after the failed 15 July 2016 coup that the government blamed him for masterminding.84 Some have even maligned post-2013 news on Ankara’s “anti-Kurdish and pro-ISIS” policies as Gülenist propaganda.85

Turkey’s increasing use of costlier hard power and its limits By late 2015, Erdoğan’s ongoing concentration of power in the context of Turkey’s deepening involvement in the Syrian crisis had all but dissipated Ankara’s soft power, revived Turkish nationalism, and made Turkey more reliant on hard power. President Erdoğan broke Prime Minister Davutoğlu’s ‘web of relationships with foreign leaders’ by arrogating more singular control over foreign policy decision-making, adopting a ‘nationalist-conservative discourse at home’ that reverberated with illiberal leaders but ‘proved thorny in sustaining stable relations with Western countries’, and imposing personal perceptions on crucial Middle Eastern policies towards Egypt and Syria.86 Nonetheless, just as an increasingly powerful Erdoğan gave a correspondingly more personalized hue to Turkey’s national interest, the consequent accumulation of foreign policy errors revived Turkish “Realist” security interests but still left their realization more contingent on his own grasp of how Iranian, Russian, and American interventions had altered regional power balances and imposed the need for domestically costly Turkish course corrections. Having alienated significant domestic audiences, Turkey’s Syria-centric policy mistakes transformed the June 2015 election into a referendum of sorts on the leaderships of Davutoğlu and Erdoğan. Loathe to swallow the AKP’s first loss of its ruling majority since coming to power in 2003, President Erdoğan obstructed the CHP from forming a coalition government with the AKP or with an impossible combination of antagonists HDP and Nationalist Action Party or MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi) in order to force November 2015’s do-over election.87 Although the 2013 Gezi protests and corruption scandals had already triggered more widespread AKP use of “nationalist symbols, imagery and references” in the 2014 municipal elections,88 Erdoğan rallied hardcore nationalists to return the AKP to power in November 2015. That triumph, however, came at the cost of a scorched-earth domestic conflict over July 2015–December 2016 that featured PKK fighters erecting barricades and digging street trenches, 24-hour curfews, urban damage consistent with use of heavy weaponry and air-dropped munitions, displacement of 355,000 persons, and deaths of 800 security personnel and 1,200 civilians.89 Ankara transitioned from full-scale urban warfare against the PKK and anti-IS police operations starting in July 2015 to hitting PYD and IS targets below its southern border and sending troops to Iraq’s Ninevah province in December of that year and to Jarablus in Syria in August 2016. Erdoğan exploited rivalries among local, regional, and global actors in Syria and 383

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Iraq to mount ad hoc defenses of vital interests, but Ankara’s extra-territorial projections of force nonetheless occurred within tight geographical and operational confines delineated by the other powers on the ground. A febrile inter-election nationalism caused Ankara to fail to recognize these limits at first and decide to shoot down a Russian SU-24 fighter jet that briefly transgressed in Turkish airspace two months after Moscow’s September 2015 intervention on behalf of Assad. However, the cost of subsequent Russian sanctions compelled Erdoğan to issue a “letter of regret” to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in June 2016 that laid the path for his August visit to Moscow.90 Even in the thick of Turkey’s declining state competencies,91 Erdoğan’s mea culpa removed the more salient deterrent threat that Russia’s S-400 air defense system had posed to Turkey’s Syria intervention. AKP circles also sought to consolidate this rapprochement by blaming Gülenists for both the SU-24 incident and a Turkish policeman’s December 2016 assassination of Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov.92 Davutoğlu paid the steepest price for re-normalization. Around the time of the assassination, the then ex-prime minister’s explicit reaffirmation of responsibility for the Russian SU-24’s downing in line with the “rules of engagement” – an implicit rebuff of government blame on ubiquitous Gülenist bogeymen – corroborates circumstances surrounding his unceremonious dismissal at the AKP’s May 2016 Congress in favor of ex-Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım.93 First, respective Russian and Turkish “Eurasianists” Alexander Dugin and ­ex-Marxist head of the Homeland Party Doğu Perinçek conducted a covert shuttle diplomacy that led to their countries’ rapprochement at the expense of Davutoğlu’s “Western” policies.94 Moreover, this activity overlapped with the “Pelican Brief ” blog and Twitter campaign staged by loyalists of “Chief ” Erdoğan to discredit “Teacher” Davutoğlu prior to the Congress.95 By winter 2016–17, Erdoğan had pivoted even closer to Ankara’s former antagonists in Syria to balance more pressing perceived transnational (i.e., both foreign and domestic in nature) threats from the PKK, PYD, and IS. The siege that broke the rebel holdout in Aleppo pushed Ankara into détente-like agreements with Moscow and Tehran on evacuating civilians, guaranteeing the end-of-2016 ceasefire, and co-sponsoring the Astana peace talks between the regime and opposition. Despite the relatively rapid success of previous campaigns to secure Jarablus, al-Rai, Dabiq, and Azaz along Turkey’s border within the scope of Operation Euphrates Shield, to which the Turkish military credited “neutralization” of 1,775 IS and 310 YPG militants, Ankara’s re-taking of al-Bab just 30 kilometers south of Turkey met stiffer resistance from 800 IS militants armed with vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, tunnel networks, and anti-tank missiles that took over three months to defeat.96 Moscow even launched airstrikes in support of this campaign in early 2017. Notwithstanding rivalries in Syria, however, Moscow and Washington DC have shown concurrent interests in limiting Turkish troop movement there. In early February 2017, Russian jets based at Syria’s Khmeimim air base killed three Turkish personnel in al-Bab, an “accident” about which Erdoğan said little, despite unease with the Kremlin’s endorsement of a draft Syrian Constitution favoring greater autonomy for Kurds, an official PYD presence in Moscow, and Moscow’s military cooperation with the YPG in Afrin just southwest of Azaz.97 As the al-Bab campaign wound down in late February 2017, Erdoğan reiterated Turkey’s aim of advancing on YPG-controlled Manbij and then on IS-held Raqqa in order to underscore Turkish demands that the YPG retreat east of the Euphrates and that the US use the FSA, not the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to free Raqqa.98 Erdoğan exploited the change of administrations in Washington DC as a fresh opportunity to lobby for Ankara’s interests. Following the coup, a Holland-based firm run by Turkish-­ American Business Council head Ekim Alptekin enlisted the consultancy of ex-military intelligence official Michael Flynn – Trump’s pick as national security advisor in part for his 384

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anti-Islamist views – to discredit Gülen and possibly delay American plans to use the YPG to re-take Raqqa; however, Flynn resigned under the pressure of investigations into legal transgressions emanating from this and similar contacts with then Russian Ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak.99 Turkish Prime Minister Yıldırım even portrayed the YPG’s March 2017 surrender of western Manbij villages to Assad regime forces as ‘not a negative development for us’,100 marking Ankara’s 180-degree pivot from seeking ‘quick regime change’ to settling for Assad as a co-guarantor of Syrian sovereignty against the YPG-spearheaded expansion of the Rojava statelet.101 Yet US special forces wearing the YPG insignia flew the American flag to deter Turkish and FSA attacks on the SDF north of Manbij, and Trump even authorized deliveries of large-caliber machine guns and anti-tank weapons to SDF forces just prior to a May 2017 meeting with Erdoğan, whose bodyguards on the same DC visit assaulted pro-YPG protesters near the Turkish Ambassador’s residence.102 Erdoğan’s increasing power and Turkey’s intervention in Syria even came to affect Ankara’s approach to the refugee issue. His recurring call for no-fly zones, Turkey’s building of a security wall along its southern boundary, and creation of areas in Syria that pro-government sources claimed to have sheltered nearly a million returnees all underscore Ankara’s rising focus on keeping more displaced Syrians inside Syria.103 On the other hand, Erdoğan’s proposed citizenship for Syrians in Turkey, arguably aimed at increasing his electoral base, added to the ongoing polarization of Turkish society.104 In another instance of the increasingly politicized use of the refugee issue that also undercut Turkey’s appeals for outside humanitarian assistance, after Germany and Holland blocked Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavuşoğlu from campaigning for expatriate “yes” votes in the 2017 referendum, AKP officials explicitly threatened to flood Europe with refugees. Emergency rule also revived the historical pattern of post-coup upticks in asylum seekers from Turkey, which quadrupled to 5,161 (nearly half of those to Germany) year-on-year in the third quarter of 2016105 and widened a growing rift between the two countries.

Conclusion The leadership in Ankara turned the events of the Arab Spring into a net loss of soft power for Turkey. The attractiveness of the Turkish model had not magically arisen from any sudden lifting of political restrictions on Islam. Ankara’s Cold War anti-Communist stance had already made Turkey more ‘intensively nationalistic, tinged with an Islamic revival’ by the late 1970s,106 a decade in which Erdoğan completed “preacher school” (imam hatip) and Erbakan’s National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi) joined the ruling parliamentary coalition. Rather, wider diffusion of Turkish influence in the Middle East seemed to emanate from the early AKP’s efforts to increase civilian control over politics, strengthen democracy, spur growth, foster dialogue and diplomacy, and lead on humanitarian aid. With AKP politicians chagrined by UN Security Council members’ failure to respond to atrocities attributed to the Assad regime but feeling confident enough to push for his removal, Ankara adopted a harder stance that spun out of control. Policies based on emotional vilification of Assad led to errors that eventually led President Erdoğan himself to revert to more tried-and-true nationalist stances. He used April 2017 referendum-approved constitutional changes to regain official AKP leadership and demand amendments to the party charter, emphasizing AKP’s commitment to “one nation, one flag, one homeland, one state”.107 Since 2015, Ankara has increasingly been projecting extra-territorial influence through Turkey’s Iraq and Syria interventions or via new military bases in Qatar and Somalia. However, the rival powers that AKP policies played a large part in bringing to Turkey’s 385

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southern doorstep also forced Ankara back into détente-like coexistence with Assad, an implicit counter-weight to transboundary threats posed by IS and anti-IS Kurdish nationalism.

Notes 1 Pew Research Center, “Global Attitudes & Trends,” www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/1/ country/224/. 2 Joseph S. Nye, Jr.,“Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616, Public Diplomacy in a Changing World (2008): 96. www.jstor.org/stable/25097996. 3 See, for example, Meliha B. Altunışık, “The Possibilities and Limits of Turkey’s Soft Power in the Middle East,” Insight Turkey 10, no. 2 (2008): 41–54. file.insightturkey.com/Files/Pdf/insight_tur key_vol_10_no_2_2008_altunisik.pdf; Pinar Ipek, “Ideas and Change in Foreign Policy Instruments: Soft Power and The Case of the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency,” Foreign Policy Analysis (2013): 1–21, doi:10.1111/fpa.12031; İbrahim Kalın, “Soft Power and Public Diplomacy in Turkey,” Perceptions 16, no. 3 (2011): 5–23. http://sam.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ibra him_kalin.pdf; and Tarık Oğuzlu, “Soft Power in Turkish Foreign Policy,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 61, no. 1 (2007): 81–97, doi:10.1080/10357710601142518. 4 H. Tarık Oğuzlu, “Turkish Foreign Policy at the Nexus of Changing International and Regional Dynamics,” Turkish Studies 17, no. 1 (2016): 62. doi:10.1080/13629395.2014.959761. 5 “Reis’e Sahip Cıkılmadı, Film Gişede Çakıldı [Reis Claimed by No One, Film Failed at Box Office],” Diken, 7 March 2017. www.diken.com.tr/reise-sahip-cikilmadi-film-gisede-cakildi/. 6 Oğuzlu, “Soft Power,” 7 E. Fuat Keyman, “Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post-Arab Spring Era: From Proactive to Buffer State,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 12 (2016): 2276. doi:10.1080/01436597.2016.1199260. 8 Bülent Aras, Turkish Foreign Policy After July 15 (Istanbul: Istanbul Policy Center, 2017), 12. http://ipc. sabanciuniv.edu/publication/english-turkish-foreign-policy-after-july-15/?lang=en. 9 Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1991): 236. www.jstor. org/stable/2010472. 10 Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978): 169, 172. www.jstor.org/stable/2009958. 11 Peter Gellman, “Hans J. Morgenthau and the Legacy of Political Realism,” Review of International Studies 14, no. 4 (1988): 259–261. www.jstor.org/stable/20097151. 12 Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1959), 232. 13 Özlem Demirtas-Bagdonas, “Reading Turkey’s Foreign Policy on Syria: The AKP’s Construction of a Great Power Identity and the Politics of Grandeur,” Turkish Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 140. doi:10.1080/ 14683849.2014.890412. 14 Aykan Erdemir and Merve Tahiroglu, “Turkey’s Patchwork Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 5 July 2017. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2017–07–05/turkeys-patchwork-foreign-policy?cid= nlc-fa_twofa-20170706. 15 Karabekir Akkoyunlu and Kerem Öktem, “Existential Insecurity and the Making of a Weak Authoritarian Regime in Turkey,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 520. doi:10.1080/ 14683857.2016.1253225. 16 Soner Cagaptay, The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (London, New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 171. 17 Ali L. Karaosmanoğlu, “The Evolution of the National Security Culture and the Military in Turkey,” Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 1 (2000): 201. www.jstor.org/stable/24357696. 18 Meliha B. Altunisik, “The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East,” Arab Studies Quarterly 27, no. 1 & 2 (2005): 54. www.jstor.org/stable/41859009. 19 European Commission, Turkey – 2005 Progress Report, SEC (2005) 1426, Brussels: European Commission, 2005: 54. http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/2/2005/EN/2-2005-1426-EN-1-0.Pdf, accessed 18 June 2017. 20 Cihan Tuğal, The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism (London, New York, NY: Verso, 2016), 138–139.

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The rise and fall of Turkey in the Arab Spring 21 Hugh Pope, “Pax Ottomana? The Mixed Success of Turkey’s New Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 6 (2010): 163. www.jstor.org/stable/20788727. 22 Ziya Öniş and Mustafa Kutlay, “Rising Powers in a Changing Global Order: The Political Economy of Turkey in the Age of BRICs,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 8 (2013): 1414. doi:10.1080/ 01436597.2013.831541. 23 European Commission, Turkey – 2010 Progress Report, SEC (2010) 1327, Brussels: European Commission, 2010: 42. http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/pdf/key_documents/2010/package/tr_rapport_ 2010_en.pdf, accessed 18 June 2017. 24 Benjamin Harvey and Taylan Bilgic, “Erdogan’s IMF Triumph Masks Surge in Private Debt: Turkey Credit,” Bloomberg, 14 May 2013. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-13/erdogan-s-imftriumph-masks-surge-in-private-debt-turkey-credit, accessed 20 April 2017. 25 Ibrahim Kalin, “Turkish Foreign Policy: Framework, Values, and Mechanisms,” International Journal 67, no. 1 (2011–12): 9. www.jstor.org/stable/23265962. 26 Tarık Oğuzlu, “Turkey and the West: The Rise of Turkey-centric Westernism,” International Journal 66, no. 4 (2011): 986. www.jstor.org/stable/23104406. 27 Alexander Murinson, “The Strategic Depth Doctrine of Turkish Foreign Policy,” Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 6 (2006): 950. www.jstor.org/stable/4284512. 28 Ahmet Davutoğlu, “Turkey’s Foreign Policy Vision: An Assessment of 2007,” Insight Turkey 10, no. 1 (2008): 82. http://file.insightturkey.com/Files/Pdf/insight_turkey_vol_10_no_1_2008_davutoglu.pdf. 29 Murinson, “Strategic Depth Doctrine,” 954. 30 Altunisik, “The Turkish Model,” 56. 31 Ahmet Davutoğlu, “Three Major Earthquakes in the International System and Turkey,” International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs 48, no. 2 (2013): 9. doi:10.1080/03932729.2013.796781. 32 Paul A. Williams, “Euphrates and Tigris Waters – Turkish-Syrian and Iraqi Relations,” in Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi, ed. Water Resource Conflicts and International Security: A Global Perspective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 43. 33 Murinson, “Strategic Depth Doctrine,” 955–956. 34 Kalin, “Turkish Foreign Policy,” 16–17; and Pope, “Pax Ottomana,” 166–167. 35 Shahram Akbarzadeh and James Barry, “Iran and Turkey: Not Quite Enemies but Less than Friends,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2016): 3. doi:10.1080/01436597.2016.1241139. 36 Paul A. Williams, “Turkey: A Neglected Partner,” in Shahram Akbarzadeh, ed. America’s Challenges in the Greater Middle East (Houndmills, UK, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 244–245. 37 Murinson, “Strategic Depth Doctrine,” 957–958. 38 Akbarzadeh and Barry, “Iran and Turkey,” 3. 39 Williams, “Turkey,” 249. 40 Tuğal, Fall of the Turkish Model, 10. 41 Ibid., 183. 42 Cenap Çakmak, “Turkish – Syrian Relations in the Wake of the Syrian Conflict: Back to Securitization?” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 29, no. 2 (2016): 708–710. doi:10.1080/09557571.2015. 1117922. 43 Emel P. Dal, “Assessing Turkey’s ‘Normative’ Power in the Middle East and North Africa Region: New Dynamics and Their Limitations,” Turkish Studies 14, no. 4 (2013): 717. doi:10.1080/14683849. 2013.861113. 44 Jonathan Tepperman and Abdullah Gul. “Turkey’s Moment: A Conversation with Abdullah Gul,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (2013): 7. www.jstor.org/stable/41720998. 45 Tuğal, Fall of the Turkish Model, 194–195; and Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Existential Insecurity,” 517. 46 Çakmak, “Turkish – Syrian Relations,” 705. 47 UNHCR, “Syria Regional Refugee Response,” 27 April 2017. http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/ country.php?id=224, accessed 15 May 2017. 48 İpek, “Ideas and Change,” 9–10. 49 Meliha B. Altunışık, “Turkey as an ‘Emerging Donor’ and the Arab Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics 19, no. 3 (2014): 340. doi:10.1080/13629395.2014.959761. 50 TİKA, Turkish Development Assistance Report 2015 (Ankara: TIKA Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, 2017), 26. www.tika.gov.tr/upload/2017/YAYINLAR/TKYR%202015%20ENG/ KALKINMA%20.pdf; and OECD, Geographical Distribution of Financial Flows to Developing Countries:

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Paul A. Williams Disbursements, Commitments, Country Indicators (Paris: OECD Publications, 2017), 94–95. doi:10.1787/ 20743149. 51 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “When the World Failed, Turkey Stepped in: Now Others Must Help,” The Guardian, 23 May 2016. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/23/world-failed-syriaturkey-refugee-crisis. 52 “Fewer Migrants at EU Borders in 2016,” Frontex, 6 January 2017. http://frontex.europa.eu/news/ fewer-migrants-at-eu-borders-in-2016-HWnC1J. 53 C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, with Aid from C.I.A.,” The New York Times, 24 March 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrianrebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html. 54 Mark Mazzetti, Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, “U.S. Is Said to Plan to Send Weapons to Syrian Rebels,” The New York Times, 13 June 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/world/middleeast/ syria-chemical-weapons.html. 55 Demirtas-Bagdonas, “Reading Turkey’s Foreign Policy,” 147. 56 David L. Phillips, Testimony by David L. Phillips: Turkey’s Democracy Under Challenge (Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs), Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, 2017. https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-turkeysdemocracy-challenge/. 57 Tuğal, Fall of the Turkish Model, 184. 58 Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Existential Insecurity,” 518. 59 Pinar Tremblay, “Turkey’s Alevi Community Fears More than Just IS,” Al-Monitor, 2 June 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/06/turkey-ankara-governor-urging-alevis-seek-protec tion.html. 60 Chivers and Schmitt, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels,”. 61 Dal, “Turkey’s ‘Normative’ Power,” 724. 62 Sinan Tartanoğlu, “El Kaide Roketlerine Erdoğan Kalkanı [Erdogan Shield for Al Qaeda Rockets],” Cumhuriyet, 22 June 2014. www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/turkiye/97749/El_Kaide_roketlerine_ Erdogan_kalkani.html. 63 Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Existential Insecurity,” 518. 64 Bilgin Ayata, “Turkish Foreign Policy in a Changing Arab World: Rise and Fall of a Regional Actor?” Journal of European Integration 37, no. 1 (2015): 106. doi:10.1080/07036337.2014.975991. 65 Semih Idiz, “Erdogan Takes Swipe at Iran,” Al-Monitor, 1 April 2015. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ originals/2015/04/erdogan-takes-on-iran-but-doubts-linger.html. 66 OIC, Final Communique of the 13th Islamic Summit Conference (Unity and Solidarity for Justice and Peace): Istanbul, Republic of Turkey, 14–15 April 2016 (Istanbul: OIC, 2016). www.oic-oci.org/docdown/?doc ID=14&refID=5. 67 “Saudi FM: Qatar Must Stop Supporting Hamas, Brotherhood,” Aljazeera, 7 June 2017. www. aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/saudi-fm-qatar-stop-supporting-hamas-brotherhood-17060704591 8921.html. 68 Ayata, “Turkish Foreign Policy,” 108. 69 Metin Gurcan, “Turkish Army Enters Syria to Evacuate Tomb,” Al-Monitor, 22 February 2015. www. al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkish-army-enters-syria-tomb.html. 70 Oğuzlu, “Turkish Foreign Policy at the Nexus,” 64. 71 Amberin Zaman, “Kurds Call on US to Set Up No-Fly Zone After Turkish Attacks,” Al-Monitor, 25 April 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/04/turkey-strike-kurds-sinjar-syria.html. 72 Jessica Donati and Peg Mackey,“Kurdistan Begins International Oil Exports, Defying Baghdad,” Reuters, 22 October 2012. www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-kurdistan-traders-idUSBRE89L0TK20121022. 73 Ibrahim Kalin, “Zizek, Turkey and Intellectual Frivolity: Facts, Details, Evidence and Coherence Do Matter,” Aljazeera, 23 December 2015. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/12/zizek-turkeyintellectual-frivolity-151223080857545.html. 74 Zaman, “Kurds Call on US,” 75 “Erdoğan’dan İbadi’ye: Sen Benim Seviyemde Değilsin [Erdoğan to Abadi: You’re Not at My Level],” Hürriyet, 11 October 2016. www.hurriyet.com.tr/erdogan-islam-surasinda-konusuyor-40245601. 76 Amberin Zaman, “Iraq’s Sinjar Heats up Again as PMU Closes in,” Al-Monitor, 25 May 2017. www. al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/05/pmu-sinjar-turkey-intervention.html. 77 Piotr Zalewski, “Turkey Grapples with an Unprecedented Flood of Refugees Fleeing ISIS,” Time, 23 September 2014. http://time.com/3423522/turkey-syria-isis-isil-refugees/.

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The rise and fall of Turkey in the Arab Spring 78 Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, “Rising Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 9 (2016): 1587. doi:10.1080/01436597.2015.1135732. 79 Mehmet Ugur, “Academic Freedom under Threat in Turkey,” THE, 14 April 2016. www.timeshigher education.com/features/academic-freedom-under-threat-in-turkey. 80 Human Rights Watch, Turkey – Events of 2016 (New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 2017). www. hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/turkey. 81 Amberin Zaman, “Barzani Asks Erdogan to Free Pro-Kurdish Detainees,” Al-Monitor, 27 February 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/02/massoud-barzani-calls-turkey-release-selahat tin-demirtas.html. 82 Esen and Gumuscu, “Competitive Authoritarianism,” 1590–1591; and Olivier Tempest, “Erdogan’s Strange Silence on ISIS’ Burning of Soldiers,” Asia Times, 26 December 2016. www.atimes.com/ article/erdogans-strange-silence-isis-burning-death-soldiers/. 83 Esen and Gumuscu, “Competitive Authoritarianism,” 1591–1594. 84 Cagaptay, The New Sultan, 136–137. 85 Aras, Turkish Foreign Policy, 10. 86 Ibid., 5–6. 87 Esen and Gumuscu, “Competitive Authoritarianism,” 1595. 88 Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Existential Insecurity,” 514. 89 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Report on the Human Rights Situation in South-East Turkey: July 2015 to December 2016 (New York, NY: UN, 2017). www.ohchr. org/Documents/Countries/TR/OHCHR_South-East_TurkeyReport_10March2017.pdf. 90 Emre Erşen, “The Regional Dimension of Turkish-Russian Relations: From Crisis to Normalization,” Rising Powers in Global Governance, 26 September 2016. http://risingpowersproject.com/ regional-dimension-turkish-russian-relations/. 91 Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Existential Insecurity,” 515; Aras, Turkish Foreign Policy, 5; and Tuğal, Fall of the Turkish Model, 266–267. 92 Pinar Tremblay, “Who’s Behind Russian Diplomat’s Murder in Ankara?” Al-Monitor, 20 December 2016. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/12/turkey-russia-who-behind-assasinationof-russian-ambassador.html. 93 Cengiz Candar, “Erdogan Consolidates Control over AKP,” Al-Monitor, 25 May 2017. www.al-moni tor.com/pulse/originals/2017/05/turkey-what-is-next-in-erdogan-akp.html. 94 Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Existential Insecurity,” 515; and Aras, Turkish Foreign Policy, 9. 95 Mustafa Akyol, “How Mysterious New Turkish Blog Exposed Erdogan-Davutoglu Rift,” Al-Monitor, 3 May 2016. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/05/turkey-rift-between-erdogan-davutoglu.html. 96 Metin Gurcan, “What’s the Holdup in Turkey’s Battle for al-Bab?” Al-Monitor, 23 January 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/01/turkey-syria-euphrates-shield-al-bab-offensivestalls.html; and Cengiz Candar,“Operation Euphrates Shield: A Postmortem,” Al-Monitor, 5 April 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/en/originals/2017/04/turkey-post-mortem-in-syria.html. 97 Semih Idiz, “Why Turkey’s Approach to Syria May Again Push It to the Sidelines,” Al-Monitor, 8 February 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ru/contents/articles/originals/2017/02/turkey-usa-russiaankara-steering-syrian-opposition.html. 98 Fehim Tastekin, “Will Turkey Attack Kurds in Manbij or Move on to Raqqa?” Al-Monitor, 1 March 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/03/turkey-syria-ankara-manbij-calculations-allmuddled.html. 99 Nicholas Schmidle, “What Mike Flynn did for Turkey,” New Yorker, 16 March 2017. www.newyorker. com/news/news-desk/what-mike-flynn-did-for-turkey. 100 Yunus Paksoy, “Ankara Content with Syrian Regime Presence in Manbij if PYD Withdraws,” Daily Sabah, 6 March 2017. www.dailysabah.com/war-on-terror/2017/03/06/ankara-content-with-syrianregime-presence-in-manbij-if-pyd-withdraws. 101 Erdemir and Tahiroglu, “Patchwork Policy,” 102 Candar, “Operation Euphrates Shield,”; and Amberin Zaman, “YPG Tightens Noose Around Raqqa,” Al-Monitor, 1 June 2017. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/06/raqqa-battle-immenent.html. 103 Fehim Tastekin, “Turkey Making Itself at Home in Syria,” Al-Monitor, 29 May 2017. www.al-monitor. com/pulse/originals/2017/05/turkey-syria-ankara-set-up-state-structure-northern-parts.html. 104 Fehim Tastekin, “What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Controversial Plan for Refugees?” Al-Monitor, 13 July 2016. www.al-monitor.com/pulse/en/originals/2016/07/turkey-syria-refugees-citizenshipcauses-tension.html.

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420

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and in bold indicate tables on the corresponding pages. 3M approach 229 9/11 attacks 75, 76, 77, 145, 156, 223; al Qaeda and 75 – 76; and American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq 165; China in the Middle East 170 – 174; hijackers in 200; Iran rapprochement with US 47 9/11 Commission Report 313 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran 72 2015 Paris Agreement 188

Ahmed, Akbar S. 79n3 Ahmed, Leila 263n20 Ahren, Raphael 374n46 Aigle, Denise 313, 319n70 Akbarzadeh, Shahram 1 – 7, 321 – 329, 387n35 Akder, Derya 358 Akder, P.G. 361n41 Akkoyunlu, Karabekir 386n15 Akram, Fares 374n36 Akyol, Mustafa 389n95 Alaei, Hossein 107n8 Al-Anani, Khalil 346n19, 347n19 Al-Awa, Mohamed Salim 333 Al-Banna, Hassan 309, 319n51, 319n52, 331 Alexander, A. 360n22 Alfoneh, Ali 107n3 Alfred, Stepan 277n3 Algeria 352 – 353 Algeria protest 350 Alhasan, Hasan 151n27 Ali, Ben 157 Al-Ikhwan Almuslmun: Bayn Alsueud Walriasa Watakul Alshareia 346n14 Al-Islah 218 Al-Jazeera 114, 116, 195, 311, 328n14, 346n72, 355 Al-Jubeir, Adel Bin Ahmed 85, 146, 150, 152n50 Al-Kattatni, Islam 334 Al Khalifa 144 Allin, Dana H. 135n10 Allinson, Jamie 57n9 Allison, Graham 280, 294n7 Al Nimr, Nimr 147 – 150 Al-Nour party 71

Abaaoud, Abdelhamid 316n4 Abbas, Mahmoud 362, 365, 366 Abbott, P. 278n34 Abdallah, King (Jordan) 126 Abdallah, Lina 295n42 Abdallah Aal Al-Sheik, ‘Abd Al’Aziz bin 138 Abduh, Mohamed 314, 320n83 Abdulla, Abdulkhaleq 213, 220n20 Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein 3 Abrams, Elliott 135n6 Acharya, Amitav 57n13 acquis communautaire 378 activism 308 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) 376 Adamson, Fiona B. 250n45 adaptability 324 – 325 Additional Protocol 84 Adeed, Dawisha 277n17 Adib-Moghaddam, Arshin 206n20, 220n17 Adler, Emmanuel 45n38 al-Adnani, Abu Mohamed 301, 317n12 Afghanistan: jihad 76; Mujahideen resistance movement 76 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 5, 15, 17, 100, 113, 146

421

Index anti-ship missiles (ASMs) 173 anti-system ideology 76 anti-terrorism 170 anti-Western/anti-Zionist notion 112 anti-Westernism 336 anti-Western opposition movement 46 anti-Zionism 105 apostasy 313 “apostate” governments 302 aqida 307, 313 Arab Awakening 350 Arab Cold War: 1952 – 70 63, 112, 117; 1990s – 2010 113 – 114 Arab exceptionalism 350 “Arabism” 48 Arab-Israel conflict 46, 111, 231 Arab-Israel war 1, 112, 125, 154 Arabl 350 Arab nationalism and Arab Cold War 62 – 64 Arab–non-Arab fault-lines 112 Arab-Persian tensions 141 Arab Revolt during World War I 210 Arab rulers 311 Arab Spring 9, 10, 12, 24, 153, 158, 237, 344 Arab Spring and Russian foreign policy 153 – 154; 2000 – 10 155 – 156; 2011 156 – 158; after 2011 158 – 160; Putin, before 154 – 155; strengths and weaknesses 160 – 162 Arab uprisings 266, 272, 279; and fragmentation of regional order 147 – 150 Araghi, Abdollah 101, 108n24 Arak heavy water research reactor 84 Aramco 186 Aras, Bülent 386n8 area/regional studies 24 Arkhipov, I. 163n17 armed non-state actors 279; Islamic State (IS) 281, 285 – 287; Kurdistan region in Iraq (KRI) 280 – 281, 287 – 293; operationalization 283 – 284; rational actor paradigm 280, 282; strategic decision-making 279 – 280; unified costcalculating entities 282 armed-to-the-teeth Zionists 326 armed transgression 313 Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) 90 al-Assad, Bashar 5, 6, 11, 13, 15, 105, 113, 243, 322, 367 – 368 Asseburg, Muriel 236n28 attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) 75, 76, 77, 145, 156, 223; al Qaeda and 75 – 76; and American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq 165; hijackers in 200; Iran rapprochement with US 47 austerity measures 367 Austin, J.L. 27 authoritarian durability 9 authoritarianism 1, 2, 223, 309

al Qaeda 76, 78, 173, 305, 310; operations in Afghanistan 72; supporters attacks in West 301 al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula 353 Al Said, Said bin Taimur 210 al-sira (ideological struggle) 303, 307 – 308 Al-Sudairi, Mohammed Turki 180n56 Al-Tamimi, Naser M. 181n61 Alter and Ego 33, 35 Al Thani, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa 200, 214 Al Thani, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim 214 Althusser, Louis 58n30 Altunisik, Meliha B. 386n18, 387n49 Alvandi, Roham 151n15 Al Wahed, T.A. 162n1 al-Zur, Deir 118 Amaq Agency 301, 317n7, 317n10 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) 87 American exploitation 153 American government 24 American hegemony 164 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 131 American-Russian rivalry 65 American Social Science 23 Anan, Sami 335 ancient militant exemplars 308 An-Nahda: after Arab Spring 330 – 349; in power 339 – 344 Ansar Allah 104 antagonism 5 Anthias, F. 263n18 anthropomorphism 282 anti-Americanism 5, 6, 105 anti-Assad fighters 322 anti-Assad rebels 325 anti-Brotherhood protests 338 anti-foundationalists 30 anti-foundational postmodernists/poststructuralists 37 anti-Hamas 365 anti-imperialism 105 anti-imperialist Islamic movements 115 anti-Iran agenda 3 anti-Iranian camp 122 anti–Islamic State 307 anti-Islamism 332 anti-Israel campaign 324, 328 anti-Israeli 336 anti-Israel narrative 5 Anti-Israel propaganda 323 anti-Mongol fatawa (religious edicts) 309 anti-Mubarak revolution 116 anti-Putin demonstrations 157 anti-Qaddafi rebels 273 anti-regime revolts in Egypt and Bahrain 6 anti-Saudi, pro-Iranian Shi’a movement 159 anti-Semitic group 303

422

Index Bensedrine, Sihem 352 Bernard, Lewis 277n5 “Between Yesterday and Today” 310 Bibbo, B. 163n20 Biden, Joe 128 Bilgic, Taylan 387n24 Bilgin, Pinar 52, 57n26 Bino, Tomisha 95n54 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) 91 Blank, S. 124n29 Boehner, John 131 Booth, W. 163n18 Borger, Julian 94n21 born fighting 112 Borshchevskaya, Anna 22n53, 163n14 Bouazizi, Mohamed 147, 362 Bradley, John R. 248n4 Braudel, Fernand 359 Brennan, John 146 BRICS countries 184 Brooks, G.S. 67n8 Brotherhood: in Egypt 339; expectations 337; foreign policy 336; Morsi support 338; qualms 337; Salafists 336; short-term political victories 337; supra-constitutional principle 337 Brotherhood-affiliated businessmen 335 Brown, Nathan J. 346n18, 347n18 Bruce, M. 68n12 Brumberg, D. 359n6 Brumfield, Ben 94n16 Bucala, Paul 94n35 budget deficits for Middle East countries 189 Buraimi oasis 357 Burgat, Francois 80m26 Bush, George W. 76, 120, 325, 365 Bush administration 125 Buzan, Barry 57n17, 123n6 Byman, Daniel 305, 318n37, 319n69, 373n17

authoritarianism and future of the Middle East 265 – 267; Arab revolts 272 – 273; authoritarian formula 269 – 272; decolonization to Arab revolts 267 – 269; democracy/security dilemma 273 – 275; political future 275 – 276 autocracy 358 – 359 Awad, Marwa 21n49, 373n32 Awad, Mokhtar 346n73, 349n73 Awakening movement 353 Axis of Evil 145 Axis of Resistance 5, 89, 144, 147 “axis of resistance” 321, 325, 327 – 328 Ayata, Bilgin 388n64 Ayoob, Mohammed 12, 20n23, 67n1, 67n6, 68n25, 68n29 Ayubi, Nazih N. 1, 7n1 Badr Corps 89 Badr Organization 104 Baer, Robert 329n33 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 302 Baghdad Pact 64, 112 Bahrain 2 Baker, Peter 94n23, 135n15, 162n9 Bakri, Mustafa 346n44, 348n44 “balance of power” concerns 61 Balfour Declaration 61, 223 bandwagoning 198 Bangladesh, attacks in 301 Bani-Sadr, Abolhassan 98 Bank, Andre 20n8 Barak, Ehud 129, 366 Barcelona Process 228 Bar Ilan University 366 Barkey, Henri J. 249n10, 294n10 Barnard, Anne 207n52 Barnett, Citing 52 Barnett, Michael 48, 49, 57n10, 123n2 Barry, James 387n35 Barzani, Massoud 293 Basij 96 Bassam, Tibi 277n18 Bassok, Moti 374n40 Battle for Bahrain and the ascendency of the monarchies, The 115 – 116 Battle for Syria,The 116 Battle of Jahra 215 Battle of Karbala 141 Baumann, Rainer 295n23 Bayoumi, Alaa 346n22, 347n22 Béatrice, Hibou 277n13 Beaumont, Peter 136n27 Beijing Platform for Action 252 Beit al-Moghadas 97 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 164 Ben-Dor, Gabriel 248n7 Bengio, Ofra 248n7

Cafarella, Jennifer 297n96, 297n97 Cagaptay, Soner 386n16 Cairo’s foreign policy 8 Cairo University 338 Çakmak, Cenap 387n42 Calabrese, John 179n32, 181n58 caliphate 300, 316n3; restoration of 303 Camp David 16 Candar, Cengiz 389n93 Capotorti Report in 1979 240 – 241 Catellino, Joshua 250n28 Central Command (CENTCOM) 200 centralization initiatives, failure 214 Cesari, Jocelyne 311, 319n56 Chaldo-Assyrians in Iraq 244 Chamoun, Camille 63 Charbonneau, Louis 94n33

423

Index Coptic identity 243 Cordesman, Anthony 84, 93n15, 95n50, 220n25 Corpus Mysticum 33 Cotton, Tom 94n32 counterterrorism 16, 226; practitioners 311 Cox, Robert W. 44n34 Cristol, Jonathan 44n24 critical security studies 52 – 53 crude oil price and USA shale oil production 186 Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) 380 Curtis, R. 361n30 cyber security 226

Chatty, Dawn 245, 251n49 Chazan, Naomi 259 Chaziza, Mordechai 181n60, 181n68 Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear Centres of Excellence (CBRN CoE) 91 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) 91 Cheng-Chwee, Kuik 178n9 China Goes Global 164 China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) 169 China’s foreign policy 164 – 165; “active and constructive” posture in Middle East 175 – 177; in Middle East during the unipolar moment, 1989 – 200 166 – 170; strategic opportunity 170 – 174; structural drivers and domestic imperatives 165 – 166 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 164, 165 Chivers, C.J. 388n53 Chivvis, Christopher 19n6 Chomsky, Noam 264n55 Christian reformation 33 civil-military relations in Egypt 10 Civil Society Neighborhood Facility 226 Clark, Dan 94n36 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) 145 Cohen, David 87 Cold War 35, 47, 60, 166, 223 Coles, Isabel 298n133 colonial feminism 254 colonialism, termination of 61 color revolutions 153, 357 Combatant Clergy Association 325 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 228 comparative politics 24 competitive interference 112 complex realism 196 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 91 Concepts that Should be Corrected 311 Congrès pour la République (CPR) 339 consensus democracy 243, 247 “conservative” governments 154 constitutional legitimacy 338 constitutional sanction 352 constructionism 23 constructivism 2, 10, 32; and the English School 48 – 50; and neoliberal institutionalism 34; positivism and linguistic 39 – 40, 41 – 42 constructivism in IR 23 – 25; adoption 29; arrival of 30; international politics 25 – 26; Nicholas Onuf and Alexander Wendt 26 – 29; post-secular constructivism 35 – 38; Wendt’s constructivism 29 – 35 conventional military power 13 convergence of Egypt and Syria 2 Cook, David 313, 314, 320n79 Cooper, Andrew F. 206n6

Dabiq 301, 304, 305, 309, 316n5 Daesh 5, 322 Dahl, Fredrik 136n34 Daily Star,The 328n13 Dajani, Jamal 135n20 Dal, Emel P. 387n43 Dalacoura, K. 346n28, 346n59, 347n28, 348n59 Damascus Accord 215 Dargin, Justin 221n37 David, Javier E. 7n2 David, Stephen 48 David, Steven R. 12, 20n24, 57n8, 206n15, 386n9 Davidson, Christopher 220n15, 221n31 Davutoğlu, Ahmet 376, 387n28, 387n31 dawla 139 de-Baathification 64 decision-makers act 60 decision-making 11 decolonization 74, 268 deep state 350, 359n4 defensive jihad 309 Dehqan, Hoseyn 325 Delhaye, Grégoire 251n46 Demirtas-Bagdonas, Özlem 386n13 demobilization: dilemma 97; of Iraqi military 64 democratic autonomy 246 democratic confederalism 246 democratic Islamic governance 75 “democratic transition” 358 Democratic Union Party (PYD) 119, 246 ‘democratisation of discourse’ 352 democratization 73, 75; agenda 364; process 75 demographic majority 247 Deng Xiaoping 164 Der Speigel 329n19 deus ex machina 32 Dhofar 210 disbelievers 308 divine vengeance 138 Dobrynin, A. 162n6 Dodson, Michael S. 58n39 domestic institutions 8 domestic-level processes of perception 11 domestic-level variables 12

424

Index EU3 + 3 negotiations 83 EU policy in the Middle East 222 – 227; Europe vs. the US in the Middle East 231 – 232; factors limiting European effectiveness 227 – 228; individualism vs. collectivism 228 – 229; normative approach vs. realpolitik 229 – 231; outlook 232 – 234; reform-based approach 226 Euro-Med framework 228 European Initiative on Democracy and Human Rights 225 European Journal of International Relations 25 European Neighborhood Policy 227 European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) 224, 225 Europe–Middle Eastern relations 234 Eva, Bellin 277n6 exceptionalism 196 Exxon Mobil 186 Ezzat, Mahmud 310

Donati, Jessica 388n72 Dorraj, Manochehr 58n39 Dorsey, James 221n57 ‘downtrodden masses’ (Mustazafin) 322 Dual Containment in 1993 354 Dugit-Gros, M. 68n13 Dunne, Timothy 57n2 Duss, Matt 135n14 Eastern Question 239 East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), 171 economic growth and oil rents 190 economic liberalization 78 economic reforms and privatization of stateowned enterprises. 193 economic reform versus political reform 193 – 194 Edwards, A. 361n28 Eglash, Ruth 135n19, 163n18 Egypt 132; and Iran and IR 54 – 56; neoclassical realism 16 – 18; regional alignment 17 Egyptian Brotherhood 345; see also Brotherhood Egyptian foreign policy 16 Egyptian political process and military control 353 Egypt: the pivotal power fails to pivot 116 Ehteshami, Anoushiravan 196, 220n28 Einhorn, Robert 95n56 El-Ad, HagaI 135n24 Eldar, Shlomi 374n50 El-Dawla, Mohamed Seif 334 El-Hokayem, Emile 58n31 El-Husseini, Rola 151n25 El-Kalyouby, R. 163n24 Ellen, Lust 277n2 El-Sheikh, Mayy 21n47 El-Sherif, Ashraf 346n37, 347n37 Emir al-Muminin 302 empowerment 259 – 260 “enemies of Islam” 76 energy security 226 Enloe, Cynthia 264n37 Ephron, Dan 135n22 epistemology 30, 31 Erdbrink, Thomas 94n27 Erdemir, Aykan 386n14 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 10, 115, 388n51 Erdogan government 305 Erşen, Emre 389n90 Esen, Berk 389n78 Essabiti, A. 360n17 Essebsi, Beji Caid 352 ethnic and cultural divisions 50 ethnic and religious minorities 237 – 239; Arab Spring 244 – 247; globalization and 242 – 244; “millets” to “minorities” 240 – 242; minority politics 239 – 240 Ettakatol 339 EU3 + 3 85

“façade democracy” 358 Fahim, Kareem 21n47 Fahmy, Nabil 336 Fahmy, Omar 373n35 failed Turkish hegemony 121 – 122 al-Faisal, Turki 139, 150n4 Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud 3 Fardella, Enrico 167, 178n13 Farhi, Farideh 107n15 Farrell, Stephen 372n3 Fars News 329n15, 329n28, 329n34 Fatah movement 364 Fath al-Mobin 97 Fayyad, Salam 362 Federman, Josef 136n28 Feith, Daniel 135n4 Feiveson, Harold A. 95n52 Felter, Joseph 109n39 Feng, Xiao 27 Ferjani, Said 345, 346n1 Fertile Crescent 61, 63, 65 financial crises 189 Finnemore, Martha 43n13 “Fisabilillah” (For the Sake of Allah) 304 Fisher, Max 208n61 Fishman, Brian 109n39 fitna 265 “flag of tawhid” 312 flagship publication 301 Flic, Dani 372n7 Fodor, Eugene 389n106 Force Armés Royal (FAR) 271 force majeure 314 foreign policy analysis (FPA) 25, 28 foreign policy and international dynamics 10 Forum Démocratique pour le Travail et les Libertés 339 Fossil fuel emission 188

425

Index Gordon, Neve 372n7 Gordon, Philip 88 Grad rocket attacks, Islamic State 301 Graham, Fuller 249n10 Great Depression 189 greater Kurdistan 285, 288 Greenblatt, Terry 254 Green Movement 101 – 102 group’s legitimacy 302 Guilhot, Nicolas 296n59 Gul, Abdullah 387n44 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 2, 13, 113, 143, 185, 196, 204, 209, 306 – 307, 354, 355 – 356, 357; assertive member states 217 – 219; obstacles to integration 213 – 217; origins and evolution 209 – 213 Gulf sub-system 21n28 Gulf War 165; first (1990–91) 76, 189, 190; second 2003 190 Gulf-y 197 Gumuscu, Sebnem 389n78 Gunter, Michael 251n58, 294n2 Gurcan, Metin 388n69, 389n96

Foucault, Michel 29 Francis, Ellen 109n41 Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) 333 – 335 free elections 358 Freeman, Chas 123n14 Free Syrian Army (FSA) 380 Free Trade Agreement 215 Frisch, Hillel 206n16 Front of the Forces of Islamic Revolution (JAMNA) 102 Fuccaro, Nelida 249n12 Fuhrmann, Matthew 108n37 “fundamentals” of Islam 69 Futuh, Abul 333 G-8 summit, Deauville 157 Gaffar, Ashraf Abdel 335 Gardner, David 294n4 Garver, John 180n40 Gause, F. Gregory, III 19n1, 20n7, 20n15, 47 Gause, Gregory 124n28 Gaza Strip 201, 365 Gazwah al-Ahzab 313 Gellman, Peter 386n11 gender-friendly post-conflict agreements 255 General Union of Palestinian Women 254 Geneva interim agreement 85 George W. Bush 325 Gerges, Fawaz A. 295n25 Ghannouchi 341 – 342, 345 Ghasemi, Rostam 100, 108n23 Ghozlan, Mahmoud 338 Gibbons-Neff, T. 163n25 Gilbert, Geoff 249n19 Gilmour, D. 68n18 Giuliani, Rudy 87 Glick, Caroline B. 135n13 global competitive interference, MENA 120 global counterterrorism campaign 315 global financial crisis. 166 globalization 72; and minorities 242 – 244 globalized discipline 23 global jihadism 76, 77, 310 global Jihad movement 308 – 315 global knowledge governance 24 global Muslim leadership 4 global terrorism campaigns 316 God, unity and uniqueness of 311 Golan, G. 162n2 Golan, Galia 256 Goldberg, Jeffrey 150n3 Goldenberg, Ilan 135n23 Goldstone, J.A. 361n36, 361n37, 361n38 Gonzalez-Pelaez, Ana 57n12 Goodarzi, Jubin 124n19, 329n17 Gordon, Louis 24 Gordon, Michael R. 388n54

Habermas, Jürgen 29 Habib, Mohammed 333, 346n14, 346n39, 347n14, 348n39 Haddadi, Anissa 123n16 hajj 143, 146, 149 Haley, Nikki 87, 88, 94n38 Hall, Camilla 374n49 Halliday, Fred 46, 57n1, 58n37, 151n13, 220n7, 238 Hamad, Emirs 195, 196 Hamama, Mohamed 346n74, 349n74 Hamas 115, 364 – 365 Hamdan, N.A. 68n22 Hamid,Yahyia 332 Hamidiye Light Cavalry 240 Hamzawy, Amr 338 Hanioglu, Mehmed S. 250n24 Hardy, Roger 220n8 Harel, Amos 137n62 Harik, I. 68n11 Harris, William W. 68n16 Harris, Winston 299n150 Harvey, Benjamin 387n24 Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Ali Akbar 98 Hashemite Iraq 112 Hawrey, Ken 94n35 Haykel, Bernard 314, 320n80 Hazbun, Waleed 52, 57n24 Hazem, Beblawi 277n8 Hebron 128 hegemony 111, 115 – 116; failed Turkish 121 – 122; Turkey 115 Heikal, Mohamed 20n21, 162n4

426

Index inter-Arab competition 112 inter-Arab politics 113 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 288 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 82, 83 – 84 International Criminal Court (ICC) 370 International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO) 211 internationalization 242 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 188, 335, 352 International Political Theology 37 international politics (IP) 25; and foreign policy analysis 25 – 26 International Relations (IR) 23, 24, 32, 41 – 42, 42n2; see also constructivism in IR; and strategies 76 – 77; theory 9, 59 international sanctions 4 International Women’s Commission in Palestine 254 – 255 inter-state conflict 48 inter-state interactions 60 intervening variables (IVVs) 8 In the Shade of the Quran 310 intifada 364 intra-Khomeinst competition 99 intra-sectarian contestation 119 – 120 inward-oriented Egypt 8 Iran: and Hezbollah 321 – 329; military capability 82; nuclear weapons program, halt 82; and Saudi Arabia, friction between 188 – 189 Iran-Hezbollah-Syria triangle 325 Iranian Army (Artesh) 96 Iranian Constitution 140 Iranian foreign policy 13 Iranian nuclear deal, stability after 82 – 83; alarming aftermaths 86 – 88; broader view 88 – 89; immediate and short-term impact 83 – 84; longterm impact 89 – 92; medium-term impact 86; positive trends 86; regional reactions 84 – 86 Iranian retaliation 324 – 325 Iranian Revolution 96, 212, 224 Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) 143 Iranian Students News Agency 329n16 Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) 5, 76, 89, 144, 213, 224, 281 Iran nuclear issue 129 – 131 Iran–Saudi Arabia dyad 12 – 16 Iran’s national security strategy 326 Iraq 2; invasion of 64 – 65; and Syria 118 – 119 Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) 279 Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 167 IRGC see Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Isakhan, B. 68n21 ISIL see Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) ISIS see Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Islamic activism 77

Helfont, S. 68n10 Hendawi, Hamza 137n51 Hezbollah 6, 15, 85, 87; in Lebanon 155 highly enriched uranium (HEU) 85 Hijaz 62 Hijjawi, Aref 123n13 Hiltermann, Joost R. 108n35, 229, 236n25, 236n39 Hinnebusch, Raymond 57n11, 181n81, 196, 206n10 Hirak al-Janūbi (Southern separatist) movement 353, 357 Hirschman, Albert O. 237, 248n6 historical materialism 29 Hizbollah 115 Hobbes, Thomas 59, 60, 67n3 Hobbesian cold/semi-hot war 117 Hobson, John M. 57n29 Hoffmann, Stanley 23 Hokayem, Emile 53 Holliday, Shabnam 372n1 Hollis, Rosemary 228, 235n18 honor and dignity 327 Houthi rebellion 3, 353 Houthis, Zaydi 121 Hroub, Khaled 374n59 Huasheng, Zhao 181n77 Hubbard, Ben 207n56 hudud (punishments) 337 Huntington, Samuel 358, 361n45 Huo, Hwei-ling 179n19 Hussain, Mehmood 194n3 Hussein, Saddam 76, 89, 155, 231 hypocrisy 308 Ibish, Hussein 22n52, 163n19 Ibrahim,Vivian 243 identity-divided societies 114 Ideological Warfare Center 306 Idiz, Semih 389n97 Ignatius, David 136n42 Ikhwan Alfyum: Mashrue Alnnahda hua Mashrue Alnabi Muhammad 346n12 Ikhwan Muslimun see Muslim Brotherhood “illegitimate regime” 331 illiberal majoritarian democracy 75 imam hatip 385 imperialism 323 incongruency 49 individual faith 69 informal institutionalization of Islamist movements 71 informal or formal mass mobilization 358 Innenpolitik approaches 10 insecurity 324 insurgency 300 intangible power 302

427

Index Israeli nuclear capability resolution 91 Israeli oppression 326 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks 126 Israel-Palestine conflict 50, 127, 362 – 363 Israel’s nuclear capability 89 – 90

Islamic affiliations 4 “Islamic Awakening” 5 Islamic community 351 Islamic evangelism 322 Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (IFLB) 144, 147 Islamic governance 70, 74 Islamic-inspired approach 71 Islamic-inspired model of governance 75 Islamic-inspired reformulation of politics 72 Islamicize Egyptian society 337 Islamic religiosity for individuals 78 Islamic repertoire 73 Islamic Republic 15, 97, 142 Islamic Republic of Iran 2, 322; foreign policy of 323; goal 323; nuclear deal, US 3; ostracization 5; regional challenges 3; Saudi diplomatic missions in 3 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) 89, 96 – 98, 130, 322; in Iranian domestic politics 98 – 102; in Iranian foreign policy 102 – 105 Islamic Revolution in Iran 354 Islamic revolution of 1979 322 Islamic Sharia 336 Islamic State (IS): activities in Syria 306 – 307; al-Qa’ida supporters attacks in West 301; attack in Jerusalem 301; attack option 286 – 287; attacks in Bangladesh 301; defining 300 – 307; delegation option 287; durability 307; Global Jihad movement 308 – 315; hold option 286; and the KRI take control of territory 284 – 285; leaders’ aspirations 305; opportunities for 285 – 286; recruitment-cum-incitement program 302; regional and global security 315 – 316; Salafi-Jihadist group 307; Salafis and SalafiJihadis 307; slavery and sex slave trade programs 305; strategic communication program 304 – 305; supporters in Europe and US 302; threat to 285 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 5, 10, 64, 73, 78, 119, 120, 158, 237, 284, 322 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) 311, 376 Islamic umma 111 Islam in social and political sphere 69 – 70; domestic perspectives on governance 73 – 75; international relations and strategies 76 – 77; post-colonial evolution 71 – 73; world of nationstates 70 – 71 Islamism 69; transforms 70 Islamist: activism 74; free elections trap 75; movements 9, 72, 73; trans-state movements 115 Islamization: of international political order 36; of the state 2 Israel 4; tactical nuclear use 84 Israeli Defence Force (IDF) 147 Israeli-Nigerian ties 131

Jabha al-Nusra 204 Jabhat al-Nusra 158 Jacobsen, John Kurt 178n5 Jad, Islah 264n53 Jafari, Mohammad Ali 326 Jaffe, Alexandra 94n25 jahiliyya 312 Jarman, Robert 220n11 Jasmine Revolution 175 Jason, Brownlee 277n14, 277n19 Jawad, Ayman Tamimi 124n26 JCPOA see Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Jebali, Hamadi 339, 343 Jebnoun, N. 360n15 Jerusalem, attack in 301 Jerusalem Center for Women 254 Jerusalem Force (Sepah-e Qods) 98 Jervis, Robert 68n9, 386n10 Jesse, Neal G. 20n26 “Jews of Jihad” 303 Jiabao, Wen 180n50 Jianming, Zhou 180n41 jihad 118; in Afghanistan 76; in Syria 122; waging 304 Jihadi-Salafist ideology 280 Jihadi-Salafist interpretation of Islam 282 jihadism 310 jihadist movements 158 Jincun, Wang 180n43 Joffé, George 350 – 361 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) 19, 82 – 92, 231 Joint Plan of Action (JPA) 85 Jones, Jeremy 219n2 Joshi, Shashank 136n35 Jourchi, Saleh 340, 346 Juneau, Thomas 20n11, 21n29, 47 – 48, 57n4, 329n27 Justice and Development party (AKP) 75, 376 Kadercan, Burak 295n14 Kaldor, Mary 124n24 Kalin, Ibrahim 387n25, 388n73 Kamal, Mohamed 344 Kamrava, Mehran 10n3, 206n11 Kankowski, P.J. 68n15 Karam, John Tafik 245, 251n50 Karaosmanoğlu, Ali L. 386n17 Karroubi, Mehdi 101, 107n19 Kattani, Islam 336

428

Index Larayedh, Ali 340 Larayedh, Amar 342 Larbi, Sadiki 277n27 Larijani, Ali 326 – 327 Lavrov, Sergey 83 Lawson, Fred 124n21, 249n9 leaders’ aspirations 305 Lebanese civil war of 1958 63 Lebanese Hezbollah 6, 15, 89, 105 Lebanese Shia community 321 – 322 Lebanon 63 Lee, Henry 179n30 Lee, Matthew 93n8, 135n16 Leech, Philip 372n1, 373n30 Leech-Ngo, Philip 362 – 375 legitimacy power balance 114 – 115 legitimate enterprise 300 – 301 Legrenzi, Matteo 221n34, 221n43 Leibold, James 182n104 levels-of-analysis problem 10 leveraging international broadcasting tools 303 Lewis, Bernard 296n52 Lewis, Patricia 93n4 Lewis, Paul 94n21 Liangxiang, Jin 182n89 liberal aberration 351 liberal democracy 351 liberalised autocracy 350 liberalism 32 liberal or constitutional revolutions of 1848 357 liberation of Khorram 97 Libya 353 Libyan Brotherhood 330, 345; see also Muslim Brotherhood (MB) Libyan civil war 19 Liebermann, Oren 94n16 linguistic constructivism 36, 39 – 40, 41 – 42 Lister, Charles 294n5, 294n11 Livni, Tzipi 365 Lobell, Steven E. 7n6, 20n26 local government 24 locus of sovereignty 351 Lofoten Declaration 188 Londono, Ernesto 21n46 Luciani, Giacomo 235n21, 249n8 Luguzan, C. 278n31 Luoma-Aho, Mika 33, 45n44 Lutterbeck, Derek 346n56, 346n57, 348n56, 348n57 Lynch, Marc 19n4, 152n42, 207n48

Katz, M.N. 162n3, 162n8, 163n11, 163n19 Kayaoglu, Turan 57n14 Kayhan 326, 329n18, 329n29 Kechichian, Joseph 220n3, 221n30 Kedourie, Elie 250n29 Kehr, Eckhart 178n6 Keohane, Daniel 236n32 Keohane, R.O. 30, 45n37 Kepel, Gilles 319n49 Kerr, Malcolm H. 20n18, 63, 68n14 Kerry, John 87, 133, 375n63 Kessler, Glenn 94n37 Keyman, E. Fuat 386n7 Khalaji, Mehdi 86, 94n29 Khalid bin Salman bin Abdulaziz 3 Khalifa 200 Khaliji 197 Khalili, Laleh 373n24 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 5, 97, 99, 108n27, 138, 148, 327 Khan, Ghazan 313 Khatam al-Anbia Construction Headquarters (KACH) 100 Khatami, Mohammad 5, 146 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 5, 76, 96, 97, 107n4, 142, 144, 151n16, 321, 322 “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them” 316n4 Kirkpatrick, David D. 207n52 Kitab al-Jihad (Book of Jihad) 315 Kitab al-Tawhid (Book of Tawhid) 312 Kitchen, Nicholas 178n8 Kiyaei, Emad 95n52 Knights, Michael 124n25 Kober, Avi 328n10 Koch, Christian 220n27 Kofman, M. 163n23 Koskenniemi, Martti 241 Kowsari, Esmail 100 Kramer, Martin 328n4 Kuangyi,Yao 182n114 Kubálková,Vendulka 23 – 38, 44n17, 45n50 Kurdish Sunnis 288 – 289 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) 119, 382 Kurdistan region in Iraq (KRI): attack option 289 – 290, 290 – 292; delegation option 290; opportunities for 288; strategic costs and benefits 288 – 289; threats to 287 – 288 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) 246 Kurds 279 Kutlay, Mustafa 387n22 Kuwait 2 Kymlicka, Will 241, 250n31

Mabon, Simon 68n33, 151n28 Mabrouk, Mehdi 342, 360n13 Mackey, Peg 388n72 Macris, Jeffrey 220n4 Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce 123n7, 251n57 Madrid conference 224

Laajimi, Moncef 340 Laden, Osama bin 305, 311 Lambton, A.K.S. 359n7 Landler, Mark 388n54

429

Index 110 – 111, 117; re-balancing in the late Arab Uprising 121 – 122; Sectarian proxy wars 117 – 118; state formation and realist power balancing 112 – 113; variations in power struggle 111 – 112 Middle East international relations 46 – 47; constructivism and the English School 48 – 50; critical security studies 52 – 53; Egypt and Iran 54 – 56; political economy of regionalism 50 – 52; realist approaches 47 – 48; regional order 53 – 54 Middle East Politics for the New Millennium: A Constructivist Approach 24 Middle East studies (MES) 24 Middle East WMD-Free Zone (MEWMDFZ) 90 Miftah 254 Milani, Mohsen 329n30 Miles, F.W. 67n4 military-backed dictatorship 331 military reprisals 302 millets 241 millet system 62, 239 Milli Selamet Partisi 385 Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP) 383 Milton-Edwards, Beverley 328n5, 372n3, 375n64 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) 103 Minorities Treaties 240, 242 Mir-Salim, Mostafa 102, 108n31 Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) 173 Mitchell, Richard P. 310 Mittelman, James H. 43n11 modernization 71, 346 Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) 3, 4, 14, 15, 21n34 Mohammed, Harbi 277n23 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 264n36 Mohns, E. Eric 123n17 Momani, Bessma 206n6 Monar, Jörg 229, 236n25 monotheism 311 moral sanction 351 Moritz, Jessie 248n3 Morsi, Mohammed 15, 16, 17, 116, 217, 330, 333 – 335, 336, 338, 346n17, 347n17, 368 Morsi’s rule 17 Mosul 279 Mounir, Ibrahim 344 Mousavi, Mir Hossein 101, 108n25 Mousavian, Seyed Hossein 95n52 Moussa, Amr 332 – 333 Moussalli, Ahmad 296n51 movement 300 Mubarak, Hosni 15, 16, 126 Mufti, Malik 123n10 al-Mughrabi, Nidal 21n44, 373n35 Mujahideen resistance movement 76 mukhabarat 272 multi-polar system 110

Maghraoui, D. 360n19 Magid, Aaron 95n55 al-Maliki, Nouri 11 Malsin, Jared 22n54 Mandaville, Peter 58n38 manhaj 307, 313 manhaj as-Salaf 315 Maoist era (1949–76) 166 al-Maqdisi, Abu Mohamed 307 Mark, Tessler 277n30 Marschall, Christian 151n30 Martin, Lipset Seymour 277n7 Marxism-Leninist party 247 Mary, Kaldor 277n10 Marzouki, Moncef 340 Mashkini, Ali 324 mass-based political movements 72 mass social movements 346 Matthiesen, Toby 21n32, 124n22 Mawdudi, Abul A’la 74 Mazower, Mark 242 Mazzetti, Mark 388n54 MBS see Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) McDowell, Angul 21n50 McGlinchey, S. 360n25 McGreal, Chris 372n6 Mcinnis, J. Matthew 89, 95n46 Mckernan, Bethan 374n54 McKew, M.K. 163n26 McLaughlin, John 136n30 Mearsheimer, J.J. 32, 361n27 Mearsheimer, John 102 Mecca 141 Medina 141 al-Medina 336 Mediterranean Free Trade Zone 225 Medvedev, D. 163n10 Medvedev, Dmitry 157 Menashri, David 328n9 Messari, Nizar 27 methodology 30, 31 Meyer, H. 163n17 Meyer, Josh 95n43 Miami Theory Group 26, 27 Mian, Zia 95n52 Michael, Willis 277n21 Middle East: cultural changes 2; international politics 10 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional order 110, 265, 276; Arab Cold War (1945–75) 112; Arab Cold War (1990s–2010) 113 – 114; global competitive interference 120; hegemony 115 – 116; Hobbesian cold/semi-hot war 117; Intra-sectarian contestation 119 – 120; Iraq and Syria 118 – 119; Islamist trans-state movements 115; legitimacy power balance 114 – 115; power balance (2010–13) 114, 116; power struggle

430

Index Netanyahu, Benjamin 85, 325, 362, 363, 366, 368, 373n21 Netterstrøm, Kasper Ly 278n39 Neugart, Felix 235n10 new Arab Cold War 9 New York Times 329n21 Nida Tounes 352 Nixon, Richard 141 Nizameddin, T. 162n7 non-aligned movement (NAM) 103, 200; conference 17 non-aligned terrorist groups 302 non-Arab societies 362 “non-member observer state” 368 Nonneman, Gerd 206n17 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 90 non-state actors 47 non-sympathetic cohabitants 302 “non-Western” approaches 24 normative forces 49 norm constructivists 24 norm entrepreneurs 24 norm subsidiarity 49 Norton, A.R. 328n1 Norton, Augustus R. 151n24 Nouiehed, Lin 21n50 Nouri, Ali Akbar Nateq 325 nuclear deal 4 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 91 nuclear weapon 129 Nuclear Weapon–Free Zone (NWFZ) 90 Nye, Joseph S. Jr. 386n2

Munson, H. Jr. 359n8 Murinson, Alexander 387n27 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) 17, 55, 71, 115, 121, 159, 197, 270, 308, 353, 355, 368; An-Nahda in power 339 – 344; decline and fall 337 – 339; document evaluation 344; in Egypt 345; failed project 331 – 334; leadership’s approach 344; mass social movements 346; “national democratic party” 345; relationship 344 – 345; veneration of state 334 – 337 Muslim Brotherhood,The:The Burden of Tradition 346n11 al-Muslimi, Farea 89, 95n48 Muslim-majority countries, development of 72 Muslim “periphery” 77 Muslim unity 327 Mustakberin 323 Mustazafin 323 muwahhidin 312 ‘myth of Israel’s invincibility’ 326 – 327 al-Naba 304 Nadia, Marzouki 278n37 Namibia Plan of Action 252 Naser, Gamal Abdul 2 Nasr,Vali 313, 320n71 Nasrallah, Hassan 325, 326 Nasrallah, Tony 113, 251n48 Nasser, Amal 194n4 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 267 Nasserism 55, 267 “national democratic party” 345 National Intelligence Council 309 Nationalist Action Party 383 National Liberation Front (FLN) 272, 273 nationally determined contributions (NDCs) 188 National Salvation Front 338, 343 national security decision-making 102 national unity government 334 NATO alliance 61 NATO-led intervention in Libya 195 Nazih, Ayubi 277n28 neoclassical realism 2, 4, 8, 165; Egypt 16 – 18; Iran–Saudi Arabia dyad 12 – 16; political science and Arab spring 9 – 10; systemic pressures and domestic politics 10 – 12 neo-liberal agenda 335 neoliberalism 23, 28, 32 neo-millet system 238 neo-patrimonialism 350 neorealism 23, 28, 32 neo-traditional Gulf monarchies 73 neo-traditionalist regimes 75 neo-traditional monarchies of the Gulf 76 Nephew, Richard 88, 95n56 Ness, Peter Van 164, 178n2

Obama, Barack 13, 139, 365 – 366, 369, 371, 373n18 Obama administration 4, 125 – 134 Obama-Netanyahu contacts 126 – 127 Occupied Territories 125, 126 of de-Baathification 65 offense/defense balance 13 Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) 370 “off-shore balancing” 354 Oğuzlu, H. Tarık. 386n4, 387n26 oil production in Middle East 184 – 185, 185; economic growth and oil rents 190; economic reform versus political reform 193 – 194; friction within GCC countries 187 – 188; Iran and Saudi Arabia, friction between 188 – 189; oil politics 185 – 186; oil prices and budget deficits 189 – 190; stakeholders and emission reduction agreement 188; technology and innovation 186 – 187; youth unemployment 190 – 193 oil-rent windfalls 184 Öktem, Kerem 386n15 Oman 2 omnibalancing 48, 196

431

Index Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) 379 Paul, Huntington Samuel 277n1 Paul, Katie 318n39 Peace of Westphalia of 1648 29, 239 Peninsula Shield Force 215 Pennell, C.R. 360n18 People’s Defense Units (YPG) 246 People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) 210 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 168 Peres, Shimon 366 Perra, Antonio 182n86 Perry, Tom 21n48 Persian Achmenaeid Empire 314 Persian Gulf 2 Persian nationalism 146 Peskes, Esther 319n62 Peter Mandaville 79n11 Petito, Fabio 37, 45n57 Petro China 186 Pföstl, Eva 241 Phillips, David L. 388n56 philosophy of language 27 Pillar of Defense 368 Piscatori, James P. 70, 79n6 plebiscites 358 political claim-making processes 70 political democratization 78 political economy of regionalism 50 – 52 political Islam 69, 70, 105, 350 political legitimacy 2 political liberalization 75 political liberalization process 351 political pluralism 266, 358 political science and Arab spring 9 – 10 politics and international relations 1 Pope, Hugh 387n21 Porter, Gareth 93n2 Posen, Barry 124n23 positivism 24 post-9/11 era 309; see also 9/11 attacks post-colonial period 73 post-colonial states 60, 72 posties 29 post-Islamism 56 ‘post-Islamist age’ 330 post-positivist 27; constructivism 26 post-secular constructivism 35 – 38 Pothecary, J. 163n22 Potter, Lawrence 102, 108n33 power balance (2010–13) 110, 111, 114, 116 power struggle 110 – 111, 117; variations in 111 – 112 pre-colonial paradigms 350 President’s Daily Brief,The 304 Price, Bryan 95n47 principled pragmatism 227

Öniş, Ziya 387n22 “On Jihad” 310 Onley, James 219n1 ontology 30, 31, 35 Onuf, Nicholas 23 – 29, 44n16 Onuf ‘s constructivism 26 – 29 Onuf ‘s World of Our Making 27 Operation Cast Lead 365 Operation Decisive Storm 3 operation Protective Edge 370 Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 186 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 3, 103, 144, 211, 378 orientalism 265 Osama bin Laden 305, 311 Oslo “peace process” 255 Osman, Tarek 346n2 Ostovar, Afshon 106n1 Otte, Marc 236n33 Ottoman Empire 67 Ottoman rule 62 Ouerghi, Jalal 334, 346n24, 346n48, 346n58, 347n24, 348n48, 348n58 Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East 1 Owen, Roger 268 Oxford Dictionary of Islam,The 311 Oxnevad, Ian 24 P5 + 1 85 Pack, Jason 68n23 Pahlavi dynasty 96 Paksoy,Yunus 389n100 Palestine-Israel conflict 362 – 364 Palestinian 141 Palestinian aspiration 366 Palestinian Authority (PA) 362 Palestinian civil authority 128 Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre Wi’am 254 Palestinian grievances 4 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 244, 364 Palestinian security apparatus 368 pan-Arabism 63, 113, 270 Pan-Arab program 310 pan-Arab regime 112 Pandya, Sophia 151n26 Pappé, Ilan 264n55 Parent, Joseph M. 7n4, 20n17 Pargeter, Alison 330 – 349, 346n11 Parsons, Nigel 372n5 participation 255 – 257 Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK) 284, 377 Party of God 147 Paterman, Carole 251n63 patriotic ideologies 7

432

Index Reidel, Bruce 124n30 re-Islamization 78 Reiter, Dan 43n14 religion 36 – 37 Renaissance Project 333 Republican National Convention 87 resilience 324 – 325 Resistance Bloc 149 resolution 2231 (2015) 84 Reus-Smit, Christian 57n7 Reuters 329n25 revolution-cum-puritanical state-building project 309 revolution in military affairs (RMA) 168 Rezaei, Mohsen 97, 99, 107n17 Ridout, Nicholas 219n2 Riedel, Bruce 194n8 Rigaux, François 250n25 Ripsman, Norrin M. 7n6, 20n19 Riyadh 15 Roberts, David B. 206n18 Rodogno, Davide 249n20 Roger, Owen 277n11 Rojava Laboratory 246 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 210 Rosato, Sebastian 7n4, 20n17 Rose, David 372n14 Rose, Gideon 7n5 Rosenberg, S. 163n13 Rothkopf, David 373n19 Rouhani, Hassan 5, 15, 86, 103 Rowe, Paul S. 249n15, 251n52 Roy, Olivier 74 Roy, Sara 372n4 Rubin, Lawrence 20n12, 21n39, 123n3 Rudoren, Jodi 135n17, 374n51 “Ruling on the Belligerent Christians, The” 313 Rumiyah 303, 313 Russian-Chechen War 156 Russian foreign policy and Arab Spring 153 – 154; 2000 – 10 155 – 156; 2011 156 – 158; after 2011 158 – 160; Putin, before 154 – 155; strengths and weaknesses 160 – 162 Russo-Ottoman War of 1877 – 78 240, 249n21 Ryan, Curtis 20n14

pro-Israeli foreign policy 51 Prophet Mohammed 308 – 309 protection 257 – 259 proto-government 300 pro-Western alignments 113 pro-Western foreign policy 51 pro-Western Saudi-led bloc 122 proxy relations 324 – 326; cultivation of 322; propaganda value 326 – 327 proxy wars 66 public morality 336 Putin,Vladimir 153; and Arab Spring 153 – 162 Qassem, Abd-al-Karim 64 Qassem, Naim 328n8 Qatar 2, 187, 195 – 196, 355 – 356, 381; 2006 Asian Games 202; crisis 219; foreign policy in the Hamad era 200 – 202; foreign policy under Tamim 202 – 205; international role 196 – 198; Qatari foreign policy 198 – 200 Qatari airpower 114 Qatari foreign policy 198 – 200 Qatari-Saudi relationship 216 quantum social science 26 Quartet 368 Quran 313, 336, 337 Qutb, Mohamed 310 Qutb, Sayyid 74, 309, 310 Qutbis 310 radical Arab-nationalist 52 radical Islamic terrorists 307 radical revolution 357 Rahim, Ahmad H. 123n15 Raisi, Ebrahim 102 Rashid, Ahmed 181n72 Rasoulallah, Mohammad 101 Rassemblement Constitutionelle Démocratique 352 rational actor paradigm 280, 282, 290 – 292 rational-choice theory 30, 36 Raymond, Hinnebusch 277n9 Razavi, Sam 328n11 Razoux, Pierre 108n34 Real GDP growth and oil rents 191 – 192 realism 32 realists 48; approaches to IR 47 – 48 re-balancing in late Arab Uprising 121 – 122 recalibration 1 reconciliation law 352 Recruitment-Cum-Incitement Campaign,The 316n2 recruitment-cum-incitement program 302 reflectivism 30 refugees 288 regional and global security, Islamic State 315 – 316 regional antagonisms 46, 49 regional order 53 – 54 Regional Security Complex (RSC) 50

Sabet, Farzan 106n2 al-Sadat, Anwar 11 assassination of 48 Sadiki, Larbi 248n1 Sadowski,Yahya M. 277n16 Sadri, Roostam 179n16 Safavid Empire 67 Safshekan, Roozbeh 106n2 Salaam 100 Salaf 307, 308 Salafi-Jihadi 312; alike 308; groups 307, 310; ideology 64

433

Index Salafist mentality 342 Salafists 336, 343 Saleem, Mohamed Elsayed 346n35, 347n35 Saleh, Ali Abdullah 218, 272 Saleh, Heba 374n49 Saleh,Yasmine 21n48 Salem, Feryal 320n87 Salem, Paul 124n20 Salih, Ali Abdullah 353 Salloukh, Bassel 20n9 Salman, Mohammed bin 13 Salman bin Abdulaziz 2 Samen al-Aemeh 96 Sapsford, R. 278n33 Saseen, M.S. 68n31 Sasley, Brent E. 206n5 Saudi Arabia 2, 3, 6; Cold War 305 – 306; Constitution 140; foreign policy 13, 14; intervention in Yemen 195; multi-million-dollar arms deal with the US 3; national security 3; regional policy 356; relations with US 3; Saudi-Israel relations 4; Salafist fundamentalism 121; security 14; state-building processes 141; territory 315 Saudi Arabia and Iran 138 – 140; Arab uprisings and fragmentation of ; regional order 147 – 150; burgeoning rapprochement 144 – 145; domestic factors 140 – 141; revolution, impact of 142 – 144; rivalry before revolution 141 – 142; Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran 3; Saudi-Iranian cold war 66; Saudi-Iranian rivalry 9, 65; War on Terror 145 – 147 Savelsberg, Eva 251n62 Savir, Uri 135n7 Sayigh,Yezid 372n13 Schmidle, Nicholas 389n99 Schmitt, Eric 388n53 scholarship 1 Schumacher, Tobias 235n21, 235n24 Schuppe, Jon 95n42 scientific realism 30 Seale, Patrick 123n8 sectarian conflicts 1 sectarian divisions 327 sectarianism 9 Sectarian proxy wars 117 – 118 secularization 71, 72; model 72; theory 76 securitization process 75 Security Council resolution 157, 370 Seeberg, P. 68n20 self-preservation 1, 2, 331; imperatives 56 self-proclamation 7 self-recognition 351 semi-clandestine opposition power 334 Sepah-e Pasdaran 96 Sepah-e Qods 103 al-Shabi, Jaysh 89

434

Shafik, Ahmed 368 Shahshahani, Soheila 249n13 Shalabi, Marina 319n54 shale-oil-producing countries 184 Shamas, Maha Abu Dayyeh 254, 264n52 Shambaugh, David 164, 178n1 Shanahan, Rodger 328n2 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) 173 Shantz, Adam 135n9 Shapiro, Daniel 135n11 Sharafedin, Bozorgmehr 109n41 Sharia 312, 341; fundament 314 Sheila, Carapico 277n20 Sherrill, Clifton W. 94n27 Shia: controlled Iraqi regime 287; Crescent 113 – 114, 122; in Lebanon 323; Islam 76; Islamic governance 76; militias and coalition forces 146; mosque 118 Shichor,Yitzhak 178n10, 179n17, 179n18 Shiraziyyun 213 shock absorption 371 – 372; analytical framework 365; April 2014–March 2015 369 – 370; April 2015–December 2016 370 – 371; December 2010–December 2011 366 – 367; historical context 364 – 365; January 2009– December 2010 365 – 366; January 2012– March 2013 367 – 369; January 2013–April 2014 369 Shoujouni, Jafar 325 shura (consultation) 75 Sick, Gary 102, 108n33 Signposts 309 Signposts on the Road (alternatively Milestones) 309 Simon, Steven N. 135n10 Sinai I and II agreements 89 Singh, Michael 182n87 Single European Act of 1987 224 Sino-Soviet tension 166, 167 Sirkeci, Ibrahim 389n105 al-Sisi, Abdelfatah 15, 16, 17, 132, 162 Sissi, Abdelfatah 338 Sistani, Ayatollah Ali 141 Six-Day War in 1967 62, 125 Skocpol, Teresa 357, 358 slavery and sex slave trade programs 305 Slim, Randa 329n22 “slogans of apostasy” 301 Small, Andrew 181n75 Smith, Michael S. II. 300 – 320 Smith, Steve 28 social and political transformation 358 socialism 270 social movements 1 social revolutions 357 social theory 29 Social Theory of International Politics 26, 28 societal-based Arab security order 54

Index Sunni-Shia: rivalry 86; Sectarianism 89, 111; variety 65; divide 10 supersonic aircraft 173 Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) 104, 147 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) 17, 217, 331 – 332, 335, 337 – 338 Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) 103 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 173 surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) 173 Swisher, Clayton E. 373n28 Sykes-Picot Agreement 61, 223, 304 – 305 Syria 65, 87, 353; activities in 306 – 307 Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) 104 Syrian Brotherhood 346n5 Syrian civil war 322 Syrian Jihad 305 Syrian Kurdish militias 285 Syrian Kurds 65 system-dissatisfied states 49, 50 systemic pressures and domestic politics 10 – 12 system-satisfied states 50 Szanto, Edith 151n12

Society of the Muslim Brothers,The (1969) 310 socio-economic determinism 72 socio-economic grievances 148 socio-religious movement 333, 335 Sofer, Roni 373n23 soft balancing 111 Solingen, Etel 50, 51, 57n19 Sorby, R.K. 68n17, 68n19 Sottimano, Aurora 53 Sovereignty 336 Soviet-Afghan conflict (1979–89) 76 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 224 Soviet Union 154 spirituality 69 Springborg, Robert 57n22 Stansfield, Gareth 124n27, 294n3 state capitalism 199 state-centric approach 1 – 2 state failure, sectarianism, and the Islamic state 65 – 67 state formation and realist power balancing 112 – 113 state-society/civil-military relations 8 state-society complex 53 state-society relations 11 state weaknesses 1 statist-nationalism 51 statist-nationalist policies 51 Stein, Arthur A. 20n25 Stephen David’s theory of omnibalancing 48 Stephens, Elizabeth 134n3 Steven David’s omnibalancing theory 12 Stewart,Vincent 88 Stokes, Bruce 136n29 Storer, Cynthia 310 strategic communication program 304 – 305 strategic culture 8 structural realism 47, 165 structural signals 14 subaltern realism 12, 59 – 61; Arab nationalism and Arab Cold War 62 – 64; Arab world 61 – 62; Iraq, invasion of 64 – 65; state failure, sectarianism, and the Islamic state 65 – 67 Sublime Porte 239 “sub-optimal” antagonistic foreign policy 48 subregional-level identity 196 sub-state variables 11 sub-systemic dynamics 12 success breeds success 302 Suez Canal 63 Suez crisis 62 Suez Crisis in 1956 354 Sufi movements 77 suicide belt–donning jihadis 308 Suleiman, Omar 331 Sullivan, Marisa 329n20 Sunni: cultural and religious hegemony 356; Gulf monarchies 116; Islam 356; Islamist movements 309

Taber, Robert 319n66 Taeb, Mehdi 89 Tafasil Alkhira Lihukm Morsi 346n7 Tahiroglu, Merve 386n14 Tahrir Revolution 350 Takeyh, Ray 328n7 takfiris 77, 120, 310, 313, 317n6, 327 Taliaferro, Jeffrey W. 7n6 Tamim 195, 197 Taraki, Lisa 372n2 Tarigh al-Ghods 96 Tariq al-Hasan, Hasan 220n21 Tartanoğlu, Sinan 388n62 Tastekin, Fehim 389n98, 389n103, 389n104 tawhid 311, 312 Taymiyya, Taqi al-Din Ibn 305 Taymiyyah, Ibn 309, 311, 313 technical cooperation for peaceful nuclear technology 84 Tehran’s anti-Sovietism 169 Tejel, Jordi 248n5, 251n62 Tel Aviv 130 temporal symmetry breaking 26 Tepperman, Jonathan 387n44 terrorism 24, 300, 302, 304, 309; campaigns 301, 308 “Terrorism has no religion” 301 “Terrorism is not Islam” 301 terrorism-related casework 303 terrorists 301, 302, 327; organization 307 Teti, Andrea 25, 44n18 Theory of International Politics 28 Third World anti-colonialism 322

435

Index UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) 243 Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) 53 UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) 91 un-Islamic influence 311 “un-Islamic” influence 308 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 2, 195, 353 United Arab Republic (UAR) 2 United Nations Charter 252 unity agreement 367 UN Resolution 2334 125 UNSCR 1325 see UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 252 – 253; empowerment 259 – 260; International Women’s Commission in Palestine 254 – 255; in Middle East 253 – 254; National Action Plans (NAPs) 252; participation 255 – 257; protection 257 – 259 US against al Qaeda 75 US imperialism 46, 326 US interventionism 335 US IR pantheon 32, 32 US-Israel relations 125 – 126; assessment 134; diverging interests 131 – 134; Iran nuclear issue 129 – 131; Obama-Netanyahu contacts 126 – 127; relations with Egypt 131; Syria, involvement in 131; two-state solution 129; West Bank settlement issues 127 – 129 US policy-makers 306 US-Qatar defense relationship 201 US/Zionist imperialism 117

Third World in the System of States,The 59 “Third World” states 12 Tibon, Amir 135n12 Tickner, Ann 36 – 37, 38, 45n52 Tilly, Charles 68n28 Tiruneh, G. 360n14 Tkach, Benjamin 108n37 totem pro parte approach 282 Toukan, Abdullah 84, 93n15 Towards International Political Theology 27 Trager, Eric 319n54 transformation of state and society 73 “transitional justice” 352 transition and the Arab Spring: formal and informal governance 350 – 351; future 357 – 359; Gulf role 353 – 357 transnational Islamist movement 331 transnational terrorist groups 303 transnational violence 77 trans-state Islamist movements 115 trans-state legitimacy 114 trans-state public sphere 110 trans-state subversion 112 Treaty of Lausanne 61 Treaty of Peace, 1820 210 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons 91 Tremblay, Pinar 388n59, 389n92 tribal and religious mechanisms 351 Tripp, Charles 151n32, 220n18 TRIP World Faculty Survey 23 Troianovski, Anton 318n30 Trump, Donald 3, 82 – 83, 306, 326 Trump administration 125 Tuğal, Cihan 386n20 Turkey in the Arab Spring 115, 376 – 377; costlier hard power and its limits 383 – 385; official development assistance (ODA) 380; soft power 378 – 380; weakening of the Turkish model 380 – 383 Turkey’s bid for hegemony 115 Turner, Zeke 318n30 two-state solution 126, 129

Valbjørn, Morten 20n8, 206n4 Valeri, Marc 220n16 Valfajr Eight 97 Valjborn, Morten 123n11 velayat al-faqih 120 veleyat-e faqih 141, 142, 143 – 144 Venice Declaration of 1980 231 Versailles-imposed Westphalian system 119 Vick, Karl 374n43 Vico 42n1 vilayet-e faqih 323 violence 303 Violent Non-State Actors (VNSA) 233 von Clausewitz, Carl 282 von Glasersfeld, Ernst 45n59 von Hippel, Frank N. 95n52

Ugur, Mehmet 389n79 UK Foreign Office headquarters in London 300 Ulama 73 ulemma 141 Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates 220n10, 220n14, 221n46, 221n56 ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam 72 umma 139, 143 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) 243 UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992) 243

al-Wahhab, Mohamed Ibn Abd 311 – 312 Wahhabis 308, 311 Wahhabism 72, 149 Walt, Stephen M. 32, 43n3, 47, 298n115, 361n27 Waltz, Kenneth 25, 28, 29

436

Index Xiaoping, Deng 175 Xi Jinping 164

Waltz, Kenneth N. 44n33, 386n12 War on Terror 75, 76, 77, 145 – 147 Warren, David 277n15 Watts, Nicole F. 244, 251n47 wave-function collapse 26 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 90 Weaver, Ole 123n6 Wehrey, Frederick 152n41 Wendell, Charles 309, 319n50 Wendt, Alexander 7n6, 25 – 27, 37, 123n4 Wendt’s constructivism 27 – 35 West Bank 362, 364 – 367, 366, 370 West Bank settlement issues 127 – 129 Western-aligned Sunni bloc 114 Westernization 2, 346 westoxification 2 White, Benjamin Thomas 135n21, 241, 248n5 Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky 58n40, 79n12 Wiktorowicz, Quintan 296n50 wilayat (provinces) 304 Williams, Kristen P. 20n26 Williams, Paul A. 387n32, 387n36 Windhoek Declaration 252 Wisal 254 WMD-Free Zone (WMDFZ) 92 Wohlforth, C.W. 67n8 Wolfers, Arnold 165, 178n7 Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda 252 Women’s Affairs Technical Committee 254 Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling 254 Wootliff, Raqul 135n18 Workman, W. Thom 58n32 World Assembly of Muslim 211 World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations 23, 26 World War I 280 World War II 61, 281, 350 Wu Bingbing 179n24

Yazidi sex slaves 237 Yemen 353 Yemen Arab Republic 154 Yemen war 3 Yosef, Lapid 44n31 Youngs, Richard 151n14, 235n16, 236n36 youth unemployment in Middle East 190 – 193, 193 Yuval-Davis, Nira 263n18 Zahlan, Rosemarie Said 220n9 Zalewski, Piotr 388n77 Zaman, Amberin 388n71, 388n76, 389n81 Zarakol, Ay¿e 43n4 Zarif, Javad 325 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab 117 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 303, 320n73 Zayid, Mohammed bin 357 Zedong, Mao 166 Zehfuss, Maja 33 Zeitgeist 24 Zelikow, Philip 280, 283 Zengerle, Patricia 93n6 zero-sum confrontation 98 zero-sum game 147, 190 zero-sum trade-off 271 Zhao, Suisheng 180n51 Zhongwei, Lu 180n42 Ziggurat of Zealotry,The 310 Zionism 46 Zionist sentiments 50 Zogby, James 124n18 Zweiri, Mahjoob 372n9 Zygar, M. 163n12

437