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Vol. 10, Nº. 2 (November 2019-April 2020), pp. 82-91

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO USE REGIONAL LENSES WHEN WE LOOK INTO

CIVIL CONFLICTS IN THE MENA?

Samer Hamati

Samer_hamati@yahoo.com

PhD in Economics, School of Economics and Management, University of Minho (Portugal). He was

Visiting Researcher in the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki.

Expert of Social Capital Rebuilding in Syria, Training and Research Institute of Romania. Senior

Researcher of Poverty and Inequality in a UNDP project of Establishing the National Social

Welfare Fund in Syria, United Natons Development Programme Projects, Damascus, Syria.

External Consultant of set the Food Security Strategy of Syria, Natonal Agricultural Policy Center,

Syria. He got a Congratulation Notification approved unanimously from the Portuguese

Parliament since he was the firts Syrian students obtaining PhD from Portugal. He has voluntary

work experience.

Abstract

Investigating different political and social variables in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

is receiving more attention between social scientists, particularly in the peace and conflict

institutes. This is due to the uniqueness of the region and to the violent conflicts it has

witnessed for the last decades. These conflicts become intrastate but transitional, hence

transfer into internationalized civil conflicts, and have large externalities exceeding the region

borders. These conflicts show the high connectedness between the MENA countries, and

recently the Arab Spring affirms the ‘contagion effect’ of upheavals in the region. Following

multidisciplinary approach, this research note is a try to explain how much important it is to

study the MENA conflicts from a regional perspective and to present the factors proving the

contagion effects there. We hope that when reading this note, the reader will sufficiently

understand the regional aspects of the MENA conflicts.

Keywords

MENA; Contagion Effect; Civil Conflicts

How to cite this article

Hamati, Samer (2019). "Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil

conflicts in the MENA". JANUS.NET e-journal of International Relations, Vol. 10, N.º 2,

November 2019-April 2020. Consulted [online] on the date of the last visit,

https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.10.2.6

Article received on June 2, 2018 and accepted for publication on Setpember 18, 2019

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 10, Nº. 2 (November 2019-April 2020), pp. 82-91

Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO USE REGIONAL LENSES WHEN WE LOOK INTO

CIVIL CONFLICTS IN THE MENA?

Samer Hamati

Introduction

For decades the MENA region at large has suffered from violence and experienced civil

conflicts leading to a permanent atmosphere of instability. This violence became a normal

way of ruling and transferring power since the modern political foundation of the MENA

by the end of WWI. Skimming the modern MENA history, one can easily notice that there

are shared historical characteristics where conflict trajectories have been similar between

the countries. These shared characteristics extend to the political, social, and economic

lives, establishing authoritarian and paternalistic regimes in the region and posing

particular challenges for transitions and development process. Above all, these

characteristics strengthen the links within this region and bring large interventions

between the newly established states there. Understanding these interventions is key

when studying peace and conflict in the MENA region.

Similar to the global trends, the number of conflicts in the MENA decreased significantly

at the beginning of nineties and the region became stable after Kuwait’s Liberation

Process in 1991. This is clear when skimming the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database

(Uppsala University, 2015). However, the number of conflicts jumps in the new

Millennium, mainly due to the occurrence of civil conflicts. More specifically, anti-colonial

and interstate conflicts have almost disappeared, and almost all of today’s wars are

interstate ones but with large international interventions, making them ‘internationalized

civil wars’. Moreover, these conflicts have been proxy-wars (Marshall, 2016). Pre-1990

conflicts were part of the Cold War with factions receiving support from their allies in

Moscow or Washington. Starting from the end of Nineties, the competitors became

regional and a cycle of regional proxy warfare, especially between Saudi Arabia and Iran,

emerged (Nerguizian and Kasting, 2013). Conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, and

Lebanon are clear examples.

The new waves of post-Arab Spring violence raise the awareness of civil conflicts

exploding in the MENA region. It becomes clear that these conflicts are not purely ‘civil’;

besides, their consequences have gone beyond the MENA borders. Ross et al. (2011)

argue that the Arab Spring affirms the ‘contagion effect’ of upheavals in the region. Based

on reviewing the literature, the current note discusses the factors proving this contagion

and emphasizing the regional perspective when investigating the civil conflicts in the

MENA. We first briefly discuss this term, the MENA, and then we explain some

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 10, Nº. 2 (November 2019-April 2020), pp. 82-91

Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

characteristics of the MENA civil conflicts that make studying them key to support global

peace and prosperity. We later clarify why it is better to look at these conflicts from a

regional window. To do so, we follow multidisciplinary approach of analysis using brief

social, economic, cultural, familial and historical anecdotal evidence. The note closes with

two important notices.

What do we mean by the MENA?

The term the Middle East appeared centuries after the western concern of this region had

increased. Since the Crusades, East, Orient, was identified with Islam and West,

Occident, became identical with Christianity. The regions were thus symbolically divided

according to two belief systems. Later, in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century,

Europeans referred to the territories controlled by the Islamic Ottoman Empire as the

Near East, while Mahan and Chirol used the term the Middle East to call the Gulf of Aden

and India in separate articles published in 1902 (Davison, 1960). Due to the political

changes after WWI, a need to change the definition of the geographical area referred to

as the Middle East appeared, and in March 1921, Winston Churchill, with the help of the

Royal Geographical Society, was re-mapping the Middle East from the Bosporus to the

western borders of India (Özalp, 2011). Later, this term appeared frequently in

international literature.

However, notwithstanding the adoption of the term the Middle East in the international

literature, there is no a common agreement on the extension of the geographical areas

and the Middle East countries (Johannsen, 2009). Scholars have included different

countries, although overlapped, when using this phrase. Many consider it the countries

that were occupied by the Ottoman Empire (Tunçdilek, 1971; Brown, 1984; Tibi, 1989),

others referred to it as the Islamic countries (Steinbach, 1979), some consider it as

limited to the Arabic countries (Hudson, 1976), and a few have included more African

countries such as Ethiopia (Davison, 1960). The major part of the recent literature define

the MENA region as being made up of the Arabic countries, i.e., the twenty-two countries

members of the Arab League, in addition to three non-Arabic countries whose actions

contribute to the political and security situations in the MENA region: Turkey, Iran, and

Israel, even though these states followed a somewhat different historical trajectory from

the Arab states and have different economic structures that in the Arab countries (Owen,

2013).

What does make civil conflicts in The MENA globally important?

Not only just one factor makes civil conflicts in the MENA with global attention. Conflicts

there last and their consequences are large and tragic. Nevertheless, the MENA position

is the major reason for this global attention. Due to its strategic geographical position,

the MENA region has witnessed many events whose causes and consequences have gone

beyond its borders. Barakat (1993: 31) stated that “The centrality of the Arab World in

ancient and modern times has qualified it to serve as an important nodal point in human

history. It has acted as a passage connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe. It has produced

some of the most important intellectual, cultural, and religious contributions of recorded

history. It is this position at human and geographic crossroads, and not merely its oil and

other resources that makes the Arab World so strategically significant”. As a consequence

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 10, Nº. 2 (November 2019-April 2020), pp. 82-91

Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

of this central geographical position, conflicts have been frequent and characterized by

attributes that make them distinctive from those occurring in other regions:

sustainability, bloodiness, tragic consequences, and externalities.

Civil conflicts are sustainable in the MENA region. Parallel to internal conflict occurrence,

a phenomenon referred to as the ‘conflict trap’ became more dominant. This trap refers

to a situation when a post-civil conflict country falls again in another civil war. Walter

(2015) finds strong evidence of a ‘conflict trap’; 57% of all countries that suffered from

one civil war during the 1945-2009 period experienced at least one conflict thereafter.

Furthermore, she points out that by the 2000s, 90% of all civil wars were repeated civil

wars. Moreover, Collier (2007) shows that the risk of further conflict in countries emerging

from civil war is almost twice as high as it was on the eve of that conflict. Further, Cevik

and Rahmati (2015) find that this trap in tighter in the MENA region since countries in

the Middle East appear to suffer from a high risk of conflict recurrence without much

decline over subsequent years, leading to a sustainable sense of violence and insecurity

there. This sustainability is one reason that increases the costs of MENA conflicts.

Civil conflicts in the MENA are costly in both terms: blood and money. The Syrian crisis,

which is considered the “worst man-made disaster the world has seen since World War

II”, according to a UN officer (Al-Hussein, 2017), is recent top evidence for these costs;

around 11.5% of the population were killed or injured in less than five years of conflict

(SCPR, 2016). Besides, the region accounts for 40% of the estimated global total of

battle-related deaths since 1946, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.

Regarding the high economic costs, Rother et al. (2016) argue that three years of

conflicts following the Arabic Spring led to GDP losses of 6 to 15 percentage points in the

MENA conflict countries compared with 4 to 9 percentage points worldwide.

These costs, furthermore, are not limited to the region, and other international costs

appear. Indeed, the MENA conflicts generate large externalities represented by refugee

outflows and energy-price fluctuations. Around two-thirds of current refugees worldwide

come from the MENA.

Refugees are not simply the unfortunate by-products of war, but

may cause interstate conflicts (Posen, 1996). Salehyan (2008) claims that refugee flows

between states increase the likelihood of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) through

two channels: Refugee-receiving states are more likely to initiate MIDs as they intervene

to prevent further externalities, and refugee-sending states initiate MIDs as they violate

borders in pursuit of dissidents.

Above all, energy-price instabilities are still the clearest externality caused by conflicts

occurring in the MENA. This region owns 55% of global oil reserves (Guidolin and La

Ferrara, 2010); and therefore any sort of tension there affects prices, output,

employment, and economic growth worldwide. Two abnormal shocks in global economic

graphs are strongly distinctive: one appeared in 1973-1974, and the other arose in 1979-

1980. These shocks stemmed from two events occurring in the MENA region: the 1973’s

October (Yom Kippur) War and the 1979’s Iranian Revolution. Using event study

methodology to analyze the impact of conflict on a selection asset markets, Guidolin and

La Ferrara (2010) find that the Middle East is very important for commodity indices

including oil prices as 73% of conflicts occurring in this region have an impact on oil

futures, and this impact is distinguishable from zero.

UNHCR. (2018, May 25). Figures at a Glance. Retrieved from: http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-

glance.html

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Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

Why Is It Important to Study Civil Conflicts through Regional Context?

The MENA countries are connected geographically, economically, and culturally showing

a strong tendency for connectedness and contagion. The famous words of Elias Hrawi,

the former President of Lebanon, when describing the civil conflicts in his home: “it was

not our conflict, but others’ in our land,” attest to this (Atallah, 2008: 217). Therefore,

one cannot investigate any civil conflict there in isolation from the regional context. This

political and security interference is not just because of the common borders, but also

because of the strong connections of their people where the majority hold similar beliefs,

culture, and religion and share the same history.

The historical and cultural roots of connectedness are too deep and long. During the

thirteen centuries preceding WWI, the majority of the region’s territories were controlled

by different powers that ruled through one ideology, Islam. The Ottoman Empire was the

last great state controlling the region. Its fall finished the Caliphate and paved the way

to construct modern artificial countries that host people sharing a common history,

culture, alphabet, feelings and demographical connections including tribal relationships.

Heydemann, as quoted in Yousef (2004: 95), points out that, “the region’s exceptionalism

is a recent phenomenon and in no sense a cultural one derived from intrinsic beliefs,

values and norms in Arab-Muslim societies.” These sharing values and senses prevent

the creation of different identities in new-born societies, hence they validate Anderson’s

theory of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 2006); communities within the Middle East

are similarly produced, and engineer similar power hierarchies between them, leading to

a strong collective imagining.

The establishment of the MENA modern states by the end of WWI explains the main part

of this connectedness. The Allies, who won WWI, including Britain and France, divided

the Arabic territories formerly occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Later, these colonial

powers would create the key structures and the public management of the new states.

Owen (2013: 9) discusses this development:

“As far as the Middle East was concerned, it was generally the

dominant colonial power that first created the essential features of

a modern state, by giving it a centralized administration, a legal

system, a flag and internationally recognized boundaries. In some

cases this was done on the basis of some pre-existing administrative

entity, as in Algeria; in others it involved either detaching a part of

a former Ottoman province (for example, Trans-Jordan) or, more

usually, adding several provinces together (for example, Syria and

Iraq). This gave many of the new states a somewhat artificial

appearance, with their new names, their new capitals, their lack of

ethnic homogeneity and their dead-straight boundaries that were so

obviously the work of a British or French colonial official using a

ruler.”

These new states, with ill-defined nature (Milton-Edwards and Hinchcliffe, 2007), host

people that belong to different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Barakat said that

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

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Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

“[c]ertain communities were imposed on others within the same country” (1993: 6). One

year after the civil conflict erupted in Lebanon, Anne Sinai and Chaim Waxman argued in

the introduction to the Middle East Review (1976: 5):

“[T]he current civil war in Lebanon is but the latest and most

publicized in a broad range of events and situations which belie the

contention that the Middle East is a unitary world of Arabs with a

common background, culture, language and identity. The Middle

East in fact consists of an intricate mosaic of different peoples...

There are Shi'ites... Alawites, Druze, Yazidis, Isma'ilies and followers

of various other Muslim denominations, who cling determinedly to

their own style of faith and their own set of beliefs. They are not

even necessarily ethnically ‘Arab,’ being the descendants of many

different peoples conquered and converted by the Islamic armies...

The first of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, and the

people with whom it is identical, have been part of the Middle East

mosaic from their beginning... There are, in addition... other small

religious groupings, each clinging to its own distinctive identity. No

Arab state, thus, can claim societal homogeneity and all consist of

major and minor religious, linguistic and ethnic groupings.”

This heterogeneity created socially and culturally incomplete entities where ethnic and

religious groups, as well as tribes and families, were divided between adjacent countries.

Religious heterogeneity dominates other types of heterogeneity in the region. This

heterogeneity has been coupled with discriminative procedures towards minorities. Fox

(2013) finds that almost all the religious minorities in 17 Middle Eastern Muslim majority

states experience religious discrimination. The literature shows that this discrimination,

as well as other sorts of persecutions, can provoke surrounding countries to intervene in

other countries to protect their ethnic kin (Saideman, 2001; Trumbore, 2003; Woodwell,

2004). Svensson (2013) finds a massive shift from nonreligious to religious conflict in

the MENA region, making it the world region where religious armed conflict is most

prominent. Svensson (2013) also argues that religious conflict in the MENA is long and

transitional.

Furthermore, current economic ties, especially employment, support the social and

cultural roots and make people of different MENA countries more connected. Millions of

the migrant MENA labor force work in the rich Gulf countries, and their remittances

support their families and their governments in their homelands. These remittances are

not only financial but also social, meaning that migrants transfer new ideas, values, and

behavior to their home countries (Levitt, 1998) having an influence on political attitudes

and behavior of families staying in the homelands. Investigating the diffusion of political

Salafism among Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia, Karakoç et al. (2017) find that the

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

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Vol. 10, Nº. 2 (November 2019-April 2020), pp. 82-91

Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

strongest support for the Nour Salafism Party came from individuals whose family

members had immigrated to Saudi Arabia.

Intra-trade and investment flows are other economic ties supporting Arabic

connectedness. According to reports published by the Arab Monetary Fund (2017), many

Arabic countries heavily rely on trading with other Arabic countries. Somalia, Djibouti,

Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Sudan export 91%, 85%, 50%, 45%, 40%, 32%,

and 30% of their total exports respectively to other Arabic countries, while the intra-Arab

investments jumped from 3% to 15% of the total Arabic GDP between 2000 and 2008

due to oil-price booms.

Historical evidence confirms how much strong is the links between MENA countries, in

particular, the Levante. We depict these strong connections by presenting two

assassination murders happened in Summer 1951. On July 17, Riad Al-Solh, the first

Prime Minister of Lebanon after independence, was assassinated in Amman, the capital

of Jordan, by Micheal El-Deek, a Syrian person. Three days later, King Abdullah I, the

first Jordanian King, was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Palestinian tailor. King Abdullah

might have not been killed had he become a King of Iraq, as it was supposed. This point

brings us to another important scope that confirms the strong regional links in the

MENA. It is about tracing the lineages between elite families.

Genealogy is important between Arab tribes. Thus, it is key to understand the kinship

between royal families in the region. Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and the leader of

Hashemites, allied with the British and rebelled against Ottomans. Two of his sons

became kings: Faisal for Syria, and then Iraq, and Abdullah for Jordan. Another son,

Ali, was the last King of Hejaz before he was defeated by his Ibn Saud, the founder of

the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

We find a similar kinship but between Arabic political parties. Pan-Arabic nationalism

parties have emerged during the last century, and many of them believes in the unity

of Arabic countries. Take for example, Ba’ath Party in Syria and Iraq; Arab Socialist

Union in Egypt; Popular Conference Party in Libya; and Socialist Party in South Yemen.

All of these parties have been in power in their countries for years. Some had a friendly

relation with others, and some were bad enemies. Ba’ath was the ruling parties in both

Syria and Iraq, but the two factions were under strong conflict for decades.

Combined with soft budget constraints in the oil-exporting countries, these strong

interconnections facilitate inter-country interventions. Above all, the military rule,

common in most of the MENA countries, intensifies this trend. The domination of military

rule over national political system in the region can be proved by the large number of

military coups and revolutions. Milton-Edwards and Hinchcliffe (2007: 4) point that this

“militaristic nature of the state in the region has a direct cause-and-effect relationship on

the political processes of countries” there, and Picard (1993) argues that the statist

preferences, mass politics, and anti-colonial struggles which existed in the post-Ottoman

Middle East, lead to strong involvement of the military in politics. Those military

governments appear to operate according to a logic of expansion and hence intervene in

the political life of neighboring states.

Nour Salafism Party, which means Party of The Light, is one of the political parties created in Egypt after

the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. It has an ultra conservative Islamist ideology, which believes in implementing

strict Sharia law.

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Vol. 10, Nº. 2 (November 2019-April 2020), pp. 82-91

Why is it important to use regional lenses when we look into civil conflicts in the MENA?

Samer Hamati

Final Remarks

Watching daily news, the western observer is becoming aware of the violence appeared

in the MENA region. Indeed, Karl Remarks’ statement: “and then God created the Middle

East and said, let there be breaking news and analysis”, which became the title of his

recent book published in 2018, attests to this. However, the western observer might be

confused by the high degree of connectedness between these violent events. The

current note, therefore, tries to shed light on the reasons behind this connectedness.

It followed a multidisciplinary approach to explain why the domino effect has appeared

in the region and why we should look at conflicts there, including civil wars, from a

regional perspective.

It is important, before closing this note, to mention two important points. First, although

unique as discussed in this note, the MENA region is a part of the Third World, hence it

is subject to the same universal process of underdevelopment as other Third World

countries, and one should put that in his mind when investigating conflicts there. In the

preface of his book, Owen warns researchers not to explain everything happening in

the MENA “by the fact that the majority of its people are Arab or Muslims who, until

becoming rich from oil, lived as tribes in deserts” (2013: xii). Looking deeply at other

conflicts in other regions of the world, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia,

the Balkans, and Latin America, many similarities can be seen within the reasons and

consequences of civil conflicts.

Secondly, scholars should not ignore the specific characteristics of individual MENA

countries. These countries are heterogeneous in terms of both economic and

institutional development. One can easily notice this by skimming the economic figures

and, more importantly, the human development index (UNDP, 2018). While all GCC

countries are classified as very highly developed, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Djibouti,

Somalia, and Mauritania are classified in the lowest rank.

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