Power and Contestations: Crossing the Lines between Power and Powerlessness in the Middle East

Abstract

Power is an omnipresent point of reference in the study of the Middle East in IR and neighbouring disciplines. Echoing a widespread sentiment in both academic and political circles, what distinguishes the Middle East from other world regions is the overt and blunt occurrence of interest politics, strategic thinking, zero-sum calculations, force, violence, conflict, insurgencies, war and suppression. As Louise Fawcett summarizes, the Middle East ‘provides, for some, an illustration of the international state of nature described by Thomas Hobbes, a world which, in the absence of a Leviathan, sees the prevalence of anarchy, greed and power struggle’.² Interestingly, this centrality of (bare) power dynamics bridges otherwise quite opposite theoretical strands in the analysis of Middle East politics. To borrow from Fred Halliday’s classification of the main theoretical categories on the study of the Middle East in IR, within various dominant theoretical traditions power politics indeed occupy a central space. For example, historical analyses on state emergence in the Middle East refer to the processes through which colonial powers, in particular Great Britain and France, have shaped regional borders, thereby institutionalizing ongoing border disputes in the region.³ They also point to the linkages between state formation and armed struggle by nationalist movements, be it the Lebanese national movement around Charles Corm, the factions within the Jewish Yishuv in the 1940s or the PLO since the 1960s.⁴ Moreover, the focus on the Middle East ‘as the last world region, whose theory-guided analyses are still dominated by realist schools of thought’⁵ also renders power the central category in accounting for the dynamics of Middle East politics in this intellectual tradition. Thus, the Middle East is observed as an unfriendly, anarchical environment in which states and, occasionally, other (rational) actors, such as, for example, Hezbollah, are obsessed with ‘security and the maximisation of power’.⁶ Likewise, through their focus on elite decision-making, foreign policy analyses shift the focus on rational actors, self-interest and zero-sum power games from the (anarchical) level of the inter-state system to the interplay of ‘a diversity of forces within a shifting complexity of contexts within and without’ the state.⁷ Finally, by addressing domestic power struggles below the state level as well as the power of norms and ideas, both liberalist and social constructivist approaches add another nuance to this centrality of power in the Middle East.⁸ Thus, the Middle East is the playground of ‘an ongoing struggle in the region between multiple competing identities that can throw light on the process of identity formation’ and, indeed, account for regional political dynamics more generally.⁹ This social constructivist outlook is thereby often conceptually linked with liberalist accounts of Middle East politics,¹⁰ since the patchwork of religious, ethnic and political identities across all states in the region requires subtle deliberations (and, at times, violent interventions) in the relationship between the political centre and actors/structures at the periphery, be they — to take two examples — local communities and pious religious movements in Syria and Jordan or the Palestinian population in Jordan and Israel.¹¹

Doesn’t matter what you see/Or into it what you read/You can do it your own way/If it’s done just how I say Metallica — Eye of the Beholder¹