“Misremembering the ACRS: economic imaginations and nuclear negotiations in the Middle East”

ABSTRACT

This article examines the political economy of Arab-Israeli peacemaking in the first half of the 1990s, specifically the multilateral working group on Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS). It focuses on the misplaced memorialization of the ACRS process as a lost opportunity for the establishment of a nuclear weapons free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, which has resulted in a continuous “return” to ACRS in policy discussions. The article contends that rather than producing mechanisms for disarmament, the ACRS process was part of a larger economic restructuring and served as a platform for militarized economic relations. Seeking to destabilize dominant repertoires on peacemaking in the Middle East, the article demonstrates the overlap between processes of nuclear entrenchment and economic imaginaries. It offers a deeper understanding of how the nuclear realm interacts with motifs of peace and prosperity.

KEYWORDS:

• Arms control
• Middle East peace
• disarmament
• nostalgia
• nuclear weapons-free zone

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Benoît Pelopidas, Kjølv Egeland, Hassan Elbahtimy, Pelle Valentin Olsen, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference organized by Kings College London, the American University in Cairo, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, which took place in Cairo, Egypt in 2020, and I would like to thank the participants for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Iran, Iraq, and Libya were not invited to join, while Lebanon and Syria refused to participate.

2 Analysts also emphasize its impact on the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty, signed in 1994, which explicitly invokes the ACRS and the goal of creating a WMDFZ in the Middle East (Jentleson, 1996, p. 10).

3 Peres recounts the story of Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa requesting to visit Dimona, to which Peres responds, “Amr, are you crazy? Suppose I shall bring you to Dimona and you see that there is nothing there? Suppose you stop worrying? For me, this is a catastrophe. I prefer you remain suspicious. This is my deterrence”. Moussa also describes this exchange in his memoirs from his point of view (Moussa, 2017, pp. 425–426).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number: 759707).

Notes on contributors

Hebatalla Taha

Hebatalla Taha is Lecturer at Leiden University. She is also a Research Affiliate with the Nuclear Knowledges program at Centre de recherches internationales at Sciences Po Paris. This paper was written during a postdoctoral fellowship at Nuclear Knowledges.