The Middle East is Violence: On the Limits of Comparative Approaches to the Study of Armed Conflict

ABSTRACT

For years, there has been debate as to whether or not the Middle East experiences more armed conflict – and for different reasons – than other regions in the world. Absent is any consideration of the grounds upon which such regional comparisons are possible. Rather than providing a general account of regions, this article instead provides a theory of the Middle East based on the violent practices that have made and reproduced the Middle East as a region, both materially and ideationally. Though critical of comparative approaches to the study of armed conflicts, this argument models a different way to understand them.

‘[T]he problem of proper conceptualisation of space is resolved through human practice with respect to it’.

– David Harvey (1973, p. 13; quoted in Paasi 2011, p. 169)

‘Geography is therefore the art of war’.

– Edward Said, Al-Hayat (10 December 1993)

Introduction

Is the Middle East more violent than any other region in the world?¹ Well before the events of 11 September 2001, this question has provoked debate and polemics from a number of quarters (for background, see Lawrence 1998). Rarely has this question been studied in a systematic and comparative fashion. When it has, most studies have tended to suggest that there is nothing extraordinary about the rates or causes of organised violence in the Middle East in comparison to other regions. The most rigorous effort to compare the levels and aetiologies of armed conflict in the Middle East with other world regions appeared over a decade ago (Sørli et al. 2005). It had two relevant conclusions: one, the Middle East is no more conflict prone than any other region in the world and, two, the aetiology of civil wars in the Middle East are no different than those elsewhere. Though now dated and limited in scope to an examination of high intensity internal armed conflicts, this latter finding nonetheless helped to undermine claims that Middle Eastern violence is rooted in regionally specific socio-cultural factors like religion or ethno-linguistic composition (i.e., the predominance of Islamic and Arabic identities), as well as the region’s notorious geology (i.e., the predominance of global hydrocarbon reserves in the Persian Gulf, Arabia, Mesopotamia and North Africa). This finding also contributed to a growing consensus among researchers in the first decade of the 2000s that culture and cultural difference (pace Huntington 1993) played little role in the causation of civil wars worldwide.

In the years since, serious comparative studies have likewise tended to reject the idea that there is a regionally specific character to armed conflict in the Middle East. A more recent study, for example, suggests that it is a volatile combination of rentier states and authoritarian republics – both being geographical and historical contingencies in the Middle East – that explains much of the region’s interstate conflict (Colgan 2013). Similarly, it has been suggested that the continuing prevalence of a particular regime type, monarchies, has in fact had a pacifying effect on the region Fenja Søndergaard Møller, ‘Blue Blood or True Blood: Why Are Levels of Intrastate Armed Conflict So Low in Middle Eastern Monarchies,’ Conflict Management and Peace Science (2017). The leading introductory textbook on the political-economy of the region similarly concludes that, in comparison to other regions, there is nothing extraordinary about the number of wars in the Middle East despite the exceedingly militarised nature of many of its regimes (Cammett et al. 2015).

Such findings seem difficult to square with recent developments across the wider Middle East in recent years. Of all the armed conflicts to emerge around the world since 2000, over a third have been in the Middle East. Since the 2011 Arab Spring, that number has grown to half. By 2016, the Syrian civil war, then in its fifth year, passed two grim milestones: it had become the deadliest armed conflict of the new century and the second most lethal since the end of the Cold War, just behind the 1994 massacres in Rwanda.² Today, four countries in the region – Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan – now rank among the ten most war-ravaged since 1989. From 2012 onward, the Middle East began to eclipse sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia in terms of conflict-related deaths worldwide, a first for the region since the end of the Cold War. The widespread violence across the region that followed the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ moreover helped to increase the number of ongoing armed conflicts worldwide to unprecedented levels. The fifty-three distinct and active episodes of armed conflict registered in 2016 was a world record for the international order established after WWII (Allansson et al. 2017, Pettersson and Eck 2018). As a result of this surge in conflict, half of the recorded terrorism events in the world have likewise occurred in the Middle East since 2011 (START 2018). Thus, despite all the rhetoric and theorization of the post-9/11 counterterrorism initiatives of the United States as a kind of ‘everywhere war’ (Gregory 2011, Scahill 2013), the geography of this sprawling campaign, whether measured in terms of combatant and civilian fatalities, other humanitarian costs or US military expenditures, is overwhelmingly in and around the Middle East.

Historically, it is also worth noting that a third of all wars between states since 1970 have occurred in the Middle East while nearly forty per cent all internationalised civil wars have occurred there as well during the same period (Sarkees and Wayman 2010; see also Pettersson and Eck 2018). This highly internationalised character of Middle Eastern conflicts is likewise revealed in the extraordinary number of wars of imperial conquest and resistance to occupation in the region. Not only has the Middle East experienced a quarter of all such conflicts over the past two centuries, half of those that have occurred since WWII were in the Middle East. Since 1970, seven of the ten wars of occupation recorded worldwide since 1970 were either in Northern Africa or Southwest Asia, including the invasions of Western Sahara, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well new phases in the Israel-Palestinian conflict (Sarkees and Wayman 2010).

The recent proliferation of full scale wars, low level armed conflicts, seemingly endemic terrorism and foreign military interventions in the wider Middle East, as well as adjacent areas in both Africa (the Maghrib, the Sahel and the Horn) and Asia (the Caucuses and the western Himalayas), raises anew questions concerning the Middle East’s putatively unique ability to attract or otherwise generate mass organised violence (e.g., see Lynch 2016, Anderson 2017). These regionally extraordinary levels of violence also call into question the relationship between armed conflict and other putative exceptionalities attributed to the Middle East, whether the prevalence of authoritarianism and the durability of its monarchical regimes (e.g., Bellin 2012); economic issues, such as failed development strategies and squandered oil wealth (Colgan 2014, Ross 2018); or socio-cultural issues, like the treatment of women, repression of minorities, and the growth of religious conservatism (e.g., Olimat 2014, Kymlicka and Pföstl 2014, Cavatorta and Merone 2017). In many ways, this extraordinary-ordinary debate vis-à-vis the question of Middle Eastern violence has been framed largely in response to Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism (see also Lockman 2004, Bonine et al. 2011). Extraordinary theories of the Middle East are often decried as neo-orientalist given their implicit or explicit resort to dubious notions of shared culture. Ordinary theories, on the other hand, are effectively distinctions without a difference: why do we need an idea of the Middle East if the Middle East is no different than anywhere else? Hence a whole series of deconstructive questions unfolds, a series that threatens to destabilise the unquestioned yet nonexistent foundations of comparative armed conflict research. If regions are distinction without a difference, then why ‘code’ for them? If regions matter, then what are they? On what basis can such comparisons even be made within and between them? What are the socio-cultural, political, or geographical properties that naturalise regions and so licence juxtapositions of spatial conglomerations of states, polities, environments and conflicts that are both near and far-flung? What are, in effect, the conditions of regionality that unite one region and render it as a coherent unit of analysis, one that can be compared to other regions with similar or different constitutive properties?

In the ongoing debate between extraordinary and ordinary approaches to violence in the Middle East, the very idea of the region, in a general sense, goes without any substantive and explicit theorization. The region, as a kind of Bourdieuian (1977) doxa, plays a similar function in the wider field of armed conflict research. In the studies and quantitative data cited above, regions are treated as unproblematic and pre-given entities through which analysis can arrive at reasonably sound comparative observations, if not something approaching a statistically derived understanding of likely causal mechanisms. When there is debate about regions, it often takes the form of defining their boundaries rather than rationalising their use. Rarely – outside of the field of geography – is there an effort to come to grips with the ideational and material conditions of regionality. The absence of meaningful theoretical engagement with the concept of the region also stands in sharp contrast with the ample debates vis-à-vis statistical methodologies that have come to dominate comparative approaches in the study of armed conflict (Schrodt 2014).

The argument presented here proposes a new way to approach these questions. The question of Middle Eastern conflict – why does it experience so much violence ? – cannot be separated from the question of the region itself – what is the Middle East? Instead of treating these as separate questions, a more fruitful line of inquiry opens when they are viewed as mutually constitutive. The question of Middle Eastern violence can only be addressed through an examination of the actual processes whereby regions historically emerge, are territorially elaborated and are politically reified as intellectual artefacts, spatial entities, material assemblages and as lived realities. The conclusion arrived at here suggests that the Middle East cannot be understood apart from the intensively violent arrangements, practices and processes that have come to constitute the fundamental conditions of its ideational and material possibility. Efforts to compare historical and contemporary forms of organised violence in Middle East with other regions are thus exposed for their inadequacy. In so far as comparative approaches to armed conflict hypothesise as a possible cause of Middle Eastern violence some innate or unique characteristics of the region, they mistake consequence for condition. In a very real and literal sense, the Middle East is violence.

Contrary to a comparative aetiological approach that problematically attempts to temporally isolate dialectically interrelated phenomena, the kind of imminent framework deployed here (Sayer 1987) theorises violence and the Middle East as emerging, existing and evolving together. Though there is some recognition within comparative politics that the independence of cases and causation are analytical fictions (Beissinger 2007; cited in Bellin 2012), an examination of the realisation/regionalisation of Middle East deconstructs, at a more fundamental level, the theoretical assumptions that undergird notions of cases and causation in the first place. Simply put, comparative approaches are incapable of accounting for Middle Eastern violence because they fail to recognise the extent to which that very violence has been ideationally, spatially and materially constitutive of the Middle East. To ask whether or not the Middle East is or is not more violent than any other region is to assume that regions have properties that are ontologically deeper and temporally prior to that violence. What this argument seeks to demonstrate is a more disturbingly dense entanglement of the Middle East and the violence that is said to emanate from it. In pursuing these questions, what is put forward is not so much a theory of Middle Eastern violence as a theory of the Middle East that centres violent practices in the constitution and reproduction of it as a region. Assisting this effort are insights drawn from recent geographical theorizations of the region and territory, poststructuralist accounts of the ‘state effect’ and its productive indeterminacy, and finally a closer analysis of the ways in which various forms of epistemic and physical violence constitute the very arrangements, practices, and processes that give rise to the ‘regional effect’ of there being a pre-theoretical and agentic socio-geographical entity called the Middle East. This analysis will examine the ways in which the violence cartographic practices, imperial-state bureaucracies and academic categorisation have complemented the extraordinary insecuritisation of the Middle East over the course of the previous fifty years through externally driven processes of militarisation, conflict exacerbation and peace deferment. In making the Middle East as violence through violence, the region came to be through its incorporation into larger global processes aimed at restructuring the political and economic dominance of the North Atlantic powers.

Theorising Regions as Political Technologies of Territorial State Space Making

Geographers have long been preoccupied with theorising regions and regionality. As recent works in that field have argued, regions are never given. They are rather constituted, reproduced and contested in numerous sites within and beyond the region, at different spatio-temporal scales and along a number of discursive axes. These dynamics are at once intra-, inter-, extra- and trans-regionally manifold and yet often appear to manifest as regionally specific characteristics. For example, Paasi and Metzger (2017) have argued,

Work of regionalization and ‘region-building’ is performed not only by economic, political and cultural/media elites in the production/reproduction of regions and identity narratives, but also in everyday practices and in the work of, for example, regional planners and developers, as well as through such mundane material structures such as transport infrastructures. (Paasi and Metzger 2017, p. 26)

Here our attention is rightly being drawn to local forms of agency in the enactment of regions. At the same time, this observation also exposes one of the more telling features of the Middle East: the Middle East is a region – first in name, then in deed – whose most powerful and devoted stakeholders have never been autochthonous.

The very idea of a Middle East was largely invented out of the ashes of orientalism. It helped to impose an identity upon diverse peoples seeking to forge their own modernity. The idea of ‘Latin America’, by contrast, is quite instructive: there a regional identity was ‘invented’ in Southern and Meso America, in part, to resist the very imperialism that had helped to constitute the region and its peoples (Gobat 2013). The sordid career of the Middle East – a concept explicitly rooted in imperial geography, military conquest, political subordination and extractive accumulation, especially since the onset of the hydrocarbon age – has much more to do with the exercise of power over people than with the resistance it generates. The increasing use of the concept of the Middle East from the late 1800s onward coincides with the efforts of North Atlantic powers to dictate the kind of politics the region could have (Lustick 1997, Khalil 2014).

The Middle East as a region must be recognised as a territorial project championed by extraterritorial forces. Territory, according to Elden (2010, p. 811–812), is best conceptualised as a ‘political technology’, one that ‘comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain’. The historical emergence of the region as a technology of rule in modern European geographical thought can be seen in a number of cartographic practices, notably in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³ These practices included maps that delimited large territorial areas premised on assumptions of relative racial homogeneity. Some of these would later become the names of states; India is a prime example. Other areas or regions were bound together by defunct, decrepit or extant empires. The cartographic territorialisation of regions was complicated by the new wave of European imperial expansion in Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century. The putative ethnological character of emergent understandings of regionality was subordinated to the political imperative to outline, with ever increasing precision, new colonial domains that notoriously disrupted or repurposed the lived geography of those populations being subjected to European domination (Lewis and Wigen 1997, p. 158–162).

The origins and perpetuation regions through processes of political power discloses the fact that the region is, first and foremost, state space. And in so far as the state is the quintessential object of modern politics, the production of state space is interrelated with the processes of capital accumulation and war-making. The ways in which states ‘simplify’ both representations of space and space itself, so as to enable and enhance the coordination of objects and bodies in the pursuit of power and profit, renders the world in ways that are more intelligible to a variety of modern institutions, above all the military (Foucault 1977, Scott 1998). From the familial household to the colonial slave-plantation to the empire writ large, the violent processes of social reproduction and capital accumulation have gone hand-in-hand with particularly attuned spatial practices (Brown 1995, Mbembé 2003, Owens 2015).

In the early post-colonial world of the mid-twentieth century, the resurgence of regions as a conceptual and practical technology of rule was likewise driven by the requirements of global war-making and capitalist order-remaking on the part of the North Atlantic governments led by the United States. As Lewis and Wigen (1997, p. 163) explain,

Simply put, the old continental architecture, anchored by the vast category of Asia, proved useless for strategic planning. At the same time, the territorial framework of European colonial empires – the other prominent template for global division – was quickly becoming irrelevant. Ultimately, the result of incremental reforms was a new system of world regions, the basis of postwar ‘area studies.’

At the nexus of the US academy and state power, regional geographies were being devised and implemented to facilitate Washington’s nascent global hegemony. As with other regions in the embryonic area studies paradigm, Middle East studies in the United States was effectively co-founded by persons whose professional biographies blurred the putative boundaries between defence, diplomacy, intelligence and scholarship (Khalil 2016). For example, the wartime organisation that would later become the Central Intelligence Agency was an important feeder of academic talent in the post-WWII academy, particularly for what would become Middle East studies (Lockman 2016, p. 30). Additionally, the prevalence of anthropologists over geographers within the Ethnographic Board – one of the bodies created in the early 1940s to help the US government understand its new imperial domains – contributed to the highly racialized cartographies of area studies. These cartographies would soon inform the exercise of global power in the emergent Cold War (Lewis and Wigen 1997, p. 162–166).⁴ In the years that followed, the reification of regions saw the concept become ‘abstract’ and ‘instrumental’: ‘A region was now a “data-bound cell” that could be analysed by statistical methods’ (Paasi 2011, p. 169). This is an apt description of the problematic way regions are now treated in most comparative studies of armed conflict, as will be seen next.

The Middle East in Comparative Armed Conflict Research

As argued above, the idea of the region developed in both modern political thought and practice as a governmental technology of territorialisation so as to render peoples and places amenable to applications of state power. Direct and indirect forms of cartographic representation of regions became important technologies of truth accompanying these projections, from maps to datasets. None of this occurred without telling complications. Regional boundaries are almost always highly contested, and just as often vaguely demarcated. An understandable response to such contradictions and ambiguities is to reject the region as either a meaningful category of analysis or as representative of an actual lived geography. The problem with this rejection is its failure to come to grips with the extent to which regions, and the Middle East in particular, have been reified into a reality that cannot be so quickly abandoned. In retheorising regions vis-à-vis the practices that constitute them as such, it will be argued that these contradictions and ambiguities, particularly with respect to the Middle East, are in fact an essential component of processes of regionalisation, and so understanding them as such.

One would hardly be surprised to learn that much of the quantitative data used to arrive at conclusions about the patterns of Middle Eastern violence, whether in terms of large-scale international warfare, lower intensity civil conflicts or the conceptually problematic category of terrorism, is riddled with contradictions. The Correlates of War dataset (Sarkees and Wayman 2010), the best historical data on wars in the later modern period, never explicitly delineates the boundaries of the Middle East nor enumerates the states that constitute it. Conflicts in Northern Africa, for example, are mostly included in the Middle East category, such as the brief Algerian civil war of 1962 and the longer one in the 1990s. However, the French conquest of Algeria’s central northern region of Kabylia in the 1850s is curiously coded as being in ‘Africa’, while the 1816 Anglo-Dutch shelling of Algiers is back in ‘the Middle East’, as are the various other waves of French conquest in Algeria from 1830 onward. The dispute over the former Spanish Sahara at the far western edge of Africa, involving a joint Moroccan and Mauritanian occupation in 1975, is also considered a Middle Eastern war in this data. On the eastern side of the region, all imperial, civil, and interstate wars in Afghanistan are consistently coded as being in ‘Asia’, whether during the British, Soviet, or NATO periods of occupation. The same goes for all wars in Pakistan since separation from India in 1947. Ottoman wars against Persia are coded as ‘the Middle East’, though the first civil war between the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK, Kurdistan Worker’s Party) and the Turkish government (1984–86) is coded as ‘Asia’, whereas the second is coded as ‘the Middle East’, as are the two wars involving the PKK and Turkey in Iraq (1991–1992 and 1997). Moreover, the first (1963–1972) and second (1983–1991) wars for South Sudanese independence, as well as the Darfur conflict (2003–2006), are coded as ‘the Middle East’, though the Ottoman conquest of those same areas in the 1820s is said to be in ‘Africa’. Late in the nineteenth century, the joint Anglo-Egyptian suppression of rebellion in Sudan is designated as being in ‘the Middle East’, whereas the Italians’ contribution to the same effort is in ‘Africa’. The various phases of civil war in Chad are revealingly assigned to ‘Africa’, including the most intensive period of Libyan occupation in 1980–1981. The later period of fighting over Chad’s northern Aouzou Strip, however, is co-located in two regions as the fighting crossed into Libyan territory – the apparent line between ‘Africa’ and ‘the Middle East’ – during the so-called Toyota War of the late 1980s.

Contrary to this somewhat expansive definition of the Middle East, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), which maintains the best data on both high and low intensity conflicts since the end of World War II, utilises a more limited definition of the region. Conflicts in Northern Africa, apart from those involving Egypt, are assigned to the Africa region. Though these instances only appear to account for approximately six per cent of all discrete armed conflicts since 1946 worldwide, the inclusion of cases from North Africa in the Middle East category would actually add over forty per cent more to the Middle East’s conflict burden while subtracting eighteen per cent from ‘Africa’. On the other side of the region, UCPD opts to treat Afghanistan as part of the Middle East, though the Central Asian republics and, more importantly, Pakistan remain outside of it, even though much of the violence in the latter has been intertwined with the near permanent state of war in Afghanistan since the late 1970s (Pettersson and Eck 2018).

The most comprehensive data on terrorist attacks, the Global Terrorism Database (START 2018), opts for a more expansive understanding of the Middle East, one that incorporates all of North Africa, though terrorist events in Mauritania and Sudan are coded as Sub-Saharan Africa. This data draws the eastern limit of the Middle East at Iran, allotting the Caucus states, the central Asian republics, Afghanistan and Pakistan to different regions. Despite the extent to which terrorism has been increasingly theorised and nominally practiced as a ‘transnational’ phenomena in recent years, the Global Terrorism Database nonetheless treats incidents that cross regions as occurring in one or the other. That is, there is no option for an event to be in two or more regions. For example, an 3 April 2010, attack on the Algeria border, attributed to Malian ‘Tuareg extremists’ with an ‘unknown’ motive, is coded as occurring in ‘sub-Saharan Africa’.

This brief survey of major datasets on armed conflict yields two relevant observations. First, there is a widespread insistence on regions, and the Middle East in particular, being an important category of analysis, if not an indispensible one. None of these sources suggest that the Middle East could be simply dissolved into Africa and Asia. Second, there is no agreement as to what countries or limits define the Middle East. Generally speaking, the lack of agreement on definitions of the Middle East tends to elicit two kinds of responses. On the one hand, there are appeals to tradition or pragmatism (e.g., Gritzner 2003, Bonine 2012); on the other hand, there are calls to decolonise understandings of the Middle East through more nuanced representations of the region’s peoples and places (e.g., Culcasi 2010). What either approach fails to perceive is the extent to which the Middle East’s ‘boundary problem’ – what constitutes its centre and its limits at any historical moment, including our own – is not a series of contradictions that can be solved through either a lowest-common-denominator delineation, appeals for scientific consensus, or an embrace of historical and cultural complexity. In fact, this boundary problem, and the endless contestation it has licenced, is indicative of the processes that have given rise to the Middle East and reproduced it.

In order to understand how the Middle Eastern boundary problem yields insights into the production of the region in the first place, it is instructive to revisit similar debates from the 1970s and 1980s about the relative autonomy of the state, society, and the economy from each other. In the wake of Althusser’s totalising theorization of the state as repressive and ideological apparatuses, questions were raised as to whether or not there was a meaningful distinction to be made between a state, the society it governs, and the economic reproduction of both.⁵ In his definitive contribution to this debate, Timothy Mitchell (1991) argues that ‘the institutional mechanisms of modern political order are never confined within the limits of what is called the state’. As a consequence, ‘[T]he boundary of the state (or political system) never marks a real exterior’. Above all, he argues, ‘producing and maintaining the distinction between state and society is itself a mechanism that generates resources of power.’ He goes on to add, ‘The arrangements that produce the apparent separateness of the state create the abstract effect of agency’ or a ‘state effect’ (Mitchell 1991, p. 90–91).

Transposing this argument to the Middle East, if not the idea of regions in general, is simple enough. As an imaginative geography that has never been self-constituted (though is purported to be such), the Middle East represents countless trans-regional ‘arrangements’. These arrangements are reproduced in two important ways: one, through the power afforded by insisting on there being a Middle East (and hence an interior and an exterior) such that, two, the Middle East appears to have an existence and capacities independent of, and historically prior to, the very arrangements that realised the Middle East and have reproduce it as such. Notions of the Middle East cannot, long after the fact, be rendered socially or spatially coherent, and so pre-political, by reducing them to either ‘the historic core of Islam’ (Bonine 2012, p. 98) or what was fashioned by European powers out of the old ‘Ottoman-Persian imperial zone’ (Harris 2016, p. 10).⁶ The only way to unravel the enigma of the Middle East is to consider, in the words of David Harvey (1973, p. 13; quoted in Paasi 2011, p. 169), ‘human practice with respect to it’. As will be argued next, the practices that have rendered the Middle East as a zone of extreme violence are themselves uniquely violent, such that the Middle East cannot be theorised in the first place – nor even compared to other regions in the second – without taking into account the very violence that has constituted and reproduced it.

The Middle East as Violent Practices: Mapping, Racialisation and Insecuritisation

So what are the practices that have made the Middle East and, in so doing, imbued it with agentic powers? As will be argued, the evolving transnational arrangements and practices that have effected the appearance of the Middle East have been, at their core, inherently and intensively violent. At the same time, this ‘regional effect’ and the resultant misprision of consequence for cause are also productive in the very ambiguities and contestations they give rise to by licencing all manner of efforts to know, represent and control the Middle East, efforts that also include resistance from within the region itself. The indeterminacy and contradictions inherent in the ideas and practices of a Middle East are, to borrow from Judith Butler (2006, p. 34), a productive outgrowth of the continual ways in which the arrangements that performatively constitute the Middle East are perceived as forces animated by a seemingly pre-existing, self-regenerating and independently agentic socio-cultural entity, infamous for its oil wealth, authoritarianism, conservatism and protracted, bloody conflicts. Though there are countless ways in which this Middle East has been produced as violence through epistemic and physical violence, three primary mechanisms – mapping, racialisation and insecuritisation – help to elaborate a historical framework to understand the emergence and reproduction of the region. This framework will, in turn, help to elucidate not only the late realisation of the Middle East but also the inherent incongruities in any effort to compare its violence to other regions.

Cartopower

The Middle East emerged at the intersection of two violent practices, capital accumulation and war making, amid the growing crisis of late European imperialism at the turn of the last century. From its inception in British imperialism and its ‘popularisation’ by US naval college professor Alfred Mahan in a 1902 text on geopolitics and strategy (see Khalil 2016, p. 297, note 4), the idea of the Middle East was a product of imperial-military thought and action, one that was frequently framed from the start as a ‘question’ or a ‘problem’, as in a journal article penned by General T.E. Gordon of the British Army in 1900. Unsurprisingly, the first governmental institutions to bear the term ‘Middle East’ were all in the British Colonial Office (Culcasi 2010, p. 585–586). At the same time, the Middle East of 1903 bears little resemblance to that of 2003. The Middle Eastern question, a 1903 book by British journalist and diplomat Valetine Chirol, who helped popularise the term in the early twentieth century, is tellingly subtitled Or some political problems of Indian defence. Its original frontispiece was a map spanning eastern Arabia to Tibet and Burma (see Foliard 2017, p. 211). A cursory examination of maps of areas that would come to be called the Middle East, along with maps explicitly claiming to represent the Middle East, reveals the extent to which today’s understanding of the region did not coalesce until the mid-twentieth century.

Daniel Foliard’s (2017) recent survey of British imperial maps produced between the 1850s through the 1920s, documents the initial emergence of the Middle East as a notion that reflected growing imperial anxieties vis-à-vis post-mutiny India and encroachment from Russia. At the turn of the century, British maps incorporating Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, and adjacent areas were either labelled ‘the Near East’ or described the specific sub-regions, nations, states or colonies being documented. As an example of the latter, the map that supposedly made the modern Middle East, the one that bears the 1916 signatures of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, is simply titled Map of Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia. Nonetheless, it was a confluence of events – the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the expansion of North Atlantic dominance into regions that held ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ – that brought the concept of the Middle East to wider public audiences in the West. At that point, the idea of the Middle East began to be encoded into the both bureaucratic and scholarly discourses concerning areas that had once gone by either many names or the Near East (Foliard 2017, p. 260–261). The years that followed saw the North Atlantic powers, in coalition with the major oil companies of the day, carefully manage the exploitation of the region’s oil so as to maintain the industry’s profits, often by deliberately retarding the development of the region’s industrial, export, labour and political capacities (Mitchell 2011, chapter two; Vitalis 2007).

The Middle East, as an internal relation involving war-making, space-making and global capital accumulation, was further realised in the Second World War. The Middle East had not only become central to the ways in which politicians, militaries and leading industries understood and actualised a world at war with itself (Drysdale and Blake 1985, cited in Sidaway 1994, p. 357), wider publics were incorporated into the Middle East’s realisation. A 1941 article in Time magazine, for example, titled ‘Treasures of the Caucasus’, featured a map describing the ‘Middle East routes’ through which Anglo-American military aid to Russia would have to flow, as well as the natural resources like manganese and oil – ‘treasures of the Caucasus’ – that ‘Hitler covets’ (in Rankin 2018, p. 73). Similar concerns animated the realisation of the Middle East during the early Cold War, as the region came to be largely constituted in extrinsic terms vis-à-vis the Soviet threat. Elaborating the Middle East as a unique global space generated by interlocking conflicts and energy extraction coincided with the converging crises that beset the North Atlantic heartlands of capitalism starting in the late 1960s, notably in terms of Keynesian economics (stagflation), conventional military power (Korea, Algeria and then Vietnam), and political legitimacy (new social movements). It is at this point in recent history when we can begin to speak of the Middle East in terms that would be recognisable today. At the same time, this new Middle East had to be re-rationalised in such a way as to justify its growing incorporation into various schemes aiming to shore up North Atlantic political and economic hegemony. This justification would largely take the form of racialising the Middle East so as to naturalise cartographies that had previously been explicitly geopolitical.

Racialising the Region

The gradual racialisation of the Middle East – replacing its political-economic logic with a socio-cultural one – coincided with the region’s reorientation westward towards zones of hydrocarbon energy extraction in Mesopotamia, Arabia and North Africa. In the postwar context of US intellectual and political supremacy, new ideas of the Middle East had to contend with the legacies of orientalism and other forms of European imperial science. These were largely philological ways of knowing that heavily informed the nascent field of area studies (for background, see Lockman 2004, Kuper 2005, Mamdani 2012). The most obvious legacy was the very idea of a ‘middle’ in ‘the East’. As noted above, the Middle East, in its original formulation in the first years of the twentieth century, was British India, not southwest Asia (Sidaway 1994). Areas adjacent to British India – Afghanistan, Qajar Persia, and even western China – were sometimes included in this early definition. The concept of Near East, by contrast, had signified what was left of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s, as well as nearby areas in Southeast Europe, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt, and some – or all – of the Maghrib. It would take two world wars and the anxieties of the emerging post-imperial international system to produce a new understanding of the Middle East. Though the US State Department continued to use the term Near East, John Foster Dulles, the agency’s Secretary in 1957, declared the two regions ‘identical’ (quoted in Culcasi 2010, p. 586; citing Davison 1959). Rather than being a product of the First World War, as is commonly suggested, the contemporary Middle East began to be realised during the Cold War.

This reorientation of the Orient, whereby the Near became or merged with the Middle (see Khalil 2014, Foliard 2017), was not the only source of confusion and contestation during the early Cold War. There was a related challenge at the level of academic institutions. As postwar social sciences were increasingly tasked with going beyond Europe to explore, explain and so help manage the totality of the human world, articulating a workable concept of the Middle East had to confront three additional challenges. It first had to contend with the intellectually and institutionally entrenched philological traditions of Orientalism as enshrined in departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilisations (Lockman 2016).

Secondly, the new idea of the Middle East had to contend with an undecided division of labour between a nascent Middle East studies and the continental regions of the world from which the Middle East would be carved out: Asia and Africa. As a concept, the continent’s fictive geological naturalness in modern European geographical thought (see Lewis and Wigen 1997) gave it a clear advantage over the Middle East, a notion that was not only a priori Eurocentric but also a priori political, and hence unnatural. These theoretical and disciplinary tensions were indicative of longstanding tensions within the ‘modern geopolitical imagination’ between natural and constructed notions of space (Agnew 2004). From the perspective of a scientific worldview that valued the pre-given nonhuman world over the ideological and constructed one of the socio-political, an area studies paradigm rooted in the continent – Africa, Asia, Latin America – held certain advantages.⁷ A telling fact is the delayed establishment of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest professional body of scholars working in this new field. It was founded almost a decade after the Sputnik crisis, the event that led to the US National Defence Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 and the dramatic expansion of government funding for area studies in the United States. By contrast, the North American scholarly associations for Asian and African studies had been founded before the NDEA, in 1956 and 1957 respectively (Mitchell 2002b). Up until that point, Middle East studies had been simultaneously facilitated by a coalition of private and public interests within the emergent US national security state, the Middle East Institute being a prime example (Khalil 2016). Though area studies is often criticised for being an instrument of the US national security state (see Sidaway 2013, Koch 2016), the founding of MESA is indicative of an effort of scholars to privatise that which was more overtly under government control.

A third challenge to the idea of the Middle East took the form of efforts to create alternative nomenclatures. The most significant was efforts to promote Southwest Asian studies. However, these never came close to contending with the popularity of ‘the Middle East’, if, for starters, because of the ‘problem’ of Egypt and the ‘Arab’ Maghrib. The use of the term Southwest Asia by diplomats and mapmakers on government documents before and after the interwar period (see, e.g., Foliard 2017, p. 224, Bonine 2012, p. 64–65, Culcasi 2010, p. 586) is suggestive of the extent to which a more socio-politically neutral alternative was readily available yet never found purchase.

More importantly, the curious insistence that there was a Middle East and that it had to be called such spoke to the persistence of racial logics at work in both postwar international thought and the rise of area studies (Vitalis 2015). Regions and their associated identities had to conform to a rigid, arbitrarily imposed socio-geographical schema, one hostile to hybridity and interpenetration, yet whose boundaries never elicited scholarly or political consensus (Paasi 2003). What is remarkable about the idea of the Middle East is not only its westward drift in the first half of the twentieth century but its corresponding racialisation. Whereas early formulations of the Middle East included countries like Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Greece well into the 1950s (Khalil 2014), most maps of the region today attempt to circumscribe an area limited to areas of ‘brown’ Islamic majorities. Where ambiguities of delineation begin to emerge often appear in zones where this purported religious and racial preponderance begins to decline in Africa, central Asia, and southeastern Europe.

Maps of the Middle East reflect the region’s racialisation. In a chapter on the seemingly irreconcilable maps of the Middle East found in post-WWII geographical texts, Michael Bonine (2012) examines the implicit and explicit logics at play in any given definition of the Middle East so as to arrive at a common basis – the Middle East as a ‘cultural region’ – that can then rationalise cartographic representations of it.⁸ However, were we to analyse these same maps diachronically, a different trend comes into focus. The maps of the Middle East produced either right before the Second World War or in the years immediately afterwards hew closely to the old Near East or Southwest Asia understanding. By the 1960s, these maps begin to expand the scope of the Middle East, mainly into Northern Africa. Even maps that attempt to define the region according to geological features or climatological patterns just as much reflect the expanding concept of Middle East in relation to the geopolitics of the day. One of the most obvious aspects of this sprawl is Libya, which begins to be incorporated into maps of the Middle East as the country becomes a ‘problem’ for North Atlantic powers in the 1970s. By the 1980s, most or all of the Maghrib states begin to appear in these maps of the Middle East, some of them now bearing the title ‘the Middle East and North Africa’. Nearly all of the maps produced after 11 September 2001, in Bonine’s study not only include the Maghrib, but several suggest the inclusion of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the central Asian republics into concepts of a ‘wider’ Middle East. At the far west of this sprawling Middle East, Mauritania and the contested territory of Western Sahara continue to present an epistemic challenge, oscillating between incorporation and ‘Africa’. Tellingly, South Sudan’s independence has made it easier to render Sudan as Middle Eastern. At the same time, increasing North Atlantic counterterrorism activities since 2002 in Africa’s Sahel belt – Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad – have further pushed the scope of the Middle East’s disputed liminal zones further south. This expansive imaginative geography is nearly coterminous with the primary theatre of operations in the sprawling Global War on Terrorism (Güney and Gökcan 2010).⁹ Thus the realisation of the Middle East through its increasing racialisation plays an important role in simultaneously masking the actual violent practices that have made the Middle East while also making that violence possible by ‘othering’ the Middle East as a race-based space of culturally inherent authoritarianism and conflict.

Insecuritisation as Accumulation

The contemporary Middle East began to be realised and consolidated, both ideationally and materially, as race-based space in final third of the twentieth century. This occurred amid the growing crises of politics and economics afflicting the North Atlantic powers towards the end of the 1960s as Western capitalism and military might increasing came into question. A partial and contingent solution to some of these crises was found in the Middle East by making it what it has become over the course of the previous fifty years: a unique zone of violence. Driven by militarisation, conflict exacerbation and peace deferment, these policies of insecuritisation helped to generate new modes and spaces of capitalist accumulation for beleaguered North Atlantic arms and oil industries. Making and maintaining the Middle East in terms of permanent war and irresolvable conflicts was accomplished through processes of epistemically violent realisation. These processes not only took the form of intellectual practices in both the public and private domains (e.g., government bureaucracies and Middle East studies) but, in so doing, they also helped to structure and legitimate the region’s realisation through the physical violence of hyper militarisation, conflict exacerbation and peace deferment. The extraordinary and intensive insecuritisation of the Middle East in the 1970s helped to actuate this co-constitutive relationship, a relationship between mass organised violence, accumulation through insecurity and new racialised understandings of the region itself.

Prominent critics of US policy towards the Middle East have often suggested that the region held immediate and profound geopolitical importance to North Atlantic interests from the interwar period to the early Cold War (e.g., Klare 2004, Bacevich 2016). As evidence, such critics cite US government support for Standard Oil of California to explore oil in Arabia (at a time when the United States was still a net exporter), the 1945 meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal or government documents like the ‘Acheson Memo’ of October 1945, which infamously described Arabian oil reserves as ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’. Moreover, the ‘Truman Doctrine’, effectively promulgated in 1948, is also presented as an indication of a strong and early US commitment to pre-eminence in the Middle East. The historical record, however, is far more equivocal as to the veracity of this geopolitical thesis. For example, key cases like the early Saudi state or the founding of Israel raise questions as to whether or not the real advocates for US entanglement in the region came from the region itself (see, respectively, Vitalis 2007, Gendzier 2015). From a political-economy perspective, the Middle East effectively became central to the interests of the North Atlantic world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for reasons that were quite different than the geopolitical context of the interwar period or the early 1950s. The crisis of North Atlantic hegemony in the late 1960s coincided with the very moment, as argued above, that the contemporary Middle East came to be. What the Bitter Lake meeting, the Truman Doctrine and the Acheson Memo provide is a trite political origins story that obfuscates the actual political-economy of the growing North Atlantic-Middle East entanglement of the last fifty years.

In two important ways, insecuritising the Middle East in the 1970s – and, in so doing, producing the region as it is understood today – helped to address twin crises afflicting North Atlantic capitalism and military power. First of all, insecuritising the Middle East helped to set in motion an interactive chain of often-violent antagonisms stretching from the western edge of the Sahara desert to the western Himalayas. The most common logic at the root of all of these antagonisms was not some violent cultural habitus but rather essentially internationalised political struggles to define and control the Middle East.¹⁰ Given the growing worldwide opposition to North Atlantic military interventions in the postcolonial world in the 1950s and 1960s, producing the Middle East as an archipelago of ‘internal’ or ‘regional’ conflicts afforded a degree of indirect control over a zone that was increasingly obtaining the financial and ideological resources to forge its own political modernity during the same period. Secondly, insecuritising the region helped to address crises of profitability in both the North Atlantic’s armament industry and hydrocarbon-based energy sector. In both economic and political terms, the Middle East served as a productive ‘spatial fix’ David Harvey, ‘Globalisation and the “Spatial Fix”,’ Geographische Revu 2 (2001). so as to ‘buy time’ Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, trans. Patrick Camiller and David Fernbach (New York, N.Y.: Verso, 2014). for key sectors within North Atlantic capitalism (arms and oil). This occurred amid the ongoing project to reconstitute North Atlantic hegemony after successive disasters in a number of postcolonial military theatres (e.g., Korea, Algeria, Kenya and Vietnam). And as much as a solution to these crises of power and profit were found in the Middle East, they were effective in so far as they were able to produce the Middle East as a space of violence through violence.

The foundations for the intensive and externally driven insecuritisation of the Middle East were laid in the 1970s through the region’s hyper militarisation. Recent scholarship on the problem of militarism has rightly framed it as a relationship between the ‘legitimation’, ‘normalisation’ and ‘preparation’ for war (Stavrianakis and Stern 2018). These facets of Middle East militarisation are already well recognised, both in terms of the high levels of security sector spending by the states in the region and the amount of military aid they have received from governments outside of it (Cammett et al. 2015). Historically, many of the regimes in the region, dominated both ideationally and institutionally by their security sectors, were often the product of colonial-military administrations (Vitalis and Heydemann 1999), or a confluence of private and strategic interests in cases like Saudi Arabia (Vitalis 2007), Iran (Alvandi 2014) and Libya (Anderson 1986), where the creation of Western-dependent security and extractive apparatuses were prioritised above all other spheres of governance. Even in cases where European imperialism was shed through violent resistance, such as Algeria (Roberts 2007) or Egypt (Abul-Magd 2017), the postcolonial state that emerged was nonetheless heavily influenced by military elements drawn from the nationalist insurgency, indigenous forces that had defected from the colonial army or a mix of the two.

On their own, the institutional dominance of security sectors within Middle Eastern regimes and the developmental logic of ‘military Keynesianism’ are unable to explain the extraordinary levels of military spending and imports across the region. As indicated in the stunning number of arms imports in the 1970s, these militaristic tendencies were exacerbated by a confluence of forces exogenous to the region. In 1972, the Middle East had only accounted for 19.2% of world arms imports with East Asia (37.7%) and Europe (28.2%) then dominant because of the Vietnam war and Cold War arms build-ups (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1984, p. 7, Table C). Whereas the Middle East collectively spent $1.26 billion on arms in 1963, a decade later its expenditures were already over $10 billion in unadjusted dollars. This reflected an annual rate of growth of 14.7%, far ahead of East Asia (7.5%), South Asia (2.9%), Africa (6.5%), and Latin America (3.9%) (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1975, p. 14–19). The intensive militarisation of the Middle East in the 1970s took place in a context where arms sales worldwide grew from $300 billion in 1972 to roughly $820 billion ten years later. The Middle East accounted for much of this growth: in 1979, the Middle East received 34% of global arms deliveries. Though this was slightly down from 1978, it still represented a figure 3.5 times larger than it had been in 1970 (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1982, p. 5, 9 and figure 5). These trends continued well into the initial years of Thatcher premiership and Reagan administration. In 1982, almost 42% of all global arms transfers went to the Middle East, which was roughly half of the developing world’s arms imports (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1984, p. 1). In 2017 dollars, Middle East arms imports went from below $7.5 billion in 1971 to over $18 billion in 1975, and then to over $30 billion in 1977 (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1982, p. 8 and figure 13). By the end of the decade, the countries whose military expenditures registered as 10% or more of GDP were almost all in the Middle East apart from the Soviet Union – both Yemeni states, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Syria, Qatar, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The ten countries with the highest ratio of military expenditures to central government expenditures in 1982 were all in the Middle East as well (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1984, p. 5, Table B).¹¹

These trends have continued well beyond the Cold War. Though average military spending across the Middle East peaked at close to twenty per cent of GDP in the early 1980s, most of the region’s states have nonetheless continued to outpaced all other ‘middle income’ countries world-wide in terms of military spending and arms imports since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These figures include low population oil-exporters and high population countries with limited natural resources. Unsurprisingly, these spending trends have been dominated, especially since 2001, by the states of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Some of these states saw acute bursts of exorbitant military outlays during times of war while others more consistently propped up elaborate internal security forces. Meanwhile, foreign military sales and aid to the region, led by the North Atlantic powers and Russia since the 1970s, has never abated, outpacing all other regions combined. Domestic funds and rents that otherwise could have gone to sectors like education, health, and civil infrastructure were massively diverted to defence, which in turn empowered, through enhanced surveillance and repressive capacities, the authoritarian tendencies of regimes dominated by the logic and institutional structures of disproportionately large security sectors (Cammett et al. 2015, p. 357–366; see also Bellin 2004).

Insecuritisation through militarisation in the 1970s helped to make the Middle East through violence by actuating an interlocking chain of conflicts from Mauritania to Pakistan.¹² How these productively destabilising dynamics have emerged in the ‘core’ – the Arab-Israeli and Israel-Palestinian conflicts, civil wars and foreign occupation in Lebanon and Yemen, the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurdish question, the Gulf Wars, the pariahisation of Iran and finally the Syrian civil war – are all well understood. Equally part of this emergent system in the 1970s were new conflicts on the ‘margins’ of the Middle East that likewise helped to constellate and maintain an archipelago of regional insecurity through the induction of sub-regional antagonisms, the exacerbation of civil and international wars, the selective pariahisation of particular regimes and the prolongation of intractable ‘peace processes’. On the western wing of the region emerged the Saudi-financed Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, which was opposed by Algerian backed nationalists (still ongoing), and the Soviet-armed Libyan war in Western-backed Chad. Libya’s de jure pariah status and Algeria’s de facto one later resulted in widespread intellectual and political paralysis vis-à-vis the civil wars that erupted in the latter in the 1990s and the former following the 2011 NATO-Arab League intervention. Preemptive counterterrorism initiatives in North Africa’s Sahel belt from 2002 onward only served to further destabilise the poorest region in the world, leading to a proliferation of armed ‘jihadi’ groups from Niger to Mauritania, the collapse of the Malian state in 2012 and the rise of ‘Islamic states’ in Timbuktu and the Lake Chad region.

At the other end of the Middle East is a conflict that needs even less of an introduction: the four-decade evisceration of Afghanistan based on the hyper militarisation of a Cold War ally (Pakistan), Saudi financing and North Atlantic intervention. By 2014, the United States had spent more money on security assistance and nation-building in Afghanistan since 2001 than was spent on the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after WWII. The expert consensus nonetheless suggests that Afghanistan remains a failed state mired in an intractable conflict nearly two decades after 9/11 (Messner 2018). The conflicts over Palestine, Western Sahara and Afghanistan (recent negotiations notwithstanding) furthermore highlight the extent to which preventing peace has likewise been an important mechanism of insecuritisation in the Middle East. Data on over two hundred peace agreements reached between 1975 and 2011 around the world shows that less than ten per cent pertain to conflicts in the Middle East, the majority of those being a series of agreements between Iraq and Iran and the various phases of the Oslo peace process (Högbladh 2012).

Thus the articulation and maintenance of interlocking yet productive instabilities from the western Sahel to the western Himalayas from the 1970s onward has combined hyper-militarisation, conflict exacerbation, deferment of peace and, at times, direct intervention. By hijacking the logic of the Cold War and all-the-while maintaining it long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these manifold processes of regional insecuritisation were abetted by geographically patterning the region into an oscillating arc of North Atlantic enemies – Algeria, Libya, Egypt (until 1973), Syria, and Iran (after 1979) – and allies – Morocco, Tunisia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq (until 1990) and, until recently, Pakistan and Turkey. Aiding and abetting these processes was the coincidental invention and development of a new framework of understanding and so managing organised violence in the Middle East, particularly by nonstate actors, as ‘terrorism’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, Stampnitzky 2013). Discourses and practices of (counter)terrorism likewise facilitated the reproduction of the Middle East through violence by – first and foremost – rendering as much indigenous violence as a priori illegitimate and imminently menacing. The result is that interventions against terrorism obtain the status of being simultaneously legitimate yet hazardous, a status with clear political urgency and strategic flexibility.

In structuring this chain of antagonistic relations, armed conflicts and hyper militarised regimes, the insecuritisation of the Middle East from the 1970s onward helped to reformulate North Atlantic political supremacy through more indirect forms of control over an increasingly divided postcolonial world. These processes also functioned as new mechanisms of capital accumulation so as to address growing crises within Western arms and oil industries. These crises were respectively rooted in, one, potential US arms spending reductions as the Vietnam war came to a close and, two, the wave of infrastructural nationalisations and profit-sharing renegotiations that had undermined the cartel power of the major North Atlantic oil companies (Mitchell 2002a). In order to solve these crises, new markets for arms would need to be opened and a new regime of managed oil scarcity would have to be devised.

On both fronts, Middle Eastern insecurity proved exceptionally capable of satisfying these accumulatory needs. In the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the Arab oil ‘embargo’, it soon became clear that widespread insecurity in the Middle East – where seventy per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves reside – could manufacture an aura of oil scarcity that had previously been effected through the monopolistic powers of the major international oil companies. Skyrocketing oil prices in the 1970s, driven by unreliable pariahs, militarisation, wars and a proliferation of ‘intractable’ conflicts across the Middle East, from West Africa to Central Asia, helped to resecure the dominance of the international oil companies. The share of profits going to the Middle Eastern states was then ‘recuperated’ by the North Atlantic powers via extravagant arms sales to an increasingly insecuritised region. Simply put, the relative or ‘differential’ profitability of the major North Atlantic arms and oil companies (i.e., in comparison to other dominant sectors within global capitalism) became predicated on the initiation and perpetuation of major wars and intractable conflicts in the Middle East in the 1970s (Rowley et al. 1989, Nitzan and Bichler 2002, chapter five). The elegance of this system, which induced and perpetually exacerbated vicious internal and external security dilemmas for almost all states in the region, rested in its ability to incorporate countries with no direct access to oil financing (e.g., Israel, Pakistan and Morocco) and petro-pariahs armed with Soviet/Russian weapons (e.g., Algeria, Libya, Syria, and post-1979 Iran). Nonetheless, contradictions emerged within this system, mainly in the form of new incentives to expand the geographical and geological frontiers of oil extraction such that extended periods of ‘overproduction’ proved difficult to reverse. Though the problem of the oil ‘glut’ of the mid 1980s and the 1990s was resolved with the onset of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts that temporarily restored the relative profitability of the dominant North Atlantic oil and arms corporations (Bichler and Nitzan 2015), the contemporary oil glut from 2014 onward – induced by the dramatic expansion of oil extraction in the United States – has so far been difficult to clear even with major production zones and circulation corridors under constant threat (e.g., Libya and the Straight of Hormuz) and two major producers, Iran and Venezuela, under increasingly tight unilateral US sanctions regimes put in place by the Trump administration. Nonetheless, it is now plainly clear that, over the course of the previous fifty years, Middle Eastern insecurity has become as much an important condition of possibility for the realisation of profitability within key energy and arms industries as this insecurity has become a mechanism through which North Atlantic political supremacy has been maintained.

Conclusion

To say that the Middle East is violence is to recognise the extent to which the Middle East is unthinkable apart from the forms of ideational and physical violence that have come to constitute it, both as territory and within the contemporary political imagination, as a race-based ‘space of exception’ premised on violence. It is also to suggest that efforts to compare war, conflict, terrorism and other forms of organised violence in the Middle East with similar forms of violence in other regions is to commit a fundamental error. This error arises from the fact that such comparisons mistake consequence for cause. Comparative approaches to the study of armed conflict search for the origins or correlates of organised violence in Middle East in an entity – the Middle East – that is in fact constituted by that very violence, among myriad other practices that have created this effect. Here it has been argued that an actual understanding of the relationship between organised violence and the Middle East must first attend to the arrangements, practices and processes that have given rise to this regional effect; that is, the actions that create and reproduce the appearance of the agentic socio-geographical phenomena called regions. As with the concept of the state, which must likewise be approached through an analysis of the practices that constitute and reproduce it, the contestation and ambiguity that surround efforts to define and control regions are indicative of such performative origins.

The Middle East, a notion born amid the anxieties of late British imperialism in India, only came to fruition during the latter half of the twentieth century. This is an important observation because it temporally locates the ideational and material consolidation of the contemporary Middle East at a moment of acute crisis in the North Atlantic world. It was during this period when the Middle East’s strange imperial origins were obfuscated by its reinscription as race-based space. That this new ‘cultural’ understanding of the Middle East yielded inconsistent delineations and endless contestation was reflective of the widespread misinterpretation of the Middle East as a socio-geographical object existing prior to the transnational arrangements, practices and processes that have given rise to this regional effect and perpetuated it. Chief among these practices, as argued above, was a convergence of extra-regional political and economic crises whose solutions were to be found through the pervasive insecuritisation of the Middle East. The key insecuritising mechanisms identified above were hyper militarisation, conflict exacerbation and peace deferment, arrangements that helped to pattern the Middle East into an archipelago of interconnected antagonisms. In this way, deepening levels of Middle Eastern insecurity assumed an important global function in the reproduction of North Atlantic political and economic supremacy from the 1970s onward. That organised violence in the Middle East has achieved record levels in recent years is as much a testament to the ability of these powerful arrangements to reproduce and amplify themselves as it is to the specifically violent functions the Middle East serves in the ongoing global contest to forge the future of modernity.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Mundy

Jacob Mundy teaches in the Peace and Conflict Studies and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies programs at Colgate University. His books include Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (2010) with Stephen Zunes, The Postconflict Environment (2014) coedited with Dan Monk, Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence (2015), and Libya (2018). During the 2018–2019 academic year, he taught courses and seminars in international political-economy at the Université de Tunis as a Fulbright Scholar.

Notes

1. Here violence and organised violence are being used as shorthand, albeit highly problematic, for what Charles Tilly (2003) might have simply described as coordinated acts that cause damage to peoples and their environments. The use of this broad categorisation, which seeks to incorporate civil wars, lower level armed conflicts, terrorism and civilian-directed atrocities, is also meant to align with Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s recent shift in attention from ‘armed conflicts’ to ‘organised violence’ more broadly.

2. This claim, of course, is not without controversy. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (Allansson et al. 2017) the Syrian civil war had claimed over 280,000 direct fatalities by the end of 2016; that is, fatalities in contexts that are effectively intentional acts of homicide committed by state and non-state actors against combatants and civilians (e.g., combat and massacres). It is commonly reported that the violence in the various conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1998, especially the Second Congo War or Africa’s ‘World War’ (1998–2003), have claimed well over two million lives. For example, the International Rescue Committee, which conducted a number of excess mortality surveys in the country, claimed in 2008 that as many as 4.53 million had died in the DRC since 1998. These were deaths caused indirectly by the conflict. Challenging this figure, the 2009 Human Security Report questioned the International Rescue Committee’s methods and findings, proposing instead a ‘best estimate’ of 863,000 excess (indirect) deaths. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program conservatively lists a total of 102,192 direct fatalities in armed conflict in the DRC from the end of the Cold War to 2016. Similar methodological controversies have surrounded efforts to approximate the number of direct and excess deaths in Iraq during the sanctions regime of the 1990s and following the 2003 US-led invasion (e.g., a 2006 study published in the Lancet controversially reported over 600,000 direct deaths in armed violence and over 650,000 indirect deaths between March 2003 and mid-2006). On the political and methodological issues of using direct fatalities as a measure of conflict duration, intensity, and typology, see Ghobarah et al. (2003) and Mundy (2011).

3. For background on the ‘cartographic revolution’ in early modern European statecraft, see Branch (2013).

4. Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union would likewise embark upon a massive project to map the world in excruciating detail, one that would also include the intensive mapping of peoples based on religion, language and other markers (see Davies and Kent 2017).

5. Often called the Miliband-Poulantzas debate. For an introduction, see Miliband (1977), Poulantzas (1978), and Abrams (1988).

6. Harris (2016, p. 21) later describes the ‘MENA’ as having become a ‘world capitalist region’ after WWII. This categorisation would be more consistent with this paper’s argument.

7. The simple solution to this problematic bifurcation – natural/unnatural, given/constructed – would have been to call into question the socio-politically manufactured characteristics of all spatial constructions, which would suggest that the regional concept of the Middle East was no more fictitious or unnatural than the continental concept of Eurasia or Australia. This theoretical revolution, however, would only come about in the 1970s in the fields of geography and urban studies (see Harvey 1973, cited in Paasi 2011, p. 169, LeFebvre et al. 2003, 2009), as well as, and perhaps even more infamously, Middle East studies (Said 1978), more of which will be said below. On the relationship between ‘modernity’ and ‘nature’, see Latour (1993).

8. Culcasi (2010) performs a similar analysis on a sample of atlases, textbooks, monographs, and other high-level scholarly sources. She produces a map of where there is consensus on the Middle East ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ so as to arrive at a possible natural or social reason to constellate all of these lands into a ‘world cultural region’, though she ultimately finds that a consistent and uncontested criteria (‘uniform characteristics’) cannot be arrived at. Her conclusion is that the Middle East’s ‘Western geopolitical origins’ has to be critically engaged so as to address the relationship between ‘oversimplified notions’ and the ‘increased involvement’ of foreign powers, namely the United States, in the region (Culcasi 2010, p. 590–594).

9. The absurdity of this sprawl is perhaps best witnessed in the almost neo-Mackinderian vision of post-9/11 geopolitics popularised by Thomas Barnett (2004).

10. Ian Lustick (1997) traces these patterns – North Atlantic efforts to subvert the rise of regional ‘hegemons’ – from the late Ottoman period through the first Gulf War. Mitchell (2002a, 2011) discusses the ways in which various alliances between North Atlantic powers and Middle Eastern regimes, despite their seemingly contradictory ideological character, have been necessary for both the advancement of global capitalism (particularly after the crises of the 1970s) and the maintenance of US hegemony, albeit both at expense of regional solidarities.

11. In these figures provided by the US government, the ‘Middle East’ excludes the states of the Maghrib minus Egypt, which are instead categorised in the Africa region. In North Africa, even the resource-poor agricultural state of Morocco was spending somewhere between 5% and 10% of its GDP on arms in the late 1970s, largely as a result of the belligerent occupation of Western Sahara, whereas oil-rich Algeria and Libya were spending between 2% and 5% (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1982, p. 6 and figure 9).

12. Though this might seem like an untenably expansive definition of the Middle East, it is actually on par with South America in terms of land size or sub-Saharan Africa in terms of population.