The MENA Region's Intersecting Crises: What Next?
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12682 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Joost Hiltermann |
The MENA Region’s Intersecting Crises: What
Next?
Joost Hiltermann
Middle East & North Africa, International Crisis Group
Abstract
Conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa have been multiplying and increasingly intersecting. This complicates and delays
efforts to resolve them. Yet sooner or later they must come to an end. Once they do, it is fair to ask what comes next. Can
the region recover? And if so, what shape will it take? Some patterns are already visible. National identities, which were sub-
sumed by a series of competing sub-national identities, are rebounding as an essential glue in uncertain times, reinforcing
state borders and possibly state structures. And forms of local governance are thriving in some areas where the state has dis-
solved and its writ disappeared; they constitute important experiments that may prevent a return of fierce authoritarian states.
Some obstacles to attempts by societies to reconstitute themselves are also evident. The current conflicts’intersecting nature
is one; the other is unremitting external interventions that do yet greater harm by militarizing solutions to political problems,
further polarizing divided polities, and undermining local efforts at renegotiating social contracts. Policy makers should gain a
more nuanced understanding of the current crises and shape policies that do no further harm but instead contribute to a
more stable future.
Principles
Observing the Middle East and North Africa region from the
outside in, one can become despondent about its future.
Old strains and stresses have undone ailing governing sys-
tems. Seemingly strong but internally fragile regimes have
collapsed, dragging their societies down with them. Actors
on the sidelines have filled the resulting vacuums eagerly
and opportunistically. They include Sunni jihadist revolution-
aries keen to reestablish (or reinvent) the Caliphate, as well
as Shi’a paramilitary groups undergirding the regional rise of
Iran; both were spawned and are supported by a marginal-
ized and repressed underclass in a region of failing states
and spreading war. They also include Kurds long denied a
state, who believe their chance has come to redraw borders
in their favor. And they include Iran, which has felt threat-
ened by the Arab world at times and determined that time
is ripe to carve out the strategic depth it needs, while prop-
ping up allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
States that weathered the storm of popular uprisings in
the Arab Spring have doubled down on repression, hoping
to delay what may be unavoidable. Some have struck out in
self-defense, supported proxies, and thereby helped escalate
local and regional tensions. The conflicts that flared up as a
result started to bleed into one another: on the ground, but
also in the sphere of diplomacy. When State A accuses State
B of being responsible for the chaos in Yemen, for example,
State B will respond by blaming State A for the war in Syria
–and they each would have a case. Conflict has spread
almost everywhere, necessitating solutions that take this
growing interconnectedness into account.
1
This intricate tangle of conflict strands hardly lends itself to
negotiated outcomes, even with third party mediation.
Instead, fragmentation, disintegration, and violence are push-
ing the region ever closer to the abyss. As Antonio Gramsci
(1971, pp. 275–276) put it –speaking at a different time, in a
different context, and on an altogether different subject, but
so very aptly: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the
old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum
a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’
This begs the question: What next? Can the region
recover? Will it recover as a region? Somehow, new struc-
tures must emerge –be born –to allow society to survive
and progress. Can we already see the outlines of a new
order in the current chaos? Who will fashion this new order?
And will it be as dysfunctional –as much of a disorder –as
the currently dying one?
A collapsing disorder
Once defined almost exclusively by the festering Israel-Arab
conflict, the Middle East and North Africa has become a
region of chronic instability and spreading conflict in the
wake of the failed Arab uprisings that erupted in 2011.
These popular revolts were a response to widespread disaf-
fection with endemic social and economic injustices, ram-
pant and conspicuous high level corruption, lack of
meaningful prospects for an expanding youth population,
republican systems sprouting dynastic succession features,
and the oppressive practices of petty police states –in sum,
the expiry of a socio-economic order that had underwritten
relative stability for decades. Without a precipitating incident
–the self-immolation by a street peddler in response to
police abuse in Tunisia –this malaise arguably could have
endured quite a while longer. But once the trigger had been
pulled, the widespread nature of the protests, the forms
Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12682 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue Supplement 2 . June 2019 29
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