This panel seeks to explore alternative sovereignties in the Middle East and North Africa not captured by the nation-states of the region. Alternative sovereignties encompass the efforts by minority and stateless communities in the region to pursue forms of self-determination within and across national borders in the absence of the ordinary levers of state power. It also encompasses governance arrangements that enable expressions of self-determining sovereignty at the sub-national level, through municipal, provincial, regional and other modes of institutionalized political authority that offer interstitial spaces for building practices of self-rule. The panel builds on recent work exploring the potential of federalism and decentralisation to break the impasse in identity-based conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, but also goes beyond the examinations of such territorially plural arrangements to consider additional forms of political experimentation. There are many reasons to consider, if not embrace, alternative sovereignties for the communities in the region excluded from national self-determination through exclusive territorial control over a state. These include the obstacles to pursuing more traditional forms of territorial self-determination or secession, the inadequacy of regional territorial autonomy to overcome these obstacles and doubts about the capacity of traditional statist forms of institutionalized authority to address threats to human security emanating from the politics of austerity and climate crisis that plague the region. The alternative sovereignties in question include strategies of internal democratization through confederal structures; exploration of municipal governance as a site for pursuing sustainable development goals, building transnational networked arrangements between stateless communities and their diasporas, and alternative forms of citizenship and enfranchisement that may encompass exilic communities in ways that preserve their claims to return while providing a provisional model of political belonging. The cases considered by panelists span the experiences of Palestinian, Kurdish and Sahrawi communities across Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and Turkey.
The Syrian refugee crisis remains the world’s most compelling humanitarian challenge over a decade after it began, even as the emerging Gaza refugee crisis is urgent and pressing. With nearly 5.6 million refugees registered through the UNHCR across the region as of late 2023, the Syrian crisis has highlighted failures of state governance. Moreover, it has encouraged ad hoc and negotiated working networks of transnational and local groups. most notably the Jordan Compact and the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP). Such arrangements represent efforts at providing innovative governance to stateless people in areas that, if stable, are only partially managed by state authority.
This paper looks at existing and emerging refugee governance regimes in the MENA in terms of the panel’s broader themes of Specifically, through focused analysis of the experience and evolution of Syrian refugee governance in Jordan, with some reference to Lebanon and Turkey, as well as to UNWRA and Gaza, I consider the following:
(1) What lessons of possible relevance to alternative sovereignty does mixed NGO-state-private sector governance in refugee camps provide about authority and governance where state control is minimal or liminal?
(2) How important has refugees’ own political agency been, when they have little or no citizenship rights in the areas in which they live?
(3) What do the failures of refugee governance suggest more broadly for alternative sovereignties in the MENA, and particularly regional order?
I address these questions using previous work and writing I have done on governance and the refugee crisis, as well as the parallels for challenges to and limitations of state sovereignty in the MENA with respect to the large numbers of non-citizen migrants in Arab Gulf societies. I argue that failures of governance and meeting services for large numbers of non-citizen migrants and refugees both illustrates and accelerates the contemporary empirical failures of MENA states and the need for alternative ideas around politics, especially enhanced regionalism. More specifically, regional regimes offer modest hope for improving the suboptimal record of both MENA states and the global order on challenging governance issues that span multiple societies.
This paper builds on my training as a lawyer, political scientist and policy scholar. It advances my prior work, and nearly $1.1 million in funding, on legal contestation in five Arab countries, and a pilot grant to develop a global group of scholars to compare and refine regional approaches to refugee governance.
This paper examines concepts and approaches explored in confederal proposals developed in the Kurdish and Palestinian contexts. Ideas about confederalism have germinated in the Kurdish national movement for two decades and resulted in a surprising experiment in Syria, which permits for the first time an empirical investigation of these ideas. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, policy proposals for binational confederalism have garnered new interest since October 7th. We believe that comparing ideas about confederalism — as a vehicle for expressing national self-determination without the formal attributes of statehood — in these two disparate cases yields important insights. Both sets of proposals leave open important questions about how to connect potential (or actual) confederal projects to existing state structures or how, in practice, to transform state institutions in ways that make them more conducive to realizing confederal futures. On the other hand, there are also critical insights about the status of borders, citizenship, residency rights and democratic representation in both sets of proposals that reconfigure the relationship between political authority and territory in ways that are generative, precisely because they sidestep the methodological and conceptual binds of the nation-state. The paper makes a contribution to the literatures in comparative politics and comparative law that address questions of constitutional design in divided societies, internal and external self-determination, and non-sovereign nations of the MENA region.
Archives of the Iraqi Ba’th regime and the Kurdish national movement between 1970 and 2003 show that both entities began to step up their attempts to gain international attention by using the language and bureaucracy of human rights in the 1990s, though only the Kurdish nationalist movement could claim undisputed success in garnering support for its goals. This chapter recounts how the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq struggled for years to publicize the atrocities being committed against the Kurdish population there and was repeatedly rebuffed or silenced by a postcolonial Iraq until after the Gulf War. The war was a major windfall that paved the way for their autonomy and gave human rights researchers access to the region, along with a trove of evidence of Iraqi crimes. Within the same period, Iraq under the Ba’th regime had become isolated and struggled to publicize the effects of harsh international sanctions, particularly against the nation’s children. Both parties tried to garner support for their goals in this way, though in the end only the Kurdish national movement achieved some level of success. This paper includes research in the Ba’th Archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Omar Sheikhmous archives at the University of Exeter, as well as United Nations archives and other material available online. It also includes some oral histories with members of the Kurdish diaspora in the U.S., U.K. and Sweden.
