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The New Warscape of the Middle East: Critical Security Approaches

RoundTable I-02, sponsored byOrganized under the auspices of Security in Context (SIC) Initiative, 2024 Annual Meeting

On Monday, November 11 at 11:30 am

RoundTable Description
This roundtable explores the new war-scape of the Middle East. It unpacks the region’s geography of conflict, which has dramatically deteriorated over the past year. The Israeli war on Gaza unleashed the bloody displacement of Palestinians, plausibly amounting to genocide as determined by the ICJ while drawing renewed frictions with Hizbullah. Drug-smuggling and militia activities have catalyzed bloodshed across the Syrian, Iraq, Lebanese, and Jordanian borders, amplified as well by Iranian state involvement. The Red Sea has joined the Persian Gulf in its extreme militarization, as American ships, the Houthi movement, and Iranian forces battle for supremacy over this waterway. Ongoing civil wars in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, and Syria have worsened, due to deepening schisms and the reorganization of non-state actors. For Western governments and media, these apertures of violence perpetuate an Orientalist trope: the Middle East is an unstable and insecure region that needs to be occupied, ordered, and disciplined. The roundtable’s participants shatter this script through the optic of critical security studies, which questions what security means and interrogates the origins of militaristic practices. It also exposes growing divergence between Western and non-Western perspectives, exacerbated by the Russia-Ukrainian conflict and ongoing wars waged by Israel. The discussion first de-centers orthodox Western notions of stability from the regional narrative. The arc of renewed violence has not come because American hegemony is “retreating,” as commonly alleged—an assumption that justifies more interventionism. Rather, it follows its trail. In almost every conflict, US and European policies have made or inflamed wars by strengthening a favored combatant (e.g., Israel) or antagonizing others (e.g., Iran). Second, the participants emphasize how organized violence emanates from not only foreign interventions, but also domestic processes like economic devastation, social ruptures, and authoritarian abuses. These are not merely outcomes of conflict, but part-and-parcel of their cause by exposing peoples to vulnerability. This requires reconceptualizing security as not the balance of warring actors, but the absence of life-altering threats upon social life. Finally, the roundtable highlights how geopolitical arrangements intended to generate peace have paradoxically facilitated more militarization. From the Abraham Accords to various foreign-brokered détentes within civil wars, bargains between dominant actors escalate the scope and intensity of violence. As the participants argue, needed instead is a radical rethinking of regional order, one that orients the emancipation of local communities as the anchor to any transnational security architecture.
Disciplines
International Relations/Affairs
Political Science
Participants
  • Dr. Pete W. Moore -- Presenter
  • Prof. Omar Dahi -- Presenter
  • Dr. Sean Yom -- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
  • Dr. Tariq Dana -- Presenter
  • Dr. Haya Al-Noaimi -- Presenter
Presentations
  • Dr. Sean Yom
    Since the Syrian civil war, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has been involved in two conflicts across its Syrian and Iraqi borders necessitating military action. One involves the interdiction of drug-smuggling gangs, and the other entails fighting against Iran-affiliated militias. Whereas the Jordanian government claims drug-smugglers and Iran-backed militias constitute existential threats to national security which require the continued mobilization of its bloated armed forces, the reality is more complicated. This strategic framing of Jordanian security is deeply imbricated within the ruling monarchy’s close alignment to American war-making. That alliance has made Jordan’s royal autocracy the host of US-led interventions in Syria and Iraq over the past two decades, as well as party to US support for Israel in its war on Gaza given its peace treaty with Israel, and close reliance upon American foreign aid and military assistance. This renders Jordan a target for militant actors attempting to reconfigure regional order in both social and geopolitical terms. Socially, a rising number of young Jordanians indeed are using illicit narcotics smuggled by criminal networks across the Jordanian-Syrian frontier. But rising drug use reflects the economic decay produced by decades of government overspending on military and security matters, and corollary neglect of economic and social development in the rural areas targeted by narcotics peddlers. Geopolitically, US forces operate a string of military bases in Jordan as part of ongoing operations against the Islamic State as well as Iran—including the secret facility attacked in January 2024 by an Iraqi militia drone. The Hashemite monarchy has surrendered much territorial sovereignty to the American military, and on occasion lent Jordanian forces as well to cross-border strikes in Syria and Iraq. This has essentially made the entire kingdom as a viable combat zone for external actors, who see Jordan as an appendage to Western war-making. Ironically, then, the very foreign policy intended to make Jordan “safer”—that is, military subordination under the vaunted wing of American hegemony—has made it less secure by inviting the very threats that the Jordanian regime claims it must defeat with US support. Such a paradoxical security doctrine is both self-defeating and recursive, and requires critical interrogation.
  • Dr. Tariq Dana
    The 2023-2024 Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza, marked by its unprecedented scale of destruction and the apocalyptic humanitarian crisis it spawned, casts a revealing light on the chilling nature of Israel’s war economy system. This is no temporary defense mechanism activated in response to wartime context; rather, the war economy lies at the very core of Israel’s settler-colonial identity since the early years of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Indeed, war economy is foundational to the Israeli colonial-state/settler-society project, serving as a defining feature for the militarized social contract. It also serves as a central instrument to achieve a variety of material and ideological ends. It fuels the infrastructure of occupation, enables territorial expansion, facilitates the erasure of Palestinian presence, generates massive revenues, and supports Israel’s geopolitical ambitions. In contrast with war economies that arise fleetingly in other countries during wartime, Israel’s war economy constitutes a permanent, all-encompassing system that upholds the colonial status quo domestically while augmenting Israel’s outreach globally.
  • Dr. Haya Al-Noaimi
    Over the past few months, Houthi militants have attacked a number of vessels and cargo ships in the Red Sea as a response to the Israeli war on Gaza, posing a significant security threat to shipping lines and the safe passage of vessels through the Red Sea strait. This arc of renewed violence comes in the wake of a new US-led initiative, Combined Task Force 153, that seeks international security collaboration in deterring Houthi maritime attacks in the region and is meant to ensure the ‘stability’ and ‘security’ of the Red Sea. As a result, the Red Sea has experienced a significant increase in the number of foreign forces operating within this context, where foreign military presence has been integrated into networks of military facilities and commercial interests that extend far beyond the region, leading to geostrategic significance. This presentation argues that initiatives like CTF 153 and increasing securitization of the Red Sea have paradoxically facilitated more militarization and higher occurrences of insecurity that could potentially lead to a wider regional war. It calls for a rethinking of the meaning of security as emancipation, focusing on ‘structural violence’ inflicted on individuals through patriarchy, capitalism, militarism, and statism, as well as ‘physical violence.’ (Tickner, 1992, Booth 2005, 2007) shifting the focus from securing states to securing people from structures, processes, and relations that prevent them from freely choosing what to do. Conceptualizing security in this way could lead to a radical rethinking of the regional order by creating new regional forums comprising the six countries surrounding the Red Sea that would develop their own multilateral responses to the shifting security environment. Rather than seeking support from external security actors to bolster regime security, countries and communities in the region should look towards their neighbors by placing renewed emphasis on localized forms of coordination and cooperation as a response to evolving security dynamics. It believes that reducing external militarization in the region is preferable and possible if Red Sea countries and civil societies are given the space and scope to assume greater responsibility for addressing regional non-traditional security in maritime spaces.
  • Dr. Pete W. Moore
    American military and security redeployment from the Persian Gulf region has been widely anticipated for several years. Making sense of these potential changes and ramifications, however, requires a historical and political understanding of US military basing since the 1960s. Geopolitical dynamics, domestic developments in the Gulf, shifts in US decision making, and advances in military technology have each contributed to a deepening US military presence. Today, Kuwait is host to the largest US military presence in the world after only Germany, Japan, and South Korea. In other parts of the Gulf, the scale and scope of American basing and presence varies, but it remains globally significant. In the last fifteen years, US officials have augmented weapons sales and regular military training exercises with joint combat support operations in places like Yemen. Does potential American re-basing represent a divergence from these patterns? What concepts of security are assumed in these new directions? What is being secured and why?
  • Prof. Omar Dahi
    The past decade or so has seen the rise of South-South trade in weapons (conventional and new technology) and Middle East states are among the leading actors. Analysis of the international arms trade has traditionally situated these exchanges within a North-South framework. North-South arms transfers have either been described favorably, as enhancing North country interests, securing peace and territorial integrity of developing countries, leveraging sales for positive political and social change, or conversely as tools of hegemony and imperialism, consolidating authoritarian regimes, or stoking rather than inhibiting conflict. However, the ‘rise of the South’ and significant increase in South-South circuits of exchange has shifted this picture considerably. This new landscape of South-South exchange, particularly the rise of Middle Eastern states as exporters and recipients of arms from other developing countries should be understood on its own terms rather than as derivative of North-South dynamics. What are the drives animating this rise in South-South trade in weapons (both conventional and new)? What are the implications on the regional security landscape? Four main dynamics/hypotheses will be discussed driving this trade. The first is the overall rise in South-South exchange in merchandise trade, services, and capital flows. The second is industrial upgrading of which the arms trade is a component. The third pertains to political economy factors, such as the rise of social forces within the South whose interest lies in expanding such trade. The fourth is the development of domestic arms industries to respond to the needs generated by the increasingly securitized and militarized foreign policies of global South actors.