Syrians who took to the streets in March of 2011 were not driven by sectarianism. They were driven by a desire to assert themselves as citizens of the state and acquire the rights that decades of authoritarian rule had denied to them. However, as the conflict morphed from a peaceful uprising to a violent civil war, sectarian identities became increasingly mobilized and solidified. Much of the scholarly literature has implicitly—and in some cases explicitly—emphasized Syria’s heterogeneous society as a factor conducive to the emergence of a protracted civil war along sectarian lines. However, identity cleavages do not exist in a vacuum, but in relation to broader structural, political, and economic dynamics. This is particularly true in a country like Syria, where ethno-sectarian boundaries often overlap with the geographic map of poverty, marginalization, and displacement. This paper explores the main drivers behind the solidification of sectarian identities in Syria. It focuses, primarily, on the instrumentalization of pre-ascribed identities in the context of an institutionally weak state experiencing drastic sociopolitical change. The main argument put forth is that pre-existing sectarian cleavages are given meaning and become activated in a particular context and, oftentimes, for a clear political purpose. By conceptualizing sectarianism as a result, rather than a cause of conflict, this study highlights the various processes behind community disintegration in Syria. To illustrate this argument, I rely on a combination of process tracing and constructivist analysis of regime discourse. I focus specifically on the Assad regime’s tactics to weaken the opposition, which, as I demonstrate, succeeded in dividing the population (both physically and ideologically) along ethnic lines. I find that, rather than an inevitable outcome of war, sectarian violence and forced displacement are a central strategy of war, particularly in the context of a weak state.

The Jordanian government asserts that one million Syrian refugees reside in Jordan, sharing with the populace many concerns about this large influx and settlement of “foreigners.” While some attention has been paid to the impact of Syrian refugees on sectarian divisions in Lebanon, very little analysis has been conducted on the potential impact of Syrian refugees and sectarian divisions in Jordan. While Lebanon has a longer and more visible history with sectarianism, Jordan does not. Furthermore, most Syrian refugees in Jordan are also Sunni Muslims. As a result, researchers often overlook the possibilities for Syrian refugees to bring sectarian outlooks and perspectives with them that inform their interactions with Jordanians. During 2014, I participated in women’s religion classes in a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. I also interviewed refugees from Syria about the courses’ content and obtained Jordanian reflections of the classes through focus groups. In addition to this primary research, I have conducted secondary research into the literature on the history and theology utilized and referenced both within the religion class and by those who discussed it. While sectarian outlooks and perspectives may not in and of themselves divide the majority of Syrian refugees in Jordan from the majority of Jordanian residents (as Sunni Muslims), the sectarian orientations and socio-cultural references of Syrian refugees have the potential to create new forms of divisiveness in Jordanian society. To counter this, Jordanians reinforce the idea that sectarianism is not welcome in Jordan and that it is even—as a few asserted—“against Islam.” In conclusion, the article demonstrates that the influx of sectarian outlooks held by Syrian refugees prompt Jordanians to reinforce the narrative that Jordan is free of such divisions and will continue to remain so, particularly in nationalist narratives.

Though referred to as ‘refugees’ colloquially, the overwhelming majority of displaced populations do not have the privilege of official refugee designation and permanent resettlement. As a growing trend (including in states party to the 1951 refugee convention and 1967 protocol), forcibly displaced populations persist with temporary and ad hoc legal statuses. Today the UAE and all of the GCC states are all officially non-refugee receiving states. Instead of taking this official policy at face value, this paper explains why refugees, particularly Arab refugees, came to be seen as a political and security threat in the Gulf. To understand the politicization of refugees as a process that unfolds over time, the paper examines the impact of this politicization on minority and displaced populations who were already present in the Gulf prior to the hardening of this policy. This paper focuses on a case study Asian-Ugandan refugees who were expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 and resettled in Dubai and Abu Dhabi by the Red Cross and UNHCR in 1973. Members of this population were designated as ‘special guests’ of the rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, receiving invitation letters that allowed them to access to public services. This ad hoc and temporary status did not fit into what has become the binary of the UAE’s official population—citizens and guest workers. I show how it became increasingly difficult for this group of refugees to reside in this ‘gray zone’ between the official population categories as (1) the state developed its infrastructure for identity management and (2) Arab migration and naturalization became associated with security threats. The paper demonstrates how members of this population have become stateless twice in their lives—once very rapidly, when they were expelled from Uganda, and again very gradually, over the course of 40 years of residing in the UAE when their documents stopped being accepted by government agencies as valid ID documents. Their exclusion from the UAE citizenry was not due to forcible displacement—but the outcome of the gradual institutional forces of standardization, centralization, and digitization. This research is based on interviews conducted in Dubai and Abu Dhabi (2009-2011) and phone interviews (2012-2015). The interviews complement an archival analysis of 2000 documents from the private archives of a former refugee who has kept memos and letters sent between refugee groups, government agencies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the UNHCR office in Abu Dhabi.

The fall of the Ba’th regime as a result of external intervention created a fissure in the domestic machination of the Iraqi state. The expedient and incongruent statebuilding that ensued following state collapse created, among other things, a security vacuum that markedly altered the trajectory of the country’s democratic transition and consolidation. An emblematic outcome of these failed transition policies was a displacement crisis that resulted in the forced resettlement of Iraqis both as internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees in neighboring states. While the American-led intervention that toppled the authoritarian equilibrium contributed significantly to forced displacement, the reliance on ethnic solidarity by successive ruling elites in an increasingly divided political arena hindered the implementation of post-conflict state and peacebuilding measures that would have mitigated the institutional and political drivers of displacement. This paper surveys the processes and conditions that affect the galvanization of ethno-religious discord as a driver of displacement in weak, multiethnic states like Iraq. It argues that, in the present case, displacement is a multilayered process linked to institutional and political conditions that fuel group grievances and ethnic mobilization. Explaining displacement as an outcome of stalled statebuilding and the absence of peacebuilding following democratization requires the dual task of identifying and linking institutional and structural failures to communal discord. To do so, we examine the effects of four interlinked variables that have both affected displacement and hindered voluntary repatriation following authoritarian breakdown: institutional deficiencies, re-emergent authoritarianism, the inability or unwillingness of the state to underwrite human security and the rule of law, and the increasing role of ethnic and sectarian militias in the absence of a unified security sector. These factors, we argue, incentivize and reframe group grievances producing an ethnic security dilemma that drives displacement and forced migration. Methodologically, we rely on data gathered from the United Nations Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), the U.N. Refugee Agency, the Fragile State Index, and the World Bank’s Development Indictors, all of which aggregate and measure the scale of displacement, state fragility, and institutional and political developments in Iraq since 2003. Theoretically, by identifying the institutional and structural causal mechanisms that affect group grievances and forced displacement, this paper contributes to existing works on international intervention, democratization, security sector reform, post-conflict statebuilding, and civil conflict in multiethnic states.