As the Syrian conflict approaches its sixth year, there are seemingly few prospects for a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Tripartite talks between Russia, Iran, and Turkey have yielded few political gains and the violence inside the country persists, as rival armed groups continue to vie for territory and the spoils of war. Despite the continued violence, there has been no shortage of reconstruction plans put forth for Syria. Many of these plans originate from think tanks and international organizations and reflect a particular worldview of how Syria should (or should not) be integrated into regional and global security architectures. These plans suggest a centrality to a global security imperative – that is, securing Syria so that the country no longer produces global threats. With this in mind, I ask how emergent reconstruction designs for Syria prefigure a particular geopolitics: How does the pre-peace, post-war reconstruction plans for Syria prefigure the country as a regional and global threat? To address this question, my paper will begin by surveying and analyzing a range of primary material in the form of reconstruction plans advanced since 2011, from diverse actors such as the American Security Project (ASP) and the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA). In highlighting the security discourses that saturate these plans, I will answer the question of how a post-conflict Syria is imagined as a source of global insecurity. The secondary material this paper will draw on is centered around critical approaches to post-conflict reconstruction. In particular, I am interested in how this literature engages with key security questions, such as Security Sector Reform (SSR) and Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration (DDR) practices that have been employed in other post-conflict cases.

One of the most significant consequences of political change in Tunisia has been the expansion of the illicit trade, smuggling networks and trafficking. This evolution has been explained by the security vacuum that followed the fall of Ben Ali’s regime especially in the border and inland regions that become “areas of limited statehood” - in which central government authorities and institutions are too weak to enforce rules and/or do not control the monopoly over the means of violence. Such explanation reveals a normative misconception that security in Tunisia (and more broadly the Arab World) is primarily about fighting crime and ensuring law enforcement. Though, heavily securitized, large parts of Tunisia’s territory have been paradoxically ruled by a ‘laissez-faire‘ form of governance, allowing an important toleration of the illegal economic activities. In other regions, namely costal regions and the capital Tunis, law enforcement has always been more effective. This pragmatic and neoliberal mode of governance has exacerbated vulnerability, facilitated the maintaining of the social order and transformed the security services into “entrepreneurs of insecurity”. Such modes of governance are based on a political economy of insecurity that combines the mobilization of minimal state resources in a context of fiscal and budgetary constraints while achieving social control through corruption, patronage and intermediation mechanisms. Based on an extensive fieldwork in Tunisia, this contribution aims at moving beyond “state fragility” approach (and the exclusive Tunisian case) to understand broadly the crisis in legitimacy and capacity of Arab states. Used to describe the weakening of the states, the category of “state fragility” should invite us to rethink about the sovereignty and its articulation to power exercise in a context of globalization.

Scholarly and policy work focusing on social media and the Middle East has frequently centered on either its democratizing potential, or on critiques of techno-determinism implicit in these narratives.  This paper presents an alternative reading of how interventionist ethics are integrated into not only discourses on bridging the so-called ‘digital divide,’ but also in the material production and distribution of data generated on participatory platforms. Further, social and participatory media produce ambivalences in how the region continues to function as a laboratory for new techniques and technologies of capital accumulation, security, and gendered and racialized discipline, while also creating novel spaces for participatory politics that resist cultural and religious explanations of agency and change. Drawing on seven months of field research, qualitative, and digital ethnographic methods at the intersection of critical security studies, media studies, and transnational regional politics, I consider how data and information produced in and about the Middle East through participatory platforms are shaping emerging infrastructures of in/security and surveillance at local and global scales. I also address some of the methodological and ethical challenges of researching and writing about the politics of security for different platforms in an age of ubiquitous surveillance. I read these questions through a number of examples, including crowdsourcing information on sexual violence in Egypt, the use of peer-to-peer funding platforms for supporting non-state violent actors in Iraq and Syria, and in video game play and design for police training and public awareness campaigns in the Gulf. In the final part of the paper, I discuss conducting research at the nexus of fieldwork and digital ethnography for basic issues like privacy and the anonymity of research participants, as well as how social technologies are producing new and complex interrelated global phenomena that often exceed an area studies focus. 

This essay argues that understanding the geopolitics of the post-Uprisings Arab world requires the introduction of new theoretical tools and models to integrate our evolving understanding of the changing picture of transnational networks that sustain armed conflict, the shifting dynamics of state-societies relations, and the organization of new governing structures at the local level. Drawing insights from theories in political geography and study of complexity and self-organizing systems, this essay develops an approach to the study of the regional geopolitics that recognizes 1) the heterogeneous nature of the security environment composed of diverse state, non-state, and transnational actors who serve as both agents of security and insecurity and 2) how these actors are embedded in transnational security relationships. Using this approach, the essay maps the development of turbulence within the Middle East regional system and identifies trends towards what it argues is a shift from statist to post-statist geopolitics in the era since the US-led invasion of Iraq. With the erosion of state governance and capacity combined with intense forms of regional and external intervention, the essay traces how the very texture of regional geopolitics is being transformed as diverse ‘hybrid’ actors and transnational processes create networks and social organizations that are not fully or formally sovereign but nonetheless increasingly wield power and control territory. Meanwhile, with rival states across the region’s geopolitical divides similarly seeking to influence and control such hybrid actors and networks, the result is a turbulent regional system in which state interests are often hard to discern and shift in complex ways. Lebanon is often viewed as the quintessential “weak state”, with this weakness in turn viewed as a source of political instability and regional insecurity. This essay argues that while Lebanon during its civil war 1975-1990 functioned as such, in the post-2003 era Lebanon has better accommodated the shift to post-statist geopolitics by developing a “weak” but plural system of governance over security that has been relative effective and surprisingly resilient in containing both domestic and external security threats. Meanwhile, much of the region—most notably Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya—have come to function as open battlegrounds for hybrid actors, transnational networks and external forces. Lebanon, however, should not be dismissed as a unique case. Instead, it offers a context from which to develop new theoretical perspectives about how to promote pluralistic political and security arrangements and coordination between diverse state and hybrid actors.