Challenging Definitions of Sovereignty: Domestic Politics, Political Ideologies and International Law in the Middle East from 1974-2014
Panel 242, 2014 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 25 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Scholars often draw on norms of political sovereignty (such as indisputable dominion over territory or the inviolability of borders) when analyzing the maneuvering of domestic state and non-state political forces, the operation of international legal frameworks or the formation or collapse of states. In reality the recognition and performance of these norms is often far more problematic than is usually acknowledged. Events in the Middle East over the past four decades offer an excellent vantage point from which to raise questions of about such views of sovereignty. Our panel will invite the audience to think beyond the familiar framework of foreign policy analysis and stock ideas about the dramatic interplay between identity, belonging and territory on the national level.
This panel will use a variety of experiences from the recent and not-so-recent history of the Middle East to complicate normative assumptions about questions of sovereignty. Our papers will demonstrate the gap between the ideal-typical assumptions about sovereign and the reality of sovereign prerogatives in the Middle East from the 1970s to the present.
The panel consists of papers focused on Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine and seeks to begin a nuanced discussion of the complicated ways in which sovereignty figures into political, legal and social optics in the region. For example, in 1970s/80s civil war ravaged Lebanon state authority overlapped in complicated ways with a variety of militia-sponsored and supported "civil authorities." What were/are the short and long-term implications for the local socio-cultural understandings of state sovereignty as a result? Or consider the question of domestic politics: does the arc of political activity of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood from January 2011 to the present belie the very notion of a "domestic" political sphere? Along the same lines, in the aftermath of 9/11 the discourse of the War on Terror and a policy vision derived from US National Intelligence Estimates obliged state elites in Iran, Syria and elsewhere in the region to rethink sovereign norms due to the Bush Doctrine. Finally, with respect to international legal regimes, despite the sovereign right to enrich uranium codified in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the campaign against the Iranian nuclear program raises questions about whether there exist different standards of sovereignty for so-called pariah states.
We hope to help bridge the divide between normative and empirical studies of sovereignty in the region that are either too abstract or descriptive to yield any generalizable insights.
This paper explores the ways in which the War on Terror discourse of the Bush Administration following the 9/11 attacks shaped new metaphorical enemies and strategic alliances among U.S. “enemies” in the region. During the Cold War, U.S. National Intelligence Estimates clearly outlined communists as enemies and this framing helped fuel U.S. perceptions of threats, policy actions to counter these threats and reactions from the Soviet Union. The same is true in the War on Terror discourse, only that conflict lacked a single enemy. Therefore, the process of constructing an alliance of regional actors to replace the Cold War threat ensued. This paper analyzes how the War on Terror rhetoric obliged state elites in Iran, Syria and elsewhere in the region to rethink sovereign norms due to the Bush Doctrine. The creation of this new existential threat affected policy choices and voter behavior in these countries.
This paper also explores the reverse process—how rhetoric and discourse from the region affects U.S. foreign policy surrounding Iran and the “Shiite Crescent.” The term, coined by King Abdullah II of Jordan in 2004, refers to the formation of a Shiite regional bloc led by Iran, and is ostensibly composed of Iraq, Alawites in Syria, and Hezbollah. This rhetoric on Iranian expansion fit well with U.S. security interests surrounding the War on Terror and the need to protect our Sunni allies. It was translated into reality as Iran became central to U.S. foreign policy postures after the birth of the term “Shiite crescent.”
The power of rhetoric lies in its ability to take on a life of its own, facilitating alliances among otherwise incompatible forces. Moreover, it leads elites in the region to engage this framing and to follow policy paths in reaction to it. That is not to say that threats are not real, but that the ways in which conflict is framed and generalized has unintended consequences. It is not the case that all Shiites in the region are allies. Yet the pervasive rhetoric surrounding the power of the Shiite crescent prevents some from seeing such things as cooperation between Sunnis and Shiites and conflict within Sunni or Shiite groups.
This paper critically examines and compares the MB’s political behavior through three time periods: before the January 25, 2011 revolution, post-revolution, and during the one-year reign of the Islamist president, Muhammad Morsi. This paper seeks to trace the change in political behavior and ideological commitments of the MB through a within case comparison of Islamist party as an opposition movement, as a political negotiator, and in power.
My paper uses the lens of “everyday life” to examine simultaneous and seemingly conflicting notions of sovereignty circulating in Lebanon during its 1975-1990 civil war. In 1976 the Lebanese Phalanges (or Kataeb) Party set up a formal civil administration in areas it controlled, and little more than six years later the Progressive Socialist Party did the same in its heartland in the Shuf. These two institutions stood apart from other less successful efforts at militia-supported civil administration that emerged over the course. The Kataeb and PSP organizations undertook a wide variety of tasks and activities ranging from collecting “taxes” to managing traffic and maintaining roads to providing water and electricity to collecting garbage to operating shops with subsidized prices for food and other essentials. As such it is difficult not to conclude that these institutions posed a direct challenge to the authority, and indeed the sovereignty, of the Lebanese state. However, leading officials within these organizations rejected such notions.
My paper will analyze this seeming contradiction on two levels. First, I examine how the leadership of these organizations reconciled their putative allegiance to the Lebanese state even as they actively usurped its responsibilities and undermined its authority. How did their vision accord with a notion of state sovereignty? Second, I draw on interviews I conducted with “ordinary” employees of militia-associated civil authorities and with people living within the areas they controlled. A number of people I interviewed continued to draw state salaries even as they worked for the Kataeb or PSP-sponsored institutions. How did they understand their position in relation to the Lebanese state?
The paper draws on interviews I conducted in Lebanon from 2009-2012 and ongoing archival work begun in 2008. The work I will present at MESA belongs to a larger project on the history of everyday life during the civil war that has a significant oral history component.
Sovereignty is a paradoxical concept in international politics. On the one hand, conditioned as it is by the distribution of power, it is a relative fact: those states that enjoy military and economic superiority are less constrained in exercising their sovereign prerogatives than less powerful states. On the other hand, as a longstanding norm regulating interstate relations, sovereignty is also an absolute legal fact: states enjoy a legitimate monopoly over the use of force within definable boundaries, which endows them with the power to regulate human relations within their borders according their own criteria. It was this paradox at the core of the concept of sovereignty that led Stephen Krasner (1999) to redefine it as “organized hypocrisy”. The understanding of sovereignty as a violable norm has further made it possible for the development of a set of standards for when foreign interventions in the domestic affairs of states might be justified: i.e. in defense of human rights or in pursuit of international stability. What all this suggests is that when considering the obligations and entitlements of sovereign states, the nature and actions of ruling regimes matter a great deal. Yet any empirical considerations of these seemingly paradoxical effects remain few and far in between.
This paper seeks to remedy this glaring oversight by considering the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has often been characterized as an international “pariah” state due to its support for the Shi’a militant organization Hezbollah and its repressive policies at home. Of course, such qualities are hardly unique to the Islamic Republic. Indeed, many other states both in the region and beyond follow similar patterns of behavior (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, to name a few). So, why then does Iran especially merit the “pariah” status? The answer to this question, this paper argues, can be found in the paradox at the heart of our normative constructions of sovereignty.
