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.