International relations theory has traditionally placed alliance politics at the very center of many analyses of international or regional politics. But international relations theory (I.R.) has also been characterized by struggles between competing paradigms and schools of thought, or what is sometimes referred to as “theoretical sectarianism”. Scholars of Middle East regional politics, in contrast, have rarely associated with a single school or perspective, and have been more likely to employ a kind of theoretical pluralism to understand the details and nuances of regional political life, including alliances. This kind of scholarly eclecticism is even more important today, in the post-Arab Spring era, as the region has been characterized by rising regional instability even as a traditional hegemonic power – the United States – has declined in relative power and influence over regional affairs. The many regional and global changes, in short, have not led to the apparent triumph of any particular theoretical approach, but rather have underscored the salience of multiple I.R. theory perspectives in understanding the politics of shifting regional alliances. This essay examines key findings in the alliance theory literature, examining realist, liberal, constructivist, political economy, and regime security approaches to regional alliance dynamics. It then turns to major alliance shifts during and after the 2011 Arab uprisings, comparing the theoretical expectations to the empirical record of shifting regional alliances. Based on the empirical analysis, I argue that regional alliances in actual practice have drawn on the entire range of expected behaviors – balancing, bandwagoning, omnibalancing, underbalancing, budget security, and more; but that all these machinations also underscore the premium put on regime security by each of these states, including their reads of ideational, economic, and domestic political dissent as primary security threats, even stronger than external or more direct military ones. If anything, the relative decline of U.S. power seems to have led states to be even more obsessive about their own regime security and the role of regional alliances in ensuring regime survival. Understanding these changing regional alliance dynamics therefore suggests the importance of the theoretical pluralism mentioned above, but it should also lead us to expect more fluidity and volatility in alliance patterns in the post-American era in the region.

International Relations of the Middle East has long acknowledged the importance of Ottoman legacies in shaping the modern Middle Eastern state-system. Indeed, scholars often diagnose the region’s recurring crises as symptoms of a deeper structural dislocation that began with the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and culminated in colonial partition post-WWI. In this paper, I argue that this conventional narrative inadequately identifies how nineteenth century dynamics reshaped the social bases of power in the region. To offer greater insight, I turn to IR scholars Barry Buzan and George Lawson, whose book 'The Global Transformation: History, Modernity, and the Making of International Relations' (2015) argues that social processes unleashed during the long nineteenth century not only fundamentally transformed the nature of the international system, but continue to shape the dynamics underlying contemporary international politics. A non-Eurocentric revision of Buzan and Lawson's argument, I suggest, can offer productive insights for conceptualizing today’s most vital political developments, from state crisis and fragmentation to civil war. To move ahead with our analysis of the Middle East in the twenty-first century, we must first return to the nineteenth. Or, to put it a different way: International Relations of the Middle East must go back to the future.

This paper explores the contribution to understand the shifting MENA regional security order through the analytical lenses provided by hierarchy. It will do so by challenging the existing under-theorization of hierarchy in IR and the need to better understand different kinds of hierarchies and the ways in which they operate (Nexon 2009; Zarakol 2017). Through the examination of the changing MENA regional security order, this paper aims at mapping how power relations across different power dimensions have changed and are changing in light of the decline of US hegemony and the rise of regional and global actors. Hierarchical relations can namely change in degree of intensity but also qualitatively according to the resources and attributes they are predominantly based upon, be they of a material, in primis military and economic resources, or immaterial/symbolic nature, such as status. Secondly, it aims at bridging the gap between Regional IR and Global IR, on the one hand by systematically applying a refined notion of multiple hierarchies and heterarchies to the MENA regional security order. The author will attempt at further developing the research agenda of NHS, enriching it empirically and diachronically and will elaborate on how the Area IR and Global IR could more fruitfully remain into dialogue.

Since the Arab Uprisings, regional politics of the Middle East has transformed from a system organized around and against a US-managed security architecture into a multipolar system lacking norms, institutions, or balancing mechanisms to constrain conflict and the use of force. The paper argues that this shift is not a result of the retreat of the US or a consequence of a so-called “power vacuum,” but a product of repeated US efforts to order the region through coercive force within the context of the emerging multipolar system at the global level. US post-9/11 interventions failed to establish a stable regional security architecture but rather generated intense insecurity for both rival and allied states as well as societies and while witnessing the proliferation of armed non-state actors. As the regional system has become more complex and multipolar, continued US reliance on coercion rather than accommodation and compromise has only intensified the forces of regional instability. Relative levels of state consolidation, the permeability between domestic, regional, and global levels, and the disjuncture between regime, state, and social understandings of security have been critical to the development of distinct approaches to the study of the Middle East IR. Most recently, the rise of non-state actors is recognized as critical to understanding recent changes in the Middle East regional system. Building from these insights, this paper argues that the Middle East regional system can best understood as a model of “turbulence.” By turbulence I mean a system with a proliferation of heterogenous actors below and above the state level with expanded capabilities that disrupt and complicate the dynamics of the regional politics. States remain the most powerful actors, but the definition of their interests and the capacity of their actions to achieve desired goals is diminished as these states must negotiate a multidimensional geography of rival forces and actors within the context of increasingly multipolar global politics. The inefficiency of balancing, breakdown of regulatory norms, and increased capacities for self-organization by armed non-state actors all help sustain the regional environment of turbulence. The result is a turbulent regional system in which state interests are often hard to discern and shift in complex ways. Such an environment fostered the emergence of ISIS and complicates regional politics as states have to navigate a hyper-polar environment that gives greater leverage to smaller actors and makes the alignment of interests between states more contingent and fragile.

Today, it is generally acknowledged that structures at global and international levels are undergoing changes. Most also agree that this carries consequences for current and future dynamics of Middle East international relations and for the role of regional and extra-regional powers. However, it is far more contested how the implications of these changes are to be grasped analytically and whether it requires a fundamental rethink of our way of studying Middle East international relations. In order to examining this question, the paper (re)visits two related and yet quite different debates on (Middle East) i.r./IR. First, the paper revisits the classic debate on global vs regional-centric understandings of Middle East international relations as it traditionally has been has been played out between discipline-oriented IR scholars and area specialists, sometimes in the context of the so-called Area Studies Controversy. While this debate is often presented as highly polarized, the paper reveals a large middle-ground of approaches and shows how some of these deserve renewed attention as they provide promising tools as for how to grasp the interplay between regional and global dynamics in a ‘post-American’ Middle East (dis)order. Second, the paper visits the so-called ‘Global/Post-Western IR’ debate. It emerges from Hoffmann’s classic statement about how ‘IR is an American Social Science’, Barkawi/Laffey’s remark about how security studies traditionally have not only been ‘made by, but also for the West’ and Wæver’s suggestion that ‘IR might be quite different in different places’. During the last two decades, this has given rise not only to various calls for making IR ‘truly international’, but also to a growing interest in how international relations are perceived outside of the ‘West’. For long, this debate only received marginal attention among Middle East scholars, but this is currently changing as reflected in manifestos about a ‘Beirut School of Critical Security Studies’ and explorations into IR scholarship ‘in, from, and about the Arab world’. Based on a comparison of the general and more Middle East specific strands of this trend, the paper shows how the existing Global IR debate does not only highlight promises but does also reveal potential pitfalls associated with an aspiration for including local/regional and non-Western perspectives (e.g., Russian, Chinese, Latin-American) in discussions about to grasp Middle East international relations ‘after the American Era.’