A History of Insecurity: From the Arab Uprisings to ISIS

In recent decades, scholars of the Middle East have come to understand that the long-dominant neorealist approaches, with their focus on the relative material power of states, fail to explain the dynamics of security politics in the region. As Gregory Gause explains, Arab states "have overwhelmingly identified ideological and political threats…to the domestic stability of their ruling regimes as more salient than threats based upon aggregate power, geographic proximity and offensive capabilities."¹ While Gause refers to threats "emanating from abroad," others have highlighted that the primary function of security policy in Arab states is to secure the interests and power of the ruling regimes from ideological and political threats that emanate from within the territory of the state.²

This essay builds from these insights, addressing how societal actors understand the sources of insecurity they face and the political consequences when their understandings differ from those of state elites and political regimes. This disjunction is largely a product of patterns of state-building in which regimes gain security directly from external powers or gain needed resources from rentier sources (like oil receipts or foreign aid). This short-circuits the European-style state-building process as understood by Charles Tilly, "in which the state essentially promises other groups and forces in society a certain level of security, in return for the resources it extracts to purchase this security."³ State elites in the Arab world often define their interests in relation to their external patrons rather than their own societies, while societal groups often view external forces, rival societal groups or even the state itself as their most pressing threats. As a result, at the heart of regional instability, as Steve Niva explains, "opposition movements in the region frequently contend that the present global order subordinates the rights of the colonized and postcolonial states to the requirements of the self-defined national interests and security concerns of the West."⁴

To understand the dynamics of regional Middle East politics, one needs to analyze the security interests and policies of state elites while also mapping the rival societal discourses of insecurity: how societal actors perceive threats and understand the security of their community. Such an approach highlights the differing understandings of various societal actors — political parties, social movements, tribes, armed militias, terrorist networks — about insecurity and the autonomous roles each can play in defining or challenging political order within and between states. To the degree that Arab states fail to serve the security interests of their societies, they lose their ability to function as the primary political affiliation for their citizens. This dynamic, rather than primordial identities or the seeming artificial boundaries of states, promotes the proliferation of substate and transnational identities that cause the security interests of societies to diverge from those of state elites.

BACKGROUND

One can trace the foundations of the disjuncture between state and societal understandings of insecurity back to the nineteenth century process of "defensive modernization," when Ottoman-era rulers sought to respond to the growing power of Western states and economies. In the Ottoman-controlled Levant, these processes were referred to as the Tanzimat; similar processes occurred in Egypt and North Africa, which the British and French came to colonize. These rulers centralized state power and developed new bureaucracies to modernize societies while bringing them into the global webs of expanding capitalist and industrializing economies. State institutions emerged to regulate, discipline and produce subjects to serve the state through processes like conscription, taxation and secular education. These processes marginalized local forms of authority such as the community of religious scholars known as the ulema, who had previously played a critical role in law and education.

As James Gelvin explains, these processes produced rival forms of nationalism with differing understandings of the requirements for sovereignty, self-determination and security.⁵ Integration of the Middle East into the global economy gave rise to an elite who benefited from this incorporation: merchants with ties to European traders; local notables and military officers who acted as officials for the Ottoman government; as well as a new middle stratum of professionals, bureaucrats and intellectuals. These social groups, traditionally divided by region, religion and clan, all came to have a common interest in promoting capitalist economic integration and developing a political system that limited representation to the landed elite and the bourgeoisie. These classes would develop an elite and classically liberal form of nationalism that sought formal national independence from colonial powers but also sought to maintain beneficial ties with Westerns states and markets.

At the same time, these socioeconomic processes fostered the formation of popular classes from social elements without the education, capital or social ties to benefit from modernization and capitalist penetration. Global market integration and state-building processes caused great social dislocation for peasants and small farmers, driving many to urban areas to enter wage labor. Small merchants and handicraft producers were displaced by cheaper imports and markets dominated by larger merchants and modern factories. These social classes formed the basis of the populist or radical nationalism that sought to resist economic incorporation and the development of centralized state power.

These divergent class-formation processes continued under colonial domination and the post-World War I League of Nations mandate system, which carved out new territorial states in the former Ottoman lands and installed elite nationalist political leaders to rule them. These states and their leaders were defined more by colonial geopolitical interests than local notions of territory, identity and sovereignty. Rather than creating a stable order, the post-mandate state system was rejected by powerful societal forces driven by Arab-nationalist and social-reformist ideologies, territorial nationalisms, Islamic solidarity and tribal identity. In the first decades of the twentieth century, colonial powers and the new mandate states faced a series of populist revolts for independence against the newly imposed authorities across North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq.

Even after they were granted independence, ruling elites in Arab states were often more dependent on external powers than on popular support for maintaining control. Thus was the Arab world incorporated into a hierarchal global order.⁶ At the same time, diverse social groups suffered dislocation and a declining ability to shape the changes around them. These inequalities were institutionalized by colonial and mandate-era preferences for building up the coercive capacities of states. Further integration into the industrialized capitalist system and the development of state institutions gave rise to a middle class of urban professionals, indigenous army officers and small industrialists. These "new" individuals led radical Arab-nationalist as well as socialist, labor and communist movements that sought to challenge both the colonial states and the Arab elite who had inherited political power and economic privileges.

THE NASSERIST ERA

The post-independence decades of the 1950s and 1960s were an era of great regional upheaval, defined by what Malcolm Kerr called the "Arab Cold War." ⁷ The radical Arab-nationalist states challenged the regional influence of the Western-backed conservative monarchies. But missing from many accounts in international relations is that regional Arab politics was also shaped by the socioeconomic changes that fostered ideological trends and social movements. "Street politics" became a force in shaping regional geopolitics. Radical nationalist and social-reformist trends mobilized the next generation, providing a support base for Egypt's Nasser and other Arab-nationalist leaders who challenged Western-backed regimes and attempted to restructure the prevailing order.

The Arab-nationalist "revolutions" in Egypt, Iraq and Syria during the 1950s might have been launched by military coups, but the postcolonial regimes they built were only able to consolidate state power by appealing to and incorporating the common people while displacing the old political elite and bourgeoisie. This wave of radical Arab-nationalist ideology was based on a vision of capturing the state and asserting the nation's sovereign claim over its own resources. These populist movements sought to modernize their nations while promoting socioeconomic change that gave rise to a new middle class identifying with these trends. In Egypt and elsewhere, populist economic development and social-welfare policies — expanding education, public-sector employment, urban housing and industry — generated new urban social classes. At the same time, these movements challenged the dependence of Arab rulers on external powers for their security and the subordination of their economies to metropolitan economic interests.

By the early 1950s, Egypt under President Gemal Abdel Nasser had become the first Arab regime to consolidate state power and promote a radical Arab-nationalist vision for self-determination and modernization. As a result, Egypt emerged as a regional force. Its influence was not due to its economic or military power but to Nasser's ability to exploit the popularity of the Arab-nationalist discourse of insecurity. He identified economic backwardness and dependence as well as the former colonial powers, Israel, and the remaining pro-Western regimes as the main threats to Arab unity and security.⁸ Popular urban street protests mobilized support for nationalist leaders like Nasser and pressured the remaining pro-Western regimes, such as those in Lebanon and Jordan, to forgo pro-Western alliances. In Syria, they led for a time to a merger with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic. These forces even mobilized workers in the oil-producing Gulf states, including at U.S.-owned ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia.

While the era of Arab-nationalist politics is often viewed as broken by the defeat of Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the foundations of their challenge to the old order had eroded by the mid-1960s. Their socioeconomic programs simply could not sustain modernization and social-welfare development without relying on large amounts of external economic support. This weakness led them to increasingly rely on authoritarian tools for social control and the suppression of dissent. Eventually, the legacy of populist programs was a generation of educated but downwardly mobile urban classes who provided the social bases for the rise of the radical Islamist movements that challenged the legitimacy of the rulers of the secular modern Arab states.⁹ Meanwhile, to maintain power, state elites further developed their coercive apparatuses and co-opted selected segments of society. These policies and their need for external support led to foreign intervention and dependence. These, in turn, continued to foster domestic opposition, regional rivalries and interstate conflicts.

STATE CONSOLIDATION AND INFITAH

In the wake of the 1967 war, regional politics became increasingly defined by geopolitical rivalries and violent conflict between regimes now politically insulated from the insecurities felt by their societies. Egypt and Syria sought to regain land captured by Israel; Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia competed to dominate the Gulf region following the departure of the British. By the 1970s, the republican states beyond Egypt (Iraq and Syria) and the conservative monarchies (Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states) were able to consolidate power and build infrastructures that socialized their populations into accepting the existing states and their forms of political authority.

With the vast wealth gained following the 1973 rise in oil prices, the producing states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya and Iraq, sought greater regional influence. Meanwhile, non-oil-producing economies became increasingly reliant on aid, investment and remittance flows from the oil states, leading to new regional divisions and forms of social dislocation.

The new forms of authoritarianism in states like Egypt and Tunisia as well as Jordan, Syria and Iraq were shaped by the social consequences of the decline of populist development policies. In the context of a shift in the global economic order toward neoliberalism, Arab states replaced nationalist modernization with infitah projects to open economies to international investment and trade and cultivate a state-dependent capitalist elite. The expansion of state-owned enterprises ended, and subsidies for consumer items like bread were cut, leading to a wave of bread riots as occurred in Egypt in 1977 and 1984. Across the 1970s and 1980s, Arab societies experienced growing inequality and were faced with a new wave of social dislocation and discontent caused by diminishing state protections and increased vulnerability to market forces.¹⁰

While states retreated from the common people, community-based organizations, most of them with Islamist orientations, began to address the increasing social needs of urban dwellers. With the statist-populist project eclipsed, it was now Islamist and mosque-based societal groups and charities that projected an alternative social vision and moral order.¹¹

As states suppressed social mobilization and shut down spaces for political expression, regimes increasingly came to depend on outside support from the United States to maintain their power and security in the face of domestic threats to their authority. An ever-growing gap developed between societal and state discourses on insecurity. Social exclusion, state exhaustion and authoritarian repression helped give rise to militant Islamist movements that offered an ideological challenge to the modern secular-nationalist state.¹² They resorted to violence in an effort to bring down regimes in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and tourists were attacked throughout the 1990s.

Already by the late 1960s, the United States had abandoned strategies of accommodating radical nationalism and supporting progressive social reform and modernization. Instead, Washington sought closer ties with Israel, which was able to contain the remaining radical Arab republics, such as Syria, and invaded Lebanon to root out the Palestine Liberation Organization. The United States also maintained close ties to increasingly authoritarian regimes while backing their efforts to suppress social and political mobilization. This transition facilitated American efforts to develop a regional Middle East strategy based on offshore balancing by supporting regimes like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which protected U.S. interests and balanced rivals. This strategy, however, encouraged Arab states to build ever-more authoritarian forms of rule that suppressed societal forces, such as the growing Islamist movements.

THE "AMERICAN ERA"

With the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, policy makers in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations came to imagine that U.S. power could be used to remake the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. Based on its unrivaled military and political power at the time, the United States sought to contain potential instability and guide the region towards transformation and eventual inclusion into the U.S.-led global order. But the growing disjunction between societal and state discourses of insecurity played a critical role in undermining this American effort and laid the foundation for the Arab uprisings.

The American vision for a post-Cold War order in the Middle East was defined by three goals: 1) advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, 2) containing Iraq and Iran and 3) promoting neoliberal economic "reform" according to the "Washington Consensus." This effort was made possible by American leadership during the 1990-91 Gulf War, in which the United States mobilized a broad coalition of Arab states to defeat Iraq, viewed by many regimes at the time as a regional threat. In the war's aftermath, Washington was able to foster multilateral peace talks that resulted in the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians (1993), the signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty (1994), and a series of regional economic conferences to encourage economic reform and foreign investment. Extending the logic of the 1978 Camp David accords that led to the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, the United States sought to end regional conflict and build an order based on alliances among pro-U.S. regimes and economic integration, while limiting the leverage of outside powers. Meanwhile, the U.S. military posture moved from offshore balancing to maintaining an unchallenged military force in the Gulf. This force projection allowed the United States to sustain a policy of "dual containment" against Iraq and Iran anchored by bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar, and a naval fleet circulating in Gulf waters.

For a short period in the early 1990s, the United States maintained considerable leverage across the region, even managing the day-to-day aspects of the peace process and attempting to guide its economic reform and foreign investment. At the same time, the United States was engaging on a regular basis in military and diplomatic containment operations against Iraq and Iran. By the late 1990s, however, U.S. control had weakened and its vision of a regional order was in crisis. A key element of this failure was the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Rather than establishing an Israeli-Palestinian security community, the Oslo process came to mean territorial confinement for the Palestinians and the fragmentation of their emerging national community. As Israel granted the Palestinian Authority (PA) control over Gaza and patches of the West Bank, new settlements, checkpoints, and a system of permits and closures restricted their mobility and cut off their economic prospects. This breakdown led to the erosion of the legitimacy of the PA and, in 2000, to the outbreak of the violent second Intifada, led by militants in Hamas and other movements. They had sought to challenge Israel's system of control, but the violence resulted in increased Israeli insecurity. This led to an Israeli program to further seal in the Palestinian population and segment its territory with the building of a separation barrier.

The United States responded to the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by more closely identifying with Israeli security concerns; this only eroded Arab support for U.S. policies and mobilized popular dissent. In Egypt and Jordan, a range of professional and community groups organized anti-normalization campaigns that sought to limit and reverse the impact of their states' U.S.-backed peace treaties with Israel. In the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria, the repolarization of the political conflict with Israel gave Iran and its allies increased influence.

Across the region, neoliberal economic restructuring was exploited by a narrow elite and failed to bring broad-based prosperity or promote political reform. Various state authorities, including the military, controlled vast economic resources and access to rents and markets. They shaped privatization and market-liberalization programs to foster a state-dependent crony bourgeoisie. For many regimes, "security" policies were less about protecting territorial borders than about creating internal partitions to define domestic spaces, where capital accumulation, real-estate speculation, and conspicuous consumption could take place.

Meanwhile in the Gulf, the dual-containment strategy failed to produce regime change in Iraq and Iran. By the late 1990s, the United States had lost international and regional support for militarized sanctions and containment. Arab states no longer viewed Iraq as threatening. Arab societies, increasingly linked by pan-Arab media, became more concerned about the humanitarian impact of sanctions on Iraqi civilians. This led to an anti-sanctions movement that sought to challenge them and bring in unauthorized relief shipments. As Marc Lynch has argued, the pan-Arab public sphere created by Al Jazeera and other media came to define a common regional frame in which Arabs could view political events across the region.¹³ Thus, the occupations of Iraq and Palestine, where Arab societies generally viewed U.S. policy as a threat to Arab security and sovereignty, became closely watched and debated concerns.

In the 1990s, the United States attempted a strategy of geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, but it was never able to consolidate an order that addressed the security concerns of Arab states — let alone insulate Arab societies from socioeconomic and geopolitical insecurities. Eventually, the United States and its allies faced challenges from Arab societies mobilized from the bottom-up. Even before 2003, the effort to build a U.S.-centered order was in decline, while regime elites in pro-U.S. states were disconnected from the interests and concerns of their societies. Meanwhile, nonstate actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah (with Iranian backing) evolved as popular movements challenging U.S. influence and allies. A rival discourse of insecurity was promoted that viewed U.S. and Israeli power as threats and support from Iran as a counterforce.

INSECURITY AND SOVEREIGNTY

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the George W. Bush administration's ambitious vision for regional transformation can be understood as reactions to the erosion of the U.S.-led post-Cold War order. These policies, however, only increased societal insecurities and led to the fragmentation of territorial sovereignty. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was widely opposed by Arab societies and the United States went to war with limited support from Arab regimes. The consequences included a breakdown of civil order in Iraq and the mobilization of Sunni jihadist movements across the region. Meanwhile, Iran expanded its regional ties with the new regime in Iraq as well as with Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, all opposed to U.S. influence.

In Iraq, the fall of the Baathist regime and its replacement by an American-backed government led by Kurdish and pro-Iranian Shia Islamist parties led to the political marginalization of Iraq's Sunni Arab community. The collapse of the security structure, the disbanding of the army and the massive footprint of the U.S.-led occupation incited an insurgency. In addition to the Sunni-based nationalist and jihadist forces, the United States also faced resistance from the Sadrist movement, led by the son of a popular Iraqi Shiite cleric murdered by government forces under Saddam Hussein. The rapid emergence of the Sadrists, especially within poor Shia neighborhoods, was due in part to their ability to quickly form local militias to provide communal security.

The resulting state in Iraq was largely a collection of authorities and security organizations controlled through ties to various political and sectarian movements. Assisted by foreign jihadists, Iranian-backed Shia militias, and Kurds eager to claim more territory, Iraq slid into a vicious civil war marked by population displacements and ethnic cleansing. Jihadist recruitment networks and flows of funding crossed over from Arab Sunni populations in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia concerned by what their leaders saw as a rising "Shiite Crescent" stretching from Lebanon to Iran.

Regionally, geopolitical conflict was defined initially not by sectarian identity, but by a "New Arab Cold War" pitting U.S.-backed Arab regimes against Iran and its regional allies. The most powerful Arab node in this so-called "Axis of Resistance" was Hezbollah, the Iranian-founded Shia movement in Lebanon. Hezbollah had gained broad support across Lebanon from the 1980s for providing what many viewed as "national" security though its resistance against Israel. Following the withdrawal of Israel from its self-declared security zone in south Lebanon in 2000, many Lebanese thought it was time for the group to put down its weapons and limit itself to its political and social welfare operations. In 2006, however, after inadvertently provoking a war with Israel, Hezbollah won respect from Arab populations across the region when a month-long bombing campaign and land invasion failed to defeat the group.

The popularity of Hezbollah's leader and chief strategist, Hassan Nasrallah, across the region highlights how the struggle for sovereignty and security remained a primary concern for many Arabs. Washington and political elites in pro-U.S. states failed to address these concerns. In Lebanon, even Hezbollah's rivals in the Sunni-led pro-U.S. March 14 Movement were concerned by the same questions. In contrast to the Hezbollah-aligned force, which viewed Israel and the United States as threats, these forces viewed Hezbollah, along with Iranian and Syrian influence in the country, as the main threat to their own interests as well as Lebanon's security and sovereignty. The United States, however, was unable to contain Hezbollah and its allies. Washington, which had backed the Israeli war, proved unable to address either side's concerns. It was the small Gulf nation of Qatar that played the lead role in negotiating a settlement to the internal Lebanese dispute while funding postwar reconstruction efforts.

Across the region, in the eyes of many Arabs, it was nonstate actors through "resistance" movements against occupiers that came to represent successful models of political mobilization. In the Palestinian territories, where the two-state solution no longer seemed viable, Hamas had won elections in early 2006, though the United States and Israel rejected the results. Eventually Hamas came to seize Gaza by force. In Iraq, both the Sadrist movement and the Kurdish parties had increased their influence through winning elections but gained real power and local autonomy by deploying their militias. They sought to establish forms of sovereignty and security within their spaces of control.

Meanwhile, in Egypt and Jordan, Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, which had not been allowed to gain political power through elections, gained social power by stepping into the vacuum created by retreating states — providing welfare services and often operating as a parallel source of authority and guidance. In the years before the Arab uprisings, Arab societies were abandoning the state and giving up on nationalist-statist projects in favor of survival strategies that relied on substate actors and subnational groups.¹⁴ Meanwhile, relative stability existed only in the smaller oil-rich Gulf states. With the oil price rises of the early 2000s, they had gained further wealth and regional influence. With their small populations, they could maintain isolated national communities insulated from the impact of markets and disruptive effects of urban development and social change.

UPRISINGS AND THE RISE OF ISIS

While the outbreak of the Arab uprisings and their trajectories were not predictable, neither do they represent a wholly new political dynamic. The continuing disjunction between the experiences of state elites and societies contributed to geopolitical instability in the region. This disjunction has been sustained by regimes that seek their own security through external ties and states that use their military forces to intervene and maintain occupations. This has been exacerbated by the socioeconomic impact and political dynamics of neoliberal policies that mobilized populations and eventually resulted in the uprisings.¹⁵ They began as an effort to force regimes to restructure state-society relations to address these insecurities, but have resulted in new forms of state repression and the mobilization of militant nonstate actors like the Islamic State, seeking to forge control over territory through political violence. The fact that for so many people across the Arab world the realization of sovereignty and security has remained partial and highly contested helps explain why the region was so quickly thrown into radical transformation. It is also why there is unlikely to be a quick return to stability.

Another enabling factor for this period of transition was a growing awareness of the end of the American era in the Middle East. The U.S. effort to promote a new regional order failed and its effort to sustain its own regional posture through military power projection and alliances with increasingly unpopular regimes proved unsustainable. By 2010, the United States was moving its troops out of Iraq, giving up on promoting Arab-Israeli peace and forgoing the George W. Bush administration's democracy-promotion goals. Partly by choice, the United States was losing leverage in shaping developments across the region.

In their initial phase, the nonviolent protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria held the promise that Arab societies would gain a voice in redefining state-society relations. Only in Tunisia and to some degree in Egypt, as their regimes were quick to fall, did societies gain much of a political voice. But as these struggles began elsewhere, peaceful protesters faced state repression. The Libyan and Syrian uprisings turned into armed conflict between regimes and rebels backed by powerful external patrons. The Egyptian experiment in post-revolutionary democracy ended in a military takeover and the installation of a repressive regime. The increased insecurity many Egyptians felt during the uprisings and then under the poor governance provided by President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood helped build support for the military-heavy regime that replaced him.

These trends marked the beginning of a counterrevolution. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have been able to use their economic wealth and foreign-supplied military power to repress the uprising in Bahrain, broker a leadership change in Yemen, bankroll the military takeover in Egypt, and arm rebels in Libya and Syria. While state interests drove this countermovement, it was enabled by societal insecurities and the failure of states to address them. As Gregory Gause explains, "It is the weakening of Arab states…that has created the battlefields of the new Middle East cold war."¹⁶ By 2014, however, the sectarian-tinged geopolitical struggle between these Saudi-led forces and Iran's allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon emerged as the defining feature of regional politics. Regimes and political forces evoked increasingly sectarian language that sought to mobilize societies by deflecting their insecurities away from socioeconomic conditions and the lack of political rights.

This endemic insecurity, made worse by foreign invention, is what has provided the basis for the rise of nonstate actors seeking to carve out their own spaces of sovereignty and security. These efforts range from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. Some spaces, like the Egyptian Sinai, western Syria, much of Libya, and the edge of Lebanon, remain contested. Most tragically, between the failure of the Iraqi state to politically incorporate the Sunni Arab community and the Syrian civil war that has left an even more brutal but territorially confined regime, large areas have become zones devoid of state authority. As Hugh Roberts notes, the Islamic State fighters, willing to use extreme violence, "have been constructing a new state in remote regions where the former central power has, at least temporarily, lost all purchase."¹⁷ Meanwhile, any effort to challenge these forces, driven by external security concerns and seeking to shape a regional order based on the interests of state elites and foreign powers, will likely, yet again, unravel from below.