A necessary void in international relations: Non-state actors in the Middle East.

• Author: Yucel, Sumeyra Yildiz
• Position: "Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War," "Hezbollah and Hamas: A Comparative Study" and "Inside the Brotherhood" - Book review

here has been a dramatic expansion in the size, scope and capacity of non-state actors around the globe in the last three decades. Providing social services, implementing development programs, participating in international conflicts, non-state actors have played important roles, especially in regions where the government presence is weak. The Middle East is rife with both important humanitarian nonstate actors delivering social services as a complement to government action and violent non-state actors operating outside domestic law and international norms. The commonality in both examples is the way in which the non-state actors establish private authorities in the spaces where state sovereignty is weak or absent, and legitimate it in terms of identity, religion, services provided or nothing but violence. This leaves numerous questions to be answered.

The global proliferation of non-state actors has increased the need for a broader theoretical analysis and empirical validation, while the increasing influence of non-state actors in the domestic and international politics of the Middle East also needs specific attention. This article reviews three books which shed light on different non-state actors of considerable importance in the Middle East. In this article, Firstly Gunter's book on the PYD; secondly Gleis and Berti's comparative analysis of Hezbollah and Hamas; thirdly Kandil's book on the Muslim Brotherhood will be reviewed. Operating under different organizational frameworks for distinctive causes and using different methods, all of the non-state actors analyzed in the books play significant roles in regional politics. The striking point that is reached when the books are read together is the shared denominator of the quite different organizations, which enables us to carry out a comparative analysis on the non-state actors in the Middle East. In the last part, two general observations related with the shared denominator of them will be briefly discussed.

The important role of the PYD in the Syrian civil war has reached to the point that it might change the artificial borders in the Middle East that were drawn according to a revised version of the Sykes-Picot agreement. The main purpose of Gunter's book Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War is to explain the processes paving the way for the sudden rise of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) from "out of nowhere." The research of Gunter's book was completed before the sudden prominence of ISIS in Syria; therefore it does not cover the most important phenomenon in relation to PYD which is their being the most effective actor in the fight against ISIS. It also misses out the battle over Kobane which turned into a symbol for and a source of Syrian Kurdish activism. Suffering from the unavoidable consequences of writing about unfolding events Gunter's book on the other hand constitutes one of the most detailed analyses of Syrian Kurds in recent years, and an essential reading on the matter. In the first chapter Gunter highlights the fact that talking about Syrian Kurds as a separate entity would only be meaningful after the separation of Kurds into the four newly established states following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the influx of many Kurds leaving Turkey to live in Syria following the Kurdish uprisings in the 1920s.

The Turkish origin of the Kurds in Syria is regarded by the Syrian government as a means to justify the disenfranchisement of many Kurds in Syria. In 1962, 120,000 Kurds were given the status of ajanib, forfeiting the rights of citizenship. Another 75,000 Kurds are also known as makhtoumeen which deprives them from all their civil rights, which is in fact worse than ajanib. The repressive policies of the Baathist regime also included the repopulation of the lands that are expropriated from the Kurds and prohibition of Kurdish language. Gunter points out that with the abovementioned policies making Syrian Kurds invisible, it is also the fractured, transient, and even obscure nature of the Syrian political parties that allowed the Kurds to be forgotten until PKK affiliated PYD suddenly emerged as the strongest among them. The Asad regime allowed Salih Muslim's return from Qandil in April 2011. On July 2012 the regime suddenly pulled its forces out from north-eastern Syria. Beginning to occupy Kurdish cities and getting an enormous edge over other political parties, PYD established its de facto...