Sovereignty versus Sectarianism: Contested Norms and the Logic of Regional Conflict in the Greater Levant/Egemenlik Mezhepcilige Karsi: Genis Levant Bolgesinde Catisan Normlar ve Bolgesel Catismanin Mantigi.

• Author: Heydemann, Steven
• Position: Report

Introduction

Since 2003, the Middle East has experienced an extended period of political turmoil, violent conflict, mass displacement, external intervention, extremism, and growing polarization among regional adversaries. America's invasion of Iraq in March of that year was the zero moment that set these processes in motion. It transformed Iraq from an adversary to an ally of Iran, enabling Iran's resurgence as a major regional power for the first time since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Iran's ascent sharpened perceptions of insecurity among Arab Gulf monarchies. Popular uprisings that shook the region in 2011 amplified and deepened these trends, further destabilizing a regional security architecture that was already under significant strain. As protest movements morphed into violent conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and with renewed violence in Iraq linked to the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS), Iranian intervention expanded across the Levant and the Arab peninsula, bolstered by the forces of Hezbollah, Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (al-Hashd al-Sha'bi), and transnational networks of Shiva mercenaries. Exploiting instability in Syria and Iraq, Kurdish nationalist movements in both countries escalated their efforts to secure greater political independence. Across the Arab east, (1) revisionist actors with distinct and often conflicting interests had successfully destabilized a regional balance of power that had previously kept their aspirations in check.

In response to the challenges of popular mobilization and Iranian gains, status quo actors, with their own distinct and often conflicting interests, pursued a dual strategy of counter-revolution and containment. Egypt and Saudi Arabia differed in their views on Syria, Russia, and the threat posed by Iran. Yet they aligned in actively suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) and other Islamist movements, with Saudi Arabia as perhaps the most determined defender of a pre-2011 regional order that successfully contained both Iran and Sunni Islamist challengers.

As threats from both loomed larger, newly empowered Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman escalated attempts to keep them at bay. Rejecting appeals from the UN, the European Union (EU), and other international actors, Saudi Arabia pressed forward with its military operations in Yemen despite their disastrous humanitarian effects. It also sacrificed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in its determination to suppress the Ikhwan. Saudi Arabia, with support from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait, pressured Qatar to break its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and end regional policies it viewed as destabilizing, including support for jihadist elements among Syria's opposition and an accommodationist posture toward Iran. In mid-2017, these Saudi-Qatari tensions led to the splintering of the GCC, with Saudi Arabia and its GCC allies breaking diplomatic relations and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures on Qatar. Punitive diplomacy, however, was only one part of a broader Saudi strategy to preserve the pre-2011 regional balance of power and contain Iranian influence. It intervened militarily in Bahrain in March 2011, intensified its repression of Saudi Arabia's Shiva communities, supported elements of the armed opposition in Syria, and cultivated anti-Iranian hardliners within the Trump administration.

Only fifteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the century-old state order in the Arab east seemed on the verge of collapse. Indeed, predicting the disintegration of state borders became something of a parlor game, with new imagined maps of how a post-Sykes-Picot Middle East might be organized appearing in several major media outlets. (2) Leading analysts of the Middle East have characterized the region as experiencing a "perfect storm of national and regional instability," or a "new Arab Cold War." (3) Prominent officials, including former diplomats and ministers, routinely describe the Middle East in terms of a "crisis of regional order," the breakdown of states, and even "the collapse of order." (4)

Accounting for Disorder

What explains this dire state of affairs? How did the greater Levant and Arab east reach such a perilous state? Two general explanations have been advanced to account for heightened levels of regional conflict and competition. The first attributes current conditions to the rise of identity politics, specifically, the intensification of sectarian polarization, linked initially to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and then fueled by the Arab uprisings of 2011. (5) This polarization, and the upsurge in transborder, sectarian identity politics that accompanied it, is expressed through a deepening rift between Shiva and Sunni Muslims, especially but not exclusively in the Arab east. These rising sectarian tensions play out through the escalation of longstanding competition between the Sunni monarchy in Saudi Arabia and the ruling Shiva clerics in Iran. A "Shiva revival" post-2003, and Iran's intent to consolidate a "Shiva crescent" from Tehran to Beirut, have been invoked as the driving forces behind this "new sectarianism"--though skeptics have challenged these claims. (6) Civil wars in Syria and Yemen, as well as Sunni discontent in Iraq, and Shiva mobilization in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, are cast as both causes and effects of this polarization, both products of and reactions to external intervention by Saudi Arabia or other Sunni regimes, on the one hand, or by Iran or its Shiva proxies on the other hand.

In this account, regional dynamics are best explained as the expression of identity politics enacted by states that serve as instruments of sectarian regimes. Except in its crudest forms, there is nothing inherently essentialist in attributing regional conflicts to sectarian polarization. Such a view is entirely consistent with an understanding of identity as constructed, and with a nuanced and fluid conception of the ways in which enacting sectarian identities have changed as regimes pursue polarizing strategies to advance their regional interests. (7) Nonetheless, the causal arrow in these accounts flows from regime identities to state policies.

State weakness is the second general explanation that has been offered to account for current levels of regional turmoil and the increasing sectarianization of regional politics. In the words of a leading scholar of Middle East international relations, "[i]t is the weakening of Arab states, more than sectarianism or the rise of Islamist ideologies, that has created the battlefields of the new Middle East cold war. Indeed, it is the arc of state weakness and state failure running from Lebanon through Syria to Iraq that explains the current salience of sectarianism." (8) It should be stressed that claims of state weakness as the cause of the current disorder in the Arab east are quite different from the common, but mistaken, notion that states in the Middle East are artificial because of their arbitrary origins in colonial mapmaking exercises of the early 20th century. It is not Sykes and Picot who are responsible for state weakness in these accounts--though echoes of their meddling are heard in the background.

Claims of state weakness as a cause of sectarianization are not the same as arguments in which current conflicts are seen as harbingers of an imminent cascade of state collapse. Gause, Kamrava, Byman, and others who attribute regional turmoil to state weakness understand that states, as political units, are not going to disappear anytime soon. (9) Rather, it is the state elites who privileged their parochial interests over the hard work of nation building, and indulged in poor governance that excluded and marginalized large segments of their societies, who are principally responsible for state weakness in the greater Levant. Feckless leaders have produced flawed states that exhibit a range of deficiencies. These dysfunctions render states vulnerable to both external pressures and the accumulation of domestic grievances. (10) In other words, the state in the Arab east is "fragile." (11) It lacks effective institutions and suffers from a deficit of legitimacy. State elites rule through modes of governance that exacerbate social cleavages and corrode crosscutting bonds of citizenship. They oversee failed development strategies, and, in many cases, have proven unable to provide citizens with economic security or with social and economic mobility. (12) These deficits have magnified the appeal of sectarian identity politics among disgruntled citizens. In turn, state elites exploit and instrumentalize sectarian identities to mobilize popular support, advance state interests, and undermine regional adversaries. (13)

While arguing for the instrumental use of sectarianism, "weak state" accounts of regional disorder go beyond the realist narrative of scholars like Salloukh, who has characterized the new Arab Cold War as "a very realist balance of power contest between two states over regional supremacy". (14) From a realist perspective, current conflicts are not the product of socio- economic tensions resulting from poor governance--an argument that views sectarianization as the first resort of weak rulers --but simply the most recent manifestation of the "Arab state system's time- honored geopolitical realities." Riyadh, Salloukh writes, "deployed sectarianism as an instrument of Realpolitik to rally support within the Gulf countries to its foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran." (15) From this vantage point, stateness is not a relevant variable. Whether states are weak or not, they use the instruments at their disposal to advance their interests in anarchic regional and international systems. These differences are not trivial, yet in both variants of state-centered accounts of regional dynamics, the causal arrow flows from states to identities.

Sects, States, and the Myth of Fragility

We view both these...