MENA's Frozen Conflicts
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POMEPS STUDIES 42 MENA’s Frozen Conflicts November 2020 Contents MENA’s Frozen Conflicts . 3 Marc Lynch, Project on Middle East Political Science, George Washington University Syria, Crisis Ecologies, and Enduring Insecurities in the MENA . .. 6 Samer Abboud, Villanova University Hybrid Security, Frozen Conflicts, and Peace in MENA . 10 Ariel I. Ahram, Virginia Tech Yemen’s Mental Health Crisis and Its Implications for Security . .15 Raiman al-Hamdani; Yemen Policy Center, ARK Group, The European Council for Foreign Relations Patterns of Mobilization and Repression in Iraq’s Tishreen Uprising . .. 21 Chantal Berman, Georgetown University; Killian Clarke, Harvard University; and Rima Majed, American University of Beirut From R2P to Reticence: U .S . Policy and the Libyan Conflict . 29 Mieczysław P. Boduszyński, Pomona College Wars, Capital and the MENA region . 35 Matteo Capasso, European University Institute, Italy The consolidation of a (post-jihadi) technocratic state-let in Idlib . 42 Jerome Drevon, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies; and Patrick Haenni, European University Institute Heartbreak, Still Time, and Pressing Forward: On Lebanon and the Future . .. 48 Sami Hermez, Northwestern University in Qatar Failure to Launch: The Inability of Catalysts to Alter Political Arrangements in Lebanon and Syria . 52 Sara Kayyali, Human Rights Watch The Great Thaw: The Resumption of Political Development in the Middle East . 59 David Siddhartha Patel, Brandeis University This Critical Juncture: Elite Competition in a Receding Civil War . 62 Ammar Shamaileh, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies Citizenship Constellations in Syria . 68 Marika Sosnowski, German Institute for Global and Area Studies Prospects for Ending External Intervention in Yemen’s War . 74 Alexandra Stark, New America Pursuing Peace by Engaging Justice in Yemen . 81 Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Hobart and William Smith Colleges The Project on Middle East Political Science The Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) is a collaborative network that aims to increase the impact of political scientists specializing in the study of the Middle East in the public sphere and in the academic community . POMEPS, directed by Marc Lynch, is based at the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University and is supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Henry Luce Foundation . For more information, see http://www .pomeps .org . 2 Introduction MENA’s Frozen Conflicts Marc Lynch, Project on Middle East Political Science, George Washington University Over the last year, the MENA region’s simmering conflicts Hermez similarly views them as “continual war, but not have seemed frozen in place . The internationally-fueled a frozen conflict . The war continues to flow in time, civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya have long since settled undergoing transformations and mutations ”. This calls for into an equilibrium in which no side can either truly win or careful attention to those mutations and metastasizing truly lose . Those conflicts have been held in place in part conflict ecologies, beyond the binaries of war and peace or by local ecologies and war economies and in part by the the false reassurance of viewing conflicts as frozen . competitive interventions by regional and international powers on behalf of their proxies and clients . But are What keeps these conflicts frozen is not simply military these conflicts truly frozen? What does viewing them quagmire . Long running conflicts create new institutional through such a lens gain, and what are the theoretical and realities which create new elites, new economies, and analytical costs? To explore these questions, POMEPS new incentives . Frozen conflicts, then, are generative of convened a virtual research workshop on September 29, new realities on the ground, warscapes characterized by 2020, with scholars from diverse empirical and theoretical fragmented authority, mixed governance, and deep social backgrounds . We are delighted to now publish their transformation . Their longevity allows time for these new papers in this issue of POMEPS STUDIES . social, political and economic realities to take deep root . As Samer Abboud describes it, “These overlapping and Those conflicts, frozen or otherwise, come at great cost . entangled insecurities constitute what I think of as crises The humanitarian consequences of the wars continue to ecologies, assembling at the intersections of civil conflict, mount . The devastation in Syria, Iraq and Yemen is too mass human displacement, proxy wars, environmental easily reduced to nigh-incomprehensible numbers: the and epidemiological crisis, state militarization, external hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions of refugees intervention, and economic collapse ”. Such conflict and internally displaced, the hundreds of billions of dollars ecologies, supported by regional circuits of power and of value destroyed, the disease and famine unleashed . exchange, are far more robust than international efforts Beyond those numbers, as Raiman al-Hamdani reminds us at conflict mediation assume . Once locked into place, in his essay for this collection, lies a devastating landscape they generate a wide range of actors and institutions of psychological trauma and collective memory, intangible incentivized to sustain them no matter the human costs . human costs which will endure for generations . People living through these frozen conflicts find themselves always The contributors to this collection document and theorize caught in between, observes Sami Hermez, waiting on the these evolving institutional realities of governance and next eruption of conflict even if it never arrives . conflict across a range of cases and domains . Across the regional warscapes, Ariel Ahram argues, new forms of The contributors to this volume agree on viewing these hybrid governance have become entrenched: “militias conflicts as deeply entrenched, stalemated and unlikely to and warlords are steadily embedding in governance and produce victory in any significant sense . But they disagree security provisions across wide swaths of territory . States about whether it makes sense to conceptualize them are receding to mostly symbolic placeholders, with limited as “frozen ”. Samer Abboud argues that these conflicts practical role in governing ”. The urge to recentralize rather continue to metastasize, as what he calls “conflict authority in a post-conflict future is a quixitic one . ecologies” constantly evolve in ways which drive deep Instead, he argues, external actors and should accept that change beneath the seemingly frozen surface . Sami “hybrid security governance yields a pockmarked political 3 landscape, with stark variations in who bears arms in mass protests, economic crisis, and the COVID-19 different locations and under whose authority ”. pandemic, citizens demanding change have been unable to achieve a transition to a new political arrangement ”. This involves significant institutional evolution both Post-occupation Iraq, too, has proven highly resistant within and outside the state . Marika Sosnowski traces to change despite massive failures of governance and the mutations of hybrid governance through the issuing security, the bloody war against the Islamic State and a of personal documents: “In the Syrian civil war, where large scale protest movement . Chantal Berman, Killian different territorial areas have, at different times, been Clarke and Rima Majed argue that “since the end of the outside of the control of the state, registering life-cycle post-invasion civil war, Iraq has experienced multiple events, such as births, deaths and marriages, has become waves of mobilization – in 2011, in 2015, and in 2018 – a necessary service other actors have had to fulfil . In all of which aired a similar constellation of demands . In times of armed conflict, life does not pause – children this sense, the Tishreen uprising was the culmination of a continue to be born, people die, marry and divorce – and decade of mobilization in which Iraqis denounced, with these life events need to be documented . The gap left by increasing forcefulness, the dysfunctional political system the state in providing life-cycle event registration during that was set up following the 2003 invasion ”. While security the civil war has been filled by a range of other actors and governance has become ever more hybrid with the in different territorial areas ”. Jerome Drevon and Peter integration and penetration of Shi’a Popular Mobilization Haenni show governance has evolved under the control Units, the political system remains impervious to change . of the jihadist Harakat Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib, where In Algeria, the inscrutable system of military control has “local governance consisted of a combination of local resisted meaningful change despite the demands of the councils, independent organisations, and armed groups’ unprecedented Hirak movement which took to the streets infrastructures (including courts and prison facilities) ”. in 2019 against the re-election of a long-incapacitated These mutations also occur inside the remaining state . president . In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority Ammar Shamaileh shows how the long war has reshaped continues to govern despite having lost its raison d’etre . the power and influence of Syrian economic elites . “As the intensity of the war in Syria has decreased, the intensity The contributors to this collection disagree about whether of conflict