THE RETURN OF THE WEAK STATE

The primacy of this type of theoretical eclecticism is best expressed today with the return of the weak Arab state. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq unleashed dynamics that restored the primacy of overlapping domestic and geopolitical battles in Middle East IR. Henceforth, the region became theater for a grand Saudi–Iranian confrontation fought not through classic realist state-to-state military battles but rather through proxy domestic and transnational actors and ideological competition in the domestic politics of a number of weak Arab states, including the perennial candidate Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, postwar Iraq, and—to a lesser extent—Yemen and Bahrain (Salloukh Reference Salloukh2013). As Gause (2014, 8) carefully noted—for both Riyadh and Tehran, the two main protagonists in this confrontation, but also Qatar and Turkey—the objective “is not to defeat their regional rivals militarily on the battlefield. It is to promote the fortunes of their own clients in these weak-state domestic struggles and thus build up regional influence.” Yet, lest we deny them agency, domestic actors also possess their own calculations and interests. They invite, and bandwagon with, regional actors in a bid to balance the political influence of their domestic opponents and advance their own local political interests.

Hazbun’s (Reference Hazbun2017) contribution to this symposium uses Lebanon as a quintessential case for examining such patterns. Lebanon’s sectarian elite mastered the game of aligning with external actors against domestic opponents in overlapping domestic and regional struggles. Consequently, Lebanon served as a site for overlapping domestic and geopolitical contests since its creation. By 2006, state collapse and the pull of centrifugal forces in post-Saddam Iraq made the country look increasingly like Lebanon. Overlapping domestic and regional struggles also dominated the politics of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The popular uprisings intensified and complicated the contests unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq, exacerbating them in some places (e.g., Lebanon, Yemen, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip) and allowing them to spread to new sites—namely, Syria and Libya. As Gause (Reference Gause2017), Matthiesen (Reference Matthiesen, Narbone and Lestra2015), Rubin (Reference Rubin2014, Reference Rubin2015), and Ryan (Reference Ryan2015) admirably demonstrated, the concomitant collapse of some regimes or states and ascendance of old and new political actors with transnational ideologies—that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and a posse of Salafi or Shi‘a non-state actors—restored to center stage the regional system’s ideational balancing dynamics. Transnational sectarian identities re-emerged as a potent power resource shaping regime foreign policy and alliance choices, underscoring yet again realism’s inability to explain the behavior of Middle East states without recourse to constructivist assumptions (Barnett Reference Barnett1998) and overlapping domestic/geopolitical dynamics. The causality is important: as state authority breaks down, the importance of the elective affinity between co-sectarian state and non-state actors increases. Consequently, Shi‘a non-state actors in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen turn to Iran for help, whereas their Sunni counterparts turn to either Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Qatar (Gause Reference Gause2017).

The myriad fallouts from the overlapping domestic, regional, and international “struggle for Syria” are examples of this process (Phillips Reference Phillips2016; Ryan Reference Ryan2012). Hafiz al-Assad’s once Hobbesian unitary state—which structured political participation and organized state–society relations along populist corporatist and neopatrimonial lines—is in shambles. The breakdown of state institutions and the torpedo of the onetime institutionally strong Syrian state gave way to the emergence of recently securitized sectarian and ethnic identities, which in the past had crosscut with more relevant class and regional divisions (Hinnebusch Reference Hinnebusch, Antoun and Quartet1991). This transformation of Syria from a Leviathan capable of waging sometimes domestically unpopular but realist geopolitical battles in defense of strategic security interests to a weak state penetrated by regional actors and their sectarian proxies—both transnational and domestic, Salafi–Jihadi or not—unleashed new dynamics that demonstrated the utility of a theoretically eclectic IR toolkit.

First, the once-unitary Syrian state has been replaced by a weak, penetrated state. A hitherto pivotal player in regional geopolitical battles now serves as a “playground” for these battles. Consequently, neither the unitary nature nor the institutional strength of the state can be taken for granted anymore. Ideological differences among regional states in what constitutes a threat to regime security obviated the emergence of an anti-ISIS balancing alliance in Syria—despite the latter’s present and future danger to the security interests of all concerned parties. When such an alliance emerges, it will be driven by domestic regime-security threats rather than strictly external geopolitical-power considerations. This does not mean that sectarianism explains more than realism, however. A pan-Sunni alliance among states or non-state actors against Bashar al-Assad’s regime also has proved elusive. Instead, different Sunni states sponsor different local Sunni non-state actors in Syria, sometimes with disastrous consequences for their own geopolitical interests. Finally—and despite Iran’s evident geopolitical interests in the survival of an allied regime in Syria—Stein (Reference Stein2017) contends in this symposium that neither geopolitical nor sectarian calculations alone can explain Iran’s intervention in support of the Assad regime. Instead, he suggests that this process is driven also by the “ideological codependency” between the two regimes, one that is meant to bind the Syrian regime to Tehran but also “reinforces the idea of a counterhegemonic regional security agenda,” thereby strengthening the position of the Iranian regime’s core hardline elements. All of this suggests the need to combine a mix of realist, regime-security, and constructivist approaches in any attempt to explain Middle East IR.