Review of : Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024.
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– The title of Christopher Phillips’ latest book, “Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East”, might scare off some potential readers. Here comes another Western man, in the worst tradition of arch-Orientalist Bernard Lewis, writing about the Middle East as a region of “perennial conflict”, beset by “ancient hatreds” and always on the verge of violence, some might think. But they would be wrong. Phillips, a Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, presents in “Battleground” a balanced study of the current Middle East. Although the focus is on ten different conflicts, each of them discussed in a different chapter, “Battleground” also has space for societal and economic dynamics that are not necessarily conflictual.
Phillips’ commendable balance has much to do with his commitment to multicausal explanations for conflict, avoiding all-too-common simplistic explanations. Although the chapters are relatively short, he does not sacrifice complexity for the sake of concision. Yes, he would argue, the legacy of Western imperialism and the ongoing intervention of non-regional actors such as the United States or Russia in the Middle East have created much havoc. But so have interventions from Middle Eastern countries into each other’s politics, or the poor performance of domestic political elites, too often focused on self-enrichment. And yes, religious and ethnic identities can be a source of conflict, but they only become truly destructive when instrumentalized by external powers or internal political elites. Frequently, they just take a back seat to economic interests and political ideologies.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, Phillips seeks to explain what he calls “the New Middle East.” Although many of the pre-Arab Spring dynamics have continued to dominate the region, Phillips argues that considerable changes after 2011 justify the notion of a “New Middle East.” Two of these recent developments are Washington’s limited withdrawal from the region, partly due to the US’s growing energy independence, and the increasing importance of non-state actors.
At the same time, the post-2011 Middle East has a broader range of regional powers, and they interact in a larger geographical area, Phillips notes. The Horn of Africa, covered in one of the book’s chapters, is a paradigmatic example of these dynamics. The Horn has seen a struggle for influence between Turkey, Iran, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, not to mention extra-regional actors. Phillips writes that “while not being in the Middle East itself, the Horn has become a new arena for competition for that region’s battling powers.”[1]
Phillips’ book does not cover Northern Africa beyond the case of Egypt. If he had done so, detailing the moderate democratic advances in Tunisia before Kais Saied’s coup in 2021, the overall image of the Arab Spring’s legacy would have been somewhat less negative. Still, it is difficult to be optimistic when one sets the hopes in many Arab countries at the beginning of 2011 against the current reality. About Egypt, for instance, Phillips remarks that “Sisi has constructed a far more fearsome police state than Mubarak, arguably more so even that Nasser, making the consequences of rebelling far greater.”[2]
Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi was killed by rebels in October 2011, but the institutionally poor country he left behind greatly complicated the prospects of a democratic transition. The long-time dictator “had hollowed out most national institutions and there was no national army or police force to fold them into.”[3] The new interim government could not control or disarm the militias that had fought Gaddafi. Moreover, the exclusion of former regime officials from the new system, however understandable it was considering their complicity in Gaddafi’s terror state, resulted in powerful grievances within a group that retained considerable influence.
Every chapter in the book provides a historical perspective of each of the conflicts as well as an exploration of the most recent developments. When reading the different cases, the seismic changes during the last decades in the configuration of power between the states in the Middle East are certainly striking. Turkey and Iran, despite their profound internal changes, have not lost influence since the height of the Cold War. But Iraq and Egypt are two former regional powers whose sway in the region has steadily declined.
In the case of Iraq, the main reason was Saddam Hussein’s successive invasions of Iran and Kuwait and the decade of sanctions that followed, culminating in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The case of Egypt is more complicated. Phillips argues that the country’s internal decline had much to do with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s failed socialist policies, followed by an equally unsuccessful new approach by his successor Anwar Sadat, who liberalized the economy. Be that as it may, what is clear is that Egypt was once “the pre-eminent Arab power in the Middle East” but is now “dependent on neighbors and allies further afield -like the US- for economic support.”[4]
Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click here to buy.
For Egypt, two of these powerful neighbors are Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which together with Qatar have greatly expanded their regional influence during the last decades thanks to their wealth in natural resources. Sisi’s coup in 2013 against the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi cannot be understood without considering the economic and political support Sisi received from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
A country that showcases the multiplicity of root causes and actors that need to be considered when studying conflict in the Middle East (or for that matter, anywhere else in the world) is Lebanon. With borders that made little historical sense, separating groups that used to live together, Lebanon was established by the victors of the First World War after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The newly established territory was ruled by France as a mandate of the League of Nations. When independence was declared in 1943, Lebanon emerged as a country with a very diverse population. There are Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites, Druze, Orthodox, and Maronite Christians, alongside smaller communities. Lebanon has managed this diversity with a sectarian political system that distributes high offices and parliamentary seats on a confessional basis.
The system, initially established in the 1943 National Pact, underwent some changes in the 1989 Taif Agreement but remained essentially sectarian. Both agreements were negotiated by political elites and later imposed in a top-down approach. The 1989 Taif Agreement, although deeply flawed, presaged the end of the civil war that devastated Lebanon between 1975 and 1990 and killed at least 100,000 people. Israel, Syria, and Palestinian militias heavily intervened in Lebanese politics, while the occupation of southern Lebanon by Israel opened the door to Iran through the creation of Hezbollah.
At the same time, Lebanon has never lacked a fair number of national elites eager to interact with foreign forces for their self-serving purposes. As Phillips puts it succinctly, in the 1990s the national elites transformed themselves “from warlords into businessmen.” The end of the war led to a turbo-charged neoliberalism that multiplied Lebanon’s GDP per capita fourfold between 1990 and 2000 and, once again, between 2000 and 2010.
However, per capita figures obfuscate how broad sectors of society were left behind. A UNDP study from 2017 showed that, in the private sector, the earnings of the top 2 percent were almost as high as those of the bottom 60 percent. While the popular sectors barely benefited from the growth years, the collapse of the banking system starting in 2019 hit them the hardest. The overall poverty rate moved from 30%–35% in 2019 to 85%–90% at the end of 2021.
What does the near future have in store for the Middle East and its ongoing conflicts? The threat posed by the so-called Islamic State has not disappeared, but it is far smaller after they lost their territorial base in Iraq and Syria in 2017. Meanwhile, the rivalries within the Gulf Cooperation Council appear to be relatively contained since January 2021, when the blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE came to an end. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to be high but at least there is a direct communication line between Riyadh and Tehran after the restoration of diplomatic relations in 2023.
The civil war in Libya was halted in 2020 and the conflicts in Yemen and Syria have lost intensity. Still, reductions in the level of open fighting very often do not translate into significant improvements in the lives of the civilian population, and this is what we see in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. And last, but certainly not least, there appears to be no end in sight for the Gaza War. At least 38,193 people have died in Gaza as a result of Israeli military operations following Hamas’ attack against Israel on October 7.
In the long run, however, the ongoing denial of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza will probably prove even deadlier than the bombs. A study recently published by The Lancet suggests this has already happened. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have no hurry to conclude the military operations in Gaza and ease the siege on the civilian population. In case Biden had not been pliant enough to Netanyahu’s wishes, the Israeli premier might find an even more receptive ear in the White House after the November election.
[1] Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 242.
[2] Ibid., p. 164.
[3] Ibid., p. 47.
[4] Ibid., p. 142.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved