"Constructing UN Security Council Resolution 1701" (original) (raw)
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2020
The main aim of this chapter is to conceptualise the conflict between states and non-state armed groups in the Middle East. It begins by tracing the colonial origin of the distinction between state and non-state violence, the emergence of counterinsurgency and its reincarnation in liberal interventions. It then considers the politics of demarcation of legitimate and illegitimate violence and its centrality in the scramble among local and international state and non-state actors to control the Middle East. The chapter analyses the effects of both physical violence and ideological confrontation in the origins and consequences of political violence in the Middle East. It finally illustrates these dynamics by analysing the concerted international and Lebanese campaign to destroy Hezbollah and the resilience of Hezbollah to withstand such enormous pressure and become stronger as a result.
Syllabus - INR 3061: Conflict, Security, and Peace Studies in International Relations (Summer 2016)
The general objective of this Summer course is to examine key theoretical schools of thought in International Relations (IR) and their multiple debates around issues related to conflict, war, and peace. The course is designed around two main parts which deal, first, with the analytical concepts, schools of thought, and main theoretical tools used to approach security studies in IR; and second, with a series of topic-related discussion sessions based on a carefully selected, recently published series of texts. This literature deals with contemporary and relevant topics (like "child soldiers," war and civilization, or state-building). A central preoccupation of this course is to ground both parts of the course (that is, the analytical and the empirical sections) with the anthropological literature on the origins of war and peace among human beings since as further back as we can collectively record. The use of anthropology and archaeology as a starting point to base our more contemporary discussions about international security is something unfortunately neglected by most IR courses. Despite being a compressed Summer course, we will try to recompose this deficiency of most undergraduate IR courses.
Andreas Leutzsch: Global Lines in Conflicts in the Middle East
Journal of Security Strategies/Güvenlik Stratejileri Dergisi, 15/29 (2019), 151-197 , 2019
My case is that current conflicts in the Middle East are not only conflicts between states or a Clash of Civilizations, but that "Glocal Relative Deprivation" has caused a vacuum of power and conflicts between stationary states. To support my argument, I will discuss three paradigms and their ability for explaining the crisis in the Middle East: First, Carl Schmitt’s turn from Westphalian Governance to global lines (of a Nomos of Earth) as spheres of foreign non-interference, which is either used to propose unrealistic international solutions to a transnational crisis or, paradoxically, to back hegemonic interests in the region. Second, I will deconstruct Samuel Huntington’s paradigm of a Clash of Civilizations, which is based on dubious data and references to call for a Western hegemony that already exists beyond the classical imperialist understanding of it as global standards empowered with help of global horizons of comparability. Third, I will extend Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s sketch of reasons for modernization crisis in nation-states that is based on relative deprivation, identity-, participation-, distribution-, penetration-, and (culminating in a) legitimation-crisis, for analyzing conflicts in the Middle East as caused by glocal comparison and competition in world society. In summing, I intend to analyze the unrest in the Middle East as caused by glocal relative deprivation. This perspective enables us to deal with glocal political and social processes rather as represented than caused by global cultural or political conflicts between “civilizations” or states.
Review of International Studies, 2008
This investigation explores the ways in which discourses of security functioned to allow military intervention in Iraq to become ‘thinkable’, and how these actions serve to reconfigure not only the identities of states – the US and Iraq – but also the characteristics of the international as a spatial and conceptual domain. In the weeks preceding the military intervention in Iraq, significant negotiations were conducted between the US government and the UN that were commented on extensively in press statements and other documents released by both parties. Drawing on UNSC Resolutions, public debates and academic analyses, in this article I analyse the relations between the US and the UN in the build-up to the Iraq war, making two related claims. First, I argue that each discourse is organised around a particular logic of security. By ‘logics of security’, I mean the ways in which various concepts are organised within specific discourses of security. That is, each competing conceptualisation of security has a distinct primary focus, referent object and perspective on the arrangement of the international system. The ways in which these claims are made, the assumptions that inform them, and the policy prescriptions that issue from them, are what I refer to as ‘logics of security’. Second, I argue that the intervention in Iraq, a violence undertaken in the name of ‘security’, has functioned to reproduce the international as a spatial and conceptual domain according to the logic of a highly conventional narrative of sovereigneity, and, ultimately, of state identity.
Contentious Politics in the Middle East Popular Resistance and Marginalized Activism beyond the Arab Uprisings, 2015
The contentious politics framework poses important centralquestions-why does the emergence of contentious politicssometimes fail to make thetransition into a social movement? Why and how does it get repressed and how does that transform the nature of contentious politics? This chapter applies these core questions to the case of the Syrianuprisings of 2011 and the subsequent conflict. The first part considers the domestic contextand explains the trajectory of Syria’s contentious politics through the strategies of the opposition and the regime. What factors and events have been obstructive and counter- productive to the development of the early uprisings into an effective social movement?The chapter considers the lack of a contentious repertoire to draw from, and the difficulties in producing a unifying contentious narrative, as key explanations–this applies just as much tothe regime and itsinability to manage opposition as it does to the protestors. The second section moves on to an analysis of the internationalisation of the crisis, and considers theinteraction between internal and external actors on both sides of the conflict. To what extentdid Syria’s internal contentious politics force the internationalisation and militarisation of theconflict? Or to what extent did interference of international actors hinder and thwart the progress of domestic contentious politics? Understanding therole of external actors in theSyrian crisis is crucial considering its entanglement with Russia, Iran, the US, the EU, Israel,Saudia Arabia, Qatar,Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. This chapter argues that the stronglikelihood of such an outcome was largely overlooked and underestimated by policy-makers,activists and academics alike, in turn contributing to the deepening crisis in Syria. http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/contentious-politics-in-the-middle-east-fawaz-a--gerges/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137537201
Anthropologica 61 (1): 83-96, 2019
Drawing on the July 2006 Israel-Lebanon War in Beirut's southern suburbs and the Syrian refugee influx into the villages of Akkar in northern Lebanon, I suggest that the Lebanese state aspires to officially assert itself as a liminal space in a bid to survive crises and preserve its political capital, therefore aborting the attempts made by citizens and refugees to leave such liminality. I look at how professed state liminality meets with humanitarian neutrality, which is a principle of several international humanitarian agencies that assisted the internally displaced in 2006 and Syrian refugees from 2011 in Lebanon. Although in anthropology liminality has mostly been approached as anti-structural and an embodiment of the margins , by proceeding from people's perception of state enmity and their frustrated aspirations to befriend the state, I suggest that state liminality rather captures the structural peculiarity of the Lebanese state's agency and violent presence, made of repressive and neglectful politics. Résumé : Partant de la guerre israélo-libanaise de juillet 2006 dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth et de l'afflux de réfugiés syriens dans les villages du Akkar au nord du Liban, j'émets l'hypothèse que l'État libanais cherche à s'affirmer officielle-ment comme espace liminaire afin de survivre aux crises et de préserver son capital politique, faisant ainsi échec aux efforts de citoyens et de réfugiés pour quitter cette liminarité. J'exa-mine l'intersection de la liminarité étatique proclamée et de la neutralité humanitaire, ce dernier principe étant mis en avant par de nombreuses agences humanitaires internationales qui ont assisté les déplacés internes en 2006 et qui accompagnent les réfugiés syriens au Liban depuis 2011. Si en anthropologie la liminarité est généralement abordée comme un phénomène anti-structurel et comme une incarnation des marges, je m'ap-puie sur la perception qu'ont les gens de l'inimitié étatique et de leurs aspirations frustrées à se rapprocher de l'État pour avancer que la liminarité étatique permet plutôt d'appréhender la particularité structurelle de l'agencéité et de la présence violente propres à l'État libanais, lesquelles sont marquées par une politique conjointe de répression et d'abandon.