Coercion and violence have played a decisive role in the shaping of the Middle East and affected all aspects of social life throughout the postSecond World War decades.
Although they have always been related to political, social or economic issues, class, generation, gender or ethnic and sectarian relations, or regional and ‘international relations' and wars, they have also created new and widely autonomous dynamics.
If each historical period had its peculiar forms of violence, the continuity of violence as a phenomenon has nevertheless given birth to a cumulative process of brutalisation of the societies.The classical approaches in historical and political sociology, which use either the theory of resource mobilisation or that of relative deprivation, may be useful in order to understand the pre-1979/80 forms of violence in the region, but not the ones observed since this turning point, and particularly the self-sacrificial violence which has become quite commonplace since the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-4) and 9/11. This is also true as far as comparative perspectives are considered: if they allow us to understand the formation of ‘terror in the mind of God' in many parts of the world during recent decades,1 they cannot explain the scale of post-9/11 violence and its aestheticised cruelties. Scholars thus reach the limits of what one could call phenomenological approaches, a fact that may explain the very small number of academic works on the issue of violence in the Middle East compared to those devoted to other parts of the world such as Latin America.
In the Middle East, as elsewhere, there is a strong relation between violence and criminalisation of political, ethnic and sectarian conflicts. In most parts of the region, the power-holders not only preserved the Islamic political doctrine which, since its elaboration between the seventh and tenth [169] centuries, prohibited internal dissent and promoted absolute obedience to the state, but also adhered, implicitly if not explicitly, to Social Darwinism. They have aimed at the formation of organically integrated, conflict-less ‘national' bodies. If they legitimised themselves by unifying, nationalist, ‘socialist' or Islamist da’was (‘call', ‘cause'), they have also often confiscated power on behalf of some ethnic, sectarian, tribal or regionalist group with a strong asabiyya (‘group-solidarity') and excluded wide sections of society. Even in the strongly integrated countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where one can hardly mention any autonomous asabiyya, power has always been monopolised by tiny elites excluding large sectors of society.