Pacified Societies, the Behemoth and Brutal Margins

The new state of violence in the Middle East attests the weakness not only of the states created in the twentieth century, often through arbitrary international decisions, but also of ideological-social projects such as Arab nationalism, socialism and Islamism.

The overwhelming force that sectarian and tribal dynamics exhibited after 2011 means that, in a context where societies collapse, the ‘primary frameworks’ become the only ones to bring an ad minima protection to their members. The tribes, for instance, can either protect their members from violence or become a unit of a large-scale state of violence, as is the case of the Hasheds in Yemen and the Ghaddafas in Libya. Sectarian affiliations, which formed internal boundaries through marriage and family ties, at times were not militarised. The context of violence forced these groups to protect themselves militarily through new leadership, to impose a unique identity and to formulate unique allegiances to their members, and to sacralise and radicalise their political language. Now they included ancient references such as to Qamus al-Uthman and Karbala, references to the shirt that the third Caliph of Islam wore when he was killed in 656, and the murder of Hussein, son of the fourth caliph and grandson of the Prophet in 680.

Similarly, this new situation created a ‘Tillyian’ scenario,^{^[194]} in which power depends primarily on the capacity of some armed actors to wage war and ‘protect' their ‘subjects', while in order to finance these ‘prerogatives' they impose a brutal policy of taxation on them. The fall of cities such as Kidal and Timbuktu in 2012, and Fallouja and Mosul (a city which had huge military resources) in 2014, had in fact a strong link not only with the issue of violence, but also with the pacification and/or fragmentation of societies that had lost their capacity of resistance.

The success of a couple of hundred jihadist fighters in conquering vast spaces is of course not unique in Middle Eastern history; at the beginning of the 1990s, the Taliban of Mullah Omar (d. 2013), who had perhaps thirty fighters, could impose themselves on a largely fragmented country. Other actors, such as Ahmad Shah Massoud (killed by al-Qaeda on 9 September 2001), who called themselves commanders, certainly had massive military resources and a vast client group, but their fragmentation, and the absence of a ‘universal cause' that could unite them, allowed the Taliban to radicalise their da'wa and create an asabiyya of their own. The Afghan case, like the IS case of the years after 2010, confirms the fourteenth-century historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun's analysis according to which the force of conquerors resided not only in their capacity of using coercion, but even more in the incapacity of the urban populations which had lost their habitus of resistance, their capacity to defend themselves.^{^[195]}

Conclusion

This survey of the phenomenon of violence during recent decades in the Middle East also shows the limits of the phenomenological approaches that scholars usually adopt in their analysis. Before the third historical cycle which started in 1979, the process of mobilisation, modes of action and discourses of legitimisation of violence in this region could easily be compared with what one could observe elsewhere in the world, including in Latin America or even in Europe, where ‘revolutionary violence' had some purchase in certain intellectual circles. But how could we explain the post-1979 evolution?

The partition of the Arab Middle East, the creation of Israel and the Palestinian issue, and the series of wars which did not end with the end of the Cold War certainly helped to create the conditions behind a generalised regional instability. The failure of the past nationalist, ‘socialist', Islamist unanimist projects, which went hand-in-hand with some forms of integrative welfare society, has also contributed to the spread of general despair.

One could also recognise that the enormous resources of the sacralisation and radicalisation of Islam, whose naked reality contradicts its ideal of the ‘just society', have also played a role in the formation of new and violent elements within Islam. But this violence can't be explained by its origins or by any simple causality.

One should bear in mind that if Middle Eastern violence constitutes an exception in the world after 2010, it is certainly not an exception in world history. The European Wars of religion in the sixteenth century, or Nazi violence with its perverse and yet perfect rationality and its nihilism which destroyed its own rationality and astonished intellectuals such as Arendt, Benjamin, Bloc, Freud, Haffner and Kraus, making them aware of the possibility of the victory of Thanatos, are comparable with what one can observe in the Middle East today. In all such cases, a destructive and selfdestructive violence was the ultimate means of imposing cruelty as the only condition that societies could or can envision as their destiny.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Pacified Societies, the Behemoth and Brutal Margins

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