The Post-2011 Era

The Arab revolutionary configurations of 2011-12 started a new cycle in the history of the Middle East. There is no need to insist here on the structural and conjectural factors behind these contests whose main aim was to end authoritarian rule.

The uprisings started in Tunisia and Egypt. In these two countries, which for centuries have had centralised states, the capital city has always occupied a decisive place in the making of the political map. Tribal and intra-Muslim sectarian divides played either a limited role or no role at all in national political life. In Tunisia, after a period of tension, elections led to a recomposition of the political system: Ennahda, the Islamist party, has been integrated as a subordinated actor (for the time being) into the new political system in which some figures of the ‘ancien regime', such as Beji Caid Esebssi (born in 1926!), the country's president, occupied key positions. The country, however, became an ‘importer' and an ‘exporter' of violence from and to other zones of conflict in North Africa or in the Maghreb. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012, but with a very weak level of popular participation in the elections. After one year in power, however, the Islamist president Muhammad Morsi was overthrown by a bloody military coup on 3 July 2013, which officially claimed more than a thousand lives, organised by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The revolutionary wave originating in Tunisia and Egypt spread to other places with radically different social, anthropological and political features, among them Libya, Yemen, Bahrein and Syria. The case of Syria cannot be separated from those of neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon, both with highly fragmented social structures. In contrast to Tunisia and Egypt, these coun­tries were created in the twentieth century and could be considered as republics with weak capital cities, but strong trans-border affiliations, and tribal, regional and sectarian divides. The nature of the ‘state cartel' there was also very different from the one in Tunisia and Egypt: while the Tunisian and Egyptian armies refused to participate in direct repression and abandoned the rais, al-Khalifa's, al-Assad's, Gaddafi's and Saleh's regimes were able to mobilise massive resources of coercion against the demonstrators.

As Adel Bari Atwan wrote, by 2012 the overall fate of the Arab world (and the enlarged Middle East) was determined not by revolutionary contests, but by the development of jihadist milieux, which increased in number and were able to create links between different conflicts in the region.^[192] In contrast to the military transhumance of the 1980s which followed a double-track pat­tern, from (mainly) the Arab world to Peshawar and Afghanistan, and back again, and to that of al-Qaeda at the turn of the 2000s, which was much more complex but has never been able to mobilise more than a couple of thousand men, the new armed transhumance concerned probably some 200,000 men (and a few thousand women) from different geographical origins towards many destinations, including Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Sub­Saharan Africa.

In reality, many elements of this ‘state of violence' were already present in the 1980s. There are, however, some major differences between the two periods: not only is the scale of violence much higher in the 2010s, but different Middle Eastern conflicts interact much more strongly with each other and form both an intra-Arab civil war and a region-wide sectarian war. Moreover, with the exception of the Anfal operations in Iraqi Kurdistan (1988) in which chemical weapons were used, the state of violence of the 1980s did not lead to the destruction of societies, while thirty years later the new wave of violence directly damaged the social structure. Nearly 2 per cent of the Syrian population has been killed and half of it forced into exile or to internal displacement in less than five years. Although less dramatic, similar developments have been observed in Iraq, Yemen and Libya. This evolution goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of time and space and creates a power vacuum in the epicentre of violence. One cannot understand the facility with which IS conquered vast regions in Syria if one forgets that the Bashar al-Assad regime has transformed itself into a brutal militia force, sharing power with some 1,200 other militia forces in 2013.

Moreover, the conflicts of the 2010s constantly mutated, leading to a progressively higher level of escalation and violence. To give the most dramatic example of the Syrian war, it has been reconfigured during each summer since 2011: some branches of the opposition decided to militarise the conflict in the summer of 2011; the deadly attack of 18 July 2012, which decimated the regime's high command in Damascus and killed the presi­dent's brother-in-law, opened a new phase marked by the systematic use of aerial force and the withdrawal of the regime from Kurdish areas; the summer of 2013 was marked by the reconquest of the city of al-Qusayr on the Lebanese border by the Lebanese Hezbollah and the formation of a compact among elements supporting the regime in ‘secured' territory including Damascus, Homs (which has been largely emptied of its Sunni population) and Latakia; the summer of 2014 was marked by the intensifica­tion of Iraqi and Syrian conflicts and the proclamation of al-Baghdadi's caliphate, and that of 2015 by Russian intervention and the full internationa­lisation of the Syrian conflict. The logic of this vertiginous chronology has to be found in the fact that the dynamics present in a given moment become irrelevant within ten to twelve months, obliging the actors to move towards a much higher level of violence.

Another significant element is that the conflicts in the 2010s gave birth to a new enlargement of the Middle East. The end of the Gaddafi regime in Libya redefined the Sahara region, leading to the creation of a short-lived jihadist state in the north of Mali. The Islamist contest of Boko Haram in the north of Nigeria, which has its own history distinguishing it from other Islamist movements, has become part of a wider violence and affirms itself as part of IS. One can even say that through unprecedented refugee waves and deadly attacks in Paris in 2015, the Middle East has moved into western Europe. But this ‘internationalisation’ is also related to the rather long history of armed jihadism and to generational changes: Bin Laden, a product of the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, was 43 years old during the 9/11 attacks; Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (named Caliph Ibrahim) was the same age when he proclaimed his Islamic state in 2014 and was a product of the Iraqi jihad of the years after 2000. In the 2010s, as in the years after 2000, the intermediary cadres of jihadism were in their twenties or thirties, and the rank-and-file militants even younger. The only difference was that these later militants came from much more plebeian categories then before.