ABSTRACT

Conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa region increasingly intersect. A compilation by cause, type and principal actors would yield a bewildering list that obscures rather than clarifies. Instead, this chapter offers a new way of looking at MENA conflicts since World War I through five distinct conflict “clusters”, each with its unique genealogy, as mediated by external interventions. Each cluster is set off by a political “earthquake” that generates rolling tremors and new fissures, and unleashes secondary struggles. The 2011 Arab uprisings were the latest such earthquake, precipitating the breakdown of the state in several Arab countries. The resulting civil wars invited external intervention, upon which local conflicts started to bleed into one another. The global retreat of the United States as unipolar power is leaving the region prey to a multiplication of conflict nodes without an actor capable of imposing overall dominance. Yet conflicts can and must be managed and brought to an end, whether through negotiation or victory/defeat. This chapter proposes a way forward but insists that the first impulse should always be: Do no (further) harm.