War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Ariel I. Ahram

trends and to define the field of inquiry for war and conflict in MENA. The data show several notable things. When viewed over the duration of the post-World War II era, the patterns of conflict in MENA are mostly unexceptional. MENA largely tracked with global trends in the frequency and form of war. War became rarer in MENA at roughly the same time as it became rare globally. War became more prevalent in MENA when it became more prevalent globally. The epidemic of internal wars in MENA roughly coincided with the global turn toward internal wars. As in other regions, war is not evenly distributed within MENA itself. Some countries, like Israel and Iraq, have experienced nearly perpetual war. Other countries in the region have seen only sporadic warfare. This suggests a need to consider the issue of war from both a global system and regional sub-system perspective.

In terms of magnitude of conflict, the data are far grimmer. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, it was wars in eastern Asia that claimed the most lives. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, conflicts in MENA have been proliferating and intensifying. Most of the recent violence in MENA is broadly attributable to episodes of internal (civil) war and state failure. Yet states in many ways remain at the fulcrum of violence. The next chapter explores how contestation over statehood generates different forms of violence.

Notes

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      2 2. Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

      3 3. Jeremy Black, “What Is War?,” in What Is War? An Investigation in the Wake of 9/11, edited by Mary Ellen O’Connell (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012), 177.

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      5 5. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars, second edition (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Siniša Malešević, “The Sociology of New Wars? Assessing the Causes and Objectives of Contemporary Violent Conflicts,” International Political Sociology 2, no. 2 (2008): 97–112.

      6 6. John E. Mueller, Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Jacob Mundy, “Deconstructing Civil Wars: Beyond the New Wars Debate,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 3 (2011): 279–95.

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      12 12. Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 61.

      13 13. Heritage Foundation, “Assessing Threats to US Vital Interests: Middle East” (2018).

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      16 16. William Eckhardt, “Civilian Deaths in Wartime,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals 20, no. 1 (1989): 89–98; Adam Roberts, “Lives and Statistics: Are 90% of War Victims Civilians?,” Survival 52, no. 3 (2010): 115–36.

      17 17. Madeline Edwards, “Syrian Author Khaled Khalifa on Latest Novel About ‘Fear, in All Its Manifestations’,” SyriaDirect, February 27, 2019, https://syriadirect.org/news/syrian-author-khaled-khalifa-on-latest-novel-about-%E2%80%98fear-in-all-its-manifestations%E2%80%99/.

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      19 19. Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball, “Documents of War: Understanding the Syrian Conflict,” Significance 12, no. 2 (2015): 14–19.

      20 20. Nils B. Weidmann, “A Closer Look at Reporting Bias in Conflict Event Data,” American Journal of Political Science 60, no. 1 (2016): 206–18.

      21 21. John Broder, “A Nation at War: The Casualties; US Military Has No Count of Iraqi Dead in Fighting,” New York Times, April 2, 2003. It was only in 2018 that the US military was required to keep track and report on civilian casualties caused by US airstrikes and other military actions. Cf. Neta Crawford, “Human Costs of the Post 9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency” (Brown University, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, 2018).

      22 22. Hannah Fischer, “Iraqi Civilian Deaths Estimates,” in Economics and Geopolitics of the Middle East, edited by Richard Dralonge (New York: Nova Science 2008).

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      24 24. Zachary J. Foster, “The 1915 Locust Attack in Syria and Palestine and Its Role in the Famine during the First World War,” Middle Eastern Studies 51, no. 3 (2015): 370–94; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

      25 25. Firdausi Qadri, Taufiqul Islam, and John D. Clemens, “Cholera in Yemen – an Old Foe Rearing Its Ugly Head,” New England Journal of Medicine 377 (2017): 2005–7.

      26 26. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Largest Consolidated Humanitarian Appeal for Yemen to Provide a Lifeline to 13.1 Million People” (2018).

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      28 28. Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group, “Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,” The New England Journal of Medicine, no. 5