Why does conflict torment the Middle East?
OXFORD: Each new war in the Middle East presents itself as an unprecedented crisis. Yet behind the headlines lurks a pattern going back more than a century: a pattern in which unresolved disputes over borders, identity, statehood, foreign intervention, and political legitimacy repeatedly erupt into new violence.
For Professor Eugene Rogan, one of the world’s most important historians
of the modern Middle East, the region’s recurring instability cannot be understood by looking only at current conflicts. It requires drawing a line from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire to European colonial rule, military dictatorships, the Cold War and the uprisings sparked by the 2011 uprisings.
“The challenge that Middle Eastern and North African countries face is that they don’t have the kind of institutional consensus that allows them to have a stable and continuous policy,” Rogan said.
Unlike Western democracies, where constitutions evolved through public debate and political engagement, many Arab societies were denied that opportunity, and the effects are evident even to this day.
“I think this is where the legacy of history weighs on the Middle East,” he said, referring to Arab countries plagued by instability. “There has been a succession of repressive state systems that denied the people of countries the opportunity to come and debate their political vision and make it a reality on their own terms.”
Rogan traces that legacy to Ottoman rule. “The Ottomans…explicitly prevented people in the Arab world from organizing and talking about a political future other than being part of the Ottoman Empire,” he said.
Professor Eugene Rogan
European colonial powers simply replaced one form of repression with another. “Both the British and the French took drastic measures against all nationalist societies and organizations. They imprisoned them, they intimidated them.”
After independence, hopes for representative politics were again dashed as military coups spread across the region. “These military men come to power and they too oppose any political expression that is not in line with their vision,” Rogan said.
The cumulative result, he argued, is a vast swath of the Middle East where strongmen have rarely allowed the people to shape their political destinies. “It means that there is no investment in a political present that unites the people of the Arab world.”
Few topics generate as much debate as the borders drawn after the First World War. Rogan maintains that they were never intended to create stable nation states. “Britain and France embarked on a kind of partition diplomacy,” he said. “Not with the goal of creating a stable region, but rather to try to achieve a balance of imperial power.”
The colonial powers divided Ottoman territory according to imperial interests rather than local aspirations. “They did not see the Middle East as a region that would exercise independence or autonomy. They saw it as a territory that was going to come under their imperial umbrella.”
However, despite their artificial origins, today’s states have become political realities. “You can’t really wish away a Syria or an Iraq,” Rogan said. “Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese and Jordanians have come to identify with the shape of the country that was given to them.”
The greatest instability, he maintains, resides in the people who are left without States. “So this really leaves us with the stateless, and that’s where the Palestinians and the Kurds come into the picture.”
Kurdish communities divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkiye have endured decades of repression and repeated insurgencies.
But Rogan believes that no issue has destabilized the region more than Israel and Palestine. “Israel-Palestine has to be the most destabilizing of the conflicts in the region, and this is very much a conflict with deep historical roots.”
The conflict, he noted, has sparked repeated interstate wars before expanding from the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 to broader regional confrontations.
While regional rivalries are important, Rogan believes outside intervention has repeatedly intensified instability. “Instability in the Middle East is both a feature of external and internal pressures,” he said.
During the Cold War, the Arab states became battlegrounds for Soviet-American competition. “The Arab-Israeli conflict almost became the proxy war of the Cold War itself.”
The end of the Cold War, he maintains, made things worse. “The Arab world found itself in a unipolar world of unbridled American domination.”
He points to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the expansion of US military bases as turning points, arguing that more recent US support for Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran has brought the region to “the peak of instability through external intervention.”
U.S. Army military police provide crowd control as Iraqi citizens line up to receive food and water being distributed to citizens in need April 8, 2003 near Al Najaf in Iraq. (AFP)
However, Rogan is equally critical of the region’s own governments. “They have oppressed their people quite consistently and have been very intolerant of dissent.”
Repression, he warns, often generates violent alternatives. “Repressive states breed violent opposition,” he said. Militant organizations from Al-Qaeda to Daesh emerged in part from that environment.
The Arab uprisings of 2011 briefly seemed to offer another path. “It was a peaceful civil opposition… saying, ‘Enough is enough. Our governments are rotten and our opposition movements are rotten, and we the people demand change.'”
Instead, many uprisings led to civil war. “They created power vacuums that would be filled by men with guns and more violence.”
For Rogan, no explanation is enough. “There is a convergence of external and internal forces that play a very important role in explaining the region’s conflicts. There are no simple explanations for a region… that faces deep-rooted conflicts with no obvious signs of resolution.”
Despite the bleak outlook, Rogan believes the current upheavals mark more than just another cycle of family crises. “I don’t think the old patterns of the past are surviving today’s violence,” he said. “I think something new is emerging.”
He believes the region is entering “a moment of important transition,” although its final shape remains unclear. Among the biggest concerns, he said, is the perception that Israel, backed by the United States, is reshaping the regional order through military power.
Rather than accept another foreign-engineered deal, Rogan hopes regional powers will take the lead. “There is a deep consensus against succumbing to yet another vision of the Middle East shaped by foreign actors.”
That could encourage “a core of Arab governments to work together to try to shape the architecture they would like to see in the region.”
However, the challenge is immense after years of conflict. The region has suffered, he said, “a period of unprecedented destruction and devastation, government failure and humanitarian crisis.”
Still, he believes the opportunity exists. “There is a core of states that enjoy sufficient stability and have the material resources to take the lead here.”
His warning is stark.
“For those who do not act in 2026, they will be acted upon,” Rogan said. “And I think the governments of the region are aware of that threat. And I hope they act responsibly.”
