Abstract
Political violence is a key theme in understanding the historical and contemporary Middle East characterized by different religious, social, and political revolts. It is thus salient to analyze why political violence emerges, how it is diffused, and why it takes different configurations during insurgencies. In order to study these questions, this article establishes three analytical frameworks: interdependency among violence and social movements, diffusion of violence, and proxy warfare. First, I argue that political violence and mobilization are interdependent processes which are shaped by personal, local, and historical dynamics. Secondly, violence is more likely to spread among the societies displaying similar political, religious, or ethnic characteristics, in particular, if there are individuals and militant organizations who take it as a model in order to affect the conflict. Finally, this violence, which depends on local and regional factors, often intersects with global politics and its path is altered as a result.
A single definition of political violence cannot be applied universally due to historical and cultural variations. Events and experiences are subjective or specific depending on context, but Nieuburg’s definition is one of the most comprehensive. Political violence refers to “acts of disruption, destruction, injury whose purpose, choice of targets or victims, surrounding circumstances, implementation, and/or effects have political significance” (Nieuburg, 1969:13). Although the importance of violence cannot be limited to a particular place, it is nowadays a crucial element in the Middle East and the Maghreb where violence is a prominent political dynamic. Most of the states in these regions were established or reconstructed following the First World War, the wars of national liberation, and decolonization. State institutions established new ethnic, religious or secular strata in the society which were contested by popular movements such as the Kurdish, Palestinian, Shia and Sunni uprisings or by social groups and classes including students, workers, peasants, labor unions (Anderson, 2016). These oppositions refer particularly to the concept of rebellion which signifies “qiyâm, 1 ” “ʿisyân” or “tamarrud” in the ancient and modern Middle Eastern culture. Rebellion, in particular when the actors are armed, is not a means of consensual persuasion but rather a means of coercion. By focusing on the shifting configurations and significations of rebellion, the article aims to study its relationship with political violence in three parts. The first part studies the relationship between political violence and mobilization to examine why violence is both a product and producer of social movements. The second part focuses upon the diffusion mechanism of violence during rebellions to understand how violence spreads in time and space. The final part attempts to explain political violence in the context of proxy wars. 2
Interdependency between violence and social movements during revolts
Social movements are either the result of social and cultural changes (Killian, 1964: 428) which mobilize people around a common cause; or are a collective demand and action to change a certain aspect of social, cultural, political or gender system. The term mobilization conceptually means that a group, community, or organization acquires control over their material and symbolic resources to maximize their interests around a given cause (Tilly, 1978). It may empirically refer to recruitment, framing sympathizers, going on strike, lobbying, making propaganda, agitations, demonstrations, protests in the street. Mobilization can also mean participation to, or an action facilitated by, an online protest or tweeting (Tüfekçi and Wilson, 2012).
Political violence and popular mobilizations are interdependent during revolts. Several case studies illustrate this relationship. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkarên Kurdistan, PKK), founded by a group of Kurdish students in Diyarbakır in 1978 due to increasing limitations on rights and youth radicalization following the coups d’Etat (1960 and 1971), combined armed struggle with social movements in several ways in different historical periods. There are examples which relate to the use of violence by the PKK in conjunction with a mobilized social base in the 1970s and 1990s. The organization entered into conflict with Turkish nationalists in Bingöl, Kurdish tribes in Urfa and rival nationalist Kurdish movements in Anteb and Mardin in the 1970s. The process resulted in a monopolization of violence, the framing of the society through a radical ideology, and increased recruitment of the Kurdish youth in Turkey. The PKK incited serhildan in the 1990s, which establishes a similar link between violence and mobilization in a different way. Serhildans were popular urban or rural riots in Turkey’s Kurdish provinces. These insurgencies were prior and posterior to armed conflicts that occurred between the PKK and Turkish military forces. Political violence constituted a context of mobilization shaped by a social base, the Kurdish guerilla, and the state. On the one hand, the death of Kurdish militants in the conflicts with the police and the army incited the mobilization of the Kurdish social base. On the other hand, the PKK increased the attacks after the killing of civilian demonstrators by the security forces during the riots. This recursive circularity enabled the PKK to mobilize anger, pain, political demands, and the Kurdish ideology.
The Kurdish conflict in Syria can be used as a second case for empirical evidence. There, the Kurdish conflict was almost dissociated from the armed struggle until the civil war broke out in 2011. Protest movements and organizations appeared after the foundation of the Syrian state in 1946. In 1957, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria was established. Although the party had the objective of obtaining Kurdish cultural rights and agrarian reform, most of their leaders and members were arrested and tortured (Vanlı, 1968: 7). Kurdish political organizations consequently operated mostly as underground groups, but their use of violence against the state and its symbols was irregular and unsystematic. The PKK has been present in Syria since 1979, but did not engage in armed activities against the Syrian government until the 2000s. The organization founded the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat/Democratic Union Party) its political offshoot in 2003. Violent Kurdish riots emerged when a Kurdish protest escalated into violence in 2004. Popular tensions between Kurdish and Arabic supporters during a football match resulted in state repression which killed Kurdish supporters and mobilized people to the streets in Kurdish villages, districts and provinces in northern Syria. The Syrian civil war, however, changed the configuration of Kurdish mobilization in three ways. The first was the Syrian regime’s withdrawal from Kurdish areas and decision to grant political autonomy and power to the PYD against the Free Syrian Army (al-Jaysh al-Hurr) supported by Turkish government in 2012. The second was the foundation of the Kurdish YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel/People’s Defense Units) by the PYD, which made military service mandatory; the third was the conflict with ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS) which attacked Kurdish areas and increasingly drove men and women to take up arms in 2014 and 2015.
Rebellions in Syria, initiating in mostly Sunni populated provinces, display a similar mechanism of mobilization with a longer continuum of violence. The first episode of these rebellions is particularly relevant for it was neither simply a social movement nor exclusively an armed struggle to begin with. A popular revolt erupted in Deraa in March 2011. Deraa is a province near the Jordanian border where the population is mostly Sunni and tribal. Manifestations took place following the arrests of school children who wrote slogans concerning the fall of the regime (al-shaʿab yurîd isqât al-nizâm/The people want to overthrow the regime). The protestors demanding the liberation of children were subject to expression repression by the security forces. Bullets fired into the crowd changed the manifestation into an insurgency which lasted for several days. Protesters fired at public buildings. This popular protest rapidly extended to nearby regions where people were already frustrated in Baniyah, Homs and Douma (a suburban district of Damascus). Violent incidents also took place in Deir al-Zour and Idlib in the spring 2011. In a couple of months, about one thousand people were killed, most of whom were protestors and civilians. However, it was the attacks in Jisr al-Shughour which marked a new phase of political violence in the Syrian rebellion. Rebels began systematically engaging in armed struggles against the power of al-Assad in June 2011. More than a hundred security forces members were killed in the armed operations, including bombings at police stations and gendarmeries. These attacks showed that the Syrian opposition was no longer a simple protest but an armed rebellion.
Mobilization during the Tunisian revolution demonstrates a pattern of interaction between violence and social movements. The self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi (1984–2011) in the public place of Sidi Bouzid (on 17 December 2010, and death on 4 January 2011) began a popular mobilization against the regime, provoked the fall of the dictator General Zayn al-Abidin bin Ali, and led to the protests in Libya, Algeria, and Egypt. Bouazizi, a fruit seller, burned himself upon the requisition of his stand by the police. Self-immolation in this case was not an act of organized protest, rather it was an act of desperation or individual expression of a collective frustration of the economically marginalized within the society. It was like a man’s “frozen act having no future,” 3 but paradoxically it became an intermediary between himself and the outer world. It triggered the rebellion resulting in the revolution. Bouazizi rapidly became a symbol of the Jasmin revolution and his actions were imitated in Egypt.
The case of Bouazizi is comparable to that of Khaled Said in Egypt in that the effects which violence produced resembled one another: Khaled Said was a victim of police repression and his death provoked a popular insurgency that led six months later to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak (Naba, 2011). Khaled Said was tortured to death by the Egyptian police in June 2010. On 25 January 2011, thousands of Egyptians used the slogan “We are all Khaled Said” against police repression and the dictatorship. Like Bouazizi, he quickly became known as one of the heroic figures in revolutionary networks. His oppression constituted a theme and became a way to create mobilization. Tahrir square became a place of popular gathering as well as a spatial and symbolic representation of revolt against the government. The following events that spanned 18 days led to the departure of the dictator.
The insurgency in Libya developed through combination of protest movements with already armed militia groups against the regime. In February 2011, a popular protest broke out over the arrest of an activist in Benghazi, a city prone to dissidence against the regime. The regime forces reacted brutally to the demonstrations that were spreading among civilian populations. After the militia forces seized towns like Benghazi and Misrata, the regime forces organized air strikes to counter their advances. Despite the UN Security Council declaration of a no fly zone in order to impede regime’s air strikes, the country devolved into civil war. Libya was already divided between three regions (Cyrenaica in the East, Tripolitania in the West, Fezzan in the South) and along tribal or ethnic lines such as Arabs, Toubous, Amazighs, Tuaregs dating back to the reign of Muammar al-Kaddafi. These divisions show the connection between the civil war and prewar cleavages that resulted in political violence (Kalyvas, 2006). The rebellion, as well as the toppling of the regime, promoted new fragmentations caused by rival militia formations, tensions between revolutionary and counter revolutionary groups, and competing processes of militarization among the revolutionary groups vying for power.
To be sure, each case presented above involves unique individuals, communities, and situations as they are situated within different historical political dynamics. Kurdish movements emerged as a response to state exclusion of Kurdish identity and culture following the establishment of new national states in the Middle East. 4 Economic frustration was a factor in the Kurdish conflict; it was, however, perceived in ethno-political terms rather than simply mere lagging economic development. Arab insurgencies, actors who came into being as the result of shifting economic, cultural and religious relations, were oppositional forces to autocratic Arab regimes. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, the state’s restrictive attitudes on political-religious groups and activities developed an individualized piety that may have helped afterwards the spread of social protest (Hoffman and Jamal, 2014). In Syria, the conflict was particularly structured around the sectarian tensions between Alawis and Sunnis, although it was not exclusively limited to this division.
Motives and ideology also help to shape differences in the link between violence and mobilization. The Kurdish cause is motivated by a nationalist leftist ideology which includes conflict about language, identity and territory, and other ethnic characteristics; this is why it can be called an ethnic conflict. Arab revolts, however, have sought to change the political system specifically. Popular Arab mobilizations were composed of heterogeneous organizations such as professional associations, liberal intellectuals, unemployed youth, left wing parties, and repressed Islamist parties which played a key role. Such heterogeneity was expression of multiple intentionalities by various actors, making it difficult to attribute a collective identity to their mobilizations.
Moreover, there are essential differences in the quantitative aspect of conflict which illuminate the nature of rebellions. The Kurdish rebellion has lasted much longer than the Arab insurgencies, so they have different tempo. The temporal rhythm of the Kurdish revolt is slow and more controlled by the state and the rebels. This is why it is less destructive than the Arab rebellions which were more accelerated and turned to civil wars. 5 The Kurdish conflict in Turkey led to the death of approximately 60,000 people since the end of 1970s, the Tunisian revolution about 150 people, Egypt’s uprisings in 2012 and 2013 to a few thousand, Libya’s conflict was estimated to have caused about 15,000 deaths, and the conflict in Syria, where several cities were destroyed, caused more than 500,000 deaths within seven years. Kurdish PYD has established an army of about 70,000–80,000 men and women and the Free Syrian Army has mobilized about 100,000 militants throughout the rebellion. At certain moments during the various rebellions, in particular between 2012 and 2016, all of the Salafist organizations reached a network of militants composed of almost one hundred thousand people, including people from Asian, European and African countries. Considered in terms of causalities, physical destruction, deaths over specific time periods, the number of people who used violence, and the number involved in the conflict, injured, or displaced because of it, indicators of conflict suggest that political violence is associated with quantitatively variable factors.
Since each situation is unique, the outcomes also display some variation. Tunisian mobilization resulted in revolution. Egyptian revolt overthrew the old regime in 2011, but the new regime led by Morsi ended by coup d’Etat in 2013. The Libyan insurgency resulted in the fall of the regime assisted by the intervention of NATO forces. Consequently, different power centers emerged including interim governments, councils, assemblies, armies, and hundreds of militia organizations. Syrian revolt became bitter civilian war with the multiplication of various radical organizations, and social movements became marginalized. About 60 different Sunni armed groups and organizations have appeared there since 2011. Sunni Arab opposition (muʿârada) was divided between Free Syrian Army and the radical Salafist movement, from which several fractions emerged. Such fragmentation became highly radicalized both by Syrian state’s politics of divide et impera (divide and rule), as well as regional and international forces’ intervention. This splintering that follows violent incidents reactivated violence.
In spite of these divergent movements, these conflicts established a link between violence and mobilization: violence used by the state or non-state actors mobilized people. This argument is plausible when violence is both structural or conjunctural because the dynamic of interdependency appears in various social, political, and historical forms. Why and how do these dynamics work?
When a state exercises its power in arbitrary and coercive ways, it provokes violent responses on popular and organizational levels. This is usually the case when violence arises from protest movements. We can look at the possible effects of military and police repression on social conflagration to explain political violence. Opp and Roehl (1990) indicated that repression usually impedes protest because of sanctions. However, as the authors (1990: 521) went on to say, “this direct effect may be endorsed under some conditions, or it may be neutralized, or even reversed if repression leads to micromobilization processes that raise incentives for protest.” For instance, mobilization during the Tunisian rebellion supports the argument that state repression causes collective action, because the police reaction to Bouazizi and the subsequent protesters incited revolutionary crisis and mobilization. As the victims and their social environment viewed the coercive authority as unjust, such perceptions produced encouraging effects, which are those that incite further protest; this supports the argument by White (1989) and Opp and Roehl (1990). This sort of effects arose from the involvement of illegitimate enforcers in Tunisian protests, meaning that political repression can lead people to use violent protest tactics especially if the context is authoritarian.
This perspective, based on the hypotheses by White (1989), Opp and Roehl (1990) is useful but has some limitations because it may ignore institutional and historical exclusion of an ethnic identity and religious minority or majority from the power structures. As Hafez (2003) argued, popular revolts and mobilizations occur as a result of combining political and institutional exclusion with reactive and non-selective repression. Before spontaneous mobilizations started as violent reactions to the state’s arbitrary use of force on Bouazizi in Tunisia or Khaled Said in Egypt, malcontent had long been spreading among the people of the region. Unemployment was high particularly among the youth, Islamic movements were repressed, and the political system was not democratic due to limited access to representation of popular claims by opposition parties, nor were free elections held to choose representatives and authority figures.
On the other hand, we should be cautious not to consider political violence simply a dependent variable. Indeed, violence may establish its own cycle of persistence, and sometimes, it is not the most repressive moments which created radical social movements. For instance, in Turkey, armed struggles persisted even when the state provided some opportunity for the Kurdish opposition to take part in democratic institutions such as rights to establish legal parties enabling access to the parliament. In Syria, 2011 was not the most oppressive period of the authoritarian regime in comparison to the last four decades. Some Syrian people, including the opposition members, acknowledged to me that society was economically much more prosperous in the 2000s than it was in the 1990s. This is why it seems fair to suggest that political violence, which is rooted in historical conditions of repression, may need a spontaneous cause to appear. At times, this is caused by a generational change as the rebellion in Deraa illustrates: as the state experienced a political transfer from the authoritarian father (Hafez al-Assad, President from 1971 to 2000) to a comparatively liberal son (Bashar al-Assad), the oppressed society shifted from the leadership of “conformist fathers” to “radical sons” who started the revolt in Deraa in 2011.
The development of radical movements that acquired a popular base after the foundation of military wings during the civil war shows the complex nexus between violence and mobilization rather than a linear tie. Kurdish YPG and other rebel groups including ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrâr al-Shâm, etc. increased their capacity of mobilization because they had armed power. Their ideological mechanism and world views were different, but the common mechanism was that they used political violence to protect their followers against their enemies, gain territory, and created new authorities during the civil war.
Della Porta (2013: 5) admits that violence reconstructs the causal mechanisms linking the macro-system in which political violence evolves and the micro-system of the symbolic interactions within the radical networks. This suggestion is original because of its focuses on the complexity in a valuable way, but the way Della Porta conceptualizes it can be criticized. Although it indicates an erroneous causal relationship, the relationship between macro- and micro-systems is better conceptualized as configurational, circular, subjective, and multilateral for the following reasons. First, as Bourdieu (2002: 262) indicates on the basis of Thompson’s work, rebellion or collective awareness of economic and political injustice sometimes arises from a process unrelated to revolutionary cogito, but as a result of public outrage caused by bloodshed. It would be too substantialist and positivist an approach if one considers political violence without any attempt to understand the context of consciousness within which conflict emerges. Second, there is a particular type of violence which Fanon (1961/1991) and Sorel (1908/1990) discussed long ago: militant individuals or organizations are formed and changed by the use of violence during revolts. This violence has an ideological and subjective mechanism that is based on the refusal of established systems, and legitimizes violence in order to transform the self, the society, and to oppose the adversary. Thus, it is important to recognize the role of human beings’ intentionality and consciousness to affront historical determinism (Shariati, 2010: 19–20), although the intended change usually occurs, not in a single direction, but in multiple or sometimes opposite directions from what rebels intended. This is especially exemplified by long lasting destructive revolts like the Syrian and Iraqi ones: the rebels not only struggle against the regime but also identify with their rival through a process of mimetism (Mounier, 1946: 68) where they begin producing the same patterns of violence. This process usually occurs when an oppressed group takes up arms against their historical enemies, for example when the Free Syrian Army rebels killed most of the members of al-Berri tribe in 2013, one of the regime’s militias. Third, the importance of the way in which political violence and social movements evolve historically, particularly if their use of violence has fluctuated. Both may persist in changing configurations and operate on micro, local, and macro levels. 6 They can impact each other in direct and indirect ways, just as one can marginalize the other as well. For example, revolt in Syrian towns like Deraa, Idlib, and Homs began with social movements. These towns produced later their own violent organizations, some of which more radicalized with the involvement of global Islamist militants and networks (e.g. Idlib, Manbij). Political violence was organized by various militant groups (such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrâr al-Shâm, etc.) which then provoked ideological and social coordination resulting in popular participation (Collins, 2008; Malešević, 2010).
Finally, subjective violence generates structural effects when it is persistent in time and space because it structures radical feelings, behavior, and symbolic resources of the insurgent groups. When political violence is structured in such a similar way to what Bourdieu (2002) called “habitus,” it brings about permanent militant recruitment, in particular in historically enduring revolts. The permanent and multiple militia formations in Libya, Syria, and Iraq are pertinent examples of such interactions between subjective and structural violence. Such examples underline empirical richness and the complexity of rebellions which most social movement theories ignore, as they fail to recognize existential, temporal, and contingent aspects of the processes under study.
Diffusion of violence and rebellions: Proximity, wave dynamic, and emulation
The above empirical and theoretical discussion addresses the question of what factors incite political violence, or how violence is initiated. In this section, I examine what possibly happens next— the spread of the violence and rebellions. This is how small conflicts become enormous wars. There are at least three mechanisms that play a role in the diffusion of violence and rebellion.
Proximity
Rebellions involve a complex process where violence diffuses from one place or actor to another. This diffusion depends firstly on proximity, in the geographical, cultural and psychological sense (Simmel, 1999: 599–668). In my previous research about popular Kurdish insurgencies, I noted that violence extends from one province or village to another one, often when they are geographically close or have similar historical political patterns of conflict (Orhan, 2014). This observation applies to the diffusion of violence during Arab rebellions as well. The Tunisian rebellion diffused to Libya and Egypt rather than other African countries. Why?
The three Arab countries are mainly characterized by Sunni communities. In contrast, the Iranian revolution in 1979 took place in a Shia majority country through a process of complex interplay between the Shia ulema (Muslim scholars), the bazaar (merchants, artisans and shopkeepers, etc.), and heterogeneous crowds (Abrahamian, 2008, 2009; Keddie, 1983). 7 This revolution influenced Sunni societies as well, but did not ignite revolutionary movements that toppled the regime in Sunni countries. 8 In addition to religion, there are other similarities between Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. They are in geographical proximity to each other, producing common social capital and increasing the possibility of trans-regional impacts. The dictatorships there were not equipped with democratic institutions, rather they had a long tradition of authoritarianism (Anderson, 2011). Muammar al-Kaddafi remained in power for 41 years, Hosni Mubarak 29 years, and Zayn al-Abidin bin Ali 23 years. These similar situations created common claims for freedom against corruption and clientelism within the opposition parties in each society. These claims were particular for their use of shaʿab (people), which is political rhetoric (McGee, 1975) and signifies their inclination to transition into a new system of popular governance. People, revolution, equality, etc. are not only intentional but are also sources of political legitimacy. The use of popular slogans including al-shaʿab yurîd isqât al-nizâm (The people want to overthrow the regime), thawra (revolution), hurriya (freedom), ʿadâla (justice) during Arab revolts are clear examples of this. Such a popular rhetoric is central to the collectivization process (McGee, 1975). Terms such as yawm al-ghadab (the day of rage) and jumʿat al-rahîl (Friday of departure) symbolize the same things in the Tunisian, Libyan and Egyptian societies’ daily languages. The concept of jumʿat al-rahîl, for instance, does not hold much weight in a non-Muslim society because Friday is a special day in Islam. As a result, there was a common semantic field of opposition which relied on similar historical repressions and future horizons of expectancy, which allowed connected societies to influence each other.
Another important example to discuss is the effects of proximity within the same society or country, namely on a national level. I mentioned above Deraa, Baniyah, Homs, Douma, Deir al-Zour, Idlib, Jisr al-Shughour to show that the rebellion in these places followed each other or simultaneous appeared. Some of these cities and regions (e.g. Deraa and Douma, and Idlib and Jisr al-Shughour) are closely situated to one another, but more importantly they are primarily Sunni and have similar historical patterns of conflict: they experienced state coercion since the Al-Assad regime began in 1971. The Muslim Brotherhood that operated during the 1970s and 1980s were permanent Islamic networks that relied on a heritage of resistance against the state authority. The bourgeoisie in these towns was religious and deprived of political power. Peasantry and disenfranchised urban youth suffered from economic problems. All of these factors facilitated the spread of the revolt.
The Middle East and the Maghreb are not a homogenous bloc but a whole mass of rites, identities, and cultures that are closely imbricated with each other (Munîf, 1989: 64). Some of these communities have greater or lesser connection with those around them, so the impact of events varies depending on proximity. For example, the Kurdish insurgency in Syria was reshaped during the civil war, but this happened due to the influence of Kurdish organizations in Turkey and Iraq. Though they were frustrated by the regime, the behaviors and positions of Kurdish rebels differed from Sunni Arabs because they did not revolt together. On the other hand, Alawites (Arabs or Turkmen) and most of the Orthodox and Catholic Christians did not rebel against the Syrian regime in 2011. In 2013, Orthodox Syrian family members who fled Syria told me that, when the revolt began in 2011, the priest visited homes and advised families not to be involved in the events and to not to take side for or against the protests given the uncertain consequences of participating. They were in a difficult situation at the time, oscillating between “opposing the regime which is oppressive to people but provides them minimal economic and religious freedoms” and “revolting with others and being persecuted after simply because they belong to a religious minority.” The dilemma of the priest between the opposition and the regime, and his pragmatic choice given the dramatic existential conditions of religious minorities invites us to remember Hamlet’s act that “rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” (Shakespeare, 1899:101). 9
Thus, they had a different attitude to the government because of their religious, economic survival interests. These examples provide confirmatory evidence that it is more likely that disobedience of a repressed society motivates the revolt of another society which experiences similar conditions if they are culturally and geographically situated in proximity.
Wave dynamic
It is rare that an insurgency remains constrained to the place it emerged from if there is a cultural, geographical, and political proximity with other places and peoples. But how does the violence really spread? When observing the way in which violence spreads, we see a metaphorical “wave” of uprisings crossing geographical space and time. The wave dynamic (Brass, 2006: 7–9) was demonstrated through an examination of the dissemination of violent events in India's uprisings. The metaphor is drawn from nature (Brass, 2006: 49) and points to the fact that the sequence of violent events is “natural”; in other words, a riot can spread without premeditation or conscious mimetism. The diffusion is influenced by the location and timing of violence, which are critical junctures that connect revolutionary events with accumulated frustrations as well as generate collective action (Bertrand, 2008). It embodies the spread of insurgency as well as its theme and representation of conflict (Orhan, 2014), which is sometimes accelerated by social or mass media.
The spread of self-immolation towards Egypt from Tunisia is a pertinent example of the wave dynamic. The suicide of Bouazizi, which provoked the revolution, was reproduced in Egypt. On 17 January, 2011, Abou Abdel Moneim, a modest snack shop owner, set himself on fire in front of the Egyptian parliament. Moneim was indeed needed bread to feed his family living in the village of Qantara in the Nile Delta. The government was providing bread to poor people upon the receipt of food coupons. Moneim, having the coupons, went to a distribution center nearby that refused his demand: he was accused of selling bread rather than giving them to his children. Unable to feed his family, he consequently set himself ablaze in front of the headquarters of the Council of Ministers. Self-immolation by fire continued. On 18 January, a day after the suicide of Moneim, Ahmed Hachem al-Sayyed, an unemployed 25 year old, who was declared by the security forces to be mentally ill, set himself on fire on the rooftop of his home (Le Monde, 20 January 2011: 6). Within the same week, four Algerians also attempted to end their lives by self-immolation.
These examples illustrate “tahmîsh al-insân” (the marginalization of human beings); something Naguib Mahfouz often discusses in his stories and novels. Michel Aflaq (1973) previously presented Arab nationalism and socialism as a way to overthrow feudalism, achieve economic equality, and to ignite a revolution by and in service of the people. Differently from what Aflaq hoped for, political parties like the Baʿathist party (Syria) or National Democratic Party (Egypt), families of the presidents, their allies and military bureaucracies monopolized not just power, but also pleasure, desire, and luxury wherein symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2002) is exercised through this principle of structural inequality. A man or woman can revolt against a political system, wherein they are not recognized as human beings. Bouazizi and Moneim are examples of humiliated individuals. They were part of the cultural and popular margins of society from which collective revolutionary action arose (Bamyeh, 2011). Indeed, Bouazizi began to work in agricultural fields when he was six years old, then occasionally as a bricklayer during high school. After leaving high school, he became a street fruit and vegetable seller living in Sidi Bouzid in Central Tunisia. His dream was to buy a truck in order not to have to push his cart. Without the state authorization to carry out his work, his goods were often confiscated by municipal employees. When he attempted to protest against this assault on his livelihood and dignity, he was slapped and mistreated by the police and municipal agents. The case of Moneim, as previously described, is identical. Moneim had to choose between selling the bread that he obtained with subsidy coupons to gain money, and giving bread to his children. The refusal of bread by official authorities deprived him of both options. Once admitted to the hospital after his suicide attempt, an official communiqué indicated that he was mentally ill person and was sent to an insane asylum (Le Monde, 19 January 2011: 6).
The wave dynamic in these examples is to be understood in relation to economic, psychological, and political crises that occur simultaneously. “Revolutionary times are [indeed] the crises of the collective self that passes through each individual” (Mounier, 1946: 113). They consist of critical moments where “the organism is characterized by the decompression of the temporality of the instant” (Sartre, 1960: 167–168) and hence serve as the basis of political violence and identity. While under the influence of exogenous factors or when provoked, individuals react radically to unexpected acts, guided by their temporarily exaggerated feelings (Freud, 1949: 15). During such moments, the recursive circularity including a dialectic transition from crisis to collective action signals a project of resistance and change.
There is another significant factor which explains wave dynamic: rumors can play a role in circulating news, narratives, and emotions that drive angry crowds towards the use of violence in addition to the crisis, suffering and marginalization of human beings. The rumors can be true or false but are shaped by ethnic, gendered, folkloric, and religious themes and motives (Fine, 2013), and can be spread more quickly nowadays due to online communication systems. What mobilized the relatives and social environment of Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid was the rumor that a female police member struck him. Sidi Bouzid is tribal society: a man being beaten by a woman galvanized patriarchal feelings because this situation affected the traditional conception of men and the women. In Syria, the governor of Deraa insulted the mothers of the abducted children when the men asked for the liberation of the children. This provocation drove people to demonstrate in the street against the regime. Another example, situated in a more historical and different context, but with the same effect of the symbolic attack on protesting civilians is when the French army occupied Anteb and Maraş in 1919 in Ottoman territory. Local people resisted the takeover but were not effectively mobilized until a French soldier removed a Muslim woman's veil, sparking resistant violence that lead to liberation. Often a hot event like this which makes part of a larger context can kickstart a spontaneous movement or resistance when it circulates through the form of rumor. It generates symbolic violence which is charged with ardent emotions that often lead people to use physical force. Gender conceptions, religious belief, and ethnic identity of the society in question are salient to understanding how this pattern of attack–reaction occurs and develops as a result of wave dynamic.
Dynamic of emulation
Rebellions and revolutions usually happen in fluid contexts rather than rigid contexts. The horizon of visibility can be very limited and uncertainty can invade the political field. This does not mean that actors lose their political consciousness and “horizon of expectation” (ufûq al-intizâr) and that they engage in absurd decisions and irrational actions. As they choose specific targets, places, and moments (Horowitz, 2001), Gustave Le Bon’s (1963) concept of emotional contagion and spontaneity interacts with consciously organized political violence.
Indeed, the diffusion of political violence is not a simple product of chance. Insurgency violence also spreads from one region to another through the dynamic of emulation (Orhan 2014: 302). As actors deliberately emulate the representation of an event or person (Tilly and Tarrow 2008), the emulation differs from the wave effect. In these situations, a sentiment of urgency develops while similar rebel groups incite a movement (Crenshaw, 1981: 389). Martha Crenshaw gives the example of the spread of anti-colonialist violence in the Maghreb in the 1950s and 1960s. This diffusion in part relies on an image of success that motivates the fighters to use arms, and identify with those they are emulating (Crenshaw, 1981: 389). The Algerian National Liberation Front followed the anti-colonial protest methods of Tunisian and Moroccan nationalists which led them to independence in 1956 (Crenshaw, 1981).
There are more examples of emulation in history like Marxist-led armed uprisings in Latin America after 1968 (Crenshaw, 1981), and national, anti-monarchical revolutions in 1848 in Europe. Different western societies rebelled while influencing each other. The revolutionary movement erupted in January in Sicily and in February in Paris, and then spread to Budapest, Prague, Wien, and Berlin in March (Ferro, 2011; Hobsbawm, 2011). Configurations of historical revolutions vary and comparisons are inadequate. A kind of conscious mimetism can led to the diffusion of violence. Fanonian violence is mixed with other types of violence including self-sacrificial violence, and simultaneously emulates rhetorical language and political claims. The act does not only extend from one place to another; but its crucial aspect is a momentum towards a better future, becoming an attractive force that gives depth, imitative, and transformative power to the action (Mounier, 1946: 459). This violence is Fanonian when the action aims to upset power relations, changing the self and acting on the present and the future (Fanon, 1961/1991). Violence of “bastards,” “scum” and “those left behind” gains value within the rebel society because it triggers the fall of the regime, or creates encouraging effects for further collective violence. If interpreted in psychoanalytic terms, political violence results from a desire to transcend to a state of “wanted self” from a state of “received self” through struggle.
Political violence as an outcome of proxy wars
Conflicts in the Middle East have progressively become part of wider international struggle that has impacted the evolution of political violence in the region. The intervention of outside actors in local conflicts changes the nature and meaning of violence. For example, the degree of violence during the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars varied throughout time depending on national, regional, and international factors. As a result, it can be inadequate to explain political violence only in reference to social movements, the nature of local rebel groups, or societies and their revolutionary, religious, ethnic, democratic, or egalitarian demands. In addition to the two approaches above, it is necessary to analyze the process of violence through the lens of foreign involvement and proxy warfare.
Proxy wars are armed conflicts where states use non-state actors to exert power, protect their interests, influence internal dynamics, or assure durability of their presence in a delimited territory that is not their own. 10 In this type of relationship, at least one of the state or non-state actors is a foreign agent outside of local conflict dynamics. Regional powers and nation-states in the Middle East have a long history of using proxies making the concept extremely relevant to studying conflict in the region. 11
Although it is mostly conceived as a military strategy by scholars, it is more pertinent to consider proxy war as a complex social and political reality which emerged as the result of embedded historical and social factors that developed throughout the 20th and 21th centuries. Internal armed conflicts, like civil wars or rebellions, are not new phenomena; they have always existed in traditional conceptions of war and violence (Hobsbawm, 2002). Yet, they have become more prominent in the landscape of conflict due to the decrease of interstate wars (Hobsbawm, 2002). The changes in the international order and the concept of statehood caused this shift in the nature of warfare (Bruno Tertrais cited by Mumford, 2013: 41). As traditional empires like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires collapsed after the First World War, the concept of the European nation-state came to dominate definitions of sovereignty and understandings of governance, culminating in the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War. 12 Proxy wars remain connected to Cold War narratives and the popular imagination surrounding global politics during that era: two world powers, the USA and the USSR, avoiding direct military confrontation (Mumford, 2013: 41) by getting their allies to enter into conflict. The end of the Cold War only perpetuated this trend of proxy warfare as the bipolar world order shifted to a polyarchic world order (Seyom Brown cited by Marshall, 2016: 190). Tribal militias, ethnic conflicts, religious rebellions, and revolutions appeared as a byproduct of wider changes within the international system.
For example, the Kurdish rebellion, Wahhabi movement or Shia contestation in Ottoman “Iraq” 13 were not as relevant to international conflicts during the 19th century as they are today. This shift is the result of the change in level of political problems and meaning of rebellious acts and causes. Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia questions are no longer simply Ottoman or Iraqi problems but are a part of wider conflicts that reappeared as proxy conflicts in the context of local wars. 14 In other words, inter-state, regional and international competitions find their expression in local conflicts. There are indeed different players and conflicts of interests in the Middle East: the USA versus Russia and Iran in terms of economic and strategic interests, Qatar versus Saudi Arabia, or Saudi Arabia versus Iran, Turkey versus the various Kurdish movements, and Israel versus almost the entire region. These multiple struggles occur both in organizational and ideological forms as state and non-state actors have different relationships—be they conflictual or harmonious—with several governments and trans-national networks. In addition to direct military intervention by states, modern warfare consists of cooperation, alliances, and rapprochement, which leads local forces to interact with national and global forces. This strategy protects states from interstate wars, reduces their military personnel loss, and allows them to retain influence on the ground with little direct cost. The implication of this multiplication of actors, be they state, sub-state, or non-state, in the same conflict creates contrasting representations of violence and cooperation. Violence from multiple actors renders the boundaries between war and peace, terrorist and non-terrorist, and enemy and friend blurry and fluid.
The connections between radical movements, diffusion of violence, and proxy war
There are different layers of conflict from which violence arises and develops. The use of proxy war as an analytical tool does not intend to study violence only within the terms of international relations, rather it seeks to explain “the connections between many local political and religious struggles and places them within a broader dynamic of political violence over regional order” (Lynch, 2016: preface). This should, however, not diminish the primacy of local politics, identity, and actors (Lynch, 2016: preface). Indeed, proxy wars generally occur as a byproduct of continued popular insurgencies or social movements like in Syria and Libya, or they trigger and renew old rebellions like that of the Kurdish and Shia in the 1990s and 2000s after the American intervention in Iraq. As proxy wars draw on sectarian, ethnic, and tribal disputes, they radicalize them, resulting in civil wars. In the Syrian conflict, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar supported the Free Syrian Army which largely represented Sunni Arabs; the USA supported the Kurdish organizations; Iran sent Shia militias to protect the regime; and Russia backed the Syrian regime governed mostly by Alawites. All the while, Turkmen and Sunni Arab tribes were divided between many organizations in north and north eastern Syria. Foreign interventions usually take place when states are weakened by internal conflict. The ability to use violence consequently extends to the population as a whole, and its diffusion causes the state to lose its monopoly on violence within its boundaries (Hughes, 2014; Marshall, 2016: 190). In this case, the state is no longer an effective governing body with central authority. In consequence, war develops two characteristics through which warring parties understand the conflict. The first characteristic is subjectivation. Each actor perceives the other as a pawn or extension of an outside enemy, and thereby may ignore other autonomous social and political dynamics driving the other. States challenge each other by attacking non-state actors because they imagine them to be local manifestations of their enemy, and when their proxies are attacked, they feel themselves being attacked. The second characteristic is rationalization. Similarly to states, proxy groups struggle to preserve their own interests and survival. In this endeavor, they are aware that they are a part of local and international conflicts where the interests and ideals of outside actors converge with their own.
Proxy wars are also one of the contexts in which local radical organizations emerge and evolve. Faisal Devji (2013) considers the emergence of al-Qaeda to be a consequence of proxy warfare in Afghanistan. It is now commonly agreed on that in order to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. forces funded and supported Afghan mujahedeen forces from which an al-Qaeda network emerged towards the end of the war. Their defeat of the Soviets gave them the legitimacy and ability to organize as a militant group in the 1990s. This kind of process should not be neglected, nor should it be overestimated and used as a unique linear explanation. Indeed, the emergence of radical ideologies and organizations is complex, as they interact with and react to the world system and its various subsequent military interventions.
Take the example of the ISIL in Iraq. The emergence of this group occurred over three decades in Iraq. Gerges (2016) explains the gradual transition from Baathism to Islamism within the context of the uprisings in the 1990s and 2000s after the US-led Gulf Wars. Sunni and Shia communities were radicalized as a result of the US occupation (Gerges, 2016; Ruthven, 2016). In the years after the establishment of the new Iraqi government, sectarian politics marginalized the Sunni community and excluded them from the power structures, favoring the Shia. It is within this sectarian charged environment that al-Qaeda implanted itself in Iraq. A splinter group appeared under the leadership of Zarqawi after the second Gulf war, some of whom would later establish ISIL. Al-Qaeda and the ISIL are both Salafist organizations. The shift of affiliation among Iraqi’s Sunni Arabs corresponds to the rising popularity of Salafist ideology under conditions of war. As a result, traditional Islamist trends adopted Salafism, combining it with nationalist and territorial ambitions. When established powers are toppled, groups may choose new affiliations and identities, combining them with pre-existing ones, in order the name of resistance. Without reducing ISIL to a single process, or homogenizing its evolution, one may consider this as a conversion of identity and affiliation, a term used by Gerges (2016: 154). This change is not just tactical and temporary, as structural changes are not solely a tactical process in which some people change their affiliation, but a shift that occurs on a generational level. They are historically embedded that war and repression accelerates and intensifies.
Such a shift produced radical changes in the Middle East. The emergence of ISIL launched a new temporal and spatial crises and cycle of violence in 2014. The takeover of Mosul and its territorial expansion caused the formation of mainly Shia al-Hashd al-Shaʿabî (Popular Mobilization Forces) in order to counter it. The militia was composed of more than one hundred thousand people. It was formed in accordance with the fatwa by Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani (a Shia mujtahid, religious scholar or leader), and backed by the Iranian government. On the other hand, the massacre of Yazidi community by ISIL in Shangal led to the formation of Yazidi military organizations such as Yekîneyên Berxwedana Şengalê (YBŞ or Shangal Resistance Units), Yekinêyen Jinên Êzidxan (YJÊ, Yazidi Women’s Units) composed of about ten thousand men and women.
Conclusion
There is no uniform insurgency or pattern of political violence in Middle Eastern and Maghreb countries. The scope of this article involves a limited range of cases examined in a detailed manner. The inclusive and comparative framework has nonetheless enabled the identification of different types of relationships between violence, mobilization, and war without reducing them to a single trajectory, organization, or historical motive. Of course certain questions regarding the diffusion of violence could be further explored. For example: why did factors like proximity, wave dynamics, and emulation produce relatively less violent uprisings as well?
Bouazizi’s self-immolation was a violent act, but it was an act of protest rather than war—the latter is characterized by suicide attacks, bombings, and armed struggles. It is consequently not surprising that Bouazizi’s act of protest incited non-armed oppositions in countries like Jordan, Egypt, or Morocco. We must consider the way in which violence spreads with the personal and collective dispositions of those who reproduce the violence. Actors who engage in collective protests and violence are not necessarily the same, they could be students, workers, lawyers, illegal revolutionaries, and Islamist militants. Their differences will lead them to react in different manners to the same event. Whether actors are peaceful or violent, their nature and disposition matter. This “habitus” variable interacts with the state, who itself plays a role in the creation of political violence in the form of repression.
There are two types of states when analyzing the process of political violence. One is the national state which uses coercion to pressure its own citizens, and the other is the external state which produces or manipulates violence for its colonialist, imperialist, or regional interests. 15 Proxy war allows a better understanding of the role of states in local dynamics. External interventions provoke fragmentation, which in turn destroys the link between violence and collective protest, activates conflict, and changes the pattern of violence. While proxy warfare is central to understanding political violence, an over use of the state-centric approach can create problems. Proxies are more or less aware of their role in both local and wider regional or international conflicts when they act. They undoubtedly have agency, despite certain limitations and constraints that allow them to generate meanings and outcomes favorable to their agendas and goals.
While this article articulates three elements—interdependency among violence and social movements, diffusion of violence, and proxy war—this question needs further discussion. These three elements are not entirely independent, as case studies have shown that they can be intertwined or succeed each other. Each case of political violence, and how its various components interact with each other, is best explained within its very specific context and historicity. For example, the case of Syrian revolt shows the relationship between violence and mobilization, the diffusion of violence depending on proximity and emulation, and proxy war that has succeeded and impacted initials paths of violence. Historically, repressive state incited popular mobilizations which spread among populations sharing common features. This process resulted in proxy war because of weak state and foreign ambitions that aimed to protect or increase their interests in the region. The insurgency in Libya also was an example of proxy warfare. It began with local protests in Benghazi spreading to neighboring villages and towns. The NATO airstrikes played a key role in supporting the militias that toppled down the regime. Nonetheless, in some revolts, the three mechanisms cannot be said to operate always together. It is much more likely to observe the interdependency between political violence and mobilization, proximity and emulation, than proxy warfare. In the Tunisian revolt, all of these dynamics of violence manifested with the exception of proxy war. The revolution was spontaneous and short, and did not develop into civil war because the society is more homogenous. Using the concept of proxy warfare to understand all political violence might be baseless, context and history must be examined. To use such an approach indiscriminately would lead to determinist ideas.
All of these factors considered, it is reasonable to conclude that political violence by individuals and organizations embedded in local and historical contexts can by influenced by international politics. Despite boundaries, Westphalian sovereignty, and internal rules of functioning, Middle Eastern politics and societies, like many others in the world, are not completely self-contained entities. They involve some anarchic situations, moments and carry dynamics to make both peace and war that intersect with global politics.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.