Regional Security in the Middle East

A Critical Perspective

Pinar Bilgin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351790079
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this new and fully revised edition Pinar Bilgin provides an accessible yet critical analysis of regional security in the Middle East, analysing the significant developments that have taken place in the past years. Drawing from a wide range of critical approaches to security, the book offers a comprehensive study of pasts, presents, and futures of security in the region.

The book distinguishes itself from previous (critical) studies on regional security by opening up both 'region' and 'security'. Different from those approaches that bracket one or the other, this study takes seriously the constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of) security. There is not one Middle East but many, shaped by the insecurities of those who voice them. This book focuses on how present-day insecurities have their roots in practices that have, throughout history, been shaped by 'geopolitical inventions of security'. In doing so, the book lays the contours of a framework for thinking critically about regional security in this part of the world.

This second edition of Regional Security in the Middle East is a key resource for students and scholars interested in International Relations and Political Science, Security Studies, and Middle East Studies.

PART I

Pasts

1

Cold War pasts of security thinking

This chapter presents an overview of (Cold War) pasts of security thinking. The chapter begins by historicising and contextualising Security Studies as we know it—that is, as a product of the Cold War that focused on the security of states, emphasised the military dimension, and privileged the post-World War II status quo. The second section introduces four strands of critique of the sub-discipline that emerged during the Cold War period. Two interrelated points will be made: alternatives to Cold War Security Studies always existed notwithstanding the turbulence and anxiety generated by the superpower relationship; and critical approaches to security were far from being a precipitous product of post-Cold War euphoria (as it is sometimes presumed).

Cold War thinking on security

What is referred to here as Cold War Security Studies was known as ‘International Security Studies’ in the United States (US) and ‘Strategic Studies’ in Britain (Booth and Herring, 1994).¹ Notwithstanding the difference in titles, the focus on states as the primary referent (to whom security refers), the emphasis put on the military dimension of security, and the privilege accorded to post-World War II status quo in world politics united the two traditions (Booth, 1991: 318).

This is not to suggest that Cold War Security Studies was unified in its approach to global affairs. After all, the ‘security community’ approach developed by political scientist Karl Deutsch (Deutsch et al., 1957) also belonged to the same period (see Conclusion). Indeed, there were significant differences among students of Security Studies as witnessed in the debates that shaped this era (see, for example, Bull, 1968, Kaplan, 1973, Baylis, 1987, Nye, Jr. and Lynn-Jones, 1988). However, as anthropologist Hugh Gusterson underscored, these debates took place among insider critics who internalised ‘the foundational precepts of strategic discourse’. These debates served to reinforce the ‘foundational precepts’ of Security Studies, wrote Gusterson, by ‘channelling disagreements into certain frameworks within which the act of disagreement obscures actors’ shared allegiance to deeper structures of thought that contain their disagreements’ (Gusterson, 1999: 326–7).

Cold War Security Studies’ ‘shared allegiance to deeper structures of thought’ took the form of what International Relations (IR) scholars Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen (2009: 19) labelled as an ‘Anglo-centric (and militaristic and patriarchal) bias’. According to Buzan and Hansen, the authors of The Evolution of International Security Studies (2009), the implication of such a bias has been that there emerged a ‘blind spot’ in security scholarship whereby insecurities experienced in other parts of the world have been overlooked. Indeed, it was not until the 1980s that students of security in the Third World began to get their voices heard in the sub-discipline, identifying its limitations (Al-Mashat, 1985, Korany, 1986, Thomas, 1987). Even then, the ‘foundational precepts of strategic discourse’ remained intact well until the end of the Cold War (see the following section for further discussion).

Cold War Security Studies had two ‘foundational precepts’: the historical context of the Cold War and its students’ embrace of realism. To begin with the former, the significance of this apparent truism (the Cold War being a foundational precept of Cold War Security Studies) is that the growth of the sub-discipline should be understood with reference to the historical context in which it emerged, developed, and helped to sustain.² This is especially necessary to understand why a rich and diverse body of thought such as classical realism was obscured by its rather simplified variant as time wore on. The development of Security Studies was shaped in response to Cold War fears and policy incentives in the US. The adoption of a state-centric approach to the study of security, for instance, was done in the attempt to introduce some neatness to the complexity of studying international phenomena. State-centrism was deemed necessary not only because the complex task of dealing with human beings would not have produced the neat and tidy analyses a ‘science’ of Security Studies was thought to demand, but also because the perceived urgency of Cold War concerns made it difficult for its students to undertake complex analyses the study of peoples (in all their diversity) required (Tickner, 1997: 618).

The second of the two ‘foundational precepts’ shared by Security Studies was realism. British Strategic Studies scholar John Garnett expressed the realist position of the sub-discipline in the following manner:

Realists tend to be conservative in their views … [they] tend to accept a world subdivided into independent sovereign states as being the normal, if not permanent, condition of international society, and they consider realpolitik an inescapable feature of the international environment … The realists also emphasize the ubiquity of the power struggle, and their literature is dominated by the concepts of national power and interest. Conflict is regarded as an inescapable condition of international life. This simple assumption is the starting point of realism.

(Garnett, 1987: 9–10)

The realist theory of IR infused a state-centric outlook and scientific-objectivist understanding of theory and the theory/practice relationship into the study of security (Krause and Williams, 1997, Wyn Jones, 1999). Critics of realism are sometimes criticised for caricaturing an old and sophisticated body of thought. Such a fallacy is partly in the nature of the task of summarising a rich and diverse tradition; crucial details and nuances get lost in the process. But, as seen above (and will be discussed below) sometimes realists themselves presented simplistic pictures of their own thinking. Indeed, throughout the Cold War, classical realism was obscured by its more simplified and would-be ‘scientific’ variant (Lebow, 2007).

As noted above, adopting a state-centric outlook allowed a degree of neatness to the complexity of world politics. However, as with all simplifications, crucial aspects were lost in the process (Enloe, 1996). During the Cold War, the state-centric character of security thinking manifested itself in the widely shared premise that security is about the state and the state is about security (Buzan et al., 1998: 37). Though this may come as a sweeping generalisation, it is nevertheless difficult to deny the way that students of Security Studies viewed the state as both the primary referent (security is about the state) and agent (the state is about security). Even some students of security in the Third World, who were otherwise critical of Cold War Security Studies, produced state-centric (if not statist, see below) analyses (see, for example, Azar and Moon, 1988a, Ayoob, 1995).

According primacy to states in our analyses does not merely reflect a ‘reality’ out there. Nor does it render more ‘scientific’ our analyses of world politics. Rather, it has helped reinforce statism in Security Studies by making it difficult to move away from considering the state as the dominant referent and agent of security. Let me clarify. Students of realism consider state-centrism as a methodological choice that is analytically distinct from statism, the latter being a normative disposition involving ‘the concentration of all loyalty and decision-making power at the level of the sovereign state’ (Booth, 1998: 52). State-centrism, in turn is viewed as a mere methodological choice made by realist scholars who modelled the study of world politics after the natural sciences by creating a ‘closed system’ (by identifying states as the most important actors, assuming them to be like units and focusing on the military dimension of security). If Security Studies has become a state-centric sub-discipline, the argument goes, this is not because of a normative choice made by realist students of world politics, but a methodological one. Yet, adopting a state-centric approach to the study of security has reinforced statism by way of rendering less than visible other potential referents and agents of security. The invisibility, in Security Studies, of agents and referents other than the state has resulted in its students overlooking all other referents and agents when studying global phenomena. Put differently, a methodological choice made by students of Cold War Security Studies has had normative implications (Bilgin, 2002). While some of these implications have been identified by feminist IR scholars since the 1980s ( Millennium, 1988, Enloe, 1990, Peterson, 1992, Tickner, 1992, Sylvester, 1994, Enloe, 1996), many students of Security Studies have remained oblivious.

Despite all its state-centrism, Cold War Security Studies left the state undertheorised. States were taken as ‘black boxes’, the internal components of which were not considered a part of the research programme (Halliday, 1987, Grovogui, 1996, Milliken and Krause, 2002). Indeed, IR scholar Georg Sørensen (1996: 371) suggested that the problem with IR in general and Security Studies in particular has had ‘less to do with an exaggerated focus on the state than a lack of analysis of the state’. What is more, the notion of state that was taken as the focal point of Security Studies was a product of a particular (Eurocentric) reading of world history. Eurocentric accounts of world history look at the past through (1) state-centric lenses; (2) often without being aware of the particularity of the notion of state that is used; and (3) overlooking relationships of mutual constitution between peoples, states, empires, and civilisations in different parts of the world throughout history (Bilgin, 2016a). For, this is ‘the way we have learned our own history’, as the anthropologist Eric Wolf (1982, 4–5) noted. According to Wolf, we read notions such as ‘state’, ‘nation’, and ‘the West’ back into history as ‘things’. As a result, we impede our understanding of the fluid and undetermined nature of the history of humankind.

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies, or culture with the qualities of internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the enemies spin off each other like so many hard and round coloured balls.

(Wolf, 1982: 6)

This particular notion of state is so entrenched in our understanding of world history that our understanding of world politics has remained tied to an image of states as unitary (not pluralistic) and pre-given (not in progress) units that have surface (not constitutive) interactions with one another (for further discussion, see Halperin, 1998).

Finally, Cold War Security Studies embraced realism’s scientific-objectivist conception of theory and theory/practice relationship. Even some critics of Cold War approaches to security such as those who participated in the ‘traditionalist v. behaviouralist’ debate of the 1950s and 1960s shared realism’s ontological and epistemological outlook (see, for example, Bull, 1968). Adoption of a scientific-objectivist understanding of theory and the theory/practice relationship resulted in essentially (but not always openly) normative theories of Cold War Security Studies masquerading as ‘objective’ approaches to international phenomena and being viewed as ‘knowledge’, whilst the explicitly normative approaches of their critics were presented as ‘propaganda’ (Bilgin, 1999).

To recapitulate, my choice of the term Cold War Security Studies (rather than ‘traditional’, ‘mainstream’, or ‘realist’ Security Studies)³ in reference to this body of scholarship is not a statement about it being a unified body of thought (which it was not). There were elements of ‘critical’ thinking during the Cold War, and much ‘traditional’ thinking has remained in the post-Cold War era (see below). Rather, I sought to historicise and contextualise the sub-discipline, underscoring its ‘foundational precepts’ that were reproduced by the insider critics who acknowledged the limits of discourse and dissent (see also Klein, 1994, Gusterson, 1999: 326–7). Let us now turn to outsider critics.

Cold War critics of security thinking

The prevalence of Cold War Security Studies notwithstanding, alternatives existed throughout this period. In what follows, I will discuss four main strands of criticism raised by the proponents of common security, the World Order Models Project WOMP, students of Peace Research and Third World security. These groups and scholars were outsider critics insofar as they chose to stand outside of or were not allowed in the metaphorical debate chambers of Cold War Security Studies.⁴

Common security

Common security thinking emerged during the height of the Cold War, as part of a broad set of efforts designed to find a way out of the superpower nuclear arms race. The immediate context to the proponents of common security was the 1979 NATO decision to site cruise missiles in Western Europe. Categorised as ‘first-strike’ weapons, the placement of cruise missiles in Western Europe was viewed as particularly alarming by those who worried about the prospect of Europe being turned into a nuclear war theatre by the superpowers.

The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues was set up in 1980 to think systematically about this immediate challenge to security in Western Europe. Chaired by the Swedish social democratic politician and statesman Olof Palme, it was modelled after the Brandt Commission (Barnaby, 1980).⁵ The Palme Commission produced a report entitled Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament. In his introduction to the commission’s report, Palme outlined the main tenets of the arguments put forward by common security thinking:

Our alternative is common security. There can be no hope for victory in a nuclear war, the two sides would be united in suffering and destruction. They can survive only together. They must achieve security not against the adversary but together with him. International security must rest on a commitment to joint survival rather than on a threat of mutual destruction.

(Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, 1982: ix)

The Palme Commission’s statement was made against the background of Cold War Security Studies, particularly nuclear strategic theorising, that was based on zero-sum thinking. The commission rejected zero-sum thinking and practices that were based on the assumption that in an adversarial relationship, one side’s gain is the other’s loss.⁶ Criticising the fashioning of defence policies on a zero-sum conception of security, the proponents of common security argued that, since both sides stand to lose in the event of a nuclear war, it was in the interests of both sides to work together to pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements to the second edition
• Preface to the 2004 edition
• Introduction
• PART I: Pasts
• PART II: Presents
• Conclusion: futures of the Middle East
• Index