Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa

Imad Mansour, William R. Thompson, Imad Mansour, William R. Thompson

• Editorial: Georgetown University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781626167698
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Políticas de Oriente Medio

Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa is the first book to examine issue-driven antagonisms within groups of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states and their impact on relations within the region. The volume also considers how shock events, such as internal revolts and regional wars, can alter interstate tensions and the trajectory of conflict.

MENA has experienced more internal rivalries than any other region, making a detailed analysis vital to understanding the region's complex political, cultural, and economic history. The state groupings studied in this volume include Israel and Iran; Iran and Saudi Arabia; Iran and Turkey; Iran, Iraq, and Syria; Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and Algeria and Morocco. Essays are theoretically driven, breaking the MENA region down into a collection of systems that exemplify how state and nonstate actors interact around certain issues. Through this approach, contributors shed rare light on the origins, persistence, escalation, and resolution of MENA rivalries and trace significant patterns of regional change.

Shocks and Rivalries in the Middle East and North Africa makes a major contribution to scholarship on MENA antagonisms. It not only addresses an understudied phenomenon in the international relations of the MENA region, it also expands our knowledge of rivalry dynamics in global politics.

1

Introduction

A Theory of Shock and Rivalry

Imad Mansour and William R. Thompson

This edited volume introduces explicit analysis of state-to-state rivalries in the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In the past two decades, international relations (IR) scholars have made significant advances in analyzing rivalries. This statement may sound strange. Surely we are all aware of the existence of rivalries. After all, they have been around as long as there have been Sumerian city-states, thousands of years ago. But that is the point. We are well aware of the existence of interstate rivalries, but we have been quite slow in addressing them as rivalries per se. Part of this process of making their study more explicit involves specifying which relationships qualify and which ones do not. We define an interstate rivalry as encompassing dyads of states that regard each other as competitive, threatening enemies.¹ We can identify which relationships count because decision-makers acknowledge in various ways who they select as prominent adversaries. They refer to them frequently in foreign policy speeches, and they orient their military preparations to cope with their threats.

As soon as we begin focusing on rivalry behavior, one fact jumps out clearly. Most of the conflict in international politics is recidivist in nature. If one counts all the possible dyadic ways to connect an ensemble of states, only a small number of the dyads are responsible for most of the conflict. Rivalries, then, are the best place to understand why conflict occurs and persists. This is all the more the case in the MENA, which has more contemporary experience with rivalries than any other region. Thus, it is a good regional theater for testing propositions as well as describing significant patterns of regional change.

For MENA-dedicated studies, it is common to find loosely defined concepts of rivalry used in studying regional conflict and various forms of security relations (Halliday 2012, chap. 6). Rivalry is often described as pertinent to understanding regional politics (Lawson 2016). In explaining rivalries and their effects, some place emphasis on “the international dimension,” that is, external politics (Phillips 2016, 3); others place emphasis on material and ideational factors (Mabon 2013). However, very few works on the MENA provide theoretically driven analyses and engage rivalry as a distinct field of study. In this volume we explicitly engage rivalry as an empirical phenomenon from a theoretical perspective. Moreover, we seek to contribute to theory building in the field of rivalry analysis from the complexity and descriptive “thickness” of regional politics.

It is not enough to simply identify which states are rivals and describe their interactions. We must also understand the dynamics of rivalry origins, maintenance, escalation, and termination. Some of these dynamics are found in many cases. For instance, rivalries tend to emerge from disputes over borders and relative position. Some of it is, of course, idiosyncratic. In the Middle East a good example is the way in which the extended Hashemite family looms large in the earlier history of the region’s rivalries; familial relations, hence, are often analyzed in how they affected the politics of Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other states born in the twentieth century. Thus, MENA has provided plenty of such idiosyncratic causes of rivalry. This volume is different in that it allocates more attention to the general factors of MENA rivalries while simultaneously probing the course of specific rivalries.

Furthermore, an important complementary goal for this volume involves stressing the role of shocks (as abrupt and jarring changes to an equilibrium or status quo) in understanding how rivalries and rivalry fields (as networks of interdependent rivalries) undergo transformation. We think that the impact of political shocks on rivalries remains seriously understudied. The MENA is not only an arena with a large number of dyadic and multiple-actor rivalries; it also has experienced quite a few shocks, especially at the regional level, with varied effects. These effects will be explored in our propositions. Thus, in our volume one effect that is highlighted is the contributory role of shocks in beginning and ending rivalries. Moreover, an important contribution of our volume is explicating how shocks affect fluctuations in interstate rivalry and rivalry field dynamics in between the onset and termination of these adversarial relationships.

RIVALRIES AND SHOCKS

The more formal study of rivalries emerged from the realization that militarized interstate disputes were not randomly distributed across time and space. Some pairs of states (dyads) engaged in them serially and disproportionately compared to other dyads.² Thus, the initial identification of enduring rivalries tended to be carried out by isolating the spatial and temporal density of conflict. Enduring rivalries were pairs of states that participated in X militarized interstate disputes within a specified period.³ Such an approach singles out the pairs of states that were involved in the most conflict. But that implies that rivalries must fight when it is not clear that all do clash conspicuously or frequently. An alternative approach emerged that focuses on inventorying decision-maker perspectives about who their interstate enemies were. Some of these strategic rivalries were characterized by frequent militarized interstate disputes, and some were distinctive in rarely coming to physical blows despite ample, if fluctuating, displays of hostility.

Both approaches to identifying rivalry exist today, with most empirical analysts using one approach or the other.⁴ Neither approach can claim to be liability free. Enduring rivalries begin and end when sufficient conflict breaks out and stops. Relationships with off-and-on hostilities tend to be slighted. A focus on enduring rivalries also tends to emphasize dyads in which very powerful states fight very weak states, however briefly. Whether these highly asymmetrical relationships should count as rivalries similar to the more protracted contests between more symmetrical powers continues to be debated.

Identifying strategic rivalries is a more subjective game and requires knowing more about foreign policy attitudes and interactions than is sometimes knowable by analysts. For instance, Egypt and Israel were once very clearly enduring rivals fighting wars in four consecutive decades, and then they stopped fighting each other. From an enduring rivalry perspective, the rivalry ended some four decades ago. From a strategic rivalry perspective, however, neither side seems to rule out the possibility of a return to conflict. The rivalry thus de-escalated after the Camp David Accords without terminating.

While there is certainly considerable overlap in the rivalries identified by either perspective, the consequent identifications are not the same. One needs to choose which approach seems more appropriate.⁵ Nonetheless, both approaches attempt to isolate conflict recidivists. That is, a disproportionate amount of interstate conflict is generated by a very small group of states that feud with each other repeatedly. It follows, then, that we need to look more closely at the recidivists to best understand why conflict persists in the ways that it does. That means more than merely identifying rivalries. We also need to better understand their origins, dynamics, and endgames.⁶

Yet it is one thing to say that we should focus more on conflict recidivists to best understand why conflict occurs. It is quite another thing to say how we should focus on conflict recidivists. We can certainly describe their behavior, and unsurprisingly, many of the descriptions of conflict in international relations are implicitly about rival interactions. There is nothing wrong with these descriptions. They add to, or more precisely, can add to our knowledge and understanding. Yet their explanatory payoffs are limited in the sense that they can tell us something about what specific actors did at specific times—or what an author thinks they might have done. Would it not be advantageous if we also had general explanations of what states are likely to do in certain situations?

This is where theories of foreign policy enter the picture. To develop theories of foreign policy, we need to move away from saying the Saudis did X to the Iranians and the Iranians responded with Y. One parsimonious view of foreign policy considers international interactions something like a tennis match. One state does or says something to another state, and in turn that state responds at the same level or chooses to escalate (tit for tat in the absence of escalation). Yet we know that this approach is not sufficient to capture all or most of the variance in foreign policy interactions.

Another explanatory factor is path dependency. States tend to keep on doing the same things to other states until or unless something makes them stop. If we know what two states did to each other last year, there is some probability that they will do much the same next year. Yet we also know that a combination of tit for tat and path dependency does not suffice to explain interstate interactions either. States radically change course at times. At other times they escalate or de-escalate out of proportion to the stimuli to which they are responding.

One of the constructs for capturing abrupt departures from tit for tat and path dependency is the notion of shocks; they alter the landscapes in which decision-makers operate. Shocks are unexpected reconfigurations of the political-military and economic landscapes within which decision-makers try to find solutions to the problems they choose to address (we define shocks in more detail later). Economists rely on them extensively to make sense of radical changes in prices, supply, and demand because they view them as overt disruptors of processes that otherwise demonstrate considerable stability. We need to make more use of them in international relations for the same reason.

In the study of rivalries, shocks have already been prominently associated with the origins of rivalries and their termination. Most prominently, Diehl and Goertz (2000) were the first to apply “independence shocks” to explain the onset of enduring rivalries (see also Colaresi 2001; Goertz and Diehl 1995a). For this line of inquiry, scholars found that the moment of political independence—Westphalian statehood—constituted a shock when emerging entities came into existence with dispute boundaries with neighbors; these disputes transformed into rivalries. On one side of the equation, that is, ending the rivalry, Rasler, Thompson, and Ganguly (2013) applied the notion of shock to rivalry terminations. For them, to de-escalate a rivalry, one or both sides needed to appreciate a much different approach to dealing with an established enemy, and shocks were the conduits to changes in strategic assessments of the other. Through historical and empirical analysis, they found that defeat in war, a major loss of capability, or radical regime change with different preferences—all of which constitute varying types of shocks—might encourage de-escalations. Therefore, as the findings of the two seminal works on shocks and rivalry analysis confirm, without some kind of significant environmental shift, foreign policy inertia should be expected to prevail, which means that rivalries should be maintained infinitely. The termination of rivalries, however, highlights the need to study sources of change in these conflictive relationships; specifically, what happens to change the ways decision-makers in rival states see each other?

Accordingly, we are proposing to focus on shocks in this volume as a way to understand not only beginnings and endings but also how rivalries are maintained and whether they escalate or de-escalate over time. In other words, we believe shocks are critical to making sense of the ups and downs of rivalry fluctuations. To do that in a nondescriptive way, a theory is needed. We develop one in the next section of this introduction.

THE SHOCK THEORY

To theorize about shocks and rivalries, we begin with two central assumptions:

Assumption 1: Foreign policy is characterized by substantial inertia that has to be overcome in some way for changes in policies to occur.

Assumption 2: Rivalries are characterized by variable levels of intensity or activity—that is, they are associated with a normal range of behavior that is susceptible to change during the course of a rivalry. Rivalries with higher intensity levels are more likely to experience militarized conflict than are rivalries with lower basic rivalry levels.

We define a shock as a rapid departure from a state of equilibrium—that is, an abrupt and significant change in the properties of a physical, social, political, or economic system. Shocks may be internal, such as an economic crisis (with implications for regime change or the ability to cope with external threats), regime change, or civil conflict. Shocks may also be external, such as a shift in power configurations at the system level (e.g., the end of the Cold War), interstate war, or the emergence of a revolution that overthrows the status quo in another state (through active calculated designed interventions or as a result of ensuing anarchy and violence spillovers). As disruptive events, shocks are perceived to significantly alter threat environments in some way and, therefore, encourage responses to the changes. Such events alter policymakers’ calculations about their external and domestic environments. Events that interrupt the status quo, therefore, alter what decision-makers perceive they should and can do about others. Decision-makers perceive these shocks not only as threats but also as opportunities to expand their interests and roles in the region, to alter balances of power, and to consolidate themselves domestically. It is here that we can introduce a third assumption on how shocks have the potential to impact political processes externally and domestically through policymaking:

Assumption 3: Shocks contribute to opening windows to change by overcoming inertia, at least for some states or actors. Shocks need not be prime drivers for change; they only have to create some potential for change. Whether actors jump through the windows is another matter.

In sum, shocks increase the probability of change in foreign policy generally, with the magnitude and direction of change varying with the type and magnitude of the shock. Thus, shocks can contribute to rivalry onset or termination and to shifting basic rivalry levels upward (escalation/inflammation) or downward (de-escalation/dampening) of hostilities.

Finally, shocks can sometimes “cluster” and thus have even more sizable effects. This means that there are, at least occasionally, circumstances in which a series of shocks in rapid succession significantly affect rivalry intensity or dynamics. For example, multiple shocks affected the Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry in 1988–91, including the end of the Iran-Iraq War, leadership changes occurring in both Iran and Saudi Arabia, the end of the Cold War, and the launching of the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. In this case the cluster of shocks moved the Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry toward temporary détente.

Following from the preceding discussion, we offer several propositions about how shocks affect rivalry dynamics, including onset, termination, and importantly, persistence and fluctuation.

Proposition 1: Shocks, in conjunction with other factors, increase the probability of rivalries beginning, escalating, de-escalating, and terminating if they introduce new sources of threat (beginnings) or devalue old sources of threat (terminations).

Proposition 2: A cluster of shocks in a relatively short period, other things being equal, is more likely to increase the probability of change in foreign policy.

Proposition 3: A series of major shocks with considerable scope is likely to destabilize foreign policies regionally, especially if the region is closely interconnected (as opposed to loosely interconnected).

Proposition 4: Regions characterized by multiple shocks and rivalries are apt to experience more conflict than regions less characterized by shocks and rivalries.

These propositions will be empirically studied in this volume’s individual chapters, each of which will demonstrate how shocks work with reference to a specific case. Studying multiple rivalries as well as varied observations within a single rivalry would give us a theoretical edge: it would help map out varieties of shocks and explain how they act on rivalry dynamics. Moreover, mapping out varieties of shocks would help unearth deeper societal and historical factors to explain rivalries. We need to be cautious in bestowing too much causal credit on shocks alone, however. It stands to reason that shocks will have greater impact in places that are more susceptible to them. For example, studying the importance of shocks while attending to societal and historical contexts wou...