The Paper's special contributor Liu Zhongmin
In news reports about the Middle East, people often have to deal with organizations that are both familiar and unfamiliar, familiar with the names of organizations that are often seen in the news media, and unfamiliar with their history, ideas and organizational development and content, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Hamas, Lebanese Allah Party, Turkish Kurdish Workers' Party, Syrian People's Defence Forces (YPG), al-Qaida, Islamic State and its affiliates.
In the Middle East, in addition to international conflicts, there are many conflicts between States and non-State actors or different non-State actors, which have even become more protracted and more difficult conflicts for political settlement. For example, the recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinian "Islamic Jihad", Turkey's cross-border entry into Iraq and Syria against the PKK, the Syrian People's Defence Forces, etc., and the long-standing conflict between Israel and the Lebanese Allah Party and Palestinian Hamas are typical clashes between State and non-State actors.
In a general sense, non-state actors in international relations, that is, actors other than sovereign States, mainly exist in the international community in the political, economic, social and cultural fields of international organizations, mainly including intergovernmental international organizations and non-intergovernmental international organizations. However, in the Middle East, the widespread presence and ability to carry out international acts includes international organizations in general, such as intergovernmental international organizations such as the League of Arab States, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as well as non-governmental organizations in all fields of society, as well as a large number of non-State actors based on traditional identities such as ethnic, religious, sectarian and familial, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Allah Party and the PKK. They not only pose a challenge to the sovereignty of the host country, but also penetrate into the international relations of the Middle East, have a strong spillover, and even evolve into regional and international hotspot issues, posing a challenge to the existing international system.
Non-state actors as international organizations are not the object of this article, which is mainly concerned with the influence of non-state actors based on national (ethnic) and religious (sectarian) on middle Eastern politics and world politics.
A variety of non-State actors in the Middle East
1. Religious and political organizations with regional and international penetration and influence
Founded in 1928, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has branches in almost all Islamic countries in the Middle East, and has spawned various Islamic organizations, including moderate Islamic organizations engaged in legitimate political struggles and extremist organizations that have embarked on the path of terrorist violence, which is why the phenomenon of "political Islam" has been internationalized, affecting and impacting the pattern of the Middle East and the international system.
The Lebanese Allah Party plays an extraordinary role in the trilateral relationship between Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Lebanese-Israeli conflict in 2006 are both important to the Allah Party. The Lebanese Allah Party has always been a quasi-state force beyond the control of the Lebanese government, and strictly speaking, the 2006 Lebanon-Israel conflict represents a new type of world conflict in the era of globalization, that is, the conflict between non-state actors in one country and another, which is beyond the traditional concept of "international conflict". In the Syrian crisis since 2012, with the Iranian-influenced Allah Party and other Shiite forces entering Syria to support the Assad government, the rivalry between Israel and the Allah Party has also expanded to Syria, where Israel often carries out airstrikes against targets in Syria under the pretext of fighting the Allah Party.
On September 1, 2022, local time, in Hodeida, Yemen, at a military parade called "Waad al-Akhera", drones were mounted on floats, and senior officials of Yemen's Houthi armed forces and troops from the western province of Hodeida participated in the parade. This article pictures People's Vision Infographic
The Houthis have played an important role in Yemeni politics, Gulf and Middle East politics, and U.S. Middle East policy. Since the fall of the Saleh regime in Yemen in 2011, the Houthis, a Shiite Islamist force in northern Yemen, have not only overthrown the Yemeni Transitional Government, but have also confronted the Saudi-led Arab coalition since March 2015, and have even had an important impact on U.S. Yemeni policy and U.S.-Saudi relations.
2. Religious extremist organizations and international terrorist organizations with great international influence
Al-Qaida is a typical representative of religious extremist organizations and international terrorist organizations, which not only has a complete ideological system of religious extremism, but also forms an organizational system covering the whole world in terms of personnel, funds, and information; In terms of regional ties, an organizational structure has been formed, with Al-Qaida as the center and Islamic extremist organizations in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa as branches. Al-Qaida not only has enormous influence in West Asia and North Africa, but it has also severely damaged the U.S.-led international system by launching 9/11. The events of 9/11 show that the confrontation between non-state actors and states has gone beyond traditional "international politics" to "world politics", showing the great power of non-state actors in the Middle East to influence the transformation of the international system.
After the outbreak of the "Arab Spring", the extremist organization "Islamic State" rose rapidly through the turbulent situation in Syria and Iraq, and once surpassed al-Qaida as the most radical and extremist terrorist force in the world. The Islamic State has many similarities with al-Qaida's ideologies, but also tends to be more extreme and violent. The Characteristics of the Islamic State include, inter alia, its assertion of the goal of establishing a so-called "caliphate" in practice; With particular emphasis on the antagonism between Shiites and Sunnis in Islam and incitement to sectarian hatred and sectarian conflict; Emphasizing the more extreme principle of "condemnation" and killing Muslims in a frenzy against their ideas and practices; Emphasize and put into practice "offensive jihad" that abuses violence. The Islamic State poses not only a serious threat to the nation-state system in the Middle East and the Entire Islamic World, but also to peace and security in the entire world.
3. Cross-border ethnic and minority forces seeking independence and unity
Cross-border ethnic groups mainly refer to ethnic groups living in neighboring countries where traditional settlements are separated by modern political boundaries. In the Middle East, the Kurdish problem that has long plagued Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran is the most typical cross-border ethnic problem. The Kurds have repeatedly clashed with the governments of Iraq, Turkey and Iran in their quest for autonomy and independence. In addition, there are many factions within the Kurds, and there are often conflicts; Because they often use the Kurdish region of neighboring countries as a base of activity, this leads to discord and contradictions between neighboring countries. In the Kurdish movement for self-government and independence, various political organizations have been established, either seeking to separate from the host country to establish an independent state, or seeking to establish a unified Kurdish nation, and the influence of the Turkish PKK is particularly striking. Some of the PKK's actions towards terrorism not only threaten the stability of neighboring countries and regions, but also have a strong international influence in Europe.
Turkish police display weapons and equipment seized in an operation against the PKK on 17 January 2016 in Diyarbakır, Turkey.
After the 2003 Iraq war, in the face of the PKK's cross-border activities and the threat of terrorism, Turkey repeatedly crossed the border to fight the PKK in Iraq, making the Kurdish issue not only an important factor affecting Turkey-Iran relations, but also another hot issue in the Middle East. Since the Arab Spring, Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq have grown and their autonomy has been increasing. In the process of fighting the "Islamic State", the Kurdish armed forces in Syria and Iraq have become an important force used by the United States and Russia, and have continued to grow, but they have aroused strong dissatisfaction from the Turkish and Iraqi governments, resulting in extremely complicated international relations in the region. Turkey has not only joined forces with Iraq and the Iranian government to suppress Kurdish forces, especially its independence tendencies, but has also launched military operations against Kurdish armed forces in Syria and Iraq on many occasions. The Kurdish issue has not only become a difficult problem for the political reconstruction of Syria and Iraq, but also an important factor affecting regional international relations and even Turkey's relations with Europe, the United States and Russia.
Non-state actors have a profound impact on international relations and the international system in the Middle East
First, the confrontation between non-state actors and existing states has led to the extreme fragility of the nation-state system in the Middle East, and anti-state and anti-system movements have arisen one after another.
In many Middle Eastern countries, non-State actors based on ethnic, religious and sectarian identities, or oppose the secularization system of the current regime in religious and secular relations, or challenge the legitimacy of the current nationalist regime on the issue of legitimacy, threaten national unity and stability through ethnic conflicts, or create contradictions and conflicts with other countries in foreign relations, resulting in the extreme fragility of the Middle East nation-state system.
In the Middle East, the "mantle" given by the international system of "nation-state" is extremely awkward to wear in many Middle Eastern countries, and many non-state actors always try to break through their shackles and set up another portal. This influence is also just as one scholar put it: "In the Middle East, sub-national and supranational identities compete with national identities, incentivize transnational movements, and limit purely state-centrist behavior." The return of the Afghan Taliban in 2021 and the establishment of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" will transform the Taliban from a non-state actor to a state ruler, but it has not yet been recognized by the international community, behind which there are both problems with the nature of the Taliban itself and the contradiction between Afghanistan and the current nation-state system in terms of the nature of the Islamist state.
Members of the Taliban came to the entrance of the U.S. Embassy on August 15, 2022, in Kabul, Afghanistan, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Taliban's takeover of government.
Second, non-State actors profoundly influence the security agenda of the Middle East region and constitute the main players in the conflict in the Middle East.
There are four main forms of conflict in the Middle East, the first is ethnic conflict between countries, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iran-Iraq war, and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The second is the conflict in which major powers intervene in the Middle East, such as the Gulf War, the Afghan War and the Iraq War launched by the United States, and the invasion of Afghanistan launched by the Soviet Union. The third form is the internal conflict of the Middle East countries, the most typical of which is the Lebanese civil war, the Somali civil war, the Sudanese civil war, etc., and the conflicts are mostly ethnic conflicts. Ethnic tensions have persisted in many Middle Eastern countries, posing a serious threat to national unity and territorial integrity, particularly in the Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. The fourth form is a multi-layered conflict initiated by religious extremist groups, such as the conflict between Islamic extremist groups and the governments of Middle Eastern countries, and the conflict between al-Qaida and the West, especially with the United States.
In all kinds of conflicts, non-state actors such as various ethnic groups, religions, sects, and tribes are important participants. For example, the intra-sectarian conflict in Lebanon constitutes an important factor leading to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, the terrorist attacks of the "al-Qaida" organization triggered the outbreak of the Afghan war and the Iraq war, which in turn led to bloody sectarian conflicts within Iraq, thus forming what Western scholars Butzan called a "security complex" and "security interdependence". Non-state actors constitute an important force in promoting "security", "in many ways, due to the deepening cycle of division and conflict, the Middle East today is an ideal example of a regional security complex." ”
Third, the Middle East regional system has been subjected to continuous external interference from the existing international system.
The various conflicts initiated and participated in by non-state actors have not only led to restrictions on the exercise of sovereignty by many Middle Eastern countries, but have also become a reason for interference and intervention by external powers and even the international community, and even led to conflicts and wars that threaten the stability of the international system.
After the end of the Cold War, most of the long blacklists of so-called "rogue states" or "rogue states" drawn by the United States were Middle East Islamic countries, and there were "regime changes" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States defines "failed states" to do much with the inability of its state power to control ethnic and sectarian conflicts within its country, and the fragmented political structures and ethnic and religious conflicts in these countries are essentially the historical legacy of the divide-and-rule policy of Western colonialism. However, the United States and the West have never been interested in understanding the "original sin" of the West in the Middle East from a historical and practical perspective, and instead have taken regime change and democratic export as the path and method to solve the Middle East problem. As a result, not only can the contradictions and conflicts in the Middle East not be eradicated, but it has caused a backlash of traditional forces such as nationalities and religions. The Taliban's ups and downs in Afghanistan are the clearest examples of this, announcing the failure of U.S. policy in Afghanistan in a brutal and absurd way. The political tragedies of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are essentially the result of the United States and the West using their internal contradictions and ethnic conflicts to intervene, but they are unable to carry out political reconstruction or even walk away.
The root cause of the anti-state and anti-system movement of non-state actors in the Middle East
First, the fragility, fragmentation and permeability of the Middle East system catalyzes the anti-systemic movement of non-state actors in the Middle East.
Historically, the political map of the Middle East has changed many times in the imperial struggle, forming a situation of frequent migration and integration of Arab, Persian, Turkic, Kurdish and other ethnic groups, and the various ethnic groups have obvious openness and penetration to each other due to common religious or sectarian factors.
In modern times, the Middle East nation-state system has been shaped by the historical legacy of imperial disintegration and colonial division. In 1916, Britain and France secretly signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided their respective spheres of influence in the Middle East, including Egypt and Sudan in North Africa, the Gulf region, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, while the French sphere of influence mainly included Syria and Lebanon and the Maghreb region of North Africa. Later Middle Eastern nation-states were largely formed based on this sphere of influence.
Under the Middle East system imposed by the West, which is based on territorial differentiation, there are a large number of indigenous anti-system forces that operate either around territory, or ideology, or around family and tribal groups, or around religion, or around attitudes toward the West.
Due to the serious dissimilarity between nations and states, as well as the existence of a large number of minorities and cross-border ethnic groups that have not established a state with their own ethnic groups as the main body, the middle East nation-state system is extremely fragile, and there are often complex political movements demanding changes in the boundaries of existing countries, some of which are "territorial recovery" movements launched by existing countries, and some of which are through the use of national unity movements to seek their own interests (such as the use of Arab unification movements by some countries). Some are minorities or cross-border ethnic groups trying to get rid of existing countries and start a new lease; Wait a minute. In these movements, some non-State actors are supported by other Countries, and some are integrated with similar groups in other Countries, so that non-State actors are widely involved in the interaction of Middle Eastern countries.
For the Arab nation that has established 22 countries, the permeability between states is even more prominent, and there is no clear line between its domestic politics and international relations, "Arab relations have almost no real diplomatic relations, but are part of an expanded family politics." "Unlike the regionalism of Europe, which gradually developed a movement of integration after the maturity of the nation-state system, the Arab unification movement accompanied the independence movement of the Arab countries, even before the independence of many Arab countries. But in the unification movement, Arab unity became a legitimate tool for some countries to pursue self-interest, and then pursued their own foreign policies through non-state actors influencing other countries. For example, in the Arab unification movement, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc. have all worked to promote Arab unity, but they have ended up with mutual suspicion and mistrust.
In many Middle Eastern countries, either power structures have infiltrated ethnic and sectarian factors, or deviations and errors in ethnic and religious policies have created conditions for non-State actors to play their roles, and have also laid the foundation for internal strife and instability within states. Typical forms include: First, internal conflicts triggered by the ethnicization of state power, such as the power struggle and sectarian vendetta in the historical Lebanese civil war and the current process of state reconstruction in Iraq; Second, internal conflicts triggered by the ethnicization of monopolies of power, such as in Saddam's era in Iraq, where state power was monopolized by Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were on the fringes of power, and responded to Saddam's dictatorship in a way of riots and riots; Third, conflicts triggered by separatist movements between ethnic minorities and cross-border ethnic groups, such as those triggered by the Kurdish independence movement. It should be pointed out that the above conflicts have typical spillover characteristics, such as the internal conflict in Lebanon involving relations between Lebanon and Syria, the internal conflict in Iraq involving bilateral and Iranian relations, and the Kurdish issue involving multilateral relations, which evolved into a regional conflict when the contradiction intensified.
Under the international system, the unfairness and irrationality of international arrangements around Middle East affairs have also stimulated the extraordinary activity of non-state actors. From Britain's perfidy to its promise to establish a unified Arab state to its support for Zionism, from the unjust division of territory under the leadership of the United States to the partiality of Israel in successive Middle East wars, from the proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union to the ever-changing pragmatic alliance, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the full control of the United States in the Middle East after the Gulf War, from the War on Terrorism in Afghanistan to the "pre-emptive" and "regime change" war in Iraq, to the "Greater Middle East Plan" of "democratic transformation", The Middle East region is always under the pressure of Western hegemony and power, which dominate the international system.
The strong external pressure on the Middle East has created conditions for the breeding and development of anti-hegemonic and anti-system non-state actors at the grassroots level of society. Taking the Palestinian issue as an example, in the eyes of the Arab Islamic world, Israel is a nail forcibly implanted by the West in the heart of the Middle East and a symbol of the "new imperialism" of the West. "Because it recreates the historical picture of the Middle East-West relations as a whole, Palestine has become one of the few common symbols of the Muslim world that cross religious, racial and ethnic lines." In this context, anti-Israel and anti-Westernism have become the most effective weapons for social mobilization by non-state actors such as ethnic and religious organizations in the Arab world, which has given birth to Islamist forces from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Allah Party, and even extremist forces such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State, and has had a profound impact on the international system.
Second, the combined action of internal and external factors has created the soil for the rise of religious political organizations, contributing to the anti-state and anti-systemic movements of Islamist movements in the Middle East.
The contradiction between the universal ideals of the Islamic traditional community and the harsh political reality, which led To islamism against the existing nation-states and the international system they constituted, is one of the internal reasons for the anti-system movement of religious political organizations in the sub-countries of the Middle East. On the level of ideal beliefs and political culture, "Uma (early referred to the Muslim commune, later to the community of faith – the author's note) is the only perfect form of existence of the entire Muslim community; It does not recognize the territory and borders of nations and states, nor does it recognize the existence of ethnic and linguistic differences among Muslims. ”
However, since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the division of the Islamic world into several nation-states has become an unchangeable reality, and the Islamic world is only a group of countries with common cultural attributes, far from being an entity that can take a unified political position and play a political role. So much so that some scholars have pointed out that since the retreat of Western colonialism from the Third World, the Islamic world is the only traditional civilization that has not succeeded in re-establishing itself as an important international player.
At a time when the modernization process within the Nation-States of the Middle East is frustrated, various social contradictions are intensifying, and the humiliation of external defeat (such as the Arab-Israeli conflict) and the heavy pressure of the West, "the Movement for Return to Islam is clearly a reaction to the failure of the Islamic state political elite to establish legitimate public order within the political community." ”
As a derivative of is an anti-state and anti-system movement that distorts and abuses the traditional concept of Islam by distorting and abusing the traditional concepts of Islam and resorting to terrorist violence after being completely disillusioned with the existing domestic and international order. In this regard, the Egyptian scholar Bahaddin once profoundly pointed out: "In the absence of norms of international law and world peace, the passage of double standards, the atmosphere of tyranny and ruthlessness that is felt everywhere, and the tyranny and ruthlessness that run amok but hopeless to change, among those who have lost hope, are deprived of their jobs, suffer and despair, are full of spatial strangeness, and they can only take the sense of distance in time as spiritual sustenance, extremist ideas and terrorism as liberation and breathing, Terrorism will continue to exist in various parts of the world and will continue to intensify with the ongoing economic depression and its political, social and psychological impact. ”
In short, the Middle East has the most unique regional system in the world today, which is both open and exclusive. Its openness is manifested in the influence of historical imperial, ethnic, religious, and other connections, which allow ethnic, religious identity, and political trends based on them to penetrate across nation-states; Its exclusivity is manifested in the strong competition and exclusivity of various identities of Arab, Persian, Turkish, Jewish, Kurdish and other peoples, as well as Sunnis and Shiites. In modern times, the Western System of Artificially Established Nation-States has broken through political geography and humanistic boundaries, resulting in intricate contradictions between the nations (ethnic groups) and religions (sects) of the Middle East. In short, complex factors, both ancient and modern, internal and external, have led to the emergence of non-state actors based on ethnicity and religion in the Middle East, who are both victims of the international and regional systems imposed by the West and challengers of the international and regional systems.
"Middle East Review" is a column by Professor Liu Zhongmin of the Institute of Middle East Studies of Shanghai University of foreign Chinese, which adheres to the combination of reality, theory and foundation, and responds to practical problems with historical and theoretical depth.
Responsible editor: Zhu Zhengyong Photo editor: Chen Feiyan
Proofreader: Luan Meng