IR, Geopolitics, US Policy by Waleed Hazbun
Pathways to Renewed and Inclusive Security in the Middle East , 2024
This memo builds from Enloe’s insights and outlines factors that have sustained the spiral of mil... more This memo builds from Enloe’s insights and outlines factors that have sustained the spiral of militarization in US policy with a focus on the Middle East. These include 1) exaggerated threat perception, 2) declining US political leverage abroad, 3) the workings of a policy and political economy “iron triangle,” 4) US interests and policy defined by militarized masculinity, and 5) technological change and the ongoing blurring of distinctions between peace and war. While these factors suggest seemingly overwhelming pressures for militarization, they also help define the multiple areas where the struggle against militarization needs to be fought and demilitarized alternative approaches fostered.
Global South In An Era Of Great Power Competition, 2024
In the past two decades China has expanded its influence in the Middle East, working towards what... more In the past two decades China has expanded its influence in the Middle East, working towards what I call "soft integration," focused on building economic ties through trade and infrastructure development. In contrast, the United States has continued to prioritize what I call "hard integration," focused on strategic alliances with security commitments, basing of military assets, and the integration of regional defense systems. An ongoing challenge is that the two integration processes are increasingly encountering points of conflict leading to stresses in regional geopolitics. A pressing question for the future is how the United States and China will adapt to these stresses. I argue that a U.S. role as a regional security provider and an expanding Chinese role fostering economic connectivity could coexist productively. Doing so, however, will require the development of a new set of norms for geopolitical competition and mutual embracing of a more pluralist vision for global order. Failure to do so risks increased instability in the Middle East and heightens the possibilities for great power conflict.
in Imad K. Harb (ed.), A US Pivot Away from the Middle East: Fact or Fiction? (Washington DC: Arab Center Washington DC, 2023), pp. 23-32. , 2023
With its troop withdrawals from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2021, the US exhibits a much smal... more With its troop withdrawals from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2021, the US exhibits a much smaller military footprint in the Middle East than it did in the mid to late 2000s. US regional strategy, however, remains structured around the capacity to deploy military force as a means maintain regional influence, contain Iran, and compete against China and Russia.
For many analysts, political leaders, and much of the US public, a reduced military posture in the Middle East is very compelling. While some argue the US should completely withdraw its forces from the region since no vital security interests are currently threatened, even those calling for continuing engagement recognize the value of rebalancing the US military posture in response to changing contexts and needs.
The challenge for any withdrawal or rebalancing, however, is that US engagement in the region has become so deeply entangled within military institutions and assets that uprooting them would further erode US influence in the region. At the same time, even as previous rationale for the strategic value of the region decline, the US increasingly approaches the Middle East as an arena for militarized great power competition. As a result, any sustained reduction in the US military posture in the Middle East would require a broader demilitarization of US policy, the reduction of great power conflict, and the development of alternative means to address the diverse sources of regional insecurity.
A US Pivot Away from the Middle East: Fact or Fiction? , 2023
With its troop withdrawals from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2021, the US exhibits a much smal... more With its troop withdrawals from Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2021, the US exhibits a much smaller military footprint in the Middle East than it did in the mid to late 2000s. US regional strategy, however, remains structured around the capacity to deploy military force as a means maintain regional influence, contain Iran, and compete against China and Russia.
For many analysts, political leaders, and much of the US public, a reduced military posture in the Middle East is very compelling. While some argue the US should completely withdraw its forces from the region since no vital security interests are currently threatened, even those calling for continuing engagement recognize the value of rebalancing the US military posture in response to changing contexts and needs.
The challenge for any withdrawal or rebalancing, however, is that US engagement in the region has become so deeply entangled within military institutions and assets that uprooting them would further erode US influence in the region. At the same time, even as previous rationale for the strategic value of the region decline, the US increasingly approaches the Middle East as an arena for militarized great power competition. As a result, any sustained reduction in the US military posture in the Middle East would require a broader demilitarization of US policy, the reduction of great power conflict, and the development of alternative means to address the diverse sources of regional insecurity.
Croft Institute of International Studies at the University of Mississippi, 2022
This talk will consider the current challenges facing both US policymakers and citizens concernin... more This talk will consider the current challenges facing both US policymakers and citizens concerning the future role the US should play in the Middle East. A decade after the Arab Uprisings, should the US rethink its close ties to authoritarian regimes and its military presence in the region, or does the US continue to have vital strategic interests that necessitate them? This question will be considered in relationship to both the long history of America's political, military, and cultural engagement with the Middle East as well as the current era of regional turbulence and shifting geopolitics at the global level.
International Studies Perspectives, Co-Authors: May Darwich, Morten Valbjørn, Bassel F Salloukh, Waleed Hazbun, Amira Abu Samra, Said Saddiki, Adham Saouli, Hamad H Albloshi, Karim Makdisi
Can International Relations (IR) as it is taught in the Arab world be said to be an “American soc... more Can International Relations (IR) as it is taught in the Arab world be said to be an “American social science” or is it taught differently in different places? The forum addresses this question through an exploration of what and how scholars at Arab universities are teaching IR and how institutional, historical, and linguistic, as well as political and individual factors shape classroom dynamics in the Arab world. This forum attempts to bring the classroom into the Global/Post-Western debate by showing how IR can be taught differently in different places with a focus on a region under-represented in IR debates: the Arab world. The essays, exhibiting diversity in pedagogical strategies and theoretical perspectives, provide a window into how the “international” is perceived and taught locally by teachers and students in various Arab contexts. While the influence from the American “core” of the discipline is obvious, the forum documents how the theoretical and conceptual foundations of IR based on Western perspectives and history do not travel intact. The essays collectively provide evidence of different kinds of IRs not just across but also within regions and show that studying pedagogy can become a way to study how disciplinary IR varies contextually.
Middle East Report, 2020
Editorial for Middle East Report No. 294 Exit Empire – Imagining New Paths for US Policy. Co-aut... more Editorial for Middle East Report No. 294 Exit Empire – Imagining New Paths for US Policy. Co-authored with Shana Marshall, Jacob Mundy and Pete Moore.
Middle East Report, 2020
Essay in special issue of Middle East Report No. 294 (Spring 2020) 'EXIT EMPIRE Imagining New P... more Essay in special issue of Middle East Report No. 294 (Spring 2020) 'EXIT EMPIRE Imagining New Paths for US Policy"
in Lorenzo Kamel, ed. The Middle East: Thinking About and Beyond Security and Stability (Bern: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 65-90)
This chapter argues that to think critically about the issue of security in the Middle East requi... more This chapter argues that to think critically about the issue of security in the Middle East requires three main tasks. First, we need to question the dominant normative understandings of regional and global order that shape existing security studies scholarship about the Middle East. This structure of knowledge production is more appropriate for American policy analysis and formation, rather than academic scholarship, be it within the American academia or outside of it. Second, we need to recognize rival understandings of order at the global and regional level, such as those defined by international law, other major powers, or alternative political forces and ideologies in the region. Academic security studies scholarship in the Middle East should seek to recognize how different actors understand and experience insecurity, rather than measure security only in terms of a US-dominated order. Scholars based within institutions outside the United States, especially those in the Arab world, are often better positioned to relate these alternative experiences and understandings of insecurity. And third, security studies scholars should seek to collectively formulate one or more alternative conceptions of political order from which to forge new critical approaches to security studies. In my own work I advocate, in particular, for the notion of a pluralist regional order which seeks to minimize conflict and insecurity without a dominant regional hegemon.
MENA Politics Newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 1, Spring., 2019
Middle East Report No. 289 (Winter 2018), pp. 32-37.
The extreme nature of both the war and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen cannot be ex... more The extreme nature of both the war and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen cannot be explained without reference to the shifting dynamics of broader geopolitical change in the Middle East. The region’s current pattern of violence is rooted in the repeated US efforts to re-make the region to its advantage through the use of coercive force since 2001. Washington’s interventions and proliferating counterterrorism operations around the region—along with the new Arab wars that followed the Arab uprisings—have led regional middle powers to attempt to reshape that system to serve their own interests. The Saudi–Emirati war in Yemen is just the most tragic example of an Arab state suffering from the geopolitical transformation of the geopolitical and regional order.
in POMEPS Studies 34: Shifting Global Politics and the Middle East (edited by Marc Lynch and Amaney Jamal (Washington DC: Project on Middle East Political Science, 2019)
Since the Arab Uprisings, Middle East geopolitics has transformed from a system organized around ... more Since the Arab Uprisings, Middle East geopolitics has transformed from a system organized around and against a US-managed security architecture into a multipolar system lacking norms, institutions, or balancing mechanisms to constrain conflict and the use of force. This shift is a product of repeated US efforts to order the region through coercive force but also shaped by the emerging multipolar system at the global level. With regional Middle East states lacking a shared understanding of threats, US post-9/11 interventions failed to establish a stable regional security architecture. Instead, they generated intense insecurity for both rival and allied states while witnessing the proliferation of armed non-state actors. As the regional system has become more complex and multipolar, continued US reliance on coercion, rather than accommodation and compromise, has only intensified the forces of regional instability.
MENARA Working Papers No. 11, September 2018
What impact have regional powers had on shaping regional order in the Middle East? What role will... more What impact have regional powers had on shaping regional order in the Middle East? What role will they play in the future of the regional system? Following the US-led invasion of Iraq and the failure of the USA to establish regional order, the area has witnessed a series of attempts by regional states to project power at the regional level and reshape the regional system around their own interests. This report surveys recent efforts by Iran, Qatar, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to influence the dynamics of this system. The report concludes that such strategies have generally failed to recognize or accommodate the security interests of rival regional states and their societies, and they have thus resulted in regional power rivalries, encouraged by external powers, that have led to a new level of destructive civil wars, weapons proliferation, state fragmentation and humanitarian crises. To stem the continuing consequences of these geopolitical rivalries, external powers and the international community need to work with regional states to manage ongoing conflicts, define norms for regional power projection and establish inclusive regional negotiations to forge the basis for a new order
Critical Studies on Security, VOL. 6, NO. 3 (2018): 273–295, 2018
This collectively written work offers a map of our ongoing efforts to work through critical appro... more This collectively written work offers a map of our ongoing efforts to work through critical approaches to the study of security and global politics with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, engaging both experiences and voices of scholars from and work- ing in the region. The unique contribution of the project, we suggest, is threefold. First, we reflect on our commitment to decolonial pedagogy, and how our collective experiences organis- ing a Beirut-based summer school on critical security studies for graduate students and junior scholars living and working in West Asia, North Africa, and the Levant are shaping the project. Second, we affirm and extend the contributions that postcolonial interna- tional relations and critical approaches to security have made to scholarship on the region, and to our own work. Third, we take inspiration from the C.A.S.E. collective’s interest in ‘security traps’ and address how and to what extent security discourse may risk colonising other fields in the pursuit of interdisciplinary scholar- ship. The article concludes with a transition to individual reflec- tions by the authors to highlight the plurality of approaches to the project.
APSA MENA Newsletter Issue 5, Fall 2018, 2018
To what degree should the way IR scholars in the Arab region study and teach IR be shaped by thei... more To what degree should the way IR scholars in the Arab region study and teach IR be shaped by their geopolitical location and relationship to IR in North American and Europe? On 21 and 22 June 2018, IR scholars from across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and North America met at a workshop in Beirut to debate these questions and ongoing efforts to make way for more voices from the region and scholarship about the region in global IR debates.
I want to follow up from Samer's overview of the Manifesto to offer some thoughts about what I re... more I want to follow up from Samer's overview of the Manifesto to offer some thoughts about what I refer to as the geopolitics of knowledge production and the challenges we must face to promote critical IR scholarship from and for the Arab region. In short, I want to suggest that, while we seek to promote scholarship that gets presented at international conferences and published in academic journals, to advance our goals, we also need to promote a structural reorganization of the existing global system of IR knowledge production. We need to build an alternate infrastructure of academic institutions that reflect the concerns and experiences of scholars in the Arab region, and more broadly, affiliated with the Global South. Such an infrastructure would include publishing outlets, training programs, funding sources, and a global network of senior scholars that provide alternatives to the existing hierarchies and priorities of the existing academic field. We need institutions and networks that value and promote the development of scholarship addressing research questions and agenda of concern to scholars and societies in the region, even if there is no agreement on what these are.
Call for Applications
Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World
June... more Call for Applications
Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World
June 17-23, 2019 | Beirut, Lebanon
Application Deadline: January 15, 2019
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) is pleased to announce the call for applications for the Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World to be held on June 17-23, 2019 in Beirut, Lebanon. This training workshop is an activity of the Beirut Security Studies Collective (BSSC), which is supported by the ACSS within its Working Groups Program. The Institute targets junior scholars working within critical approaches to questions of security in the Arab World.
This panel will present the manifesto of the " Beirut Security Studies Collective, " a transnatio... more This panel will present the manifesto of the " Beirut Security Studies Collective, " a transnational working group supported by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). The collective seeks to foster alternative approaches to understanding global politics that draw on encounters with lived experiences of insecurity in the Global South and promote knowledge production by scholars and institutions in the Arab world. This event will also mark the launch of the Collective's website, http://www.thebeirutforum.com where a discussion of the manifesto and papers from the " The Making of IR in the Middle East " workshop will be posted.
APSA MENA Workshops: Alumni e-Newsletter | Issue 3, Fall 2017.
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IR, Geopolitics, US Policy by Waleed Hazbun
For many analysts, political leaders, and much of the US public, a reduced military posture in the Middle East is very compelling. While some argue the US should completely withdraw its forces from the region since no vital security interests are currently threatened, even those calling for continuing engagement recognize the value of rebalancing the US military posture in response to changing contexts and needs.
The challenge for any withdrawal or rebalancing, however, is that US engagement in the region has become so deeply entangled within military institutions and assets that uprooting them would further erode US influence in the region. At the same time, even as previous rationale for the strategic value of the region decline, the US increasingly approaches the Middle East as an arena for militarized great power competition. As a result, any sustained reduction in the US military posture in the Middle East would require a broader demilitarization of US policy, the reduction of great power conflict, and the development of alternative means to address the diverse sources of regional insecurity.
For many analysts, political leaders, and much of the US public, a reduced military posture in the Middle East is very compelling. While some argue the US should completely withdraw its forces from the region since no vital security interests are currently threatened, even those calling for continuing engagement recognize the value of rebalancing the US military posture in response to changing contexts and needs.
The challenge for any withdrawal or rebalancing, however, is that US engagement in the region has become so deeply entangled within military institutions and assets that uprooting them would further erode US influence in the region. At the same time, even as previous rationale for the strategic value of the region decline, the US increasingly approaches the Middle East as an arena for militarized great power competition. As a result, any sustained reduction in the US military posture in the Middle East would require a broader demilitarization of US policy, the reduction of great power conflict, and the development of alternative means to address the diverse sources of regional insecurity.
Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World
June 17-23, 2019 | Beirut, Lebanon
Application Deadline: January 15, 2019
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) is pleased to announce the call for applications for the Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World to be held on June 17-23, 2019 in Beirut, Lebanon. This training workshop is an activity of the Beirut Security Studies Collective (BSSC), which is supported by the ACSS within its Working Groups Program. The Institute targets junior scholars working within critical approaches to questions of security in the Arab World.
For many analysts, political leaders, and much of the US public, a reduced military posture in the Middle East is very compelling. While some argue the US should completely withdraw its forces from the region since no vital security interests are currently threatened, even those calling for continuing engagement recognize the value of rebalancing the US military posture in response to changing contexts and needs.
The challenge for any withdrawal or rebalancing, however, is that US engagement in the region has become so deeply entangled within military institutions and assets that uprooting them would further erode US influence in the region. At the same time, even as previous rationale for the strategic value of the region decline, the US increasingly approaches the Middle East as an arena for militarized great power competition. As a result, any sustained reduction in the US military posture in the Middle East would require a broader demilitarization of US policy, the reduction of great power conflict, and the development of alternative means to address the diverse sources of regional insecurity.
For many analysts, political leaders, and much of the US public, a reduced military posture in the Middle East is very compelling. While some argue the US should completely withdraw its forces from the region since no vital security interests are currently threatened, even those calling for continuing engagement recognize the value of rebalancing the US military posture in response to changing contexts and needs.
The challenge for any withdrawal or rebalancing, however, is that US engagement in the region has become so deeply entangled within military institutions and assets that uprooting them would further erode US influence in the region. At the same time, even as previous rationale for the strategic value of the region decline, the US increasingly approaches the Middle East as an arena for militarized great power competition. As a result, any sustained reduction in the US military posture in the Middle East would require a broader demilitarization of US policy, the reduction of great power conflict, and the development of alternative means to address the diverse sources of regional insecurity.
Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World
June 17-23, 2019 | Beirut, Lebanon
Application Deadline: January 15, 2019
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) is pleased to announce the call for applications for the Third Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in the Arab World to be held on June 17-23, 2019 in Beirut, Lebanon. This training workshop is an activity of the Beirut Security Studies Collective (BSSC), which is supported by the ACSS within its Working Groups Program. The Institute targets junior scholars working within critical approaches to questions of security in the Arab World.
of American director George Lucas' Star Wars creations. The first movie had a ground-breaking imaginative power, while the
"empire" the films have since produced casts shadows of the "dark side."
This collectively written work offers a map of an ongoing effort to work through critical approaches to the study of security and global politics with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, engaging both experiences and voices of scholars from and working in the region. The unique contribution of the project, we suggest, is threefold. First, we reflect on our commitment to decolonial pedagogy, and how our collective experiences organizing a Beirut-based summer school on critical security studies for graduate students and junior scholars living and working in West Asia, North Africa, and the Levant are shaping the project. Second, we affirm and extend the contributions that postcolonial international relations and critical approaches to understanding security have made to scholarship on the region, and to our own work. Third, we take up the C.A.S.E. collective's interest in 'security traps,' and address how and to what extent security discourse may risk colonizing other fields in the pursuit of interdisciplinary scholarship. The article concludes with a transition to individual reflections by the authors to highlight the plurality of inspirations and approaches to the project.
Volume produced in the frame of the New-Med Research Network.