POMEPS Studies 42: MENA’s Frozen Conflicts

Over the last year, the MENA region’s simmering conflicts have seemed frozen in place. The internationally-fueled civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya have long since settled into an equilibrium in which no side can either truly win or truly lose. Those conflicts have been held in place in part by local ecologies and war economies and in part by the competitive interventions by regional and international powers on behalf of their proxies and clients. But are these conflicts truly frozen?  What does viewing them through such a lens gain, and what are the theoretical and analytical costs?  To explore these questions, POMEPS convened a virtual research workshop on September 25, 2020, with scholars from diverse empirical and theoretical backgrounds.  We are delighted to now publish their papers in this issue of POMEPS STUDIES.

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Introduction: MENA’s Frozen Conflicts 

Marc Lynch

Syria, Crisis Ecologies, and Enduring Insecurities in the MENA

Samer Abboud

Hybrid Security, Frozen Conflicts, and Peace in MENA

Ariel I. Ahram

Yemen’s Mental Health Crisis and Its Implications for Security

Raiman Al-Hamdani

Patterns of Mobilization and Repression in Iraq’s Tishreen Uprising

Chantal Berman, Killian Clarke, Rima Majed

From R2P to Reticence: U.S. Policy and the Libyan Conflict

Mieczysław P. Boduszyński

Wars, Capital and the MENA region

Matteo Capasso

The consolidation of a (post-jihadi) technocratic state-let in Idlib

Jerome Drevon, Patrick Haenni

Heartbreak, Still Time, and Pressing Forward: On Lebanon and the Future

Sami Hermez

Failure to Launch: The Inability of Catalysts to Alter Political Arrangements in Lebanon and Syria

Sara Kayyali

The Great Thaw: The Resumption of Political Development in the Middle East

David Siddhartha Patel

This Critical Juncture: Elite Competition in a Receding Civil War

Ammar Shamaileh

Citizenship Constellations in Syria

Marika Sosnowski

Prospects for Ending External Intervention in Yemen’s War

Alexandra Stark

Pursuing Peace by Engaging Justice in Yemen

Stacey Philbrick Yadav