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.
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