Speakers on “Panel 2: Stoking Conflict” will be presenting their work from 11:00-12:40pm in Allard 123.
Samantha Sam Olson (UVic) | “FM 3-24 and Religious Literacy in American Military Operations in the Middle East”
In August 2021, the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan shocked American citizens and foreign policy analysts. Many counterinsurgency experts sought to explain this phenomenon by focusing on tactical and strategic military failures; however, such explanations often neglected to investigate the religious literacy of American troops engaged in counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East. By considering the treatment of ‘religion’ in General David Petraeus’s landmark field manual, FM 3-24, a startling degree of religious illiteracy is revealed within counterinsurgency operational protocols for the Middle East. While a historically and culturally focused “civilizational approach is often proposed by foreign policy analysts as a potential solution to the problem of religious illiteracy in counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East, this approach also falls short of addressing the complex realities that confront American “liberators, whom locals often perceive to be foreign invaders.
This essay therefore addresses the disconnect between American military strategy, foreign policy, and the tactical realities encountered by military personnel stationed in the Middle East. Resultantly, this essay argues that improved mandatory religious literacy training for American troops is critical not only for conducting successful operations in the Middle East but also for ending, rather than reinvigorating, conflicts abroad.
Carter Dungate (UBC) | “Oil and Water: Libya’s Control of Natural Resources in the Qaddafi Era”
I will present a 90% graded paper from HIST 405 (History of the Middle East) at UBC on the relationship between oil production and water infrastructure in Gaddafi-era Libya. The rise and fall of the Gaddafi‘s ‘Great Manmade River’ draws attention to the profound impact of freshwater security on political stability and conflict in the Middle East in a warming climate. My research includes excerpts from Middle East historians, global security analysts, environmental scientists, and hydro-engineers. There is also primary research focused on Libyan writer Ali al-Fazzani’s cultural description of Gaddafi’s background and trend towards socialism, as well as analyzing how news coverage of conflict over freshwater in the Middle East often disregards climate change. This interdisciplinary-learning historical research highlights the growing trend of water conflict in the Middle East. Conflict over freshwater security is demonstrated with the historical examples of conflict in Israel, Syria, and Libya, along with more recent examples of water conflict in Kashmir, and cyber-attacks on the “Great Ethiopian Dam.’
This paper not only presents unique research into the relationship between Gaddafi’s socialist policy of water distribution and oil production, but also notes how conflict over access to freshwater has profoundly destabilizing effects on Middle Eastern politics. This presentation will support MEICON’s emphasis on comprehensive study of the Middle East by analyzing freshwater insecurity that affects many Middle East nations and continues to be exacerbated by climate change.
Zahra Khan (KPU) | “Exile; Democracy, Imperialism and the Political Sense of Self”
Conditionality in foreign aid and state-to-state conciliatory tactics are read as a justification of violence on global state bodies. This work responds to a “new imperialism, and explores the dissolving distinction between the self and the other through the case of state identity in international relations – and focuses on self-determination through democratic consolidation through the case of cultural and political revolution in the muslim world. State violence, and the historicity of a nation’s role in the development of a people, are compared to the effects of interpersonal violence on the individual ego, persona, and the development of a cohesive, individual identity, or a steady sense of self. The legitimation of a state body and the autonomous development of a people are read as the final step in cementing the identity of a state, at a waypoint between individuation and democratic consolidation.
The experience of a state-body as formed by its historicity is read as a confusion of the politics of the self with the politics that federated bodies conduct between themselves; in selling one’s nationhood short, or dissolving the sense of self, imperialist violence drives immigration laws to constitutional amendment and cements the dissociated state as one that must work towards regional partnership, justice, remembrance, acknowledgement of the general will, and strengthened democratic politics. Conversations on democratic consolidation and praxis in the context of government-to-government interaction posit conditionality in foreign relations as a test for imperialist sentiment, rather than an imperialist tactic – individual democratic consolidation is here seen as essential to the development of national identity. State function gives the muslim world a way to nationhood in the bureaucratic sense, while state history, experience, and the individual sense of self is never forgotten.
Nancy Hamad (UBC) | “Perpetual Wars: Paramilitaries and Proxy Wars in the Middle East”
International interventions by non-Arab states like the USA, the UK and Russia and Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the Middle East have a long history, but in the twenty-first century they intensified in the wake of 9/11 and again following the start of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010.
These actions have often provoked civil wars; they have typically issued in anarchy, chaos, and social and economic collapse; and they have almost always deepened (and indeed capitalised on) internal divisions. These internal divisions have assumed multiple and sometimes intersecting and compounding forms: sectarian fractures, Islamic radicalization, and nakedly material squabbles over the spoils of war. Although the actions of external actors have almost always been cloaked in the rhetoric of counterterrorism or opposing oppressive regimes, they have in fact transformed states like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen into arenas for settling their own geopolitical disputes through proxy powers and proxy wars that are intended to further their own strategic goals without engaging directly in costly and bloody warfare.
Drawing from my ten years of working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), this paper will explore the impact of these strategies on Yemen. Presenting how Saudi Arabia and UAE are committed in their fight against Iran backed forces, however, their relationship remains divergent in views over means and objectives in the Yemen conflict as they evidently pursue different strategies, alliances and geopolitical goals, and different approaches to political Islam.