"A conceptually and empirically rich introduction to war and conflict in the MENA"--

Since 2011, civil wars and state failure have wracked the Arab world, underlying the misalignment between national identity and political borders. In Break all the Borders, Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake those borders and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern resistance in Yemen, and Kurdish nationalist parties, Ahram explains how separatists captured territory and handled the tasks of rebel governance, including managing oil exports, electricity grids, and irrigation networks. Ahram emphasizes that the separatism arose not just as an opportunistic response to state collapse. Rather, separatists drew inspiration from the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and ideal of self-determination. They sought to reinstate political autonomy that had been lost during the early and mid-twentieth century. Speaking to the international community, separatist promised a more just and stable world order. In Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya, they served as key allies against radical Islamic groups. Yet their hopes for international recognition have gone unfulfilled. Separatism is symptomatic of the contradictions in sovereignty and statehood in the Arab world. Finding ways to integrate, instead of eliminate, separatist movements may be critical for rebuilding regional order.

In Break all the Borders, Ariel Ahram focuses on why these conflicts erupted and how separatist movements were able to gain control over territory and population centers in the years since 2011. After explaining how contemporary Arab states were established in the twentieth century, he emphasizes that the separatist movements that did gain traction were the descendants of movements and populations that lost independence in the twentieth century. That is important because Arab politics is often caricatured as a contest of ancient clans, tribes, and sects masquerading under the banner of modern states and political parties. Given the presumed ubiquity of sub-state identities and artificiality of state borders, the Arab world should be rife with rebellions bent on breaking the borders of existing states. Yet most of the rebels involved in the 2011 uprisings sought to overthrow individual rulers and regimes and did not contest the integrity of the state. There are only a handful of actors bent on separation, and they have been trying to reinstate political entities that were repressed within the last one hundred years. Their appeals are distinctly modern: they ask the international community to make good on the promises of popular sovereignty and point to recent histories of self-rule or failed bids for independence to justify their campaigns. Ahram ends by stressing that if we look at the actual sources of separatism in the region, we can see that they do not necessarily signal a breakdown of 'order'--an order that was always tenuous given that its foundations lay in repression of legitimate territorially-based political movements. We should not dismiss contemporary separatists them but rather engage with them.

This study examines the proliferation of militias and other armed groups who act in conjunction with, but outside, the state's military apparatus. Groups like the Sudanese janjaweed, the Serbian paramilitaries, and Colombian self-defense forces figure prominently in a host of contemporary conflicts in the developing world. They are widely identified as banes of human and international security and harbingers of anarchy. Their very existence violates the Weberian ideal-type of the state as a monopolist over the use of force. I argue, however, that reliance on non-state violence-wielders has been a common form of military development and is not necessarily associated with state failure.

"Since the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011, centralized military power has broken down in North Africa, the Levant, and Yemen, and several weak Arab states have turned to local militias to help defend regimes. While these pro-government militias can play important security roles, they have limited military capacity and reliability. Transitioning militia fighters into national guard forces with formal ties to the national command structure can overcome some of these limitations, but the shift must be accompanied by a wider commitment to security sector reform and political power sharing"--Publisher's web site.