Contemporaries face a daunting task when trying to understand the complex and fluid dynamics in the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East, which has been witnessing turbulences since 2010. This period has been one of uprisings and counter-uprisings, of civil wars and proxy wars, and of deliberate and destabilizing ideological and strategic crises. This ever-growing and complex set of regional dynamics since the first Arab Spring movement is not routine politics; rather, it is a formative condition for an altered or a novel regional system across the broader Middle East.
While these formative regional dynamics evolved during the twenty-first century, they are actually a prolongation of long-standing issues, affairs, and narratives across the region, as well as domestic and foreign leanings and behaviors of state actors and non-state militant actors dating back to the early stages of the formation of the interstate system in the twentieth century. Different authors in this book take account of this continuation of regional dynamics in their respective chapters.
This book thematically explores this unfolding regional system, which is also referred to as a regional order, make-up, or security complex. Written by scholars from diverse disciplines, it addresses the major security alliances (i.e., subsystems) and the most vigorous regional great powers and non-state militant actors in the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East, in addition to the role of external actors and ecological factors in regional dynamics. The analysis takes place at the regional level and considers the interplay of a combination of a cluster of factors, including the distribution of material power dynamics, ideational factors, and domestic influences.1
The intent of the book is to contribute to a greater understanding of interactive politics in the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East from the interrelated vantage points of different systemic units and clusters of factors at the regional level of analysis. At the risk of oversimplifying a vastly varied and rich body of literature on the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East, I argue that major studies typically have used material power-based explanations and political explanations with a major focus on the foreign policy of states in the region or the determinant role of global great powers in regional dynamics. This line of inquiries draws, openly or indirectly, on insights from the realist theories of International Relations (IR) and, to a lesser degree, is informed by liberal- or constructivist-inspired approaches.
However, this research design also has shortcomings once a certain level of knowledge and a disciplinary canon of literature have been established, as it hinders a fuller and wide-ranging explanation of the topic under exploration, and has a tendency to produce repetitive or unimaginative outputs.
The literature on regional interactive politics in the broader Middle East reveals an apparent focus largely on the state level and/or the international level of analysis. The region, in itself and by itself, as a level of analysis on its own has attracted the attention of fewer scholars.2 Moreover, few scholars have examined the regional system in terms of the interplay between material power dynamics, immaterial power dynamics (ideas, narratives, and causes), and domestic influences.
Indeed, the state level and the international level are interconnected with one another and with the regional dynamics, so they deliver valuable insights for understanding regional dynamics. Regional powers and global powers still have a dominant say in the broader Middle East, as different chapters in this book demonstrate. Yet, a major aim of the book is to demonstrate that combining different clusters of factors in relation to the regional level of analysis delivers a more encompassing and comprehensive explanation for regional politics and dynamics. These are intertwined, and so their separation into one or a subset of clusters/factors does not deliver an adequate and reasonable explanation.
As a contribution to the profusion of excellent scholarship on the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East, a factorial approach is taken that includes material clusters and immaterial clusters of factors, while paying attention to the region as a level of analysis in itself and by itself. Note that this approach engages internal and external dynamics, as illustrated below. As the final section in this chapter will demonstrate, the respective authors accord distinct weights to the various systemic units and clusters of factors and combine them in different ways in their chapters.
The book is intended to serve as a text for university-level classes on Middle East Studies and IR in the broader Middle East and as a general reference text for practitioners interested in the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East. It highlights recent developments in a regional context.
Notably, regional dynamics across the broader Middle East provide students of IR and Middle East Studies, as well as practitioners, with cases and topics covering fascinating lines of inquiry of regional dynamics and international politics in both their empirical and theoretical dimensions. These lines of inquiry include regional combinations of state and non-state actors, and forms of regional relations; regional powers and the scope and extent of foreign and security policy behavior; the increasing significance of non-state militant actors and ecological factors; and the involvement of global great powers; in addition to what the author calls āideational balancingā (ideological jostling for power). The various chapters of the book are also useful for social scientists who are interested in hypotheses and gathering knowledge for theory building of regional systems, as well as alliance formation and deformation. The objective of this book is not, however, to deliver a definitive account of the regional system in the Gulf Region and broader Middle East or to serve as an encyclopedia of all state actors and non-state militant actors (i.e., systemic units) considered part of the regional system.
The rest of this introduction is divided into three main sections. The first section deals with the terminology of the Gulf Region and the broader Middle East. Because this book focuses on related geographic entities, it is appropriate to define them and to explain why there are so many conflicting understandings of what exactly the region is. The second section is a broad overview of the concept of the regional system and the relationship between the different systemic units. In relation to the first, the second section theoretically demonst...