Why Is War the Father and King of All?

Evaggelos Vallianatos

 July 15, 2026

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War, painting by Evi Sarantea.

For a variety of reasons, humans often resort to killing each other. Instead of resolving their differences peacefully, they arm themselves and kill each other until one of them wins the conflict, that is, he has killed most of his opponents. This deadly tradition survives and thrives to this day – in 2026.

Despite international organizations designed to prevent wars like the United Nations, there are alliances like NATO and the European Union, which still prepare and crown war. NATO is basically an American war alliance against Russia. It is an extension of US hegemony in Europe. Meanwhile, deadly conflicts are wrecking Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The war in Ukraine is to some degree WWIII. It has been funded and armed by NATO. This abhorrent race to war justifies the sixth century BCE philosopher Herakleitos who said, “War is the father and king of all” (Hippolytos, Refutation 9.9.4).

True, it is, but why? Wars have been the greatest forces shaping civilization and history. The question is, why are humans incapable of learning to live with each other without mayhem? Such behavior negates civilization. Therefore, what we call civilization to praise ourselves has become civilized barbarism.

Wars in Hellas / Greece

The Greeks discovered democracy, science and beautiful culture. They tried to avoid war through the Olympics and other Panhellenic games and festivals as well as the Oracle at Delphi, which constantly reminded them of their eusebeia / piety for the gods, the speaking of the same Greek language and their Hellenic identity. But these worthwhile institutions and efforts of reconciliation often failed. The result was a series of dehumanizing and de-Hellenizing civil wars like the Peloponnesian War, 431- 404 BCE. This very destructive mayhem started not because of any aggression on the part of the strongest Hellenic city states: Athens, Sparta, Thebes or Corinth. No. The spark for the war came from Sparta because of its fear of rising Athenian influence and power. And once the deadly conflict started, Persia funded Sparta.

After the Greek victories over the Persian invasions of Hellas in 490 and 480-479 BCE, Athens allied with other city states in Ionia / Asia Minor and the Aegean concerned about more Persian invasions. This leadership of Athens gave it international prestige, influence and money with which Athens rebuilt the Parthenon, which the Persians had burned. Sparta did not appreciate a strong rival in Hellas, hence it started the Peloponnesian War that had catastrophic consequences for all Greeks.

The internal strife in Hellas weakened the Greeks and invited conquerors like the Greek Macedonians from Northern Greece and the Romans from the West. The Roman emperor Constantine embraced Christianity in the fourth century. That caused a political and cultural earthquake that demolished nearly all of Hellenic civilization. Christians and other barbarians undid Hellas, overthrowing its temples, architecture, science, schools, libraries and way of life. The Christianization of Hellas was a global catastrophe that sunk Western Europe into darkness: the burning of libraries, crusades and the triumph of barbarism for several centuries.

A very small number of Greek manuscripts survived the march of Christianity into Hellas. These treasures sparked the Renaissance among the Arabs in the 8^th century and among the Western Europeans in the 15^th century. But the Greeks themselves, made Christians by force, failed to repel the attacks of the Mongol Turks and, in 1453, they lost their freedom. The Western Christian Europeans did not go to the assistance of the Greeks because of theological divisions. Some 400 years later, in the 1820s, the Greeks fought a heroic struggle and won their freedom.

Wars in Europe

Wars continued in Europe. The Greeks spent most of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to recapture their land. World War I and especially WWII almost annihilate Greece. In addition, the British and the Germans sowed the seeds of civil war in Greece, 1943-1949. Communist class struggle and American and British capitalist ideologies fought a ferocious conflict in impoverished Greece.

The United States founded the European militarist alliance of NATO, that also included the perennial enemy of Greece, Turkey. This meant that the hot wars of the first half of the 20^th century would continue as Cold War conflicts between NATO and the Soviet Union, both armed with the genocidal and extermination nuclear bombs. Islamic Turkey was the only beneficiary of this meaningless regime of tensions and conflicts in Europe. Turkey continued to play one Western Christian country against another and against the communist Soviet Union.

As for Greece, the game was desperate. German occupation, 1941-1944, almost wiped out the country. The civil war, 1943-1949, became another Peloponnesian War: destructive and fratricidal. And just like the Mongol conquest of 1453, when most Greek scholars escaped to Florence, Padua, Venice and Rome, many Greeks left their country in the 1950s and 1960s for other countries in Europe, Australia and America, especially America.

The misfortunes of modern Greece started in 1831. Local enemies of the first president of modern Greece, Ioannes Kapodistrias, did not like him. He came to Greece in 1828 after a brilliant career in Russia, where he was the Secretary of State, 1816-1822. Kapodistrias was also the preeminent diplomat of Europe. In Greece, he tried to create an independent nation state. However, he set the foundations of the modern Greek national state, using his own wealth and Philhellenic contributions for funding the army, schools, courts, hospitals, post office and the expansion of the national borders. He was just to the landless peasants by giving them land. Nevertheless, on September 27, 1831, his local and foreign enemies assassinated him. Britain might have funded the assassins.

After Kapodistrias, the “great” European powers (Britain, France, Russia) sent kings and monarchical institutions to Greece, which undermined the country’s democracy, facilitated the looting of Greek archaeological treasures and weakened ancient traditions. The outcome, as I said, was NATO that included Turkey.

The US, Turkey and NATO

The US was so incense by the influence of the gigantic communist Soviet Union that overlooked the genocidal legacy and policy of Turkey. Like Britain, the US treated Turkey as a fence for the Soviet Union. This blind bias encouraged Turkey’s 1955 pogrom against 85,000 Greek residents of Constantinople / Istanbul. Turkish state-led mobs, armed with torches, knives and iron rods, smashed everything Greek: churches, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, orphanages and thousands of business and commercial stores.

The same disregard for Greece and admiration for Turkey was the reason the US ordered Greece to remove its army from Cyprus. To facilitate such a cowardly act, the Greek army took over the government from 1967 to 1974. The Greek military gave the green light to Turkey, which, in 1974, invaded Cyprus and occupied about 40 percent of the Greek island.

Meanwhile, NATO and the European Union remain silent about Turkish aggression. Even the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis downplays the Turkish war threat. If his country dares to expand sovereignty to sea waters that belong to Greece in the Aegean., Turkey threatens war. Mitsotakis mumbled this apocryphal message in early July 2026 NATO conference in Ankara: “My country is in a very delicate neighborhood, facing geopolitical challenges.” NATO and the EU are well aware of this “delicate” situation developing into a volcano in the Aegean but keep silent. The United Nations also treat Turkey like a “normal” state, more than 50 years after Turkey occupied Greek and EU territory.

The Trump administration also has no trouble with genocidal Turkey. In fact, Trump seems to like Erdogan, who continues threatening Greece. Erdogan reads the lips of Trump. In the Ankara NATO meeting, July 7-8, 2026, Erdogan welcomed his distinguished guests with music from an Ottoman-era orchestra.

Evolution of war

Demetrios Karkamanis, a Greek war expert who spent his professional life in the Swedish armed forces, published a couple of articles about the immorality of NATO. None of its nation state members had the courage to raise the human rights violations the government of Erdogan inflicted on Turkish citizens primarily because of the NATO summit in Ankara, much less the systematic violence Turkey has been inflicting on the Greek population and institutions in occupied northern Cyprus for more than 50 years. NATO in early July 2026 was repeating the Trump obsession of spending about $ 50 billion for additional armaments. One wonders all these new guns are going to fight whom? Certainly the Europeans are not deluded or insane to think of fighting Russia directly, though they have been doing that indirectly through the arming and destruction of Ukraine.

The Greek Swedish military expert talked extensively on what Greece needs to do to face the inevitable military confrontation with NATO-embolden Turkey.

I read Karkamanis carefully. He is a strategic thinker. He knows the weapons manufactured and used today. He agreed it was a good idea that Greece purchased 4 very advanced technology warships from France, the so-called Belharra. But he raised critical questions about warfare and strategy. He said that Greece must become self-reliant in weapons and the manufacture of weapons. Her dangerous neighbor, Turkey, has been investing in its military industry and especially in the development of drones, sea and air drones carrying explosives for the annihilation of the enemies they attack. Would the French warships in the Greek navy be able to withstand the ferocity of the drone attacks, the explosive powers of wave after wave of explosives-armed kamikaze drones? And what if the warship destroyed the cheap drones with expensive bullets or missiles? And then he speculated about the algorithmic warfare of tomorrow. Where would such mechanical killing nightmare push humans? Back to the dark ages and mountain caves?

Extinction is the other side of the high tech warfare coin, the potential outcome of still maintaining thousands of “modernized” nuclear weapons by several nation states: US, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Britain, France, North Korea and Israel: flying them in military aircraft and filling submarines with missiles loaded with the dreadful weapons of extinction; keeping them in air force bases and elsewhere. But instead of discussing disarmament, showing off nukes is becoming fashionable once again.

Nuke fever is unsettling Britain. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which for decades is acting like the canary in the mine, is warning that Britain is up to something dangerous: “In the last five years,” the Bulletin says, “Britain has quietly moved to increase the maximum size of its nuclear stockpile and revise its nuclear doctrine, and it is now acquiring an additional nuclear capability. In concert with the United States, the UK government is expanding the deployment of non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons in a way that could destabilize the strategic balance in Europe.”

Yes, but why is Britain moving around “tactical” nukes? To scare Iran? Ireland? Russia? the EU? We don’t know the depths of insanity behind this extremely dangerous and provocative “doctrine” and policy of Britain. Of course, Britain works closely with its younger brother, the United States, which she educated so well that the US replaced her as world hegemon.

Epilogue

The dogma of Britain to rearm its nuclear forces confirms that war is not about to take a vacation. In such a new jungle of enemies armed to the teeth with a variety of high tech AI weapons, Hellas / Greece must merge her ancient virtues of daring, courage and passion for freedom with the latest high tech technologies of war. No doubt, fighting Turkey in the Aegean will be complex, demanding weapons, daring and strategy. The geography of the Aegean is a tremendous asset to Hellas. Arm each island to defend and fight any invader. The Greeks defeated much larger armies and navies because they had centuries of experience fighting for their freedom. They had studied their potential enemies and knew their strength and weakness. The Turks have a large army but very little experience in fighting naval battles. The Greeks practically lived in the sea for millennia. Belharra, drones, submarines, missiles, air force, electronic warfare and radars become heroic if they are monitored and guided by heroes.

I am not praising warfare. But we live surrounded by danger and enemies. The Greeks are not aggressive. They prefer peace to war. However, their neighbors, the Turks, want what the Greeks have. That’s why the Greeks must develop a strategy to defeat the Turks decisively.

Turkey does not belong to the West and NATO. It’s a jihadist state that has been oppressing non Turks and non-Muslims for centuries. Why is the US and its Western allies refuse to learn this simple truth? Don’t they learn from history? It would be a good idea to talk to the Armenians and Kurds.

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological-political theorist. He studied zoology and history, Greek and European, at the University of Illinois and Wisconsin. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency; taught at several universities, and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including Poison Spring (2014), The Antikythera Mechanism (2021), Freedom (2025) and Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).

 

From bursts to creep: scientists rewrite the story of mud volcano flows

New study in Geology proposes a new model for understanding mud volcano dynamics

Geological Society of America

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image: 

Panoramic view of the mud flow at Lokbatan mud volcano, Azerbaijan. 

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Credit: Photo by A. Mazzini

Boulder, Colo., USA: Mud volcanoes are often pictured as dramatic geological phenomena featuring the sudden eruption of large volumes of fiery mud in short, powerful bursts. By examining recent activity at the Lokbatan mud volcano in Azerbaijan, an international team of researchers led by the University of Oslo found that many eruptions are relatively small and short-lived, producing only modest amounts of material near the crater. Instead of building large flows all at once, these outbursts seem to “wake up” much older mud deposits that were already sitting on the slopes.

The team combined field observations, satellite imagery, and geophysical measurements to track how these older mud flows behave over time. A key player is a hidden, water-rich layer beneath the surface that acts like a lubricant, allowing the overlying mud to slide, almost like a slow‑moving glacier. This slow, step-by-step motion has been ongoing for years, quietly reshaping the landscape in ways that are not immediately visible.

Based on these findings, the authors propose a new model for mud volcano dynamics: Large mud flows are not generated by single, catastrophic eruptions, but instead grow progressively through repeated small events that reactivate and push existing material downslope triggering a slow creeping. This new perspective changes how scientists understand these systems and has important implications for hazard assessment and monitoring.

Contact: Dr. Adriano Mazzini email: adriano.mazzini@geo.uio.no
Dr. Petr Brož email: petr.broz@ig.cas.cz
The study combines expertise from researchers in Norway, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Azerbaijan.

CITATION: Mazzini, A., et al., 2026, Mud volcanism and creepy mud flows: A new model: Geology, https://doi.org /10.1130/G54583.1

Link to visual materials: All photos credited to A. Mazzini

About the Geological Society of America

The Geological Society of America (GSA) is a global professional society with more than 18,000 members across over 100 countries. As a leading voice for the geosciences, GSA advances the understanding of Earth's dynamic processes and fosters collaboration among scientists, educators, and policymakers. GSA publishes Geology, the top-ranked “geology” journal, along with a diverse portfolio of scholarly journals, books, and conference proceedings—several of which rank among Amazon’s top 100 best-selling geology titles.

 

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Journal

Geology

DOI

10.1130/G54583.1 

Article Title

Mud volcanism and creepy mud flows: A new model

Identity, Religion, Nationalism, And Political Mobilization In The Middle East – Analysis

July 8, 2026 
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Key Takeaways

Identity Politics in the Middle East is Fluid and Instrumentalised — Nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender are not fixed but continuously renegotiated by state and non-state actors depending on power, legitimacy, and political opportunity.

Modern Constructs Meet Deep Cultural Repertoires — While Arab nationalism and state borders were modern inventions (shaped by colonialism and print capitalism), they draw on pre-existing ethnic, religious, and symbolic resources that give them strong affective power.

No Single Identity Dominates — Secular Arab nationalism declined after 1967, Islamism rose then adapted, and sectarian/ethnic identities persist — all are strategically mobilised rather than primordial, with outcomes shaped by context and elite competition.

Introduction

The politics of identity—encompassing nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender—provides the affective and normative fuel of political mobilisation across all regime types, and its comparative analysis has generated some of the most vibrant and contested debates in the discipline. Nationalism, as the ideological claim that the legitimate unit of political authority is the nation, was analysed by Anderson (1983/2006) as the product of particular conditions of modernity—print capitalism, vernacular standardisation, and the displacement of religious cosmologies—rather than as the natural political expression of pre-existing primordial communities. Gellner’s (1983) structural account, which derived nationalism from the homogenising cultural demands of industrial society, and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) constructivist emphasis on the ‘invention of tradition’ converge on the insight that national identities, however experienced as ancient and organic, are modern political constructions whose genealogies are contingent and recoverable.

The Middle East, however, poses a set of complications for this modernist consensus that make it an especially productive terrain for comparative analysis. First, the region’s national boundaries were substantially the product of external imperial cartography—the Sykes-Picot arrangement and the League of Nations mandate system—such that the ‘nation’ frequently postdated, rather than preceded, the state (Hourani, 1991; Fromkin, 1989). Second, Islam supplies a transnational normative vocabulary—the umma, the caliphate, sharī’a—that both antedates and persistently competes with the territorial nation-state as a locus of ultimate political loyalty (Piscatori, 1986; Zubaida, 1993). Third, ethnic and sectarian cleavages—Kurdish, Amazigh, Shi’a, Sunni, Christian, and others—cross-cut and often subvert the nationalist project, producing what Makdisi (2000) termed ‘the culture of sectarianism’ as a durable political technology rather than a residue of primordial hatred. This essay argues that political mobilisation in the Middle East is best understood not as the triumph of one axis of identity over the others but as a continuous, historically contingent renegotiation among nationalist, religious, ethnic, class, and gendered idioms of solidarity, each instrumentalised by state and non-state actors according to shifting configurations of legitimacy and power (Barnett, 1998; Telhami & Barnett, 2002).

Theorising Nationalism: Modernism, Ethno-Symbolism, and Their Limits

The modernist paradigm associated with Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm (1990) treats the nation as an artefact of capitalism, bureaucratic rationalisation, and mass literacy. Anderson’s (1983/2006) concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’—imagined because its members will never know most of their fellow-nationals yet nonetheless perceive a horizontal fraternity—rests on the technological precondition of print capitalism, which standardised vernacular languages and created the simultaneity of experience that national consciousness requires. Gellner (1983) located the causal mechanism instead in the functional requirements of industrial society, which demands a culturally homogeneous, literate workforce mobile across an anonymous labour market; nationalism, in this reading, is the political roof that industrialism requires. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) edited volume complements both accounts by demonstrating empirically how ostensibly ancient traditions—kilts, coronations, civic rituals—were frequently fabricated in the nineteenth century to manufacture the historical depth that new political communities required (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).


Against this modernist current, Smith (1986, 1991) advanced an ethno-symbolist corrective, arguing that modern nations, whatever their political novelty, typically crystallise around pre-existing ethnies—named human populations with shared ancestry myths, historical memories, and cultural markers—such that nationalism’s ideological work is one of reinterpretation and mobilisation rather than pure invention. Connor (1994) pressed a related point about the affective, quasi-kinship character of national feeling, cautioning that instrumentalist accounts of nationalism-as-elite-manipulation understate the visceral force such identities exert once activated. The Middle Eastern cases discussed below vindicate elements of both positions: Arab nationalism’s ideologues self-consciously constructed a modern qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) using print media and party organisation in a manner consistent with Anderson and Gellner, yet they did so by reworking pre-existing linguistic, tribal, and religious materials whose symbolic resonance—per Smith and Connor—could not simply be manufactured ex nihilo (Dawisha, 2003; Choueiri, 2000). The analytical task, then, is not to adjudicate definitively between constructivist and ethno-symbolist positions but to trace how political entrepreneurs mobilise available cultural repertoires under specific structural constraints (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).
Religion and the Nation-State: A Structural Tension

A second complication specific to the Middle East concerns the relationship between religion and the nationalist project. Piscatori (1986) demonstrated that Islamic political thought has historically resisted full assimilation into the Westphalian logic of territorially bounded, mutually exclusive sovereignties, since the umma is conceived as a single moral-political community transcending ethnic and territorial particularism. Zubaida (1993) extended this analysis by showing how modern Middle Eastern states have nonetheless successfully appropriated Islamic symbolism in the service of territorial nationalism—Egyptian, Moroccan, and Saudi state Islam each construct a nationally bounded religious authority that domesticates the universalist claims of the umma. Ayubi (1991) characterised this appropriation as constitutive of what he called ‘the over-stated’ Arab state: a state apparatus strong in coercive and symbolic reach yet weak in autonomous legitimacy, compelled continuously to borrow religious authority to compensate for thin nationalist consensus.

Halliday (2000) usefully disaggregated the analytic confusion that often attends discussions of ‘religious nationalism’ in the region, distinguishing between religion as a marker of communal boundary (a functional equivalent of ethnicity), religion as a totalising political ideology (Islamism proper), and religion as a legitimating discourse instrumentalised by incumbent states. These are analytically distinct even though empirically entangled: Ba’athist Syria’s minority-inflected Alawite leadership deployed a studiously secular Arab nationalist idiom precisely because sectarian identity could not supply legitimating universality (Batatu, 1999), whereas Saudi Arabia’s ruling family fused dynastic nationalism with Wahhabi religious authority from the state’s founding (Al-Rasheed, 2010). The variation across cases confirms Barnett’s (1998) broader point that Arab and Middle Eastern politics unfold within a shared normative field—pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, sovereignty—whose meaning is nonetheless perpetually contested and redeployed by rival elites for domestic and regional advantage (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).

Arab Nationalism and Its Vicissitudes

Arab nationalism (qawmiyya) emerged in the late Ottoman period among Christian and Muslim intellectuals of the Levant who sought, per Anderson’s (1983/2006) model, to construct a horizontal fraternity transcending confessional and dynastic loyalty through a shared Arabic print culture (Hourani, 1991; Dawisha, 2003). Its interwar and post-independence apotheosis under Nasserism and Ba’athism reworked this cultural nationalism into a state-centred ideology of anti-imperial liberation, non-alignment, and Arab unity, most spectacularly embodied in the short-lived United Arab Republic (Choueiri, 2000). Yet as Ajami (1978) diagnosed with prescient bitterness, pan-Arab nationalism’s normative claim—that the Arab nation, not the individual territorial state, constituted the legitimate unit of sovereignty—generated a persistent legitimacy deficit for the very states that invoked it, since qutriyya (territorial patriotism) and qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) pointed in mutually undermining directions.

The 1967 defeat is conventionally treated as the watershed moment in this ideology’s decline (Ajami, 1978; Kerr, 1971), discrediting the secular nationalist regimes’ claim to have mastered the instruments of modern statecraft and creating the ideational vacuum into which Islamist movements would later expand (Kepel, 2002). Batatu’s (1999) monumental study of Syria demonstrates how, even as pan-Arab rhetoric persisted, Ba’athist power became increasingly captured by minority-sectarian and rural class networks, such that official nationalist ideology functioned less as a description of the regime’s social base than as a legitimating veneer over what was, in practice, an exclusionary patrimonial order—an early instance of the instrumentalisation dynamic elaborated below (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).

The Islamist Alternative: Religion as Mobilising Ideology

The eclipse of secular pan-Arabism created the political opening that Islamist movements—the Muslim Brotherhood chief among them—were organisationally and ideologically positioned to exploit (Kepel, 2002; Wickham, 2002). Wickham’s (2002) ethnographic study of Egyptian Islamist activism reframes mobilisation theory itself: rather than treating Islamism as a spontaneous outpouring of religious sentiment, she demonstrates how movements like the Muslim Brotherhood built dense networks of social provision, professional syndicates, and moral community that functioned as parallel infrastructures of solidarity where the state had retreated under structural adjustment. Ismail (2003) similarly emphasised the everyday, associational, and disciplinary dimensions of Islamist politics—mosque study circles, dress codes, neighbourhood surveillance of moral conduct—arguing that Islamism’s political effectiveness lay as much in its capacity to reshape the texture of daily life as in its formal ideological claims.

Roy’s (1994) comparative analysis complicated any triumphalist reading of political Islam’s ascendancy, arguing that Islamism as a totalising revolutionary project—aiming at the wholesale Islamisation of state and society—had substantively failed by the 1990s even as ‘neo-fundamentalism,’ a more socially conservative, depoliticised piety movement, continued to expand. This distinction proved analytically prescient: the subsequent trajectories of Islamist parties after 2011, from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s brief and calamitous experience of incumbency to Tunisia’s Ennahda’s pragmatic accommodation with pluralist competition (Cavatorta & Merone, 2015), illustrate the instability of Islamism’s relationship to formal state power, in contrast to its comparatively greater durability as a social and associational force. Kandiyoti’s (1991) work on gender and Kepel’s (2002) transnational history of jihadist trajectories further indicate that Islamist mobilisation itself fractured along multiple axes—reformist versus revolutionary, quietist versus militant, nationally bounded versus transnational—undermining any monolithic characterisation of ‘political Islam’ as a single actor or ideology.

Sectarianism, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Fragmentation

Where Arab nationalism and Islamism each aspired, in different registers, to transcend sub-national particularism, a third body of scholarship has examined how ethnic and sectarian identities have been actively produced and instrumentalised as bases of political mobilisation rather than surviving as inert pre-modern residues. Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism is foundational here: he shows that the very category of a fixed, politically salient sectarian identity was itself a product of nineteenth-century Ottoman reform and European intervention, which recast a more fluid social order into administratively legible confessional communities—an argument structurally parallel to Anderson’s (1983/2006) and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) treatment of nationalism as constructed rather than primordial. Salloukh et al. (2015) extended this analysis to contemporary Lebanon, arguing that the post-civil-war confessional power-sharing arrangement did not merely reflect sectarian identity but actively reproduced and hardened it, since political elites’ access to patronage resources depends on the perpetuation of confessional voting blocs—an instance of what Cammett (2014) termed ‘compassionate communalism,’ whereby sectarian parties furnish welfare goods in ways that entrench, rather than dissolve, communal boundaries (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).


Comparable dynamics obtain for ethnic mobilisation more broadly. Kurdish nationalism, straddling Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, illustrates Brubaker’s (1996) argument that nationalism is best conceptualised not as the property of bounded groups but as a relational, contingent ‘nationalising’ practice pursued by state elites, homeland minorities, and external patrons in dynamic triadic interaction; Kurdish mobilisation has accordingly taken sharply divergent institutional forms—armed insurgency in Turkey, federal autonomy in Iraq, and localised self-administration in Syria—depending on the specific configuration of state strategy and external alliance in each context (McDowall, 2004; Romano, 2006). Amazigh (Berber) mobilisation in North Africa presents a further variant: rather than seeking territorial secession, Amazigh movements in Morocco and Algeria have pursued cultural and linguistic recognition within the existing nation-state, contesting the Arabo-Islamic monopoly on official national identity while working through, rather than against, state institutions (Maddy-Weitzman, 2011; Silverstein & Crawford, 2004). This variation across the Kurdish and Amazigh cases underscores that ethnic mobilisation, no less than religious or nationalist mobilisation, is shaped by the political opportunity structures within which it operates rather than by the intrinsic content of ethnic grievance alone (Wimmer, 2013).
Class, Gender, and the Intersectional Terrain of Identity Politics

Identity politics in the Middle East cannot be reduced to nationalism, religion, and ethnicity alone; class and gender constitute intersecting axes that mediate how the former are experienced and mobilised. Batatu’s (1999) analysis of Syria already demonstrated the inseparability of sectarian and class dynamics, as rural, minority-sect officers used the vehicle of Ba’athist party organisation to displace an urban Sunni landholding elite—sectarian mobilisation, in this instance, cannot be understood independently of the class realignment it accomplished. Bayat’s (2010) concept of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ similarly reframes subaltern class politics in the region away from formal movements and towards incremental, informal appropriations of urban space and resources by the poor, a mode of mobilisation that operates beneath, rather than through, the nationalist or religious idioms more commonly studied.


Gender constitutes an equally constitutive axis. Kandiyoti’s (1991) edited collection demonstrated that nationalist and Islamist projects alike have relied on the regulation of women’s bodies, dress, and family status law as a primary terrain upon which competing visions of authentic national or religious identity are enacted and contested—the female body functions, in this literature, as a privileged symbolic site onto which anxieties about modernity, authenticity, and communal boundary are projected. Moghadam’s (1993) comparative study extended this argument by tracing how state-led modernisation projects across Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere instrumentalised women’s legal and social status as an index of national progress, only for subsequent Islamist reactions to reverse these very reforms as a means of repudiating a discredited secular-nationalist order. Joseph’s (2000) concept of ‘relational rights’—wherein legal and political personhood in much of the region is mediated through kinship and confessional status rather than direct individual citizenship—further demonstrates how gender, sect, and nationality are structurally co-constituted within the region’s legal and political architecture rather than analytically separable variables (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).
Authoritarian Durability and the Instrumentalisation of Identity

A final dimension concerns the relationship between identity politics and the durability of authoritarian rule that long characterised, and in most cases still characterises, the region. Bellin’s (2004) influential ‘robustness of authoritarianism’ thesis located regime durability primarily in the coercive apparatus’s institutional cohesion and willingness to repress, but subsequent scholarship has argued that coercive capacity alone cannot explain variation in regime survival without attention to how identity cleavages are managed. Anderson (1991) had earlier shown that Middle Eastern monarchies in particular derived resilience from dynastic and tribal legitimating formulas unavailable to republican regimes, which were correspondingly more reliant on the nationalist and populist legitimation whose 1967 collapse Ajami (1978) diagnosed. Brownlee’s (2007) comparative analysis of party institutionalisation similarly demonstrated that regimes which successfully channelled elite competition through ruling-party structures—again frequently articulated through nationalist or religious idiom—proved more durable than those relying on coercion alone (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).

Lynch’s (2006) study of the post-2000 Arab public sphere added a further dimension: the proliferation of satellite television and, later, social media created a transnational discursive space in which pan-Arab identity was reactivated—now channelled through networks like Al Jazeera rather than Nasserist state broadcasting—generating new forms of mobilisation, most consequentially during the 2011 uprisings, that cut across the boundaries of individual authoritarian states even as those states’ formal identity-management strategies remained nationally bounded (Lynch, 2012). The uprisings themselves, and their profoundly divergent outcomes—democratic transition in Tunisia, military restoration in Egypt, state collapse in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—confirm that identity mobilisation is neither uniformly liberalising nor uniformly authoritarian in its effects; rather, as Barnett (1998) and Telhami and Barnett (2002) argued in advance of these events, the political consequences of identity mobilisation depend on the specific institutional and coalitional context into which mobilised sentiment is channelled, not on the intrinsic content of the identity invoked (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).

Conclusion

The comparative study of identity politics in the Middle East vindicates the modernist premise, shared by Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), that nationalism and its cognate identity formations are historically contingent constructions rather than primordial essences—a premise borne out empirically by Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism, Batatu’s (1999) account of Syrian Ba’athism, and Dawisha’s (2003) history of Arab nationalism’s rise and decline. Yet the region’s experience equally illustrates the limits of a purely constructivist account: religious, ethnic, and communal identities, once activated by political entrepreneurs, acquire an affective density and institutional entrenchment—through confessional power-sharing, welfare provision, and associational life—that render them resistant to unmaking even after the political conditions that produced them have changed, a durability closer to Smith’s (1986) and Connor’s (1994) ethno-symbolist emphasis (Chtatou, 2022, January 11). The overarching lesson for comparative politics is that nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender in the Middle East are not competing, mutually exclusive vectors of political mobilisation but a continuously reconfigured repertoire, whose relative salience at any moment reflects the shifting strategic calculations of state and non-state actors operating within specific, historically produced structures of opportunity and constraint (Barnett, 1998; Wimmer, 2013).


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About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.

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