It was my pleasure to read Ariel Ahram’s new book, Break All the Borders: Separatism and the Reshaping of the Middle East. In this detailed study of contemporary separatist movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Ahram describes the historical roots of these self-determination efforts, and he specifies the issues that motivate them. He offers not only general coverage of separatism in the region, particularly in regard to the Arab Spring, but also a set of detailed case studies focusing on Cyrenaica, Southern Yemen, Kurdistan, and the Islamic State. The book is organized around a set of important questions in world politics. Why do these separatist conflicts erupt? Why do they develop in the context of state weakness? What role has the international system played and is continuing to play in perpetuating these conflicts? What can be done to fix the underlying problems?
Ahram’s core argument is that separatism in the MENA region is the consequence of state-building efforts during the twentieth century (if not earlier). In contrast to arguments that stress ethnosectarian divides and ancient hatreds, Ahram contends that separatists are drawing inspiration from the Wilsonian emphasis on self-determination and building their claims on the legacies of prior states and state-building efforts. He contends that the legacies of these earlier states continue to shape contemporary separatism in two ways. First, the memory of these earlier states provides focal points and a kind of socio-institutional residue around which separatists can mobilize. Second, separatists can then refer to these former states in their appeal to the international community, effectively arguing that self-determination should be awarded for historical reasons. Overall, Ahram is making a fairly structural argument, one that will be familiar to those who have read Philip Roeder’s book on the role that administrative units play in generating nationalist aspirations (Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism, 2007).
In addition to this argument for where separatist movements come from, Ahram offers an analysis and critique of international order. First, the so-called Wilsonian Moment (p. 4) at the end of World War I introduced the principle of self-determination to the international system. As a result, a substantial number of stateless nations from around the world sent representatives to France to meet with Wilson and declare their desire for statehood. Although some states were born during this time, mostly from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the majority of the aspiring nations were denied independence. Second, the Sykes-Picot Agreement at the end of the war created new territorial boundaries and units that would eventually become modern states like Syria and Iraq. Despite the fact that these new states and borders were largely artificial and did not match the realities of preexisting political and ethnic units, they gradually structured reality for state leaders, who then had an interest in defending the territorial integrity of the new state, and for trapped populations and separatists who saw “their fate as inextricable from the states they were trying to contest” (p. 31). The product of these two forces—the Wilsonian emphasis on self-determination and the bias in international politics toward preserving territorial borders—is the perpetuation of enduring separatist movements (what Ahram calls “Wilsonian Orphans,” p. 13) within states that are juridically sovereign but empirically frail. Ahram concludes by saying that stability in the MENA region will be unlikely without a reconceptualization of how sovereignty is awarded and organized.
There is much to like about this book. It is meticulously researched, and it offers a terrific primer on separatist politics across the region. Its case studies are particularly rich, as Ahram delves into the histories of Cyrenaica, South Yemen, Kurdistan, and the Islamic State. Readers will learn about the key actors in these separatist struggles and come to understand that these efforts are all built on the idea of a state or political area that existed in earlier times. I particularly enjoyed learning about historical political units like the Senussi-Ottoman condominium, the sultanates of eastern Yemen, and the Kurdish principalities that sat astride the frontier between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. According to Ahram, these early states provided the building blocks and eventual focal points for contemporary separatist movements.
Despite the many merits of the book, parts of the argument were less convincing. In many ways, Ahram discusses the MENA region in the same manner that Jeffrey Herbst described Africa (States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, 2000). Both authors argue that the sovereign borders in their respective areas are too strong. They are protected by the emphasis placed by the international community on territorial integrity, even if the borders in question are artificial and imperfectly drawn. The result is a set of weak states where leaders collude with other state leaders to defend their borders just as peripheral populations challenge them. This is a familiar story, and I wondered at points what Ahram was adding to it beyond the rich details. His answer is that the extant literature has overlooked past states and state-building efforts and that “their exclusion is a form of selection bias, examining only cases in which the outcome of interest (i.e. statehood) has already occurred. This yields a blinkered and teleological understanding of how MENA states endured and how they might change” (p. 12). Although I accept that earlier states, autonomy regions, and administrative jurisdictions often serve as the embryos of modern separatist efforts, I questioned the theoretical weight of the argument. Do scholars really have a teleological understanding of these processes? What does it mean that researchers and practitioners have a selection bias? Overall, I thought there was an imbalance between the theoretical importance given to these earlier states in the initial chapters and the role they played in the case studies.
On a related point, I thought the Islamic State was an odd addition as a case study. I understand that leaders from Cyrenaica and Kurdistan made a failed pitch to Wilson after World War I and that both groups had experienced forms of stateness in the past. Likewise, South Yemen had been a sovereign state in living memory, and thus it is easy to see how it could form the basis for renewed separatism. But the Islamic State felt like an outlier. Yes, it originated in the historic region of the fertile crescent, but its claims were universal, and unlike the others, it rejected the modern state system. Can we really say that it was a Wilsonian Orphan?
A lesser critique pertains to Ahram’s conclusion that sovereignty will need to be reconceptualized to achieve a lasting stability in the region. What exactly does his analysis prescribe? At points I thought he might suggest that the international community should begin to recognize de facto states that are built on long-running foundations and can provide a surer form of political order. But he avoided that recommendation, perhaps because it would be vulnerable to the charge that the international community is meddling in the affairs of MENA states. In the end, Ahram’s analysis was quite detailed, and readers will learn a great deal about the problem of separatism in the region from this rich book, even if it remains unclear how to fix that problem.
