Break all the borders: separatism and the reshaping of the Middle East

Since 2011, civil wars and state failure have beset the Arab world, underlying the misalignment between national borders and identity in the region. This book offers a unique and detailed account of the separatist movements that aim to remake those borders-the southern movement in Yemen, the federalists in eastern Libya, the Kurdish nationalists in Syria and Iraq, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Instead of focusing on incumbent states, the book shows how separatists claim the mantle of self-determination and seek to replace a broken regional order with more legitimate and stabile polities.

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 but rather engage with them.