The casual observer of the Middle East could be forgiven for concluding that the 2000s were the decade of the non-state actor: al Qa’eda launched the new century with its attacks on New York and Washington and challenged governments in Iraq and Saudi Arabia; Iraqi politics came to be defined by parties and militias that were mostly unknown, even to careful observers of the region, before 2003; Hizbollah and Hamas – and not Lebanon and Palestine – fought wars against Israel. Now the Houthi movement in Yemen has captured the headlines, out of proportion to its real strength, because it seems to be the latest example of a shift in power from states to non-state actors across the Arab world.
But a longer view suggests the influence of non-state actors in itself is nothing new: today it’s Hizbollah and the Sadrists, but yesterday it was the PLO, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Baath Party. What was actually novel about the last decade, however, was the reversal of a trend dating back to the 1960s: the strengthening of the Arab state.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, numerous movements emerged to call for a redrawing of the political boundaries bequeathed to the region by colonialism. Some of these movements were nationalist – Zionist and Kurdish and Palestinian – and sought to carve out their own states. Others called for greater unity across the region: some explicitly advocated the erasure of existing borders – like the Baath, the Nasserist trend, and the Arab Nationalist Movement – while others preached a religious solidarity that would not replace the new states but transcend them.
