The Politics of Regional Regimes and the Prospects for Addressing Increasing Refugee Crises in the Middle East

Scholars of Arab societies for decades have used the term “azmatology” to describe the Middle East’s tendency to always seem in azma, crisis in Arabic (e.g., Dwyer 1991). This regional state of crisis appears even more urgent than ever today, with millions of Lebanese, Palestinian and Sudanese adding to the ongoing displacement of nearly 6 million refugees from Syria. As Israel’s war in Lebanon and Gaza continues, neither international refugee law nor relevant international organizations have proven able to stem the rising tide of massive human displacement of vulnerable Arab populations. At the same time, the Middle East is remarkable both in its range of regional governance challenges and its entanglement in global resource and military geopolitics. A dearth of regional governance organizations has encumbered the alleviation of problems of mass displacement in the region, while the global significance of the Middle East has likely exacerbated these problems.

Indeed, there are both concrete issues and contested global discourses around international rights and governance that play into the lack of development of regional legal and institutional approaches to collective governance challenges. Building on prior work I have done on human rights and refugee policy in the Middle East, this paper begins by elaborating the importance of the double-edged sword of Western countries' engagement in the Middle East through the oil and weapons economy but also the language of democracy and the rule of law. The internal contradictions of resource and military politics versus liberal political norms have amplified many Middle Eastern states’ own tendencies to limit their use of regional and international formal governance norms and structures. Contextualizing these contradictions then allows the paper to consider what changes, and prospects for change, might foster a more effective interplay of regional and international policy towards mass refugee displacement in the Middle East.