NSCC/SA: Deciphering Civil Conflict in the Middle East

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This award was funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between NSF and the Department of Defense.The Middle East is a global hotspot with over thirty percent of global international terrorist attacks, a major share of deaths from internal armed conflict, and all of the inter-state wars of the past three decades such as the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq conflict and the 1990-1991 Gulf war. Because it is a strategic region with a significant share of the world's energy reserves and the crossroads of the world, it is important to understand the nature of Middle East conflicts and the possibilities for their resolution. Conflict in the Middle East represents a central challenge to twenty-first century international security.This research project will develop and implement a new conceptual framework for understanding civil conflict. The focus of the project will be on the effects of transnational processes such as economic rentierism (the derivation of national revenues by renting internal resources to external clients), international migration, and far-reaching social networks. The project will investigate how these processes shaped the development of civil protest and terrorism in the Middle East since the Gulf War. Understanding cross-national processes requires interdisciplinary conceptual and methodological expertise. Thus, this project will bring together a team including scholars from sociology, geography, and economics, all with international expertise. Several either reside in or originate from Middle East nations. The results of this research will inform scholarly and policy-related understanding of the transnational, transformational processes in the Middle East that were relevant to civil conflict during the 1990s and remain important today.This research will directly influence the interdisciplinary community of researchers, educators and future scholars concerned with the early warning of civil conflict. It will promote an agenda for future research that advances interdisciplinary and multi-method assessment of transnational processes so that the complex consequences of regional change can be anticipated. In addition to policy insights, it will also create visual products (such as geo-spatial presentations of Palestinian migrations and the growth of transnational networks) that will be useful to educators, students and policy makers interested in the changing international order and factors that influence international security.