NSCC/SA: Deciphering Civil Conflict in the Middle East

该奖项由国家安全、冲突和合作竞赛的社会和行为维度资助，该竞赛是国家科学基金会和国防部之间的合资企业。中东地区是全球热点地区，全球30%以上的国际恐怖袭击都发生在中东地区，国内武装冲突造成的死亡人数占全球死亡人数的很大一部分，过去30年发生的所有国家间战争，如1980年至1988年的两伊冲突和1990年至1991年的海湾战争，都发生在中东地区。由于中东是一个战略地区，拥有世界能源储备的重要份额，也是世界的十字路口，因此了解中东冲突的性质及其解决方案的可能性非常重要。中东冲突是对21世纪国际安全的一个主要挑战。这个研究项目将为理解国内冲突制定和实施一个新的概念框架。该项目的重点将放在跨国进程的影响上，例如经济食利主义（通过向外部客户出租内部资源来获取国家收入）、国际移徙和影响深远的社会网络。该项目将调查自海湾战争以来，这些过程如何影响中东地区民间抗议和恐怖主义的发展。理解跨国过程需要跨学科的概念和方法专业知识。因此，这个项目将汇集一个包括社会学、地理学和经济学学者在内的团队，他们都具有国际专长。一些人居住在中东国家或来自中东国家。这项研究的结果将为学术和政策相关的中东跨国转型过程提供信息，这些过程与20世纪90年代的国内冲突有关，今天仍然很重要。这项研究将直接影响跨学科的研究人员、教育工作者和未来关注国内冲突预警的学者。它将促进一项未来研究议程，促进对跨国进程进行跨学科和多方法的评估，以便能够预测区域变化的复杂后果。除了政策见解外，它还将制作视觉产品（例如巴勒斯坦移徙和跨国网络增长的地理空间展示），这些产品将对对不断变化的国际秩序和影响国际安全的因素感兴趣的教育工作者、学生和决策者有用。

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.