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A
Welcome to the new books network.
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This is the nordic asia podcast. I am Helen Haas, the coordinator of the Middle east in the Asia center of the University of Tartu, Estonia. My guest today is Dr. Sean Lee, Assistant professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, and he's currently completing a book on minoritized communities during the civil wars in Lebanon and Syria. Sean, welcome to the podcast.
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Thanks for having me.
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Today's episode explores the Middle east through a lens that is both historically deep and highly relevant to the present moment. The so called minority question. What does our guest argues this is not simply about minorities. It is fundamentally about the relationship between majorities and minorities and how these categories are shaped by power, conflict and political change. Sean, your work looks closely at the relationship between majority and minority groups in conflict settings, and you argue that the minority question is really about the relationship between majorities and minorities. How should we understand that relationship today in the Middle East?
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So I think that the first thing to think about is the categories themselves and that these, they may seem intuitive to us majorities and minorities, but in fact, my work shows that these notions of thinking about political cleavages and societal cleavages are in fact not necessarily intuitive at all in that they're historically situated. So whose minority today doesn't necessarily mean that that same group will be a minority tomorrow. So these categories are shaped by history and politics and institutions, and I would argue conflict as well. So today I think what we're seeing is that we're seeing transitions in some countries, for example, like Syria. And so there was a notion that the previous regime had privileged one particular type or part of the society rather, and that the kind of majority, that is to say Sunni Muslim Arabs, that they are kind of coming back into their rightful place in society and in politics. And so we can see how that's playing out on the peripheries of the country, whether it's the Druze in the south, whether it is the Alawi communities on the coast, whether it's or Kurdish communities up in the northeast. And so we've seen the new regime in Syria with an attempt to kind of try to bring all of these peripheries back under some sort of centralized control after over a decade of in some cases autonomy and freedom of action from the center in Damascus. So I think that those are playing out over both at the domestic level, but also we're seeing how kind of regional and international politics are playing on these cleavages. And so one good example that we see in Syria is the way that the Israeli state has been talking about the demilitarization of the south of Syria, for example, and a sort of minority protection, quote unquote, of Druze communities and the south.
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So how have these categories, majority and minority, been restructured since October 2023?
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Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think one thing in Israel and Palestine is that many people who for decades have been thinking about that conflict through the lens of a two state solution have come to the conclusion that in fact there's what many political scientists today would call a one state reality between the river and the sea. And so this kind of brings up larger questions about what does it mean to be a Jewish state? Does it mean having a Jewish demographic majority? What does it mean when in fact Jews are a very slight minority between the river and the sea today? So I think that's calling into question the project of a two state solution and that people are starting to think about the question of what does it mean to be a Jewish state, what does it mean to be a democratic state? And are those two things in contradiction? Are they in conflict and what would be a solution for it? So we see, for example, some political scientists like Ian Lustig, kind of dean of Israel studies, who has talked about that essentially the two state solution is a dead paradigm and that we now need to start thinking about democratization because we are talking about a society where some people live under some rules and others live under other rules, and some people have full rights and other people have no rights at all. And so some would talk about a kind of democratization as opposed to a kind of two state solution, which really is about maintaining demographic majorities in each of the states.
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Talking about political violence which reshapes majority and minority relationship, does it tend to harden boundaries between groups or rather transform them?
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That's a great question. I would say that often conflict situations tend to harden these boundaries, but not necessarily in the ways that one might expect. So usually with some sort of civil conflict comes breakdown in state institutions. In the case of Lebanon, for example, we saw a breakdown of the Lebanese state. And Lebanon is a little bit of a special case because Lebanon was already a state that dealt with citizens not as individual citizens per se, but, but rather as members of a particular community. So in my research, I've been looking at different communities during the Lebanese civil war. And just to give you one example, I look at the Armenian community. And so during the Lebanese civil war, there was an attempt to kind of mobilize Armenians as Christians as part of a larger kind of Pan Christian front. And this was not something that the Armenian parties wanted to do. The Armenian parties, while they were initially very much divided amongst themselves, they came to slightly before the civil war, they came to a united decision to take up the stance of what they called positive neutrality. And they fought attempts to be folded into the conflict as part of a larger pan Christian front. And in many ways this cost them very dearly. So they ended up being at the wrong end of artillery fire from Christian militias. Just to give you one example, there was a destruction of a dynamiting of an Armenian genocide memorial up in Bikfaya, up in the mountain. And so these borders can become hardened, but not necessarily in ways that we, that we predict. And so part of my research is trying to think through the way that the, you know, pre existing political institutions as well as conflict dynamics, how those might affect different communities decisions now moving
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from local or domestic dynamics to a broader regional or even international level. What has changed that makes minority and majority question so important nowadays? Right now?
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Yeah, I would say that the big change is that the international order as we've come to think of it as kind of a liberal, international rules based order is in many ways breaking down. So we've seen this play out in different ways, whether it's the question of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, whether it's the talk of an American invasion of Greenland, or frankly the US invasion of Iraq before that. But I'd say that since October 2023, we've really seen that basically the order itself has been falling apart. And so what this means is that there's really not much that these communities can do if other parties get involved in their domestic affairs. So I'm thinking of, for example, attempts by the Americans and the Israelis to involve Iranian Kurds in the war that's happening right now between the US and Israel on one side and Iran on the other. Thinking of the Druze communities that we mentioned earlier in the south of Syria, the questions of who is going to protect autonomy in the Kurdish regions or majority Kurdish regions of northeastern Syria, that conflict between the center and the periphery, luckily so far seems to have been resolved more peacefully than some of the others. But I would say that in general what this means is that we've kind of returned to a sort of 19th century great powers politics where we can see that minoritized communities are kind of the battleground for different players. I mean, we can see this with Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine in the same way that we can see this with, for example, Druz in the south of Syria?
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Yes. We hear that some sort of new regional order or international order is emerging through these conflicts in the Middle East. But are we looking at a more stable regional hierarchy as a result, or one that could generate new tensions and conflicts?
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Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, there's a broad political science IR literature on these questions of hierarchy and stability. I would say that there's clearly a hierarchy that has been established. It's always kind of been there, but now it's becoming much more formalized in the sense that, like I said before, it seems like there's no more rules about what can happen. So we're seeing a situation where the Israeli state, for example, can and does essentially do what it wants, whether it's in Gaza or the west bank or Lebanon or Syria, Iran today as well. And there's not really any recourse to any kind of broader, whether it's international law or great powers, whether it's the United States or the Europeans or the Russians, certainly not the Chinese these days. So I would say that when there's a hierarchy that is in place in which those who are subject to the hierarchical order are kind of in relatively broad consensus about that order, then it can be more stable. So we can think of American hegemony in Western Europe, so the US Having military bases in places like Germany or Iceland or elsewhere in general, the European countries and the populations of those countries were mostly on the same page. Obviously, there are some different opinions from leftists and from communists in Western Europe, but for the most part, there was a consensus in the region. I would say that consensus we're very far from any kind of consensus. So some of the states seem okay with it. We think predominantly of the Emirates, although that may be changing with the current war. I would say as long as there's no consensus about, one, what happens to Palestinians, and two, who is essentially in charge and who can make the rules, who's the landlord in the region, Then you're going to fundamentally and continuously have more resistance and more fighting. So we think of Hezbollah. Hezbollah did not exist in 1978 when Israel invaded Lebanon and again in 1982, and it. And it rose up as a response to that invasion. And so whether it's Hamas or Hezbollah or the Iranian regime, I think that as long as there's no real consensus on these questions, we're going to see some sort of resistance to that order. And what that will mean is continued violence and more conflict in the region.
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We have been talking about minorities and majorities in the Middle east, this far. But what about majority communities globally? Are there lessons or patterns that extend beyond the Middle East?
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Yeah, I mean, I would say that we see similar dynamics playing out in different places. I think of, for example, Nagorno Karabakh, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There was a recent military conflict between the two countries. Azerbaijan recaptured this territory that had been taken over by the Armenians in the late 1980s. And one of the first things that happened was that the Armenian communities of that region essentially were ethnically cleansed. And so I think that as long as we are are pushing towards a kind of global ethno nationalist populism, the more that we're going to see that minoritized communities are going to suffer, whether it's, you know, people who are from immigrant backgrounds in places like the US or France or the UK or if we're talking about longstanding minoritized communities in places like Central Europe or, or Eastern Europe. I think that if we see this push towards populist ethnonationalist sentiment, then we're only going to see more conflict on these questions and not less. My sense is that until we start to see a push towards kind of citizenship and the way that a state deals with its citizens less as members of a community and more as, you know, individuals who are all, you know, under an equal citizenship regime, that we're going to continue to see more conflict, more kind of minority problems, quote, unquote, in the rest of the world.
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If we look ahead five years or 10 years, what do you think? What is one or two or three key shifts in majority minority relations that will define the region's future and also global future. In this question, what we need is
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a shift towards kind of full regimes of citizenship. And this is something that authoritarian regimes, for example, are not particularly good at doing. And so it really remains to be seen what kind of a situation we're going to see in a country like Lebanon, which is extremely fragile right now, or Syria, which is undergoing an important transition that has a lot of opportunities for going sideways or moving in the wrong direction, but also has potential for moving in the right direction. So I think it depends on the larger regional and international currents and so pushes to respect international law, citizenship and essentially human rights. I think that these are the direction that we want to see going. So a kind of. That we want to see ourselves going. So a more rights based regime, where one's rights doesn't depend on one's ethnic or religious or sectarian background, but rather whether or not one lives in the country. And so I would say that I'm not terribly optimistic for the short term future because it seems like we're going down the wrong path in many places in the region. But I do tend to be an optimist by nature and I hope to see that we can move towards more citizenship based regimes, whether that's in Palestine, Israel, whether it's in Syria, whether it's in Lebanon, whether it's in Egypt, one where people can fully participate in their in their government and their society. And that's something that I hope to see in the medium term future.
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Thank you, Zhongli, for this interview. Would you like to add something to wrap up the topic?
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I don't think so. I think I would just like to thank you for having me. And it's been so far a wonderful experience coming to visit Estonia. I'm it's a country that I don't know much about and I would say that I think there's some really interesting comparisons to be done between the Baltic region in the Middle East. And I think that what you guys are doing here at the Asia center is great on that front. And so thank you so much for having me.
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Thank you. Sean Lee, Assistant professor of Political Science from the American University of Cairo. I am Helen Haas from the Asia Center, University of Tartu, Estonia. You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast.