There are other paths that people and nations can take when they encounter failure apart from the “Road to safety” (Sikkat al-salama), which I discussed last week. One holds that the path of the nation-state – the very foundation of the “Road to safety” – is not sufficient to achieve their national or, perhaps, Arab nationalist goals. Some may even believe that the nation-state in which they live is not big enough to realise a historical vision capable of providing redemption from sins and transgressions.
History is replete with stories of the rise of non-state actors. Some have taken the form of “universal” churches whose authority transcends state boundaries. Multinational corporations like the East India Company wielded more wide-ranging power than the colonial state in which they were based; they even served as a spearhead for colonial expansion.
In the Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood was one such actor. It expanded its political, economic, and military influence beyond Egypt’s borders by establishing the International Organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood. This organisation exploited the holy pilgrimage season to recruit followers, build Muslim Brotherhood branches in Islamic countries, and foster loyalties preparatory to the establishment of an Islamic national state. It had its own banks in the Caribbean, political and media machinery, and indoctrination programmes. These programmes’ graduates would go on to espouse ever more violent and extremist ideologies as they became firmer in the conviction that armed resistance was more effective than national armies.
The “Palestinian cause,” despite its emotional and political charge, became a source of legitimacy for crossing state boundaries including to fight wars in defence of its cause or in its name. The fifth Gaza War was the pinnacle of this phenomenon. It brought religiously oriented organisations such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen, the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq, and other Hizbullah-like, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS-affiliated groups together. To these groups, the territorially defined sovereign state should be confined to the annals of history as it constitutes an obstacle to the realisation of the dream of a resurrected “caliphate”, which some of these extremist organisations attempted to establish astride the Iraqi-Syrian border under the banner of the “Islamic State.”
These violent and radical international actors basically emerged to undermine the Arab nation-state by forcefully imposing a new, de facto reality that defies the basic concept of sovereignty. One of the defining features of sovereignty is the state’s exclusive right to enforce its constitution and laws within its national territory.
Hizbullah in Lebanon cast aside the long history of Lebanese statehood – a proud legacy rooted in that country’s Phoenician past and in the modern Lebanese state’s political, cultural and economic openness. Casting itself as a spearhead of resistance against Israel, Hizbullah engaged in wars that not only transcended the needs of national defence but also – by its late leader Hassan Nasrallah’s own admission – were based on “miscalculations.” This did not prevent the organisation from positioning itself as the “blocking one-fourth”, the Lebanese term referring to the Shia movement’s ability to use its veto power in the Lebanese government and parliament to paralyse the state and the economy.
Hamas scuttled the Palestinian state project by destroying the Oslo Accords, which established the beginning of the path to Palestinian statehood, which was marked by the creation of the first-ever Palestinian National Authority on Palestinian soil, comprising the West Bank and Gaza. After it carried out a number of suicide attacks intended to nullify the agreement, Hamas received economic and financial support from Israel. If Tel Aviv’s purpose was to undermine the legitimacy of the PNA, Hamas saw an opportunity to create its own separate Palestinian statelet in Gaza.
Across the broader Arab region, other non-state actors exploited the Palestinian cause to destroy the states they lived in by commandeering one of the sovereign state’s most strategic prerogatives: the decision of war and peace. Since the beginning of the 21st century, more and more regional wars have been instigated by these actors, after they blackmailed existing governments by threatening to ignite civil war and national fragmentation. Not only did the Ansarullah (Houthi) movement turn against the “Yemeni Spring,” it also imposed partition on Yemen after engaging in an international war by obstructing global commercial traffic in the Red Sea.
In Iraq, after a series of wars led by the state – an eight-year long war against Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, the battle against the liberation of Kuwait, all leading up to the US invasion – a plethora of militias emerged. Chief among them was the Popular Mobilisation Forces, which, in coordination with Iran, crossed many borders and fired missiles at Israel without regard for their country’s national interest in rebuilding the unified Iraqi state.
Fortunately, this widespread fragmentation and dismantling of the nation-state in the Levant was countered by the ability of the national states of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries to stay the course on the “Road to safety.” Egypt joined them on this path after overthrowing Muslim Brotherhood rule on 30 June 2013, after which it managed to defeat the IS-affiliated terrorist group in Sinai once and for all in 2018. Jordan and Morocco have also succeeded in withstanding pressures from non-state actors. All of this occurred in tandem with the implementation of nationwide modernisation and development projects, which have reinforced the nation-state.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 10 July, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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