The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East

MARC LYNCH: The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East. New York: Public Affairs, 2016, 284 pp.

Before The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East, Marc Lynch,3 a political science professor and well-known commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, authored three other books devoted to the region4 and edited several others. The last but one, The Arab Uprising, written in the midst of what came to be known as the Arab Spring and published just one year after the first popular protests swept across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and other Arab countries, concluded with a warning. While the region was undergoing a real generational change coupled with a media and information revolution, the uprisings could just as easily lead to more autocracy as to democracy. Four years later, when this prediction has seemingly been fulfilled, the author attempts to demonstrate why. When launching his new book in April 2016,5 Lynch's main message was that, just as the uprisings began in "transnational diffusion," so they provoked coordinated "transnational repression" and gave birth to "transnational proxy wars," which largely explains the Arab Spring's apparent, but certainly not definite failure. The New Arab Wars... re-tells the story of the uprisings from the perspective of their appropriation by surviving regimes vying for control of a region undergoing tectonic shifts, and laments the consequences of this hijack.

It is telling that Lynch opens his book with Libya. Back in 2011 the author was a vocal supporter of a NATO mission to protect civilians against the ire of their long-term dictator Muammar Qaddafi, a stance he has since come to rethink. That fateful intervention, which effectively helped topple Qaddafi, became a point of reference for both the insurgents and the regime in Syria. The former felt emboldened, the latter learned to calibrate violence in a way that would scare the nation into submission but stop short of meriting unwanted international attention. Meanwhile, a dictator-less Libya quickly fell prey to regional competition between Qatar and The United Arab Emirates (UAE), each seeking out its preferred rebel groups to fund and arm, thus contributing to the uprising's fragmentation. The country is still struggling to install a central authority amidst violent conflict between numerous local factions...