First of all, I've got to get your take on the Iran-Israel war.
It's one of those transformative moments in the region where it's
hard to make sense of where things could go. The orthodoxies and the
ways of understanding, politics, economics, security, all seem to be
dissolving or being shattered. Less than a month ago Trump was in the
Gulf making economic deals and talking about the region being an
important return on investment for the US and trying to negotiate
ceasefires. Less than a month later it explodes again. This just shows
the incoherence in Trump's policy, the many different vested interests,
but also the lack of substance. Israel bombs Iran, decides to escalate
into a war and the US and Trump is left with very little choice but to
follow Israel's lead. It just shows you that a foreign policy based on
‘the Art of the Deal’, is not a foreign policy that's going to win
anyone the Nobel Peace Prize or lead to sustainable peace.
You've just released a study co-authored with Mark White in which
you argue the world order as we knew it is effectively vanishing. You
note in your report that in 2024 there were 61 armed conflicts across
the world, which is a 74% increase from the average that prevailed
throughout the early 2000s and you quote the UN which notes that
‘conflict has become more protracted and less responsive to traditional
forms of resolution’.
If you look at the numbers over the past decade global conflicts have
doubled. We're living in an age globally where there just are more
conflicts and they're more protracted and more difficult to resolve. The
Middle East and Africa are the front lines. In Sudan, Israel,
Palestine, Iran, across the region we are seeing this rise in global
violence every day. In this report we tried to use a specific angle -
conflict economies - to look at the rise of many different actors, be
that middle powers or armed groups and how they're engaging with each
other in a multi-aligned manner. Pragmatism is the name of the game,
often economic pragmatism. Profit seeking governments and groups across
the region are looking to benefit from this changing order because the
world is changing. You have a transition away from that moment of US
unipolarity where the US was this global hegemon. But the new order is
still in the making and in that process of transition everyone is
hedging their bets for survival and the mode is economic.
Around the world, governments are in a state of insecurity and
looking out for their own national interest, defined by a very narrow
scope of profit and economics. These profit seeking governments and
armed actors may be benefiting in the short term, but there aren't
bodies emerging that can resolve these conflicts and that's why they're
increasing. For the UK for example, yes, conflict is important to
mitigate and manage, but what's more important is UK growth and
migration. So you have this hierarchy of priorities across the world
right now as each country seeks to ensure its interests as this
uncertain transition unfolds and often genuine conflict mediation isn't
high up on the hierarchy of priorities.
In the report you look at three case studies to buttress your
thesis: Sudan and the smuggling of gold; sanctions on Iranian oil
exports; and people smuggling through Libya. What did those case studies
tell you and how did it support your thesis?
Well, the hypothesis that we had from a geopolitical level, is that
there are no longer these spheres of influence, relics of the Cold War
era where you have East versus West, allies versus adversaries, good
versus bad, democracies vs autocracies. What we saw at the geopolitical
level is that many governments, states and armed groups are working
across these binaries, and it's far more blurred. We wanted to trace
that so we decided to take a political economy or conflict economy angle
which traced specific supply chains that we think are instrumental to
the conflict actors. So one which has been widely reported is gold
coming out of Sudan. The two warring sides, the RSF [Rapid Support
Forces] and SAF [Sudanese Armed Forces] are both fighting each other but
also extracting gold for profit and this gold makes its way all the way
to the UAE where it's sold. Everyone along the way is profiting from
this system.
Similarly in recent years countries in the Gulf, the UAE or Saudi
Arabia, were almost seeming to be on both sides of the Israel-Iran
conflict. The UAE, for example, had normalised relations with Israel but
at the same time was a crucial economic partner to Iran. Recently we
heard Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries pleading with the Trump
administration not to attack Iran, but to reach a deal, a deal that they
would have rejected just a decade ago. So we wanted to trace these
geopolitical changes through economics and what we found was, although
Iran's fuel was sanctioned by the US and other Western governments, Iran
was still able to sell significant amounts with China being the major
market. But all along that way, from Iran to China, many different
groups, states, governments, all take part in that trade in different
ways. These are ecosystems that are incredibly decentralised, but have
developed a resiliency, a logic of their own, which are fueled and fuel
the conflicts.
Similarly, we looked at Libya with migrant smuggling and again the
armed groups in Libya, whether it's the national government, the unity
government, or Khalifa Haftar’s armed forces, are profiteering from the
trade of human migrant smuggling from Africa towards Europe. So these
supply chains are more than supply chains. They are systems that allow
us to understand why these tectonic plates geopolitically are shifting
in the way they are. We follow the money to make sense of how decisions
are being made in the region.
You've mentioned countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar
who are facilitating these economic transfers. But also you look at
Europe which is giving big money to countries to keep migrants out. But
some of that money, probably a lot of it, is going to the very gangs
that are putting the migrants into the water.
Exactly and at the same time Europe is sanctioning, for example, a
lot of Iranian fuel. So fundamentally, the purpose of this paper was to
push Western - and again, we use the word Western here but we don't
think really there is a coherent sphere that we could call the West -
but to push the UK, US and European governments that are involved in
these conflicts and which claim to be trying to reduce violence to look
at some of the tools that they have, like securitising borders against
migrants or criminalising the trade of human migrants, to say that these
tools are no longer working anymore. Partly the reason for that is
because the world is changing and the tools are still stuck in the Cold
War. So it's time for a rethink.
Donald Trump is coming in with this catch-as-catch-can foreign
policy made in the middle of the night via Truth Media. It couldn't be
more transactional and it beggars the people who are caught in these
conflicts. There is not a path to sustainable peacemaking in this
economic pragmatism is there?
Yes and that's exactly the point. It's survival mode. It's not
sustainable peace building. It is based on hedging and ensuring economic
benefit until we see where things go. The Middle East is awash with
deals right now, MOUs, energy, trade deals and all these projects, and
at the same time it is experiencing more conflicts than in its recent
memory. How do you square so many deals with the fact that you have so
much conflict? The answer has to lie in that these deals are superficial
insofar as they're just economic. The region is far more complex than
that. Societies, history, politics, they matter and you can't just
quantify and make economic deals and hope for peace.
So Trump’s the Art of the Deal driving everything down to the common denominator is just not going to work is it?
It's not and there isn't precedent for this working. It's short
termist, it's very rationalist. It's economically focused. They don't
want to talk about the histories of peoples. Even preposterous and
criminal ideas like Gaza being a beachfront with resorts comes from a
logic of people who just fundamentally do not understand conflict, do
not understand peace, and certainly do not understand the Middle East.
The word we're using is ‘multi-aligned’ only because we don't know
where the poles are yet. Every country and armed group in the region
make it very clear that they are multi-aligned. They want to have
relations with Russia, with China, but also with the US and Europe. It's
part of this hedging, of uncertainty of where things are heading.
Certainly in the short term, there needs to be more flexibility in
understanding real dynamics on the ground, moving away from this idea
that you have allies and enemies and being more pragmatic. Where are the
people's economic livelihoods and how can they be supported so that
they don't turn to conflict economies? How can people better hold to
account their elites? How can the people have more of a voice in their
governance? When you look at Israel's war on Iran and the ruthless
bombing of Tehran there are some who are suggesting that Iranians will
welcome this because they've been fighting against this very same regime
for a long time and their lives aren't good right now. That's certainly
true. It's a repressive regime, but it's preposterous to think that
someone would accept their family home and themselves being bombed for
the sake of potential regime change or for the sake of potential
democracy. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere teach us that
democracy and a better future doesn't come from the barrel of a gun. It
doesn't come from arms and this type of bombing.
At a recent Chatham House panel on Iraq that you chaired there
was a mood refreshingly of cautious optimism. Is that optimism in danger
of evaporating?
For the last several decades Iraq has been at the centre of conflict
in the Middle East. It's almost been synonymous with conflict in the
Middle East. Yet since October 7 [2023], Iraq has largely remained
insulated. Part of the reason for that is that Iraq is reemerging from
decades of violence in a potentially different spot where, supported by a
relatively high price of oil, the government has kept its head down and
focused on development and infrastructure and trying to build a state,
basically to stay out. Iraq is the only country that has links to the
Axis of Resistance, but it also has links to the US, Europe and NATO.
NATO doesn't have that many missions, but it does have NATO Mission
Iraq. Iraq also has links to Russia. So it is really one of these
countries that is trying to survive through multi alignment and because
of that, until now, a certain pragmatism has allowed Iraq to stay out.
But any potential regime change or conflict on the border of Iraq will
push it to the brink of conflict again.
You can read Renad’s recently published Chatham House paper ‘Why peacebuilding fails and what to do about it’ by clicking here.
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