West Asia/Middle East

Overall Region
This region is pretty expansive, it includes Central and Western Asia as well as North Africa, so I’m going to try my best to limit it to Western Asia where I can. The current issue with demographics is the massive amount of youth in this region, approximately 30%, the majority of whom are young men. This trend generally leads to two possible outcomes: job shortages and resources shortages—both of which lead to a greater possibility of violence escalation. What is really good to see is that, of course, the infant mortality rates have dropped significantly in the last century, and more recently so have fertility rates. With such a large youthful population, this region is expected to soon have a very significant elderly population by 2050 as well; therefore a huge issue for this region is resource allocation and adequate healthcare for women and the elderly. Speaking of resources, due to climate change and already dry atmospheres, food and water continue to be very crucial resources for this region. This region in particular has quite a few climate regions, however the region as a whole can be characterized as pretty arid—hot and dry; this isn’t to say however that some regions don’t have more mediterranean, mountainous, or cold regions, it’s important to remember that this is a very large area of land. I usually like to compare it to California seeing as how in just our state we have many different weather patterns and geographic elements: desert, mountains, snow, mediterranean, etc, but at the end of the day we are a generally a hot and dry state with issues surrounding water. Just like California, the “Middle East” is very diverse, but imagine tenfold since this region is thousands and thousands of years old. There are a plethora of languages and ethnic groups even within the same country; for example in Iran alone there are over a dozen ethnic groups! This is because this area has some of the oldest known civilizations and later it became the middle—as in Middle East—of trade from the East to the West. Such a trade route means that people from all corners of the world got to trade not only goods but ideas, language, cultures, you name it. Unfortunately with such an advantageous geographic location and abundance of resources comes problems; some nations in this area were directly colonized, such as Algeria by the French, for example—while almost all of the others have been preyed upon by Western imperialist nations, along with the settler-colonialism in Israel-Palestine. These recent foreign interventions via neo-imperialist policies have wrought absolute havoc in the region ranging from proxy wars to entire regime changes to full on guerrilla and drone warfare.

Economic Development
As mentioned, current economic development of the majority of these countries has in some way, shape, or form been affected negatively by foreign influence or intervention. Some of these countries, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have benefitted from foreign relations—however it’s important to note that these few countries were overall much wealthier than their neighbors to begin with, making the better allies and assets for Western imperialists. The main exports in this regions are oil and related products, and textile, so they’ve had issues with immigrant workers’ rights since much of their physical labor is done by immigrants, refugees, and the like, but many are not granted citizenship or residency. An important point to bring up again is the dire need for younger generations to have good employment opportunities with the globalization of capitalism, otherwise there will be political unrest in addition to declining economic development. A big issue for some of these countries has been gender equality, especially adequate access and quality of women’s healthcare. Freedom of expression remains an issue in most of these countries unfortunately due to a plethora of reasons, with religion being a huge tool for spreading fear and propaganda, much like it has been in the West. Armed conflict continue to ravage some areas of the region, such as Yemen and Palestine, due to issues of political inequality and social unrest from lack of resources, opportunities, and human rights. A lot of these injustices result from systemic oppression and unbalanced justice systems, usually in favor of the state and the elite classes thereof. Speaking of systemic oppression, one last hurdle for these countries to overcome is rights for LGBT+ individuals; this continues to be a big issue for the region due to religious propaganda unfortunately. All of these factors affect economic development since unequal access to resources can easily become a source of tension, and therefore, violence. As we know, armed conflict becomes a huge deterrent for economic development, and actually in many cases causes underdevelopment—Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc. In addition to these factors, Western neo-imperialism and intervention has negatively impacted economies in the area, such as Iran, by helping install an authoritarian theocracy, and continuously imposing inhuman sanctions. This has created a toxic atmosphere in the region where instead of resource collaboration, we are seeing extreme resource competition where there was historically already some tension which has now been heightened through exploitation by various actors and states as a means of progressing economic development—another example of the globalization of capitalism.

Focus
It’s important to note analyze why this region has seen so much violence and unrest in the past century or so, and to do that we need to dissect the “War on Terror” and the cyclical, and highly profitable, nature of modern warfare. The dictionary definition of terrorism is: “Noun the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.” Now this simple noun has become synonymous with the Middle Eastern region—why? If we simply look at the bare bones definition, we can think of several Western examples immediately, but it remains a word reserved only for violence committed by those who look a certain way. This modern notion of “terrorism” is not only fueled by so much propaganda, but it is inherently racist and islamophobic at its core.

The origins of this word were used almost exclusively to mean state sponsored violence and later on gang racketeering, however in 1973 a very specific definition came to being: “violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands”. Ever since this definition has morphed, we have been convinced that the armed conflicts in these region arose strictly due to internal tensions and that it is the West’s job to bring “freedom”, “democracy, and “peace” to the region. If this sounds familiar, it’s essentially the White Savior Complex reinvigorated and rebranded to service a new generation of people that otherwise would not accept more warfare; what gets left out is a thousands of years of history and foreign interventionism particularly by Western European powers and the United States. For example: we are only shown how much hatred extremist regional groups have for Americans, and the West, but what we are not shown is that these extremist groups prey upon the most vulnerable in this region—usually war survivors left behind from Western imperialist funded conflicts or proxy warfare between imperial powers. Imagine being a child or a vulnerable person surviving gruesome conditions directly funded by America, Russia, France, or the UK over something as meaningless as oil or worse, power. Can we not then understand what is happening in the region on a more dimensional level? Can we not imagine the helplessness, hopelessness, and psychological anguish it must take to be willing to give your life so that people pay any kind of attention? It’s not that these vulnerable people who get recruited do not know from right and wrong, it’s that they have been forced to pick between evil and more evil, and at least the extremists (although manipulative and completely sociopathic) express empathy and acceptance whereas the West regularly rejects and dehumanizes them. It’s also imperative to consider the eerily similar fear-mongering and propaganda fed to the citizens of these neo-imperialist nations in order to garner legal, economic, political, social, and national support for the “War on Terror”.

On top of all this, neo-imperialist powers add insult to injury by demonizing everyone that looks like you, insisting that you and your people are completely blame for any and all conflict, and therefore must be duly punished—and even banned from wearing your own religious regalia in their so called “free” societies. This dangerous rhetoric on behalf of the West only empowers extremism and while not always violent in a physical sense, perpetuates systemic violence, oppression, and total dehumanization. Extremism attracts and breeds more extremism—every action has an opposite but equal reaction, as does human behavior; the tensions in the Middle East will not be fixed with more punitive legal action, more weapons and tactical training, or installing puppet governments. I’d also like to add a question to keep in mind: are the far and few “terrorist” attacks on the West really even an equal reaction to neo-imperialist violence inflicted on the region? (This is not at all to condone these attacks, just to put into view a bigger picture than the one we often see). The more state sponsored violence the West throws at the Middle East, the more there will be desperate retaliation, and the more violence will be enacted as punishment, and so on, and so on, and so on. It is the cycle of modern warfare, and it is extremely profitable for the lucrative military-industrial complex, as well as helping the elite classes in the West and its elite allies in the region to maintain hegemony. We cannot keep looking at the Middle East through the biased lens of Western imperial powers, we must look at everything critically and form our own conclusions based on data and research if we ever want to see this region flourish once again.


 * 1) Definition of terrorism | Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Www.Dictionary.Com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/terrorism
 * 2) Editors of Merriam-Webster. (2017, November 3). The History of the Word “Terrorism.” The Merriam-Webster.Com Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/history-of-the-word-terrorism
 * 3) Human Rights in Middle East and North Africa - Review in 2020. (2020). Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/report-middle-east-and-north-africa/
 * 4) Middle East Demographics to 2030. (2019, August 21). Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. https://dayan.org/content/middle-east-demographics-2030
 * 5) The Geography of the Middle East, Geoff Emberling. (2010). Teaching the Middle East. http://teachmiddleeast.lib.uchicago.edu/foundations/geography/essay/essay-01.html