It is easy to lose sight of hope for peaceful coexistence in the midst of carnage and war. Well into my 50s, I cannot remember a time when I did not know of a conflict raging between nations, militia, or warlords.

And yet there are those brave souls who dare to emerge from the rubble left behind by the bombs and the tanks to bridge the chasm of fear and despair. They have a solitary, if not lonely, mission to carve a path forward for conflicting parties to sit down and face one another; to talk; to deliberate; to negotiate and even to argue for a foundation of mutual benefit and peacemaking.

Some countries are leading mediation processes for major conflicts. Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar are all hoping that their intervention can bring some form of peaceful resolution to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Their efforts are honorable, but these peace-minded nations have a robust system of diplomacy and international presence to support their missions. What about those mediators who do not have such capacities?

This essay is dedicated to the individuals who often are alone in negotiating an exchange of prisoners, convincing armed parties to lay down their weapons, or ensuring the safe passage of women, children, and the elderly. These individuals face head-on the mounting number of deadly conflicts erupting across the globe, many of which are never covered by the media.

According to the Sweden-based Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), there is a record high number of 61 state-based (those involving territory and/or control of power) conflicts around the world today. Based on its definition of a full-scale war as a conflict in which more than 1,000 deaths a year are registered, there are between 11 to 20 of these raging at any given time. These include high-profile wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, and Somalia, alongside deeply entrenched civil conflicts in Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to name a few.

On the other side of conflict is the effort to end them. At times, there are small victories of transactional diplomacy—allowing humanitarian aid into war-torn areas or enacting localized ceasefires which end just as quickly as they begin. The task of moving them to comprehensive peace settlements, however, is far more difficult, and far more elusive.

The task becomes all the more desperate when one considers the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) report that the number of  international personnel dispatched to multilateral peace efforts has drastically fallen to half in the past 10 years.

That is why this issue is dedicated to those localized brave men and women (and their international partners) who embark on a journey of building trust where only distrust once prevailed. Alongside the Pathways to Hope project, this issue highlights how their work lays down the foundations of robust peace building. They are the Peacemakers.

Firas Al-Atraqchi

Managing Editor of The Cairo Review

In the three years since the Sudanese Civil War erupted, armed parties to the conflict have committed heinous violations against millions of civilians, particularly women and girls.

Both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have capitalized on the collapse of political and economic order in the country—and crises elsewhere in the region—to continue their unfettered campaigns to seize power and territory at any cost.

In just three years, millions of civilians have been forcibly displaced or have fled to refugee camps and sought asylum under extremely difficult conditions. In the meantime, human rights organizations have documented 1,294 cases of sexual violence in 14 Sudanese states, as well the detention of more than 840 women in areas under SAF and RSF control. 

While the lack of legal recourse is not unique to the Sudanese conflict per se, it remains that civilians are paying the price with no accountability or justice being served.

To bring this into contextual focus, consider that those wanted by the  International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and genocide committed in the Darfur region between 2003–2005 have to this day not been brought to account and are walking free under the protection of the authorities currently ruling Sudan. 

The same crimes perpetrated more than 20 years ago are now being repeated by the RSF, which has carried out campaigns of genocide and forced displacement against the people of El Fasher and El Geneina. 

But unlike the Sudanese conflicts of the past, fighting was restricted to states far from major urban and government centres like the capital Khartoum. Between 1956–when the country became independent—and 2023, women had always been exposed to human rights violations and killing, but since most lived in rural areas and did not have modern digital communication, their suffering went unnoticed, both by the world and by other Sudanese people who lived far from the fighting.  

The current war, however, is different because its epicenter was at the seat of government in Khartoum and has been carried out in major cities, affecting communities, particularly urban women, that have never experienced such fighting. Despite this new reality brought to urban centres, the international community continues to ignore the voices of millions of Sudanese women as regional media is preoccupied in the Persian Gulf, Palestine and the Ukraine.

There now is an urgent imperative to end the war, which has most negatively impacted Sudan’s women across all social and ethnic backgrounds, and to chart a path for building real and meaningful spaces for women’s political participation in the peace process. 

Building Hope During the Pre-War Period

Before the most recent outbreak of  violence in Sudan, women and girls fought long battles against the authoritarian and Islamist government of the ousted President Omar al-Bashir. They were at the forefront of  protests that resulted in the outbreak of the revolution and its victory in 2019.

During the transitional period from 2019 to 2021, which centered around a partnership Transitional Council between civilian rule and the military remnants of the al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (Inqaz) regime, women’s rights defenders continued to press for amendments to laws restricting women’s advancement in work and personal status (including marriage, divorce, and presence in public life). Despite some shortcomings, the transitional period was a golden era for creating positive change in the status of women in Sudan.

But on October 25, 2021, the head of the Transitional Council and commander of the Sudanese army Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in alliance with the commander of the RSF Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo “Hemedti”, carried out a coup against the civilian government, putting an end to the journey of democratic civilian transition. 

This allowed the SAF’s ruling clique—traditionally associated with the Muslim Brotherhood—to regain some of its control of the government, and state-sanctioned violations against women began to rise again.

Throughout this period of renewed authoritarian rule in Sudan from 2021 to the outbreak of war between RSF and SAF in 2023, women were among the most targeted groups by the regime. Religious laws were used to impose further restrictions on women’s freedom in public and private spaces, institute new personal status laws that favored men, increase wage disparities, and limit women’s presence in public spheres like politics or economics. 

These restrictions had significant consequences. Since women were forced out of public and political spaces, they were unable to pass legislation that would improve protections for women during times of conflict, specifically regarding UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which called for increasing women’s presence in the peace-making process. While Sudan did adopt the resolution and soon implemented a National Action Plan (2020-2022) to increase women’s political participation, the initiative failed to achieve real change before the civil war erupted. The perpetual sidelining of women from political participation has, therefore, paved the way for the extreme level violence against women and children we have seen in the past three years of conflict.

Crimes Against Women Surge

Since 2023, both the RSF and SAF have disregarded humanitarian law; despite human rights organizations documenting thousands of cases of violations against women, they still operate with impunity. United Nations reports indicate that cases of sexual violence are systematic and widespread, and that sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war. These violations leave deep psychological and physical wounds that are difficult to treat, which is made worse by social stigmas against survivors in Sudan’s very conservative society. In some cases, survivors cannot reintegrate into society and some decide to end their own lives.

There are reports indicating that the RSF committed heinous violations against women during their occupation of Khartoum and various cities in central Sudan from April 2023 to October 2024. RSF units have been accused of raping hundreds of women at gunpoint and taking some as captives. There are also reports from the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies which indicate that the RSF established markets for selling girls.

During the same period of RSF control over areas of the capital Khartoum and Al-Jazira State, the rate of forced marriage of women increased. Families were forced to marry their daughters to RSF soldiers, and in case of refusal, families were threatened with force. Some of these marriages involve underage girls, some of whom were taken from their families in Khartoum and Al-Jazira and sent to RSF-controlled areas in Darfur. Such tragedies deeply affect families, both from the shock of this deep loss and the social stigma attached to such violations.

The SAF also committed multiple crimes against women, including violence, rape, and killing, and legally prosecuted some women on charges related to cooperation with the RSF, especially against those who remained in Khartoum and Al-Jazira after the RSF invasion, some of whom may be subjected to penalties as extreme as execution. 

Despite the documentation of these violations, the absence of fair local judiciary and legal institutions increases the difficulty of bringing perpetrators to trial for crimes committed against women. Internationally, the UN Human Rights Council established an Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan in 2023 to review alleged violations, but these have not yet translated into consequences for perpetrators or justice for victims. In the event that the war stops, it is important that perpetrators from all sides of the war be held accountable for crimes against women and girls.

In addition to suffering violence at the hands of both armed groups, large numbers of women and girls are internally displaced or seeking asylum in neighboring countries. Millions of them live in difficult conditions in refugee camps and lack the means to build a dignified life. Even amid this suffering, women have not been spared from sexual assaults and extortion by service providers in those camps. These conditions limit women’s access to jobs and increase economic vulnerability, which further limits their participation in the public sphere and increases their isolation. 

The lack of healthcare and social and psychological support also presents a challenge for women as they attempt to rebuild their lives. This point is exacerbated by the fact that educational processes have been suspended and hundreds of thousands of girls have withdrawn from schools and universities. Women’s education was already a problem before the war, and this situation has further deprived a large number of Sudanese women from obtaining meaningful employment and building safe and independent lives. This is particularly important because as the men fight, women have increasingly had to step into the role of head of the household, becoming responsible for maintaining family cohesion and financial stability.

Political Exclusion

One way in which women have attempted to retain some political influence in this war has been by becoming soldiers themselves. While it is known that increased military activity negatively impacts women and increases violations against them, it has also led some women to participate in military training camps run by the SAF. This practice became apparent when female fighters appeared in the city of El Fasher in the Darfur region in western Sudan in combat operations to defend their city from the RSF. While there have been smaller scale examples of women in combat prior to 2023, this new conflict is considered a new manifestation of women’s participation in combat because it is happening on a broader scale. 

In fact, there is currently a debate within feminist circles on the usefulness of women’s armed engagement and whether this could contribute to ensuring women’s political participation in the future, especially in negotiations or post-war arrangements. However, similar situations in other countries have shown that women’s participation as soldiers, especially in revolutionary movements, has not been a decisive factor in obtaining a better status for women in the long-term. A clear example is the participation of women during the Eritrean liberation war (1961–1991) or in Kurdish resistance against ISIS (2013-2019), where the proportion of women as military leaders was large, but when the time came to reap victory and political gains, men shared political power and women were completely marginalized.

Beyond picking up weapons, Sudanese women have historically played central roles in conflict prevention and resolution, humanitarian efforts, and social change, often at the risk of their lives. However, they have yet to receive a fair share of representation in political power. Therefore, it is important that peace-making initiatives in Sudan acknowledge women’s roles and contributions during the conflict; any future peace processes must anchor their role in shaping Sudan’s future beyond symbolic overtures. 

Based on previous experiences of peace processes in Sudan, there are many challenges facing the move to integrate women in mediation. Traditional platforms such as political parties and tribal leadership do not typically have women representatives and continuing male dominance over political spaces leaves no clear strategy to overcome this dilemma.

Division Within the System

In the meantime, internal divisions and competition among women’s groups have also negatively affected efforts to enhance their political representation.

Symbolic representation, which gives the guise of inclusion with no real power, has also been used as a means to represent women’s agenda. This is a situation widely accepted by Sudanese political entities as well as international NGOs due to their lack of nuanced understanding of how Sudanese society is organized. No formal negotiations to end the current war have included any Sudanese women negotiators. Instead, women are confined to advisory bodies, raising concerns over humanitarian crises but unable to give these concerns weight at the negotiating table. 

Furthermore, conservative traditions and customs hinder the participation of poor, working-class women in public life. This explains the dominance of the often English-speaking urban middle class in women’s groups. These groups often believe their agenda represents all women, but in reality ignore marginalized women whose struggles and desires differ from those of educated women from more privileged backgrounds.

Beyond class issues, the current war has also divided society along new regional and political lines, creating alignments that did not previously exist. This has also affected feminist organizations, some of which have split between the warring parties. Some women have aligned themselves with political groups close to  the SAF, others with the RSF, and still others who remain independent of both parties. This may affect the unity of women’s decision-making in achieving feminist agendas in the future.

At the same time, new grassroots locally-funded feminist groups emerged during the war, helping women mitigate the effects of conflict while monitoring and documenting violations. The “No to Women’s Oppression” organization has been at the forefront of these entities, working to assist women from a humanitarian perspective, in addition to training, capacity building, monitoring crimes, and providing psychological and medical support, especially to victims of sexual violence.

Urgent Interventions

Amid the intensity of war and declining international support, there is a need for urgent interventions for women in Sudan, primarily related to identifying perpetrators of violations against women and bringing them to trial in accordance with international law. It is also important to expand the ICC’s jurisdiction to include all of Sudan, as it is currently limited to only Darfur. The ICC does not have jurisdiction elsewhere because the country never ratified the Rome Statute; the ICC was only given limited jurisdiction over Darfur for crimes committed after 2002 following a resolution from the Security Council in 2005. Expanding its jurisdiction to all of Sudan is key to holding perpetrators accountable and bringing justice for victims. 

In addition, the international community must provide urgent humanitarian assistance to women and children, including food, healthcare, and safe shelter, as well as strengthening international mechanisms to protect women and providing healthcare and psychological services to survivors. 

All internal and external parties must also work to ensure fair participation of women in peace processes and in designing transitional justice mechanisms, and to include robust women’s rights and protections in any future constitutional project. These moves must be more than symbolic—they must operate within a scope of real influence that fairly represents women from all economic and social backgrounds. This requires women’s leadership, despite their potential divides, to unite around this agenda and pressure for it to be placed at the forefront of priorities.

There are several challenges to address, but many solutions as well. 

There is a rich culture of art in Sudan, which can be mobilized toward creating projects which promote national unity and recovery, rather than violence and dehumanizing hate speech, which has been used by the conflicting parties and spread by their supporters. Supporting local artists is a key avenue to address this social problem. This could be achieved through a workshop for community recovery, led by academics from Arab and neighboring countries with shared histories and highlighting the participation of women and artists, such as poets, musicians, playwrights. 

Regarding the role of women in mediation processes, it is recommended to hold a conference on the role of women in transitional justice and national reconciliation, with the participation of Sudanese women’s organizations and drawing on expertise from Africa, especially South Africa, Rwanda, and Morocco. International experts in transitional justice and national reconciliation should also participate. 

In addition to the legal track, a conference and series of workshops for women and spiritual leaders, with the participation of Islamic, Christian, and African religious institutions, Sufi orders, and international religious figures and institutions such as Al-Azhar, could help integrate the legal and cultural processes of conflict mediation. These workshops should also highlight the informal roles of women in conflict situations, particularly their participation in keeping their communities protected and sustainable. 

Water has always been an integral component of governance in Sudan, given the country’s location along the Nile and its role as both a downstream and midstream state in one of the world’s most politically sensitive river basins. Its importance has grown significantly since the outbreak of a power struggle and eventual civil war in April 2023 when water management became inseparable from violent conflict in the country. The war fractured state institutions responsible for irrigation, flood control, and dam safety, while displacement and infrastructure destruction have severely constrained adaptive capacities.

At the same time, climate change has intensified hydrological volatility across Sudan, increasing both flooding and drought risks. These pressures intersect with regional disputes over Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), declining global commitment to multilateral environmental and water governance, and expanding foreign land acquisitions in Sudan’s most water-rich regions. Together, these factors have transformed water from a strategic development asset into a major driver of vulnerability and instability.

This article examines water management in Sudan under conflict through four interlinked dimensions: a) climate change impacts; b) impacts of the launch of GERD and flooding risks for Sudan; c) the decline of multilateralism and its consequences for regional environmental agreements; and d) mediation and conflict resolution as pathways forward.     

Climate Change as a Conflict Multiplier

Sudan is among the most climate-vulnerable countries in Africa. Recent assessments show that mean annual temperatures have increased by approximately 0.3°C per decade since the 1960s, with accelerating warming observed after 2000. By the early 2020s, Sudan was already experiencing more frequent heat extremes, longer dry spells, and heightened rainfall variability, conditions that climate models project to intensify by 2050 under all emissions scenarios.

Against the backdrop of war between 2024 and 2025, Sudan recorded some of the most destructive flood seasons in decades. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), heavy rains in 2024 affected over 490,000 people across 15 states, destroyed more than 35,000 homes, and triggered widespread outbreaks of cholera linked to stagnant floodwaters. Satellite imagery from the UN Satellite Center (UNOSAT) in January 2025 detected that flooding had affected roughly 145 km² in Khartoum and surrounding areas, exposing approximately 63,000 people to flood risk. 

Seasonal forecasts in 2025 issued by Sudan’s Meteorological Authority indicated a high probability of above-average rainfall in central and northern states, including Blue Nile region, Kassala, Gedaref, and parts of Darfur, raising significant concerns over flood management capacity during wartime conditions. Empirical modeling of Nile Basin flows suggests that under high emissions scenarios, extreme flood events that historically occurred once per century may happen every decade by the late twenty-first century. The forecasts for 2026 indicate much lower rainfall in Sudan by up to 60% in comparison to 2025, particularly during the rainy season of June-September. However, the major problem lies not only in the seasonal flooding from rainfall that may occur on the Nile, but by intentional discharging of dams along the Nile that can create human-induced flooding events. These exacerbate the difficulties of dealing with floods caused by climate change. 

These climatic stresses interact directly with conflict dynamics. Armed violence has disrupted irrigation maintenance, damaged pumping stations, and halted hydrological monitoring across large parts of the country, including Darfur, Blue Nile, and South Kordofan. Rural displacement has increased pressure on fragile water points around urban and peri-urban areas, intensifying local competition. Pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Darfur, Blue Nile, and Kordofan face simultaneous exposure to drought, conflict, and land dispossession, eroding adaptive capacity and increasing the risk of local clashes.

Moreover, climate impacts intersect with foreign-controlled agricultural schemes that extract large volumes of water for export-oriented crops. These schemes are largely operated by investors from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait, as well as other Middle Eastern partners such as Egypt and Jordan, which have acquired extensive land concessions in Sudan. Over 760,000 hectares of Sudanese land have been acquired by foreign investors, primarily for irrigated export agriculture. These projects intensify pressure on Nile water resources while contributing to extractive enclaves that dissociate local communities from land and water access.

These investments are primarily export-oriented because many of these countries face severe domestic water scarcity and limited arable land. As a result, they outsource food production to Sudan to secure stable supply chains for their own populations and reduce reliance on volatile global markets. Under such arrangements, agricultural production is geared toward external food security strategies rather than local consumption, with crops, fodder, and livestock often destined for export markets. 

Spatially, these schemes are not evenly distributed across Sudan but are concentrated in specific high-potential zones, particularly along the Nile and in irrigated regions such as Khartoum State, River Nile, Northern State, and parts of central Sudan (e.g., Gezira and Kordofan), where access to water and infrastructure supports large-scale farming. In these areas, foreign-controlled projects frequently coexist with or displace local smallholder systems. Under rising climate variability, such arrangements often externalize environmental risks, especially water depletion and land degradation, while offering limited benefits to local water users, ultimately undermining climate resilience and contributing to localized social tensions.

GERD: Infrastructure Safety and Flooding Risks

Sudan’s position (currently being led by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)), regarding GERD was initially deeply ambivalent. While Sudan has recognized potential benefits from regulated river flows, reduced sedimentation, and the possibility of flood mitigation, these benefits are conditional on coordination, transparency, and joint management by Ethiopia with downstream states of Sudan and Egypt. In the absence of binding operational rules, GERD has introduced new layers of risk rather than stability. There has been no agreement with Ethiopia and its downstream neighbors on the management and operation of the dam. 

Sudan’s most immediate concern relates to the safety of downstream hydraulic infrastructure, particularly the Roseires Dam on the Blue Nile. Scientific studies indicate that GERD’s large reservoir will trap the vast majority of sediment flowing downstream, which may extend the operational lifespan of Sudanese dams. However, this same storage capacity enables Ethiopia to control the timing and volume of releases at a scale unprecedented in the basin, creating downstream vulnerability in the absence of real time data sharing from Ethiopia to downstream states.    

Since the initial filling stages, and especially after GERD began partial operation, Sudan has experienced repeated flood events that Sudanese officials and hydrological experts have linked to uncoordinated upstream releases. In October 2025, after the launching event of GERD by Ethiopia,  water was discharged from the GERD without prior notification to Sudanese or Egyptian authorities downstream. These unannounced releases contributed to sudden surges in the Blue Nile river in Sudan (as well as Egypt), overwhelming embankments, damaging irrigation canals, and inundating large areas of agricultural land and settlements in Blue Nile, Sennar, and Gezira states. Egyptian and Sudanese experts warned that high discharge rates from GERD had overwhelmed Roseires and downstream barrages, endangering millions and putting them at risk. These continued unilateral releases by Ethiopia could generate sudden surges that Sudan’s weakened flood control systems cannot manage.

The absence of advance notice has severely limited Sudan’s ability to operate its own dams and barrages safely. Roseires in particular, located approximately 100 kilometers from GERD, depends on careful, timely regulation of incoming flows. Without early warning, dam operators could not adjust reservoir levels or downstream releases, increasing the risk of infrastructure stress and uncontrolled flooding. For a country already coping with war induced institutional collapse, these hydrological shocks were particularly destabilizing, displacing communities, destroying crops, and exacerbating food insecurity. Some initiatives have shown the water engineers of the Roseires dam in Sudan working on their own time through Whatsapp groups and citizen science to try to maintain the dams during wartime to prevent dam failure and compounded effects to the population.

Sudan occupies the most precarious position in the GERD dispute. Unlike Egypt, which frames the dam as an existential threat, Sudan has expressed mixed reactions, recognizing potential benefits while raising serious safety and governance concerns. Regulated Blue Nile flows could theoretically reduce extreme floods and improve irrigation planning, especially for large schemes such as Gezira. These benefits, however, depend entirely on coordination with upstream Ethiopia.

Politically, the experiences of 2025 however have hardened Sudan’s stance towards GERD. Khartoum increasingly has aligned with Egypt in demanding a binding legal agreement on GERD’s filling and operation and has called for joint technical management and data sharing mechanisms. Yet Sudan’s fragmented governance due to the ongoing war has undermined its ability to negotiate effectively, leaving it vulnerable to upstream decisions taken without enforceable constraints.

Faltering Multilateral Agreements

Sudan’s water insecurity unfolds within a broader crisis of multilateral environmental governance. International norms governing transboundary rivers emphasize equitable use, prevention of significant harm, and cooperative management, as codified in the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention. Yet in practice, Nile Basin governance remains fragmented and weakly institutionalized 

While international water law emphasizes equitable use and prevention of significant harm, these principles lack enforcement in the Nile Basin. The Nile Basin Initiative, a transboundary river basin initiative established in 1999 between all Nile River Basin countries, remains consultative rather than regulatory, and attempts to institutionalize binding frameworks such as the Cooperative Framework Agreement remain politically contested. The GERD dispute exemplifies the limitations of local multilateralism, as repeated mediation efforts by the African Union and international actors failed to produce binding outcomes.

Within the Arab world, GERD has exposed fractures in regional solidarity. While Egypt and Sudan have sought collective diplomatic backing, Gulf states have adopted divergent positions aligned with strategic investments rather than basin-wide stability. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar maintain significant economic interests in Ethiopia, including energy and agricultural investments tied indirectly to GERD power generation. At the same time, massive Gulf funded land acquisitions in Sudan have restructured Nile hydropolitics through market power rather than treaties. 

Water Offers Opportunity, not just Liability

The problems associated with water management under conditions of conflict in Sudan illustrate how climate change, geopolitics, and institutional fragility can interact to produce cascading risks. Intensifying floods and droughts, driven by rising temperatures and rainfall variability, have overwhelmed already weakened water governance systems. The launch and operation of the GERD has further exposed Sudan’s vulnerability as a midstream state, particularly through uncoordinated and unannounced water discharges that exacerbate flooding, damage infrastructure, and deepen humanitarian crises. These impacts have unfolded in a regional context marked by declining multilateralism, where the absence of binding agreements and enforceable norms has allowed hydropolitics to be shaped by unilateral action, market power, and foreign investment rather than collective governance.

Despite deep tensions, water remains a potential entry point for cooperation both domestically, regionally, and internationally. Domestically, rehabilitating water infrastructure and ensuring equitable access are essential to rebuilding Sudan’s water sector, which will be essential for post-conflict recovery, food security, and social stability. Additionally, community-based water governance, protection of customary water rights, and inclusion of displaced populations become critical to reducing conflict drivers.

Regionally, Sudan could serve as a bridging actor between Ethiopia and Egypt once internal stability improves. This would translate into technical cooperation on dam operations, data exchange, climate adaptation, sediment management, and establishing early warning systems on flood forecasting to reduce flood risk and rebuild trust even in the absence of a political settlement and a comprehensive treaty.

Ultimately, durable solutions will require re-embedding water governance within broader peace processes, and revitalizing regional institutions and multilateral engagement, which would allow Sudan to move beyond crisis management toward long term resilience. Gulf states could play a constructive role by conditioning agricultural and energy investments on local water rights, ensuring that climate adaptation, foreign investment, and infrastructure development are aligned with principles of equity, transparency, and environmental sustainability. 

In a basin increasingly strained by climate change and geopolitical competition, Sudan’s experience underscores the urgent need to treat shared waters not as instruments of power, but as foundations for collective security and resilience. 

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from physical fatigue but from the accumulated weight of failed opportunity—the exhaustion of watching a political solution slip through one’s fingers, not because it was impossible, but because the structural conditions to sustain it were never honestly built. That is the exhaustion I carry from years of engagement with the Syrian conflict: first as an Egyptian diplomat and, subsequently, as UN Deputy Special Envoy for Syria. Syria was not merely a diplomatic challenge. It was a civilisational rupture that exposed, with brutal clarity, the fractures in the regional and international order within which all mediation must operate.

What follows is an attempt to extract from the debris of stalled negotiations, violated ceasefires, and squandered diplomatic openings a set of lessons that may serve the next generation of mediators—whether in Syria, where the political landscape shifted dramatically after late 2024, or across the wider arc of Arab conflicts that continue to bleed. These lessons were learned in rooms where the stakes were human lives, in corridors where geopolitical rivalry overrode humanitarian imperative, and in the quiet despair of a mediator who knows that the tools available are not equal to the scale of the crisis.

I. Syria as a Mirror: When the Internal Becomes External

When the Syrian crisis erupted in March 2011, Syria was performing well on most human development indicators. The desire of the Syrian people for a better life—for freedom, dignity, and accountable governance—was legitimate, widely shared, and initially expressed through peaceful protest. What happened next is a cautionary tale that transcends Syria’s borders: a domestic grievance was progressively colonized by external interests until the internal and external dimensions of the conflict became indistinguishable.

Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened to sustain the Assad regime when it could no longer sustain itself. Turkey and Gulf states backed opposition factions with divergent and often irreconcilable political programmes. Western powers oscillated between engagement and disengagement with a consistency that itself became a structural factor in the conflict’s prolongation. 

The United States declared early that Assad had lost legitimacy, then declined to act on that declaration with any instrument capable of making it real. President Obama drew a red line on chemical weapons in August 2012, only to step back when it was crossed at Ghouta a year later—a reversal read across the region as a signal that Western commitments were negotiable. When the Islamic State emerged in 2014, Washington pivoted to counter-terrorism, marginalising the political track and inadvertently reinforcing Assad’s core argument that the choice was between his regime and jihadist chaos.

France was equally contradictory. President Hollande recognised the Syrian National Coalition as the legitimate Syrian representative in 2012 and had aircraft positioned and ready to strike after Ghouta—only to stand down when Washington reversed course. When President Macron succeeded him, French policy shifted: regime change was quietly dropped as a precondition, a pragmatic recalibration that arrived without a diplomatic framework to make it consequential.

Britain’s oscillation was the most publicly dramatic. In August 2013, Prime Minister Cameron sought parliamentary authorisation for military strikes and lost—a historic defeat that removed Britain from the immediate military equation and directly influenced Obama’s own hesitation. London pivoted to generous humanitarian funding and active Security Council engagement, co-sponsoring successive resolutions that were vetoed. When the 2018 Douma attack occurred, Britain joined limited strikes on Syrian chemical facilities—bounded enough to demonstrate will without altering the conflict’s trajectory.

The cumulative effect was deeply corrosive to mediation. Western policy told conflict parties that declared red lines were provisional, that the cost of intransigence was low, and that time—rather than compromise—remained the more reliable instrument for those determined to outlast international attention.

The result was a theatre in which foreign powers competed at the expense of Syrian lives and Syrian statehood. As I argued in the Cairo Review of Global Affairs as early as 2021, the Syrian conflict did not just happen: it was waiting to happen. The best framework for understanding it remains the one I borrowed from Churchill’s description of the Soviet Union—popular grievances wrapped in regional rivalries inside big power competition. Remove the regime and the wrapping changes; the content does not.

The domestic foundations of Syria’s vulnerability were decades in the making. A political system caught in a time warp, dominated by a single party for more than fifty years, had stifled every channel through which legitimate grievances could be expressed. Denied a political voice, the population retreated into communal identities—ethnic, religious, tribal—steadily eroding the multi-dimensional national cohesion that had been Syria’s defining social asset across centuries. The regime’s response to this retreat was to deepen it: dividing the population into the trustworthy and the expert, emphasising loyalty over competence in an oversized public sector, and systematically advancing the Alawite community as a pillar of political control in ways that sharpened sectarian fault lines rather than bridging them.

Economic mismanagement compounded political rigidity. Syria before 2011 was a case of uneven development: high growth rates pursued without the transparency, distributional mechanisms, or political reforms required to sustain them. The result was corruption, the rise of crony capitalists who exploited liberal economic policies for narrow private gain, and a widening gap between a wealthy urban elite and an increasingly resentful rural poor. A prolonged drought from 2007 to 2010 accelerated migration into already overcrowded cities, intensifying social tensions that the sclerotic system was constitutionally incapable of addressing. When the regime chose to divert attention through performative anti-Western and anti-Israeli posturing—brandishing its revolutionary credentials in lieu of delivering reform—it was buying time with a currency that was rapidly depreciating.

The fall of Assad in December 2024 removed the figure at the apex of this system. It did not dismantle the system itself, nor did it address the three underlying questions I identified in the Cairo Review as the true determinants of any settlement: what specific political reforms are required, and how are they to be linked to reconstruction; what “political transition” means in a context where simple regime change was never a viable endpoint; and how the web of foreign military interventions—Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, Russian, American—is to be addressed. 

None of these questions were answered by the military collapse. On the contrary, the sudden nature of the collapse foreclosed the possibility of an orderly, negotiated transition in which all Syrians would participate in designing their country’s future. The state’s institutions, already hollowed out by years of war and sanctions, were not handed over—they dissolved. 

The armed groups that filled the vacuum had their own agendas, their own external backers, and their own conceptions of what Syria should become. The population remained below the poverty line, the infrastructure remained shattered, and the reconstruction funding that I had argued since 2019 must be linked to concrete political reform—used as a positive incentive to shape the behaviour of whoever governed Damascus—remained entirely undeployed as a strategic instrument. The collapse, in other words, changed the names at the top without changing the structural conditions at the bottom. Syria remained, as Churchill might have said, popular grievances wrapped in regional rivalries inside big power competition—with a new cast and an unwritten script.

This dynamic contains the first and most structurally decisive lesson of the entire experience: domestic grievances and external interventions cannot be addressed sequentially. They are fundamentally intertwined, and the mediator who treats them as separable problems—who believes the internal political track can be advanced while setting aside the question of foreign forces—is working at the periphery of the real conflict rather than at its centre.

II. The Indivisibility of the Internal and the External

A political settlement, however carefully designed, cannot survive in a theatre saturated with competing foreign militaries, proxy armed groups, and overlapping spheres of geopolitical interest. Equally, external actors—whether regional powers with security concerns along their borders or great powers projecting strategic influence—will not withdraw unless the internal dynamics of the conflict create conditions that incentivise their departure. The two dimensions are locked in a dynamic relationship that must be navigated in parallel, not in sequence.

In practical terms, this meant that any negotiating framework which ignored the Iranian military presence, the Russian strategic calculus, the Turkish security concerns, or the Gulf states’ interest in shaping Syria’s post-conflict political order was doomed before the first session convened. Mediators who confined discussions to constitutional committees, transitional governance mechanisms, and electoral roadmaps—however earnest—were working at the edges of a conflict whose real negotiations were taking place elsewhere, among external patrons whose convergence or divergence determined the space available for internal political progress.

The corrective is a mandate issue. Any future mediator in a conflict of this complexity must have explicit authority—and, crucially, the political backing of key external actors—to engage those actors as parties to the process, not merely as patrons of it. Without such a mandate, the mediator manages the optics of negotiation while the substance is decided in bilateral channels that bypass the process entirely.

III. The Illusion of International Support

The Syria experience was saturated with what might be called performative multilateralism: joint communiqués that spoke eloquently of a political solution, Security Council resolutions passed after months of agonised negotiation only to be immediately circumvented. 

The Geneva Communiqué of June 2012, co-chaired by Kofi Annan and attended by all five permanent members, called for a transitional governing body with full executive powers. Within days, Washington and Moscow were offering irreconcilable interpretations of the same text—each citing it to justify the position it had held before negotiations began. Resolution 2254, adopted unanimously in December 2015, endorsed a comprehensive political roadmap, ceasefire, and UN-supervised elections. It was the first time the Council had agreed on a full political framework for Syria. The resolution was cited in every subsequent diplomatic exchange, but conditions were never created to allow for its implementation. 

The humanitarian track fared no better. Resolution 2165, adopted in 2014, authorised cross-border aid access without Syrian government consent—a hard-won procedural achievement. Within weeks it was being systematically circumvented, convoys denied passage or stripped of supplies at checkpoints. The Council passed successive renewals, each slightly weakened by the threat of veto, each violated as routinely as its predecessor. Meanwhile the Astana Process, launched in 2017 by Russia, Turkey, and Iran, produced four agreed de-escalation zones. Within months, two had been subjected to major military offensives.

The cumulative message of this record was not lost on the conflict parties. They understood with precision what the mediator had to work with—and they negotiated accordingly.

Vague verbal endorsements do not constitute genuine support. They allowed one permanent member to publicly back a political process while simultaneously bombing civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, they allowed another member to preach a Syrian-led solution while arming warring factions, including groups blacklisted as terrorists by the UN Security Council. 

They are diplomatic camouflage for inaction. When the Security Council is paralysed—when the veto is deployed not to protect genuine national security interests but as a tool of geopolitical leverage—the mediator is stripped of the enforcement backstop that gives negotiations their credibility. The parties to the conflict read this accurately. They understood when external patrons were protecting them, and they negotiated accordingly, which is to say they did not negotiate in good faith at all.

The broader problem was the absence of what the region has long lacked: a functional security architecture that provides an agreed framework for managing conflicts before they metastasize. As I have argued elsewhere, when the major external powers—Russia, the United States—worked together on the Middle East, regional stability measurably improved; when they worked at cross purposes, the consequences fell on civilian populations. The challenge was, and remains, to design mechanisms that can sustain their cooperation beyond the episodic and the transactional. But in the absence of such mechanisms, the mediator must work within the political space created by great-power competition, and that space was, in Syria, consistently narrower than the crisis required.

The lesson is not merely descriptive but prescriptive: the international community—and specifically the permanent members of the Security Council—must provide genuinely unified, substantive, and directive support for mediation processes. Agreement on the existence of a process is not sufficient; there must be agreement on its specific parameters, its timelines, and the consequences of non-compliance. Without this architecture of accountability, mediation remains aspirational.

IV. The Strategic Value of Incrementalism

In environments characterised by profound mutual mistrust—and Syria was among the most mistrustful political environments I have encountered in more than four decades of diplomacy—the temptation is to hold out for a comprehensive grand bargain, a settlement that resolves all outstanding issues simultaneously. This temptation must be actively resisted. In deeply divided conflicts, the comprehensive solution frequently becomes the enemy of the possible, and the possible is always limited.

Local ceasefires, humanitarian access agreements, detainee exchanges, confidence-building measures at the community level: these were not compromises of principle but investments in possibility. Each local agreement that held, even temporarily, created a constituency—among ordinary Syrians, local commanders, and community leaders—for the proposition that negotiated accommodation was achievable. Each detainee exchange reminded families that diplomacy could deliver what military pressure could not. These incremental gains were fragile and frequently reversed, but they were real, and they preserved the possibility of wider progress in ways that a rigid insistence on comprehensive solutions would have foreclosed.

Incrementalism also generates information. In the early stages of a deeply mistrustful process, confidence-building measures reveal which parties are capable of compliance, which are genuinely interested in a political path, and where the real obstacles lie. This knowledge is not costless—it is purchased through the slow, patient, and often unglamorous work of local-level engagement that rarely attracts diplomatic attention. But it is essential groundwork for any broader negotiating effort.

V. Dialogue as Necessity, Not Endorsement

No lesson from the Syria mediation is more easily misunderstood—or more politically inconvenient—than the one concerning engagement with controversial actors. In Syria, those actors were numerous and each carried their own distinct form of political toxicity. Engaging the Syrian government was deeply uncomfortable for many member states—an administration whose security forces had used barrel bombs, whose detention facilities had become synonymous with torture, and whose conduct had been documented as involving crimes against humanity. 

Yet without that engagement there was no humanitarian access, no local ceasefire, no prisoner release. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, the EU, and the United Nations, controlled Idlib and the millions of civilians living there. Declining to engage it did not make it disappear; it simply made humanitarian operations more dangerous and less effective. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were an indispensable Western counter-terrorism partner yet regarded by Turkey as a terrorist organisation—making their inclusion in any process politically explosive for Ankara. Even Iran had to be engaged, however indirectly, on de-escalation in areas where its proxies exercised control. In each case the calculation was identical: dialogue was not endorsement. It was the only available route to protecting civilians.

Humanitarian access to besieged populations, de-escalation of military operations in populated areas, the prevention of forced displacement, the return of detainees: all of these outcomes depended on maintaining working relationships with parties that exercised real control on the ground, regardless of their political or ideological character. The alternative—refusal to engage, driven by entirely understandable moral revulsion or by domestic political calculations in external capitals—did not punish the actors in question. It punished the civilians caught between them.

Future mediators must have the political cover to maintain such channels without the perpetual threat of diplomatic scandal at home. This requires two things. First, a clear public articulation of the distinction between dialogue and legitimation—a distinction that is genuine, not merely rhetorical, and that is visible in the structure of the engagement itself. Second, institutional backing from the mediator’s political principals that is robust enough to withstand the inevitable accusations of appeasement that sustained dialogue with armed actors will attract. Absent these conditions, mediators will be forced to choose between their effectiveness and their political survival, and the civilians in besieged areas will bear the consequences of that choice.

VI. Economic Architecture as a Tool for Peace

Another lesson, consistently underappreciated in analyses of the Syria process, concerns the strategic deployment of economic incentives. Military pressure and sanctions—the default instruments of external coercion—have a demonstrable record of failure in conflicts of this type. They impose costs, sometimes severe ones, but they do not alter the fundamental calculations of parties whose continued control depends on the perpetuation rather than the resolution of conflict.

Reconstruction offers a different logic. Linking the prospect of reconstruction funding to genuine political reform—to the dismantling of instruments of repression, to the return of displaced populations, to the creation of accountable governance structures—creates constituencies for peace among actors who would otherwise have no incentive to support a political settlement. Structuring economic relationships in ways that generate dependencies on a stable, unified state rather than on fragmented patronage networks transforms the cost-benefit calculation of key actors over time. This is not idealism. It is a recognition that durable peace requires that the actors who control military and political resources perceive their interests as better served by stability than by continued conflict.

This insight was consistently marginalised in the Syria process, where reconstruction was treated as a reward to be delivered after a political settlement rather than as an instrument to be deployed in its pursuit. Reversing this logic—integrating economic architecture into mediation frameworks from the outset, not as an afterthought—is one of the most actionable reforms available to future mediators.

VII. The Arab Dimension: Fragmentation as the Original Sin

One cannot analyse the failures of Syrian mediation honestly without confronting a structural reality that extends far beyond Syria: the chronic inability of Arab states to develop and sustain collective political will in response to conflicts within their own region. Competing national agendas among Arab states have repeatedly undermined peace processes. We have not witnessed a single conflict in which all influential Arab actors united behind a single roadmap and leveraged their combined political, economic, and diplomatic weight to implement it. This absence of collective will is, in my judgement, the original sin from which all subsequent mediation failures descend.

The sub-regional model—illustrated by the GCC-led initiative in Yemen—has shown severe inherent limitations. While sub-regional groupings can mobilise resources and apply pressure, they are inevitably perceived as party to the conflict rather than as neutral arbiters. Their mediation agenda reflects the interests of dominant member states, eroding legitimacy among key conflict parties and complicating implementation. 

The GCC Initiative produced legible institutional outputs—a signed transfer of power, a single-candidate election, a National Dialogue Conference—that satisfied the formal requirements of a transition without disturbing the structural conditions underneath it. Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh left office but kept everything that made him dangerous: his financial networks, tribal patronage, and crucially, military units loyal to his son Ahmed Ali. The decree ordering armed forces restructuring existed on paper; the actual chain of command did not change. Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi inherited the presidency with international recognition but no political base, no loyal military, and no independent patronage networks—authority as an institutional shell.

The Houthis received seats at the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) without any obligation to demobilize. They used the transitional period to expand territorially while formally participating in dialogue. Southern representatives attended the conference but rejected its federal map as a deliberate carve-up of their oil regions, hardening separatism rather than containing it. A transitional justice framework was drafted and never activated, leaving grievances from the Sa’ada wars and southern crackdowns as live political fuel.

The initiative gave each unresolved dynamic a formal address—a clause, a commission, a decree—which made the conflicts harder to see coming precisely because they appeared, on paper, to have already been handled.

The neighbouring-states model presents a distinct but related dilemma. Neighbouring states have undeniable leverage and high stakes. They also have national security priorities—concerns about borders, political alignment, rival influence—that can distort the mediation agenda, tilting it toward arrangements that serve their security interests rather than the conflict’s root causes. The question is not whether to involve neighbouring states, whose engagement is unavoidable, but how to channel that involvement through frameworks that prevent their national interests from overwhelming the requirements of an internally driven settlement.

The events in Syria after late 2024 provided a stark demonstration of the costs of diplomatic abandonment. The cautious momentum built around regional gatherings dissipated rapidly, leaving a vacuum that was filled not by a renewed collective mechanism but by disjointed, ad-hoc national initiatives. Momentum, once lost in a mediation process, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. When structured mediation collapses, it does not pause—it regresses: to zero-sum power politics, to humanitarian crisis management, to the consolidation of facts on the ground that make future political solutions progressively more distant.

VIII. Proposals for the Future of Arab Mediation

Diagnosis without prescription is a luxury the region can no longer afford. Drawing on the lessons outlined above, five structural imperatives present themselves.

The first is the shift from the unattainable ideal of full Arab consensus to the realistic target of minimal consensus among key stakeholders—agreement on core principles: ending foreign military interference, prioritising the rebuilding of civil state institutions, and channelling resources through a unified political track. A dedicated high-level Arab contact group with a genuinely unified mandate, rather than a rotating chairmanship of disagreement, could provide the institutional expression of this minimal consensus.

The second is the institutionalisation of mediation capacity within the Arab League. The League has operated too long as a vehicle for declaratory diplomacy. What is needed is a permanent, professionally staffed, and well-resourced mediation unit within the Secretariat—populated by individuals of genuine regional stature and empowered to maintain continuous engagement with all conflict parties, not only during crises but in the quieter periods between them, when the foundational work of trust-building actually takes place.

The third is a clear definition of the role of neighbouring and regional powers. Their proper function is to underwrite and guarantee agreements reached by the conflict parties themselves—to provide the security and economic assurances that make settlements credible—not to dictate their terms. A formal firewall between states’ national security interests and the mediation process is essential. Without it, every mediation risks becoming a proxy negotiation over regional geopolitics, with the conflict parties reduced to secondary actors in a drama conducted at their expense.

The fourth is the abandonment of what might be called the summit-and-neglect model of conflict engagement. The pattern—intense multilateral attention around a high-profile gathering, followed by protracted periods of diplomatic neglect—has produced consistent failure and is visible across three cases where high-profile diplomatic moments substituted for sustained engagement.

The Oslo Accords generated a White House lawn signing of maximum symbolic intensity. What followed were intervals of neglect—settlement expansion, security deterioration, institutional erosion—punctuated by further summits convened to rescue a process that had been abandoned between them. Camp David 2000 inherited the unresolved residue of everything that had not been addressed since 1993. Each summit reset the clock without changing the underlying arithmetic.

In Libya, NATO intervention and Gaddafi’s fall produced intense multilateral attention followed by rapid international withdrawal. No serious disarmament process, no sustained institutional support. The Skhirat Agreement (2015) was another concentrated moment of diplomatic attention, producing a government that never controlled the territory it nominally governed. External actors filled the vacuum between summits with competing proxy support.

Syria’s Geneva process ran through multiple rounds from 2012 onward, each receiving considerable diplomatic attention and none producing any mechanism for implementation. The deeper problem was structural: between sessions, the military landscape changed beyond recognition—Russian intervention, Hezbollah’s armed involvement, the rise of ISIS, the entrenchment of opposition armed factions with support from regional and international actors, and Iran’s growing consolidation on the ground—yet diplomats returned to each new round carrying assumptions formed at the last one. Astana shared the mediation space with Geneva not by accident but by logic: the parties had concluded that summits without follow-through carried no enforceable consequences, and so sought a forum that at least reflected the facts on the ground.

Successful mediation requires sustained, patient, and relentless engagement insulated from daily political fluctuations. This demands envoys with genuinely long-term mandates, deep contextual expertise, and direct access to the leaders whose decisions determine outcomes.

The fifth is accepting inclusivity as a non-negotiable principle rather than an aspirational preference. The history of failed mediation is, in significant measure, a history of exclusion: of attempts to engineer settlements without the engagement of actors who control territory, armed groups, or popular constituencies essential to any agreement’s implementation. The political discomfort of engaging such actors is real. But the alternative—mediation processes that exclude significant parties, only to find agreements undermined by those excluded—is consistently worse. Future processes must develop frameworks for engaging all actors with significant constituencies, or accept that they are designing instruments of conflict management rather than conflict resolution.

IX. The Overarching Lesson

The lessons distilled from the Syria mediation experience do not exist in isolation. They form part of a larger, deeply troubling pattern visible across the four major Arab conflicts of our era: Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan. In each case, the absence of a unified Arab framework has been filled by fragmented, often counterproductive initiatives driven by competing national interests. In each case, the political cost has been borne overwhelmingly by civilian populations. In each case, the opportunities for a negotiated solution have narrowed with each year of continued violence.

The Syrian conflict, at its deepest level, is a mirror. It reflects with unsparing clarity the consequences of a divided Arab world attempting to navigate civilisational crises with instruments designed for a different era. From the constitutional committee sessions that produced no constitution, to the ceasefires that held for days rather than decades, to the diplomatic openings that closed before they could be walked through—the lesson is not that peace was impossible. It is that peace requires conditions, and conditions require sustained collective political will.

Arab conflicts require Arab-led solutions. But Arab-led solutions cannot emerge from a divided Arab world. The hard, unglamorous, and often thankless work of rebuilding a minimal collective framework—for mediation, for diplomatic coordination, for the channeling of economic and political resources toward settlement rather than perpetuation—is therefore not optional. It is the precondition for everything else. Until it is done, mediation in the Arab world will remain what it too often has been in Syria: a dignified gesture in the direction of peace, insufficiently backed by the political architecture to make peace real. What is required is a sustained, principled, and collectively supported process that the Arab world has the capacity to provide and has, until now, consistently failed to deliver.

Conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa have proven both devastating and persistent, laying waste to generations and impeding meaningful development in the region. The Pathways to Hope project launched by the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo with support from the Ford Foundation examines the complexities of these conflicts by unpacking the different forces that shape regional mediation processes and identifying what is required to build durable peace. In that, the project’s mission statement reminds us: 

“Wars and conflicts in the region have tremendous consequences that go beyond questions of institutions, authority and power dynamics. They proved to be intractably interconnected with increasing regional polarization, exposure to foreign and regional interventions, and protracted socio-economic vulnerabilities. The implications uproot societies, upend economies and leave considerable levels of destruction that take generations to rebuild, if at all. These key outcomes also intersect with questions of gender, youth and state-society dynamics, transitional justice, as well as the control over / extraction of natural resources and the costs of climate change.”

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs is partnering with the Pathways to Hope project to publish two special issues on conflict and mediation in the region. Each issue draws on the expertise of practitioners and scholars from diverse backgrounds to analyze the drivers of conflict and how mediation efforts can be enhanced to effectively resolve them. Most contributors have also participated in the project’s closed working groups, designed to allow experts to share experiences and perspectives candidly. The first issue covers the project’s four focus countries: Sudan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

This pilot issue approaches Sudan’s civil war through two distinct lenses. Tahani Abbas, a Sudanese human rights activist directly involved in the country’s mediation process, examines how gendered violence has prevented women from being active participants in the peace process. Lama Hattow, an environmental expert at Johns Hopkins University, analyzes how water management intersects with conflict and mediation dynamics in Sudan.

Additionally, three contributors examine the dynamics and shortcomings of mediation through the lens of their own lived experience. Ambassador Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy reflects on his firsthand engagement in Syria, Abdussalam El Belazi draws on the Libyan case to highlight the importance of local mediators, and Assem El Essawi examines the role of the impartial negotiator. 

Together, these articles offer a nuanced picture of how mediation unfolds within active conflicts and what it will take to achieve lasting peace in the region. Beyond their immediate scope, the insights generated by this issue and the Pathways to Hope project serve a broader purpose: they provide frameworks for understanding conflicts not covered by the project and a body of practical knowledge to train current and future mediators in helping communities survive war and build toward a more stable future.

To gain a better understanding of the current bout of conflict in the Middle East, turning to the various theorists of war can help explain the rhythms of politics, peace, and violence. This essay draws on a handful of thinkers on war and politics to glean insights that might help us better understand the forces shaping the Middle East. It does not offer a comprehensive study of any of these thinkers or their philosophies; rather, it uses them as sounding boards—as intellectual companions—to reflect on the present dynamics of war, politics, and peace in our region. From Clausewitz to Arendt, from Foucault to Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun, these thinkers provide us with key questions to pose when examining the dynamics of our turbulent region and insights on how to build a more peaceful future.

Clausewitz: The Trinity of Passion, Chance, and Policy

The Prussian theorist and practitioner of war, Carl von Clausewitz, famously described war as consisting of a “remarkable trinity”—a dynamic interplay between passion, chance, and policy. Passion lies in the realm of the populace and denotes the hostilities, enmities, and willingness to kill and be killed that is necessary for prosecuting any war. Chance lies in the realm of the war commanders and denotes elements such as the fog of war, the surprises and reversals of battle, and the skill of commanders to navigate this chaotic terrain. Policy refers to the realm of reason, and Clausewitz argues that policy (decided by the political leader or government) should guide and shape the conduct of war in pursuit of a rational goal. Clausewitz asserts that this rational goal should be the determinant element over the unruly dynamics of passion and chance.    

Seen through this lens, the wars that have convulsed the Middle East since October 7, 2023—from Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran—are a vivid laboratory of the Clausewitzian trinity.

Passion: The Fire That Transformed the Battlefield

Hamas and its allies in the so-called Axis of Resistance appear to have misread the passion component of the trinity. They believed Israeli society had grown complacent—divided, cynical, and unwilling to bear the costs of major war. The October 7 attacks were thus designed not only to inflict tactical damage but to reveal Israeli weakness and demoralization. Instead, they triggered the opposite effect—a surge of collective fury and unity that reignited the Israeli public’s willingness to fight. What Hamas thought would expose exhaustion instead rekindled a national passion that legitimized a vast and prolonged military campaign.

At the same time, Hamas deliberately sought to re-erect walls of passion and enmity—to restore clear lines of hostility, not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also between Israel and much of the Arab and Muslim world. In this purpose, they have generally succeeded: a new emotional landscape of mutual rage and fear has reshaped regional politics and frozen the space for dialogue or compromise.

Iran and its regional allies also misjudged the emotional equation. They assumed Israeli fatigue and underestimated the mobilizing effect of existential threat. While Israel has shown high tolerance for prolonged fighting, it remains unclear whether the leadership of the Islamic Republic, aware of their narrow base of support and facing multiple political and socio-economic challenges as well as largescale opposition, can rely on a sustained national passion for more open-ended conflict.

Chance: The Realm of Surprise and Miscalculation

The second element of the trinity, chance, refers to the unpredictability of war—the “play of probability”, as Clausewitz called it. Hamas’s October 7 attack was, at its core, a masterstroke of surprise. It exploited Israeli overconfidence and intelligence failure. The breach of Gaza’s border defenses, and the extensive underground networks Hamas had prepared for a long campaign, gave it an early tactical advantage.

But the element of chance soon turned against Hamas. The scale of Israel’s response, and the rapid adaptation of Israeli technology and intelligence (including AI-driven targeting and real-time battlefield awareness), shifted the balance dramatically. Chance worked against Iran and its allies too. They found themselves fighting the last war—unprepared for Israel’s evolving tactics and its capacity to integrate cyber, intelligence, and airpower on a new level.

For Israel, October 7 was also a lesson in chance—and complacency. The Israeli military establishment was blindsided, its assumptions about deterrence shattered. Yet, this very failure galvanized a level of audacity and improvisation that turned the various battlefields around. 

Policy: The Elusive Third Leg of the Trinity

Clausewitz warned that war must always remain subordinate to policy—to a coherent political purpose. Without that compass, war becomes a destructive drift of passion and chance with no clear path toward a cessation of fighting. In the current conflict, political purpose has been the murkiest element of all.

For Hamas, the policy dimension of the October 7 attacks was only partially clear. If the aim was to derail the progress of the Abraham Accords (especially a Saudi-Israeli deal)  and return the Palestinian question to the center of global attention, that has been achieved—but at catastrophic cost to Gaza’s people and Hamas’s own command structure, and without a clear political  end game in sight. 

For Iran, the Axis of Resistance has proven an unwieldy policy instrument. Tehran’s degree of foreknowledge of the October attacks remains uncertain, suggesting limited control over the network it helped build with Hamas. Hezbollah has always had close strategic relations with Iran, but many decisions are left to the group itself, especially when the prominent Seyed Hassan Nasrallah was at the helm. In Iraq, Iran has faced political headwinds in trying to get the allied Hashd militias to always do its bidding.  And after it has become clear that Iran’s previous “forward defense” strategy was no longer working—it can no longer serve to deter attacks against Iran, or defend against them—we have not seen a new policy approach from Tehran. It would seem that although the old strategy has collapsed from a policy-purpose perspective, it lives on out of inertia and an absence of clear policy deliberation and decision making.  

Which also brings us to the murkiness of the policy decision-making process in the Islamic Republic. Overall policy is decided by the supreme leader but many of the battlefield decisions are made by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or by the proxy groups themselves; the president and government of Iran have no say on these critical matters of Iranian foreign and security policy. In other words, in the last two years of wars that one of its proxies (Hamas) triggered, it is not clear that Iran and its Axis of Resistance have managed the ensuing conflicts with clear political and policy priorities in service of a clear set of policy goals. 

On the Israeli side, the policy dimension of the conduct of the war has also been contentious and uncertain. While early phases of the Gaza war enjoyed wide domestic support, the absence of a clear political end-state—and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s evident intertwining of personal survival with strategic decisions—blurred the line between national and personal purpose. 

Clausewitz’s dictum that war must serve a rational political goal has, at times, been inverted: the continuation of war has served the interests of the politician, rather than  well-defined national goals. Former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s famous dictum is that “war is too important to be left to the generals”; in this case, one might say this war was too important to be left to the politician. Indeed, many generals in the Israeli military advocated early on for a more judicious policy goal, and in the end it took an intervention from U.S. President Donald Trump to kick some policy purpose into what seemed like an endless war.  

At the broader regional level, Israel’s military dominance—striking across Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and even Iran—has shifted the balance of power, but without a clear policy framework to consolidate it. The strategic policy opportunity to translate battlefield superiority into regional integration—particularly through normalization with Saudi Arabia and beyond—remains hostage to domestic Israeli politics and the refusal to engage seriously on the Palestinian question. While the war might be made to serve this broader policy purpose, narrow domestic political considerations for Netanyahu and his extreme right wing allies are preventing this policy goal from being moved forward.

In short, the Clausewitzian trinity of passion, chance, and policy remain in constant tension—but the balance has tilted heavily toward the first two, with rational policy often the weakest element. The region’s conflicts reveal not only the enduring relevance of Clausewitz but also the fragility of his ideal that war should be guided by reason.

From Clausewitz to Arendt: When Politics Itself Disappears

If Clausewitz emphasizes that politics and policy should prevail over blind battle in the conduct of war, German American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt warns that war often destroys the very realm in which policy—and politics—can exist. For Arendt, politics is not merely another means of conflict; it is the space of dialogue, plurality, and mutual recognition. War, by contrast, is its annihilation. Where Clausewitz offers a framework for understanding war’s internal dynamics, Arendt offers a warning about its external consequences: once unleashed, war devours the capacity for politics itself.

Arendt argues that war and politics are opposites. Politics is the domain of engagement, interchange, and negotiation to arrive at some form of agreement or understanding; it leans on trust and is built on consent. War is the opposite of politics: based on dehumanization rather than engagement, employing force to harm or obliterate the other, and aiming for an imposed outcome. For Arendt, war—whether interstate or civil war—arises either where politics has collapsed completely, or where politics really did not exist in the first place. Furthermore, war does not lead to or end with a ‘return’ to politics, but rather it undermines or often prevents the possibility of engaging in ‘politics’ after war has done its damage.  

This is very clear in the case of failed states in the Middle East where the collapse of the central authority of the state led to the collapse of normal ‘politics’ and created the conditions for the eruption of civil war. In these cases, the armed conflict was not a continuation of politics, but a form of interaction that emerged either when actual politics did not exist in the first place (e.g. Assad’s Syria, Qaddafi’s Libya, or Saddam’s Iraq), or where it failed and collapsed (Lebanon in the mid-1970s, Yemen after 2014, Sudan more recently). More ominously, these civil wars are not a temporary aberration that will segue back into normal politics, but rather cast a much longer shadow: Lebanon since the end of its 15-year civil war in 1990, entered a period of what can be described as a continuation of (civil) war but through political means; post-Saddam and post-Assad Syria are in different stages of trying to build national politics that are not simply a sublimation of sectarian and/or ethnic armed conflict.   

Regionally as well, war has served to destroy or degrade the possibility of regional politics or regional diplomacy, rather than just be a temporary departure from it. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while purportedly aiming to build new politics in both countries, tipped the balance in the opposite direction, igniting long civil wars in both.  The Hamas-Israel armed conflict since October 2023 has made the possibility of any return to ‘politics’ all but unimaginable at this point. The wars between Israel and Iran have also hardened the passions of existential enmity and largely eliminated the possibility of political engagement between the two.  

Furthermore, wars are often launched or prolonged to block or prevent politics.  Hamas’s attacks of October 7 were largely to block the ‘politics’ that was emerging between Israel and a broader set of Arab states. Iran threw its weight behind the ensuing set of wars because the Islamic Republic also had an interest in blocking the emerging path of politics that was integrating Israel and several Arab states against its interests. Netanyahu and right wing elements of his government insisted on prolonging the war, and still fear its ending, because the end of war might lead to pressure for him to engage in a ‘political process’ with the Palestinian Authority or a similar Palestinian entity. In these cases, war is pursued to block the path of politics. 

Arendt’s point is that war is harmful not only because of its obvious human, material, and psychic costs on those communities dragged into it, but also that war is a negation and obliteration of politics that has a far deeper and longer negative effect on populations caught up in it.

Foucault’s Insight: Politics Masks Conflict and War

The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s insights are of a different nature, however. He looked at politics and described states and the political and socio-economic orders they impose as masking the underlying conflicts and ‘wars’ that every society—in which there are always winners and losers—has. Every state structure empowers certain classes and groups in society, and disempowers or subjugates others; every regional or international ‘order’, is created by and favors certain states and marginalizes others.

This insight can be borrowed to understand elements of international politics. The Pax Romana, or Pax Americana, or Pax Iranica, or what Israel might want to impose as a Pax Israelica, are largely built on the realities of raw power, include winners or losers, and are ‘orders’ that mask frozen or simmering conflicts of many kinds. The philosophies of Marx, Mao, and Gramsci would not disagree with Foucault on this point. Israel’s imposed order on the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; Iran imposing its armed militias on various Arab countries; and the United States imposing its will previously on Iraq and Afghanistan are all examples of this reality.  

From Foucault’s perspective, stability comes through inclusion, engagement, and building accommodating orders, not imposing them by force. Until this shift is achieved, armed conflict is a feature of the system, not a glitch.   

Thucydides’s Timeless Warning: Power and Hubris

In his examination of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian historian Thucydides was clear that in times of conflict the powerful do what they can, and the weak submit to what they must. In that sense he was clear-eyed in understanding that in war, power is the only currency, and justice falls by the wayside. This, of course, has become common parlance in our contemporary examination of war. 

But what Thucydides warned about, and what is often overlooked, is that once one party obtains the upper hand in terms of power, they will be tempted  to press that advantage as much as possible. But that ‘hubris’, as he calls it, leads them to mistake a temporary military advantage as a long-term ability to sustain an expanded domain.

This has already been said repeatedly of America’s overreach in the Middle East after 9/11. Iran similarly has overreached into several Arab capitals, which has led to a complete reversal recently in Syria and setbacks with Hezbollah in Lebanon. It can also be said of Israel’s current approach, where it is pressing its military advantage to reshape regional power dynamics in its favor, but simultaneously inviting the potential for more turbulence, rather than stability, in the future. 

‘Asabiyyah and ‘Adl: Ibn Khaldūn’s Lens on Conflict and Order

Before concluding, it is worth turning to a thinker from the region itself, Ibn Khaldūn, the 14th-century North African historian and philosopher, whose Muqaddimah remains one of the most profound analyses of power, conflict, and social cohesion. Long before Clausewitz or Arendt, Ibn Khaldūn sought to understand why states rise and fall, why war recurs, and what conditions sustain peace and stability. Two of his central concepts—ʿasabiyyah (social solidarity or collective cohesion) and ʿadl (justice)—remain strikingly relevant to the Middle East today.

ʿAsabiyyah: The Bonds that Build—and Unravel—Power

For Ibn Khaldūn, ʿasabiyyah was the invisible glue that held communities and states together—the shared sense of belonging, loyalty, and purpose that enables collective action. Dynasties, he argued, rise when their ʿasabiyyah is strong and inclusive, and decline when it decays into factionalism, luxury, or corruption. Conflict, in his view, is rarely just about resources or ideology; it is a symptom of the weakening or collision of solidarities.

In today’s Middle East, this Khaldūnian lens is illuminating. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is, at its core, a struggle between two powerful and competing ʿasabiyyahs. Each community—Israeli and Palestinian—possesses its own deep, emotionally charged solidarity, shaped by trauma, identity, and historical memory. Neither has been able to accommodate the other within a shared political framework. The result is not simply a clash of policies or interests, but of collective solidarities that define themselves in opposition to one another. Hamas’s recent resort to violence, and Israel’s massive mobilization in response, both draw from and reinforce these opposing ʿasabiyyahs. Each act of war hardens the emotional and moral boundaries that make coexistence harder to imagine.

Across the Arab world, the Arab nationalist ‘asabiyah that animated multiple Arab-Israeli wars between 1948 and 1973 has ebbed as a driver of Arab interstate action. In addition, the nation state-based solidarities that animated the independence and nationalist eras of the mid-20th century (e.g. Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Yemeni, etc) weakened, as regimes (or ‘dynasties’ as Ibn Khaldun would describe them), turned corrupt and repressive. 

Into this vacuum stepped non-state actors, drawing on narrower forms of solidarity: sectarian, tribal, or ideological. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria all embody narrower ʿasabiyyahs that have filled the void left by failing nation-state ‘assabiyyahs. The power of these non-state actors is not merely military; it is social and emotional. They command loyalty because they offer belonging where the state has faltered.

Ibn Khaldūn’s cyclical vision of history is sobering. In many ways, the region’s wars reflect a continuous ebb and flow of different ʿasabiyyahs and the recurring contestation among various contending groups. It is also a pessimistic, if maybe realistic, view of regional politics in which recurring wars will be an unavoidable feature.  

The realistic task, then, would be trying to prevent as many wars as possible from erupting, managing and containing those that do occur, and creating conditions that reduce their frequency and ferocity—prioritizing a policy of constant vigilance and conflict management, rather than expecting permanent peace.   

ʿAdl: Justice as the Foundation of Stability

But Ibn Khaldun might not be as pessimistic as described above. He also argues that if ʿasabiyyah explains why states emerge, the presence or absence of ʿadl (justice), explains how a state can be made to endure longer or collapse quicker. Ibn Khaldūn saw justice not as an abstract virtue but as the foundation of order. Injustice (ẓulm), he wrote, is the true cause of a state’s ruin: it destroys trust, paralyzes economic life, and corrodes the moral bond between ruler and ruled. Oppression and corruption will hasten a state’s demise; ‘adl, or good governance, will prolong its tenure.

In the Israeli–Palestinian arena, this insight could not be more relevant. A durable peace cannot be built on domination or exclusion. Military dominance may impose temporary calm; but without justice—without a framework that restores dignity and equality to both peoples—every pause will be provisional. The absence of ʿadl ensures the recurrence of revolt. In this sense, Ibn Khaldūn’s warning is stark: order without justice is self-defeating. It creates the illusion of stability while sowing the seeds of future conflict.

The same principle applies region-wide. From a Khaldūnian perspective, the road to stability in the Middle East does not lie in military dominance, or deterrence and a mere balance of power, but in the establishment of some measure of justice and legitimacy. Peace, he would argue, is not just the absence of war; it is the presence of a just order that commands voluntary loyalty. 

Toward a Politics Beyond War

Taken together, the aforementioned perspectives warn us that the Middle East is in many ways locked in a dynamic in which war is often not the exception but the norm, and in which the path of politics is not an inevitable outcome but one we have to work very hard to enable. 

The Clausewitzian lens has shown us that passion and chance have often outstripped rational policy in the conduct of the region’s wars. Arendt adds urgency to the problem by warning that war and politics are not neighbors, but dangerous opposites. To move from one to the other is not achieved by a ceasefire but requires a profound and transformative effort. Foucault exposes how imposed orders perpetuate latent forms of violence beneath a veneer of stability, and only kick the dangerous can down the road. Thucydides warns us of the hubris of power, in which victory becomes indistinguishable from overreach and sowing the seeds of future conflict. Finally, Ibn Khaldun reminds us both of the recurring nature of war, but also the realistic need to pursue stability through the foundation of justice. 

If these insights map the traps into which the region repeatedly falls, they also point toward the path out. To move toward a politics beyond war requires deliberately addressing the passions of enmity, exclusion, and domination. It means investing not in the multiplication of enemies, but in the slow and deliberate building of trust, institutions, and processes that allow states, nations, and communities to engage without annihilating one another. It means confronting the fears and identities that fuel permanent hostility, and creating inclusive frameworks in which politics, including regional politics, can be plural, negotiated, and ongoing.

The alternative is already well known: cycles of violence that undermine the very possibility of shared futures. But if politics in its truest sense is about coexistence, bargaining, and collective problem-solving, then reclaiming politics from the demon of war is both urgent and possible. The challenge for the coming decades is to bend the arc of the region toward a politics beyond war—one that does not deny conflict, but insists it be worked through by persuasion and compromise, and within a foundation of justice and mutual respect, rather than by force. 

Two years ago, in September 2023, the former National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, offered a resoundingly hopeful outlook for the Middle East. The administration’s efforts to “depressurize and de-escalate” the Middle East had succeeded. A de facto truce was holding in Yemen, Iran-backed attacks on U.S. bases had dropped off, and the United States was able to focus on regional integration and normalization efforts rather than “crisis and conflict management”. The Middle East, Sullivan concluded, was “quieter today than it [had] been in two decades”. Sullivan’s comments did not age well. Just a few days later, a Hamas-led attack on Israel’s southern communities swiftly set the region ablaze, thrusting the Middle East back to the center of Washington’s crisis mitigation efforts.

October 7 and Its Aftermath

The Hamas-led attack on October 7 and the armed response to Israel’s ensuing retaliatory offensive in Gaza, once again, demonstrated the ongoing centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to regional volatility. Just one day after Hamas and a coterie of armed Gaza-based groups launched their multi-pronged attack on Israel, Hezbollah joined the conflict, firing rockets and artillery into the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms “in solidarity” with the Palestinian people. On October 18, in response to U.S. support for Israel in its war against Hamas, Iranian-backed militias began expanding their attacks with a series of coordinated attacks on U.S. facilities and assets in Syria and Iraq. A day later, on October 19, the Houthis fired cruise missiles and drones headed toward Israel; a month later, the group started targeting “Israeli-linked” maritime vessels traversing the Red Sea. By December 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed that Israel was engaged in “a multi-front war”. 

This was not the type of multi-state, territorial war that Israel faced between 1948 and 1973, when neighboring Arab states engaged in three direct military confrontations with Tel Aviv. Rather, the war’s initial outbreak in October 2023, its endurance, as well as its regional reverberations, were highly predicated on non-state armed actors’ (NSAAs) ability to exploit latent fissures. As the past two years have shown, state-powered military interventions targeting NSAAs that proliferate regional instability can reduce their fighting capabilities in the short term. However, without addressing the underlying causes of violence as well as the structural conditions that enable these NSAAs to function, they are unlikely to lead to long-term regional stability. Nowhere is this perhaps better illustrated than in Gaza.

NSAAs and the Middle East: A Long History

NSAAs have a long history in the Middle East as powerful shapers of regional trajectories and events and as “clients” of powerful state backers. Britain’s material support of NSAAs, for instance, dates back to World War I, when it supplied arms to tribes to fight against the Ottoman Empire. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union relied on regional allies to support various NSAAs as a tool for geopolitical rivalry. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as part of its War on Terror, the United States began arming Sunni forces in Iraq to combat Al-Qaeda under the framework of the Anbar Awakening movement. As these examples illustrate, NSAAs’ emergence is highly indicative of regional sociopolitical trends.

Their activities are also deeply entwined with ongoing conflict, and most NSAAs rise or fall based on local circumstances, exploiting local grievances, attracting local recruits, and targeting local governments. In the past two decades, the rise in non-state armed actors has often coincided with the relative weakening of states. Both Libya and Yemen saw a surge in non-state armed actors following the breakdown of state authority and amidst prolonged conflict. In Iraq and Syria, power vacuums and sectarian tensions led to the emergence of a singularly brutal and repressive non-state armed actor in 2014, known as ISIL or ISIS.

At its height, ISIS—a Salafi-jihadist movement—controlled about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq. The fight against ISIS, meanwhile, included its own array of NSAAs, including the U.S.-backed Kurdish People’s Defense Unit (YPG) and its sister militia, the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). As it consolidated control over northwest Syria in 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an erstwhile al-Qaida affiliate, also joined the fight by publicly announcing––and engaging in––dozens of anti-ISIS operations. Its leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, is now the president of Syria, overseeing a newly formed transitional government. 

Al-Sharaa’s rise to power, which coincided with HTS’ voluntary dissolution, is merely the latest example of an NSAA’s transformation. Indeed, various contemporary political movements and structures across the Middle East can trace their origins back to armed groups before being integrated into a political system. After Israel’s establishment, the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization responsible for the deadly King David Hotel bombings in 1946, transitioned into the Herut, a right-wing political party that won fourteen seats in Israel’s first elections. Its head, Menachem Begin, served as Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983.

Another example is Fatah, currently led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, which was established as a national liberation movement in 1957; combat operations, according to its founders, were deemed a necessary precedent to “Filastin’s liberation”, based on the notion that “freedom is taken, not granted”. Almost 40 years later, Fatah, as the dominant member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), for the first time engaged with Israel in direct peace negotiations, following the PLO’s renunciation of violence and Israeli recognition of the organization as the political representative of the Palestinian people. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has operated as a hybrid organization inside Lebanon since 1992, with both a military and political wing. Its party, the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc, currently holds 13 seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament.      

What’s in a Name: Fraught Terminology

The characterization of NSAAs is, of course, highly dependent on the socio-political normative perceptions of the cause for which armed force is being used, as well as the actions taken by an NSAA—and their targets. Depending on the group’s organizational structure, ideology, use of violence, and its relationship with domestic and international actors, other descriptors might be used too. For instance, Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), an Iran-backed armed group, has been described as a paramilitary organization, a terrorist group, and a militia.

NSAAs, which are also described as violent non-state actors (VNSAs), organized armed groups, or non-state armed groups (NSAGs), rarely self-identify in such terms. The above-mentioned Palestine Liberation Organization, as the name suggests, viewed itself as a liberation movement, dedicated to the “complete restoration of our lost homeland”. In 1987, conversely, the U.S. designated the PLO and its affiliated groups as terrorist organizations, deeming its covenant as well as the group’s implication in the murder of U.S. citizens a threat to the “interests of the United States”.

Other nations did not take the same stance. Almost ten years prior, in 1974, the Arab League and the UN General Assembly had politically recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and allowed it to participate in UN activities under observer status. More recently, the European Union, in contrast to Washington, has taken a differentiated approach to Hezbollah’s military and political wings, only designating the former a terrorist organization. 

When it comes to NSAAs, diverging regional and international approaches and engagement tend to be more of a feature than a bug. This divergence, in part, can be explained by the hybrid nature of many NSAA across the Middle East. To a varied extent, NSAAs in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon have come to play governing and political roles in their countries, undermining neat dichotomies between state and non-state actors. NSAAs’ hybridity also challenges assumptions that bureaucratic institutionalization inherently leads to restraint and the adoption of non-violent principles.

Hezbollah is perhaps one of the best-known contemporary examples of a hybrid actor, having expanded from an Iranian-backed ideological movement to an established political organization characterized by bureaucratic state-like structures, including a semi-public Foreign Relations Department, a significant geographic presence that depends on Shia support in southern Lebanon, and an extensive welfare infrastructure. In 2023, on the eve of the latest Israel-Hamas War, Hezbollah was considered the world’s most powerful non-state actor, often described as “a state within a state”.

In Iraq, the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Force (PMF), comprising dozens of separate armed groups, is another hybrid actor. Its transformation from a “rag-tag army” to an auxiliary state force in 2019 has coincided with an expansion of formidable political and economic influence inside Iraq, raising concerns over the institutionalization of Iranian influence and undermining of Iraqi sovereignty.

Iran is by no means the only state backer of NSAAs in the Middle East. In Syria, a dizzying array of competing armed groups emerged during the Syrian civil war and following the rise of ISIS, backed by different nation-state actors, including France, Jordan, the UK, Turkey, Iran, the United States, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, who all sought different strategic objectives.

The Israel-Hamas conflict inside Gaza is also marked by competing NSAAs and state supporters, seemingly based on the old proverb: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Though there is no evidence suggesting Iran had prior knowledge of the October 7 attack, Iran has long worked to militarily and operationally strengthen groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel, for its part, turned to arming local anti-Hamas groups to displace Hamas from the Gaza Strip while avoiding support for real governing alternatives. Among these groups was a Rafah-based armed group called the “Popular Forces” led by Yasser Abu Shabab, a member of the Bedouin Tarabin tribe whose past smuggling and crime previously led to friction with Hamas. In 2015, Abu Shabab was arrested by Hamas and imprisoned; in October 2023, he reportedly managed to escape prison amidst Israeli airstrikes. His recent death surprised no one; in a statement, Abu Shabab’s tribe reportedly denounced him and promised not to “allow any other member of the tribe to participate in militias that serve the occupation.”

Indeed, NSAAs can prove to be tough clients; material support for NSAAs does not always confer direct and lasting influence over actions. The Houthis, for instance, are not true Iranian proxies. Even though the group benefits from Iranian support, Iran lacks substantial control over Houthi behavior, making them a highly unpredictable actor while also enabling Iran to conveniently deflect responsibility. As Shabnam Dadparvar and Amin Parto recently argued, when state support is (intended to be) covert, the goal is typically to maintain “plausible deniability”, allowing the power to avoid direct attribution while pursuing its strategic interests. State-NSAA alliances can also change based on geopolitical events, diminishing relationships with foreign partners. When Hamas refused to back the Assad government in the Syrian civil war, Iran responded by temporarily cutting off funding to the group in 2012. A year later, the downfall of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamad Morsi led to strained relations between Hamas and Egypt, which violently suppressed Hamas’ parent organization. More recently, Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah’s capabilities contributed to the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024; in turn, Hezbollah saw a decade-long alliance collapse.

Holding NSAAs Accountable: Few Good Options

Despite their “actorness”, unlike governments, traditional policy tools to hold NSAAs accountable are few and far between. The international laws that enshrine wartime behavior were drawn up for states. NSAAs also do not necessarily feel responsible for the welfare of their own national populations and, in several instances, have demonstrated that concerns over citizens’ welfare are of limited influence on their behavior. Hamas’ former leader Yayha Sinwar, for instance, reportedly claimed that the civilian death toll in Gaza resulting from Israel’s deadly retaliatory campaign, which has now surpassed 70,000, was a “necessary sacrifice” to “infuse life into the veins of this nation [Palestine]”. According to Palestinian American humanitarian activist Ahmed Fouah Alkhatib, devastating Israeli-imposed restrictions on humanitarian aid and assistance, which led to “widespread starvation” in the strip, similarly played into Hamas’ hands, strengthening Hamas’ ceasefire demands, generating justified international outcry, and further worsening Israel’s international standing. Meanwhile, aid restrictions had less impact on Hamas. As Alex de Waal, an authority on famine, noted, “the people who starve last are the men with guns”.

The Houthis have similarly made cynical use of Palestinian solidarity. Their attacks on the Red Sea were partly motivated by a desire to divert Yemeni public attention away from repressive governance policies, poor provision of services, and an egregious record of aid obstruction and diversion in Yemen. Their attacks against maritime targets in the Red Sea, which have been paused following the latest ceasefire in Gaza, only made matters worse. While ostensibly aimed at lifting Israel’s blockade on Gaza, the Houthis’ attacks on one of the world’s busiest maritime chokepoints also impacted aid deliveries to Yemen, where an estimated 19.5 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.

In addition to military support from their state backers, new, low-cost technologies have made NSAAs more effective militarily. The Houthis, for instance, are certainly no longer, or not just, a “ragtag group of rebels”. The Houthis have managed to hone the tactics of irregular warfare, as is particularly evident in the group’s drone warfare strategy. Between October 2023 and June 2024, ACLED records show that the Houthis relied on drones to target international shipping in the Red Sea more than 40 percent of the time. Drones have significantly raised the maritime threat––and at a low cost to the Houthis who can manufacture one-war attack drones in large quantities by exploiting low-cost technology for around $2,000. The increased proliferation of cheap, makeshift drones, which have also been employed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iraqi-based NSAAs, is a testament to the economic asymmetry that has become part and parcel of regional counter-drone efforts. Indeed, the cost of shooting a locally-manufactured drone down is substantially higher than launching an attack: around $2.1 million a shot. As the former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante put it to Congress in May 2024, “That’s not a good cost equation.”

The Middle East: What’s New is Old

Over the past year, talk has once again turned to a “New Middle East” in the wake of the weakening of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”. In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the erstwhile most powerful group of the Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance”, emerged heavily battered and leaderless from its 14-month-long war with Israel last year. While it had played a crucial role in supporting the Syrian government throughout the civil war, its newly weakened status left it unable to help defend Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from a lightning-fast ousting by opposition forces led by HTS in December 2024.

Meanwhile, targeted Israeli strikes in October 2024 and June 2025 on air defense systems and Iranian military leadership significantly degraded the patron of the “Shiite Crescent”, enabling the United States to subsequently target key nuclear infrastructure sites unencumbered. U.S. President Donald Trump, always partial to vainglorious statements, swiftly declared Iran’s nuclear program “obliterated”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu similarly claimed a “historic victory” against Iran, even as analysis suggested that the country’s nuclear program—and its commitment to a “nuclear hedging” strategy—had survived. Indeed, the mirage of force-induced change in the Middle East is grounded in a more complicated reality. The situation in Gaza serves as a stark illustration of this fact.  

“Prolonged warfare”, the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu argued, never benefited a country. This is a lesson Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to ignore. Even after the most recent U.S.-mediated ceasefire, billed as a “peace plan” in typical Trumpian fashion, Israel has continued to conduct strikes on the strip, killing at least 360 Palestinians. Life for Palestinians in Gaza, as the Guardian recently noted, is marked by a dangerous illusion that the ceasefire has created any return to normalcy or safety. Hamas, meanwhile, remains standing, even if it no longer poses a military threat to Israel. Two months after the truce, Hamas has been able to reassert control over almost half of Gaza, likely aided by the uncertainty of the truce’s persistence and the implementation of additional envisioned phases.

Israel, in this sense, might have won the battle but lost the war. Indeed, social science research has repeatedly found that the most salient fact about ideologically driven armed groups is how hard they are to eliminate; military pressure rarely provides a panacea. In the wake of October 7, and with the decimation of its leadership ranks and loss of military infrastructure, Hamas increasingly pivoted to low-level guerrilla warfare. Israeli restrictions on aid equally failed to drive Hamas to defeat and secure the release of Israeli hostages––another of Israel’s initial war aims. Netanyahu’s dogmatic commitment to destroy Hamas, as such, served no broader strategic purpose.

The road to a more durable solution lies in a firm Israeli political commitment to Palestinian self-determination that would involve the gradual military decommissioning of Hamas. This is not an implausible prospect, though it does require concessions on both sides and continued involvement of powerful external guarantors such as the United States and key Arab League members. Since last year, including in conversations with U.S. mediators, Hamas has reportedly indicated openness to decommissioning some of the group’s military capabilities while also agreeing to the exile of limited senior figures and ceding governing power to an independent body of Palestinian technocrats. More recently, Hamas said that its disarmament would be contingent on the establishment of an “independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state”, a goal supported by a majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Convincing Hamas to make verifiable concessions on its weaponry will therefore require ending Israel’s decade-long occupation that strips Hamas of its claim that no meaningful political progress exists.

The “pathway for hope,” in Gaza––and more broadly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict––lies in context-driven actions that produce an end to the repeated cycles of violence that have afflicted Israeli and Palestinian societies and that have impaired Palestinian sovereignty and livelihood for too long. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach that effectively addresses the disparate tensions arising from NSAAs, as well as all their underlying ideological and geopolitical drivers and societal resonance. But given the conflict’s regional reverberations, it’s a necessary start.