In the first decade of the 21st
century and before the “Arab Spring” of 2011, it was
primarily the Iraq war post-2003 and the violent escalation
in the Palestine conflict after the second Intifada 2000
which “radiated” beyond their boundaries, thereby strongly
impacting political changes within and beyond the Middle
East: Globally, the Iraq war manifested the declining
world-political influence of the U.S. under President Bush
Jr. and regionally, the Iraq war and the Palestine conflict
contributed to the explicit polarization of inter-state
relations as well as to the increasing multiplicity of
relevant actors in the Middle East. Beyond this
classic-geopolitical perspective on the cross-border impact
of the key violent conflicts in the Middle East, one can
identify further, albeit often less visible dynamics which
concern different local levels in the neighboring countries
of the war contexts: The flight of over two million Iraqis,
who settled in the urban centers of Jordan and Syria,
shattered the social structures and led to partly massive
counter-reactions of the “native” populations. Furthermore,
one can observe indications of an Iraq-related war economy in
parts of Jordan, Syria, the Gulf countries and Iran. The
Palestine conflict and the Iraq war have also contributed to
advancing the politicization of religious-sectarian and
ethnic differences as well as the rise of a violent Sunni
Islamism in the Middle East. The dissertation thesis starts
with the observation that the violent conflicts in Iraq and
Palestine since the beginning of the 21st century have not
only contributed to the re-configuration of global and
regional politics. Crucially, they have also strongly
effected local power configurations in the neighboring Arab
Middle East, without at the same time contributing to topple
the authoritarian regimes at the respective national levels
(at least until early 2011). In accordance with this, it is
the guiding research interest of this dissertation to
theoretically capture and comparatively analyze the dynamics
between regional wars and local orders, a topic that has so
far been widely neglected in Middle East-related political
science. The study thus pursues both a theoretical-conceptual
and an empirical-comparati...