Via Marc Lynch, Eric Davis has a useful list of things that most US journalists and academics get wrong when studying the Middle East. I'm not going to dwell on all of them, but #2 is the most important:
"Sin # 2: Overemphasizing the ethnic and confessional identities, the 'ethnoconfessional model.' All too many analysts of Middle East politics view the Middle East through a narrow set of conceptual eyeglasses. They focus on religion and ethnicity (and sometimes on tribe) to the exclusion of other variables."
This is not to deny that ethnicity and religion aren't hugely important, but it often leads to a reductive, primordialist vision of "ancient hatreds" that have existed since Cain slew Abel. Davis expands on this point in his discussion of Iraq:
"It is not at all obvious that hostility towards a member of a different ethnic group or religion automatically leads to violence. And if it does, what are the reasons? If Iraqis have some 'genetic' proclivity towards ethnoconfessional conflict, why is there over 25% intermarriage among members of different ethnic and religious groups?"
The "ancient hatreds" frame is seductive because it is simple, and is easily confirmed by the region's bloody ethnoconfessional wars and patronage politics. But it ignores political and economic explanations that might provide better explanations of how local conflicts are produced.
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