Armed Groups in the Middle East and Conflict Research

For much of the past fifteen years, the Middle East and North Africa have been witnessing the largest proportion of conflicts in the world. Long and bloody wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya drove the trend through the 2010s, followed by a respite in 2022 and then by another particularly brutal wave of conflict over Israel/Gaza and in Lebanon in 2023/2024. Given the prevalence of violence in the Middle East, one would expect that a sizeable part of the conflict studies scholarship draws on research from and about the region—especially as it is a hub for phenomena of broader interest to academics of civil wars such as foreign fighters, proxy wars, rebel governance, and non-state armed groups. Yet evidence suggests that publications drawing on empirical research from the region constitute less than 5% of all articles on conflicts in political science journals (Melani Cammett and Isabel Kendall, “Political Science Scholarship on the Middle East: A View from the Journals,” PS: Political Science & Politics , 54(3), 2021). The reasons for the under-representation of Middle East scholarship in conflict research are understandable. The prevalence of war/instability makes it difficult to collect data in systematic ways, and the language skills and contextual knowledge required to compensate for this lack of standard data are in short supply among political scientists.