The Sinai border. ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com. Some rights reserved.Most articles on the Middle East tend to follow political lines, but the region is rarely explored in a cultural and social sense, except through a rather romanticising tourist lens. Nowhere is this more apparent than in recent attempts to understand the extreme violence of Daesh, also known as ISIS.
Standard descriptions of the Middle East usually introduce the region as being divided into coherent nation states with clear boundaries. Furthermore, it is assumed that the Middle East is solely populated by Arabs of Muslim faith. However, it is rarely mentioned that the state territories in the Middle East were in fact negotiated between colonial powers and competing tribal leaders.
Today, governments are mainly backed by an urban elite, but their ability to control the wider population is weak and relies heavily on state-sanctioned violence rather than consensus. The Middle East is not as 'Arab' and 'Muslim' as it is made out to be, although the ongoing violence is impacting harder on minority groups, making them the first to leave. The lack of legitimacy and engagement with minorities and poorer sections of the community is prevalent all over the region, making it harder for these governments to control their borders. This results in what I refer to as “geographies of hate” in marginalised border regions.
