In the first half of the thirteenth century, Mongol forces launched raids into areas that are now parts of Iraq and Syria. Raids turned into conquest with Hülegü’s movement into the region in the mid-1250s. Baghdad was taken in 1258, and by spring 1260, much of Syria was overrun by Mongol forces. A small Mongol army, however, was defeated by the Mamluks from Egypt in northern Palestine later that year. After a clear border was established along the Euphrates, for sixty years the Mamluks and Ilkhanids struggled for regional supremacy in major battles, frontier warfare, and diplomatic démarches. Around 1320, this conflict ended after negotiations, with peace agreements in place until the breakup of the Ilkhanate after 1335. Although ultimately unsuccessful in conquering lands beyond Iraq, the impact of the Mongols on greater Syria, Egypt, and Arabia was significant, not only militarily, but in the realm of demography, culture, and economy.

Using a classical perspective tending to interpret existing positive international law, this chapter pursues a double objective. First, it fits in with the doctrinal trend embodied by the Institut de droit international (IDI) in emphasising that intervention by invitation is unlawful if it implies interference in an internal situation, contrary to the right of peoples to self-determination. Second, this research highlights the growing role of the UN Security Council in appraising and characterising the conditions surrounding the legal validity of intervention by invitation. The chapter focuses on military operations in Mali (2013), Iraq (2014), Syria (2015), Yemen (2015), and The Gambia (2017). It observes how, by adopting resolutions, the UN Security Council made pronouncements on which authority was entitled to give its consent, and on the legitimacy of the object and effects of the intervention. The chapter concludes that the Council no longer necessarily authorises any military intervention, but centralises and multilateralises the appraisal of the circumstances surrounding the formulation of the invitation.

Aiming to move beyond the limited primary sources on which polarised debate is usually based, this chapter reviews new data on UN Security Council practice in response to consensual interventions. From 1990 to 2013, the Council passed resolutions on 76 per cent of all internal conflicts. This chapter evaluates that response in light of four leading theories: of the Court in Nicaragua, that governmental invitations are always valid; of the Institut de droit international (IDI), that pro-government interventions are ‘allowable’ until a conflict becomes a civil war; that intervention is allowable at the invitation of an elected ‘democratic’ government to secure or restore its power; and that it is allowable in response to an invitation to counter ‘terrorist’ threats. The data shows that the Council does not unequivocally support the Nicaragua or IDI views but has approved regularly the anti-terrorist, and occasionally the pro-democracy, views. Its active voice is more marked than its alignment with any one theory. Among other implications, the IDI view – a Cold War response to abuses of supposed invitations – may be less salient when a multilateral check on such abuses is available.

This chapter examines the relations between thousands of Yemeni Jews and the Jews of the Indian subcontinent in modern times. Starting in the eighteenth century, Yemenite rabbis and emissaries filled in religious functions in Jewish communities first in Cochin and among other groups. In the opposite direction, members of Bene Israel community served as officials and officers in the British army during the time it occupied Aden in 1839. These mutual relations formed intimate ties among various communities across the Indian Ocean.

To understand the way in which Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other groups have become involved in the conflict in Yemen, we must understand the complexities of both political life and the conflict itself. The existence of myriad groups with competing agendas reveals the parabolic pressures working broadly within the context of the Yemeni state. Although largely reduced to either a ‘proxy struggle’ between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or a conflict between the Houthi insurgents and the regime of President Hadi, events on the ground are far more complex. While there are aspects of both narratives that ring true, both require contextualization and must be located within the milieu of Yemeni politics.

Part III of the books analyses the legacies of the 2011 “revolutions”. In these legacies, Chapter 5 identifies federalism in Yemen and an abundance of new social roles in Tunisia. Civic activism in Tunisia includes, among others: new spaces, social roles, and pushes for decentralization, with universal municipalization. The traditional prestige of the state is used to downplay the resistance of artistic creativity. In Yemen, because of deteriorating economic conditions, the democratic articulations of representations and violence are made vulnerable. The map of federal Yemen is used as an excuse for the outbreak of a civil war. Democratic pressure remains nonetheless present.

The chapter explores a paradox – the apparent impossibility of decentralization in a country where orography, a long history of political fragmentation, and a vulnerable central state authority would appear naturally to favor decentralized authority. Through a historical exploration of governance in different parts of Yemen since 1960, it reveals longstanding demands for decentralized governance, as well as the existence of a strong society capable of formulating and pressuring the central authority to implement decentralization reforms. It then analyzes efforts from 2013 to 2015 to produce a new constitutional order built on federal principles – first through a broad-based National Dialogue and, then, through a far less inclusive constitutional drafting process. This quite revolutionary project of founding a federal Yemen with six regions was eventually buried under Gulf Cooperation Council coalition bombs from March 2015 onward. The chapter concludes by exploring the circumstances that led to the rejection of a federalist solution and the eruption of civil war in Yemen, but notes that federalism, far from being an imported concept, has generated rich intra-Yemeni intellectual debates. A six-region federal Yemen might not be the way forward, but a “federalism of the provinces” could be a path for future reconstruction of Yemen.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

Chapter 7 presents the third of the three case studies: Killing the Individual Human Being via Drones. Here I look at targeted killings and the growing use of drones in this practice. The chapter offers a detailed discussion of the predominantly legal and ethical debate. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates the relevance of an analysis guided by insights from IR theory. But it also discusses legal questions concerning International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law. The case study engages in detail with the general discourse on drone strikes and targeted killings and provides an in-depth analysis of specific strike types and drone strikes. The analysis demonstrates how the individual human being appears as an innocent civilian who should not be killed (if possible) or as a guilty terrorist who should be killed.

This chapter is concerned with Germany’s stand on State responsibility and liability. Regarding the former, the German position on State responsibility in the context of arms exports to Yemen is explored. Germany’s reading of the Nicaragua judgment is found to be both unnecessary and incorrect. Further, Germany’s differentiation between ‘bearing responsibility’ and ‘being responsible’ is assessed as being well founded in the context of a missile attack carried out on Saudi Arabia. Concerning the dispute with Greece on war reparations stemming from the two World Wars, Germany’s rejection of claims of reparations, grounded in the opinion that twhe issue is settled, is presented and discussed.

Chapter 6 focuses on Libya and Yemen, both cases in which the former ruling dictator was removed – and eventually in both cases killed – but the result was the fragmentation and near-collapse of the state accompanied by direct and competitive foreign military intervention. Although ‘tribalism’ is often presented as a common factor in producing this outcome in both states, the chapter presents a materialist account of the tribe: just as in the case of the sect, tribal identification and forms of mobilisation acquiring their importance from previous forms of political economy. In both Libya and Yemen, the inheritance of previous revolutions from above – Gaddafi’s in Libya, and the anti-monarchical and anti-colonial revolutions of the 1960s in North and South Yemen, respectively – also shaped the revolutionary-counter-revolutionary conflicts after 2011. Although the NATO campaign in Libya in 2011 has been taken as a paradigmatic case of humanitarian intervention, assimilating the uprising to mid-2000s US policies of ‘regime change’, this chapter demonstrates that in both Libya and Yemen counter-revolutionary external intervention has been much more substantial and consequential.

Using the concept of a revolutionary situation as a turning point in which previously accepted social structures and relations are in flux, this chapter demonstrates the profoundly revolutionary nature of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Tracing the history of the revolutionary situations in each case – Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Libya and Yemen – the chapter demonstrates how mass uprisings of historically remarkable size and breadth established new forms and sites of sovereignty and challenged existing social relations. These included mass, class-based revolts rooted in dissatisfaction with decades of neoliberal economic policy in the region, and the rejection of hierarchies of gender and sect. These revolutionary situations often produced a new sense of expanded and collective selfhood, which would then require counter-revolutionary violence to be eradicated. This chapter, thus, outlines the revolutionary situations that post-2011 counter-revolutionaries sought to end.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.