The Middle East – Building a Community of Nations

The term ‘cultural area' as used here refers to a region whose inhabitants, whether divided into independent states or not, have common traditions, values and historical experiences and exhibit similar patterns of behavior in their kinship, family, social, economic and political organizations. According to this definition the culture area of the Middle East extends from Morocco to Afghanistan, and from Turkey to the Sudan

The term ‘interstate wars' is used here to refer to wars among sovereign states; ‘civil wars', to wars involving groups or movements within a single state; and ‘extrasystemic war', to wars involving a sovereign state and movements or groups outside that state's jurisdiction

My estimates of the frequency of violent conflicts in the Middle East are rather conservative. Starr & Most in their study of violent conflicts in the post-WWII international system have shown that for the period 1945–76 alone, the Middle East experienced more violent conflicts than any other region in the world. According to Starr & Most, for this period, out of 120 major wars in the world (both interstate and civil), 36, or 30%, occurred in the Middle East; compared to 35 in Asia, 23 in Latin America, 21 in Africa and 5 in Europe. See Harvey Starr & Benjamin A. Most, ‘Patterns of Conflict: Quantitative Analysis and the Comparative Lessons of Third World Wars', in Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Newman, eds, The Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1985), vol. I. On the casualties of war in the Middle East, Daniel Papp's study has shown that over 2,168,000 were killed in the 1960–88 period alone from Afghanistan to Morocco and from Sudan to Turkey … Papp's study does not include conflicts in which fewer than 1,000 people have been killed. Nor does it cover the pre-1960 era. See Daniel S. Papp, ‘Soviet Unconventional Conflict Policies and Strategies in the Third World', Conflict Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, Fall 1988, pp. 50–55

The terms ‘positive peace' and ‘development' are used here interchangeably to refer to the absence of such structural violence as poverty, income inequality, exploitation, sexism, racism, illiteracy, malnutrition, persecution, discrimination, unemployment, environmental degradation, and substandard housing, education and medical care. It is assumed here that unless organized, political violence can be ended, positive peace and development cannot be achieved

Scholarly works on economic and/or income inequality among Middle Eastern countries are scarce or non-existent. Data presented here have been independently calculated from different sources but primarily from: The Middle East and North Africa, 1992 (London: Europa); and World Bank, World Development Report, 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

For data on Kurdish populations in various Middle Eastern countries, see Chaliand Gerard , ed., People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan, trans. by Michael Pallis (London: Zed Books, 1980), pp. 47, 108, 109, 154, and 211; Stephen C. Pelletiere, The Kurds: An Unstable Element in the Gulf (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 15–16; and The Economist, 24 June 1989, pp. 38–40 and 9 February 1991, p. 25