The Middle East has been betrayed – but despite everything, there is always hope

Why has political change been so difficult to achieve in the Middle East, and why has the region reached this low point in its 100 years history? The people of the region have been systemically denied self determination, political participation and effective government. The agency of everyday people in the Middle East has been constantly crushed. 

In my book, The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East, I argue that the convergence of western social engineering, deepening political authoritarianism and the effects of prolonged regional conflicts like that of Israel-Palestine, have produced political paralysis and economic stagnation. These dominant interrelated threads help explain why there is so much upheaval and violence in the contemporary Middle East and why the aspirations of the people for self determination have been unfulfilled so far.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

From the early 19th century to the present, western powers have intervened in the internal affairs of the Middle East. Driven by imperial ambitions and economic and military expansion and control, colonial Britain and France invented the modern Middle East in their own image. The colonial powers set up the region’s borders and frontiers, as well as the nation-state as foundational governing principle, the political economy, the security services and the ruling elites. 

The colonial legacy did not really end with the formal independence of Middle Eastern states following World War II. As a set of practices and an ideology, imperial domination and control has proven remarkably durable, nimble and dynamic. Western intervention (and Soviet and Russian to a lesser extent) has persisted under different guises, disrupting the region’s normal social, political and economic progression and changing its development trajectory.

In my recent book, What Really Went Wrong, I argue that the impact and effects of the global Cold War on the newly independent Middle Eastern states and societies was transformational. The region was reimagined as a Cold War chessboard, leaving a legacy marked by weak political institutions, fragile sovereignty, lopsided economic growth and political systems prone to authoritarianism.

Washington’s decision to roll back Soviet communism and its desire to build a new informal empire frustrated early efforts by the first generation of postcolonial leaders in newly independent nations. The Cold War also polarised the Middle East into two rival camps – pro-western and nonaligned – forcing decolonised leaders to shift focus and priority away from development and institution-building to geostrategic competition and rivalry.

Read more:

• Lessons from the Middle East – ‘the epicentre of climate discourse’ – for a warming planet
• Lebanon’s crisis isn’t just statistics. It’s people’s lives – and their stories matter
• ‘How many more children must die?’: British Palestinians plead with UK to act as Gaza’s people starve

Consequential as it is, colonialism and foreign intervention are not the whole story of the dynamics that affect the everyday lives of people in the Middle East and of why the region is mired in economic and political instability. On the whole, the story of the Middle East over the past 100 years is one of creeping and deepening local political authoritarianism and gross economic mismanagement. Autocratic leaders consolidate their rule and thwart the agency of people who demand an effective government. 

The Great Betrayal – which traces more than a century of consequential events in the region, from the end of the Ottoman Empire and the European carve-up of the Middle East to the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring uprisings – details how this powerful partnership between domestic authoritarians and their superpower patron(s) benefit from and actively propagate prolonged, violent conflict.

This historical layer of conflict has exacted a heavy toll on state, society and economy in the region. The struggle for Palestinian self-determination and freedom from Israeli occupation is a case in point.  

Despite all these great odds, the region’s future will ultimately be determined not by the local autocrats and their external enablers but a growing population of Arab and Muslim youth who demand to be treated as citizens and not as subjects. 

Even for a region that has dominated world headlines for decades, today’s Middle East is remarkable for its surprises. For example, after 13 years of a devastating war in Syria that cost thousands of casualties and almost destroyed the country, many had written the Syrian revolution off and declared Assad the winner. Yet in 2024, it took the Syrian people only two weeks to seize their country back from that dictator.

The swift fall showed the resilience of Arab agency and that the people’s struggle for self-determination and freedom will continue.

Fawaz A Gerges is a professor of international relations and chair of the contemporary Middle East at the London School of Economics.

His book, The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle Eastby Fawaz A Gerges is out now (Princeton University Press, £30).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.