| Summary/Abstract |
More than a century has passed since Britain, France, and Russia arbitrarily divided the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire into areas of their own post-war dominance. The Sykes-Picot Agreement started the process of partitioning the Middle East into countries that cut through regions historically populated by Arabs and Turks, Kurds and Assyrians, Sunnis and Shiites, Christians and Jews, etc. Subsequently, the borders of those countries changed many times, but the great powers remained consistently involved in the process. And yet, although the borders were largely artificial and the risk of conflict was quite high, the Middle Eastern order held for almost a century (assuming the 1920 Treaty of Sevres is the starting point), and some countries in the region developed quite successfully. But the quality of governance and functionality of the State were never high, and the ability to resist centrifugal tendencies was often ensured by harsh—and sometimes downright repressive—regimes. But the U.S. intervention in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and the subsequent Arab Spring created such turbulence that the Middle Eastern order started to crumble, putting Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen on the brink of disintegration.
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