Underlying causes of the current Middle East refugee crisis

By A.B.K.Kasozi

The Middle East is on fire and producing more refugees than world refugee organisations can handle.

Except in Tunisia, the “Arab Spring” has resulted in chaos and the weakening of states as in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen or in increased levels of autocracy as in Egypt, Bahrain and a number of Gulf States.

Vertical violence emanating from the state by leaders trying to stay in power and horizontal violence by non-state actors trying to destabilise regimes have increased.

Syria alone, which had a population of 22.4 million people in 2011, has produced more than four million refugees.
Some 7.6 million Syrians are believed to be internally displaced, over a quarter of million killed and only about 11 million remain in the country surviving under sub-human conditions.

In Iraq and Libya, the political vacuums created after the fall of Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein respectively have created chaos that has made living in those countries very difficult.

The vacuum has been exploited by extreme groups like ISIL. The failure of democratising Egypt has led to the re-emergence of the military dictatorship the Arab Spring was supposed to fight in that country. Since 2011, Yemen has been engulfed in civil war and Bahrain is under constant fear of rebellions.

Suicide bombers have acted in the once invincible Saudi Arabia and life in the Gaza strip is miserable.

On the other hand, Europe and the west are trying to deal with the largest human migration of people the world has witnessed since World War II. What are the underlying causes of the chaos that is producing so many refugees?

As consumers of oil originating from the Middle East, we must understand what is going. Personally, I think the following are the problems.

Firstly, the current crisis in the Middle East is the crisis of the current Arab state. As created by European victors in the First World War, the Arab sate is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Its very existence is being questioned by populations within it.

The current Arab Middle East state is a relatively new structure – newer than African states.  Created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire when the allied powers (mainly France and the UK) defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the new state was superimposed over simmering old cleavages of Sunni and Shia within Muslim societies, some of which (in Palestine, Morocco, Syria and Iraq) had long established Christian and Jewish minorities as well.

The Arab states’ recent existence means that populations in the geographical areas of those states have not developed the loyalty and attachments to them as political units.

In the early days of the Arab Spring, it was thought that the West was ready to negotiate with democratic forces in the Arab world who represented the views of the people instead of with the autocrats who have been guarding Western interests in the region since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

It seems, however, that western attitudes towards the region are influenced by some aspects of Orientalism (in this case the belief that Muslims societies are backward looking, that they can only be controlled by strong western backed autocrats, and that democracy is alien to them because they always prefer to live under Islamic orthodoxy).
But Islamic societies, since the fall of the Mut’azalites in the 8-10 centuries, have always had two contending camps: forward looking and orthodoxy camps.

Secondly and related to the first point, the desire to influence the Middle East by oil consuming nations is so strong that rich nations are unwilling to use new and unknown guards to maintain their interests in the area. This is in spite of the fact that the methods the old guards are using to rule Middle East states are no longer able to sustain authority.

What is clear is that the west attaches great strategic importance to the Middle East due to the latter’s oil reserves. The weak Middle East and North Africa states occupy economically very strategic regions of the world. They contain some 45 percent of known world oil reserves.

This translates into about 790 billion barrels of oil, with Saudi Arabia having 263 billion barrels, Iran 136 billion, Iraq 136 billion, Kuwait 101, Libya 42billion, Qatar 15 billion, Egypt 6 billion, Yemen and Syria about three billion each.

In the Maghereb alone, Algeria alone has some 12.7 billion barrels of known oil reserves. It is important to note that each day, the region exports some 20 million barrels of oil, with Saudi Arabia contributing about 8.65 million barrels of total daily exports.

For the USA and the west, which imports some 50 percent of its oil needs (before the shale drilling revolution), the area is particularly strategic. Not only are some of its military and naval bases located in the Middle East in Bahrain and Oman, but also ten (10) percent of its oil imports come from the Persian Gulf countries.

Thirdly, the Middle East is situated mid-way between Europe and Asia.  The Suez Canal and the Straits of Hormuz are vital strategic waterways.

Further the safety of Israel is, for the West, a must if a new holocaust is to be avoided both in the West and East.

Most of the Arab states are very backward in terms of political development and social organization.

Power is centralized in either monarchies or military dictators. There is no freedom of expression or association nor are there viable democratic institutions in these states. Populations are not well versed in social and political organization. The main groups that can stand up to injustice are either religious or the military. Egypt is a classic case of this scenario.

However, the dichotomy between reformers and orthodoxy in Islam further weakens political organizations based on religion.

Fourthly, although the autocratic governments of these countries have put in place extensive welfare systems that provide a number of subsidized services to the people, the rulers are not accountable to the population.

Few people know the percentage of national income that is given to the population as social welfare. Few of these countries have institutions that check on the behaviour of government such as the auditor-generals or Ombudsmen.
Fifthly, these countries use, and depend on external (imported) labour. Many of the citizens are not participants in the economy. The majority of the people in the area are Muslims whose relationship with Western Christendom is punctuated by conflict and mistrust. Can these two cultures wish each other well and construct a just social order in the region?

2. The petro-state is the source of the fire

Middle Eastern nations are not only new, they are also petro states and it is the petro-state structures of these nations superimposed on the weak foundations of relatively new states, constructed in the region since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, that is the major cause of the uprisings and chaos we are witnessing and the flood of refugees in the region.

The petro-state system is a neo-colonial construction intended to siphon resources out of the region using local autocrats as conduits of resources. 

This system has permitted the extraction of surpluses from the area by western oil interests using local autocrats without involving the people in governance or placing them in the commanding heights of the economies of their countries.

The autocrats have been mainly soldiers and kings who have tightly controlled the region’s oil resources for themselves and for western oil interests at the expense of their peoples. Almost all the “royal” kings in the Middle East and North Africa supervise kingdoms that did not exist as political units before 1900. These states were constructed by outside interests for external purposes.

For a long period of time, Western democratic loving populations were fooled by Orientalist theories, which depicted Muslims as backward looking, undemocratic and therefore at home with strong autocratic leaders.

In essence, this notion, which has fuelled the belief that if democracy is introduced in the Middle East, Muslim extremists will be elected, has influenced western views of Muslim countries. It has frightened, and still frightens, some people in the west from favorably regarding democratic movements in the region and other Muslim countries.

Thus, the West, including Western media, did not worry about the lack of democracy in Arab and Muslim countries. This factor partly explains the prevalence and survival of the petro-states in the region.

Petro-state social structures, constructed to serve both Western oil interests and local autocrats, explain the current violence in the Middle East.

To understand what is going on in the Middle East, one needs to know the petro-state political systems that are being undermined by the current fire burning the region. Most of the petro-states undergoing uprisings (except Egypt), derive over 75 percent of their national income from the sale of oil.

Petro-states normally have strong rulers who often use primordial structures and external foreign support to make political and economic decisions as exemplified in Libya and Equatorial Guinea. The state and the ruler are all in one: to paraphrase Louis XIV, the state is the ruler and vice versa.

In a petro-state, the level of oil dependence influences political behavior, a fact that can be measured by the percentage of contribution of oil export to the GDP.

In a number of petro-states, the dependence ranges between 25 to 80 percent. Additionally, a petro-state lives on rents or revenues from oil export rather than extraction of surpluses from human labor.

Like a Banana Republic, a petro-state has a “mono” source of revenue as other sectors of the economy have either been crowded out by oil dominance, as typified by countries such as Nigeria, or have not been developed because of the easy cash from oil, as evidenced by countries like Congo Brazzaville, Angola and Gabon. It is worth noting that petro-states face numerous problems such as price volatility of oil and other raw materials.

They therefore suffer booms and busts that create economic and eventually political problems. As oil is a finite resource, its long-term contribution to development of the state is unpredictable and fragile. Moreover, such states exhibit uneven regional, sectarian and sexual development due to the nature of their resource enclaves, a fact which, often, breeds conflict.

Most of the states on fire in the Middle East at the moment are all rentier states with no strong bonds with their people except in maintaining autocracy.  Petro-states and banana republics are rentier states. Rentier states depend on funds remitted from external sources instead of proceeds from a domestically diversified economy.

Since the state does not need taxes from the people, people are presumed not to have claims on the government. After capturing power to own and therefore market oil, autocratic rulers do not care about the people. They focus on receiving and consuming oil money.

As cash flows in, authorities focus on resource distribution instead of resource creation. State budgets resemble shopping and distribution lists, instead of emphasing strategic goals and overall development.

Agencies of restraint like the Auditor General, Ombudsman, Parliament, the Judiciary and civil society, are often absent, weakened or compromised. State priorities or activities shift from the maintenance of law and order, to the reception and consumption of oil money. Money is used to reward supporters or to suppress opponents. At the government level, the state loses fiscal control and often embarks on reckless spending which often leads to massive debts. 

In such instances, the aim of political participation becomes the capture of the state or to be part of it, in order to share the oil loot. This has been the case in most of the North African and Middle East countries that are on fire now and are producing the many refuges that we are seeing moving into all directions in the safer countries of the Middle East and Europe.

The loot in the Middle East went on for so long because autocrats built very repressive structures, which permitted them to control not only resources but also information and social interaction. However, education and the ICT revolution have opened the eyes of the educated youths. These youngsters have used technology to unmask the dictators and hitting them hard at the Middle East Arab state. It is a collapsing state.

3. Petro-states are autocracies

The chaos in the Middle East cannot be divorced from the nature of the state systems that are producing the refugees. The petro-political system that pertains in the Middle East and is producing the refuges fleeing the area inhibits, and is totally lethal, to democratic development and governance.

Rulers who represent themselves and external forces are afraid of the slightest sound of democratic ideas. Michael Ross who has written a lot on this factor believes that the interplay of the rentier effect, the repression of petro-states and the lack of modernization, collectively work to inhibit the development of democracy in oil exporting underdeveloped states. 

Of the twenty-five oil-reliant and exporting countries, only five (Venezuela, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Malaysia) can be referred to as democracies – or seriously developing democratic institutions. 

The rest (Brunei, Kuwait, Congo/Brazzaville, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Algeria, Syria, Iran, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Cameroon, Colombia and Kyrgyz Republic) cannot be described as democratic. Almost all the ingredients of democracy have either been missing, or curtailed in many of the currently burning petro-states of the Middle East.


4. Petro states are lethal to democracy

Petro-states are rentier states, depending on money remitted by oil firms (rents on their natural resources).

As a result, the majority of the people in a petro state are not involved in economic or social organization activities of their country. Their relationship with the state is through handouts from the government.

To Ross, the rentier effect divorces fiscal relationships between the government and the people, which in turn, undermine the development of democracy.  Since the government gets rent (oil royalties and taxes) from renters (oil buyers), it has no need to tax the population.

In turn, the people have no immediate or visible strong basis to demand representation in government structures.  In such situations, democratic representative institutions cannot develop fast.  There are many reasons for this stagnation. First, the absence of representative institutions makes governments less accountable.  Official transactions need not be transparent as there are few institutions demanding that they do so. 

Secondly, as money comes directly from oil firms to the government, patronage, family and ethnic interests (or group favoritism) increases.  Increased cash is used to reward supporters and punish opponents.  This trend is common in most of the undemocratic oil exporting states of the Middle East and Africa.

In the heat of the Arab Spring rebellions, Libya, Bahrain and other affected nations are reported to have handed out money to buy revolutionary ideas out of the minds of people.

Thirdly, the formation of social groups that can stand up to the government is undermined by the ability of the state to use acquired money to buy, to suppress opponents or to extinguish ideas that are presumed to undermine authority. This is common in many petro states of the Middle East and Africa.

In France and England, the development of independent property owning classes with a stake in the economy (the bourgeoisie), helped to create social groups that stood up to those in power.  However, in many oil exporting countries described in this paper, the formation of independent social groups or classes with ambition to take power is not only suppressed, but compliant group formation is encouraged and funded by the state using available unaccounted for oil money. 

Fourthly, the formation of independent civic institutions that are above the family and below the state is not permitted.  In turn this prevents the gathering of people of like opinions to freely discuss, pursue crucial ideas and organize strong associations for advising or standing up to governments. 

Fifthly, as oil money flows in large amounts, it encourages leaders to spend excessively on instruments for internal repression and conspicuous consumption such as structures. For example, much of the pre-1979 Iranian expenditure was spent on the security of the Shah and the survival of his regime. 

The presence of elite defense “national guards” (the Mukhabarats) in Middle Eastern countries has the effect of suppressing opposition and individuals with contrary views of the state. 

The possession of oil wealth therefore increases expenditure on arms for armies that can only fight internal wars against civilians but are terribly weak when it comes to external combat. Despite all the money Arab petro states armies spend on arms, no Arab army is a match to Israel’s.

Sixthly, in Africa where primordial loyalties and attachment are still very strong, oil wealth exacerbates ethnic conflicts. Thus, Petro-states are neo-colonies controlled by oil interests. External controllers have dealt strongly with nationalists who sought legitimacy from sources other than their own because they feared that democratization would wake up the masses to understand their rights. Since 1953, any petro-state leader who refused to co-operate was dealt with strongly.

Thus Mohammed Mosagegah of Iran and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were forcibly removed while similar but co-operative dictators in the region were left untouched. However, this is not to apologize for these dictators but to make the preceding point.

As a petro-state uses money to buy or enforce its legitimacy, revolutions begin to simmer, go underground and eventually bust out. This is what is happening in the Middle East. Internal heat, like in a volcano, is busting to the surface.


Ross’s argument that oil hinders democracy is strongest in reference to the choking of modernization. Modernization is a prerequisite for democracy and oil money, in many cases, hinders the modernization process of backward undemocratic states. 

Modernization theory states that a collection of social and cultural changes, which include occupational specialization, urbanization, and high levels of education, lead to democracy.  It follows therefore, that democracy cannot be cloned and imported or imposed from outside like dolly the sheep.

It emerges as a result of changes in domestic social systems.  Economic empowerment accompanied by high levels of higher education, professional differentiation, strong civil society and a vibrant indigenous property owning class with a stake in the economy, are necessary conditions for the emergence and development of democracy.

Education and the ICT revolution have brought changes in petro-state societies and the fire we are witnessing in the Middle East is lighted by these changes. Refugees are produced by collapsing states and the long term solution to the refugee crisis is to build Middle East society’s governance.

5. The social structures of the petro-states

The social structures that emerge in Petro-states reflect the way their economies are structured. In a petro-state, a tiny clan or family based clique controls all economic, social and political power. National income may be high and the per capita income figures may be impressive. But money accrues to a very tiny section of the population who are members of the ruling ethnic group, clique or family and their clients.

The ruling cliques or families may be monarchies (for example Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the Gulf), or republican military dictators such as was the case in Libya, Algeria, Yemen and Egypt.

Even republican presidents in petro-states tend to assume monarchical characteristics such as longevity of tenure in office and preparing their blood off-springs to succeed them, for example in Libya, Egypt, Iraq (in periods of Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein), Syria and Egypt (Mubarak’s son was being prepared for taking over). The citizens, on prompting from the top, glorify birthdays of these dictators.

Since the economy of the petro-states lacks a diversified base, there is often no “entrepreneurial” middle class with a stake in the economy independent of either the government or the oil export sector.

The middle classes are mainly public employees (academics, health workers, police, engineers) who cannot stand up to government autocracy for fear of losing their jobs. It is an imprisoned bourgeoisie, which cannot lead social changes. That is probably why the youth tried to seize the opportunity to take up leadership for democratic change during the heyday of the Arab Spring.

Government methods of handouts are often massive social welfare that actually undermines the urge for many to work even in their homes. Hence, there are many foreign workers doing skilled and menial work in petro-states. Whenever there is social discontent, the leaders try to “buy” out problems.

Hosni Mubarak tried to appease workers by giving a fifteen percent salary increase, Abdul-Aziz Boutlefika of Algeria ordered massive subsidies in social welfare to stem revolts and Gadhafi asked banks to pay $2000 to anyone with Libyan identity cards.

6. Changing Social Structures

However, a number of social changes have occurred in the Middle East in the last three decades that have rocked the foundations of the petro-states social structures. These have included the impact of neo-liberal policies which seek to reduce the role of the state in favour of the market, increases in the young population, increasing higher education access and the ICT revolution.

The neo-liberal reforms emphasizing the free market led to deregulation of state enterprises. This action increased corruption by consolidating the ruling cliques who took over state properties. But it also increased the social distance between those who have and have not. And the latter are in the majority.

However, of greatest impact has been the ICT revolution, education and the spread of social media. The demand for democracy in the Middle East has followed social changes brought by education, the ICT revolution and the social media in these Petro-states.

The Middle East, like other continents, has been transformed by ICT and the resultant use of social media for political education. By 2010, mobile phone usage in the Middle East was believed to have reached 79.4 percent.  Of the Arab populations of the Middle East, Internet usage had climbed to 25 percent of the population (World Bank, Internet World Statistics).

Increased access to education, particularly higher education, further improved the ability of the people of the Middle East to access political information. As Table 1, shows, most of the Middle Eastern countries have literacy rates of over 50 percent. The higher education gross enrollment ratio for Arab states improved from an average of 12.5% for the years 1990 to 1999 to average of 22% in the period 2000 to 2010.

The number of Arab universities grew from 10 in 1950 to 175 in 1996 (Nader Fergany, 2000). Between 1980 and 1995, actual enrolments doubled from 1.5 to 3.1 million tertiary students. Although these improvements in higher education are observable in other developing societies, Arab student have more opportunities to access better educational facilities than, say those of sub-Saharan Africa, because of higher incomes of their societies.

These social changes have enhanced the ability of the Middle Easterners, particularly the youth, to access political information previously denied them, to communicate broadly and therefore to rise up against the oppressive petro-states’ structures in which they found themselves.

According to a recent World Bank Report, the tertiary student populations in the Middle East will more than double over the next 30 years. This development, in conjunction with globalization, has increased levels of social awareness, particularly amongst the youth.

Petro-states dictators in the Middle East have found themselves dealing with a youth different from the older submissive, not well informed and compliant population.

The current fire in the Middle East originates from the desire of technology literate populations, especially the youths, to dismantle the dictatorial structures of the neo-colonial petro-state. The violence that has been ignited in this struggle has created the conditions that have generated the massive numbers of refugees coming out of the Middle East.

7. Is the fire likely to spread to Africa South of the Sahara?

It is also of interest to note that, many oppressed Africans like the Zimbabweans, or the people of Equatorial Guinea, are looking at the Middle East with the hope that people power can stand up to dictators. It is true petro-state social structures exist in some oil exporting sub-Saharan African countries such as Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and until recently, in Nigeria.

However, level of technology penetration in sub-Saharan Africa are low, the average gross higher education ratios average only about 10% compared to 22% in the Middle East and the degree of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa is very low. It would be difficult to collect demonstrators from rural areas to protest. Then, there is a problem of communication. While in the Arab world all people can speak to one another in Arabic from Oman to Morocco, the same is not true in Africa where each district may have its language.

Thus, the social conditions of sub-Saharan African petro-states are very different from those of the Middle East.

Similar threats to the existence of the state are not likely to start soon in Africa, but sure they will later on as education and access to technology and the use of world languages for communication accelerates.

8. Conclusions

What we are witnessing in the Middle East is the collapse of the Arab state as configured by Allied powers after the First World War.

The leaders of the Arab Spring might have failed to capture power in the Middle East. But their movement has undermined the authority and existence of the post Ottoman Arab states created after the first Great War. If they are to exist and the influence of extremism reduced, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria and a number of Gulf States, have to be reconfigured in the ways they are governed.

The social changes that have taken place in the region including the ICT revolution and the consequent development of the social media have undermined the ability of autocratic rulers of petro-states to control information, discussion, association and the questioning of the status quo.

To get oil from the region without fighting costly wars such as the two Iraq wars, the west will have to negotiate with the people or their representatives instead of dealing with externally supported autocrats. If this happens, the region’s political scene will not be the same.

Anti-western attitudes in the area are likely to soften. Terrorism against the west could be reduced for terrorists and fundamentalists have fed on the existence of western supported autocrats as a major reason for terror against presumed supporters of oppressors.

If neo-colonial structures especially their goalkeepers, the autocratic rulers are removed, whom will the extremists be fighting? It is therefore in the long-term interests of the West to support the democratization of the Middle East and North Africa. Orientalism should be buried. Orientalism is a racist anti-Islamic philosophy different from apartheid only in not being a legal system in any country.

As James Petras has observed, the revolts in the region during the Arab Spring were political intended to solve domestic issues. Protesters did not wave anti-American or anti-Israel banners. The revolts were against the autocracies of kings, sultans emirs, sheikhs, “supreme guides” and life presidents who supervised the petro-states on behalf of external interests. It is in the long-term interests of oil–consuming nations to be on the side of democracy in the Middle East and Africa.

It is also in the long term interests of African oil rich nations to avoid building petro-state social structures lest the continent sink into the same chaos as is now happening in North Africa and the Middle East.

The writer is a Research Associate, Makerere Institute of Social Research and former Executive Director, National Council for Higher Education