“I think we need a reconsideration of the whole of the post-1945 period, which is an era in which both authoritarian and semi-democratic governments across the region engaged in massive arms acquisition and then deployed many—in some cases most—of those weapons against their own populations. We usually see this as a process of violent decolonization and then an equally violent postcolonial descent into either authoritarianism or fractured forms of democracy, which is a pattern that of course we can identify elsewhere in the world as well. But actually, when we look through this lens of mass violence, we can see that there are many ways in which this is not a period of decolonization at all. It is a period of recolonization: a recalibration and a recasting of empire into new shapes, in which superpowers control spaces by combining economic dominance with a deliberate flooding of weaponry in the relevant territory, alongside the careful—and sometimes not so careful—creation of specific ethnic or sectarian client populations. I hope that this book begins to shed light not just on the past but also on the present of this kind of neocolonial violence, and helps readers to understand that contemporary mass violence is not somehow endemic to the Middle East but is a manifestation of an ongoing system of imperial colonization, domination, and oppression that has continued long past the era of formal empire.”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51
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