HEGEMONIC STABILITY THEORY AND SECESSIONIST MOVEMENTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST DURING THE 1990S

Abstract

Sessessionist movements had played a big role in foreign policies of countries in the Middle East, mainly Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia during the 1990s. This article tries to answer the question of how Kurdish issue and terror stemming from shaped and changed the international subsystem during the 1990s. I propose a theory to explain the succcess or the failure of the sessessionist movements. These movements are dormant or ineffective due to constrains provided by the international system. The change in the international system, in this case the end of Cold War and the Gulf War, created opportunity for ethnic groups, such as Iraqi Kurds to attempt to seccede from central government. The states in the region responded accordingly and this created power vacuum and escalated interestate conflict. In this power vacuum, the support of hegemon for ethnic group was necessary condition for the success of the ethnic secessionist movement. If the USA as a hegemon had supported the seccesionist movements, a new international system would have emerged. However, ideological affinity and alliance between regional power and hegemon, as the case between Turkey and the USA, prevented hegemon to support sessessionist movement. If ineffective state such as Iraq after the Gulf War was unable to defeat the revolt and ethnic group was fragmented, the civil war reigns as happened in Iraq during the 1990s

Keywords

• Key words: Hegemonic Stability Theory, Secessionism, Kurds, Turkey, Iraq.

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