Prof. Simon Mabon’s presentation will analyze how the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran has fuelled the flames of sectarian division across the Middle East, intensifying regional instability.  

To discuss this, Mabon will be examining how religious identities—such as Sunni, Shia, or the Alawite and Druze communities—have been politicized in different places, including Bahrain, Syria and Lebanon. He will also explore the differences between the current situation and previous crises, like those in 2003 and 2011.   

The war on Iran has opened up old wounds with potentially more hazardous consequences.  

US and Israeli strikes on Iran have opened up sectarian schisms in the Middle East and beyond. The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—a political and spiritual leader—and the ferocious exchange of attacks across the Gulf has created a precarious environment in which sectarian identities risk being weaponized once again. The region has endured the consequences of sectarian violence in the past, as occurred during the Lebanese civil war, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and after the Arab Uprisings of 2011. This time it risks becoming far worse, however. 

In some countries, like Bahrain, the onset of sectarian tensions was almost inevitable because of the state’s lengthy history of fraught relations between Sunnis and Shi’as. Protests took place across the island after the killing of Khamenei, while attacks on the US fifth fleet were celebrated by some amongst the Shi’a population, much to the chagrin of the Sunni ruling family.  

In other places like Syria, tensions between the government in Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon reflect the changing geopolitical landscape which arose after the fall of Bashar al Assad. Thousands of Syrian troops have been deployed along the border with Lebanon—seemingly for protection against its erstwhile ally—while the government in Damascus is broadly aligned with the US and Israel. In Syria itself, sectarian violence against the Alawite and Druze communities has created a climate of fear amongst minority groups.  

In Lebanon, the cultivation of sectarianism was seemingly a deliberate tactic for manipulating sectarian identities in an effort to turn Lebanon’s population against Hezbollah through displacement amongst Shi’a areas, the targeting of sites outside traditional Hezbollah strongholds. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezel Smotrich also suggested that Dahiya will soon “resemble Khan Younis,” a part of Gaza that was nearly razed to the ground, further seeking to engender anti-Hezbollah sentiment within Lebanon’s population.

This talk argues that the conflict has politicized pre-existing sectarian identities across the Middle East, much like what happened in 2003 after the Iraq War and in 2011 after the Arab uprisings. This time, however, the region is in the midst of violent conflict and states are facing serious economic pressures, raising questions about whether governments across the region can meet financial obligations, with consequences that may even be existential in nature. 

Organized with the cooperation of the Master’s Program in International Relations: Global Governance and Regional Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, and the Master’s Program in Political Science and Public Affairs with a Concentration in International Relations and Crisis. David Hernández Martínez, a professor of International Relations at the UCM, will introduce the speaker and the session on behalf of the former, and Barah Mikail, a professor of Political Science and International Relations at Saint Louis University, will be providing an initial commentary/response to the lecture on behalf of the latter. Olivia Orozco de la Torre,  Casa Árabe's Training and Economics coordinator, will be moderating the session.  

Simon Mabon 
Simon Mabon 
Simon Mabon is a professor of International Politics at Lancaster University. His work lies at a crossroads between Middle Eastern Studies, International Relations and (International) Political Theory.   

His main areas of interest are sovereignty and its discontents, sectarianism, space¡ and nomos, as well as the empirical manifestations of these issues. He is the director of SEPAD (Sectarianism, Proxies and De-sectarianization), funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Henry Luce Foundation.   

In 2012, he was awarded a research fellowship at the FPC (Foreign Policy Centre), a London-based think tank with which he continues to collaborate. Since joining in 2012, he has taught several courses at Lancaster University and has been supervising the work of doctoral students for years.   

In 2016–17, he served as an academic adviser to the House of Lords Committee on International Relations regarding its inquiry into British relations with the Middle East. He has given presentations at various political organizations, including the UN, the European Parliament, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defense and the Home Office. He has also lectured at various academic institutions such as Harvard University, Oxford University and George Mason University. He is a regular commentator on international news for media outlets which include the BBC, Sky and CNN.  

After completing a degree in Philosophy (2003–2006), he earned his PhD in International Relations at the University of Leeds (2008–2012), then joining Lancaster University in the summer of 2012.     

His two most recent monographs analyze the interplay between these issues. The most recent, The Struggle for Supremacy in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The second, Houses Built on Sand: Violence, Sectarianism, and Revolution in the Middle East, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020 and was selected by Choice as an academic book of the year. He is currently working on a book for Yale University Press on sectarianism in the Middle East.