Conclusion
This Brief challenges the core assumptions behind a
narrative commonly encountered in op-eds and papers
asking whether we are approaching “The End of Sykes-
Picot.” Those assumptions include the belief that the
Middle East’s states and borders are articial because
they were laid down by imperial powers beginning with
Sykes-Picot. The rise of ISIS and ongoing civil wars in the
region are assumed to pose an unprecedented challenge to
those states and borders, and to have revealed their frailty
and illegitimacy. The unraveling of borders, it is assumed,
will nally permit people to fall (or be moved) into their
“natural” conguration among relatively homogeneous
ethnic or sectarian polities. According to this narrative, the
dilemma for Western policy makers, therefore, is whether
they should wait for ethnic partitioning to occur naturally,
or convene a conference of great and regional powers
to either defend the old order or manage the inevitable
redrawing of the map.
The dilemma is a false one because it rests on a number of
myths. First, the borders of today’s Middle East were not
actually drawn by colonial authorities via the Sykes-Picot
Agreement. In fact, since World War I, the line-up of states
in the region has evolved, with some borders changed
and others nally demarcated. Locals played important
roles throughout. Second, ISIS’s ambition to erase state
borders echoes the goals of other movements in other eras,
when the region’s state system seemed equally at risk of
collapse. Finally, Westerners and Arabs understand “the
end of Sykes-Picot” in different ways, in terms of retractive
versus expansionist borders. The emergence of explicitly
Sunni, Shiite, or Kurdish states would be seen by many
Westerners as “natural”—but within the region, it would
be seen by many as serving Western interests.
Endnotes
1 “The Breaking of the Borders” [in Arabic];* “The End of
Sykes-Picot” [in English].*
2 See, for example, Robin Wright, “How the Curse of Sykes-
Picot Still Haunts the Middle East,” The New Yorker, April
30, 2016;* Thanassis Cambanis, “The Middle East’s Fading
Frontiers,” Boston Globe, May 1, 2016;* David Ignatius, “How
to Put the Middle East Back Together,” Washington Post, May
3, 2016;* Michael Rubin, “Was Sykes-Picot a Bad Thing?”
AEIdeas (American Enterprise Institute), May 3, 2016;*
Itamar Rabinovich, “The End of Sykes-Picot? Reections on
the Prospects of the Arab State System” (Saban Center for
Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution, Middle East Memo
Number 32, February 2014);* Patrick Cockburn, “Is It the
End of Sykes-Picot?” London Review of Books 35, no. 11, June 6,
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2013, pp. 3–5.*
Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global
Civilization (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 100. In
contrast to most outsiders’ visions of reorganization, which
focus on ethnic and sectarian groups, Khanna calls for the
region to “recover its historical cartography of internal
connectivity” among “urban oases” (p. 101).
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/kovgs5/the-daily-show-
with-jon-stewart-sir-archibald-mapsalot-iii.*
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York:
Avon Books, 1989), p. 17.
James Barr, A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the
Middle East, 1914-1948 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012).
There are several versions of the Sykes-Picot Agreement
Map. This is the original, signed by the two men. Sykes-
Picot Agreement Map signed by Mark Sykes and François
Georges-Picot, May 8, 1916 (Image from UK National
Archives MPK1/426, FO 371/2777 [folio 398]).* See also a
map that overlays the territorial divisions of Sykes-Picot
with contemporary state borders.*
See the text of The Sykes-Picot Agreement.*
The British Navy had largely switched from coal-burning
to oil-burning ships by 1912, making such facilities a vital
national interest. Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the
Middle East, 1914–1956 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1963), p. 98.
Sara Pursley, “‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’: Iraq’s
Borders and the Legend of the Articial State (Part 1),”
Jadaliyya, June 2, 2015.*
Set down in the “Report of the Commission Entrusted by
the Council with the Study of the Frontier between Syria
and Iraq” (Geneva, September 10, 1932).
Nick Danforth, “Forget Sykes-Picot. It’s the Treaty of Sèvres
That Explains the Modern Middle East,” Foreign Policy,
August 10, 2015; Cyrus Schayegh, “The Mandates and/as
Decolonization,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the
Middle East Mandates, ed. Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan
(New York: Rutledge, 2015), pp. 412–19.*
David Siddhartha Patel, “Remembering Failed States in the
Middle East,” Project on Middle East Political Science, May 3,
2015.*
In an oft-cited passage, Barr (2012, p. 12) writes that “Sykes
sliced his nger across the map that lay before them on the
table. ‘I should like to draw a line from the “e” in Acre to the
last “k” in Kirkuk,’ he said.”
See, for example, Eliezer Tauber, The Formation of Modern
Syria and Iraq (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995) and Nelida
Fuccaro, The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (London: I.B.
Tauris, 1999).
Pursley, “‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’ (Part 1).”* See
also, Sara Pursley, “‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’: Iraq’s
Borders and the Legend of the Articial State (Part 2),”
Jadaliyya, June 3, 2015.*
Reidar Visser, “Proto-political Conceptions of ‘Iraq’ in Late
Ottoman Times,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi
Studies 3, no. 2 (2009), pp. 143–54.*
“The Breaking of the Borders” [in Arabic]; “The End of
Sykes-Picot” [in English].
Abu Sayya’s real name is Bastián Alexis Vásquez; he was
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