Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractWith the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the Sunni-Shiite divide came back to the fore in regional politics. In this context, sectarian identities have now acquired a security dimension, as actors have started framing each other as existential threats. This article aims to examine the process by which sectarian identities become security issues and sources of conflict. We claim that primordial and instrumentalist/rationalist approaches to identity cannot capture the complexities of sectarianism in Middle East international relations. Instead, we draw on securitisation theory to examine the speech acts and narratives leading to the construction of sectarianism as a security issue in the Middle East. We examine Hezbollah's and Saudi Arabia's speech acts towards the Syria crisis as revelatory cases in the securitisation of the Sunni-Shiite divide in the post-2011 order.

On 26 March 2015, Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes on Yemen with the aim to restore the rule of President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi and destroy the Houthi movement. Scholars and policy analysts moved quickly to examine the Yemen war as a by-product of Saudi-Iranian rivalry in the region and a sectarian struggle. These traditional explanations fall short of unravelling the Saudi motive behind launching a large-scale operation in Yemen, a severely weakened and politically divided neighbour. This paper offers an alternative explanation of abrupt Saudi aggressiveness toward Yemen. It argues that this intervention is driven by a non-material need; Saudi leadership aims to assert the Kingdom's status as a regional power in the Middle East.

External interventions are an enduring feature of international relationships. While the causes for interventions have been at the heart of studies on interventions, the dynamics of termination versus escalation have received little attention. This article poses the question: why do intervenors persist in failed military interventions despite diminishing prospects of victory? Whereas some scholars adhered to rational choice approaches, others focused on cognitive and emotional psychology to explain seemingly puzzling decisions at the origin of war continuation. This article builds on the emerging literature on status in IR to unravel the escalation of commitment to a failed war. It argues that when leaders engage their own status and that of their countries to an eventual success in a military intervention, persistence in the war becomes the only solution to salvage their status. Through this lens, this article presents an explanation for Saudi and Emirati escalations in what was planned as a brief operation in Yemen since 2015. Understanding the dynamics of persisting in failed wars has clear implications for the development of international relations theory, the conduct of regional powers in military interventions, and the practice of conflict resolution in the Middle East and beyond.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.