Isn't it time for the faction mentality to end?

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The real devastation in the path of modern states begins when their legitimacy is hijacked, and the state transforms from a unifying entity that protects the higher interest and controls the public sphere into a tool managed by an unruly factional mentality, with a militia tendency that challenges the state’s civility and hinders its growth. In the face of this bitter truth, as is the case in the Arab world, the dispute is no longer an ordinary political one, but rather becomes a struggle over the meaning of the state itself: is it a framework that brings together citizens, or a spoils seized by a specific group and redistributed according to its narrow interests and loyalties?

Hence, eliminating the logic of the faction becomes a condition for restoring the meaning of the state, and opening the way to political inclusion that relies on the law, not the logic of the mob and the laws of the jungle. The mission of restoring the state begins with abolishing the faction’s culture and unruly ideology, which targets state institutions and confiscates national decision-making.

The danger of this penetration lies in the fact that it does not remain within the boundaries of party competition or disagreement over power. It moves from pressuring the state to controlling it from within with the aim of reshaping its institutions according to the standard of loyalty and subordination. This problem deepens when the faction finds an extension of it within a political class that is at the forefront of the scene of legitimacy, and meets with it on the basis of common interest, thus making its constitutional authorities a nominal façade that works in the name of the state and sponsors its continuation.

The complexity of this political phenomenon also increases when factions are harnessed to serve external support and guidance centers. Then the penetration becomes double: internally in the name of the organization, and externally in the name of the sponsor and financier. The faction that expands within the state often needs a force to guard its influence from outside its bases, and then the deeper imbalance begins. The state retreats in the face of surplus power, and weapons turn into an internal pressure tool and an external negotiating card. With the multiplicity of centers of influence, society loses its confidence in the neutrality of the state, so it returns to its sub-identities and clings to them, and the political difference turns from legitimate competition to closed alignment and chronic conflict.

In order to dismantle this mentality that produces penetration and fuels conflict, it must be dealt with as a source of organized terrorism practiced by factions against society, and sometimes against each other when the balance of control and distribution of spoils is imbalanced. In such a case, it is not enough to criticize or warn against it unless the tools for survival are removed from it, namely parallel weapons, external financing, influence within institutions, and control over national decisions. Every postponement of this confrontation gives it additional time to arrange its positions and reproduce itself with new faces.

The first requirement for this dismantling is a clear political and institutional path, which begins with returning national decision-making to its institutions, not to the negotiating rooms between the armed factions or the influential powers. The second is a decisive political will that places weapons and law enforcement in the hands of the state alone, so that no group remains able to impose a fait accompli or barter over sovereignty. The third is to rebuild public administration on the basis of competence and citizenship, not on party or sectarian loyalty, because a state that is managed by quotas voluntarily opens its door to uncalculated chaos.

This path can only be straightened by political forces that lead their reform revolution from within, believe in the establishment and stability of the state, and have the courage to learn from the harsh lessons for which the peoples of the region paid the price. The more these formations expand outside the authority of the state, the wider the door to external intervention becomes, and the national identity, general capabilities, and peoples’ history become open arenas for distortion and attrition.

Because the last effective medicine is getting rid of the factional mentality and logic, and the ghosts that continue to haunt us because of it, requires an urgent restoration of the state’s authority as a unifying framework for citizens, not a spoils shared by groups, while making a greater effort to consolidate citizenship as a higher bond than party, sect, and group. Without this, the region will continue to be crushed by the militias, until they exhaust the last breath of the state’s entity and render its idea forgotten.