Vali Nasr, a prominent Middle Eastern studies scholar, recently argued in Foreign Policy that the ‘Arab moment’ has passed and that the competition among non-Arab powers Turkey, Iran, and Israel will shape the region's future. Nasr was simply summarising what many scholars have observed over the last decade since the Arab uprisings. Civil and proxy wars in the aftermath of the uprisings have severely strained the Arab territorial states’ post-World War II order, and, as Haggag observes, the ongoing instability extends beyond periodic shifts in the regional power balance. The pillars that have long sustained the Middle East's regional order, namely the Arab core that served as a strategic bulwark against the non-Arab periphery and the shift in the US's strategic support for the region, have weakened and fragmented.

Prior to the uprisings, the region's geopolitics were defined by polarisation between a ‘resistance axis’ led by Iran and including Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and a broad swath of public opinion, and a moderate axis’ triangulating the US, Israel, and the majority of other Arab states. The region's US-led unipolar order, defined by the Bush administration's strategy of labelling Iran as the primary threat in order to build an anti-Iran coalition of Arab states and Israel, began to disintegrate with the Obama administration's strategy of US withdrawal from the region, based on the US's perceived inability to support democratic transformation and war fatigue. As a result, the emerging regional system of ‘multipolar anarchy’ is being shaped by local state, non-state, and transnational sectors.

Waleed Hazbun employs James Rosenau's concept of ‘turbulence’ to explain the rise in the influence and power of non-state and transnational actors transforming the region's political and security architecture, describing the geopolitical landscape since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq as ‘post statist’ geopolitics. He contends that the Arab world's erosion of state governance and capacity, as well as the early development of self-organized political movements exhibiting ‘hybrid sovereignty’, was combined with intense forms of regional and external interventions and occupations, such as Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, or the United States in Iraq.