In recent years, the politicization of sub-national identities in the Middle East has progressively slipped to the margins of political and analytical debate. This retreat, which became particularly evident after 7 October 2023, does not signal a weakening of the phenomenon, but a transformation of it. Sectarianization has not disappeared: it has been reconfigured. From an explicit dynamic, associated with violent mobilizations and open conflicts, it has progressively become inscribed in less visible but more pervasive forms, rooted in government practices and security logics.
To understand its scope, it is necessary to reconstruct its trajectory in the recent history of the region. Limiting ourselves to the new millennium, the centrality of sectarianization in the regional debate was consolidated after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Between 2006 and 2008, the Iraqi civil war marked a decisive passage: ethnic-confessional violence not only redefined internal balances, but transformed community identities into a central analytical and political category even beyond national borders.
The Arab uprisings of 2011 temporarily cracked this trajectory. In different contexts, transversal mobilizations questioned authoritarian systems, articulating claims that crossed sectarian, ethnic and sectarian lines. For a short time, the politicization of difference seemed to recede.
That phase did not last long. The dynamics of counter-revolution and growing geopolitical competition have quickly reorganized the field. Since 2013, identity fault lines have re-emerged as central tools for mobilizing and governing the conflict. Between 2013 and 2019, sectarianization returned to being the dominant lens for interpreting regional transformations.
After 2019, the picture appeared to change. The gradual exhaustion of the most acute phases of conflicts and the emergence of new strategic priorities have fueled a narrative of de-escalation and normalization. But it was a fragile stabilization. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, which emerged in Iran in 2022, clearly showed the persistence of the sectarian and security logic of the state in the face of any form of transversal mobilization.
In this context, sectarianization has not receded: it has changed form. Its logic has been progressively reabsorbed into new languages – security, governance, normalisation – redefining itself in close relation to the processes of securitisation.
October 7, 2023 marked a new caesura. The Hamas terrorist attack and the subsequent Israeli response opened a phase in which Israel's strategy shifted from a reactive posture to a broader and more proactive projection, aimed at redefining the regional balance of forces.
This turning point had its first epicenter in the genocidal devastation of Gaza. The war has produced material and social destruction, mass displacement and collapse of civilian infrastructure, transforming the territory into a space of differential management and control of the surviving population. In the West Bank, at the same time, the expansion of settlements and the intensification of control practices have accelerated a dynamic of de facto annexation, structuring space and mobility along increasingly unequal and exclusionary identity lines.
The conflict quickly spread. The confrontation with Hezbollah has directly affected Lebanon, while the weakening of the regional networks supported by Tehran has contributed to redefining the balance that had supported the Syrian regime. The fall of Assad was part of this broader reconfiguration of the balance of forces.
In the vacuum that has opened up in Syria, Israel has expanded its margin of action along the Golan and in the southern space, seeking new forms of local legitimacy also through the co-optation of Druze communities. At the same time, Syria has offered a particularly clear example of a broader dynamic: the coexistence between inclusive rhetoric and differential practices. The new political order relied on national unity, but developments between 2025 and 2026 – violence against Alawite communities, tensions in Suwayda, friction with Kurdish actors – showed that identity lines had not disappeared: they had reorganized.
In 2026, the US-Israeli attack on Iran opened a further phase of escalation, culminating in the Strait of Hormuz crisis and the full regionalization of the conflict. In this scenario, Lebanon was among the most affected contexts. The resumption of the confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel, together with the attacks against Beirut and the south of the country, displacement and restrictions on the movement of civilians, has further redefined the distribution of vulnerability among communities, accentuating polarizations related to security and the maintenance of internal order.
Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran are not separate cases: they are moments of the same sequence. After October 7, sectarianization did not return to the forms of the past; it has been inscribed in the practices of war, occupation and management of populations. It has not shrunk, nor has it been overtaken by events. It has become less visible, but more structural. Today it operates less as an explicit mobilization and more as a mode of government. It doesn't just divide: it organizes, selects, distributes.
It is in this transformation – between discursive opacity and rootedness in practices – that sectarianization continues to shape the contemporary Middle East.