Rethinking regional order concepts after october 7: Uncertainty, non-state agency, and the limits of existing IR theories

Abstract

Middle East scholarship has agreed since 2024 that regional order concepts are struggling, and has largely diagnosed a coverage problem: the frameworks left non-state actors out, so put them in. This article argues the trouble runs deeper and is epistemic rather than empirical. Regional security complex theory and its rivals are instruments built for a world of calculable risk. They assume units that hold their type, capability that behaves as a stock, and actors optimizing against distributions they can estimate. October 7 and the twenty-nine months that followed satisfied none of those conditions. Borrowing Katzenstein and Seybert’s distinction between control power and protean power, the article shows that the pivotal effects of the period came from improvisation under radical uncertainty, which is an effect rather than a resource and therefore cannot be held, counted, or balanced against. It also identifies a second failure the debate has missed: the units themselves changed type, not merely position, and concepts that index order to relations among units cannot absorb that. Adding non-state actors as a variable will not repair either problem, because both are properties of closed-system modelling rather than of any variable list. The article specifies what a generative account would require and states the scope conditions under which existing concepts still hold.