Reconciling with Sykes-Picot (Richard N. Haass, Project-Syndicate)

This month marks the centenary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret British-French accord that launched a decade-long series of adjustments to the borders of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Most commentary on the anniversary has been negative, suggesting that the agreement bears considerable blame for the frequency and durability of the region’s conflicts

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/reconciling-with-sykes-picot-by-richard-n--haass-2016-05

Sykes-Picot at 100 (part 2) (David Gardner, ASPI The Strategist)

Before toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, much of the west backed the Iraqi dictator during the 1980–88 war against Iran. Iraq’s Shia majority fought against their coreligionists in the Shia Islamic Republic during that war. Things started to change after the first Gulf War in 1990–91, in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In its messy aftermath, the west encouraged Shia and Kurds to rise against Saddam, and then left them to their bloody fate. Scroll forward to 2003 and it’s unsurprising that Iraqi Shia came to place more faith in Iran than the west, and still do

http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/sykes-picot-100-part-2/

The women behind Sykes-Picot (Ibrahim al-Marashi, Al Jazeera)

British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot garnered most of the attention in the retrospective commentaries published around May 16, the100-year anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Treaty

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/05/women-sykes-picot-160519112909032.html

The convenient scapegoat of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (Azeem Ibrahim, Al Arabiya)

One of the favorite tropes in the Middle East about why the region is so politically unstable is to blame the Sykes-Picot Agreement signed exactly 100 years ago, in which Britain and France settled on how they would partition the territory of the Ottoman after their eventual in WW1

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/05/22/The-convenient-scapegoat-of-the-Sykes-Picot-Agreement.html

Sykes-Picot – The centennial of an imperial curse (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

For my generation of Arabs, the “Asia Minor Agreement”, better known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, came to symbolize imperial betrayal and treachery, a secret scheme signed in May 1916 by Mark Sykes, a British diplomat, and François Georges-Picot his French counterpart representing the two victorious European Empires in WWI to divide the imperial inheritance of the dying Ottoman Empire. In the collective mind of the peoples living in what used to be called Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent, Sykes and Picot became names that shall live in infamy, for they imposed an imperial construct by etching arbitrary lines and coloring zones of influence on a map, and establishing artificial entities over these regions that have been inhabited by a rich mosaic of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, and religions over millennia of successive civilizations

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/05/21/Sykes-Picot-The-centennial-of-an-imperial-curse-.html

A Century since the Sykes-Picot Agreement: Current Challenges (Itamar Rabinovich, Robbie Sabel, Oded Eran, INSS)

Exactly one hundred years ago, two diplomats, one British and one French, concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided the Middle East into two zones of influence. The agreement became one of the cornerstones of the region, and gave the core area of the Middle East the shape it has assumed since the end of World War I. However, the political order founded a century ago by what were then British and French superpowers, including the regimes created and the borders delineated, is currently under serious challenge. The article looks at the agreement through the lenses of the past and the present, and considers its prospects for surviving the political storms that currently engulf the region. It concludes with one recommendation: Israel should be prepared to articulate its ideas for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When a new "Sykes-Picot" order is created, it will almost certainly relate to that issue as well

http://www.inss.org.il/index.aspx?id=4538&articleid=11812