Entropy and Middle East: Why Geopolitics Is Melting into Disorder and Volatility

In physics, entropy is the tendency of all systems to drift toward disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is unforgiving: without input, systems decay. Apply that to global politics, and you begin to understand why today’s international order feels increasingly fragmented. Nowhere is this more evident—or more urgent—than in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where entropy is not just a metaphor but a governing principle.

The Age of Fracture

The post-World War II order, structured by Cold War binaries and US hegemony, was paradoxically more stable than today’s multipolar mess. But entropy didn’t arrive suddenly. The MENA region has endured successive waves of collapse and recalibration—from Ottoman dissolution to colonial mandates, from post-independence centralization to the Arab Spring’s chaotic aftermath. Each period of imposed order gave way to new forms of disorder, driven by internal fragmentation and external interference.

An analogy in material science?: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013794422005380

Today, we witness a splintering of power structures unlike any in recent history:

• Gulf states balancing East and West, hedging their bets between the U.S. security umbrella and Chinese infrastructure investments. 
• Proxy conflicts raging across Libya, Syria, and Yemen, where non-state actors and regional players blur the lines of sovereignty. 
• BRICS+ alignment by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran, who now flirt with alternative financial architectures outside the U.S. dollar. 

Power no longer flows predictably from Washington or Moscow. It pools chaotically, like heat in a closed system, among regional blocs, cities, private corporations, and digital communities.

Climate Entropy: The Silent Disruptor

Beneath the diplomatic chaos lies another accelerating force: climate entropy. The region’s ecological fabric is unraveling. Scarcity of water in the Nile Basin and Tigris-Euphrates watershed is sharpening geopolitical tensions between Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Turkey. The rising sea threatens the Nile Delta; desertification creeps across the Maghreb and the Levant.

Climate change doesn’t just destabilize—it multiplies instability. It depletes governance capacity, fuels migration, and underwrites conflict. It is entropy’s most literal form: the degradation of environmental order, with cascading social and political consequences.

Entropy in Finance and Technology

Entropy manifests not just in treaties and borders, but in bandwidth and blockchain. As BRICS nations accelerate trade in local currencies, the petrodollar system that once defined MENA’s economic identity is quietly dissolving. Meanwhile, cyber capabilities and dual-use technologies—once monopolized by states—now empower militias, freelance hackers, and rogue entrepreneurs.

From crypto funding for militant groups to precision drone strikes by non-state actors, the architecture of power has flattened. The frictionless spread of capital, ideas, and weapons has produced volatility that no single actor can contain. Sovereignty is porous; governance is reactive.

Cognitive Entropy: The Breakdown of Shared Reality

Perhaps the most dangerous form of entropy is cognitive. Across the MENA region, shared narratives are disintegrating. There is no longer a common understanding of events—even within single countries. In Lebanon, citizens occupy parallel realities depending on sect, region, or access to diasporic media. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, the battle over memory, identity, and legitimacy is not just political—it’s ontological.

As information ecosystems splinter, so too does diplomacy’s ability to function. Trust, nuance, and mutual recognition have become rarities in a region flooded with propaganda, deepfakes, and algorithmic outrage.

Ideological Entropy and Homogenization

Ironically, as systems grow more chaotic, they also become more ideologically rigid. The MENA region is witnessing not an explosion of pluralism, but the rise of dogmatic blocs: sectarianism, populist Islamism, technocratic illiberalism, ethnonationalism. These echo chambers resist compromise and suppress nuance.

We’ve moved from a chessboard of ideologies to a pixelated battlefield of memes, slogans, and zero-sum narratives. Diversity is being flattened—not by consensus, but by coercion and algorithmic filtering.

Energy Transitions and the Identity Crisis of Petrostates

The decline of oil as the world’s dominant strategic commodity presents a peculiar challenge to MENA’s petro-monarchies. These states were built on hydrocarbons and hard power; their legitimacy came from energy rents and central authority. As the global economy shifts toward renewables and local production, MENA states are confronting what could be called transition entropy: the destabilizing identity crisis of once-supreme petrostates.

In response, countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are launching giga-projects, investing in tech, tourism, and finance. But diversification is not a cure for entropy—it’s a race against it. These economies must transition faster than their existing political and social contracts can accommodate.

Governance Under Pressure

Global entropy doesn’t just break old structures—it overwhelms new ones. The UN Security Council is paralyzed. The Arab League is moribund. Hybrid governance—where states subcontract power to corporations (think Palantir, Huawei) or militias (think PMFs in Iraq or the RSF in Sudan)—is becoming the region’s default.

MENA’s new governance model is improvisational: ad hoc coalitions, informal forums, and reactive policymaking. Like entropy, these arrangements lack a central organizing force. They are situational, fragile, and unscalable.

Is Entropy Always Bad?

It’s tempting to see entropy purely as decline. But disorder can also be generative. It disrupts stagnant hierarchies and opens space for innovation. The end of centralized order can empower smaller actors—like Qatar’s diplomatic agility, Tunisia’s civil society, or youth-led tech ecosystems from Amman to Algiers.

The key is to build resilience in disorder. Systems that can adapt, self-organize, and maintain coherence without uniformity will survive the century’s entropy storm. This doesn’t mean imposing order—it means evolving better forms of it.

Conclusion: From Centralization to Coherence

Entropy tells us that disorder is the default. But so is adaptation. For the MENA region, the challenge is not to “restore” order in some nostalgic post-colonial sense. It is to embrace the flux, build flexible institutions, and develop governance systems that channel entropy, rather than collapse under it.

The opposite of entropy is not hierarchy—it is coherence. And in the new geopolitics of MENA, coherence may be the highest form of power.