This lecture evaluates explanations for war at three levels of analysis: state, state system, and leadership, and matches them with empirical evidence from a data set of 19 MENA wars. It seems that while revisionism at state level most immediately drives wars, it has little connection to regime type; and that war is the result of a regional system marked by a "Hobbesian" form of anarchy. These propensities are exacerbated or diluted by regional imbalance (or balance) of power and the character of state leadership at a given time; finally, the periodic intervention of global powers struggling over a region's oil resources also accounts for several wars. A BORDERLANDS lecture on 8 April 2016