Security Studies (SS) is a subfield of International Relations (IR) concerned with the ways that conflict and violence contribute to shaping the world. The subfield’s concern with the conditions of war and peace has situated the state as the referent object of security and produced a state-centrism in scholarship, academic journals, and teaching that overemphasizes security as a policy problem. Beginning in the early 1990s challenges to state-centrism emerged through Human Security (HS) and Critical Security Studies (CSS) approaches that sought to challenge and rethink the referent objects of security while introducing more critical theoretical traditions from which to research, publish, and teach about what constitutes threat and security. These new approaches expanded inquiry into security and oriented scholars around different ways of approaching questions of what security is and for whom (or what) it is produced. Despite the expansion of the different subfields of inquiry into security, a common criticism levelled at these approaches concerned how regions of the Global South were incorporated into scholarship. In this reflective essay, I draw inspiration from these criticisms to ask how the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been studied, taught, and theorized from in the fields of Security Studies and Critical Security Studies. The principal question guiding this essay is What do different traditions in Security Studies have to tell us about conflict in the Middle East and North Africa? I seek to reflect on how the region, its peoples, and their experiences are incorporated into these fields and how this has shaped scholarly and popular understandings of conflict and peace in the MENA. I wish to reflect on how tensions between the MENA’s incorporation into SS and CSS produce patterns of visibility and invisibility. I then shift attention to a discussion of how the emergent scholarship on non-Western IR and other approaches from within the MENA region itself may contribute to different ways of researching and teaching conflict and security in the MENA. The essay concludes with some observations about the future of conflict and security studies in the MENA with an emphasis on key questions that are raised in the context of the region’s contemporary overlapping crises.