Sofia Fenner, Shouting in a Cage: Political Life After Authoritarian Co-optation in North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Sofia Fenner (SF): Over the past twenty-five years, I have watched a vibrant literature on authoritarianism take shape in political science. Co-optation is everywhere in that literature; almost all scholars agree that it supports durable authoritarian rule. Interestingly, MENA cases—especially Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan—have inspired many of our theories of co-optation. But as I read these accounts, I kept wondering what co-optation actually looked like. Very few works had any direct evidence of the process or of its effects. I wanted to find that evidence, and more—I wanted to know how people experiencing co-optation made sense of it. What did they think was happening, and how did they explain their choices to others?
It was only after I started talking to those people, reading party documents, and observing party events that I realized how much the standard materialist account of co-optation was missing. I was already skeptical of that account—the idea that opposition parties give up their principles for perks—because it fits so neatly with Orientalist stereotypes about “Eastern” venality. But it also fails to account for how co-opted parties actually behave: specifically, why they are weakened by co-optation but retain a latent potential for resistance. Shouting in a Cage offers an alternative account that makes more sense of these empirical patterns.
... co-optation is best understood as an interpretive contest—not an exchange of benefits for quiescence.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
SF: The book’s main argument is that co-optation is best understood as an interpretive contest—not an exchange of benefits for quiescence. Co-opted parties that predate incumbent regimes (what I call “holdover parties”) do not moderate their behavior in order to access perks from rulers; they often maintain their anti-authoritarian positions and can even undertake contentious acts of resistance. Regimes benefit when observers believe that co-opted parties are sellouts, because it makes those parties look hypocritical; even if they criticize the regime, no one will believe that they mean what they say. Parties do advance their own counter-explanations, but, for systematic reasons, those explanations are less persuasive than the standard sellout story.
Because of its focus on how co-optation is narrated, Shouting in a Cage engages with more linguistic and literary theory than the average political science book. I base my analysis in theories of genre and historical emplotment as advanced by Hayden White and David Scott. I then rely heavily on co-opted parties’ own narratives, drawn from interviews, ethnographic observation, and archival sources. In doing so, I apply methods often used to study informal politics to organizations deeply enmeshed in the formal political world.
Writing the book entailed a fair amount of historical work. Its two cases, the Istiqlal Party in Morocco and the Wafd Party in Egypt, are quite well-studied as anti-colonial nationalist movements. Scholarly interest in their trajectories, however, seems to fall off after independence. Many people respond with surprise when I tell them about this project; they either do not consider the Wafd or the Istiqlal oppositional at all, or they do but dismiss them as utterly irrelevant. Both responses are actually consequences of co-optation—and, given how powerful these parties once were, deserve explanation. The book offers a history, drawn in large part from primary sources, of each party’s trajectory since independence. As such, it serves as a sequel to pre-independence histories, including those written by Daniel Zisenwine, Janice Terry, and Marius Deeb.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
SF: Much of my previous work, including Coercive Distribution (my collaboration with Michael Albertus and Dan Slater), has been in a more positivist vein. Conversations in political science tend to be bifurcated by the interpretivist-positivist divide, and co-optation has long been a topic for the positivist branch. But at the risk of epistemological (or ontological) incoherence, I have never thought of this as a hard-and-fast distinction. Those of us who take language and meaning seriously often point out that linguistic and semantic constructions shape what might be more conventionally thought of as political “action”—they make some behaviors more or less likely, some paths more or less takeable. Such claims can absolutely fit in with positivist approaches. To be sure, not everything translates. But Shouting in a Cage is an attempt to show that the linguistic and the ideational are essential to understanding concrete patterns of political behavior.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
SF: I have always envisioned several audiences for this book. One is scholars of authoritarianism who use the concept of co-optation in their work. My hope is that having the book out there causes people to pause, even momentarily, before describing a dynamic as co-optation or assuming that co-optation necessarily neutralizes opposition. I hope people ask themselves, “Do I have evidence of how co-optation is working here? Can I show that it’s having the effect I’m asserting?” People may not be totally convinced by my argument, or they may be working on very different kinds of co-optation; that’s fine. What I want scholars to do is provide more evidence to support their claims about co-optation.
Another audience I hope to reach is graduate students who might be trying to envision how to do a methodologically offbeat exploration of a mainstream concept. I was extremely lucky, at the University of Chicago, to have a rigorous education in qualitative methods—but that is not true for everyone, especially in political science. I tried to write my chapters in a way that clearly showed the steps of my research and analysis, and I hope that will be useful to others.
Finally, I hope the book is of interest to observers of Egyptian and Moroccan politics, local and international: scholars, journalists, activists, and even party members themselves. As I mentioned before, a lot of people who think seriously about these polities do not consider the Wafd or the Istiqlal worthy of extended study. I hope the book shows why they are—and, crucially, why smart, thoughtful people would continue to devote their time and energy to parties that are widely considered washed-up has-beens. That some people still cared about these parties was my first clue to look more closely at their histories.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
SF: As I was doing the research for this book, I often came in contact with the trajectories of leftist parties, which appeared as rivals, allies, and analogues to the nationalist Wafd and Istiqlal. There is certainly more scholarly interest in the left, much of it wrapped up in the big question of why leftist groups have not done better in the Arabic-speaking world. But when we look at the empirical record of leftist—even explicitly communist—parties in the region, what we see is not universal failure but in fact variation. There are certainly many marginalized or defunct communist movements. But there are also (relative) success stories—the Sudanese Communist Party, for example, or the Iraqi Communist Party—even if we set aside South Yemen. Right now, I am interested in what explains this variation. Why did some communist parties fizzle out while others became lasting players in their countries’ politics? Is it something about the parties themselves? Their political environments? Something else entirely? I hope to leverage my experience with party histories and organizational ethnography to explore these questions.
J: What, if anything, does the book have to say to activists and citizens who are considering working within “the system” to make change?
SF: Co-optation intrigued me as a topic because of my own experience making versions of the same choice that faces opposition parties: is it better to try to make change from within the system or to challenge it from the outside? I originally thought that this project would help me answer that question, but I am not sure it has. I argue in the book that authoritarian politics is best viewed as Tragedy, classically understood; authoritarian systems present parties (and people) with a few bad choices and very little information. Debating whether opposition did the “right” thing under such circumstances is not productive. I do think, though, that the book offers some perspective on how to survive co-optation if you find yourself in it. The damage co-optation did to these parties, I show, is primarily reputational; other people came to see them as hypocrites and sell-outs precisely because the parties refused to admit any tension between co-optation and their democratic principles. Perhaps surprisingly, it might be wiser to acknowledge that co-optation represents a meaningful shift and attempt to explain why that shift was appropriate. Audiences may not agree with the shift, but a group’s reputation for honesty may well be preserved.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, pp. 87-90)
Perhaps the most common accusation leveled against co-opted groups is that they have “sold out” or been “bought off”—that is, that they are hypocrites more interested in personal gain than in pursuing their professed political commitments. The quotidian language of selling out and buying off echoes and underlies social-scientific theories that conceptualize co-optation as a transaction: the exchange of some form of bounded, commodity-like benefit for a commitment not to pursue oppositional goals. In the most extreme transactional models, the co-opted were never “really” opposition at all but were pure perk-seekers performing opposition in order to gain access to regime patronage networks.
Implicit in transactional models of co-optation is the idea of neutralization as a process that takes place between opposition and regime. Opposition is neutralized either because it no longer wishes to undertake confrontational actions or because it agrees to suspend such actions in exchange for benefits. Yet, as I argue in the previous chapter, these arguments struggle to comport with the very patterns of behavior they purport to explain. What I propose here is that neutralization, in its most insidious form, occurs in another space entirely: in front of various audiences, including potential mass supporters, pundits, scholars, and other organizations or movements. Co-optation does not neutralize opponents by deterring them from critique or complaint. Instead, it severs links to mass and elite support, rendering even the most strident criticisms moot through the dual curses of isolation and irrelevance.
Istiqlal and the Wafd were once organizations with a proven record of connecting with other political groups and with mass constituencies. Intellectuals and mass supporters alike allied with the Wafd in the 1940s and 1950s and would do so again (albeit on a smaller scale) as the party fought for legal status between 1978 and 1984. Istiqlal, for its part, began its career as an opposition party with a proven ability to mobilize broader constituencies. When the party defended contentious strikes or called for constitutional reform in the 1960s, its positions were politics: closely watched and considered by other political actors. By the first decade of the 2000s both parties were still calling for democracy and still intermittently challenging the regime, but there was, as one Wafd member put it, “no echo. They were shouting in a cage.” The loss of an echo—of allies and supporters who can amplify the volume and extend the reach of a party’s actions—is the most damaging form of neutralization, and the only form that comports with empirical patterns in the cases at hand: continued (if intermittent) opposition that simply does not seem to affect broader political outcomes.
In this chapter I locate the roots of neutralization in the interpretive dilemma that co-optation creates. All actions are susceptible to multiple interpretations, of course, but co-optation urgently demands interpretive resolution because it seems contradictory: why would a system’s opponents agree to participate in it? Outside observers, party members, and ordinary citizens must all find answers to this question; those various answers then compete against one another for prominence.
I argue that co-optation’s interpretive dilemma creates severe reputational problems for co-opted parties. Such parties lose credibility in the most fundamental sense: what they say is no longer taken seriously as an indicator of what they believe or intend. Their confrontational statements can be easily ignored as the empty promises of hypocrites; they are not perceived as reliable partners in efforts to challenge the regime. Incorporated parties become less popular, less credible, more isolated, and less relevant. Crucially, the mechanism here is discursive. Co-optation does not neutralize opponents through “material” processes of which discourse is straightforwardly reflective or epiphenomenal: the discourse is what is doing the work. Embedded as they are in history and language, the specifics of these discursive processes will vary somewhat from case to case. Nevertheless, the basic architecture I outline here for Istiqlal should be applicable to other holdover opposition groups (including the Wafd, whose discourse I examine in chapter 4). In this chapter I trace three processes set in motion by co-optation’s interpretive dilemma.
First, I argue that there is an elective affinity between co-optation and Romantic emplotments of politics: those that emphasize a hero’s suffering en route to an eventual vindication. In existing literature co-optation is often something parties grudgingly accept when they lose faith in the possibility of radical change. I argue, instead, that discourses of hope, possibility, and future vindication are powerful facilitators of incorporation. Istiqlal’s turn toward the regime in the 1970s is often described by scholars as a transaction: the party either gave up on its long-term aspirations or agreed not to pursue them in exchange for limited material, influential, and legal benefits. Istiqlal sources, however, narrate the moment quite differently. As they describe it, Istiqlal was not conceding failure but was motivated by a major victory—one that demonstrated that the country was headed for a democratic future. The party publicly “emplotted” Moroccan political life as a Romantic narrative in which Istiqlal would ultimately be vindicated and its sacrifices justified once democracy was finally achieved.
Second, Romantic narratives, which rely for their moral analysis on inherently unverifiable future events, perform poorly in competition with other readings. Their reliance on the future puts them at a logical disadvantage compared to other sense-making efforts. Observers have an interpretive choice: ascribe to the party’s Romantic narrative (which will not be verified until the very end of the story, so to speak) or explain the contradiction of co-optation with reference to hypocrisy, corruption, or greed in the present. While the latter approach may require imagining secret backroom deals or unobserved payoffs, obscurity is so common in authoritarian regimes that the leap of faith required to call parties hypocritical (i.e., the belief that they were “bought off” in secret) is much smaller than that required to suspend judgment until the parties’ imagined future finally arrives.
Third, Romantic narratives of incorporation are extremely resilient to negative feedback. Metaphors and other discursive constructions can shape how organizations process inputs from their environments. Romances anticipate setbacks and suffering, providing an easy way to make sense of electoral defeats, declining popularity, and other seemingly negative developments without logically necessitating a change of strategy. Istiqlal relied on its “democratic journey” metaphor to explain all manner of setbacks, discursively erasing the question of whether those setbacks might merit serious consideration or a change of strategy. The harder the going, the more of a vindication the ultimate victory would be; the party’s responsibility was to stay the course. The built-in resilience of Romance helps explain why parties are so slow to abandon narratives that, from an outsider’s perspective, seem to be causing trouble for party credibility.
