Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch (eds.), Making Sense of the Arab State (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch (SH & ML): The volume originated in an animated debate at an annual conference of the Project on Middle East Political Science about the concepts of state weakness and state fragility and how they help us understand, or get in the way of understanding, fundamental questions about politics and societies in the (largely) Arab Middle East. We all talk about the state, but we mean very different things by it and have very different views of its role in political life. That discussion helped us to see that, after decades of research, scholarship was still animated in large part by comparisons that cast the Arab state as defective, as defined by what it lacked, rather than by what it actually did. We see this going back to modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s, continuing with research on democratization, civil society, and the region’s democratic deficit, in work on how to explain the absence of Arab developmental states, or most recently, in ideas about state weakness and fragility that gained prominence with the 2011 uprisings. To overcome these limitations, we charged our authors with developing a new comparative vernacular that begins by asking not how to explain what is missing but how to explain what is there—and how it matters. We wanted to take an expansive view of our scope, posing questions about states and regimes, state practices, and modes of governance, but also about state-society relations and social and political dynamics more broadly, including dynamics of protest, contention, and resistance. What kinds of insights might emerge if we move beyond the assumption that Arab state builders were trying but failed to emulate Western state models? Rather than enjoining authors to adopt a single shared theory, we urged them to approach the question of the Arab state through the lens of the theoretical foundations and empirical cases with which they were most engaged.
They offer perspectives on how regimes instrumentalize stateness, whether more or less effectively, and the underlying logics behind how and why they do so.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
SH & ML: The volume is organized around three thematic sections: dimensions of stateness; dimensions of regime-ness; and contesting stateness: societies and sites of resistance. In the first, authors, including both of us as well as Raymond Hinnebusch and Toby Dodge, develop arguments about trajectories of state development, state-regime relations, state capacity, and state practices that offer new ways of understanding states as the product of, and the object of, historically informed social conflicts and processes of contestation. The second section, with chapters by Bassel Salloukh, Lisa Anderson, and Dipali Mukhopadhyay, focuses on questions about regimes, states, and governance. They offer perspectives on how regimes instrumentalize stateness, whether more or less effectively, and the underlying logics behind how and why they do so. We include a non-Arab case in this section, Afghanistan (by Mukhopadhyay), to highlight cross-regional comparisons and the broader relevance of how we approach the study of Arab states The third section, with chapters by Jillian Schwedler and Sean Yom, explores a central theme of the whole volume: how regime interests, preferences, and practices affect processes of state development, including where stateness is present and where it is absent, how state institutions take shape, and how governance is organized, contested, and resisted. We invited Dan Slater, a southeast Asianist, to offer a transregional comparative reflection as a conclusion.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
SH & ML: As a collaborative effort, the volume offered us an opportunity to step back from our previous and ongoing research and reflect on its implications for big questions about where the state fits in how we think about politics in the Middle East. As we note in our introduction, the state remains an elusive, unsettled presence for scholars of the Middle East—one that has been the focus of important work by Ayubi, Mitchell, Migdal, Salame, and others, to be sure—but one we continue to wrestle with. For us, the book is a chance to reflect critically on the concepts, methods, and theories our fields have used to do that wrestling, and to deploy concepts, methods, and theories that we hope will help readers think in new ways about the Arab state. That includes especially our work on “upgraded authoritarianism” (Heydemann) and the Arab uprisings (Lynch) which implicitly and explicitly invoked state theory without directly engaging with those core texts.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
SH & ML: One of the volume’s strengths, we hope, is the broad scope of its coverage and its relevance to a wide range of research programs in the social sciences. We hope that all scholars of the contemporary Middle East will find it of value, along with those who focus on related issues in other world regions. Our authors all think and write in comparative, theoretical terms and we would welcome the possibilities the volume opens up to engage with colleagues who work on the state in comparative perspective. We also view the volume as especially well-suited for both undergraduate and graduate courses on Middle East politics. It will certainly appear in both of our syllabi in coming years. We are especially pleased that the book can be downloaded for free from the press website, and hope that this makes it much more accessible for readers in the Global South.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
SH & ML: In typical fashion, we both have too much on our plates at the moment! Heydemann will be at the Wilson Center this academic year while on sabbatical, working on a book project that grew out of his chapter in this volume, along with two, perhaps three, other major projects (!) and several articles. One of the projects is a collaboration with Melani Cammet and Ishac Diwan for a new edition of A Political Economy of the Middle East. The other is a collaboration with Karam Shaar on the role of economic networks in Syria’s political economy under Bashar al-Assad. The third is a possible co-authored book with Reinoud Leenders, which focuses on the relationship between authoritarianism and conflict, using the Syrian conflict as a case. Lynch is finishing a book on America’s role in the Middle East and centered on the long arc of failure and devastation from Iraq to Palestine, and will be spending the next year working on a book about the Middle Eastern warscape. He has a book coming out soon on the definition of the Middle East as a region and another edited volume on regional order in the Middle East, as well as a really exciting edited project on race-making and racial formations in Africa and the Middle East.
J: What did you learn that surprised you while working on this volume?
ML: For me, probably reflecting on the disconnect between the “state effect” literature, which tends to view the state as elusive, discovered through its presence in society, and the “state capacity” literature, which tends to focus on the omnipresent surveillance and repressive capacity of those same states. Putting those into dialogue, and really disaggregating things sectorally and in terms of regime purpose, helped me to better understand what was missing from a lot of our discussions about state strength and weakness, and to refine my thinking about whether and how digital authoritarianism would reshape state capacity.
SH: On my part, it was the realization that perhaps we need to shift attention from stateness as the focus of our research—a surprising notion given the volume’s focus—to what we termed regime-ness, and think more deeply and creatively about regimes in understanding how state institutions and state-society relations become organized and operate.
Excerpt from the book (from Steven Heydemann, Seeing the State or Why Arab States Look the Way They Do)
More than ten years ago, a wave of mass protests across the Arab world reanimated research programs on the Arab state. While the causes of the Arab uprisings continue to be debated, state weakness, state dysfunctions, and failures of the state loom large in explaining the most significant episode of anti-regime mobilization in the modern history of the Middle East. Although the specific forms of state failure that researchers link to the onset of the uprisings differ, with some accounts highlighting economic factors and others focusing on political or social conditions, some common themes are evident. Perhaps most prominent are failures of governance by self-interested ruling elites. In such accounts, feckless leaders privileged their parochial interests over the hard work of nation building and ruled in ways that excluded and marginalized large segments of their societies. They oversaw failed development strategies, pursued predatory economic practices, captured and corrupted state institutions, and proved unable to provide citizens with economic security or social mobility.
Instead, state elites exacerbated social cleavages, undermined prospects for inclusive and equitable development, and corroded crosscutting bonds of citizenship. These dysfunctions are on vivid display in this volume. They rendered states vulnerable to both the accumulation of domestic grievances and external pressure, notably demands to adopt neoliberal economic reforms that further weakened state capacity and exacerbated economic and social precarity. For most Arab citizens, therefore, national identities are loosely held and easily discarded in response to states that appear incapable of meeting their needs. For rulers seeking legitimacy, state weakness has elevated the appeal of sectarian identity politics. State elites exploit and instrumentalize sectarian identities to mobilize popular support, advance state interests, and undermine regional adversaries.
If the uprisings of 2011 are the proximate inspiration for these accounts, they have deep roots in earlier generations of research on the Arab state. Claims of state weakness and failures of governance as causes of the uprisings resonate with broader comparative research programs on modernization, political development, and the conditions associated with the formation of developmental states, including work that explores why such states have not emerged in cases that exhibit the institutional dysfunctions seen as widespread in the Arab world.8 Echoes of these accounts are evident as well in comparative literature on state failure and in practitioner literature on failed states and state fragility. Post-uprising literatures thus fit neatly within a conceptual and theoretical landscape saturated with claims about conditions that contribute to weak and ineffective state institutions in general and to the weakness and fragility of the Arab state in particular.
To be sure, there are ample reasons to view Arab states as flawed and ineffective. Global indices routinely rank states in the Middle East poorly on control of corruption, rule of law, civic freedoms, education, service delivery, and any number of other indicators. Nonetheless, taking state failure as a starting point for research—establishing one or another deficiency as the outcome of interest—has come at a cost. To do so may bring some questions into sharper focus, such as accounting for poor economic performance, but obscures many others. In particular, state failure as a starting point falls short in accounting for the resilience of Arab regimes, in considering the variation in capacities across regimes and within regimes, or in explaining the transformations of authoritarian governance and the selective expansion of state capacity that regimes have engineered since the 2011 uprisings, issues that Lisa Anderson, Marc Lynch, and Raymond Hinnebusch all address in their chapters in this volume.
Questions of resilience and regime continuity, and the capacity of Arab regimes to effectively reconfigure elements of authoritarian governance as conditions change, are central for an understanding of the state of the Arab state. Simply put, if states are so weak, if state institutions are so ineffective, if governance is so poor, how did the majority of Arab regimes survive the largest wave of mass protests in the region’s modern history? How can we explain the extraordinary continuity of regimes, which in Arab republics such as Algeria, Syria, and Egypt are now in their sixth or seventh decade of rule, even though they consistently produce suboptimal social and economic outcomes? Is it plausible to argue, as Hinnebusch does in this volume, that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has strong regimes but weak states? If we begin by assuming state weakness or by assuming that what matters in assessing state capacity is whether states can promote social and economic development—what I term a developmentalist bias in literature on the state—how do we account for the puzzle of regime resilience in the context of weak states and ineffective institutions?
Once we accept state weakness as a starting point we leave ourselves with few theoretical or conceptual tools for addressing such questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, when we start from the assumption of state weakness, the explanatory focus in accounting for regime resilience turns toward coercion. Rather than asking how it is that purportedly weak states acquire the capacities needed to produce high levels of regime continuity, to sustain the loyalty of a social base, or to manage complex systems of social regulation, service provision, or a legal-juridical apparatus, scholars have often focused on narrower questions concerning coercive capacity. Such work emphasizes the conditions under which regimes will resort to violence to contain the political effects of developmental weakness or social fragmentation and highlights the capacity of coercive institutions as a key determinant of regime resilience. It has less to tell us, however, about the noncoercive domains in which regimes have consolidated institutional mechanisms that provide for regime survival or how the presence of such mechanisms might inform our understanding of trajectories of state building, patterns of state-society relations, or how political economies are organized.
However, if we move beyond approaches shaped by developmentalist biases, alternative questions and alternative research agendas come into sharper focus. We have an opportunity to see Arab states as they are rather than to define them by what they lack—the “deficit approaches” familiar to us from earlier research on failures of democratization and developmentalism. We open up possibilities for exploring how the Arab state got to be the way it is—to account for actual trajectories of state development and consolidation in the Arab Middle East—rather than treat such states as flawed versions of their developmentally more successful counterparts in Europe or East Asia.
For example, what hypotheses might follow if we assume that regimes in the Arab Middle East prioritize their security and continuity over developmentalist outcomes? How might regimes’ perceptions of threats from within and without influence their choices about the design of state institutions? What kind of economic and social policies and what sort of state-society relations would be consistent with regimes that viewed the primary purpose of the state as facilitating regime survival, even while recognizing the importance of economic and social development as crucial for their stability? How would such regimes organize political economies? How would they construct notions of citizenship? Would the assumption that regimes act on the basis of “survivalist” preferences as opposed to developmentalist preferences help us understand why governance functions are often allocated to non-state mechanisms? How might survivalist biases shape how regimes manage external pressures of various forms, whether economic, political, or strategic, including the pressures of economic globalization?
To begin to address such questions, I start from the assumption that state weakness and the closely related concept of state fragility offer unproductive starting points. Rather than trying to account for state weakness—with weakness defined in developmentalist terms as the dependent variable—I view it as more productive to ask a simple, straightforward question: How can we explain the configurations of state and non-state institutions that deliver governance in the Arab Middle East today? Or, more simply, how did the Arab state get to be the way it is?
