Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want

Too bad they usually get what they need. That and more in this week's MENA Academy!

The start of the fall semester is upon us. I am on leave this academic year, continuing as a visiting scholar with the Mershon Center at Ohio State University. But the rest of the new semester activities will continue as usual: a new season of the POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast will launch in a couple of weeks, and I have some hopefully good ideas for this blog which will hopefully start at the same time. And I do hope to see many of you at the APSA reception next Saturday. In the meantime, thank you all for your continued support, whether as paid or free subscribers — I’ll try to keep the good MENA Academy content coming! Oh, and last week’s special offer is still available for one more week: any new paid subscription (or existing paid subscriber who asks) can get a free, signed paperback copy of my new book Making Sense of the Arab State either in the mail or hand-delivered to the APSA reception.

This week, we have some blog recommendations, a book review essay, and a tour around the academic journals which includes three - yes, three! - APSR articles.

First up, two great Substack blogs that should be of interest to Abu Aardvark readers:

Good Authority. The good folks at Good Authority (the successor to The Monkey Cage) moved their content to a Substack newsletter (all the content is still available at the website, too). While I’ve had to step back from an active editorial role for a while, because of my commitments at home, I follow it regularly and am constantly amazed by the high quality of rigorous, informed and well-written academic writing for the broader public. As we move into the home stretch of the election, Good Authority is only going to be more important — so follow it now!

Jonathan Fulton’s China-MENA Newsletter. Fulton launched this Substack newsletter a while back, to go along with his always excellent podcast on all things China and the Middle East. His newsletter is the go-to source for anyone interested in the rapidly evolving relationship between China and the MENA region, across all dimensions - economic, political, and broadly theoretical. Both the blog and the podcast bring in a lot of top-flight scholars from both the Gulf region and China. It’s a must-listen, and the newsletter is a must-read.

Next, the MENA Academy’s book of the week: Nathan Brown, Steven Schaaf, Samer Anabtawi, and Julian Waller. Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism. University of Michigan Press, 2024. [Open Access at the link]

I’m really impressed with the new University of Michigan Emerging Democracies series, and not only because they published Steven Heydemann’s and my new book Making Sense of the Arab State. Last week, they released another book attacking some similar questions from a very different perspective — also fully open access and available for free download, something I strongly support. This one is written by four of my George Washington University colleagues - the inestimable Nathan Brown and three recent GW PhDs, Steven Schaaf, Samer Anabtawi, and Julian Waller. Titled Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, this new book poses the puzzle of the variable degree of autonomy of state institutions in the Arab world — where more often than one might expect, the courts, parliaments, religious affairs bureaucracies, and administrative bureaucracies don’t just do what autocrats tell them to do, or even what they want them to do. (The autocrats do usually get what they need, unfortunately, as the classic theorist Michael Phillip Jagger would have anticipated).

Brown, Schaff, Anabtawi and Waller push back against the functionalist theories which they see as prevalent in the study of autocratic Arab states, where everything that happens is presumably a function of regime survival imperatives. They propose to study the state inside out to turn the question of autocratic state institutional compliance with regime imperatives into a question rather than an assumption. While Arab states are their primary explanatory focus, the authors maintain an impressively global comparative lens, engaging deeply with the comparative literature on state institutions in order to ground their arguments in ways that speak to the broader discipline. Their approach to state instituitons nicely complements the approach developed by Heydemann, me and our co-authors in the Arab State book — stepping away from treating the state as a black box or as varying only along lines of state capacity to examine its “inner workings”. That means understanding empirically how exactly specific state institutions exist within and alongside society (and the political actors with which they might form alliances), the internal divides and personal ideosynracies of leading bureaucrats, the interests which accrue to those institutions independently of regimes, and their ability at times to resist regime-driven imperatives.

The argument is developed through close empirical analysis of specific state institutions, with paired comparisons used to draw out particularly interesting variations. The first empirical section compares the trajectory of the courts in Egypt and Palestine, showing how much more autonomy Egyptian courts have maintained in comparison to Palestinian courts — which were designed explicitly along the Egyptian model but still failed to maintain autonomy. The Egyptian case shows both the reality of constitutional court autonomy — where the regime can’t always get what it wants — and the equally real reality of the autocratic state’s ability to force it back into line when it’s really important — i.e. where the regime gets what it needs. The second empirical section looks at parliaments in autocratic regimes, looking at the Russian Duma and Kuwait’s raucous (and currently suspended) parliament. The third empirical section turns to religious establishments, with close looks at religious establishments in Germany, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand (Morocco’s already having been fully covered, of course, by Ann Marie Wainscott’s Bureaucratizing Islam).

This is an important, refreshing approach to the question of state autonomy, really well-written, genuinely comparative in a cross-regional and intra-regional way, and wonderfully written. I expect that it (and our book, please) will be gracing quite a few syllabi in comparative politics in the coming years — so get a hold of it now. (Did I mention that it’s open access, and that University of Michigan should be commended and rewarded for making it so?).

Finally, it’s time for the MENA Academy’s weekly Around the Journals tour. We lead with an unusual and exciting three-fer in the American Political Science Review, all authored by Friends of POMEPS: Ferdinand Eibl and Steffen Hertog, two of the three authors of the chapter on political economy in our book The Political Science of the Middle East, have a fascinating argument about oil rents and welfare focused on the understudied case of Oman; Daniel Masterson uses field experiments to show how refugees make political demands in Lebanon and Jordan; and Sarah Parkinson has a provocative argument about the political economy of media reporting in the region and the distortions that introduces into quantitative data sets. We also have an important comparative piece on climate change, conflict migration (one of the authors, Jeannie Sowers, was my co-editor for a POMEPS Studies volume on environmental politics), Thomas Pierret on Syria’s religious establishment and the battles over ‘moderate Islam’ post-2011, and a fascinating example of trans-regional analysis by Ismail Numan Telci of migration from the Horn of Africa to war-torn Yemen.

Ferdinand Eibl and Steffen Hertog, “From Rents to Welfare: Why Are Some Oil-Rich States Generous to Their People?” American Political Science Review (August 2024). ABSTRACT: Why do some, but not all oil-rich states provide generous welfare to their populations? Building on a case study of Oman in the 1960s and 1970s, we argue that anti-systemic subversive threats motivate ruling elites in oil states to use welfare as a tool of mass co-optation. We use the generalized synthetic control method and difference-in-difference regressions for a global quantitative test of our argument, assessing the effect of different types of subversion on a range of long-term welfare outcomes in oil-rich and oil-poor states. We demonstrate that the positive effect of subversion appears limited to center-seeking subversive threats in oil-rich countries. The paper addresses a key puzzle in the literature on resource-rich states, which makes contradictory predictions about the impact of resource rents on welfare provision.

Daniel Masterson, “Refugee Networks, Cooperation, and Resource Access,” American Political Science Review (August 2024). ABSTRACT: Without formal avenues for claims-making or political participation, refugees must find their own means of securing services from state and non-state providers. This article asks why some refugee communities are more effective than others in mitigating community problems. I present a framework for understanding how refugees’ social networks shape the constraints and capabilities for collective action. I analyze a field experiment where I organized community meetings with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, randomly assigning the recruitment method for meetings to introduce exogenous variation in network structure. During meetings, participants were tasked with resolving collective action problems. I examine the dynamics of subsequent group discussion. Results show that although densely networked refugee groups exhibit more cooperation, they suffer from a resource diversity disadvantage. Group diversity facilitates access to resources that may help refugee communities confront community problems. The novel experimental design allows for separately identifying group-level and individual-level mechanisms.

Sarah Parkinson, “Unreported Realities: The Political Economy of Media-Sourced Data,” American Political Science Review (August 2024). ABSTRACT: What is the gap between scholars’ expectations of media-sourced data and the realities those data actually represent? This letter elucidates the data generation process (DGP) that undergirds media-sourced data: journalistic reporting. It uses semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists to analyze how media actors decide what and how to report—in other words, the “why” of reporting specific events to the exclusion of others—as well as how the larger professional, economic, and political contexts in which journalists operate shape the material scholars treat as data. The letter thus centers “unreported realities”: the fact that media-derived data reflect reporters’ locations, identities, capacities, and outlet priorities, rather than providing a representative sample of ongoing events. In doing so, it reveals variations in the consistency and constancy of reporting that produce unacknowledged, difficult-to-identify biases in media-sourced data that are not directionally predictable.

Gabriela Nagle Alverio, Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal, “Climate change, conflict, and urban migration,” Environment and Security (August 2024). ABSTRACT: The adverse effects of man-made climate change and protracted conflict intensify rural-to-urban migration in many developing countries. This article examines the impacts of climate and conflict migration on urban environments and on migrants themselves. To trace the distinctive pathways by which climate change and conflict drive migration as well as shared challenges for urban planning and services, we employ qualitative case studies of Jordan, Pakistan, and Honduras informed by interviews and secondary literature. These countries are chosen as they exemplify the compounding, cumulative impacts of climate change and conflict on urban expansion and the challenges in providing adequate public services in these contexts. Across all three cases, climate hazards threaten rural livelihoods and agricultural productivity, increasing rural to urban migration, while civil conflict and gang violence further induce urban migration, both internally and across borders. In Jordan, we assess the impacts of increasing water scarcity and conflict-driven refugee flows on infrastructure and public services. Pakistan’s experience highlights the impacts of rapid-onset natural disasters, severe water scarcity, and enduring refugee flows from Afghanistan on environmental quality and pollution within cities. In Honduras, we analyze how increasing droughts and hurricanes, combined with gang presence in cities, affect migrants in terms of increased violence and negative physical and mental health impacts. Together, these cases illuminate the need for context-specific proactive policy measures that address the independent and interrelated ways that climate change and conflict lead to migration and the subsequent profound impacts on urban development and human well-being.

Thomas Pierret,” Minister vs. Mufti the struggle over ‘moderate Islam’ in wartime Syria (2011–2021),” Mediterranean Politics (August 2024). ABSTRACT: In 2021, President Bashar al-Assad ordered the most significant reform of religious institutions in Syria’s modern history by abolishing the position of Grand Mufti and replacing it with a collegial body. Whereas most observers interpreted this move as a means to further subdue the Sunni religious elites, I argue that in fact, Assad’s decision addressed an old demand of the conservative Sunni ulama. For decades, the latter had asked for a collegial religious authority to be entrusted with the protection of ‘correct’ Islam not only from extremist ideas but also from modernist interpretations like those propagated by the last Grand Mufti himself. Getting rid of such ‘enlightened’ figures was all the more urgent, for the conservatives, that wartime circumstances had provided their rivals with new allies among paramilitary forces and pro-regime minority constituencies. In that context, ‘moderate Islam’ had become the focus of competing definitions by conservatives, who equated it with traditional Sunni doctrines, and modernists, who advocated innovative interpretations of the Scriptures and further secularization of law and education.

Ismail Numan Telci, “Escape to the war: Understanding Ethiopian migration to Yemen,” Migration Studies (August 2024). ABSTRACT: This article scrutinizes the enduring migration corridor from Ethiopia to Yemen, ultimately leading many to Saudi Arabia. This route, steeped in a rich historical context of interregional movement between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, particularly from Ethiopia to Yemen, is explored not for its novelty but for the distinct contemporary challenges it poses to migrants. The study delves into the motivations, strategies, and resilience of migrants traveling through these historically significant yet perilous paths under present-day geopolitical and socio-economic conditions. Although the route itself is not unusual within the long history of regional migration, the term “unusual” is applied here to discuss the heightened risks and the complex dynamics faced by migrants today. Utilizing reports and firsthand interviews from international aid organizations, the research offers a granular analysis of how these migrations influence the demographic fabric of the Gulf region and the integration of migrants upon arrival. By melding economic, social, and integrative aspects of migration, the article enhances the scholarly discourse on migration studies, emphasizing the transformational impact of established migration routes in contemporary settings.