Seeing Like a MENA State

Our new book is sadly relevant in memory of the great James Scott; plus this week's MENA Academy weekly roundup.

I’m on the road again, so posting has been and will remain light despite all the momentous happenings. All I will say here is that I’m relieved and heartened to see Biden step aside. Aside from his clear inability to meet the challenge of the campaign, Biden’s legacy will always be blighted by his moral and policy failures on Gaza. I’m excited for Kamala to turn the page and to better align US policy with both values and the preferences of most of the Democratic party base.

I was saddened to learn this week of the passing of the great Yale political anthropologist James Scott. I only met him a few times, and never had the honor of studying with him, but I was always inspired by his work — especially Seeing Like a State, which I would rank as one of the most important books of political science I’ve ever read. He had other classic works, of course, including Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Weapons of the Weak (even if that brilliant examination of the forms of resistance to power too often got overgeneralized by others to claim virtually everything as some form of resistance), and The Art of Not Being Governed (which I loved reading even if it didn’t convert me to anarchism). But Seeing Like a State is the one that really stuck with me, especially as I began to work on questions of state development and authoritarianism in the Middle East.

I learned of Scott’s unfortunate passing almost exactly a week before the official publication of Making Sense of the Arab State (University of Michigan Press), an edited project that Steven Heydemann and I shepherded through multiple workshops and developed into one of the first full length treatments of the Arab state since Nazih Ayubi’s classic work Over-Stating the Arab State a few decades ago. Making Sense of the Arab State brings together a spectacular group of scholars working from different theoretical perspectives to grapple with key puzzles about the strengths and weaknesses of states in the Middle East — and how states in the region differ from states in other regions, if at all. While each contributor brings their own theoretical approach (from Mann to Mitchell to Migdal to Bourdieu) and focuses on their own cases, they all examine the puzzlingly asymmetries in state capacity, the gap between remarkable regime resilience and remarkably poor developmental outcomes, and the notable difficulty in demarcating the relationship between state and society or how citizens encounter the state in all its paradoxical presences and absences.

I mention our book today because my own chapter reads the Arab state through Scott and the concept of “legibility” as it’s been developed as a component of state capacity in recent political science literature. I build on my work elsewhere on digital authoritarianism to ask whether and how the dramatic rise in online surveillance capabilities and the digitization of citizenship across much of the region affects state capacity and authoritarian durability. Much of the analysis is rather dystopian and depressing, befitting the dark times the region is passing through: “The aspirational nature of the MENA state today might be seen where the societal panopticon of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) meets the aspiring mukhabarat state, with a detour through the ostensibly stateless dystopian surveillance archipelago that is the Israeli-occupied West Bank.”

But, drawing on Scott, I argue despite my dystopian fears against assuming that greater surveillance rendering society more legible to authoritarian MENA states necessarily translating into greater state capacity or specific outcomes. Israel may have deployed unprecedented levels and forms of online and offline surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza over long years of occupation, but instead of its AI technologies and detailed knowledge facilitating a targeted response to October 7 it instead carried out indiscriminate mass bombardment, displacement and killings of untold numbers of women, children and civilians. Online surveillance of Egyptian society may render dissent more legible to the state and facilitate arrests and repression, but it hardly compensates for the structural weaknesses and governance failures of the shambolic Egyptian state. Scott helps me to explain why the MENA state has so often failed to improve the human condition, even as it has so reliably protected the regimes which sit atop it.

Making Sense of the Arab State is officially out next week; you can pre-order it here. I’ll be blogging more about it when it comes out - keep an eye out for a forthcoming symposium and more from Heydemann and me this fall.

Now for the MENA Academy weekly roundup of new journal articles. We lead with a searing look at the German discourse on antisemitism as a moral panic by the great scholar of social movements and violence Donatella Della Porta. We then have a spotlight on Tunisia, featuring bunch of articles based on original field research in Tunisia. We then have two good pieces on Islamist movements, the first an intriguing study of the Islamist (dis)advantage in elections and the other looking at the post-2013 fortunes of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, two pieces on the social contract outside Tunisia, one on digitization across the MENA region and the other a piece on the exclusionary social contract in postwar Syria. As always, I hope you enjoy and learn from the flood of great political science research being done by scholars in the POMEPS orbit on the politics of the Middle East and North Africa — and those who should be in the network but aren’t yet!

Donatella Della Porta, “Moral Panic and Repression: The Contentious Politics of Anti-Semitism in Germany,” Participation and Conflict (July 2024). ABSTRACT: Moral panics can be used as a mechanism of repression of political and social protests through the definition of activists as challenging the core values of a society. Taking Germany as a critical case, the article analyses a number of aggressive campaigns mounted by the media and politicians against progressive artists and intellectuals, most of whom are from the global South, but which also includes Jewish people critical of Israeli actions, who have been accused of violating the German narrative in what has been defined as a "war" against anti-Semitism. After an introduction to the repression of pro-Palestinian protests, I will begin by providing a methodological note, before going on to present the conceptualization of a moral panic and locate its mechanisms within an analysis of the repression of social movements. I will then present some cases that can be read through the sociological category of a moral panic, singling out the panic entrepreneurs and their forms of intervention as well as the outcomes of their actions. What this further analysis adds to the literature is a reflection on the contextual conditions for the development of such moral panic in a specific mass-media, regulatory and political context. I will then suggest that in the German case in particular the contextual conditions for the spread of the moral panic are related to: a) a bureaucratization of anti-Semitism policies, with the creation of a specialized bureaucracy; the adoption of a semi-legal definition of anti-Semitism through the development of an especially vague and blurred definition of anti-Semitism; and the assimilation of anti-Zionist peaceful forms of protests (such as BDS) as anti-Semitic; b) the development of political and cultural opportunities around the definition of the security of Israel as a "raison d'État" and a convergence on a selective, formalized official memory; and c) the alignment of the majority of civil society and mass-media around an official narrative.

Sari Madi, “Critical junctures, labour unions, and social dialogue in Tunisia and Lebanon: Implications for the social contract,” Mediterranean Politics (July 2024). ABSTRACT: This paper examines the evolution of social dialogue institutions in Lebanon and Tunisia between 2010 and 2017. Both countries faced critical junctures, but their institutions pursued divergent courses. The national social dialogue institution was revamped in Tunisia to increase participation in policymaking, whereas it was reinstated in Lebanon without addressing its institutional flaws. By building on these developments, this paper makes two theoretical contributions. First, it argues that the nature of political interference in organized labour prior to the critical juncture influences its subsequent role. Labour neutralization in Lebanon was founded on sectarian politics that co-opted national leadership and bound rank-and-file to sectarian clientelism. Labour pacification in Tunisia harmed executives, whereas local unionists remained independent. After the critical juncture, Tunisian organized labour revitalized itself, aided by rank-and-file autonomy. It then made a strategic choice to reconsolidate the tripartite system with enhanced involvement of the traditional labour and capital organizations in policymaking. Lebanese organized labour was unchallenged by its rank-and-file. It maintained ties with political elites. Second, these paths illustrate the differences between social contracts. Participation in policy elaboration is among the deliverables exchanged between political elites and social actors in Tunisia but not in Lebanon.

Saerom Han, “Performing (against) the state,” Mediterranean Politics (July 2024). ABSTRACT: The reformation of the Arab state in neoliberal times has produced the narratives of the withdrawing versus intervening state. This article complicates these binary notions by taking seriously both top-down and bottom-up state practices in the realm of employment in Tunisia. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of precarious workers’ collective actions, it shows that the precarization of labour relations was structured by state actors’ arbitrary acts for and against a new state image in a neoliberal direction before and after the Uprising. Importantly, bottom-up mobilizations have criticized, challenged and attempted to correct these top-down state practices by performing their image of the state as a coherent entity that is bound by laws and protects the right to decent work.

Bedirhan Mutlu and Salih Yasun, “Weak party system institutionalization and autocratization: evidence from Tunisia,” Mediterranean Politics (2024). ABSTRACT: Why do party systems remain weak in transitioning countries in ways that can hamper the democratization process? We answer this question through a case study of Tunisia, which was the only success story of the Arab uprisings. Tunisia has experienced a process of autocratization since President Saied's presidential coup in 2021. Utilizing a historical institutionalist framework, we conducted interviews with 15 leaders from the major political parties. We find that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, the strong party institutionalization under authoritarian rule did not lead to an institutionalized party system after authoritarian rule ended. We attribute this dynamic to the inability of regime-successor parties to institutionalize, perpetuating democratic vulnerabilities inherited from authoritarian rule. We also find that too-powerful civil societies can be detrimental to transitions. The labour union, UGTT, acted as a de facto veto player and limited the ability of cabinets to implement reforms. Furthermore, leftist parties could not benefit from the UGTT's base. The 2011 revolution was a critical juncture that could have facilitated the establishment of an institutionalized party system. However, the political elite's institutional choices put additional challenges on parties. The weakness of the party system in turn contributed to President Saied's self-coup and dismantling of Tunisia's democratic institutions.

Prisca Jöst, “Neighborly social pressure and collective action: Evidence from a field experiment in Tunisia,” PLOS One (July 2024). ABSTRACT: Research on political participation almost unanimously assumes that social pressure by neighbors induces collective behavior. Yet most experimental studies focus on individually based forms of political and civic behavior, such as voting and recycling, in Western industrialized societies. The paper tests the effect of neighborly social pressure on collective action in Tunisia. In a field experiment, I manipulate whether neighbors or community outsiders invite citizens to contribute to a public good (i.e., trash collection). I run the experiment in three neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic composition in Tunis (n = 1199). I do not find evidence to suggest that neighborly social pressure encourages participation in neighborhood cleanups, with low participation rates both for the neighbor and outsider contact conditions. While the effect of social pressure does not significantly vary across communities, overall participation rates do. Residents of the poor neighborhood are most likely to respond in a socially desirable way when asked about their intentions but least likely to participate. The paper also discusses some limitations of the study and outlines avenues for future research.

Yannik Suderman and Tina Zintl, “Towards an exclusionary social contract: Narratives of a revanchist city in (post)war Syria,” Mediterranean Politics (July 2024). ABSTRACT: This article asks to what extent national narratives drive changes in social contracts on both national and local level. Societal and especially state actors can use narratives to underline or omit specific rights and duties in social contracts, or to privilege particular contracting parties. In the Syrian case, repression and foreign intervention triggered changes in the national social contract, yet the exclusionary narrative functioned as a catalyst for these changes and entrenched them on both, the national and the city level. We show that housing, land and property (HLP) policies in (post-)war Damascus have an urban scope but a national impact. Not only wartime destruction but also post-war demolition have been particularly high in selected neighbourhoods and (re-)construction favoured upscale urban mega projects. This approach to urban planning reflects an exclusionary national narrative, which stigmatizes parts of the population as ‘terrorists’ and suspects them of stirring up public disorder. In consequence, these groups are marginalized or even ‘evicted’ from the social contract. For those Syrians still covered by the social contract, the narrative seeks to offer a justification for the large-scale exclusion of fellow citizens. Our analysis is based on an extensive review of literature from human geography, with a focus on the physical and social urban fabric, and political science, on intra-societal power relations.

Carmen Fulco and Doha Abdelgawad, “A movement in exile: the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s survival action frames in the post-coup era (2013–2023),” Journal of North African Studies (July 2024). ABSTRACT: On August 14, 2013, the Egyptian security forces raided the Rabaa and al-Nahda sit-ins, marking the largest mass killing in modern Egyptian history. The massacre, aimed at targeting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – henceforth MB – did not end its existence; rather, it recast it as a movement in exile striving for organisational survival. Drawing on interview materials, MB media outlets, and a process tracing of key international and regional events unfolding between 2013 and 2023, this article explores the interactive relationship between exile politics and the MB’s survival action frames from a framing perspective. By mapping four successive phases highlighting its organisational trajectories to pursue survival, the article contends that the MB’s survival action frames result from the interactive relationship between failed mobilisation tactics and changes in the MB’s hosting environment which together affected and sustained intra-movement divisions. Following shifts in exile politics and inefficient mobilisation tactics to face the post-2013 Coup, the MB’s survival action frames included the organisational recentralisation of a demobilised and inactive movement and the re-setting of the group’s priorities amid unresolved leadership strife.

Courtney Freer and Naeman Mahmood, “An Islamist disadvantage? Revisiting electoral outcomes for Islamists in the Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies (July 2024). ABSTRACT: In this article, we interrogate the extent to which a so-called Islamist advantage existed prior to the Arab Spring by examining country cases often neglected in the literature on Sunni Islamism. We then assess the extent to which the presumed ‘ft of Islamist fortunes post-Arab Spring exists (a) solely in the Sunni sphere or extends to independent Shiʿi movements, and (b) is present in country cases less commonly studied: Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and Lebanon. We find overall that there is no difference in advantage or disadvantage between Sunni and Shiʿi Islamists; what matters more than the moment of the Arab Spring for understanding the future of Islamism writ large is inclusion of country case studies that are often neglected, like those of Iraq and Lebanon, which complicate assumptions made about Islamists in electoral politics in the Arab world and add nuance to the argument over the existence of an Islamist advantage.

Tina Zintl and Annabelle Houdret, “Moving towards smarter social contracts? Digital transformation as a driver of change in state–society relations in the MENA region,” Mediterranean Politics (July 2024). ABSTRACT: Digitalization has far-reaching yet under-researched impacts on state–society relations. This article addresses this gap and explores digitalization as a driver of change to social contracts. The conceptual framework explains how it changes (a) the state’s duty to grant protection, provision, and participation in exchange for legitimacy; (b) the modes of state–society interaction; and (c) the contracting parties with respect to their location and their relative power position. Based on a literature review and recent developments in digitalization, the article then discusses how this plays out in the MENA region. It shows that digital surveillance by authoritarian regimes often dominates over the states’ duty to protect their citizens. Spaces for political participation increase through social media and online platforms but often fail to translate into ‘offline’ mobilization. Digitalization can improve public service provision, but only for digitally-connected citizens. Thus, digitalization tends to enhance the relative power positions of MENA states even if states themselves partly depend on external actors for access to and control over digital technologies. Overall, digitalization is an important, structural driver of change to social contracts but pre-existing state–society relations and governance framework conditions lead to either more inclusive or rather more authoritarian social contracts.