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North Africa Studies: Politics
Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Politics Steve Heydemann, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 15, pp. 10442–10447, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd, with revisions made by the Editor.
Abstract This article reviews the development of Middle East politics as a field of study. It identifies prominent themes and questions that have shaped research on Middle East politics in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, focusing on comparative politics and comparative political economy. The article emphasizes how the relationship between the study of Middle East politics and the social sciences has changed over time. It concludes with a brief speculation about where this relationship is headed at the turn of the twenty-first century. It concludes with a brief overview of the Arab Spring events that shocked the politics of this region.
The study of Middle East politics has deep historical roots in the social sciences. The Middle East – defined here to include the region that stretches from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan in the east, and from Turkey in the north to the Arab Peninsula in the south – has figured prominently in a tradition of political and sociological-comparative research stretching from Max Weber to Karl Wittfogel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Broadly defined, this tradition has sought to understand why capitalism and democracy emerged first in the West, and how the initial appearance of these forms of economic and political organization in the West affected the developments of nonWestern parts of the world. For well over a century, social scientists have drawn, in particular, on the experience of the Ottoman Empire to study political institutions, social structures, and economic arrangements perceived as explicit counterpoints to those that sparked the rise of capitalism and the transition from absolutist to republican systems of rule in the West (Anderson, 1979). This tradition, in which the experiences of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states that formed in its wake are used as counterpoints to European experiences – often negative counterpoints – has had a lasting impact on the study of Middle East politics. It established a focus on absolutism, ‘predatory rule,’ despotism, and authoritarianism as central themes in social science research on the Middle East. The legacy of this tradition has been decidedly mixed. On the one hand, authoritarianism and personalistic modes of governance remain prominent issues in the study of Middle East politics today – appropriately so, given political conditions in the region (Heydemann, 1999; Weeden, 1999). Less positively, this legacy is expressed through research in which individual behavior and collective outcomes are understood in terms of deeply embedded cultural constraints – an essentially authoritarian political culture, for example – that reinforce patrimonialism, undermine prospects for democracy, and impede the development of institutions capable of securing economic growth. Such culturalist assumptions reinforce the impression of Arab (or Muslim) politics as exceptional. They diminish possibilities for integrating Middle Eastern cases into broader comparative frameworks or applying to social and political processes in the Middle East theories and methods that have been used
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productively in other settings. In practice, moreover, culturalist research has rarely escaped the tautological quality of many theories that rely on culture as an explanatory variable. Largely for this reason, culturalist arguments are less prominent in the study of Middle East politics today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Post-World War II Period After World War II, with the rise of the USA as a superpower, and the not unrelated emergence of comparative politics as an established subfield of political science in the USA, the study of Middle East politics made significant contributions to a number of important research programs in the social sciences. These included theories of political development, political decay, and praetorianism (military rule), as well as theories of dependent and peripheral development (Keyder, 1987; AbdelMalek, 1968). As early as 1956, for example, economic historian Charles Issawi studied the relationship between economic development and democracy in the Middle East, predating the more general work on this topic by Seymour Martin Lipset (1960). Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958) also influenced the subsequent development of modernization theory. His study was cited by Lipset and was noted, as well, in Almond and Coleman’s The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960), a volume that exerted considerable influence in the USA on the study of politics in the developing world for much of the 1960s and 1970s, both as a model to be followed and as the object of criticism. Samir Amin’s Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (1974) was an influential contribution to debates about the role of the industrialized North in imposing conditions of underdevelopment on the postcolonial states of the South. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) originated outside the social sciences, but has had a profound and widespread impact on the study of Middle Eastern politics and is central to the rise of postmodernism within the social sciences more generally. Said’s work, along with the writings of postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault, has generated significant interest in discursive and
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interpretive methods in the study of Middle East politics (Mitchell, 1988), and revitalized research on power and authority in relations between the Middle East and the West. Other important areas of research in which the Middle East has figured prominently include the study of nationalism, state formation, and state–society relations in the developing world, religion and politics, and social revolution – themes that continue to inform research on Middle East politics today. For much of the post-War period, therefore, the study of Middle East politics, especially in the USA, developed in a close and interactive relationship with the field of comparative politics and with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. During these years scholars of Middle East politics, like their colleagues who worked on other regions, made considerable progress in exploring such concerns as the experience of colonialism and how it influenced the trajectory of political and social life after independence, state formation, the construction of national societies, and the formation of national markets; the political economy of industrialization in the Middle East and the region’s incorporation into a global capitalist system; the role of new military elites and the rise of single-party authoritarian regimes; the incorporation of workers and peasants into the political arena and its effects on coalition building and regime formation; the rise of import substitution industrialization as the dominant economic development strategy in the region and the growing role of the state in the economy, as well as the relationship between private sectors and regimes that often pursued, and coercively implemented, highly redistributive social policies; the effects of regime type on a wide range of economic, social, and political processes; the rise of state-corporatist models of interest representation; and more recently the revitalization of ‘civil’ societies as sites of political contestation. While these issues were prominent in social science research on Middle East politics within the USA and provided the empirical foundations for theoretical developments in the field, research programs in Europe followed a somewhat different trajectory, less with respect to themes and issues – European scholars, like their colleagues in the USA, engaged issues concerning the state, modes of governance and power, the politics of economic development, and processes of social formation – than to methods and conceptual approaches. Disciplinary boundaries loomed less large among European scholars of Middle East politics, who preserved closer links between history and political science, than became the case in the USA, especially from the 1980s onward. It is also the case, however, that European traditions of linguistic–philological and Orientalist scholarship, as well as the legacy of having ruled the Middle East as colonial powers, were more evident in the concerns of European research programs than in those that developed within the USA. In addition, during the post-War period, the work of European scholars reflected a more assertive engagement with various strands of Marxist political theory than was evident in the Cold War atmosphere of the USA. This was manifest most productively in the development of a rich tradition of labor studies among European, especially French, scholars of Middle East politics. More recently, the presence of growing Middle Eastern communities within Europe has sparked considerable interest in issues such as the dynamics of migration from Muslim societies to Europe, the experience of
immigrant life among Muslims in Europe, the politics and political economy of a greater Mediterranean region that links, in particular, North Africa and southern Europe, as well as the impact of expanding Muslim populations on social relations and political processes in largely Christian European states. Within the Middle East, as well, research trends were and remain heavily influenced by the experience of colonialism. Higher education systems tend to be organized along lines similar to those found in the country that exercised colonial authority in a given place, with scholars in North Africa and Lebanon socialized into French modes of training and scholarship – as well as French academic networks – while training, research, and professional socialization of scholars in Egypt and Jordan reflects (though to a more modest degree) the influence of British rule. However, the most powerful influence on the study of contemporary Middle Eastern politics by scholars working in the Middle East is the repressive political environment found in most Arab states, and the resulting lack of financial support, data resources, and independent institutions capable of functioning as sponsors and promoters of social science research. The research environment in the region varies, however, and scholars in the Arab world continue to work, against the odds, to produce high-quality social science. In recent years, active and vibrant research communities in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon (among others) have established significant research programs on democratization, Islam and politics, civil society and the role of new social movements, the politics of economic liberalization, as well as regional and international relations. The state of social science research on Middle East politics in Israel reflects the influence on Israeli scholars of trends in American social science, including an emphasis on quantitative and formal methods. Work on Middle East politics also benefits from a more open research environment than elsewhere in the region. However, Israeli research programs also reflect the effects of the protracted and persistent Arab–Israeli and Palestinian–Israeli conflicts, both as a filter that shapes the perspectives of researchers and as a focal point of research programs themselves.
Politics and Society Since the early 1990s, and still in keeping with broader trends in the social sciences, scholars of Middle Eastern politics have focused attention on issues of gender, economic and political informality, local-level politics, identity politics, civil society, and the dynamics of social movements (Singerman, 1995; Norton, 1996). They have sought to integrate the experience of the Middle East into larger debates in the social sciences around such questions as authoritarianism and democratization (al-Naqib, 1991; Salame, 1994) and the comparative political economy of development (Waterbury, 1993; Waldner, 1999). Inevitably, however, the study of Middle East politics has also emphasized that which is distinctive about the region. Three aspects of Middle East politics have received particular attention from researchers over the past two decades. First, the relationship between Islam and politics, and the dynamics of politics in Muslim societies more generally have been and remain subjects of considerable interest (Eickelman
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and Piscatori, 1996). These became especially prominent in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the increasing visibility of militant Islamist movements and organized Islamist political parties from Morocco to Afghanistan. Second, the social, economic, and political consequences of the oil boom of the 1970s on Middle Eastern states and societies have also sparked a considerable body of research in Middle East comparative politics and comparative political economy that focuses on the fiscal sociology of the state. Perhaps the most enduring contribution of this research can be found in theories of the rentier or distributive state (Luciani and Beblawi, 1987; Chaudhry, 1997) that explore the political, institutional, and social implications of circumstances in which states and governments generate a significant share of their revenue from the sale of natural resources and are not dependent on the direct taxation of their citizens. Whether representative forms of governance can emerge where taxation (the direct extraction of resources from citizens) is low remains a matter of considerable interest in the study of Middle East politics. With the decline of oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s, the question of whether, and under what conditions, states that have not historically developed the capacity to tax might do so has also received some attention. Third, and not entirely unrelated to work on the political economy of oil, researchers in a number of disciplines and fields, writing from a variety of (often contending) perspectives, have developed research programs focused on the state in the Middle East. Again, this work has been situated largely within political science, and in the subfields of comparative politics and international relations, but has been a core concern of scholars in the Middle East and in Europe as well as in the USA. Here too, moreover, the state as a conceptual category has been approached from a wide range of perspectives, including many that have subjected the category to sustained critical scrutiny. Within comparative politics, one persistent debate has addressed the question of the exceptionalism of the Arab state; whether culture and history (the absence of an experience comparable to the Enlightenment, and the resulting lack of differentiation between religion and state are most often cited in this regard) combined to produce a distinctive form of state, one that defies ready comparison with states in other regions and, moreover, requires distinctive conceptual tools and a special analytic vocabulary if we are to make sense of it. Increasingly, however, researchers tend to operate on the contrary assumption and view the Arab state as simply one variant among a range of state forms. States in the Middle East are shaped by and subject to the same social, economic, and political processes that affect states everywhere, and there is a recognition that these processes are filtered through and experienced within particular historical contexts, institutional legacies, and cultural frames of reference that give state formation in the Middle East a distinctive quality (Zubaida, 1989; Ayubi, 1995). This starting point permits the development of research programs that draw on and contribute to general theoretical frameworks while accounting for both intraand interregional variations. In addition, questions about and critiques of the state in the Middle East have also served as the basis for a number of productive research programs. A concern with the fixity or fluidity of state borders in the case of Israel and Palestine served
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as the basis for Lustick’s general theory of how state boundaries change (1993). Mitchell (1991) has used Middle Eastern cases to explore how the impression of a boundary separating the state and society operates to construct stateness as a general attribute, and how this attribute is mirrored in (and, in his view, distorts) research on the state in political science. Migdal (1987) also drew on a nuanced understanding of the state in the developing world, including the Middle East, to explore how societies maintain a measure of autonomous power in the face of states that seem to possess an extraordinary capacity to intervene in and shape societies.
International Relations In international relations, the contingent quality of state sovereignty in the Middle East and the impact on state consolidation of regimes that were at times highly responsive to transnational, pan-Arab ideologies pose important challenges to neorealist theories of the international system. Pointing to the fluid, fragmented, and contested quality of stateness in the Middle East, scholars of international relations, both those more sympathetic and those more critical of neorealism, have used Middle Eastern cases to question the neorealist assumption that states are like units that operate as unified actors intent on maximizing their security in an anarchic international system. They have worked to develop theories of interstate behavior that account for variability in the nature of state interests and extend more weight to economic considerations, and to the role of norms, ideas, and institutions as determinants of policy making (Barnett, 1998; Mufti, 1996). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the study of Middle East politics stands in uneasy relationship to the social sciences. Within political science, sociology, and certain subfields of economics, significant research programs have emerged to explore processes of democratization, the transition from state- to market-based modes of economic governance, and the deepening of economic globalization. Yet, as noted earlier, the Middle East remains largely authoritarian, despite limited political openings in some states. The transition to markets has been partial and slow. Linkages between domestic and global markets vary considerably but typically are weak. Economic performance also varies widely, and though trends in the 1990s were positive, overall performance levels remain low. The effect of these conditions has been to limit opportunities for integrating Middle East cases into some current research agendas, notably but not exclusively in the subfield of comparative politics. In contrast to general trends in the discipline, therefore, the study of Middle East politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century has tended to focus less on democratization and democracy than on understanding how persistent authoritarian regimes adapt to changing domestic and international conditions, less on the transition to and consolidation of markets than on the limits of economic reform, less on the impact of global economic integration than on barriers to globalization, and less on developmental success than on persistent obstacles to development. Work on these questions has been profoundly important in explaining political outcomes in the Middle East and holds out significant theoretical value for the disciplines. Yet, they are, nonetheless,
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reflective of how the everyday-lived experience of politics in the Middle East has moved the study of politics along paths that differ from those that are grounded in the experiences of other regions in the developing world. Methodological issues have also constrained the inclusion of Middle East cases into broader research agendas. Generally, the study of Middle East politics rests on the use of casespecific, macrohistorical methods rather than the formal or quantitative methods that are now more broadly applied to the study of politics in other regions. The reasons for this are several, but the methodological orientation of research on Middle East politics results, in no small measure, from the lack of data resources that are needed to undertake quantitative research and a research climate that is not conducive to data collection and dissemination. Thus, while the continuing development of various institutionalist approaches holds out considerable potential for linking region and discipline, and for cross-regional comparative research that incorporates Middle East cases, prospects for building robust research programs that make use of quantitative and formal methods for the study of Middle East politics are limited, at least at present. Despite these concerns, current tensions in the relationship between the study of Middle East politics and the social science disciplines should not be overstated. Certainly, it should not be permitted to overshadow the presence of a large number of creative, analytically focused, and highly productive research programs both inside and outside the USA. As noted, researchers on Middle Eastern politics have made good use of and contributed to the development of new institutionalist methods. Comparative macrohistorical research coexists comfortably with case-specific but theoretically generalizable research programs that apply a wide range of methods – from archival, discursive, and interpretive to public opinion polling; from network and social movement theories to moral economy and rational choice – all of which are being used to ask important questions about contemporary political life in the Middle East and to engage the analytic concerns of the disciplines. Through attention to the dynamics of political institutions and institutional change; the organization and dynamics of local-level politics and social networks; business–state relations; the relationship between gender, power, and politics; the impact of new information technologies on political life; the formation and transformation of identities; new approaches to the study of culture and politics, and to the role of norms and ideas in political behavior – a list that is far from complete or comprehensive – scholars of Middle Eastern politics are pursuing research programs that not only resonate across regional boundaries but express increasingly sophisticated theoretical perspectives. On this basis, there is reason for optimism that the relationship between the study of Middle Eastern politics and the social sciences is now (again) becoming interactive, reciprocal, and mutually constructive.
A Postscript: Arab Spring On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi committed an act of self-immolation in Tunisia, which led to a series of protests that eventually unleashed widespread political conflict and change throughout the region, an event broadly called ‘Arab
Spring.’ Some countries were affected only mildly. Saudi Arabia faced only moderate protests, while larger protests forced Jordan’s King Abdullah to dismiss the government – not for the last time, as the king would have to dismiss several more governments in the face of mobilized public pressure. The Arab Spring had a more fundamental impact elsewhere, perhaps the most dramatic being the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s long-lived regime in Libya and Gaddafi’s eventual death in the civil war that erupted there. Ultimately, all countries of this region witnessed some degree of political contention, and in four countries leaders and regimes were brought down (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen). Strikes and organized demonstrations have been one fairly common trait of this wave of political change, and social media have been particularly prominent as tools for mobilization and strategic organization. Much like the collapse of state socialist regimes in East Europe in 1989, which also had a wavelike quality and appeared quite suddenly, Arab Spring was grounded in a combination of deeper institutional causes and proximal conditions. One quality shared by countries in this region was long-simmering public dissatisfaction with leading politicians and parties. Corruption, repressive politics, and other forms of injustice had marked political systems that had various authoritarian traits (with some, such as Libya, relatively more populist than others but still authoritarian). Further, the 2008 global economic crisis had also affected markets and employment in the region, leaving many average civilians unemployed or not well-off economically. These political and economic strains were exacerbated by inability of these authoritarian regimes to address social pressures, either through sufficiently robust welfare measures or through the kind of democratic politics (e.g., elections and turnover in leadership) that can act as an outlet for social discontent. Finally, these were not all docile societies. For example, there had already been stirrings of protest in Egypt and Tunisia before 2010; in Egypt, in particular, trade unions had become active, defending workers’ rights, calling strikes or other forms of industrial actions before 2010. Thus, in several countries there already was an existing organizational foundation for mobilizing and directing action, and experience with collective action. Social media facilitated exchange of ideas and information to aid that mobilization, although social media alone did not provoke or shape protest. The trigger that turned potential political contention into real social protest and action was Bouazizi’s act in December 2010, which he committed in response to his treatment by a local inspector and general discontent with corrupt police. His subsequent death in January 2011 brought together a wide swath of people (rights activists, lawyers, students, trade union representatives, etc.) also disaffected with Tunisia’s state. Protests in Tunisia in January 2011 began to spread elsewhere, in part because of a demonstration effect: citizens in one country might view successful protest elsewhere, and sharing similar dissatisfaction, become more likely to take action themselves. Protests in Tunisia quickly spread to Oman, Egypt, Morocco, and Syria, and by February 2011 Hosni Mubarak had stepped down from the presidency of Egypt (a position he had held through rigged elections since the 1980s), and Libya’s eventual civil war had begun with conflict in Benghazi. By the end of 2011, the army was maintaining some order in Libya and Egypt, although protests and violence continued to break
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out in urban areas and organized protest groups called for the military to transfer political authority to elected bodies and officials. Except in Syria, where a bloody civil war was dragging out, the politics of many countries of the Arab Spring had settled down to an extent; some had a change in government, while in others (e.g., Algeria) major protest had been repressed but had forced some government concessions (e.g., more social provisions or some political reforms). In Libya and Egypt, social discontent continue to break out on occasion, for example, the attack of the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi in September 2012, or the political crisis in Egypt in 2012 and 2013 during the brief tenure of President Mohamed Morsi, who was overthrown by the military in July 2013. The worst violence of the Arab Spring was in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad responded to protests with violent repression. This transformed the protest into armed resistance, and as a result Syria was engulfed in a civil war that continues to this writing and has so far claimed more than 120 000 victims. The ultimate effect of Arab Spring is impossible to predict at this point in time, given the newness and rapidity of events. While there have been changes in specific leaders, deeper institutional and structural changes have thus far been far weaker. Militaries continue to play important roles in these countries, and democratic procedures have not yet taken deep roots (although it is far too early to expect such a result). The Syrian civil war also contributed to the creation of the radical group ISIS, which controls territory within Syria and Iraq and has proven to be a major threat to all actors in the region. As for any revolutionary event, Arab Spring has had its romantic portrayals, and the upheaval may ultimately be more superficial than real – but the effects of such revolutions take time to emerge as well. What is clear is that the region is still not entirely stable and more change likely awaits elites and citizens before long.
See also: Islam: Middle East; Nationalism, Historical Aspects of: Arab World; Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Culture; Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Religion; Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Society and History; Orientalism.
Bibliography Abdel-Malek, A., 1968. Egypt, Military Society: The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser. Vintage Books, New York. Almond, G.A., Coleman, J. (Eds.), 1960. The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
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Amin, S., 1974. Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of UnderDevelopment. Monthly Review Press, New York. Anderson, P., 1979. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso Editions, London. Ayubi, Nazih NM., 1995. Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East. I B Tauris, London; New York. Barnett, M.N., 1998. Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order. Columbia University Press, New York. Chaudhry, K.A., 1997. The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Eickelman, D.F., Piscatori, J.P., 1996. Muslim Politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Heydemann, S., 1999. Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946–1970. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Issawi, C.P., January 1956. Economic and social foundations of democracy in the Middle East. International Affairs 27–42. Keyder, C., 1987. State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. Verso, London. Lerner, D., 1958. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Free Press, New York. Lipset, S.M., 1960. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Doubleday, Garden City, NY. Luciani, G., Beblawi, H. (Eds.), 1987. The Rentier State. Croom Helm, London. Lustick, I.S., 1993. Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank–Gaza. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Migdal, J.S., 1987. Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NY. Mitchell, T., 1988. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge University Press, New York. Mitchell, T., 1991. The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics. American Political Science Review 85 (1), 77–96. Mufti, M., 1996. Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Norton, A.R. (Ed.), 1996. Civil Society in the Middle East. Brill, Leiden, Holland; New York. al-Naqib, K.H., 1991. al-Dawlah al-tasallutiyah fi al-Mashriq al-’Arabi al-mu’asir: dirasah bin’iyah muqaranah. Markaz Dirasat al-Wahdah al-’Arabiyah, Beirut, Lebanon. Said, E.W., 1978. Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York. Salame, G. (Ed.), 1994. Democracy without Democrats?: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World. I B Tauris, London. Singerman, D., 1995. Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NY. Waldner, D., 1999. State Building and Late Development. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Waterbury, J., 1993. Exposed to Innumerable Delusions: Public Enterprise and State Power in Egypt, India, Mexico, and Turkey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York. Weeden, L., 1999. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Zubaida, S., 1989. Islam, the People and the State: Essays on Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East. Routledge, London/New York.
Abstract This article reviews the development of Middle East politics as a field of study. It identifies prominent themes and questions that have shaped research on Middle East politics in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, focusing on comparative politics and comparative political economy. The article emphasizes how the relationship between the study of Middle East politics and the social sciences has changed over time. It concludes with a brief speculation about where this relationship is headed at the turn of the twenty-first century. It concludes with a brief overview of the Arab Spring events that shocked the politics of this region.
The study of Middle East politics has deep historical roots in the social sciences. The Middle East – defined here to include the region that stretches from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan in the east, and from Turkey in the north to the Arab Peninsula in the south – has figured prominently in a tradition of political and sociological-comparative research stretching from Max Weber to Karl Wittfogel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Broadly defined, this tradition has sought to understand why capitalism and democracy emerged first in the West, and how the initial appearance of these forms of economic and political organization in the West affected the developments of nonWestern parts of the world. For well over a century, social scientists have drawn, in particular, on the experience of the Ottoman Empire to study political institutions, social structures, and economic arrangements perceived as explicit counterpoints to those that sparked the rise of capitalism and the transition from absolutist to republican systems of rule in the West (Anderson, 1979). This tradition, in which the experiences of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states that formed in its wake are used as counterpoints to European experiences – often negative counterpoints – has had a lasting impact on the study of Middle East politics. It established a focus on absolutism, ‘predatory rule,’ despotism, and authoritarianism as central themes in social science research on the Middle East. The legacy of this tradition has been decidedly mixed. On the one hand, authoritarianism and personalistic modes of governance remain prominent issues in the study of Middle East politics today – appropriately so, given political conditions in the region (Heydemann, 1999; Weeden, 1999). Less positively, this legacy is expressed through research in which individual behavior and collective outcomes are understood in terms of deeply embedded cultural constraints – an essentially authoritarian political culture, for example – that reinforce patrimonialism, undermine prospects for democracy, and impede the development of institutions capable of securing economic growth. Such culturalist assumptions reinforce the impression of Arab (or Muslim) politics as exceptional. They diminish possibilities for integrating Middle Eastern cases into broader comparative frameworks or applying to social and political processes in the Middle East theories and methods that have been used
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productively in other settings. In practice, moreover, culturalist research has rarely escaped the tautological quality of many theories that rely on culture as an explanatory variable. Largely for this reason, culturalist arguments are less prominent in the study of Middle East politics today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Post-World War II Period After World War II, with the rise of the USA as a superpower, and the not unrelated emergence of comparative politics as an established subfield of political science in the USA, the study of Middle East politics made significant contributions to a number of important research programs in the social sciences. These included theories of political development, political decay, and praetorianism (military rule), as well as theories of dependent and peripheral development (Keyder, 1987; AbdelMalek, 1968). As early as 1956, for example, economic historian Charles Issawi studied the relationship between economic development and democracy in the Middle East, predating the more general work on this topic by Seymour Martin Lipset (1960). Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958) also influenced the subsequent development of modernization theory. His study was cited by Lipset and was noted, as well, in Almond and Coleman’s The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960), a volume that exerted considerable influence in the USA on the study of politics in the developing world for much of the 1960s and 1970s, both as a model to be followed and as the object of criticism. Samir Amin’s Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (1974) was an influential contribution to debates about the role of the industrialized North in imposing conditions of underdevelopment on the postcolonial states of the South. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) originated outside the social sciences, but has had a profound and widespread impact on the study of Middle Eastern politics and is central to the rise of postmodernism within the social sciences more generally. Said’s work, along with the writings of postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault, has generated significant interest in discursive and
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interpretive methods in the study of Middle East politics (Mitchell, 1988), and revitalized research on power and authority in relations between the Middle East and the West. Other important areas of research in which the Middle East has figured prominently include the study of nationalism, state formation, and state–society relations in the developing world, religion and politics, and social revolution – themes that continue to inform research on Middle East politics today. For much of the post-War period, therefore, the study of Middle East politics, especially in the USA, developed in a close and interactive relationship with the field of comparative politics and with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. During these years scholars of Middle East politics, like their colleagues who worked on other regions, made considerable progress in exploring such concerns as the experience of colonialism and how it influenced the trajectory of political and social life after independence, state formation, the construction of national societies, and the formation of national markets; the political economy of industrialization in the Middle East and the region’s incorporation into a global capitalist system; the role of new military elites and the rise of single-party authoritarian regimes; the incorporation of workers and peasants into the political arena and its effects on coalition building and regime formation; the rise of import substitution industrialization as the dominant economic development strategy in the region and the growing role of the state in the economy, as well as the relationship between private sectors and regimes that often pursued, and coercively implemented, highly redistributive social policies; the effects of regime type on a wide range of economic, social, and political processes; the rise of state-corporatist models of interest representation; and more recently the revitalization of ‘civil’ societies as sites of political contestation. While these issues were prominent in social science research on Middle East politics within the USA and provided the empirical foundations for theoretical developments in the field, research programs in Europe followed a somewhat different trajectory, less with respect to themes and issues – European scholars, like their colleagues in the USA, engaged issues concerning the state, modes of governance and power, the politics of economic development, and processes of social formation – than to methods and conceptual approaches. Disciplinary boundaries loomed less large among European scholars of Middle East politics, who preserved closer links between history and political science, than became the case in the USA, especially from the 1980s onward. It is also the case, however, that European traditions of linguistic–philological and Orientalist scholarship, as well as the legacy of having ruled the Middle East as colonial powers, were more evident in the concerns of European research programs than in those that developed within the USA. In addition, during the post-War period, the work of European scholars reflected a more assertive engagement with various strands of Marxist political theory than was evident in the Cold War atmosphere of the USA. This was manifest most productively in the development of a rich tradition of labor studies among European, especially French, scholars of Middle East politics. More recently, the presence of growing Middle Eastern communities within Europe has sparked considerable interest in issues such as the dynamics of migration from Muslim societies to Europe, the experience of
immigrant life among Muslims in Europe, the politics and political economy of a greater Mediterranean region that links, in particular, North Africa and southern Europe, as well as the impact of expanding Muslim populations on social relations and political processes in largely Christian European states. Within the Middle East, as well, research trends were and remain heavily influenced by the experience of colonialism. Higher education systems tend to be organized along lines similar to those found in the country that exercised colonial authority in a given place, with scholars in North Africa and Lebanon socialized into French modes of training and scholarship – as well as French academic networks – while training, research, and professional socialization of scholars in Egypt and Jordan reflects (though to a more modest degree) the influence of British rule. However, the most powerful influence on the study of contemporary Middle Eastern politics by scholars working in the Middle East is the repressive political environment found in most Arab states, and the resulting lack of financial support, data resources, and independent institutions capable of functioning as sponsors and promoters of social science research. The research environment in the region varies, however, and scholars in the Arab world continue to work, against the odds, to produce high-quality social science. In recent years, active and vibrant research communities in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon (among others) have established significant research programs on democratization, Islam and politics, civil society and the role of new social movements, the politics of economic liberalization, as well as regional and international relations. The state of social science research on Middle East politics in Israel reflects the influence on Israeli scholars of trends in American social science, including an emphasis on quantitative and formal methods. Work on Middle East politics also benefits from a more open research environment than elsewhere in the region. However, Israeli research programs also reflect the effects of the protracted and persistent Arab–Israeli and Palestinian–Israeli conflicts, both as a filter that shapes the perspectives of researchers and as a focal point of research programs themselves.
Politics and Society Since the early 1990s, and still in keeping with broader trends in the social sciences, scholars of Middle Eastern politics have focused attention on issues of gender, economic and political informality, local-level politics, identity politics, civil society, and the dynamics of social movements (Singerman, 1995; Norton, 1996). They have sought to integrate the experience of the Middle East into larger debates in the social sciences around such questions as authoritarianism and democratization (al-Naqib, 1991; Salame, 1994) and the comparative political economy of development (Waterbury, 1993; Waldner, 1999). Inevitably, however, the study of Middle East politics has also emphasized that which is distinctive about the region. Three aspects of Middle East politics have received particular attention from researchers over the past two decades. First, the relationship between Islam and politics, and the dynamics of politics in Muslim societies more generally have been and remain subjects of considerable interest (Eickelman
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and Piscatori, 1996). These became especially prominent in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the increasing visibility of militant Islamist movements and organized Islamist political parties from Morocco to Afghanistan. Second, the social, economic, and political consequences of the oil boom of the 1970s on Middle Eastern states and societies have also sparked a considerable body of research in Middle East comparative politics and comparative political economy that focuses on the fiscal sociology of the state. Perhaps the most enduring contribution of this research can be found in theories of the rentier or distributive state (Luciani and Beblawi, 1987; Chaudhry, 1997) that explore the political, institutional, and social implications of circumstances in which states and governments generate a significant share of their revenue from the sale of natural resources and are not dependent on the direct taxation of their citizens. Whether representative forms of governance can emerge where taxation (the direct extraction of resources from citizens) is low remains a matter of considerable interest in the study of Middle East politics. With the decline of oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s, the question of whether, and under what conditions, states that have not historically developed the capacity to tax might do so has also received some attention. Third, and not entirely unrelated to work on the political economy of oil, researchers in a number of disciplines and fields, writing from a variety of (often contending) perspectives, have developed research programs focused on the state in the Middle East. Again, this work has been situated largely within political science, and in the subfields of comparative politics and international relations, but has been a core concern of scholars in the Middle East and in Europe as well as in the USA. Here too, moreover, the state as a conceptual category has been approached from a wide range of perspectives, including many that have subjected the category to sustained critical scrutiny. Within comparative politics, one persistent debate has addressed the question of the exceptionalism of the Arab state; whether culture and history (the absence of an experience comparable to the Enlightenment, and the resulting lack of differentiation between religion and state are most often cited in this regard) combined to produce a distinctive form of state, one that defies ready comparison with states in other regions and, moreover, requires distinctive conceptual tools and a special analytic vocabulary if we are to make sense of it. Increasingly, however, researchers tend to operate on the contrary assumption and view the Arab state as simply one variant among a range of state forms. States in the Middle East are shaped by and subject to the same social, economic, and political processes that affect states everywhere, and there is a recognition that these processes are filtered through and experienced within particular historical contexts, institutional legacies, and cultural frames of reference that give state formation in the Middle East a distinctive quality (Zubaida, 1989; Ayubi, 1995). This starting point permits the development of research programs that draw on and contribute to general theoretical frameworks while accounting for both intraand interregional variations. In addition, questions about and critiques of the state in the Middle East have also served as the basis for a number of productive research programs. A concern with the fixity or fluidity of state borders in the case of Israel and Palestine served
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as the basis for Lustick’s general theory of how state boundaries change (1993). Mitchell (1991) has used Middle Eastern cases to explore how the impression of a boundary separating the state and society operates to construct stateness as a general attribute, and how this attribute is mirrored in (and, in his view, distorts) research on the state in political science. Migdal (1987) also drew on a nuanced understanding of the state in the developing world, including the Middle East, to explore how societies maintain a measure of autonomous power in the face of states that seem to possess an extraordinary capacity to intervene in and shape societies.
International Relations In international relations, the contingent quality of state sovereignty in the Middle East and the impact on state consolidation of regimes that were at times highly responsive to transnational, pan-Arab ideologies pose important challenges to neorealist theories of the international system. Pointing to the fluid, fragmented, and contested quality of stateness in the Middle East, scholars of international relations, both those more sympathetic and those more critical of neorealism, have used Middle Eastern cases to question the neorealist assumption that states are like units that operate as unified actors intent on maximizing their security in an anarchic international system. They have worked to develop theories of interstate behavior that account for variability in the nature of state interests and extend more weight to economic considerations, and to the role of norms, ideas, and institutions as determinants of policy making (Barnett, 1998; Mufti, 1996). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the study of Middle East politics stands in uneasy relationship to the social sciences. Within political science, sociology, and certain subfields of economics, significant research programs have emerged to explore processes of democratization, the transition from state- to market-based modes of economic governance, and the deepening of economic globalization. Yet, as noted earlier, the Middle East remains largely authoritarian, despite limited political openings in some states. The transition to markets has been partial and slow. Linkages between domestic and global markets vary considerably but typically are weak. Economic performance also varies widely, and though trends in the 1990s were positive, overall performance levels remain low. The effect of these conditions has been to limit opportunities for integrating Middle East cases into some current research agendas, notably but not exclusively in the subfield of comparative politics. In contrast to general trends in the discipline, therefore, the study of Middle East politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century has tended to focus less on democratization and democracy than on understanding how persistent authoritarian regimes adapt to changing domestic and international conditions, less on the transition to and consolidation of markets than on the limits of economic reform, less on the impact of global economic integration than on barriers to globalization, and less on developmental success than on persistent obstacles to development. Work on these questions has been profoundly important in explaining political outcomes in the Middle East and holds out significant theoretical value for the disciplines. Yet, they are, nonetheless,
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reflective of how the everyday-lived experience of politics in the Middle East has moved the study of politics along paths that differ from those that are grounded in the experiences of other regions in the developing world. Methodological issues have also constrained the inclusion of Middle East cases into broader research agendas. Generally, the study of Middle East politics rests on the use of casespecific, macrohistorical methods rather than the formal or quantitative methods that are now more broadly applied to the study of politics in other regions. The reasons for this are several, but the methodological orientation of research on Middle East politics results, in no small measure, from the lack of data resources that are needed to undertake quantitative research and a research climate that is not conducive to data collection and dissemination. Thus, while the continuing development of various institutionalist approaches holds out considerable potential for linking region and discipline, and for cross-regional comparative research that incorporates Middle East cases, prospects for building robust research programs that make use of quantitative and formal methods for the study of Middle East politics are limited, at least at present. Despite these concerns, current tensions in the relationship between the study of Middle East politics and the social science disciplines should not be overstated. Certainly, it should not be permitted to overshadow the presence of a large number of creative, analytically focused, and highly productive research programs both inside and outside the USA. As noted, researchers on Middle Eastern politics have made good use of and contributed to the development of new institutionalist methods. Comparative macrohistorical research coexists comfortably with case-specific but theoretically generalizable research programs that apply a wide range of methods – from archival, discursive, and interpretive to public opinion polling; from network and social movement theories to moral economy and rational choice – all of which are being used to ask important questions about contemporary political life in the Middle East and to engage the analytic concerns of the disciplines. Through attention to the dynamics of political institutions and institutional change; the organization and dynamics of local-level politics and social networks; business–state relations; the relationship between gender, power, and politics; the impact of new information technologies on political life; the formation and transformation of identities; new approaches to the study of culture and politics, and to the role of norms and ideas in political behavior – a list that is far from complete or comprehensive – scholars of Middle Eastern politics are pursuing research programs that not only resonate across regional boundaries but express increasingly sophisticated theoretical perspectives. On this basis, there is reason for optimism that the relationship between the study of Middle Eastern politics and the social sciences is now (again) becoming interactive, reciprocal, and mutually constructive.
A Postscript: Arab Spring On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi committed an act of self-immolation in Tunisia, which led to a series of protests that eventually unleashed widespread political conflict and change throughout the region, an event broadly called ‘Arab
Spring.’ Some countries were affected only mildly. Saudi Arabia faced only moderate protests, while larger protests forced Jordan’s King Abdullah to dismiss the government – not for the last time, as the king would have to dismiss several more governments in the face of mobilized public pressure. The Arab Spring had a more fundamental impact elsewhere, perhaps the most dramatic being the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s long-lived regime in Libya and Gaddafi’s eventual death in the civil war that erupted there. Ultimately, all countries of this region witnessed some degree of political contention, and in four countries leaders and regimes were brought down (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen). Strikes and organized demonstrations have been one fairly common trait of this wave of political change, and social media have been particularly prominent as tools for mobilization and strategic organization. Much like the collapse of state socialist regimes in East Europe in 1989, which also had a wavelike quality and appeared quite suddenly, Arab Spring was grounded in a combination of deeper institutional causes and proximal conditions. One quality shared by countries in this region was long-simmering public dissatisfaction with leading politicians and parties. Corruption, repressive politics, and other forms of injustice had marked political systems that had various authoritarian traits (with some, such as Libya, relatively more populist than others but still authoritarian). Further, the 2008 global economic crisis had also affected markets and employment in the region, leaving many average civilians unemployed or not well-off economically. These political and economic strains were exacerbated by inability of these authoritarian regimes to address social pressures, either through sufficiently robust welfare measures or through the kind of democratic politics (e.g., elections and turnover in leadership) that can act as an outlet for social discontent. Finally, these were not all docile societies. For example, there had already been stirrings of protest in Egypt and Tunisia before 2010; in Egypt, in particular, trade unions had become active, defending workers’ rights, calling strikes or other forms of industrial actions before 2010. Thus, in several countries there already was an existing organizational foundation for mobilizing and directing action, and experience with collective action. Social media facilitated exchange of ideas and information to aid that mobilization, although social media alone did not provoke or shape protest. The trigger that turned potential political contention into real social protest and action was Bouazizi’s act in December 2010, which he committed in response to his treatment by a local inspector and general discontent with corrupt police. His subsequent death in January 2011 brought together a wide swath of people (rights activists, lawyers, students, trade union representatives, etc.) also disaffected with Tunisia’s state. Protests in Tunisia in January 2011 began to spread elsewhere, in part because of a demonstration effect: citizens in one country might view successful protest elsewhere, and sharing similar dissatisfaction, become more likely to take action themselves. Protests in Tunisia quickly spread to Oman, Egypt, Morocco, and Syria, and by February 2011 Hosni Mubarak had stepped down from the presidency of Egypt (a position he had held through rigged elections since the 1980s), and Libya’s eventual civil war had begun with conflict in Benghazi. By the end of 2011, the army was maintaining some order in Libya and Egypt, although protests and violence continued to break
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out in urban areas and organized protest groups called for the military to transfer political authority to elected bodies and officials. Except in Syria, where a bloody civil war was dragging out, the politics of many countries of the Arab Spring had settled down to an extent; some had a change in government, while in others (e.g., Algeria) major protest had been repressed but had forced some government concessions (e.g., more social provisions or some political reforms). In Libya and Egypt, social discontent continue to break out on occasion, for example, the attack of the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi in September 2012, or the political crisis in Egypt in 2012 and 2013 during the brief tenure of President Mohamed Morsi, who was overthrown by the military in July 2013. The worst violence of the Arab Spring was in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad responded to protests with violent repression. This transformed the protest into armed resistance, and as a result Syria was engulfed in a civil war that continues to this writing and has so far claimed more than 120 000 victims. The ultimate effect of Arab Spring is impossible to predict at this point in time, given the newness and rapidity of events. While there have been changes in specific leaders, deeper institutional and structural changes have thus far been far weaker. Militaries continue to play important roles in these countries, and democratic procedures have not yet taken deep roots (although it is far too early to expect such a result). The Syrian civil war also contributed to the creation of the radical group ISIS, which controls territory within Syria and Iraq and has proven to be a major threat to all actors in the region. As for any revolutionary event, Arab Spring has had its romantic portrayals, and the upheaval may ultimately be more superficial than real – but the effects of such revolutions take time to emerge as well. What is clear is that the region is still not entirely stable and more change likely awaits elites and citizens before long.
See also: Islam: Middle East; Nationalism, Historical Aspects of: Arab World; Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Culture; Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Religion; Near Middle East/North Africa Studies: Society and History; Orientalism.
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