Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T13:41:07.423Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Failure of the Regime or the Demise of the State?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2018

Rabab El-Mahdi
Rabab El-Mahdi*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In English the terms “political system” and “political regime” are used to distinguish different constructs. The first was initially developed by behavioralists such as David Easton and Gabriel Almond to replace the older, institutionalist term, the “state”; the second typically designates the arrangements for producing a government. In Arabic, though, the words “system” and “regime” both translate as niẓām. This piece argues that when millions of citizens across the Arab region came out in 2011 chanting al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām, those chants marked a critical juncture in a long process reflecting the end of not just the existing regimes, but also the states as we knew them. Whether defined in terms of governing institutions and capabilities, as Lisa Anderson, Ellen Lust, and Ariel Ahram do, or in terms of discourse, imagination, and symbolic power, as Ellis Goldberg and Charles Tripp do, the state was withering away long before the uprising. Concomitantly, the heightened levels of repression and shifts within official discourse by the changing ruling elite after the uprisings signal a perceived threat to the state itself, and not just to a particular regime. And while this piece focuses on Egypt, unlike some of the other contributions in this collection, I argue that the nation-state, as a conceptual and material construct, is being challenged.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 328 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Nowell Smith, Geoffrey (London: International Publishers, 1971)Google Scholar.

2 Chalmers, Douglas, “The Politicized State in Latin America,” in Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America, ed. Malloy, James (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).Google Scholar

3 I borrow this translation from Goldberg, Ellis and Zaki, Hind A., “After the Revolution: Sovereign Respect and the Rule of Law in Egypt,” Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law 16 (2010–11): 16–32.Google Scholar

4 Migdal, Joel, Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Ayubi, Nazih, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 1996)Google Scholar.

5 Human Rights Watch, “All According to Plan: The Rab'a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protestors in Egypt” (Human Rights Watch report, New York, 2014), accessed 7 December 2017, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/egypt0814web_0.pdf; Amnesty International, “Egypt: Human Rights in Crisis: Systemic Violations and Impunity: Expanded Amnesty International Submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review” (Amnesty International report, London, October–November 2014), accessed 7 December 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde12/034/2014/en/.

6 Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Aretxaga, Begoña, “Maddening States,” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 393–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77–96Google Scholar; Bendix, John, Bartholomew Sparrow, Bertell Ollman, and Timothy Mitchell, “Going Beyond the State?,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992): 1007–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Amnesty International, “Egypt: ‘Officially, You Do Not Exist’ – Disappeared and Tortured in the Name of Counter-Terrorism” (Amnesty International report, London, 2016), accessed 7 December 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde12/4368/2016/en/.

10 Gerth, Heinrich and Mills, Charles, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946)Google Scholar.

11 Baron, Beth, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

12 Hobsbawm, Eric, “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100 (1971): 20–45.Google Scholar