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Authoritarianism and its Adversaries in the Arab World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Jill Crystal
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

While scholars outside the Arab world often link authoritarianism there to some dark cultural template involving religious doctrine or family structure, scholars of the region ground their explanations in political economy, in the historical evolution of the state, in patterns of state-society interactions, and in ideological appeals. To understand authoritarian outcomes, they draw attention to economic transformations, to social actors and the importance of organized social groups, to the role of state efforts to contain them in shaping political outcomes, to the repressive institutions that sometimes arise from this process, and to weaknesses of state ideologies that arise to justify authoritarian outcomes. Their work allows us to unpack the phenomenon of authoritarianism by reorganizing it into three different sets of forces: those that precipitate authoritarianism, those that sustain it, and those that resist it. The result is a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the range of factors that affect the likelihood of any state resorting to violence.

Type
Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1994

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References

1 Democratization has shaped recent scholarship on the Middle East, although this work is more recent and less widely known than scholarship on other regions. For an overview of work under way, see Cantori, Louis, “Democratization in the Middle East: Report, American Political Science Association,” American-Arab Affairs 36 (Spring 1991)Google Scholar, which summarizes papers from the 1990 San Francisco APSA meeting; Hudson, Michael, “After the Gulf War: Prospects for Democratization in the Arab World,” Middle East Journal 45 (Summer 1991)Google Scholar; Muslih, Muhammad and Norton, Augustus Richard, “The Need for Arab Democracy,” Foreign Policy 83 (Summer 1991)Google Scholar; the special issue of Middle East Report 174 (January 1992)Google Scholar on democracy in the Arab world; and Ellis Goldberg, Resat Kasaba, and Joel Migdal, eds., Rules and Rights in the Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming).

2 E.g., Pye, Lucian, “Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism,” American Political Science Review 84 (March 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, concerned primarily with postauthoritarian systems; or O'Donnell, Guillermo et al., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

3 Perlmutter, Amos, Modem Authoritarianism: A Comparative Institutional Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Linz, Juan, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Greenstein, Fred and Polsby, Nelson, eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3, Macropolitical Theory (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975)Google Scholar; idem, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and. Huntington, Samuel P. and Moore, Clement, eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modem Society (New York: Basic Books, 1970)Google Scholar. There is also the voluminous literature on bureaucratic-authoritarianism, e.g., Collier, David, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968)Google Scholar; Friedrich, Carl, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Friedrich, Carl and Brzezinski, Zbigniew, The Permanent Purge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955)Google Scholar. In the 1980s only a handful of new writers revisited the topic, e.g., Stohl, Michael and Lopez, George, eds., Government Violence and Repression: An Agenda for Research (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Stohl, and Lopez, , eds., The State as Terrorist: The Dynamics of Governmental Violence and Repression Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984).Google Scholar

4 E.g., Hurewitz, J. C., Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger, 1969)Google Scholar; Be'eri, Eliezer, Arab Officers in Arab Politics and Society (New York: Praeger, 1970)Google Scholar. Haddad, George, Revolution and Military Rule in the Middle East: The Arab States (New York: Robert Speller, 1971, 1973)Google Scholar; Fisher, Sydney, The Military in the Middle East (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. Clement Moore's treatment of Tunisia in Huntington and Moore (fn. 3) takes on authoritarianism directly, as does Halpern, Manfred, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, whdevotes a chapter each to “neo-Islamic totalitarianism” and “communist totalitarianism.”

5 The few exceptions suggest what rich material might be available if they did, e.g., Batatu's, Hanna use of the pre-1958 Iraqi police files in The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; or the unpublished records of state security forces in Kurdish Iraq presently in the hands of Middle East Watch.

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7 Or Kanan Makiya, who originally published Republic of Pear pseudonymously.

8 Linz deals with the definitional problem by focusing on what authoritarian regimes are not, defining these political systems as “nondemocratic,” in Linz (fn. 3, 1975), 177. He thus examines the degree to which political pluralism and political activism are absent (pp. 179–80).

9 Amin, Notably Samir, e.g., The Arab Nation (London: Zed Press, 1978).Google Scholar

10 E.g., al-Rumaihi, Muhammad, Beyond Oil: Unity and Development in the Gulf (London: Al Saqi, 1983).Google Scholar

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12 I develop this argument at length in Crystal, , Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Norton, Augustus Richard, “The Future of Civil Society in the Middle East,” Middle East Journal 47 (Spring 1993)Google Scholar, and the other pieces in this special issue on civil society edited by Norton. In the pipeline are other articles from Norton's civil society project, a rumored forthcoming issue on the topic in Middle East Report, and possibly an edited volume on the same by Roger Owen and Tim Mitchell. For some of Owen's preliminary thoughts, see Owen, , “State and Society in the Middle East,” Items 44 (March 1990)Google Scholar. See also Bianchi, Robert, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

14 Fuad Khuri and Emile Nakhleh likewise demonstrate the rich associational life in Bahrain. See Khuri, , Tribe and State in Bahrain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Nakhleh, , Bahrain (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1976)Google Scholar. On Kuwait, see Crystal (fn. 12); idem, Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil State (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Ghabra, Shafeeq, “Voluntary Associations in Kuwait: The Foundation of a New System?” Middle East Journal 45 (1991).Google Scholar

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16 Migdal, , Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

17 Sadowski, , Political Vegetables? Businessman and Bureaucrat in the Development of Egyptian Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991).Google Scholar

18 Three recent books take up the issue of economic liberalization in the region: Barkey, Henri, ed., Economic Crisis and Policy Response: The Politics of Economic Reform in the Middle East (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Niblock, Tim and Murphy, Emma, eds., Economic Liberalization in the Middle East (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Harik, Iliya and Sullivan, Denis J., eds., Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Steven Heydemann's work on the Syrian case very nicely sustains his conclusion that “economic liberalization can be, and frequently is, pursued without recourse to political liberalization. Syria's experience … calls into question the underlying assumption that economic and political reform are necessarily linked.” See Heydemann, “Taxation without Representation: Authoritarianism and Economic Liberalization in Syria,” in Goldberg, Kasaba, and Migdal (fn.l). See also his piece in Barkey.

19 This line of thought runs through many, many books on the region. For a recent example, see Kedourie, Elie, Politics in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

20 E.g., Pryce-Jones, David, The Closed Circle (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).Google Scholar

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22 A point made by Gause, F. Gregory III, “Sovereignty, Statecraft and Stability in the Middle East,” Journal of International Affairs 45 (Winter 1992).Google Scholar

23 She analyzes the following texts: the Iranian constitution; Jama'at-i-Islami's founder Abu'l A'la Mawdudi's Human Rights in Islam; the Azhar-affiliated Islamic Research Academy of Cairo's Draft of the Islamic Constitution; the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights; and Sultanhussein Tabandeh's A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.