Does the US administration exercise more informal influence over the World Bank when it has less control over US bilateral aid because of opposition from Congress? Replicating four studies of the World Bank, we show that years with a divided US government account for earlier findings of informal influence. This link between donor domestic politics and the exercise of influence in multilateral settings is important for understanding informality in international organizations and provides an alternate explanation to persistent questions about the role of international organizations in the international political economy.

Foreign aid is given from a variety of motives, not as a rule rationally ordered by the donor governments. Some is, and some is not, treated as of high importance. Thus each national aid offering is likely to be a diverse collection of disparate items, hardly worthy of the name ’programme’, with its own idiosyncratic character. Australia’s aid in 1971 has the superficial appearance of being motivated to an unusual degree by geography. This geographical pattern is not accidental. Since the second world war, Australian foreign policy has been much concerned with proximity. Australian aid has also been subject to little public cricitisim, either in principle of in detail. The magnitude, achievements and failures of Australian aid are therefore very largely the resultant of the efforts of officials in the various interested departments.

Economic tradecraft is a set of duties, responsibilities and skills required of diplomats working in economic affairs. It is a key instrument in the diplomatic tradecraft toolbox. As is the case with their colleagues in the political career track, economic officers work both at diplomatic missions abroad and at headquarters. On the surface, it may appear that a country’s economic and commercial diplomats do the same type of work abroad, but that is not quite the case. Economic officers inform policymaking at headquarters by monitoring and analyzing economic trends and developments in the receiving state. They also advocate for host-government policies aimed at leveling the playing field for companies from the home country and against regulations that hurt those businesses. Commercial diplomats directly help industries and individual companies in starting or expanding business and investment in the host country. Conversely, they facilitate investment by local firms in the home country.

The period from 1945 to 1960 was a mixture of the darker aspects of the time and the brighter aspects of the succeeding period. While there were disorder, division, and war, many of the conditions for the subsequent development were provided during this period. South Korea became an exception among the ex-colonies by escaping from socialism and being closely integrated with advanced capitalist countries. The country built a system whereby private enterprises faced workers with poor labor rights while carrying out the land reform. After the war, the growth rate was not impressive, as the prevalent government failure made it impossible to overcome the market failure. Yet import-substituting industrialization proceeded, through which chaebol emerged as a major player in the economy. The country implemented disinflation, enhanced education level, and began to promote exports, providing a condition for future growth, but the former two rather helped precipitate a crisis in 1960.

This chapter explores the limits of Lyndon Johnson’s capacity to empathize with and understand the peoples of the decolonizing world during his presidency and the implications of his experience for the America he left behind. It traces Johnson’s view of the decolonizing world in the context of the Cold War, showing how his understanding of revolutionary nationalism and the social, political, and economic problems left behind by European colonialism evolved – or failed to evolve – alongside his increasingly progressive definition of democracy at home. Acknowledging his truly ambitious vision of a “global Great Society,” which promised innovative global health, education, and anti-poverty initiatives to the Third World, the chapter ultimately shows how Johnson failed to fulfill his promises to redefine US national interests in the world around compassion for the marginalized. Instead, in his dealings with Third World leaders, he often reverted to the kind of transactional power politics that had served him so well in the Senate, failing to see how central the value of self-determination was to anti-colonial movements and their representatives. In the final analysis, this chapter uses Johnson’s example to investigate the limitations of compassion in US foreign relations more broadly.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

We turn from Raqqa – a site where the absence of connective ties deprived the Islamic State of citizen trust – to Saraqeb, where the bonds of solidarity heavily informed the local council’s governing model and authority. In late 2012, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) campaign made Saraqeb the first liberated town in northern Syria. Before the war, this small city of 50,000 inhabitants relied on agriculture and iron and oil production industries. Its location was important due to its proximity to Idlib City and its position along the main artery running from Turkey to Hama Governate further south.1 A local FSA affiliate, together with the locally bred Islamist militia, Ahrar al-Sham, succeeded in liberating the town from the Assad regime in November 2012.

We have worked to establish, throughout this book, that institutional closeness is both an important and understudied good for rebels striving to achieve authoritative rule. We explored various forms of closeness through connection and the means by which they mediated the management of coercion and capital in local insurgent-controlled communities. We also considered the possibilities and limits of these social solidarities to compensate for these young institutions’ material deficiencies. But, ultimately, absent the sinews of national institutions capable of binding them to one another, even the most authoritative of local opposition councils, while markers of profound political change, would remain perpetually disaggregated in structure and effect. Therefore, in this penultimate chapter, we move from the local level of insurgent politics up to the national level to examine the opposition institution of the Syrian Interim Government (SIG) that was meant (and failed) to bring the counter-state together.1

Whereas rents in conquest petrostates have been a source of relatively peaceful authoritarianism, this has not been the case in many Muslim countries that do not produce oil. Muslim non-oil producers – many of whom were also exposed to the institutional legacy of Muslim conquest – have tended to experience more frequent and violent political upheaval since the 1960s. This chapter leverages a quasi-natural experiment of oil price driven foreign aid disbursements to show that buoyant levels of foreign aid receipts strengthened dictatorship in Muslim non-oil producers, but their subsequent decline led to heightened political instability in the form of civil war. However, despite this greater political upheaval (during periods of lower aid inflows), Muslim recipients remained staunchly non-democratic

Protest in the face of authoritarian rule necessitates a kind of audacity rarely, if ever, called for in daily life. When uprising turns to revolt and revolt to civil war, new questions arise: What comes next? What combination of suffering and joy does the future hold? And to whom should one now turn to manage those matters previously entrusted to the state? Even as new political possibilities arise, the stuff of ordinary life does not disappear but instead must be managed on terms that are both newly expansive and constrained. As people confront the hopes and hardships that come with rebellion, bread must be baked, crimes punished, and garbage collected.

When we turned to the besieged Damascene suburb of Darayya, we found a very different narrative emerging around the production and evolution of rebel governance from those in Raqqa and Saraqeb. Darayya, a mere 8 kilometers from the country’s capital, sat close to the regime’s military airport, the General Intelligence Service Headquarters, and the Interior Ministry.1 The accounts from this place were not of people controlled by an occupying rebel force or an emergent limited access order, but rather a community – rebels included – that had cohered as the target of a sustained, merciless siege by the regime on account of its early and enthusiastic participation in the uprising.

When we turned to Aleppo, we discovered a cityscape that was more complicated than those of Raqqa, Saraqeb, and Darayya. Its battle lines crisscrossed the city, continually shifting during our period of study, making each neighborhood its own unique nucleus in an atomized space. Aleppo is the oldest and second largest Syrian city. Known for its mercantile past and modern industrial present, the city had approximately 3 million residents before the conflict began. The first wave of protests began in 2011, and the city council came into being in March 2013 and was staffed by over 550 personnel by 2016.1

Among political economists, the prevalence dictatorship and civil conflict captures the central features of societies afflicted with political violence. Accordingly, this chapter adopts this terminology and develop an analytical framework to better understand why many Muslim societies are inflicted with varying and heightened levels of political violence. The chapter identifies patterns in dictatorship and civil war in Muslim societies, relative to non-Muslim societies; and how they vary across oil and non-oil producing countries. These empirical patterns motivate a discussion of how variation in preexisting institutional structures and sources of nontax government revenue (rents) may explain these patterns in political violence. This discussion identifies tensions in existing theoretical accounts, leading the author to develop a formal model. The model shows that increases in rents can entrench dictatorship, while a decline in rents may facilitate peaceful transitions to democracy or lead to the outbreak of civil war. Societies whose preexisting institutional structures encourage “sharing” government resources with the opposition are more likely to transition to democracy. The model’s hypotheses form the basis of book’s subsequent empirical analysis.

As the Syrian uprising took a violent turn, armed fighters and civilian leaders alike carved out insurgent micropolitical economies across the country’s contested territories. Raqqa City was the first provincial capital to fall from the regime’s control into the hands of opposition forces. The city elected its first opposition council, the Raqqa city council, in early 2014, but the council proved short-lived. By mid-2014, a zealous band of foreign fighters had consolidated control over the city with the aim of establishing a caliphate that would transcend the Westphalian state system and manifest an extreme vision of Islamic rule. These aspiring governors quickly established a monopoly over coercion and availed themselves of a range of capital assets through access to natural resources, looting, and various forms of taxation in the service of their state-building effort. Our close reading of accounts from the city of Raqqa between 2014 and 2016 revealed the corresponding emergence of tight forms of social control as well as the demonstrated capacity to deliver a wide array of key services. In these ways, the so-called Islamic State proved to be a paragon of rebel governance, mobilizing key forms of material power to erect a robust new political order.

The institutions that constitute a rebel government have long been understood and evaluated in comparable terms to those of a state government, the only difference being orientation (i.e. against versus on behalf of the state). Similarly, the doctrine underpinning modern state-building and counterinsurgency campaigns, repurposed in Syria in the service of a “good” rebellion, has emphasized the import of rationalized governance in winning the population’s support, its “hearts and minds.” In this chapter, we consider the limits of employing rational legitimacy as a conceptual outcome and offer our own – institutional closeness – as a theoretical alternative with distinct analytical possibilities for the study of insurgent rule.