I begin the analysis of oil-financed institutionalized practices with a focus on government transfers and subsidies, highlighting the variation in access to resources in Gulf monarchies. I describe various types of transfers: 1) universal – those, such as free health care and subsidized household utilities, which all citizens enjoy; 2) particularist – those which are extended to specific communities – as in allowances to members of tribes or royal families and contracts to business elites; 3) idiosyncratic – as in funds to men to assist with their marriage expenses. I note changes to government distributions from mid-2014 and the oil price downturn. I then explore matters of equity and exclusion, highlighting those social categories who are privileged and those who are discriminated against in access to distributions in these states. I argue that the hierarchization of society and the related variation in access to resources are both integral to the shaping of the national community and a means for the state to exercise control insofar as key social categories are appeased via the relative marginalization of others.

Chapter 7 is on the limits of Qajar political authority and imperial rule. The chapter focuses on the case of Khurasan in the early nineteenth century, when the Afshars, under the leadership of Nadir Mirza, a scion of Nadir Shah, repeatedly rebelled against Qajar rule and refused to send taxes and tributes. It explains how the practices discussed in prior chapters were ultimately unsuccessful in extending Qajar authority in Khurasan.

If the war in Afghanistan, even more than that in Iraq, was meant to win the hearts and minds of the locals so they would not sponsor the terrorists we were seeking to defeat, how were Western forces supposed to accomplish the task – or indeed, know when they had accomplished the task? The answer, at least initially, was what was called the Human Terrain project, which might as well have been called the anthropologists full employment scheme, as it sought to use anthropologists to guide Western forces in assessing local support. Coupled with the American administration’s naturalistic belief that once terror states were torn down democracy would spring up unaided, the project was a colossal failure. By tracing the assumptions that went into this particular encounter, we can, perhaps, more readily avoid such actions in the future.

Tribes are often seen as territorial, pugnacious, and collectivized. In fact, they are quite resilient, individualistic, and readily accepting of others’ practices. When one turns to the law, we can see these features at work in the Berber and Arab tribes of the Middle East, both currently and historically. By starting with the practices of the Berbers of North Africa and then comparing the features they exhibit in their customary law – both substantive and (more importantly) procedural – the similarities to Islamic law are striking. Moreover, it is suggested, this is not surprising, as much of the procedural aspects of classical and modern Islamic law developed out of the tribal background of the Prophet’s day and finds additional support in the precepts of sacred texts. Thus, the comparison of Berber tribal law and Islamic law underscores the continuity of Islamic law, one reasons why it could spread into diverse regions of the Middle East and North Africa so quickly, and why we need to see the spread of Islam not simply as having been carried by military conquest and economic contact but by a form of law that readily resonated with the tribes the new religion encountered.

This famous Indian law case concluded that tribal nations lack criminal authority over non-Indians. Two white defendants were charged in Suquamish tribal court for criminal acts at the Suquamish annual Chief Seattle Days celebration. The Court concluded that tribal governments have lost certain attributes of sovereignty pursuant to their dependence on the federal government. This case is ripe for a feminist re-write due the extremely high rates of violence perpetrated by non-Indians against Native women.

In Jordan, social order has historically emerged as a result of the regime’s laws, policies and institutions, but also as a result of practices established and modified from above and below. This chapter lays the ground for the book’s subsequent examination of how the Public Security Directorate intervenes into citizens’ lives and how citizens have recourse to the police, by tracing the emergence of several hegemonic projects in the Kingdom. These projects are largely grounded in the nature of patron–client alliances forged since the establishment of the modern state between the Hashemites and the East Bank Transjordanian population on the one hand, and Western liberal democracies on the other. Whilst uneven and increasingly amalgamated, these alliances have supported the dissemination of a tribal order, which for several decades enjoyed a large degree of hegemonic consent. and more recently a ‘neoliberal-civic’ order, which is facing an appreciable counter-hegemonic pushback from below and paradoxically fostering an increased reliance on kinship networks.

The chapter shows how Jacob Grimm’s idea of culturally autonomous peoples was troubled by the intimate interactions that he uncovered in his historical scholarship on ancient German tribes. Seeking to unify his knowledge of diachronic linguistics and ethnic history in a final work, Grimm paid special attention to the one thing that had survived of the myriad tribes – their names – but also conceded that names were always generated by outside observers; names, Grimm admitted, were never chosen, always given. When Jacob Grimm explored the prehistory of Germany, then, he found not proud acts of autonomous self-naming by nations, but only boundary-defining encounters between groups and peoples. Grimm suspected that such cultural encounters had first become visible within the structures of literate imperial civilizations that housed multiple peoples and languages. Indeed, the practice of philology itself with its comparative grasp of several languages and cultures was an imperial phenomenon. The nationalist philologist, Jacob Grimm’s own writings ironically suggested, was the inheritor of the transnational and polyethnic empire rather than self-enclosed Germanic tribe.

This chapter discusses the changing role of tribes in Kurdish politics and society. It focuses mainly on Turkey but also considers ‘Kurdish situations’ in Iraq, Syria and Iran. It provides a historical overview of the developments and suggests that the tribal factor has been one of the major determinants of Kurdish politics throughout the twentieth century. It is thus no wonder that French and British Mandate officers, as well as Turkish, Iranian, Syrian and Iraqi authorities, have paid specific attention to tribes and tribalism in Kurdistan. The sociopolitical developments in the second half of the twentieth century that have significantly transformed their role in Kurdish politics and society are highlighted before an assessment of their role in the current period is provided.

This chapter explores the gulf that existed in British India between theories of linear boundaries and unitary sovereign territory on the one hand, and precarious practices of bordering on the other. It analyses three distinct periods of bordering common to the northwest and northeast frontiers. In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials sought to instantiate partially porous borders that would provide security while allowing themselves freedom of action in frontier regions. The limitations of these schemes led to a widespread flurry of bordering in the 1860s and 1870s led by administrators ‘on the spot’. Much of this activity contradicted orders from superiors, and took the form of breaking existing boundaries as well as instantiating new ones. A third period, around the turn of the twentieth century, saw heightened attention to international boundaries. These borders remained fragmented and limited. They also had disruptive effects on internal boundaries, reopening questions over where the frontier began.

Chapter 1 starts with a critical juncture that installed a new pattern with the political surge of armies in many Arab states. Newly independent states engaged in the complex task of building their armed forces, also as a symbol of their newly gained sovereignty. During this foundational period, the complex processes of nation- and state-building went hand in hand with the politicization of the officer corps so that the army was propelled as the founder of new, postcolonial political orders and as a specific incubator, in control of real power and endowed with huge power resources. Within this general trend, some militaries were much more submitted to social trends and penetration by societies in the form of ethno-confessional or tribal dimensions, when compared with the relative closure of the Egyptian armed forces to society and its dynamics. Rather than their exhaustion in the framework of national armies, subsequent political developments witnessed their enhancement, as exemplified by Syria and Yemen. And, in this overall picture of heightened militarization in the Arab World, Tunisia appeared as the negative and exceptional case with its armed forces remaining a subservient part of the (civilian) Tunisian state and regime alike.

This chapter highlights the primary features of politics and society in the Persian Gulf from the rise of civilization to World War I. It provides a survey of state-tribe relations in the Gulf from antiquity until the introduction of European powers. It will then turns to a consideration of the triangular relationship between states, tribes, and foreign powers in the Gulf, with an emphasis on the period of British supremacy. It identifies the appropriate theoretical tools pertaining to tribes and tribal politics in the Arabian Peninsula, which can be used to better understand how British intervention was viewed by the tribally organized societies situated around the Gulf's perimeter. The advent of nationalism in Iran and the consolidation of Iran's frontiers beginning in the late Qajar period are discussed as well as the waves of Iranian immigration that laid the foundations of politics and society in the Gulf Arab shaykhdoms. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the profound changes that were beginning to take shape in the regional system on the eve of World War I.

The notion of the ‘tribe’ is perhaps the most (ab)used socio-political category when it comes to contemporary political discourse on Afghanistan. Following on from the alternate construction of Afghanistan as a failed state, as a frontier and from debates about ‘Af-Pak’, Chapter 3 shows the ways in which a particular lens through which the early East India Company administrators tried to comprehend the people they encountered has become a definitive marker of Afghan society, polity and culture today. The discussion traces the genealogy of the term ‘tribe’ before moving on to an examination of the problematic knowledge practices that underpin this over-determined and misleading Afghan ‘way of life’.

Having grown up in an industrial township, the author reflects upon housing that was conditional and retractable, being linked to the job, as well as a means through which one’s socio-economic location was visibly reinforced. This chapter focuses on a cement factory, and the way businesses control a particular landscape, the mineral wealth and other natural resources, without having either historical or cultural roots in the land, and the relative powerlessness of indigenous communities that were the original inhabitants.

The Libyan case study in Chapter 3 reveals how harrowing the introduction of democratic elections can be in countries without national unity or any of the attributes of a modern state. Qaddafi’s ideology of a stateless, egalitarian society based on an idiosyncratic blend of Islamic and Marxist concepts left Libya’s transitional regime largely without a bureaucratic apparatus to implement policies. Qaddafi had also reinvigorated Libya’s tribal system by favoring his own and punishing the region and tribes that were the base of support for the prior monarchical regime. Competitive elections in Libya were implemented in a country without a national military that could monopolize the use of violence. In its place, during the civil war, a welter of regional, local, tribal, and ideological militias – some more powerful than the “national military” – emerged and prevented transitional governments from being able to provide peace and security for Libyans. There was also a military strongman in Libya, General Haftar, seeking to utilize the near anarchic conditions to forge a military authoritarian regime – by reining in the militias and providing desperately needed security.

This chapter aims to consider how deep reciprocity lies in humans, by looking at some of the evidence on how tribal communities live. Although extant tribal communities have invariably been touched by the modern world, they perhaps offer a reasonable approximation of the practices conducted in human hunter-gather societies for tens of thousands of years. Reciprocity – in both its positive and negative forms – is of fundamental importance to the functioning of tribal communities. Here, people reciprocate over almost everything – e.g. through sharing meat, childcare responsibilities, wisdom etc. – and within and between communities, gifts are used to bind and obligate. Moreover, the threat of negative reciprocity discourages the transgression of social norms and attempts to exert power. In tribal communities, it is likely that reciprocity evolved organically for the good of the group, but as societies became larger and more atomised, creating opportunities for people to act on egoistic motivations with less fear of detection, a form of social contract was perhaps needed to nurture and sustain the socially beneficial norm of reciprocity.