World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

· NOT_DEFINED date: THU 22, 11.30 am-1.30 pm

· NOT_DEFINED institution: Kent State University (USA)

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Joshua Stacher

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: During the past decade, scholars of Middle East politics have produced a plethora of books, edited volumes, and journal articles on the problem of authoritarian regime persistence. Two areas that remain understudied, however, are state violence (particularly with regard to changes in the character of governmental repression and social dissent) and co-optation (expansion of regime power). Enriching the debate on authoritarianism and its adversaries, this panel’s papers examine recent modulations in state-society relations through the prism of contentious politics. Contributors thereby fuel a burgeoning research agenda that is grounded in the empirical developments of the Middle East while at the same time informs scholars of other regions. Under the rubric of addressing state violence and/or co-optation, these papers share a focus on changes taking place in the state’s approach to quelling or integrating dissent. For example, whereas the police and mukhaberet would previously suppress the opposition more or less overtly, many Arab governments are adopting new approaches (primarily legal) to silence criticism without employing raw force. Thus, today across the Arab world, presidents are criticized in newspapers daily, protests frequently occur from every imaginable area of discontent, and opposition groups openly plot new ways to resist their governing systems. Without minimizing the continued resilience and brutality of many governments, state officials are reproducing their control through selective repression, legalistic engineering, rebranded co-optation practices, and the use of Western democratic discourses. Each of the papers addresses a different aspect of these developments in Arab states that appear to have embarked on such a process (Post-structural approaches to Egyptian Authoritarianism, the evolution of the state’s expansion into religious politics in Tunis, the protest dissent-repression nexus in Jordan, and comparing institutions and co-optation in Egypt & Syria). The authors’ multi-disciplinary methods and findings help to widen the opportunities for subsequent faculty and graduate student research on state violence, contentious politics, and the expansion of authoritarian power.

Chair: Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick

Discussant: Raymond Hinnebush, University of St. Andrews

Paper presenter: Andrea Teti, University of Aberdeen, Democratisation and the Location of the Middle East in Contemporary Global Politics
The twinned ideas of ‘democracy’ and ‘democratisation’ are staples of contemporary global political discourse and Western foreign policies. In particular, the question of democratisation in the Middle East has received enormous attention on the basis of the claimed linkage between democratisation and political de-radicalisation. Alongside scholarship on the absence of a ‘Third Wave’ in the region, these failures have contributed to re-legitimising certain policies unsympathetic to democratisation, which in turn reinforce the radicalisation of anti-Western opposition in the region. This paper investigates the actual effects of democracy-promotion policies, and in particular it challenges the role which ‘democracy’ and ‘democratisation’ play in locating the Middle East within the contemporary global political order, analysing the ways in which these concepts and their ‘securitisation’ in particular have helped sustain rather than overcome global trends towards new forms of authoritarianism. The implications of this line of analysis are to not only to better understand what concrete impact democracy-promotion policies are having in the Middle East, but also how those policies might be modified to facilitate the democratisation process.

Paper presenter: Joshua Stacher, Kent State University, The Origins of Authoritarian Variance: Comparing Institutional Power in Egypt & Syria. The study of authoritarianism in the Arab world has largely manifested itself in single case country studies. Consequently, scholars have produced implicit but similar comparisons between states in the MENA region. Yet, differences among states in the Arab world abound. What explains the variation in regime power? This paper’s purpose is to historically explore how differing institution-building projects in Egypt and Syria led to diverging abilities for elites in these states to co-opt potential members. It explains the varying character of institutional regime power in two Arab countries (Egypt and Syria) often presumed to be more similar than different. This paper relies on field research from both countries, which includes interviewing and secondary materials. The findings complement the wider debate on contemporary Egyptian and Syrian politics as well as the work by a larger group of scholars currently researching elite politics, institutions, and authoritarianism.

Paper presenter: Laryssa Chomiak, University of Maryland, Islam, Inc.: Privatizing the Religious Sphere in North Africa.
How does the nexus of economic liberalization and religion provide new tools for authoritarian leaders to sustain their power? By examining recently developing financial-religious links in North Africa, I uncover the innovative strategies used by authoritarian states for co-opting oppositional voices and garner public support. As the religious sphere is being increasingly privatized through religious media-networks and planned Islamic banking systems, I examine the impact such state-corporate initiatives are having on North African populations, whether one of support, opposition, or indifference. I am hypothesizing that North African secular states are exhibiting greater religiosity, with the regime itself embracing the privatization of the religious sphere as a way of further legitimizing its authoritarian rule.

Paper presenter: Jillian Schwedler, UMass-Amherst, Rethinking Protest and Dissent in Jordan
Social scientists have begun to examine dissent and repression in a systematic manner. Commonly referred to as the ‘dissent-repression nexus’ this work has produced two contradictory sets of findings. On the one hand, dissent has consistently been found to increase repression in every statistical investigation. On the other hand, repression has been found to have every imaginable influence on dissent, including no influence at all demonstrating the instability of coercive effectiveness. What accounts for this imbalance in research findings? In this paper, I argue that this inconsistency and the potential imbalance in the response of dissidents to repression is due to limitations in the way dissent and repression are normally conceptualized, how the theoretical explanations are invoked to explain contention, and the ways in which data on dissent and repression are collected and analyzed. Using extensive primary and secondary sources, I explore the relationship between repression and dissent through a detailed study of protest activities in Jordan. Ethnographic research of several groups that participated in the protest events reveal the micro-details of planning and also the groups’ expectations about responses from security agencies.