Congrès Mondial des Études sur le Moyen-Orient et l'Afrique du Nord

Barcelone du 19 au 24 Juillet 2010

· Institution: Centre for Middle East and North African Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney (Australia)

· Organisateur: Gennaro Gervasio

· Langue: English

· Description:
Scholarly debates on polities and societies in the Greater Middle East have focused mainly, if not exclusively, on the palais du pouvoir, the officially sanctioned loci of power. Much less attention has been devoted to the exploration of the so-called ‘hidden geographies’ of power that is political dynamics occurring outside or beyond institutional fora. By observing less frequented spaces of power, co-option, and negotiation, this interdisciplinary series of panels provides a new insight in the study of the intersection between policy-making and un-official political space in the Greater Middle East. Academic and non-academic observers have often portrayed the old picture of politics in the Greater Middle East as a small area reserved to local authoritarian rulers. This series of panel builds upon prior debates, to ultimately argue that hidden power plays a crucial role in regional political dynamics, both in support of official power and, less frequently, in opposition to it. Paper presenters will unveil and discuss three distinct yet not unrelated typologies of relationships between official and informal power in the region. To begin, tribal, religious and military powers ‘which have seldom received official sanction’ have offered indispensable political support to ruling elites.
Secondly, we have detected the emergence of new forms of informal powers, particularly in ‘post-populist’ States where regime stability is no longer the direct outcome of military coercion and large-scale political cooptation. In these cases, the ‘new asabiyyat’ ‘extensive networks of local patronage and clientele’ supported ruling elites during protracted crises of legitimacy through extensive electoral support, extended in exchange of informal recognition of actual localised powers.
Finally, these panels will recognise the emergence of a new dialectic between formal and informal powers in the Greater Middle East, namely one that probes the role of the ‘power of civil society’ as an alternative to authoritarian governance through the region. If, on the one hand, civil societies and formal opposition parties can be seen as challengers to established regimes, recent scholarship is arguing that it is the mere existence of these organizations that strengthens the regimes, as it offers them a much desired democratic façade. This new debate is a further demonstration of how a scientific investigation of the hidden geographies of power, based on extensive fieldwork and on collection of fresh data, is timely and topical.

Panel II: Redistributing power relations through informal alliances

This panel aims to investigate the role of informal alliances within the ruling elites of the Arab world, in order to explain both the ‘durability’ of ruling regimes and the new dynasticism. Particular attention will be granted to developments in the Arab Republics. Although recent debates pointed out that the durability of the authoritarian state in the MENA region can no longer be explained through ‘coercion’, there is great need for new research on the mechanisms of elite turnout in the Arab context. New insights in this regard will be offered by papers presented in this panel. Here, central attention will be focused on a) the pivotal role of local elites in ensuring the survival of the regimes, and b) the mechanisms through which new informal elites are de facto associated to central formal powers.

Chair: Andrea Teti (University of Aberdeen)

Paper presenter: Massimo Alone (NGO Project Manager, Palestinian Territories), “Traditionalism, religion and politics in the West Bank: the cases of Hebron and Nablus”
Hebron and Nablus (the most important urban centres in the contemporary West Bank) have for many centuries hosted a vibrant multicultural/multiethnic society, while occupying a pivotal role in the regional trade system. With the progressive deterioration of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the socio-urban landscapes of the two centres had been drastically changed, and most of their old features have now been lost. The socio-political decline experienced by Hebron and Nablus is an indicator of major trends emerged in the wider Palestinian political landscape, in which power relations are often developed as function of clashes erupted between official political actors/institutions, ‘informal’ and ‘traditional’ powers. This paper is focused on the interaction of official and unofficial sources of power in the contemporary urban settings of Hebron and Nablus, in order to unveil the interactive patterns connecting traditionalism, religion and politics in the respective local contexts.

Paper presenter: Lorenzo Trombetta (Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’), “Beyond the party: patterns of elite turnover in Syria between the two Al-Asads”
This paper aims to analyse major shifts occurred within the Syrian political system between the 1990s and the first presidential mandate of Bashar al-Asad. The research is focused on the role(s) played by different factors - above all ‘asabiyya and Islam in its various rhetorical and practical formulations - not only in legitimising the authority inside and outside the regime, but also in defining the informal access rules to the inner circles of power. Ultimately, this paper delves into the nature of the different circles of power active under the formal and uncontested umbrella of Ba’th party supremacy.

Paper presenter: Larbi Sadiki (University of Exeter), Whither Arab Republicanism: Neo-Dynasticism & State-Making/Unmaking
What is the future of Arab republicanism (whatever that means)? What is the nature of the 'new’ asabiyyat (solidarities) contesting or vying for the occupation or re-occupation of the Arab state? The central proposition of this paper is that the tension between the politics of ‘neo-dynasticism’ and the imperatives of republicanism is fundamental to understanding the process of state privatisation in several Arab states, with special reference to the Arab Maghrib. The analysis has two dimensions, to unpack two paradoxes. Paradox One: Ruling families and dependent interests seem to be bent on excluding or eliminating potentially viable solidarities, thus undermining ‘competitive’ asabiyyah as understood by Ibn Khaldun. Paradox Two: political re-alignment by enacting narrow nepotistic and primordial ties is dismantling the fragile Arab ‘republics’ - or what is left of them. The tension this papers attempts to explain does not bode well for the Arab state.

Paper presenter: Noah Bassil (Macquarie University, Sydney), “Re-inventing tribal power in Darfur”
This paper aims to examine the efforts by the National Islamic Front government to employ ‘tribal’ elites as a means of countering the growing political radicalisation of Darfuri society in the 1990s. Darfur’s educated elite, in particular, had come to be considered a threat to the power of the National Islamic Front (NIF). The Islamists on the one-hand and pro-SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) secularists on the other had begun to agitate against the failure of the NIF government to resolve the chronic shortage of state services and growing impoverishment in the region. In 1996, the government responded by restoring the tribal administration system which had been long abandoned in urban and semi-urban Darfur. This paper explores the tensions that the new policy created and the way that the government’s efforts to re-tribalise Darfur sowed the seeds of anti-government agitation in the region in the late 1990s and civil war in the region from 2003.