Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics

Larbi Sadiki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138047631
• eBook ISBN: 9781351692595
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the Handbook problematizes Middle East politics through an interdisciplinary prism, seeking a melioristic account of the field. Thematically organized, the chapters address political, social, and historical questions by showcasing both theoretical and empirical insights, all of which are represented in a style that ease readers into sophisticated induction in the Middle East.

It positions the didactic at the centre of inquiry. Contributions by forty-four scholars, both veterans and newcomers, rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis. Substantive themes include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Like any field of knowledge, the Middle East is constituted by texts, authors, and readers, but also by the cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts within which diverse intellectual inflections help construct (write–speak) academic meaning, knowing, and practice. By denaturalizing notions of singularity of authorship or scholarship, the Handbook plants a dialogic interplay animated by multi-vocality, multi-modality, and multi-disciplinarity.

Targeting graduate students and young scholars of political and social sciences, the Handbook is significant for understanding how the Middle East is written and re-written, read and re-read (epistemology, methodology), and for how it comes to exist (ontology).

1
Writing Middle East politics

A field in transit

Larbi Sadiki

The Middle East (regardless of what geographical elasticity is applied) seems to be devoid of the rules of engagement in a region which, even parsimoniously, give the modicum of a system. That is, a multi-centred network with rules that inform inter-state behaviour. Externally, the state-system is under stress and duress, fragmenting in many parts, or functioning with seemingly compromised sovereignty. Questions arise about whether colonialism, as European powers traded off Middle Eastern lands and their natural resources (Fitzgerald 1994) has really ended for “independent” Middle Eastern states. Have they become subject to re-colonization by other means, as exemplified in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq (Gregory 2004)? More quietly, military bases dot several Arab states as foreign fleets surround the region’s waters, all part of a creeping, unabashed militarism justifying American “empire,” framed, since 2001, by the War on Terror¹ (Johnson 2004). Egypt has at least temporarily ceased to be an Arab centre. Other states, too, have receded in projecting influence or exuding a sense of a sub-system (Algeria, Iraq, and Syria). Palestine is increasingly looking more and more like a dream. Internally, within many states, rules about who governs, “who gets what, when and how” (Lasswell 1936), accrue neither under monarchy nor electoral democracy. Parallel networks of wealthy states and politicians in the Gulf, for example, have refigured the codes by which we can read the political game. The only locally-driven game changer since independence has been the region-wide hirak, the ruly (e.g. peaceful protests) and unruly (e.g. militias) popular mobilization through which the political margin strikes back against the authoritarian “centre,” eliciting elite counter-strikes and adaptations, from Rabat to Manama (Sadiki 2016). For all this, scholarship of Middle East politics must furnish the tools through which to grasp the big changes in the Middle East, so that its publics and observers alike can learn of the divisions, the military bases, and the role of wealth in political brokerage. Do the trading off of Jerusalem and the Syrian miasma signal the tightening grip of populism (Inglehart and Norris 2016) on international politics, or simply states run mad? It is at this juncture that extant scholarship has yet to convincingly address the trade-offs between, for instance, big power plays and dependency in the Middle East. How, for example, might petrodollar recycling proceed at the expense of democracy? Is it better to be politically unequal but well-off economically (Gulf), or is it better to be free but poor (Tunisia)?

The study of Middle East politics: knowledge mapping

One tough assignment regards the standing of the study of the Middle East, in any discipline. What constitutes its main foundations and the links between them is not always readily understood. After all, this is a field whose founding and foundations are not merely intellectual or scientific. It was incubated within a matrix of power, political (Mitchell 2002; Lockman 2016) and capitalist (Ford Foundation 1999)². From the outset, at least three separate agendas (identities) have interlocked, but also clashed, in the construction of the study of the Middle East. First, a political agenda having to do with the rise of the US as a new hegemon in global politics (Wedeen 2016). Second, a capitalist agenda whereby the various arms of the new hegemon (multinationals) have played their own hand in framing the rise of area studies as fields. Last, the academic agenda, which to an extent predates the other two but whose pursuit of science through systematic research may have destined it to juggle its own aims of neutral and responsible knowledge with those of power and the market.

The study of Middle East politics has thus been contentious. It has defied fixity and perhaps even coherence. Scholarship on Middle East politics, as this brief review highlights, expands or restricts its scope of study depending on the varying contexts of imperial or neo-colonial interests, and ideological projects from modernization to democratization to counter-terrorism. For Edward Said, Western discourse constructing a fictional Orient is a form of domination. East/West binaries both justified and enabled European, and then American, imperial domination; through the knowledge-power dyad, Orientalism sustains the “positional superiority” of West over East (1978, p. 7).

Halliday acknowledges some Saidian critiques of “Orientalism,” but seeks to disabuse social scientists of the notion that the Muslim world is unique. Dictatorship, tribalism, weak democracy, exclusion of minorities, and fundamentalism are not particularities of Muslim societies (1993, p. 156). Halliday stresses the importance of examining the discourse of the dominated (Orientals, Muslims), especially what he calls “hypostatisation from below” that essentializes all things “Islamic,” vilifying all things Western (1993, p. 161). Bryan Turner (1994) attests to Saidian deconstruction while exploring alternatives. The East/West dichotomy must be recognized, he argues, as an antiquated imperialist construction. He warns of privileging indigenous accounts; these must be scrutinized, the temptation of Occidentalism thus resisted (Turner 1994, pp. 100–104).

Yet the “regional narcissism” Halliday shuns (2005, p. 49) is not independent of Occidental narcissism (academic paradigms, assumptions, methods,) that moulds the Middle East (ME) and is moulded by it. It restricts the study of the ME to key inquiries framed in Western academe and chancelleries of power. Epistemic stress is on themes that seem to define the Middle East through problems. Such pathologies are thus reconstructed as powerful signifiers by which the Middle East is defined and by which its elites define their region. It behooves us to ask the extent to which the “Middle East” remains “perceived as being immensely relevant and yet antipathetically troubled, and problematic,” (Said 1981, p. x). An impressive thematic roster of Middle Eastern ailments has accumulated over the decades. It spans weak states and/or societies, despotic cultures, resilient authoritarians, persistent patriarchy, religious radicalism, and terrorism. An accompanying interest in non-Western deviance also has a long pedigree in political science, as in Almond’s curiosity about “the ‘uncouth’ and exotic systems” of the non-Western world (Almond 1960, p. 10). Normatively linking research to democratic preservation, Harold Lasswell exhorted social scientists to “promptly gather data about primitive forms of social organization,” not to be outpaced by a “world where primitive societies are melting away” (1941, p. 456).

Perhaps the Janus-faced field of Middle East politics vacillates between Said’s Orientalism and rebuttals against it. Needed is more than a periodically updated Orientalist critique of its questions, methods, conclusions, and silences. Knowledge-making of Middle Eastern politics has followed the itinerary of disciplinary social science. Western theories (modernization, “third wave” democratization), paradigms (statism, secularization), and epistemologies (positivism) have been repeatedly “tested” against Middle East politics—often regardless of their suitability.³ One great paradox is that while Western analytical frameworks have been transposed onto the study of the Middle East, the same West “quarantines” itself from the region’s problems. A desire for modernity is stymied by inexcusable ambivalence and a “reject[ion of] the label ‘made in U.S.A.’ ” (Lerner 1958, p. 45). Intra-regional economic disparities, lagging political development, the spewing of “militant” ideologies, and subsequent violence are lubricated by newfound oil wealth across the Arab world (Ibrahim 1982, p. 3). Unearned oil income flows in largely from Western oil consumers to Gulf coffers: external rent. Yet a lopsided “rentier mentality” with its “break in the work-reward causation” (Beblawi 1987, p. 385) is framed as almost an internal Arab problem. The coercive apparatus sustaining despotism is bolstered by Western powers motivated by ostensibly legitimate security concerns (Bellin 2004, pp. 148–149). And so on. This disjuncture between a deployment of a Western toolkit and a simultaneous distancing of Western responsibility from Arab “pathologies” is a common theme running through decades of scholarship.

Stuck in the state

Perhaps nowhere is the imprint of social science trends on the study of Middle East politics as apparent as in the “statist” paradigm. With very few exceptions (e.g. Mitchell 1969), attention to forces below the state is largely absent from formative studies of the region. A revitalized interest in the state as the framework for political science inquiry emerged from explorations of the US and other European democracies (Almond 1988). Yet it is almost as if through the adoption of the state as primary analytic lens, the Middle East region has arrived in social science research. Lisa Anderson (1987) explicitly seeks to bring the Middle East into the fold of disciplinary political science precisely through spotlighting the state, its bureaucracies, extraction and distribution mechanisms, and militaries. Hermassi, who “rejec[ts] the surrogate paradigm” of modernization theory in his exploration of nation and state-building in the Arab Maghreb (1972, p. 4). In the same vein, Anderson (1987, pp. 5–7) recognizes that the Middle East’s specific history, where top-down state-building was spurred by international intervention or the threat thereof in postures of “defensive modernization,” has shaped the pathways of state formation in ways different from the European experience. This includes lingering tribal loyalties and dependency on external powers.⁴

Yet even critiques of the neo-statist paradigm seem to accept it as a universal category of analysis, pressingly relevant from France to Saudi Arabia (Mitchell 1991b). Sometimes Middle Eastern states are treated in Third World comparative fashion. Migdal (1988) designates Egypt a “weak state” where peasant strongmen hindered Nasser’s attempts at “social control.” Here Migdal’s focus on “strongmen” effectively reduces society to networks of patronage. (What forces and factors of Egyptian society are left out in such simplistic attempts at identifying causal inference?) While more theoretically sophisticated, Ayubi’s account (1995) reinforces this statist bent of Middle East scholarship. He explores the paradoxical weakness of a corporatist “over-stated” Arab state, ineffective in its extractive, allocative, ideological, and “hegemonic” capacities despite a marked expansion of bureaucracies and budgets. The Arab state is fierce rather than strong, “frequently resorting to raw coercion in order to preserve itself,” incapable of ideologically underwriting its own legitimacy (Ayubi 1995, p. 3). The power of Arab states has thus been exaggerated by many observers, writes Ayubi—but not, it seems, the analytic salience of the state as such.

The Middle Eastern state seems everywhere in scholarship, even sprawling histories (Owen 2004). It is rendered almost omnipotent in its deficiencies. Judged against the European-North American standard, the post-colonial “quasi-state” (Jackson 1991) remains less than incomplete. It lacks sovereignty and capacity, and a cohesive national identity. Always looking upward, the singular statist perspective has precluded other objects of study. When behaviouralists could not locate political parties and elections worth studying in the Middle East, they turned instead to elites (Zartman 1980, p. 7). The field has generally overlooked popular mobilization—even where it has existed (Abdalla 1985). Resultant analytical blind spots can leave experts playing catch-up. Charles Tripp’s (2000) authoritative statist history of Iraq, for instance, did not seem to foresee the floundering and destruction of the country as the US invaded a few years later. A statist focus on formal structures may too easily see stability where conflict simmers in informal political spaces.⁵

Searching for democracy

Similarly, an interest in Arab (non)democratization mirrored social science trends, such as Huntington’s The Third Wave (1991). A comparative politics field now almost defined by the study of democratization once again welcomed the Middle East. Some writers tested the Latin American “transitology” framework in the region (Salame 1994). Yet broadly speaking, conclusions appeared to reinforce Sharabi’s “neopatrimonialism” (1988) as a defining feature of Arab polities. This body of scholarship was at odds with the new public opinion studies that demonstrated consistent Arab support for democracy (Gao and Tessler 2005).⁶ The so-called durability of authoritarianism was variously explained, from “competitive clientelism” (Lust 2009) to “authoritarian upgrading” (Heydemann 2007). For some, an absence of autonomous social forces that could create pressure from below existed in the Middle East: save “anti-systemic, Islamist militants”: there was no democratic hope (Albrecht and Schlumberger 2004, p. 386). Possible Arab democratization, in this view, should be conceived of as a “failure of authoritarianism,” thus far skillfully avoided by Arab autocrats—apparently the default status. (Is this not a repackaging of Gellner’s proposition that in traditional, tribalist Islam, “Government by the people of the people and for the people is poppycock” [1981, p. 30]?)

Such analyses of democratization thus dovetail with the tradition-modernity binary, long another organizing paradigm of scholarship on Middle East politics. Ernest Gellner investigates the staying power of Islam, modernity’s “victim” and not its “pro-genitor” alone “retain[ing] its pre-industrial faith in the modern world” (1981, p. 4). The “segmentary society” of tribal Islam whereby cohesiveness, violent praxis, and religious authority are entangled, is contrasted with the more statist and stable Otto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Writing Middle East politics: A field in transit
• I Knowledge frames and horizons
• II Towards re-conceptualizations of the democratic and the authoritarian
• III The secular and the religious: questions and contests
• IV Gendered relations and realities: critical interpretations
• V Borderline politics: claims and counter-claims
• VI Conceptual categories: reflexive notes
• VII Navigating the field: notes and outlooks
• Select bibliography
• Index