Informal Power in the Greater Middle East

Hidden Geographies

Luca Anceschi, Gennaro Gervasio, Andrea Teti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138290389
• eBook ISBN: 9781317816461
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last decade or so, academic and non-academic observers have focussed mainly, if not exclusively on the institutions and places of formal power in the Greater Middle East, depicting politics in the region as a small area limited to local authoritarian rulers.

In contrast, this book aims to explore the 'hidden geographies' of power, i.e. the political dynamics developing inside, in parallel to, and beyond institutional forums; arguing that these hidden geographies play a crucial role, both in support of and in opposition to official power. By observing less frequented spaces of power, co-option, and negotiation, and particularly by focusing on the interplay between formal and informal power, this interdisciplinary collection provides new insights in the study of the intersection between policy-making and practical political dynamics in the Greater Middle East.

Contributing a fresh perspective to a much-discussed topic, Informal Power in the Greater Middle East will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars and those interested in the politics of the region.

Part I

Redistributing Power Relations through Informal Alliances

1 In-Formalized Polity and the Politics of Dynasty in Egypt and Libya

Larbi Sadiki

The Arab Middle East has entered a moment of revolution, inevitable counter-revolution, and transition. Integral to this moment is a dialectical dynamic in which the formal and the informal conjugate, through unsettled tension and interaction between endless forces, voices and discourses; bid to re-imagine community; and seek to pin down their idealized community to preferences in terms of morality, polity, society and intellectual artefacts, including a particular brand of language. This moment concerns not only the mapping out of political identities and preferences. More importantly, it concerns what might be termed the resistance ‘turn’ (along with implications for revolution and transition) in social science. This turn is guided by projects probing the subaltern and hidden forces and discourses that drive revolutionary change as well as how forces and discourses antithetical to change seek to capture the informal as one way of privatizing politics. This is primarily intended to reproduce power, through the occupation of the state, thus blurring the boundaries between the formal and the informal and ultimately re-designing politics as a dynastic project, a family affair, or a manifestation of ‘asabiyya-based impulse, recording political decay and, at the same time, signalling the onset of marginalized solidarities arrayed against the dynastic centre (Issawi 1950). Thus, the ‘story’ of the formal-informal dyad is more than simply re-locating power play outside the institutional realm. More importantly, it is the in-formalization of the formal and the institutional that points to key lines of inquiry about state-society relations that are in need of critical theoretical and empirical investigation. This chapter can only hint at this problematique, aided by a mostly empirical analysis of in-formalization in the context of the dynastic politics of Egypt and Libya prior to the 2011 revolutions, drawing on Ibn Khaldoun’s concept of ‘asabiyya, social cohesion and solidarity deriving from but not limited to blood ties (Mahdi 1957; Ibn Khaldoun 1958).

A Khaldounian logic of ‘in-formalized’ politics

The use of the term ‘informal’ should first be explained. The intention is not to firm-up any kind of dichotomy between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, especially since the notion of open ‘spectrums’ – intended here as the fluid political spaces that negate absolute polarity – best describes organized Arab politics. That is, even in the most institutionalized forms of politics there tends to be a non-institutionalized element. Nonetheless, for present purposes, formal will refer to official interventions in the political arena, including the reproduction of power and support of the structural and legal system. By contrast, ‘informal’ refers to political interventions from outside or below the level of formal and state institutions. This level comprises discourses and interventions by grass-roots activism and primordial and sanguine associations and loyalties whose dispositions to the state may be marked by indifference, hostility, collision or collusion – in a nutshell, approximating non-institutionalized political activities, which may be motivated by personal or sanguine loyalties or calculations (Cross 1998: 7–17).

Pre-2011 scholarship on Arab politics generally tended to claim an exaggerated connection to authoritarianism, ignoring the nexus of informal and formal politics in rearticulating power. Two peculiarities central to the reproduction and organization of institutionalized state politics marked the repositioning of power with a dynastic stamp. The collapse of the formal and informal into a single realm virtually erased the boundaries between the ‘personalist’ and the ‘legal-rational’ – to paraphrase Weber. This deviation set statecraft on a collision course with society, in turn provoking the vigorous resistance from below started in Tunisia in mid-December 2010. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that the clear ousters in the Arab world have thus far taken place in countries – Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen – that until 2011 shared the dynamic of dynastic republicanism (Sadiki 2009). Connected to this peculiarity, it may be stated that the transformations afoot prior to the Arab Spring, which more or less led to the ‘vandalization’ and subsequently decay of statecraft, fed under such conditions the articulation between formal and informal politics through a process of ‘casualization’ of public politics. This happened through recourse to the ‘informal’ realm in order to escape accountability and due process that, in theory at least, management of public affairs implies. The assumed channels and modes of doing politics that in the past fed the articulation of state and society, public and private, formal and informal, personalist and legal-rational, and democratic and authoritarian are all cancelled, returning society into stricter political singularity that, in name, content, intent and strategies, obey one political game: dynasty.

In such contexts, designation of leaderships is never the result of political debates, deliberations or open bargains over institutional design – democratic, semi-democratic, etc. Private interests favour informal over formal politics, including deliberative, open, democratic channels. Thus, legal modes for the distribution of power are skewed, with society’s ability to shape public affairs continuously narrowed whilst the influence of dynastic rulers is simultaneously widened. It is in the informal realm that those rulers seek weak partners – literally, clients – in their bid to force ‘de-contested’ thought-practice of politics and ‘in-formalized’ political arrangements matching their preferences. When de-contested, language or rules of engagement are hierarchically placed above all competing projects of imagining community and the political, in general.

These new articulations of power, through the blurring of the formal and informal, had several destabilizing effects. On one level, political management, legitimacy, citizenship, and state-society relations all took on different meanings – or rather lost all meaningfulness. Neither state nor society measured up to the functions theorized for them under the division of labour that defines the ‘polity’: formal and institutional translation through assignment and aggregation of competing inputs informally produced by discourses, forces and voices operating below the state. When the state (institutional-formal) or state-holders replace society by taking over recruitment of political leadership and of potential stakeholders, politics is reduced into a one-way flow of ideas, acts, decisions, preferences and practices. This marks the death of all politics. Literally, this, in varying degrees, afflicted the brands of polity in the cases that this chapter considers – Egypt and Libya.

Unwittingly, however, these processes of ‘in-formalization’ and ‘privatization’ of politics triggered a dynamic that allowed bottom-up profusion of discursive identities, new types of informal subjects, and anti-systemic spatialities from below to counter the ‘dynastic turn’. In-formalization at the apex of power precipitated the rise of forces corrosive and destabilizing to statist (dynastic) hierarchies of power: non-formalized discourses, forces and voices. In-formalization from the top triggered de-formalization from below, signalling de-nationalization of politics, the de-institutionalization of leadership and opposition, and citizenship practices which reverted to formerly abandoned margins of political practices and identities that the postcolonial state supposedly eliminated. These include the dynastic, the tribal, the informal and the traditional. It is here that new battle lines are drawn in the hidden geographies of de-formalized, in-formalized or de-nationalized/de-institutionalized politics in the Arab Middle East, both prior to the Arab revolutions and beyond.

In particular, one analytically useful way of exploring the repositioning of power from formal to informal realms prior to the Arab revolutions is to investigate the continuities and discontinuities these shifts have entailed, with special reference to the design of dynastic politics in Egypt and Libya. My aim is not to delve into the new struggles engendered to counter hereditary rule; rather, through a parsimonious Khaldounian framework, I seek to showcase the in-formalization of politics as a means to bypass society in converting politics into narrow power projects of self-reproduction. Conceptually, this task requires a brief explanation of the terms deployed – first and foremost the ‘privatization’ of power – before elaborating the discussion by comparing the dynastic project in the case studies chosen.

Private rule in public domains

Nowhere does the blurring of boundaries between the formal and informal manifest itself more glaringly than in the privatization of power, i.e. the tendency to favour sanguine relations in the design of rule, recruitment of ruling inner circles, and entrusting the fate of states or other political institutions to family or clan management. The return to dynastic practices is an extreme form of this trend, evident in pre-revolutionary states where dynastic networks were being created – Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. Partly, the privatization of power is due to there being no declared ‘rules of engagement’ when it came to succession. Ironically, some Arab monarchies experienced smoother transitions than Arab republics. Anwar Sadat consolidated his succession of Nasser in 1970, eliminating potential rivals such as Alī Sabrī, Sha‘rāwī Jum‘a and Muhammad Fawzī It took nearly a year before he could fully secure his hold on power, with the near victory in the 1973 October War with Israel catapulting him to Pharaoh-like stature. Like Nasser, in spite of his stature, Sadat never attempted to engineer a dynastic coup as did his successor, Mubarak. Jordan’s Abdullah II came in from the cold to succeed his father, side-lining his uncle, longstanding Crown Prince Hassan. Once enthroned, he also swiftly removed his father’s choice of Crown Prince, his half-brother Hamza. However, hereditary rule is clearly within Jordan’s constitutional framework, despite there being no clear rules concerning the process. In Syria, following the death of President Hafez al-Asad in 2000, it took several hours to amend the country’s constitution to facilitate hereditary succession by the young Bashar. Bashar, now fighting for his political survival and facing the possibility of defeat, was not his father’s first choice. In Kuwait, the deftly-staged 2006 ‘constitutional coup’ asserted the Āl-Sabāh as the sole kingmakers, purging the al-Sālim branch of the Sabāh dynasty, despite its equal claim to the throne. Even Lebanon, often represented in Western scholarship as approximating democratic standards superior to other Arab states, is not immune from ‘family politics’ in the recruitment of political leadership. Here, confessionalism and family have worked in tandem to reproduce forms of quasi-feudal politics. Michel Aoun and Hassan Nasrallah seemed to buck this trend, but Walid Junblat and Amin Gemayel, amongst others, continued it.

These case studies lead one to reflect not only on the peculiar brand of Arab ‘republicanism’, but also on the durability of Khaldounian ‘asabiyya (clan solidarity) in the making and unmaking of state institutions and in political recruitment. In his study of social change, Ibn Khaldoun appreciates the role of social cohesion. He places it at the centre of politics, a dynamic that proves essential to understanding processes of making and un-making power. Ibn Khaldoun notes how ‘affection’ for blood relations is part of human nature. In fact, he views it as God-given, noting its utility in the cultivation of ‘mutual support and aid’ (in Ibn Khaldoun 1958: 90–95). The dynamic of ‘asabiyya is not confined to sanguine relations and may be derived from client–patronage power relations, which demand the obligation of favouring close ties, sanguine and non-sanguine, in protection, loyalty, and the seeking of superiority vital for state-making and consolidation of power (in Ibn Khaldoun 1958: 290–95). The notion of ‘asabiyya has continuously informed power politics beyond the middle ages. It evidently applies in analysing dynastic manifestations in pre-revolution Arab Spring societies to qualify the kind of informal–formal interventions and forms of socio-political interactions that solidified ties between political patrons and clients in the pursuit of ghalāba (superiority) and jāh (power) as families or clans and their associates sought to engineer hereditary successions.

The ‘privatization’ of power must be appreciated through a sound understanding of ‘hereditary succession’ as central to what is here called ‘ruling complex’ or murakkab al-kursī. Literally, the notion of ‘comfortably sat’ or ‘positioned’ denoted by ‘murakkab’ highlights the ‘free-rider’ element involved in lubricating ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Introduction Crossing the Formal/Informal Boundary
• Part I Redistributing Power Relations through Informal Alliances
• Part II Radicalization and Conflict
• Part III Resistance, Co-optation, Centralization
• Index