The ACRPS has published The Contemporary Arab State: Theoretical Perspectives and Case Studies (656 pp.) edited by Mohammed Hemchi and Morad Diani. The book includes an introduction and fifteen chapters, divided into three sections: “Theoretical Research”, “Historical Studies”, and “Case Studies”.
The volume answers a set of questions related to issues of the modern Arab state such as citizenship, civil society, conflict of executive authority, identity politics, state stability, effects of the authoritarian corporatist state and the welfare state, the problem of assessing the Fragile States Index, tension between the modern/sultanic state models, the continuation of traditionalism in the structure of the modern state, political violence, centralization and decentralization, and so on. The book’s fifteen chapters feature overlapping theoretical approaches and case studies for several Arab states: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. It does not rush to declare state failure, as the volume is not concerned with this label. In fact, most Arab states have demonstrated remarkable resilience despite the transformations they have seen and have achieved some important successes in institution-building and modernization. Yet authoritarianism has brought them to a dead end, and there has been a notable failure in citizenship-based nation-building and in reconciling between ethnonationalism based on Arab culture and the belief in an Arab political collective on the one hand and the citizenship-based nation on the other.
In Chapter 1, Adham Saouli and Raymond Hinnebusch present the book’s theoretical approaches to the contemporary Arab state, which they consider to be “the mountain which all political scientists must eventually climb”, from the perspective of historical sociology. Rifaat Dika addresses the question of reproducing the Arab political sphere between sovereignty and the collective in Chapter 2, concentrating on the historicity of Arab political intellectual terminology through a critical dual reading of ibn Khaldun and Mohammed Abed al-Jabri.
In the third chapter, Souhail Hbaieb discusses the concepts of citizenship [muwāṭana] and citizenism [muwāṭaniyya] as two characteristics of the contemporary Arab nation-state. He also addresses the contradiction between the concepts of democracy and the citizenship state in contemporary Arab thought and how it has impacted the course of democratic transition in relation to the Arab Spring uprisings. Mohammed Hemchi concludes the volume’s theoretical section in Chapter 4 by broadening the approach to the state in its relationship with civil society in Global South Studies, with emphasis on the arguments of Azmi Bishara’s Civil Society.
Mohammed Jamal Barout’s study in Chapter 5 covers the history of the Syrian state during the period of 1943-1949, which saw its political independence and the emergence of a parliamentary republic governed by a modern constitution. Barout argues that Husni al-Za’im’s coup on 30 March 1949 delivered the coup de grace to the first and only parliamentary republic in Syrian history. In Chapter 6, Said El Haji sheds light on the Moroccan state’s ongoing use of traditional mechanisms of discipline and control, dating back to the Makhzen period beginning in the 16th century, as an essential problem of Moroccan post-colonial state building.
Bassel Salloukh discusses the issue of the “compromise state” in Lebanon after the 2006 war in Chapter 7, arguing that the expansion of the public sector on a sectarian basis turned it into a source of political rent. In the case of Iraq, Harith Hasan studies the “regulated neopatrimonial state” in Chapter 8, which resulted from the decline of the populist-developmental state model and Iraq’s experience of absolutist patrimonial rule. In Chapter 9, Marwan Kabalan investigates the dynamics that caused the Syrian state to experience the worst existential crisis since its establishment in 1920.
Next, Abdellatif El Moutadayene studies identity politics and state stability in the Arab Maghreb, the effect of subcultural identities on this stability, and the challenges they pose for the construction of national identity in Chapter 10. For the Algerian case, Abdelkader Abdelali devotes Chapter 11 to a discussion of the model of the authoritarian corporatist state as an organizational, structural construct and a kind of state-society relationship that leads to a distorted, limited democratic transition. Then, in Chapter 12, Hami Hassan uses a comparative statistical analysis to explore the relationship between social transformations of the state and the pressures of the social issue in turbulent economic contexts.
Abdulaziz al-Taheri traces the association between political violence and state building in Chapter 13 using the case of Morocco during the protectorate and independence periods, arguing that this violence is closely related to the transitional stage from traditional to modern state. Next, Mohamed Ahmed Bennis investigates the role of advancing regionalism in strengthening the centralization of the Moroccan state and reproducing its reform crisis in Chapter 14. Finally, Ruwaida Mohamed Abdel-Wahab Farah addresses the case of Sudan through a critical study to assess the Fragile States Index, which for several years has classified Sudan as a failed state, in Chapter 15.
