State, Rent, Repression

This is a framing-and-vocabulary chapter rather than a thesis-driven article: Angrist argues that contemporary MENA politics is intelligible only as the product of a specific historical sequence, and she supplies the analytical categories the rest of the volume then uses. She first defines the region — a label coined by nineteenth-century European and American elites, covering twenty countries and roughly 500 million people, and far smaller than and not synonymous with 'the Muslim world' — then classifies its regimes, showing that until 2011 MENA was a global outlier: the one world region where dictatorships did not fall while democracies replaced them elsewhere.

The historical core of the chapter traces a chain of legacies: Islamization and Arabization from the seventh century; Ottoman decline relative to Europe and the reform debate it triggered; European imperialism in three distinct legal forms (colony, mandate, treaty); the creation of Israel; uneven decolonization; and the three types of founding regime that emerged (single-party republics, monarchies, and three electoral systems). Her central causal claim is that the founding regimes' failure — state socialism that did not deliver growth, and pan-Arab nationalism discredited by the 1967 defeat — broke an implicit authoritarian bargain (prosperity and victory over Israel in exchange for citizens forgoing participation and accountability), and that this failure opened the political space that Islamist movements filled, with the 1979 Iranian revolution as the galvanizing event. She closes by arguing that the Arab Spring did not undo authoritarianism (only Tunisia moved toward democracy; the monarchies weathered the storm and actively counter-mobilized) and identifies five cross-cutting problems that structure the whole book, with gender running through all of them.

INTRO (pp. 1–7 as assigned; pp. 1–4 in the 3rd edn): Owen sets up the book's unit of analysis and its anti-essentialist method. He takes his working definition of the state from Joel Migdal — an organisation of agencies, coordinated by an executive leadership, able to make and enforce binding rules over a population — preferring it to Weber's monopoly-of-violence formula and rejecting Nazih Ayubi's treatment of the state as an abstraction, on the grounds that Middle Easterners experience state power as concrete. Following Sami Zubaida and Talal Asad, he argues that Middle Eastern states are 'like' Western states because the European territorial state was the compulsory model for new political units outside Europe, and that they are modern rather than traditional formations. He therefore refuses explanations that read the region's politics off Islam, race, tribe or an 'unchanging East', and insists the Middle East be analysed with the same comparative tools used for the rest of the post-colonial world. He states his coverage (the Arab League states less Mauritania and Somalia, plus Iran, Israel and Turkey, almost entirely in the twentieth century), his thematic rather than country-by-country organisation, and a methodological check borrowed from the Saidian critique: would the picture he presents be recognisable to Middle Easterners themselves. NOTE: some of this framing sits in the Preface rather than the Introduction proper, and Part III on the post-9/11 period exists only in the 3rd edition.

CH. 1 'The end of empires' (pp. 8–26 as assigned; 5–22 in 3rd edn): the argument is that today's Middle Eastern states are not the organic expression of pre-existing nations but the product of imperial collapse followed by colonial construction. Four centuries of Ottoman rule left a real inheritance — administrative practice, a culture of governance oriented to Istanbul, and, after the 1908 Young Turk revolution, a Turkish nationalism that strained Arab loyalty to the empire — but the decisive break is the First World War, after which Britain and France carved the Arab provinces into successor units (French Syria and Lebanon; British Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan), drew nearly all the boundaries, and chose the rulers. The League of Nations mandate system is analysed as a new instrument of control that dressed imperial supervision in the language of tutelage toward eventual independence. Owen's central analytical device is 'the colonial state', which he breaks into components: a centralised administration with a legal system, census, nationality law, controlled borders, a flag and internationally recognised frontiers — often with an artificial look (new names, new capitals, ethnically heterogeneous populations, ruler-straight desert boundaries); a security-heavy fiscal profile (he reports colonial budgets in which roughly two-thirds of expenditure was security-related, starving education and welfare); a policy repertoire of alliance with large landowners and tribal shaikhs, deliberate management of sectarian, ethnic and tribal difference on 'divide and rule' lines, and a monetary regime tying the currency to the metropole via a currency board rather than a central bank; and a contradiction between democratic practice at the imperial centre and arbitrary rule in the colony. The lasting legacy is the creation of a national political field centred on the capital, which reoriented ambition inward and inhibited cross-border political relationships. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia are handled as the states that escaped formal mandate rule and built central authority themselves.

CH. 2 'The growth of state power in the Arab world: the single-party regimes' (pp. 27–62 as assigned; 23–38 in 3rd edn): this chapter picks up AFTER independence and argues that the newly sovereign Arab republics presided over an enormous expansion in the reach and pervasiveness of the state apparatus, driven by regime security, the need to control territory, developmentalist ambition, and competition over Arab unity. The single-party republics — Egypt above all, plus Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Tunisia — are the cases; Egypt after the 1952 coup is the template. The mechanisms are land reform, the nationalisations that followed Suez in 1956 and the sweeping 1960–61 nationalisations of banks and industry, five-year planning (the first Egyptian plan 1960–65), showcase projects such as the Aswan High Dam, and a rapidly enlarged officer corps and army. The upshot is a state that is far more powerful over its own society than the colonial state was, but whose power is concentrated in an executive-military-party complex rather than in representative institutions — Owen's setup for the later chapters on authoritarianism, the military, and the limits of democratisation.

Saouli argues that MENA states must be analysed not as finished Weberian entities but as ongoing, reversible PROCESSES of formation and deformation taking place inside what he calls "social fields" — bounded spaces where states may form, develop, or come apart. State-building, on this account, is a regime's attempt to monopolize three spheres of social life — coercion, the economy, and ideology — while oppositional forces (which he treats as potential alternative regimes) attempt to de-monopolize them. Because Arab states were LATE formers, entering an already-constituted and European-dominated international states-system, their rulers had to pursue state consolidation, nation-building, national independence and democratization simultaneously — tasks that took Europe roughly four centuries. This produces the chapter's central dilemma: incorporating rival social forces would generate legitimacy but would erode the regime's own power and ideological project, so regimes overwhelmingly choose survival, yielding states that are coercively strong (Saouli's word is "fierce") yet weak in legitimacy — and precisely that legitimacy deficit invites external penetration, which he theorizes as the "internal-external nexus." His conclusion is deliberately counter-intuitive: despite civil wars, collapse, and challenges from Arab nationalism and the Islamic State, the one constant is the resilience of the territorial state as the natural landscape of Arab political imagination.

Hertog asks why low- to middle-income Arab economies (the non-Gulf 'core' cases) perform so badly on growth, productivity, firm entry and employment despite decent state infrastructure, real gains in schooling and health, and proximity to European markets. His answer is that the problem is not too much market (the standard 'neoliberalism did this' story) and not only elite neopatrimonialism, but the uneven, over-committed presence of the state, which protects some citizens and firms intensively while leaving the rest exposed.

He calls the resulting configuration a 'segmented market economy' (SEME) — a distinct variety of capitalism built from three mutually reinforcing parts: an over-stretched, interventionist state with limited fiscal and institutional resources; deep and unusually rigid insider–outsider divides in both labour markets and the private sector, produced by and reproducing lopsided state intervention; and a low-skills, low-productivity equilibrium that follows from those divides. The distinctive Arab twist is that the labour-market insiders are not mainly privileged private-sector workers but formal PUBLIC employees, so the protected coalition is large, middle-class, politically organised, and very hard to dislodge — which is why encompassing reform is blocked from below as well as from above. State intervention is therefore not incidental to the divide; the rationing of state jobs, subsidies, credit, land and regulatory favour is precisely what manufactures insider status, and hence cronyism at the top and 'queuing' for government jobs at the bottom are two faces of the same rent structure.

CAUTION — see confidence_note; I could not read this chapter and the following is reconstructed from the verified chapter title, the book's verified structure, the publisher's description, and three published scholarly reviews. The chapter reconstructs the Nasserist social pact as the foundational bargain of the post-colonial Egyptian republic: in exchange for political demobilisation and a state monopoly on organised politics, the regime committed itself to land reform, nationalisation (the 1961 July Socialist Decrees and after), Soviet-style planning, mass public employment, subsidised consumption, free education, and employment-linked social protection. Sallam's framing — signalled by 'Nasser's debts' — is that these commitments were fiscal and political obligations that outlasted the capacity to fund them, so that every subsequent Egyptian ruler inherited a set of promises he could neither honour nor safely repudiate.

The 'fall' half of the chapter tracks the pact's unravelling from the 1960s fiscal strain and the 1967 defeat through Sadat's infitah and realignment with the United States to Mubarak-era structural adjustment, with the regime progressively reneging on redistribution while retaining the political architecture the pact had built. The chapter's payoff for the book is that it establishes the puzzle the rest of the book answers: the dismantling of the Nasserist pact generated enormous, broadly shared socioeconomic grievance, and yet elite national politics after the 1970s was organised around Islamist–secular identity conflict rather than around class and redistribution. Sallam's answer, developed in later chapters but set up here, is that the Nasserist state had already reshaped the opposition field — absorbing and domesticating the organised left inside state institutions while repressing and excluding the Muslim Brotherhood — so that when the pact collapsed, the Brotherhood retained the organisational autonomy to capitalise on the discontent and the left did not.

Clark argues that the answer to why Morocco decentralized and Jordan did not lies in the colonial period and in the different support coalitions each monarchy inherited and then rebuilt after independence. British indirect rule in Transjordan bound the Bedouin tribes to a state being created around them - above all through the Arab Legion - producing what Tell calls the Hashemite Compact, in which tribal shaykhs became the conduits for state resources and thus acquired a direct stake in the monarchy's survival; French rule in Morocco consolidated an already centralized state and manufactured a rural Berber notability, which the Alawite monarchy then used after 1956 to weaken the Istiqlal, the one serious rival to royal power. The two paths ran in parallel until the early 1970s, which Clark identifies as the turning point: the failed 1971 and 1972 coups came out of the Berber-officered army, so Hassan II reversed course, downgraded the military as a coalition partner, and broadened his base by luring the nationalist parties into the system - the 1976 Municipal Charter being the bait, with the 2002 and 2009 charters later performing the same enticement function for civil society.

Jordan's monarchy, facing the 1957 crisis and then Black September and mass Palestinian in-migration, did the opposite: it deepened its historic tribal coalition through Jordanization, which revived tribalism and hollowed out ideological parties. The chapter closes on the variable that ties the comparison together - party institutionalization: Morocco's parties, however hollow programmatically, had real branch structures and could therefore capture local elites, votes and resources through empowered municipal councils, whereas Jordan's tribal independents and wasta networks run through ministers and MPs at the centre, so devolving power would strip the regime's own coalition partner of its privileges. Centralization and decentralization are therefore both tactics of coalition maintenance rather than movements toward or away from democracy.

Daadaoui argues that post-1956 Morocco is governed by a symbiotic relationship between two dissimilar systems of power: a rational-bureaucratic modern state apparatus, and a traditional, patrimonial authority — the makhzen — that predates colonial rule and that has actually strengthened, rather than obstructed, Moroccan state building. Against the view that the makhzen was an archaic mode of government killed off by the French Protectorate, he insists on its continuity: the makhzen survived by recasting its patrimonial and symbolic power inside modern institutions, so that institutional manipulation typical of Arab authoritarianism is legitimized by traditional practice rather than resting on coercion alone.

He treats the makhzen as conceptually slippery on purpose — for most Moroccans it is simultaneously an apparatus of state violence and domination and a system of representation of traditional royal power, plus a king-controlled mechanism of conflict resolution that evokes fear, awe, and respect. He then traces its genealogy: literally a sixteenth-century fiscal institution where taxes were gathered for the treasury of the ummah, but as a sociopolitical system dating to the twelfth-century break of Moroccan sultans from the Abbasids, becoming under the Almoravids, Almohads, and Merinids a word for the whole government, and under the Sa'adian and Alawi sharifian dynasties a centralized order with the sultan at the center of army, bureaucracy, ulema, and Sufi zawiya. The chapter's stated payoff is that Moroccan state formation is the bureaucratization of older patterns of power — dahir, shura, and the rituals of power of baraka, bay'a, amir al-mu'minin, and sharaf — so that what looks like modernization is the modernization of makhzen authority itself; in Daadaoui's phrase the makhzen shifted from treasury to "a reservoir of power."

Endelman asks how colonial states make themselves known to the people they claim to rule, and answers that colonial authorities make the state visible — and in doing so make its territoriality real. Jordan is his case: he treats it as an exemplary instance of ideological power produced by visual means, organized around the cult of the Hashemite monarch, and he insists the origins and logic of that practice must be traced back to the British mandate over the country (which he dates 1922–1946) rather than to any indigenous or post-independence invention. His examples of colonial state-making by display are concrete and material: British officials built desert forts, designed ornate tribal uniforms for the military, and showed the Jordanian flag across the territory. Theoretically the article is a reappraisal of Clifford Geertz — the theatre state and the symbolics of power — repurposed for a colonial setting and cross-cut with post-colonial and feminist theory. The conclusion is a general claim about state formation: for new states especially, the foundation of the state–citizen relationship lies in ideological power expressed materially, which is a direct challenge to accounts of state formation built on war-making, extraction, and bureaucratic capacity alone.

Peterson reframes the Gulf's encounter with Europe as a single long 'age of imperialism' running from the first European entry into the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century to the final imperial exit in 1971 — what he notes has also been called the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history — rather than treating oil as the trigger that pulled the Gulf into the international system. He opens by attacking as demonstrably facile two common assumptions, the first being a clean Europe-versus-Asia dichotomy of two civilisational blocs meeting on terms of political-military inequality; he counters that violence was already present in Indian Ocean waters through piracy, maritime warfare and invasion, and that what the Europeans actually innovated was the militarisation of trade itself.

He then traces the successive external contenders — Portuguese, Dutch VOC, English East India Company, French, Ottomans, and around 1900 Russia, Germany and the Ottomans again — and argues that once Britain achieved supremacy its aim was less to project power than to preserve an environment congenial to imperial (largely Indian) interests. The chapter's payoff is its account of impact: the nineteenth-century treaty system imposed through the Government of India, plus the later assumption of protection over the smaller states, worked to (in his words) "fossilize the political arena as it existed at that time", locking in the particular rulers, families and territorial units that later became states. He insists this was not one-way domination but an interactive relationship in which local rulers bargained, deflected and exploited the Residency system for their own ends, and he closes by tracing the residues of empire into the English language, British-trained militaries, and enduring ties to the Indian subcontinent and later the United States.

Heard-Bey starts from a puzzle of surface similarity: six Arab states, joined in the GCC since 1981, all with hydrocarbon-dominated but non-industrialised economies, and in every case supreme authority vested in a family whose leadership was established generations ago — the reason it became convenient to call them the 'Arab oil monarchies'. Her argument is that this modern resemblance obscures six surprisingly different routes to sovereignty, and that understanding today's Gulf politics requires seeing how pre-colonial and pre-modern social conditions were carried forward and hardened into the fundamental political structures of twenty-first-century sovereign states.

She therefore proceeds case by case rather than thematically: Oman's oscillation between an idealised centralised Ibadi imamate and the secular, coast-based sultanate it kept producing; the Saudi realm as a dynastic state given religious validity by the Wahhabi ulama, whose borders were paradoxically consolidated each time Britain pronounced on the limits of Ibn Sa'ud's conquests; Kuwait as a merchant city-state founded by 'Utub settlers where the balance between ruling family and merchants was overturned by oil concession payments; Bahrain as two communities under one ruling family; Qatar as a late-emerging 'accidental state' pulled out of Bahrain's shadow by British intervention in 1868; and the Trucial States as a configuration rooted in tribal structure and shaped by shifting British imperial agendas. The second half turns to the endgame: Britain's January 1968 announcement of withdrawal by end-1971 threw nine states and statelets, which had not expected the unilateral abandonment of treaty obligations, into a four-year scramble to become sovereign; Bahrain broke away and declared independence in August 1971, and the UAE that formed in December 1971 was in that sense a diminished federation. Throughout, her implicit causal claim is that British tutelage shielded these rulers from sudden change, which is precisely why traditional structures survived into sovereign statehood.

Richter argues that the concentration of hydrocarbons in the Middle East goes a long way toward explaining the region's signature combination of organisationally weak states with unusually durable authoritarian regimes. Oil income, captured by governments through the nationalisations and the price boom of the 1970s, financed a surge of state building, and the chapter tracks how booms (1973-86, 2007-14) and the intervening bust (1986-2004) correlate with periods when MENA states expanded and periods when they weakened. Because rulers do not depend on taxing their populations, regimes become more autonomous from and less accountable to society; but the same fiscal independence leaves them administratively flabby, since they never had to build the extractive machinery that funds ordinary states, and it produces chronically inefficient use of resources. Rent therefore deters democratisation and sustains authoritarian rule, and Richter singles out the combination of rentier income with large dynastic ruling families as especially resistant to change. Crucially the argument is extended past the oil producers themselves: transfers of rent as foreign aid and worker remittances to the oil-poor states reproduced a version of the rentier effect region-wide, which is why the framework is used to explain MENA as a whole and not just the Gulf.

Lust attacks the then-fashionable 'democratization by elections' thesis — the claim that repeated elections, even unfair ones, have self-reinforcing liberalizing effects — by showing it does not travel to the Middle East. Examining legislative elections across the region, she argues they are best understood as competitive clientelism: a genuine, often fierce competition among elites for privileged access to a limited pool of state resources, which the winners then distribute to their clients. The contest is therefore over distribution, not over policy, ideology, or the rules of the game. Because this logic drives voters and candidates in systematic and predictable ways, it reliably produces pro-regime parliaments, which in turn lets incumbents manage electoral outcomes largely through institutional design — districting, electoral formulas, weak party law — rather than through crude fraud or extralegal coercion. Elections thus become an efficient patronage-distribution machine and an instrument of regime maintenance; Lust closes by arguing that democracy promotion aimed at elections themselves is therefore aimed at the wrong target.

Chapter 3 is the book's context-setting empirical chapter: it establishes what the Asad regime's relationship to Syrian society actually looked like before March 2011, in order to dismantle the primordialist premise that 2011 was latent sectarian hatred surfacing. Mazur maps the ethnic boundaries and then shows, using original town-level data joined to census material, that the regime bound society to itself through a patchwork of two very different kinds of tie: formal ones (public-sector and military employment, corporatist institutions, service provision) and informal, personalistic ones (kin networks, brokers who sell access, tribal shaykhs, business partners). The quantitative finding is double-edged, and that is the point — per the publisher's chapter abstract, "ʿAlawis were disproportionate beneficiaries of state largesse, accessed through informal ties and formal positions" in the civil service and military, yet substantial Sunni Arab populations were also incorporated through personalistic relationships and public employment, and the variation in state access AMONG Sunni communities was enormous.

He shows the Baʿth regime pursued two opposite strategies toward local social hierarchies depending on context: instrumentalizing them by building ties to leaders with customary status, or deliberately dismantling them to forge direct links to individual citizens via corporatist development and state employment. Finally he assesses how post-2000 neoliberal liberalization reconfigured these linkages. The payoff for the book's argument is that ethnicity was not a fixed primordial cleavage but a category whose political salience was manufactured by these uneven, sub-ethnic patterns of inclusion and exclusion — which is precisely why the 2011 challenge did not erupt neatly along ethnic lines.

The chapter traces the Egyptian military's transformation from a statist developmental institution of the postcolonial Nasserist period into an emergent fraction of the capitalist class under neoliberalism. Joya argues that under Sadat senior officers lost their privileged access to the political sphere, but that this formal depoliticization was compensated with new economic privileges that let the military leadership expand both institutional and personal economic power — a bargain that demilitarized the state without estranging the army from the regime (functionally, coup-proofing through economic autonomy rather than through political office). With the neoliberal shift of the 1990s and 2000s the military expanded that economic base further and emerged as a distinct fraction of capital in competition with the neoliberal businessmen clustered around the NDP. The chapter's title claim is that the military's civilian and food production — most visibly baking bread during the 2007-08 food crisis — let it accumulate popular legitimacy and visibly differentiate itself from a regime whose internal security services were simultaneously repressing protesters and striking workers (Joya, p. 135). The upshot for the unit: Egypt's coercive apparatus was never a unitary bloc, because army and interior-ministry security had divergent economic interests and divergent standing with the population.

Conduit asks: how does devolving cybersecurity functions to 'patriotic hackers' affect an authoritarian regime's stabilization and survival agenda? Existing defence/cybersecurity scholarship reads pro-regime hackers instrumentally — they compensate for the state's technical deficit, or they deflect blowback from risky operations. Conduit argues instead that what matters is what the devolution does to the regime's ability to manage its own population. Authoritarian devolution is old (National Progressive Front parties, GONGOs, militias, mercenaries), but DIGITAL devolution is novel in its mechanisms and effects: because online actors lack corporeality, the perceived distance between regime and hacker can be stretched and collapsed at will and at speed, in either direction. The Syrian regime performed distance when distance was useful — to manufacture a veneer of spontaneous civilian loyalty, and to escape attribution for operations that would breach diplomatic norms — and collapsed that distance when coercion was needed, absorbing the hackers back into coordinated operations. The net effect is not merely deniability but omnipresence: opponents can never know whether they have been targeted or by whom, so the regime becomes, in her framing, everywhere and nowhere at once. Digital devolution therefore blurs the normative boundaries of the regime itself and constitutes a new mode of population management serving de-democratization and survival.

Chamas asks what the LOCALISATION of the war on terror does to LGBT activism in the Global South, taking Lebanon as her case. Her claim is that the Lebanese state weaponised war-on-terror discourse and the refugee 'crisis' as an instrument of domestic governance, cultivating a chauvinistic patriotism organised around reverence for the army and security forces; as the ISIS threat receded, the state faced a legitimacy deficit and had to locate new 'monsters', turning on previously tolerated middle- and upper-class LGBT subjects and reframing them not merely as cultural threats to the heteronormative family but as national security threats — as criminals, drug dealers, or foreign agents. Some prominent, well-funded LGBT NGOs — dominated by middle-class cisgender gay men — responded to this new hyper-visibility with a politics of respectability that appealed to nationalist and security logics rather than contesting them. Chamas names this proto-homonationalism: attempts to position certain segments of the LGBT population as not only OF the nation but BENEFICIAL to the security state. The 'proto' prefix is doing deliberate work: unlike Puar's Western homonationalism, this is an attempt to make homonationalism palatable to the state, not a shift that has already occurred. Her critical conclusion is that this bargain requires appeasing the very power one claims to oppose, and depends on the continued disposability of refugees, migrants, trans and working-class people whom the security state needs as monsters.

Wedeen starts from a puzzle: the Syrian regime spent enormous resources on a personality cult around Hafiz al-Asad whose claims were transparently false and which almost nobody — including the people producing it — actually believed. Standard accounts would call that wasted effort, since a regime already possessing coercion and patronage should not need implausible propaganda, and since propaganda that fails to persuade should fail politically. Her answer is that the cult was never in the business of producing belief; it was in the business of producing compliance. Its power lay in compelling citizens to publicly act 'as if' they revered the leader — attending rallies, mouthing slogans, displaying portraits, voting in referenda — which generated a politics of public dissimulation in which each person's outward performance became evidence to everyone else of the regime's reach, whether or not any individual was sincere. The cult therefore functioned as a disciplinary device rather than a legitimating ideology: by saturating everyday life with tired, obviously false symbolism it enforced obedience, induced complicity (the citizen becomes a co-producer of the lie), isolated Syrians from one another (nobody can read anyone else's real convictions), and fixed the boundaries of permissible public speech and behaviour.

Leber attacks a default assumption in the authoritarianism literature: that personalist rulers, freed from institutional checks, substitute private handouts, cronyism and personal whim for coherent public policy — i.e. that personalization degrades policy quality. He argues the opposite can hold, and specifies two mechanisms by which concentrated personal power acts as a permissive condition for policies that benefit broad, mass constituencies rather than narrow elites. The first is the elimination of veto players: by removing rival power centres who could block change, the personalist ruler makes previously impossible reforms available. The second is establishing institutional control over the bureaucracy: centralizing authority lets the ruler direct a fragmented state apparatus toward implementation rather than letting agencies be captured by their patrons. He tests this on Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman, arguing that both mechanisms underlie the concrete policy achievements of Vision 2030. The conclusion is deliberately double-edged and should be read as such: this is not a defence of personalist rule but a claim that the relationship between personalization and policymaking is more complicated than the literature predicts, which in turn changes the research questions the field should be asking — from 'does personalization wreck policy?' to 'under what conditions, and with what trade-offs in oversight and accountability, does it enable it?'

Hamzawy asks why the post-2013 Egyptian regime has been able to re-establish authoritarian rule and govern undemocratically "at a low cost" over a society that mass-mobilised for democracy between 2011 and 2013. His answer is that repression alone does not explain it: a majority of Egyptians now tolerate, and in survey terms actively endorse, the regime, having traded democratic demands for perceived security and macroeconomic stabilisation. He identifies four regime tools: (1) authoritarian and populist narratives that strip January 2011 of political meaning and build a personality cult around Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi; (2) repression and prosecution carried out by a security apparatus that has colonised NGOs, unions, media, elections and the bureaucracy; (3) "legal engineering" - deliberately vague laws that criminalise peaceful activity through the courts rather than around them; and (4) the closure of formal politics, so that neither loyal nor oppositional parties can carve out independent space. He frames this as continuity rather than novelty: since 1952 Egypt has known only an elite-regime alliance sustained by the barter of "bread and security for freedom," reaffirmed after each crisis, and he assigns part of the blame to an opposition that could not bridge the secular-Islamist divide between 2011 and 2013.

Pratt and Rezk use securitization theory to explain not only the July 2013 coup and the 14 August 2013 Rabaa and Nahda massacres but, crucially, why such violence met so little domestic objection. They argue the massacres were enabled by a securitization process in which the military appropriated already-circulating popular opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, constructed the group as an existential threat, and thereby licensed exceptional measures.

To make Copenhagen School theory work outside Europe they make two moves: following Vuori, "special politics" is redefined as a break from the rules that non-democratic regimes rely on to govern rather than a break from liberal-democratic deliberation; and following Gramsci, those rules are theorised as hegemony - an "authoritarian bargain" of freedoms for welfare - while civil society is theorised as a hybrid space organically linked to the state rather than autonomous from it. Empirically their striking claim is that the leading securitizing actors were nominally non-state actors (youth activists, human and women's rights advocates, opposition parties, artists, satirists, journalists, media personalities, coalescing around Tamarod), whose demonisation of the Brotherhood created the window in which the military could rehabilitate itself as a legitimate securitizing actor. Their theoretical payoff is that securitization is not only a break from "normal politics" but can be integral to reconstituting normal politics after a transition - here, a new authoritarian bargain in which Egyptians trade political freedoms for security rather than for socio-economic benefits.

Errazzouki argues that Morocco's much-praised 2011 reforms were the opening move of a strategy that entrenched palace power at the expense of elected institutions rather than diffusing it. She reads Mohammed VI's reign as the continuation of a playbook his father perfected in his final decade - minimal liberalising gestures that win international applause while the monarchy's real power is consolidated. Since 2011 the mechanisms have been institutional rather than spectacular: royal advisers operating as an unaccountable "shadow cabinet"; sovereign ministries and a security apparatus (Interior, DGST, DGSN, BCIJ) staffed by palace appointees outside party politics; the 2017 transfer of public prosecution from the Ministry of Justice to a king-appointed judicial council; and direct interference in party politics, culminating in the ousting of PJD prime minister Benkirane in 2017. The elected government, she argues, functions exactly as it did during the Years of Lead - as a shock absorber that takes the blame for crises while shielding the palace, a pattern visible when ministers were sacked over the Rif crisis while the security chief was retained. She frames post-2011 Moroccan politics as a dialectic between a monarchy whose overriding aim is survival and an increasingly disenchanted population animated by hogra, and concludes that the costs of this stability will keep mounting as people have less to lose.

Bogaert argues that Morocco's urban transformation under Mohammed VI is the clearest window onto a broader mutation of authoritarian rule. Economic liberalisation was supposed to erode authoritarian power structures; in Morocco it did the opposite - authoritarianism was re-institutionalised and rescaled, with power shared with new global actors rather than surrendered. He tracks two complementary urban tracks that emerge from the same 1983 structural adjustment crisis and the urban riots that followed it. The first is the city as a class project: megaprojects like Tanger Med, Casablanca Marina and above all Bouregreg, where a special agency created by Law 16-04 concentrates planning, permitting and expropriation powers in an exceptional zone that is accountable to investors rather than to citizens. The second is the city as a governmental problem: the Cities Without Slums programme, which replaced repression with integration, remaking the urban poor into indebted, taxpaying homeowners through credit, resettlement and a technique called accompagnement social. Bogaert's conclusion is that these celebrated reforms are not liberalisation creeping into an authoritarian shell but a qualitative transformation of authoritarian rule itself: where Hassan II ruled with an iron hand, Mohammed VI rules through holdings, funds and new state agencies - not less authoritarianism, but authoritarianism with a different face.

Heydemann argues that the 2011 uprisings did NOT push Arab regimes toward the more inclusive social contracts protesters demanded; instead regimes imposed what he calls repressive-exclusionary social pacts. Under these pacts, economic and social provisions that were formally universal under the old populist-authoritarian bargain are redefined as selective benefits distributed to politically useful or compliant constituencies. He names the resulting arrangement contingent citizenship, and treats it as increasingly institutionalized: it becomes the organizing framework for social policy and for state-society relations generally, so the material content of citizenship is made conditional and revocable. His stated stakes are about discontinuity — he explicitly challenges the "back-to-the-future" reading that post-2011 authoritarian reassertion is simply a return to the formally inclusive social pacts of pre-2011 authoritarian governance. The unit question "has the social contract changed?" therefore gets a strong yes from him: it has changed in kind (universal entitlement to selective benefit), not merely in generosity.

The chapter is a field-level stocktake, not a case study: it asks what a decade of post-2011 research shows about how authoritarian rule in MENA actually works. Its framing claim is that authoritarianism remained the region's predominant form of government but was reconfigured rather than merely restored, so the older research question — why are these regimes so durable/resilient? — has been displaced by questions about the concrete forms political control now takes. The authors identify convergent trends: a drift toward personalization of power in both republics and monarchies, which cuts against the theoretical expectation that rational autocrats institutionalize through dominant parties; a broad intensification of repression despite its costs; new cultural and ideological mechanisms for producing compliance; and deeper embedding of regimes in international and regional networks of authoritarian support. They argue these developments strain existing theories of authoritarianism, and that regional political change keeps outrunning the discipline's models — a deliberate echo of the field's failure to anticipate 2011.

The introduction's analytical move is to stop classifying regimes and start studying practices. Rather than asking whether a state is authoritarian or how long a regime will last, the editors follow Marlies Glasius's practice-based approach, in which an authoritarian practice is a patterned, organizationally embedded sabotage of accountability that works by disabling people's access to information and/or disabling their voice — which lets surveillance, censorship, protest policing, judicial capture, restrictive security and communications laws, and transnational repression be analysed as one family of instruments. Their own contribution is the concept of the authoritarian assemblage: MENA regimes did not replace old repression with new digital tools, they combine them, so torture, imprisonment, intimidation and extrajudicial killing now run alongside spyware, social-media monitoring, troll armies and disinformation. The 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi is their emblematic case precisely because it fused Pegasus-type digital surveillance with a physical, cross-border killing. Two further framing claims follow: practices cut ACROSS regime type — the volume covers closed autocracies, pluralistic systems, a democratising Tunisia, conflict-fragmented states and occupied territory — and MENA is not exceptional, since the same techniques circulate globally, including into Western liberal democracies, which is also the editors' rebuttal to orientalist 'Islam explains it' accounts.