MEHRAN KAMRAVA (Editor) Fragile Politics Weak States in the Greater Middle East HURST & COMPANY, LONDON 1 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST Mehran Kamrava he outbreak and domino-like spread of uprisings in much of the Arab world beginning in 2011 has brought added urgency to the study of weak and failing states in the Middle East. Despite the region’s history of wars and revolutions, the general scholarly consensus has oten favored the prevalence of mammoth, strong states in the Middle East.1 In fact, despite considerable regional variations in the political and institutional make-up of Middle Eastern countries, statism tends to be one of the most common denominators that an overwhelming majority of the region’s countries share. Nevertheless, as this volume makes amply clear, not only are several states in the Middle East chronically “weak”—Lebanon, Yemen, and the Sudan—but most others have inherent structural and institutional features that compromise their capacity, devoid them of legitimacy, and make them prone to weakness. his introductory chapter presents a broad survey of the study of weak states both as a scholarly exercise and in relation to the Middle East. he study of 1 See, for example, Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2004); Nazih Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996); and Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East, 3rd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2013). 1 FRAGILE POLITICS weak states, the chapter shows, is a contested terrain. Much of the controversy arises from the fact that the study of weak states is not merely an academic endeavor, but also goes to the heart of practical development policies.2 Equally troubling is the frequent association of weak or collapsed states with terrorism and terrorist groups, as attested by the rise irst of sea piracy and then the Al Shabaab group in Somalia, the March 23 Movement (M23) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen, to mention only a few examples. Not surprisingly, as Mark McGillivray’s contribution to this volume shows, at times the concept of “failed states” and various indices for state failure have been used by policy experts to link international security with domestic stability and development promotion.3 he chapter begins with a discussion of some of the more salient controversies involving the weak and failed states discourse. hese controversies bear on the very designation of states as weak, failing, or failed. he chapter then turns to the question of where weak states come from, examining the causes and characteristics of state weakness and failure. State weakness is rooted in diminished “capacity” and eroded or non-existent “legitimacy”. At the broadest level, states feature two key ingredients. All have institutional frameworks within which their capacity is generated and through which it is exercised. hey also have leaders who operate within these institutional frameworks and make choices along the way. Especially in non-democratic states, commonly found in the Middle East, leaders can at times crat or shape institutions to their own liking.4 In understanding state weakness, in other words, both structure and agency are important. In studying state weakness, our traditional conceptions of both notions of capacity and legitimacy need to be ine-tuned in order to take into account state leaders’ ability to manipulate existing social cleavages for their own advantages and to further their tenure in oice. his is particularly the case in the Middle East, as the chapters on Yemen and Sudan in this volume demonstrate, where despite signiicant state weakness leaders were able to remain in oice through reliance on institutions that were just strong enough, and practices that were politically rewarding enough, to maintain them in power. 2 Volker Boege, et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: State Formation in the Context of ‘Fragility’” (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conlict Management, October 2008), 4. 3 Charles T. Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, hird World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 8 (2008), 1494. 4 Mehran Kamrava, “Preserving Non-Democracies: Leaders and State Institutions in the Middle East”. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (March 2010), 231–50. 2 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST he Study of Weak States here are essentially three, broad perspectives about failed states.5 Some scholars view the concept of failed state as analytically useful, especially insofar as the study of international relations and security is concerned. A second group of scholars are open to the concept but do not see it as analytically useful because, they maintain, it is oten hard to deine. Fragile state terminology is oten maligned because of its analytical imprecision.6 Scholars in a third group are openly hostile to the concept, which they see as ethnocentric and motivated by hegemonic political agendas. hey point to the fact that international and especially US interests in the study of weak and failed states peaked especially ater the 9/11 attacks.7 Because fragile states are seen as a threat to the United States and to international security, much of the state-building eforts around the world by the US and its allies have focused irstly and primarily on building up the security sector.8 Much of the controversy surrounding the discourse arises, in fact, because of its alleged concern with the protection of US and Western national and international security interests. In addition to a number of conceptual laws in the “failed state” moniker, a number of scholars maintain, there are also ideological underpinnings to the concept that emphasize the use of power and advancing hegemony.9 Realizing that weak states can threaten security, the more powerful states and international organizations have invested considerable sums of money in countering conlict and stabilizing societies.10 he remedy needed to ix weak states is oten assumed to be more order: “without security, nothing else is possible”. Especially within the United Nations, there is an assumption that peace-building and state-building are connected. his entails placing emphasis on the strength and the coercive institutions of the state: the military, police, civil service, system of justice, and leadership.11 he 5 Edward Newman, “Failed State and International Order: Constructing a PostWestphalian World”, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 30, No. 3 (December 2009), 422–243. 6 Claire Mcloughlin, Topic Guide on Fragile States (University of Birmingham: Governance and Social Development Resource Center, 2012), 9. 7 Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, 1493. 8 Boege, et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States”, 4. 9 Charles T. Call, “Beyond the ‘failed state’: Toward conceptual alternatives”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 20, No. 10 (2010), 19. 10 Newman, “Failed State and International Order”, 438. 11 Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, 1496–8. 3 FRAGILE POLITICS relationship between peace-building and state-building is more complicated, with state-building potentially privileging one ethnic group over another, while peace deals may enable military leaders to divide the spoils of the state amongst themselves.12 Edward Newman’s arguments in this respect are largely representative of the critiques of the weak state discourse. He argues that the idea of failed states is a political construct and a relection of Western concerns over new security threats since 9/11. he securitization of failed states in political and academic discourse relects this subjective, Western construction of international security threats and represents another constructivist process in international politics.13 Newman concedes that no matter how problematic, the concept of failed states should not be abandoned. here is a distinction between the concept of failed state and the reality of failed states. It may therefore be academically useful to see how weak states and the threats they pose are constructed and perceived, and the meanings attached to them in policy and academic discourse.14 Others, Charles Call among them, have argued that the study of failed states is oten informed by culturally speciic assumptions about what a successful state should look like.15 he failed state discourse is oten value-driven, Call maintains, assuming that there is some “good” endpoint toward which states should be progressing.16 Branwen Grufyd Jones goes so far as to maintain that the prevailing discourse on weak and failed states “must be recognized as a contemporary successor to a much longer genealogy to a much longer imperial discourse about Africa and other non-European societies… he discourse of good governance and state failure reproduces a racialized imagination deeply entrenched in the structure of Western thought” and is “irredeemably rooted in an imperial imagination”.17 Some scholars have also taken issue with the presumed relationship between weak and collapsed states and terrorism. he connection between state weakness and global threats is less clear than is commonly assumed. In 12 Ibid., 1499. Newman, “Failed State and International Order”, 437–9. 14 Ibid., 433. 15 Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, 1494. 16 Ibid., 1499. 17 Branwen Grufyd Jones, “‘Good governance’ and ‘state failure’: genealogies of imperial discourse”, Cambridge Review of International Afairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2013), 49–50, 52. 13 4 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST fact, some cross-border threats are more likely to emerge from stronger states that possess critical gaps in capacity and will.18 According to Stewart Patrick, weak and fragile states can provide useful assets to transnational terrorists, but they may be less important to the terrorists’ operations than is widely believed. Patrick also questions the empirical evidence underpinning presumed multiple linkages between state weaknesses and international security threats.19 he empirical link between state weakness and failure and terrorism is also questioned by Aidan Hehir. Hehir demonstrates that there is no strong evidence that most terrorist groups have a pronounced preference for associating with weak or failed states.20 Some criticism has also been raised against the “institutionalist” approach to state collapse, an approach that is largely adopted in this chapter. Broadly, institutionalist perspectives focus on the viability, functions, and capacity of the institutions of the state, while legitimacy approaches are more concerned with social and political cohesion and the legitimacy that central authorities can generate.21 Institutionalist approaches run the danger of separating statebuilding from nation-building, and they attribute state weakness and collapse more to the collapse of institutions rather than lack of social and national cohesion.22 hese approaches oten miss the political dimensions involved in a state’s exercise of capacity, especially in relation to actors and currents in society. hese social dynamics are oten forged through conlict and have direct bearing on levels and exercise of state capacity. State capacity needs to be understood as a “socially constituted and dynamic phenomenon”.23 Some of the controversy involving the study of weak and failed states has to do with the precise categories—or lack thereof—of states that deserve such designations, especially since donor agencies rely on typologies and degrees of 18 Stewart Patrick, “Weak States and Global hreats: Assessing Evidence of ‘Spillovers’”, Center for Global Development, working paper No. 73, January 2006, 1. 19 Ibid., 5. 20 Aidan Hehir, “he Myth of the Failed State and the War on Terror: A Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom”, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 1, No. 3 (November 2007), 308. 21 Nicolas Lemay-Hebert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building? Legitimacy, State Failure and the Limits of the Institutionalist Approach”, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1 (March 2009), 22. 22 Ibid., 40. 23 Shahar Hameiri, “Failed states or a failed paradigm? State capacity and the limits of institutionalism”, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 10 (2007), 123. 5 FRAGILE POLITICS state fragility to determine appropriate strategies for donor engagement.24 he very deinitions of “weak” and “collapsed” or “failed” states are contested.25 In broad terms, the distinction between the two categories of “weak” and “failed” states is self-evident. Failed states occur in “a situation where governmental structures are overwhelmed by circumstances”.26 Robert Rotberg has ofered what is a generally accepted deinition of failed states: Failed states are tense, deeply conlicted, dangerous, and contested bitterly by warring factions. In most failed states, government troops battle armed revolts led by one or more rivals. Occasionally, the oicial authorities in a failed state face two or more insurgencies, varieties of civil unrest, diferent degrees of communal discontent, and a plethora of dissent directed at the state and at groups within the state.27 In these failed or collapsed states, “the state apparatus ceases to exist for a period of several months” and the services that are normally provided by the state are instead provided by sub-state or non-state actors.28 Warning against the potential political uses of the concept of a failed state, Call maintains that the concept is useless unless it refers to wholly collapsed states in which there is no domestically or internationally recognizable authority.29 his emphasis on the total collapse of state institutions and functions arises from the discrepancy between the de jure and de facto nature of many states.30 Such states are marked by a collapse of central government authority and subsequent loss of territory or monopoly over the legitimate use of force. State collapse encompasses more than the failure of governmental institutions and also involves the complex dynamics having to do with the erosion of social and political cohesion.31 A weak state, according to the widely-used deinition suggested by the OECD, “has weak capacity to carry out basic functions of governing a population and its territory”, and lacks “the ability to develop mutually constructive 24 Mcloughlin, Topic Guide on Fragile States, 12. For an insightful analysis of the evolution of the concepts of weak and failed state, see Call, “Beyond the ‘failed state’”, 3. 26 Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, “Saving Failed States”, Foreign Policy, Vol. 89 (1993), 5. 27 Robert Rotberg, “he Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair”. In Robert Rotberg, ed., When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 5. 28 Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, 1501. 29 Ibid., 1492. 30 Newman, “Failed State and International Order”, 423. 31 Lemay-Hebert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building?” 22. 25 6 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST and reinforcing relations with society”.32 he primary diference between a failed and a weak state is a matter of degree. In broad terms, state fragility can be deined as a state’s inability to meet its citizens’ basic needs and expectations. hese states sufer from signiicant gaps in performance, legitimacy, security, and control over parts of their territory.33 he state is a provider of public goods and service deliveries. Its core functions include the provision of security, legitimacy, and wealth and welfare. Gradations of state weakness and failure include measures of statehood against these core functions.34 Fragile states can be conceptualized along a continuum of declining state performance, from weak states to failing and then failed states and inally collapsed states.35 According to Rotberg, weak states in fact generally contain the “incubus of failure”, as has been the case with Lebanon, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala, among others, or they may be “enduringly frail”, as has been the case with Haiti.36 Paradoxically, the literature on weak states does not explicitly distinguish between “state” as an institutional construct in the Weberian sense and “state” as a sovereign territorial unit. his is an important distinction. Territorial entities designated as states oten contain one or more nations, and it is in relation to these national or subnational groups—as well as in relation to other states—that states experience weakness or strength. From an institutionalist perspective, conceptualizing the state in purely political terms does not always provide a complete picture of the dynamics of state-building operations. States also have the ability to enforce a successful social contract that ensures a cohesion of the larger social entity they govern. here are even some “phantom states” that may have external resourcing but lack domestic social and political legitimacy.37 Weak and failing states oten possess legal but not empirical sovereignty.38 In weak states informal institutions such as tribes, patron–client networks, or ethnically-based networks, rather than formal 32 Anten, Briscoe, and Mezzera, “he Political Economy of State-Building in Situation of Fragility and Conlict”, 12. 33 Mcloughlin, Topic Guide on Fragile States, 9. 34 Rolf Schwarz, “he political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East: Rentier states, economic reform, and democratization”, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 15, No. 4 (October 2008), 602. 35 Boege, et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States”, 3. 36 Rotberg, “he Failure and Collapse of Nation-States”, 18–19. 37 Lemay-Hebert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building?” 29, 37. 38 Patrick, “Weak States and Global hreats”, 7. 7 FRAGILE POLITICS state institutions such as ministries, are the main channels of service delivery and allocation of public resources. Weak states feature low state capacity, and service delivery across social groups and territory is inconsistent.39 Causes and Characteristics of State Weakness his leaves unanswered the question of where weak states come from, or, more accurately, what kinds of institutional and other factors cause state weakness. Weak states feature lack of institutional cohesion, bouts of political instability, violent competition over control of resources, fragmentation of society along multiple fault-lines, and citizens resort to alternative means of coping and surviving, including migration and crime.40 he competition of political power-holders in the “political marketplace” is crucial to determining the path taken by a fragile state. Not surprisingly, such a state can give rise to a violent political marketplace, as Alex de Waal formulates in Chapter 8, one in which there is incessant armed confrontation, bargaining between the ruler and lower-level, local leaders, and where there are local militias. If there is no established balance of power, violence in the political marketplace has the potential to erupt into civil war.41 One of the most critical causes of state weakness is political fragmentation, as it “warps incentives, encouraging short-term opportunism at the expense of long-term investments that could advance development”. Conlict between identity groups becomes a societal obsession and replaces other collective or individual endeavors that could enhance communal cohesion and harmony. Formal governing institutions and regulations become disconnected from the larger environment within which they operate, commanding at best supericial and perfunctory allegiance and compliance. “State laws go unheeded because no one acknowledges them as legitimate.” Weak states invariably sufer from corrupt government, biased courts, and weak property rights.42 Ghani and Lockhart refer to this as a “syndrome of dysfunctionality”.43 Not surprisingly, 39 Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, 1502. Louise Anten, Ivan Briscoe, and Marco Mezzera, “he Political Economy of StateBuilding in Situation of Fragility and Conlict: From Analysis to Strategy”, Conlict Research Unit, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, January 2012, 21. 41 Ibid., 23. 42 Kaplan, Fixing Fragile States, 41. 43 Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80. 40 8 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST in weak states allegiance to the state as a set of legitimate institutions with oicial power and compliance to its policies is in short supply. Weak states invariably sufer from a disconnect between the state and social actors. In fact, in fragile states allegiances are more likely to be focused on a tribe, local notables, religious leaders, and other, more parochially focused entities instead of state institutions and political symbols and objects whose scope and purview is national in scale.44 At times, as Charles Schimtz’s contribution to this volume shows, the very process of state-building and political consolidation, which in Yemen for example occurred under the auspices of British rule, heavily favors one social group over others, setting into motion dynamics whose alienating consequences for large swathes of population have lasting results. Yemen’s predicament may have changed today since the days of British rule, but strong local identities, oten fed and nurtured by outside force, continue to dominate the country’s political landscape, thus contributing to the state’s chronic weakness. Whether fed endogenously or from the outside, strong local identities are one of the main contributors to state weakness. Not surprisingly, this weakness is not always inimical to the interests of actual or potential power centers. In Yemen’s case, in fact, the state’s weakness has entailed a number of functional beneits to many of the country’s tribes, ruling coalitions, and to Saudi Arabia. here are a range of other pathologies associated with state weakness. Perhaps the most glaring have to do with a state’s diminished capacity and status in the international arena and its ability proactively to promote or even to defend its interests in dealing with regional and international forces and actors. hese outside forces may be other states, multinational agencies and organizations, corporations, or, as a number of Middle Eastern states are learning the hard way, non-governmental actors such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). But weak states oten also have a host of domestic exigencies with which they need to contend. hese internal diiculties may include forced migration; various forms of smuggling; the emergence of recalcitrant or aggressive governments; the emergence of war economies in which illegal networks and activities thrive; adverse impact on the environment; heightened health problems (such as the spread of cholera or the reappearance of polio); and the appearance of environments conducive to the establishment and operations of terrorist organizations.45 44 Seth Kaplan, “Identity in Fragile States: Social cohesion and state building”, Development, Vol. 52, No. 4 (2009), 469. 45 Newman, “Failed State and International Order”, 429–31. 9 FRAGILE POLITICS At the broadest level, four clusters of factors combine to bring about state fragility: structural and economic factors, such as endemic poverty or chronic armed conlict; political and institutional factors, such as crisis of legitimacy and authority and the weakness of formal institutions; social factors, such as lack of social cohesion and sever identity fragmentation; and international factors, such as global economic shocks and loss of powerful patrons.46 Weak states have “capacity gaps” in the security realm where they struggle to provide security against external and internal threats; in the political realm in the form of lack of legitimacy; in the economic realm insofar as trade, investments, and legal and regulatory environments are concerned; and thus are unable to meet the basic needs of their populations.47 A state is failing when a government loses control over its territory; it lacks monopoly over legitimate use of force; its authority to make collective decisions is eroded; it is unable to provide reasonable public services; and it has diminished capacity to conduct formal relations with other states.48 he failure to perform functions of statehood, in other words, is central to state weakness or collapse. Charles Call conceives of state weakness as a series of core exigencies and gaps in capacity, security, and legitimacy. A “security gap” is when the state cannot “provide minimum levels of security in the face of organized armed groups”. Not surprisingly, most of the states experiencing security gaps are those in the midst of armed conlict. A “legitimacy gap”, which is the most diicult to conceptualize and operationalize, occurs when a “signiicant portion of political elite and society reject rules regulating the exercise of power and the accumulation and distribution of wealth”.49 As evident, state weakness and/or collapse is driven by both institutional factors and by diminished legitimacy.50 Insofar as institutional factors are concerned, the collapse or resilience of states is oten directly tied to their capacity. State capacity owes much to institutional depth and breadth.51 he “backbone of the state”, political capacity is the ability to implement political decisions, especially in the face of actual or potential opposition from powerful social 46 Mcloughlin, Topic Guide on Fragile States, 16. Patrick, “Weak States and Global hreats”, 7–8. 48 Zaryab Iqbal and Harvey Starr, “Bad Neighbors: Failed States and heir Consequences”, Conlict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 25 (2008), 317. 49 Call, “Beyond the ‘failed state’”, 5–6. 50 Lemay-Hebert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building?” 28. 51 Linda Weiss, he Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 19. 47 10 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST groups.52 State weakness is a function of diminished state capacity. Among other things, diminished capacity opens the door to “political entrepreneurs” seeking to displace national allegiances with local ones.53 State capacity refers to the capacity of the state to ensure the delivery of its core functions vis-à-vis providing security, rule of law, public inance management, and services.54 A capacity gap exists where the institutions of the state are incapable of delivering minimal public goods and services to the population. “Minimal capacity”, of course, difers from one society to another. States only become operational in relation to other states and in relation to their own societies. According to Joel Migdal, a cohesive, strong state is perceived by its subjects as “a dominant, integrated, autonomous entity that controls, in a given territory, all rule making either directly through its own agencies or indirectly by sanctioning other authorized organizations—businesses, families, clubs, and the like—to make certain circumscribed rules”.55 Institutional capacity develops in an environment of social conlict and denotes the capacity of institutions to promote certain interests while marginalizing others.56 Weak states, on the other hand, facilitate circumstances in which there are some groups that gain from the luid circumstances and some that lose, and political collaboration and competition ensue over various material interests.57 In such circumstances, “the state’s ‘outposts’ are mediated by ‘informal’ indigenous societal institutions which follow their own logic and rules within the (incomplete) state structures”.58 State capacity is oten also directly impacted by a state’s position within the international system and its relations with other states. More speciically, state fragility can oten arise as a result of the dynamic interplay between internal and external factors. In addition to internal “malfunctions”, a state’s fragility 52 Michael Bratton, “Peasant–State relations in postcolonial Africa: patterns of engagement and disengagement”, in Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the hird World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 235–6. 53 Lemay-Hebert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building?” 28. 54 Call, “Beyond the ‘failed state’”, 4. 55 Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. 56 Hameiri, “Failed states or a failed paradigm”, 141. 57 Anten, Briscoe, and Mezzera, “he Political Economy of State-Building in Situation of Fragility and Conlict”, 11. 58 Boege, et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States”, 7. 11 FRAGILE POLITICS or strength is oten directly impacted by its place in the international system and the international political economy.59 he fragile state’s tenuous but nonetheless continued power and relevance to the life of society is further reinforced by a combination of international norms and forces that reinforce its de jure sovereignty and its de facto authority. More commonly, states use international as well as internal coalitions to enhance their capacity. Many, in fact, consolidate their domestic and international linkages as a way of increasing their power and capacity in both domestic and international arenas.60 Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than the de facto break-up of Syria and Iraq as a result of the rise of the al-Qaeda ofshoot calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In their competition for regional inluence in the chaos of the post-Arab Spring Middle East and to further their own international agendas, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar lent what initially seemed like blanket support to groups ighting the Syrian state, among which the ISIL emerged as by far the most brutal and the most efective. Buoyed by parallel developments next door in Iraq and the Iraqi state’s incapacity to extend its reach meaningfully beyond Baghdad and other key cities, ISIL also expanded its operations in northern Iraq. With continued though indirect and increasingly lessening support from outside backers, in June 2014 ISIL renamed itself the Islamic State and declared an independent, new country under the same name (ad-Dawlah al-ʾIslāmiyyah) in parts of northern Iraq and Syria. As of this writing, in late 2014, the fate of the new state and those of Iraq and Syria remains an open question. What is certain, however, is that neither the Iraqi and Syrian states nor the new entity are likely to have enough institutional capacity and military strength on their own to withstand the impact of outside inluences. he example of ISIL illustrates the importance of state capacity and its reach in areas not easily accessible to its agents and institutions. Particularly in developing countries, state capacity is oten at its weakest in more remote, rural areas. Not surprisingly, as Daniel Esser’s contribution here forcefully demonstrates, it is in the cities in which the full impact of the state’s powers and capacities are most apparent, and where citizens come into the most sustained and meaningful contact with them. Cities are indeed, as Esser claims, important sites of state-building. But neglect of the countryside or of other non-central areas, as the cases of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan demonstrate, can have perilous consequences for state weakness and failure. 59 60 Mcloughlin, Topic Guide on Fragile States, 16. Weiss, he Myth of the Powerless State, 209. 12 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST he survival of weak states in the developing world is due to the support of an international political order that upholds existing boundaries and assists regimes against internal, at times even external, threats and challenges. his supportive international order has helped mask “the actual weakness and political incapacity of ‘quasi-states’”.61 States seek to adapt to new and emerging challenges by forging domestic and international alliances. In fact, engaging with other states, as in globalization, can have the potential to enhance the powers of the state.62 Globalization may also be an important contributor to state weakness, with neoliberal economic forces weakening state capacity and its provision of public goods.63 While regional and international dynamics can help maintain a weak state in power, they can also seriously undermine the strength and capacity of otherwise stable states. Declining superpower support, for example, is a critical factor in causing weakness, especially among more dependent states. Similarly, states neighboring failed states are likely to experience high levels of instability themselves.64 Consequences of state failure may be destabilizing at the regional level as weak and failed states have a higher probability of getting involved in interstate conlict. Weak states cannot mitigate conlict difusion and escalation from outside their borders. Moreover, as the cases of Iraq and Syria starkly demonstrate, state failure creates destabilizing conditions in a region, with possible incentives for violent behavior by other states. he failed state itself may present an attractive target for outside military intervention and interstate armed conlict.65 In this respect, geographic contiguity plays a particularly important role in the spread of the efects of state collapse.66 Equally consequential to state weakness or strength is the legitimacy the state enjoys among its population. Although legitimacy’s nebulous nature makes it diicult for the social sciences empirically to document its depth and extent among social actors, especially in non-democracies, it does nevertheless play a critical role in shaping the overall nature of state–society relations. As Seth Kaplan has argued, “state legitimacy lies at the base of any stable political order; it is an essential ingredient inluencing any country’s capacity to foster economic, political, or social progress and is a powerful predictor of economic 61 Schwarz, “he political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East”, 601. Weiss, he Myth of the Powerless State, 210–11. 63 Newman, “Failed State and International Order”, 424. 64 Iqbal and Starr, “Bad Neighbors”, 315. 65 Ibid., 325. 66 Ibid., 319. 62 13 FRAGILE POLITICS growth and the quality of governance”.67 Fragile states are characterized by competing claims to power and logic of the formal state. hey do not have a privileged position as the political framework that provides security, welfare, and representation, and are therefore forced to share authority, legitimacy, and capacity with others.68 States that are beret of legitimacy are essentially non-democratic, there being a direct connection between state strength and democracy. he critical linkage between democracy and state strength, or lack thereof, lies in legitimacy. State legitimacy rooted in acceptable and responsive performance—the essence of democracy—fosters increased public conidence, “positive cycles of capacity development and institutionalisation, and a growth in legitimacy and constructive state-society relations”.69 Weak states may be able to perform security functions, but they cannot perform welfare and representation functions, thus sufering from eroded or diminished legitimacy. Failed states, on the other hand, can perform neither security nor welfare and representation functions, and have no legitimacy either.70 A number of scholars, Rotberg among them, see a lack of democracy as one of the most central elements of state weakness. Rotberg classiies state strength or weakness on the basis of a state’s ability to deliver a series of “political goods”, among which the provision of security, medical and healthcare services, arteries of commerce and transportation, and communication networks are key. Most notably, however, Rotberg points to a state’s ability to provide its citizenry with the opportunities to participate freely in politics and the political process as one of the most important indicators of strength. Democracy equates with strength for Rotberg, and its absence denotes state weakness.71 Nevertheless, as the Middle East attests, the relationship between authoritarianism and state weakness is seldom direct. Authoritarian states may lack popular legitimacy but still be able to afect social and economic change and enjoy considerable capacities in institutional, security, economic, and diplomatic arenas. Although authoritarian regimes contain the seeds of their own demise, as their longevity and preponderance in the Middle East demonstrate, they oten show remarkable staying power. Even if they may be “semi-stable”, 67 Kaplan, Fixing Fragile States, 37. Boege, et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States”, 10. 69 Derick W. Brinkerhof, “State Fragility and Governance: Conlict Mitigation and Subnational Perspectives”, Development Policy Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2011), 133. 70 Schwarz, “he political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East”, 603. 71 Rotberg, “he Failure and Collapse of Nation-States”, 4. 68 14 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST they are not necessarily weak since “state agencies are the main vehicle for the exercise of power and the delivery of services… [hey] have generally refashioned the state along the lines they desire.”72 Even in instances of general state weakness, as this volume illustrates with speciic reference to the cases of Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan, the use of a “political budget”, as de Waal puts it, to establish and maintain patronage and clientelist networks with strategically positioned social actors enables the state to continue holding on to power, and to maintain continued relevance in social and economic realms, despite signiicantly eroded capacities. As Barry Buzan reminds us, there are three critical elements to the state and its strength. hey include its physical base (its sovereignty in a given territory); its institutional expression (the scope of its institutions); and the idea of the state (in terms of the implicit social contract on which it relies).73 States may have weakened institutional capacities and eroded legitimacies, but the idea of the state and its ability to frame the context and continually inluence norms and the environment will not easily dissipate. Closely related to legitimacy is the equally nebulous notion of identity, which plays a key role in determining a state’s strength and capacity. Identity is particularly critical in the creation of state legitimacy, since legitimate political orders are usually built around a cohesive group and use institutions that are relective of that group’s historical evolution.74 As Robert Putnam has formulated, in most cohesive societies “virtuous circles” develop that feature “social equilibria with high levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well-being”. At the opposite end, a combination of multiple identity groups on the one hand and absence of robust governing institutions on the other hand can result in a “vicious circle” in which “defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another”.75 States work better when they are more deeply integrated with the societies they purport to represent. States that are structured around cohesive population groups are more efectively positioned to capitalize on the common identities and ainities found in society.76 72 Call, “he Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’”, 1504. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 64. 74 Kaplan, “Identity in Fragile States”, 468. 75 Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 177. 76 Kaplan, “Identity in Fragile States”, 470. 73 15 FRAGILE POLITICS States that can take advantage of group synergies on a national level have considerable advantage over those that cannot.77 Similarly, a cohesive society is central to both a state’s robustness and enhanced capacity. Identity plays an important role in the construction of both formal and informal “productive” institutions of the state.78 In weak states, in which formal institutions are fractured, the efects of diverse identities are magniied. Fluid, unstable environments in weak states encourage polities to split along the most salient cleavages. If they do not sufer from paralysis and debilitating fragility, states in fragmented societies are at best likely to remain “arenas of accommodation” instead of functioning as mechanisms for fostering major changes in people’s social behavior.79 Fragile states are unable to assert complete authority in their territories and are vulnerable to challenges from rival institutional systems. hey feature “historically embedded disconnects between formal and informal institutions”.80 Where informal rules dominate governance, levels of institutionalization are generally low, and people have little trust in formal institutions, in turn undermining the possibility of reform through institutional design. When competing identity groups are tied to weak formal institutions, at the very least, they can cripple development.81 State weakness, in sum, is fundamentally a product of diminished capacity. It may be brought on endogenously, as a result of the nature of the state’s relationship with the national groups and social actors over whom it seeks to rule; or exogenously, as a result of the nature of its interactions with other states. Among the more common catalysts of state weakness are wars and other forms of interstate conlict and tensions; international eforts to bring about “regime change” or changes in “regime behavior”, such as trade sanctions and economic embargos; or cross-border attacks and attempts to foment ethnic unrest. As it happens, there has been no shortage of these endogenous and exogenous drivers of state weakness in the Middle East. Weak States in the Middle East he wave of mass-based rebellions that rocked the Arab world beginning in 2011 shook the very foundations of numerous Middle Eastern states, “weak” 77 Ibid., 467. Ibid. 79 Migdal, State in Society, 94. 80 Anten, Briscoe, and Mezzera, “he Political Economy of State-Building in Situation of Fragility and Conlict”, 31. 81 Kaplan, “Identity in Fragile States”, 467. 78 16 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST and “strong” alike. Seemingly invincible regimes like those of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt fell like houses of cards, while the eternally revolutionary Qadhai was dragged out of a sewer pipe at the bloody end of a civil war and shot dead while pleading for his life. Whatever ediice of a state he had erected in Libya over his forty-year rule—or, perhaps more aptly, deconstructed—is now being dismantled and reassembled anew. he Syrian state, meanwhile, has so far proven more resilient, still standing as of this writing, despite a civil war raging since early 2011. But its very foundations have been shaken to their core. he Bahraini monarchy has been similarly jolted, the state’s attempts at painting Shia protestors as Iran’s ith column having done little to stem the tide of popular anger or to strengthen its own hold on power. In Yemen, the revolution succeeded, to a degree. he wily Ali Abdullah Saleh inally relented and gave up power ater mass protests wouldn’t subside until he let oice, but the transition was only to that of his vice president, with little of the substance of politics, or even the many personalities manning state institutions, changing in any meaningful way. Yemen—along with Lebanon—has long been cited as the Middle East’s prototypical weak state, and Saleh’s departure has done little to change the fortunes of the state one way or another. he country’s sovereignty continues to be violated with the same frequency by lethal US drones as it was during Saleh’s last years in oice. At the other end of the Arab world, in Sudan, Omar al-Bashir has so far had better luck keeping his hold on power using the same budgetary management of the political marketplace that Saleh resorted to in Yemen. But what Bashir could not do was to keep his country intact, by February 2011 having no alternative but to agree to the secession of South Sudan. But even in his nowtruncated country, the Bashir state’s hold over and reach into Sudanese society remains tenuous at best. Along with Yemen and Sudan, Lebanon remains one of the Middle East’s chronically weak states. Lebanon was born weak, with the institutional design of its state having sentenced it to a life of weakness. he unwritten National Pact of 1943 assigns state oices based on an archaic and artiicial confessional distribution that from early on was more iction that fact. he design of the state along confessional lines only perpetuated the hold of sub-national loyalties and identities, maintaining also the inluence and powers of local notables (zuama), and impeding the development of state power and capacity. As if centrifugal forces were built into the state, the young country soon erupted into civil war, in 1958, and political stability remained elusive. By 1975, the additional burden of Palestinian presence in the country once again plunged 17 FRAGILE POLITICS Lebanon into civil war, this time only to subside under the overpowering hand of the Syrian army’s occupation in 1990. Neither the Syrian presence nor the Tai’f Accord of 1994, meant to reconstitute and rejuvenate the state, brought the country stability or enhanced state power. he political elite continued to bicker; sectarian and confessional loyalties retained their strength within the country’s fractured society; the army and the bureaucracy remained weak; Syria’s heavy hand was matched by Israel’s routine neglect of Lebanese sovereignty and occasional, destructive attacks; and non-state actors, especially the Hezbollah, operated at will and with impunity. By the time the impact of the Syrian civil war was felt in the northern parts of the country, the Lebanese state had already taken itself to the edge of the precipice and back several times. Today, the weakness continues. Yemen, Sudan, and Lebanon join the countries of the Arab Spring— Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain—in exhibiting pronounced features and manifestations of state weakness. he extent to which the rest of the states of the Middle East can be classiied as either “weak” or “strong”, or something in between, is open to debate. Speciic, national variations notwithstanding, state capacity in the Middle East is oten greatly inluenced by rentierism or war making, or both. Both of these developments bear directly on the capacity of the state, and both have been pervasive features of Middle Eastern politics for the last several decades. War making, Charles Tilly has convincingly argued, directly contributed to the enhancement of state power in Europe as it helped to centralize the state, consolidated national boundaries, gave rise to political symbols at the employ of the state, and enhanced the state’s penetrative and extractive reach within society.82 In the Middle East, however, war making has had the opposite efect, signiicantly reducing the state’s infrastructural power.83 As is the case in the rest of the developing world, in the Middle East war making does not contribute to the development of state power and, in fact, may actually lead to a decline in state power. Starting out from a position of relative weakness, disadvantage, and oten dependence in the international arena, states in developing countries are likely to ind it particularly taxing to marshal human and material resources for purposes of warfare. hroughout the Middle East, war making is likely to 82 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). 83 Schwarz, “he political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East”, 608. 18 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST result in a decline in state power due to three factors. hey include the speciic conditions of warfare prevailing in the region; the general inancial challenges of war making; and the more speciic iscal crises that regimes face as a result of war making. Due to the pervasiveness of vast expanses of desert and large swathes of open, exposed territories, military conlicts in the Middle East— not the least of which have included the 1967 and 1973 Arab–Israeli wars and the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq war—have oten entailed the destruction of massive quantities of military hardware and personnel, therefore exposing warring states to weakness and fragility. hese conlicts have been costly not only in terms of human life but also insofar as the state’s inancial and overall economic health is concerned. In each of the three wars mentioned, as well as in Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the damage to infrastructure in the countries afected reached into billions of dollars. Less obvious but still important has been the deepening dependence on Western weapons suppliers for purposes of war preparation. In the case of Middle Eastern states involved in prolonged wars and international conlicts, the state does not gain power during sustained war making because the types of war making that exist in the region marginalize the value of domestic resources and instead increase the value of externally driven ones, including especially advanced weaponry, foreign currency, military assistance, and even skilled labor.84 Ultimately, war making reduces the infrastructural power of the state, which is the power of the state to penetrate and centrally coordinate the activities of civil society through its own infrastructure.85 During the course of its eight-year war with Iran, for example, the Iraqi state’s power over national economic resources declined precipitously as a direct result of the war, with the state’s diminished capabilities bringing about important changes to the state–private sector relationship.86 As evidence from Iran and Iraq in the 1980s and Egypt in the 1960s indicates, war making has also failed to provide impetus for growth in state power. In the lead-up to the 1967 war, in fact, war preparations placed great strains on the powers of the Egyptian state.87 he relationship between rentierism and state power is less clear. Benjamin Smith maintains that oil-rich states are particularly durable and have built-in 84 hierry Gangora, “War Making and State Power in the Contemporary Middle East”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 29 (1997), 331. 85 Ibid., 324. 86 Ibid., 326. 87 Ibid., 330. 19 FRAGILE POLITICS institutional immunity to slow-downs in the low of oil revenues, thus ensuring their survival in tough economic times. Longevity, in fact, is their dominant distinguishing feature, regardless of whether or not they may be authoritarian or feature some hybrid of democratic and semi-democratic or non-democratic features.88 Authoritarian leaders in oil-rich states invested their windfall revenues in building state institutions that could carry them through hard times, as in the 1980s, when their access to patronage rents decreased dramatically. He concludes that “oil wealth is robustly associated with increased regime durability”.89 Rolf Schwarz, however, claims that rentierism has created fundamentally weak states in the Middle East. Arab states in particular, he argues, are “strong” in times of oil boom and weak in representative functions and, at times of iscal crisis, in welfare functions as well.90 Rentierism has permitted extensive militarization rather than resource extraction. his has signiicantly contributed to the weakness of the state internally. Extensive militarization has not fostered eicient bureaucracies, as large bureaucracies function as employers of last resort. he more a state relies on direct measures of taxation, the more the collection of taxes depends on an eicient bureaucracy and voluntary compliance. In the absence of voluntary compliance, which is mainly a function of lack of legitimacy, states have to rely on other indirect measures to accrue necessary revenues.91 Rentierism may erode the long-term eicacy of state institutions and their extractive capacity in relation to social actors, but it also facilitates the continued replenishing of a political budget at the disposal of state elites. Patronage and clientelism can be powerful substitutes for political legitimacy. he otpredicted demise of the monarchical states of the Arabian Peninsula is nowhere near actually taking place, thanks largely to the beneits of rentierism accrued to state leaders.92 And in times of crisis and economic slow-down, only states relying on indirect forms of rent or those with larger populations and comparatively lower rents sufer adverse political consequences. he others that are better endowed and have fewer mouths to feed—especially Saudi 88 Benjamin Smith, “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960–1999”, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 2 (April 2004), 242. 89 Ibid., 232. 90 Schwarz, “he political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East”, 599. 91 Ibid., 607. 92 For the latest of such predictions, see Christopher Davidson, Ater the Sheikhs: he Coming Collapse of Gulf Monarchies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 20 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—tend to come out of crises relatively unscathed.93 Altogether, as the contributions to this volume make clear, we see in the Middle East a number of states in a condition of seemingly perpetual weakness—Sudan, Yemen, and Lebanon, plus Pakistan and Afghanistan, if the geographic designation of the region can be stretched slightly—and then the recurrence of episodes that push states toward weakness, most notable of which are wars, war making, and mass rebellions. State leaders, meanwhile, devise a variety of coping mechanisms and survival strategies, prolonging their own tenure in oice and ensuring the operations of supportive institutions at suicient, though not necessarily optimum, levels. Weakness persists, but failure and collapse are averted, at times just barely. his Volume Despite the growing importance of the topic, especially since 2011, so far the subject of weak states in the Middle East has not been studied in a systematic, in-depth manner through English-language sources. Scholars writing in Arabic have been equally inattentive to the broader topic of state weakness and failure in the region.94 his omission has been mostly inadvertent rather than by design, a product, as Ayubi correctly asserts, of the largely mistaken impression that the expansive size and reach of the state in the Middle East entails a parallel growth in its size and eicacy.95 his volume is designed to ill some of the scholarly gap let as a result. Given the vast array of topics that could be studied under the broader umbrella of state weakness and failure, no single volume could possibly present a complete picture of the complex dynamics involved in a region as vast and diverse as the Middle East. Nevertheless, the contributors here have 93 Mehran Kamrava, “he Political Economy of Rentierism in the Persian Gulf ”, in Mehran Kamrava, ed., he Political Economy of the Persian Gulf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54–62. 94 Most scholars writing in Arabic examine state weakness within the context of challenges to state-building processes. See, for example, Khaled Mustafa Murab, Moshkilat Bina‘ Aldawlah Alhadeetah i Libnan was Al-Watan Al-Arabi (Problems in Modern State-Building in Lebanon and Arab Countries) (Cairo: Dar Alnahze Alarabiyya, 2010); and Jihad Awda, Fi Bina‘ Aldawlah Al-libraliyah Al-dasturiyah (Building a Liberal, Republic State) (Cairo: n.p., 2013). 95 Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State, 3. 21 FRAGILE POLITICS sought to highlight some of the most pertinent, and in some cases the most understudied, examples of state weakness or state failure in the Middle East region. By design, the contributors approach the study of the topic from a variety of perspectives and angles, exploring various causes, facets, and consequences of state incapacity in relation to social groups, service delivery, and interactions with other states or with groups outside their borders (in Brand’s case, their own citizens in the diaspora). he contributions to the volume start with two treatments of Yemen, each from a diferent angle. Charles Schmitz presents a historical account of the evolution of the Yemeni state, drawing attention to its very genesis as a British creation meant to protect Britain’s interests in Aden. Tribal chietaincies were transformed into state institutions under the labels of “Paramouncy” or “Princely” rule. Whatever state-building ensued, whether under foreign auspices or a product of indigenous dynamics, it experienced severe strains during the Cold War, with centrifugal forces inspired by Nasserist pan-Arabism on the one side and Saudi conservatism on the other. he two Yemens that emerged had chronically weak institutions, and their uniication into one in 1990 did little to enhance the reach and capacity of the new state. Schmitz shows that in the post-uniication era and reaching well into and ater the Arab Spring, foreign interference into Yemeni politics has not ceased. his level of persistent foreign machinations over time, Schmitz claims, is not adequately captured and accounted for by the literature on failed and weak states. Complementing the historical analysis of Schmitz is Sarah Philips’ focus on the security-oriented conceptions of the weakness of the Yemini state. Among other things, these conceptions, frequently perpetuated by Western publications such as the Foreign Policy Failed State Index, are all too oten inspired by the perceived need to help “stabilize” the country in the face of terror attacks by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Philips maintains that in Yemen’s case what is commonly perceived as state weakness or failure is essentially a complex and multi-faceted process of state formation that is inherently fraught with unpredictability and conlict and violence. Within the context of today’s globalized world, and more speciically given Yemen’s strategic location, the violent travails of late state formation were assumed to be symptoms of state failure best remedied by development assistance the ultimate outcome of which was securing the state from its citizens. “Stabilization” has become a code word for regime stability through defeating the AQAP and ending its violence, in turn perpetuating a vicious cycle that has only eroded the state’s functionality and its means of nexus with society. 22 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST Daniel Esser’s chapter similarly critiques statist conceptualizations of governance that ignore sub-state dynamics as potential building blocks of improved human security and service delivery. Focusing on the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, he argues that the labeling of these states as failed by US policy-makers was as much a product of political considerations and agendas as it was an analytical assessment of the two polities. he discourse of state weakness was employed for purposes of waging invasions. he invaders—the United States and its Coalition of the Willing—correctly targeted cities as the primary sites of political power and state-building. Where they went wrong, Esser argues, is when they ignored the urban centers’ “sub-national politics and practices” and instead focused on cities as sites of violence and terrorism. Pre-determined rulers were imposed on local populations; indigenous urban actors were excluded from the political process and ignored, replaced instead by imported technocrats who had resided in the West; donor money poured in to buttress ledgling security apparatuses; and old, statist patterns of centralized rule, albeit with new garb, began to re-emerge, this time with a decidedly pro-Western hue. Historic opportunities to reinvent “space of governance” in both countries were squandered and were sacriiced for the beneit of Western—US—hegemonic control of the region. Frederic Wehrey chronicles the travails of post-revolutionary state-building in Libya, focusing speciically on the interplay between institutional fragility on the one hand and societal issures on the other. he breakdown of political order in the lead-up to and following Qadhai’s ouster from power has given rise to multiple, previously suppressed issures in Libyan society. Wehrey maps out these issures, demonstrating that the most important ones are beginning to emerge along geographic and ideological lines. he Qadhai state had rather successfully employed a combination of institutional coercion and patronage to foster, and in instances to forcibly impose, political and societal homogeneity. he weak and contested institutions that have appeared in the wake of his overthrow have been ill-equipped to pull together the centrifugal forces that the civil war had unleashed. Perhaps the most heavily contested of the political institutions has been the security forces. In addition to the ensuing “security gap”, the tensions and at times open conlict among competing armed groups and militias has done little to deepen public conidence in the ledgling institutions of the state or, for that matter, to help remedy state weakness. Weak states create space and opportunities for non-state actors to pursue opportunities and agendas they would not have otherwise been able to pursue had the state’s capacities not been eroded. his is particularly the case with one 23 FRAGILE POLITICS of the Middle East’s chronically weak states—Lebanon—and one of the comparatively more powerful, better-backed non-state actors in the region, the Hezbollah. Mikaelian and Salloukh examine the political space created by the weak Lebanese state within which the Hezbollah has operated with relative impunity. he group, in fact, owes its establishment to another state altogether, Iran, and has almost consistently found its domestic and regional strategies in line with those of either Iran or Syria, or both. In the process, the group has tied its own fortunes as much to the vagaries of regional military and diplomatic developments as to the shiting power balances of Lebanese politics and the state’s ability to enforce its agendas and rule on the country’s heterogeneous society. Sudan’s weakness is neither new nor a recent discovery. A number of Sudanese writers and intellectuals, in fact, have been exploring its genesis and lamenting its consequences from the earliest days of the republic’s birth. Rogaia Abusharaf explores the work of one such Sudanese intellectual, the anthropologist Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub (1927–71). Zeroing in on one of his books, Rectifying the Wrongs in Working with the Masses, Abusharaf explores Mahgoub’s thoughts on what she calls “the shared ideology of othering”, an earnest attempt to understand “the enduring predicament of margin and center” in relation to the state’s performance. Rectifying more than anything else is a cautionary analysis of the conlict that engulfed Sudan shortly ater its independence in 1956. It ofers a detailed examination of the historical, and speciically colonial, roots of the weakness of the Sudanese state. Mahgoub also presents pathways to state strength, seeing the essence of a successful state in a forward-looking, democratic political system. A product of his times, he warned against the lurking dangers of fanaticism, sought to subvert marginality, and called for political and cultural democratization. As the secession of South Sudan in 2011 and the ongoing turmoil in the Darfur region attest, Sudanese leaders have yet to come up with viable solutions for the problem of marginality, assuming solving it was a priority. In fact, South Sudan’s secession demonstrates the Sudanese state’s continued weakness. In some ways, the very fact that Sudan continues to exist today despite deep-seated, structural dynamics that pull it in diferent directions, and a string of leaders committed more to their own political endurance than to the national project, is in itself a remarkable political achievement. Alex de Waal demonstrates how Sudan’s endemically weak state can stay in power despite consistently failing to deliver essential public goods such as functioning institutions, peace and security, or social and economic development to its popula24 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST tion for the last three decades. Relying on patrimonial governance, Sudanese political leaders in general and President Omar al Bashir in particular, in power since 1989, have relied on a inite “political budget” to dispense with favors, jobs, and rewards. Loyalties are bargained over, and a modernized patronage system resembling a “political marketplace” has emerged in which “loyalties are regularly auctioned of to the highest bidder”. Sudan is also explored in the chapter by Babar and Osman, here in comparison with Pakistan, another state located at the periphery of the greater Middle East. Babar and Osman focus speciically on these two weak states’ neglect of rural women, who in both cases are among the most neglected of the marginalized communities. State inattention, or incapacity, to afect change to the conditions of rural women opens up space for the non-governmental sector to step in and ill the void. NGO eforts at social mobilization do usually bear fruit, as the women involved achieve a degree of autonomy and agency they are unlikely to have had otherwise. At the same time, however, the impact of NGO eforts tends to be limited by two undercurrents, one having to do with prevailing, and resilient, social norms and constraints, the other due to the continued power and relevance of the lingering state. Even in situations of state neglect and weakness, and even in instances where long-active NGOs have impacted social conditions, the magnitude of that impact has been mitigated by the continued perseverance of the state. NGOs can achieve grassroots empowerment on a micro level. But macro-level change that facilitates the social inclusion of women in a given society is something that needs the active involvement of the state. Limited state capacity and uneven delivery of services means that social inclusion of marginalized groups is greatly hindered. In fact, Babar and Osman maintain, in the cases under review NGO eforts help “reproduce and reinforce the hegemony of the state”. Even for the most marginalized of peoples in weak states, the state, as a set of institutions with attached practices and symbols, continues to have relevance and salience. Closer to the geographic heart of the Middle East is Palestine, which today exists as a form of hybrid nation-state ruled mostly by the Israeli occupation authorities, somewhat also by the Palestinian National Authority, in cantons that are not easily accessible to one another. Glenn Robinson examines the history and travails of institution-building in Palestine. he continued dispossession and dispersion of the Palestinian nation makes any potential Palestinian state fraught with dysfunction. According to Robinson, the Palestinian march toward statehood has been shaped by the dynamic interplay of three developments: institution-building under an over-bearing, in fact 25 FRAGILE POLITICS sufocating colonial rule; a rentier political economy; and the legacy of Arafat’s personalist rule, which Robinson aptly calls “the politics of the antithesis”. If Palestine were ever to become a fully-ledged state, it is likely to sufer from profound structural weaknesses, as well as, no doubt, territorial and economic ones. Laurie Brand identiies four critical gaps in weak states—gaps in capacity, security, legitimacy, and national identity—and examines the relationship between these gaps and the potential role of diasporas in state and nation (re) building. Oten, but certainly not always, diaspora communities come about as a result of state failure or conlict situations. Similarly, they oten play important and changing roles in conlicts back home, functioning as peacewreckers or peace-makers depending on changing circumstances. In relation to the MENA region, diaspora communities have emerged as a result of colonial linkages (across the Maghrib), ethnic cleansing and communal tensions (Palestine), sectarian strife and civil wars (Lebanon and Iraq), revolutions (Iran), and limited domestic economic opportunities and perceived regional opportunities (Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere). Brand looks at the emergence of linkages between these and other MENA countries on the one hand and their respective diaspora communities on the other in the two critical areas of remittances and development projects and political development and statebuilding (as in civil society organizations and overseas voting). he nature of the relationship, Brand argues, is far from unitary or unidimensional, changing according to evolving historical and political circumstances. Brand’s focus in her chapter is on the relationship between diaspora communities and state-building and on how remittances and long-distance politicking contribute to state weakness or strength. Insofar as nation-building and/or social change are concerned, diaspora communities can also play salient roles in the difusion of cultural norms and values, both in terms of the symbolic aspects of cultural communication—language, music, the arts, dress—as well as internalized codes of behavior and commonplace or accepted values. his potential role of diaspora communities is particularly important in instances, as in contemporary Iran, in which the state relies on highly pronounced ideological and normative tenets from which sizeable swathes of middle-class urbanites are disconnected.96 In the case of Palestine, a non-state 96 For the normative disconnect between the Islamic Republic state and large swathes of middle-class Iranians, see Samih Farsoun and Mehrdad Mashayekhi, eds., Iran: Political Culture in the Islamic Republic (London: Routledge, 1992). 26 WEAK STATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST vulnerable to multiple exogenous inluences, cultural forces emanating from the diaspora have for decades been directly consequential for shaping social currents in Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories. he volume ends with a critical analysis of weak states to absorb the international development assistance coming their way from donor agencies and countries. Weak states oten face absorptive capacity constraints and diminishing returns on the aid they receive from abroad. More speciically, aid efectiveness may be curtailed due to capital constraints, policy and institutional constraints, macroeconomics limitations, donor factors, and social and cultural forces. An important irst step, argues Mark McGillivray, is to identify the various dimensions of absorptive capacity and to devise a composite index of individual recipient countries. Within the Greater Middle East, Afghanistan is receiving more aid than its absorptive capacity would suggest. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, McGillivray argues, it is important for donors to identify and understand the drivers of absorptive capacity, to identify which drivers they can actually drive and how, and actually to begin to drive the identiied driver. Only then will aid efectiveness increase. Collectively, the chapters in this volume enrich our understanding of the nature and functions of weak states in general and those in the Middle East in particular. State weakness, the volume demonstrates, is essentially a matter of eroded or diminished capacity, in turn opening up space for non-state actors that can capitalize on the growing spread and rise of localized identities and loyalties. As the examples of Lebanon and Sudan illustrate, state weakness is oten historically rooted. Weak states are vulnerable to foreign machinations. Additionally, diaspora communities could and oten do play inluential roles in the economic, political, and even cultural lives of weak states. Ultimately, however, insofar as the lives of their own societies or their relations with other states are concerned, even weak states matter. Domestically, they continue, at the very least, to frame the larger context within which operate marginal social groups and the NGOs helping them. Internationally, they constitute juridical entities which, at least theoretically, enjoy the beneits accorded to sovereign states. Finally, repairing weak states requires more than enhancing the capacity of their coercive and security institutions. It also means ensuring that they have the necessary absorptive capacity to channel donor assistance into capacity-enhancing venues. he 2011 Arab uprisings shook and weakened supposedly strong Arab states, breaking some and greatly bending others. As of this writing, into 2014, the dust of what started as the Arab Spring is far from settled. So the question 27 FRAGILE POLITICS of the uprisings’ ultimate imprint on Middle Eastern states is far from clear. What is clear is that weak states—whether in their pre- or post-revolutionary varieties or in their condition of political normalcy, whether touched by the Arab Spring or not, and no matter where in the Middle East they are located—are likely to remain prominent features of the greater Middle East. 28