The developments of early 2011 changes the political landscape of the Middle East. But even as urgent struggles continue, it remains clear that authoritarianism will survive this transformational moment. The study of authoritarian governance, therefore, remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region.
This volume considers the Syrian and Iranian regimes—what they share in common and what distinguishes them. Too frequently, authoritarianism has been assumed to be a generic descriptor of the region and differences among regimes have been overlooked. But as the political trajectories of Middle Eastern states diverge in years ahead, with some perhaps consolidating democratic gains while others remaining under distinct and resilient forms of authoritarian rule, understanding variations in modes of authoritarian governance and the attributes that promote regime resilience becomes an increasingly urgent priority.
The developments of early 2011 changes the political landscape of the Middle East. But even as urgent struggles continue, it remains clear that authoritarianism will survive this transformational moment. The study of authoritarian governance, therefore, remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region.
This volume considers the Syrian and Iranian regimes—what they share in common and what distinguishes them. Too frequently, authoritarianism has been assumed to be a generic descriptor of the region and differences among regimes have been overlooked. But as the political trajectories of Middle Eastern states diverge in years ahead, with some perhaps consolidating democratic gains while others remaining under distinct and resilient forms of authoritarian rule, understanding variations in modes of authoritarian governance and the attributes that promote regime resilience becomes an increasingly urgent priority.
Middle East Authoritarianisms: Governance, Contestation, and Regime Resilience in Syria and Iran
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Overview
The developments of early 2011 changes the political landscape of the Middle East. But even as urgent struggles continue, it remains clear that authoritarianism will survive this transformational moment. The study of authoritarian governance, therefore, remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region.
This volume considers the Syrian and Iranian regimes—what they share in common and what distinguishes them. Too frequently, authoritarianism has been assumed to be a generic descriptor of the region and differences among regimes have been overlooked. But as the political trajectories of Middle Eastern states diverge in years ahead, with some perhaps consolidating democratic gains while others remaining under distinct and resilient forms of authoritarian rule, understanding variations in modes of authoritarian governance and the attributes that promote regime resilience becomes an increasingly urgent priority.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804784351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2013 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Middle East Authoritarianisms
GOVERNANCE, CONTESTATION, AND REGIME RESILIENCE IN SYRIA AND IRANStanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8301-9
Chapter One
AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNANCE IN SYRIA AND IRANChallenged, Reconfiguring, and Resilient
Steven Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders
AFTER A DECADE of authoritarian renewal, nondemocratic regimes in the Middle East find themselves under stresses that only a short time ago were, if not unimaginable, then certainly unexpected. As the first decade of a new century ended, regimes that once seemed all but invulnerable found themselves on the defensive. In Tunisia, an entrenched authoritarian ruler collapsed under the weight of mass protests. By mid-January 2011, incumbent President Zine al-Abdin Ben Ali had taken refuge in Saudi Arabia and, together with his family, was the target of international arrest warrants. Also in January, mass protests led Jordan's King Abdullah to dismiss his government and initiate a process of limited constitutional reforms. In Egypt, protests on a scale unprecedented in the region forced the end of the Mubarak era in February 2011 and, as this is being written in early 2012, continue to pressure the Egyptian military to open the political system and permit a transition to real democracy. In October 2011, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libya's ruler for over forty years, was killed following months of armed struggle against rebel forces backed by NATO air support. The following month, similar protests and the armed mobilization of regime opponents forced Yemen's President Ali Abdallah Salih out of office, bringing his forty-three-year tenure as Yemen's ruler to an end. Elsewhere in the Middle East, from Morocco to Bahrain, authoritarian regimes moved to shore up social policies that they felt would mitigate, at least temporarily, the economic and social pressures that contributed to popular uprisings.
The significance of these changes cannot be overestimated. At the start of December 2010 authoritarian regimes in the Middle East appeared more deeply consolidated than they had in the late 1980s, when the Third Wave of democratization broke against the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean and then receded. Despite two decades of Western support for democracy and civil society promotion, by late 2010 hopes for genuine and far-reaching democratic change in the Middle East seemed to have reached a dead end. Yet, only two months later, Arab citizens, acting spontaneously and outside any formal political framework, revitalized the possibility of Arab democracy. Through their sacrifice and commitment, they achieved more in a matter of weeks than Western democracy promoters had accomplished in two decades.
The protesters who have redefined politics in the Middle East also pose significant challenges to scholars of authoritarianism. Although it is too soon to know whether Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen are on the path to genuine democracy, as opposed to the reconfiguring of authoritarian governance, their recent experiences will undoubtedly force a reassessment of arguments about authoritarian persistence and the durability of authoritarian systems of rule in the Middle East. Those who have developed arguments accounting for the success of authoritarianism in the region, including the editors of this volume, thus have a particular obligation to be clear about conditions under which their arguments might be falsified and will undoubtedly be among those who assess old arguments in the light of new facts.
What seems clear, however, even from a vantage point that is deeply enmeshed in the urgent struggles underway across the region, is that authoritarianism in the Middle East will survive this transformational moment. In Syria, one of the two cases on which this volume focuses, fear of civil war is deepening as a popular uprising begins to morph into armed resistance to a repressive regime. Syrians have joined their Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni, and Jordanian counterparts in taking to the streets to demand the end of a brutal authoritarian government. The Syrian regime responded with promises of reform but then, like its counterparts elsewhere, quickly resorted to large-scale repression. In Iran, the second case covered in this volume, the hard-liners of the Islamic Republic initially showed extraordinary audacity in claiming the Egyptian uprising as an omen that the region was tipping in their direction. However, supporters of Iran's failed "Green Movement" of 2009—the wave of protests and mass mobilization prompted by Iran's rigged elections that year—viewed events in Egypt very differently. They found the most important parallels to be between their own treatment at the hands of the Revolutionary Guard and the fate of Egyptian protesters or their Syrian counterparts, who have been attacked by regime thugs and state militias. Regardless, the relative success of the Arab uprisings thus far has failed to revitalize Iran's own protest movement or to force the Iranian regime into major concessions, let alone bring about its demise.
None of the key approaches to the study of Middle Eastern regimes saw the wave of protest coming. Yet far from contradicting recent work on authoritarianism in the Middle East, the response of many Arab regimes to mass pressures for change has been largely consistent with the expectations and frameworks developed in the research literature: surviving authoritarian regimes have learned from the experiences unfolding across the region and have adapted their strategies of governance in response (Heydemann and Leenders 2011). They have made concessions—more cosmetic than real in many cases; adopted policies intended to mitigate the economic and social drivers of conflict; sought to divide and fragment nascent oppositions; applied heavy repression when deemed necessary; imposed stricter controls over social media, the internet, and new communications technologies; and otherwise demonstrated the flexibility and adaptive capacity that have served them so well over the course of their many decades in power.
Whatever our own hopes for more widespread and deeper democratic transformations in the Middle East, therefore, the facts suggest that authoritarianism will remain a prominent and formidable presence in the lives of millions of citizens. The study of authoritarian governance therefore remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region—even while recognizing that recent events demand renewed attention on our part to shifts and pressures that might drive cases such as Syria and Iran in directions that now, in the wake of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, cannot be ruled out. Indeed, from March 2011, Syria too became engulfed in turmoil, its government struggling to contain protests demanding the fall of the regime, demands from which, as late as January 2011, Bashar al-Asad believed his regime to be insulated by virtue of its Arab nationalist credentials. Largely due to the regime's harsh and unremitting response to what began primarily as calls for reform, confrontations between the regime and protesters have become so violent that there appears to be no possibility for a return to the status quo ante. Regardless of what the future will bring—regime change or not—the protracted struggle now holding Syria in its grip speaks volumes about the Asad regime's willingness and capacity to press for its survival at any cost and by any means.
The developments of 2011 will leave the political landscape of the region changed but recognizable. Yet they also highlight concerns that have animated this volume since its inception in late 2009. Among the most important of these is the understanding that the Middle East is home to not one but to many forms of authoritarian governance. Differences among regimes were always present but have tended to be overshadowed by the use of "authoritarianism" as a generic descriptor awkwardly capturing a rich pallet of nondemocratic rule. In the aftermath of the successful popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, however, it has become more important than ever to break this generic category apart and assess not only the attributes that regimes such as the Syrian and Iranian share—and, as we argue in what follows, they share more than might be evident at first glance—but what distinguishes them, as well. As the political trajectories of Middle Eastern states seem increasingly likely to diverge in years ahead, with some perhaps consolidating democratic gains while others remain under distinct and resilient forms of authoritarian rule, understanding variations in modes of authoritarian governance and linking these to varying degrees and forms of regime resilience become an increasingly urgent priority.
WHERE TO FROM HERE IN THE STUDY OF MIDDLE EAST AUTHORITARIANISM
For much of the past decade, research programs in political science, political economy, sociology, and anthropology have chronicled experiences of authoritarian regression across the Middle East, explored sources of authoritarian persistence, and developed explanations that account for authoritarian survival in an era of democratization (Brownlee 2002 and 2007; Lust-Okar 2005; Posusney and Angrist 2005; Pratt 2007; Schlumberger 2007). Setting aside not only the lingering essentialisms of previous research but also the more recent (and perhaps newly relevant) legacies of "transitology," these research programs have in large measure turned away from earlier efforts to understand failures of democratization. Instead, like the current volume, they assumed the viability of authoritarianism as a system of rule, not least because it has been around for over half a century, and directed their attention to understanding how authoritarian regimes in the Middle East govern. Individual rulers at times faced daunting challenges. They explored how authoritarian systems of rule managed the challenges they confronted and how, in doing so, they reconfigured existing institutions and practices, developing new configurations of both that equipped them to endure significant economic, social, and political stresses without breaking, even while societies in the Middle East were themselves adapting to new patterns of authoritarian governance (Heydemann 2007a).
The current volume is a contribution to this emerging and still relevant research program. In keeping with the assumptions that inform such approaches to the study of authoritarianism in the Middle East, the following chapters view authoritarian regimes in Iran and Syria as consolidated and viable systems of rule able to withstand significant, although by no means all, challenges. We do not presume that our two case countries are either stalled in transitions to democracy or exceptional in the challenges they face and the strategies they have developed to manage them. Nor do we rule out the possibility that significant political change can occur in the future, especially in Syria, where popular demands for an end to the regime have been so intense that it would be foolish to assume that the regime will succeed in its increasingly violent attempts to hang on. Instead, the chapters focus on understanding and explaining long- standing patterns that shed light on critical aspects of how these regimes govern, including at moments of crisis, and how the societies over which they rule have themselves adapted to their political environments.
While broadly situated within emergent research programs, however, this volume also seeks to stretch their boundaries by extending and refining assumptions about authoritarianism in the Middle East in at least four ways. First, our focus in this volume is not on the persistence of authoritarian regimes in Syria and Iran—a theme many of the authors have addressed in previous work—but their resilience. To some, this may appear to be a minor distinction. We view it as consequential, however, both for how we conceptualize authoritarianism in the Middle East and for how we organize our research. Authoritarian persistence carries connotations of anachronistic, one-person dictatorships stubbornly clinging to power while falling increasingly out of touch with their societies and rapidly changing environments. Chehabi and Linz's "sultanistic regimes"—personalist rule resting on little more than sheer force and bribes, weakly institutionalized, and enjoying no social base to speak of—appear to be compatible with these conceptualizations (Chehabi and Linz 1998). By contrast, authoritarian resilience refers to the attributes, relational qualities, and institutional arrangements that have long given regimes in the Middle East, conceptualized as institutionalized systems of rule, the capacity to adapt governance strategies to changing domestic and international conditions. If questions of persistence draw our attention to explanations of outcomes, questions of resilience shift our focus to explanations of processes and in particular to the dynamic and complex interconnections between processes of authoritarian renewal, on one hand, and social adaptations to these processes, on the other. Questions of resilience thus require that we broaden our analytic focus beyond regime-level analysis—which remains relevant—to encompass the microlevel adaptations among social actors to new patterns of authoritarian governance.
Second, in contrast to some research on Middle East authoritarianism, which has implicitly viewed state and social actors as occupying discrete political spaces, the chapters here focus on the interconnections and overlap between the two. In particular, scholars who maintain normative expectations about the role that civil societies play as advocates of reform, democratization, or "development," or who assume that civic sectors provide an inherent counterweight to authoritarian states, tend to assume the separateness of "associative life" even if they acknowledge that reality is often far messier than these assumptions warrant and that civic sectors may even reinforce authoritarianism instead of posing a challenge to it (Jamal 2007). Without in any sense erasing the all-too-real disconnects between Middle East states and the societies they govern, the following chapters focus instead on the political effects of this distance: how gaps between ruler and ruled are themselves productive of certain kinds of social adaptations to authoritarian rule, how social actors exploit these gaps in unintended ways, and how their shape and boundaries (whether viewed as constructed or not) are in turn affected by regime-level efforts to contain and manage Middle Eastern societies. Thus, in making authoritarian governance central to the analysis of Syrian and Iranian politics, we have not discarded the significance and role of nonstate actors but have instead set aside the expectation that nonstate actors effectively organize in spheres independent from or (only) in opposition to the state, thereby generating a platform for liberal-democratic change. In the current volume this interactive conception of state–society relations is evident in Günes Murat Tezcür's analysis of Iran as a competitive authoritarian regime and in Arzoo Osanloo's chapter on the strategies developed by Iranian women to seize the regime's focus on women's rights as the basis for expanding their legal autonomy in ways that have challenged the regime's intent. In Max Weiss's chapter, we see these interconnections reflected in contemporary Syrian literature and the quietly subversive strategies that novelists adopt to convey the effects of life under authoritarianism for their protagonists.
Third, building on research that Heydemann (2007a and 2007b) and others have pursued over the past decade on authoritarian upgrading, our focus on resilience extends and deepens how we conceptualize the adaptive capacities of regimes and societies in both Syria and Iran. Unlike much of the more recent work on authoritarian modernization, we do not view the adaptive attributes evident in these two cases as limited in scope to "defensive" responses to political and economic challenges. They are not episodic features that emerge during moments of crisis only to fade back once the crisis recedes. Thus, we do not conceptualize this capacity in terms of "survival strategies" (Brumberg 2003). Instead, we define regimes in Syria and Iran in terms of what we call recombinant authoritarianism: systems of rule that possess the capacity to reorder and reconfigure instruments and strategies of governance, to reshape and recombine existing institutional, discursive, and regulatory arrangements to create recognizable but nonetheless distinctive solutions to shifting configurations of challenges (Stark 1996).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Contributors....................viiAcknowledgments....................xi
1 Authoritarian Governance in Syria and Iran: Challenged, Reconfiguring, and Resilient Steven Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders....................1
2 The Economics of Authoritarian Upgrading in Syria: Liberalization and the Reconfiguration of Economic Networks Caroline Donati....................35
3 A Martyrs' Welfare State and Its Contradictions: Regime Resilience and Limits through the Lens of Social Policy in Iran Kevan Harris....................61
4 The State Management of Religion in Syria: The End of "Indirect Rule"? Thomas Pierret....................83
5 Islamic Social Movements and the Syrian Authoritarian Regime: Shifting Patterns of Control and Accommodation Teije Hidde Donker....................107
6 Contesting Governance: Authority, Protest, and Rights Talk in Postrepublican Iran Arzoo Osanloo....................127
7 Who Laughs Last: Literary Transformations of Syrian Authoritarianism Max Weiss....................143
8 Prosecuting Political Dissent: Courts and the Resilience of Authoritarianism in Syria Reinoud Leenders....................169
9 Democratic Struggles and Authoritarian Responses in Iran in Comparative Perspective Günes Murat Tezcür....................200
10 Authoritarian Resilience and International Linkages in Iran and Syria Anoushiravan Ehteshami, Raymond Hinnebusch, Heidi Huuhtanen, Paola Raunio, Maaike Warnaar, and Tina Zintl....................222
Notes....................245
Bibliography....................263
Index....................287