Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics

by Joseph Sassoon

By examining the system of authoritarianism in eight Arab republics, Joseph Sassoon portrays life under these regimes and explores the mechanisms underpinning their resilience. How did the leadership in these countries create such enduring systems? What was the economic system that prolonged the regimes' longevity, but simultaneously led to their collapse? Why did these seemingly stable regimes begin to falter? This book seeks to answer these questions by utilizing the Iraqi archives and memoirs of those who were embedded in these political leaders, ministers, generals, security agency chiefs, party members, and business people. Taking a thematic approach, the book begins in 1952 with the Egyptian Revolution and ends with the Arab uprisings of 2011. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the authoritarianism and coercive systems that prevailed in these countries and the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism that began after 2011.

Genres: Politics, Middle East, History, Nonfiction

275 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2016

About the author

Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he also completed his PhD. Professor Sassoon, whose research focuses on political economy, economic history, Iraq, Iraqi refugees, and authoritarianism, has published extensively and is the author of five books.

Reviews

[Will Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes for some very dry reading, but nevertheless contains a useful arsenal of footnotes (and an index!). Good research tool.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful, interesting, and fairly concise analysis of politics in the Arab republics (really dictatorships). This is a work of comparative politics in which JS examines commonalities between these regimes. It took me a while to get into this book, as the second third is more interesting than the beginning. But it's very insightful on a number of points. Here are some big picture things I took away:

Many analysts argue that the main problem with Arab politics is the "resource curse" in which regimes can collect revenue from natural resources and basically pay off their people with jobs, welfare programs, etc, thus maintaining authoritarianism with some level of tacit legitimacy.. JS doesn't necessarily disagree, but he argues that many of these states lacked the massive energy resources of LIbya or Iraq and still have had authoritarianism. He argues that the deeper problem in all of these regimes is the power of the state, especially the military, in blocking reform, stifling civil society, controlling the economy, etc. Everything in these states is subordinated to the cause of maintaining political control, especially the economy, where the private sector never emerged in large part because it could become a threat to regime control.

Independent courts, a private sector economy, flourishing civil society groups, and independent media are the kinds of institutions needed to really challenge the domination of the state and military. While discussions of a "deep state" in the US are largely asinine, in places like Egypt it's a real problem, as we have seen since 2011 when the Egyptian military intervened on behalf of the protestors, permitted a halting experiment in democracy, and then seized power again in 2013 on the back of a mass protest movement and reinstituted full authoritarianism. Tunisia's relative success in building democracy, Sassoon convincingly argues, is related to the weakness and small size of its military, which did not dominate politics even under the rule of Ben Ali and the previous generations of Tunisian autocrats.

This book is also interesting in the sense that these are all secular nationalist regimes that had to deal with the rising Islamization of politics in the Arab world. Some did so through co-optation (Saddam's increasing reliance on Islamic imagery and propaganda), others by building personality cults to rival Islam, and almost all of them by crushing Islamist groups. The Arab Spring, in a sense, was the great crisis of the Arab Republics, and in each case the groups most ready to fill the vacuum or contest for power were Islamist in nature (like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt). But many of these regiems held on (Syria, most notably), so ME politics remains stuck between sclerotic nationalist regimes that basically lack legitimacy and bubbling Islamist movements that the US, frankly, would rather not see come to power.

There's a lot more that you could take away from this book. It's fascinating to see that Sassoon has little hope for improvement in these societies and not much of a plan to get there. I don't see a way out either, tbh. But this book is important for understanding the common problems of these states, and I'm sure I will draw on it often in my own teaching on the Middle East.