Ellen Lust

Opposition Cooperation and Uprisings in the Arab World

What affects the possibilities and success of opposition cooperation in the Arab world? This piece examines the various contributions to the special issue, highlighting their insights into the types of opposition cooperation prevalent in the region, and the factors that influence the formation, endurance and success of cooperative arrangements. Understanding the structure and dynamics of opposition cooperation, as well as its success and failure, is critical in developing an analytic framework from which to launch further research on the evolving political and sociological realities in the Arab world. Drawing from the contributions in this special issue, this piece concludes by exploring how the uprisings of 2011 are likely to affect cooperation across opposition groups in the future.

Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism

In Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism, Holger Albrecht draws together rich, detailed studies by a set of excellent scholars to explore political opposition in the Middle East. The cohesive volume takes as its starting point opposition as an institution that engages the state, and contributions focus on the ideological bases, organisational structures and strategies of oppositions, as well as domestic and international influences. Albrecht’s introduction situates these studies within both the broader literature on contentious politics and prior work on the Middle East, while exploring how oppositions under authoritarianism should differ from those in democracies. It demonstrates how the book both contributes to the theoretical literature of contentious politics and provides important insight into the oppositions that have taken centre stage, and continued to evolve since the book was published. The volume is divided into four main sections. Section 1, ‘Approaching Contentious Politics under Authoritarianism’, contains essays by Albrecht, Agnieszka Paczynska and Peter Slugglett that review the organisational and ideological nature of oppositions, their strategic opportunities and relations with the state. Section 2, ‘Political Opposition in Civil Society’, includes analyses of Western funding and civil society in Jordan and Lebanon (Francesco Cavatorta and Azzam Elananza) and of the failed United National Front for Change electoral alliance in the 2005 Egyptian parliamentary elections (Hendrik Kraetzschmar). The third section, ‘The Islamist Quest’, examines the weakened position of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan (Janine Clark), the changing positions taken by the Syrian Islamist opposition (Fred Lawson), and the nature of Islamist politics in Bahrain and Kuwait (Michael Schmidmayr). The final section, ‘Opposition within the State’, includes chapters on opposition in the development process of Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia (Amin Allal and Florian Kohstall) and on the changing nature of governance in Lebanon during and following Syrian intervention (Basel Salloukh). The book concludes with reflections by I. William Zartman, whose own work on opposition in support of authoritarianism fundamentally shaped the ways in which we have examined state–opposition relations in the Middle East. The sections are coherent, but the volume’s divisions partially obscure some of its insights. For example, the contributors pay a great deal of attention to the nature of Islamist oppositions and the division between these groups and secularists, but the chapters in the section on Islamist opposition shed light on only part of the story. The authors demonstrate wide variation in the ideological appeals, strategies or state–opposition relations of Islamist oppositions. Lawson nicely shows how Islamists in Syria shifted their appeals over time, partly in response to the political British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, December 2011 38(3), 435–459

Governance Challenges in the Face of Transformation

Th e Middle East has undergone signifi cant social, economic and political changes in the last two decades. Some of these changes have been manifestly evident — for example, increasing contestation over gender relations and religiosity; privatization, public sector reforms, and property rights reforms; and (re)-invigoration of political parties, associational life and more competitive elections. Others have been more subtle but no less signifi cant. All have reshaped the lives of citizens, altered state-society relations, and redefi ned the nature of state authority. Although largely beyond the scope of the present collection of articles, the last two decades have also brought important changes in inter-state relations within the Middle East and between the region and the rest of the world. Th e articles in this special issue are drawn from papers presented at two workshops in which participants from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States gathered to take stock of these changes and, more importantly, to examine the implications of these changes for governance. 1 We considered