Steven Heydemann

War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East

Few areas of the world have been as profoundly shaped by war as the Middle East in the twentieth century. Despite the prominence of war-making in this region, there has been surprisingly little research investigating the effects of war as a social and political process in the Middle East. To fill this gap, War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the role of war preparation and war-making on the formation and transformation of states and societies in the contemporary Middle East. Their findings pose significant challenges to widely accepted assumptions and present new theoretical starting points for the study of war and the state in the contemporary developing world. Heydemanns collaborators include political scientists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Their essays are both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, covering topics such as the effects of World War II on state-market relations in Syria and Egypt, the role of war in the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the political economy of Lebanese militias, and the effects of the 1967 war on state and social institutions in Israel. The volume originated as a research planning project of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council.

Syria and the Future of Authoritarianism

Abstract:In response to the uprisings of 2011, Syria’s Assad regime brought the full weight of its repressive apparatus down on the heads of peaceful protesters, provoking reactions that led gradually to civil war. Since then, the regime has been adapting to the new challenges posed by mass uprisings through a process of “authoritarian learning,” and at least some of its methods are being applied elsewhere in the region. It seems that the future of Arab authoritarianism, like that of the Assad regime itself, will be darker, more repressive, more sectarian, and even more deeply resistant to democratization than in the past.

Defending the Discipline

Crisis is the handmaiden of introspection, so it is not surprising that, even as demand for expertise on the Middle East and Islam ballooned after September 11, the attacks also generated a wave of criticism and debate about the state of Middle East studies and its track record in helping to make sense of those awful events. Much of this debate has been internal to the field and motivated by a desire to use hard-won expertise effectively at a moment of extraordinary suffering and loss. As in other moments of crisis, however, specialists have also been targeted by those for whom the attacks underscored the shortcomings of a field that—in their view—did not adequately anticipate what happened. Like the Sinologists who “lost” China and the Sovietologists who missed the collapse of communism, Middle East specialists have been charged with “getting it wrong,” with misunderstanding and misrepresenting the region they study. One recent expression of this view comes in the form of a monograph by Middle East specialist Martin Kramer entitled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Though written prior to September 11, after the attacks Kramer’s book achieved a certain notoriety for the intensity of its critique, becoming for a time the focal point of heated exchanges in print, at conferences, and on Internet bulletin boards. Kramer, who holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, finds much to criticize about the state of his field, but he finds its track record on the question of democratization to be an especially vivid exSteve Heydemann is director of the Program on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector at the Social Science Research Council, where he previously directed the Programs on International Peace and Security and on the Near and Middle East. From 1997 until 2001, he was associate professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author of Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946–1970 (published in 1999).

Explaining the Arab Uprisings: transformations in Comparative Perspective

Abstract Drawing on the research presented by contributors to this special issue, this article assesses the analytic opportunities that emerge when the Arab uprisings are conceptualized as moments of transformation rather than as incipient, flawed or failed transitions to democracy. Highlighting critical issues that cut across and link the experiences of political relevant elites (PREs) and mobilized publics in the cases of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, it identifies three sets of issues that warrant further comparative research: the effects of stateness and patterns of state-society relations on the trajectory of Arab uprisings; the role of identity politics and non-state forms of solidarity as drivers of political mobilization and collective action, and the impact of these forms of collective action on possibilities for establishing stable, legitimate forms of governance; and the limits of civil societies and civic sectors in influencing transformational processes.

America's Response to the Arab Uprisings: US Foreign Assistance in an Era of Ambivalence

This article traces the impact of the Arab uprisings on US foreign assistance to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the period since 2011. Despite the Obama administrations rhetoric in support of Arab protesters and their demands for political and economic change, and despite the US Presidents commitment to place the full weight of the US foreign policy system behind political openings created by mass protests, US foreign assistance programs to the MENA region were largely unaffected by the dramatic political changes of 2011 and beyond. The article explains continuity in US foreign assistance as the result of several factors. These include the administrations ambivalence about the political forces unleashed by the uprisings; domestic economic and political obstacles to increases in foreign assistance; institutional and bureaucratic inertia within the agencies responsible for managing foreign assistance programming, and institutional capture of the foreign assistance bureaucracy by implementing organizations with a vested interest in sustaining ongoing activities rather than adapting programs in light of the new challenges caused by the Arab uprisings.

Continuities and Discontinuities in Foreign Assistance

Assessing foreign assistance to Arab states sheds important light on how Western and regional donors have responded to the dramatic changes set in motion by the wave of mass protests that swept across the Middle East in 2011 and beyond. The papers presented in this special issue highlight two essential fingings. First, Western patterns of foreign assistance exhibit remarkable continuity, despite the scale of the uprisings and their effects, and despite the commitment of Western governments to expand assistance in support of the aspirations of Arab protestors. Second, patterns of foreign assistance from the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries reflect the deepening politicization of Arab foreign assistance, the ongoing shift in regional influence from the Arab East to the Gulf, and the extent to which foreign assistance has become instrumentalized in regional balance of power politics.