Making Sense of the Arab State

Steven Heydemann is Ketcham Chair in Middle East Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Making Sense of the Arab State
By Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch
Section One: Dimensions of Stateness
1. Seeing the State or Why Arab States Look the Way They Do
By Steven Heydemann
2. Understanding State Weakness in the Middle East and North Africa
By Raymond Hinnebusch
3. Rethinking the Post-Colonial State in the Middle East: Elite Competition and Negotiation within the Disaggregated Iraqi State
By Toby Dodge
4. Legibility, Digital Surveillance, and the State in the Middle East
By Marc Lynch
Section Two: Dimensions of Regime-ness
5. What We Talk About When We Talk About the State in Postwar Lebanon
By Bassel Salloukh
6. The “Business of Government:” the State and Changing Patterns of Politics in the Arab World
By Lisa Anderson
7. Palace Politics as Precarious Rule: Weak Statehood in Afghanistan
By Dipali Mukhopadhyay
Section Three: Contesting Stateness: Society and Sites of Resistance 
8. State Capacity and Contention: A View from Jordan
By Jillian Schwedler
9. Water, Stateness, and Governance in Jordan: The Case of the Disi Water System
By Sean Yom
10. Conclusion: The Specter of the Spectrum: States in all their Riotous Heterogeneity
By Dan Slater
List of Contributors