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.

Table of Contents

Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Making Sense of the Arab State
By Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch
SECTION 1: 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 Postcolonial 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 2: DIMENSIONS OF REGIME-NESS
5. What We Talk About When We Talk About the State in Postwar Lebanon
By Bassel F. 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 3: CONTESTING STATENESS: SOCIETY AND SITES OF RESISTANCE
8. State Capacity and Contention: A View from Jordan
By Jillian Schwedler
9. Water, Stateness, and Tribalism in Jordan: The Case of the Disi Water Conveyance Project
By Sean Yom
10. Conclusion: The Specter of the Spectrum: Escaping the Residual Category of Weak States
By Dan Slater
Contributors