In Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, published more than 20 years ago (Wedeen Reference Wedeen1999), Lisa Wedeen asks: Why did the Syrian regime spend so much time and so many resources promoting a cult-of-personality campaign for President Hafez al-Asad when ample evidence existed that many citizens neither loved the president nor believed other Syrians’ public expressions of love and adoration? Why invest scarce resources in a cult that Syrians clearly did not believe? These straightforward questions and their answers are unpacked in 160 beautifully written pages, including 10 pages of published and unpublished cartoons. Wedeen’s answer is what she calls a “politics of as if”: it mattered little what Syrians really believed because as long as they acted as if they revered the president and reproduced the images and symbolism of the cult, their public compliance with the cult would work to shore up the regime’s power—even when people viewed the cult as patently “bogus.” Based on several years of ethnographic research and semiotic analysis—undertaken under extraordinarily difficult field conditions—Wedeen examines the stories, jokes, cartoons, television shows, and other images that circulated publicly and allowed citizens to quietly signal their disbelief in the cult while publicly complying with the regime’s demand that they act as if they believed the cult’s ridiculous claims. One of the book’s lasting contributions is the “politics of as if” as a political category—a contribution with theoretical purchase beyond an analysis of the Asad regime in Syria.
One of the book’s lasting contributions is the “politics of as if” as a political category—a contribution with theoretical purchase beyond an analysis of the Asad regime in Syria.
Wedeen’s analysis of how acting “as if” worked to produce political power provided a refreshing and compelling counterpoint to arguments about authoritarianism in the Middle East that emphasized the capacity for coercion, intimidation, and physical repression. Most analyses ignored the cult or else took at face value expressions elicited by the cult: Syrians (like North Koreans and others) really love their strongman leader. The shadow of Orientalist assumptions about Middle Eastern societies as backward provided fertile soil for leaving unquestioned the apparent devotion of the masses to monstrous and violent regimes. Whereas less-Orientalist analyses also often dismissed “culture” as epiphenomenal, Wedeen set about understanding how the cult actually worked. Indeed, Ambiguities reshaped how we think more broadly about popular support for authoritarian regimes by rejecting “false-consciousness” arguments and unpacking distinctions among consent, compliance, and resistance—distinctions that Wedeen (Reference Wedeen2019) continues to explore in her most recent book, Authoritarian Apprehensions.
This symposium reflects on the continued impact of Ambiguities on both the study of Middle East politics and related themes in the discipline. The contributors critically examine the work in the context of the scholarship produced since the first edition was published in 1999, including authoritarianism, state repression, public opinion, the politics of obedience, political violence, and political performance. Ambiguities also critiques the way much of political science has embraced Weberian notions of the state and the idea that legitimacy sustains the rule of those who wield power. The symposium contributors reflect the diversity of the field in terms of epistemological commitments and methodologies as well demographics and career stage.
CONTEXT
Ambiguities was published when the field of Middle East politics was undergoing a seismic change. In the 1990s, many top political science departments lacked faculty with expertise in the Middle East. A significant proportion of those who did specialize in the region were area specialists who did not engage directly in the discipline’s main theoretical debates or evolving methods. Middle East political scientists were their own cohort apart from even many other area specialists (e.g., Latin Americanists and Africanists) with whom they might have collaborated in cross-regional research. (Exceptions exist, of course, but they were largely outliers in political science or else based in other disciplines.) At the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, for example, political scientists who studied the region congregated in the Conference Group on the Middle East panels. The Conference Group was run (undemocratically) for decades by Lou Cantori and Augustus Richard Norton, who chose the themes for and the composition of the panels each year. Particularly in the 1990s, the Conference Group functioned as a type of “mini-MESA”—the acronym of the interdisciplinary Middle East Studies Association of North America—with panels packed predominantly by Middle East specialists. It was not that Middle East political scientists were producing purely descriptive or atheoretical analyses (although some were) but rather that many were not engaging with the mainstream debates of the field—or even interacting with their counterparts at conferences. Some Middle East specialists began to blame this cohort for failing to engage disciplinary debates or even submit articles to the discipline’s primary comparative journals, such as Comparative Politics and World Politics and the flagship American Political Science Review (e.g., Green Reference Green1997; Lustick Reference Lustick2000).
To be sure, earlier generations of Middle East political scientists were not solely to blame for this estrangement from the broader discipline. Many nonregional specialists continued to hold Orientalist views of the Middle East, seeing it as a monolith whose institutions, practices, and culture were so distinct from those of other regions as to make comparison futile. Whereas the Middle East’s historic past was romantic and exotic, the contemporary period was perceived as hostile, backward, and dangerous. Indeed, after describing my dissertation research on Islamist political parties in the late 1990s, one (white male) senior colleague asked me if I had ever traveled to the region. Although I said that I spoke Arabic and already had completed more than two years of fieldwork in Jordan and Yemen, he remained skeptical that people in the region would talk to me. Many such “commonsense” assumptions about the region were behind the widespread dismissal of Middle East politics as so exceptional as to be useless for comparison—if field research were even possible. In her chapter titled “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East,” Wedeen (Reference Wedeen, Shami and Miller-Idriss2016) presents a careful analysis of the tensions between political science’s liberal and democratic commitments and how those commitments shaped research agendas (as others also have written) in ways that further sidelined scholars of the region.
Many nonregional specialists continued to hold Orientalist views of the Middle East, seeing it as a monolith whose institutions, practices, and culture were so distinct from those of other regions as to make comparison futile.
During this same period, however, a growing cohort of new scholars completed their doctoral degrees at a wide range of institutions, many without a Middle East specialist on their committee. These scholars were committed to directly engaging debates in the discipline and to finding, supporting, and collaborating with one another. Wedeen was of this generation.
RECEPTION
During this subfield turn in the late 1990s, Ambiguities was one of a few theoretical powerhouse studies that leveraged intimate knowledge of the region to engage and advance debates central to the political science discipline. Wedeen not only took on coercion-centric approaches to authoritarianism, she also raised fundamental concerns about the way that the discipline studied political behavior and relied on terms such as “legitimacy”—a concept that was ill defined and also fundamentally unmeasurable in a discipline increasingly obsessed with measurement. The influence of Ambiguities grew steadily during the next two decades after its publication. According to the University of Chicago Press, Ambiguities sold more than 10,000 copies—including a second edition, with a new preface, in 2015. Virtually every political scientist specializing in the Middle East has read it, regardless of the reader’s epistemological or methodological orientation.
However, the influence of Ambiguities extends far beyond Middle East political science, as reflected in the contributions to this symposium. The book’s influence also is evidenced by the appearance of Wedeen’s work on numerous reading lists for doctoral comprehensive exams in comparative politics. In all three of her books—including Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2008)—Wedeen engages the main debates in the discipline: power, authoritarianism, consent, and democracy and democratic practice, among others. In her American Political Science Review article (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2002), she examines the discipline’s various (and incommensurate) conceptualizations of culture while also engaging scholars of rational choice to suggest how they might better examine aspects of culture in their own studies.
Wedeen’s work thus has been inspirational not only for her theoretical interventions and careful empirical analyses but also because she has led the way for the next generations of scholars by engaging the mainstream of the discipline from two peripheries: area studies and interpretive analyses. Ambiguities models a fearlessness and confidence in taking on the major debates and—by name—some of titans of the discipline. However, it also models the need for respect for divergent methodologies and epistemologies; carefulness in getting others’ arguments right; and a spirit of lively engagement for the betterment of the discipline, its methodological tools, and its analytic contributions.
Ambiguities models a fearlessness and confidence in taking on the major debates and—by name—some of titans of the discipline.
The contributions to this symposium demonstrate the broad impact of Wedeen’s scholarship, including her work subsequent to Ambiguities. However, the contributions are not merely celebratory. Their authors ask difficult questions, showing that the enduring value of Ambiguities is not only that it has had an impact on major theoretical debates but also that it continues to inspire and suggest exciting avenues for theoretical and empirical work. Wedeen also shows how seemingly insurmountable epistemological and methodological divides can indeed be crossed—and with rich theoretical and empirical results.
