DOMINANT PATTERNS: THE SECURITY STATE AND “RECOMBINANT AUTHORITARIANISM”

The dominant, though not universal, pattern of rule across the Arab Middle East is a security state permeated by endemic corruption and conditioned by the absence of traditional attributes of state sovereignty. A key puzzle concerns the main characteristics and sturdy resilience of this pattern, of which Egypt and Syria, two otherwise quite different countries, are perhaps the clearest and most important exemplars. Both countries have long been simultaneously powerhouses of Arab politics, offering competing visions of and paths to Arab solidarity, and targets of foreign intervention.

The two books from our set that tackle the nature of Middle Eastern regimes most systematically are Roger Owen's The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life, which, despite its title, also discusses countries—Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and Oman, among others—that are not governed by presidents, much less presidents for life, and Middle East Authoritarianisms, edited by Steven Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders, a volume that concentrates on the dissimilar political systems of Syria and Iran in order to analyze the patterns that produce authoritarian “regime resilience” across the region (p. 4).

Roger Owen's readable, relatively short, and deliberately derivative book focuses on a succession of “strongmen of a certain type” (p. 26). First, a generation of postcolonial leaders developed successful techniques for “coup-proofing” their regimes, ending the instability that had plagued newly independent regimes compromised by colonial legacies and by the powerful delegitimizing shockwaves produced by the loss of Palestine in 1948. In the 1970s and 1980s, this generation made way for leaders who used their control of the military and security services to rule like kings. Eventually, several sought to control their own succession. Yet paradoxically, they employed democratic mechanisms (e.g., elections) and republican discourse to legitimize and consolidate highly personal and increasingly authoritarian systems of rule. Owen sees such leaders as typical of Middle Eastern authoritarianism, “a more universal phenomenon in the Arab world than in other regions” (p. 157), regardless of whether a particular authoritarian system is, even formally, presidential. He calls the resulting regimes “monarcho-republican” (p. 8), but he often analyzes them more conventionally as security states.Footnote ⁷ His book is stimulating for the range of questions it poses and the number of countries it considers; it is useful in its emphasis on the impact of colonial institutions and practices; and it is salutary in its determination to remind us of how limited our sources are and how little we know, a point also stressed by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham in her study of change and continuity in the Muslim Brotherhood.Footnote ⁸

Owen's book raises the full set of questions evoked at the beginning of this essay; inevitably, the answers he suggests are not fully satisfying. His emphasis on presidentialism—systems normally characterized, in opposition to parliamentary regimes, by separate and independent electoral mandates and powers for the executive and legislative branches of government—encourages us to think about how the concept of popular sovereignty has played out in a region where it remains contested not just in fact by authoritarian regimes, but on principle by Islamist movements. It also draws attention to the “tricky business” (p. 56) of manipulating ostensibly democratic laws and processes—primarily elections—to emasculate opposition groups and prop up authoritarian rule (pp. 53–57).Footnote ⁹ Mastery of this “tricky business” has become central to authoritarian resilience. But the subtypes of presidentialism that Owen identifies do not seem fully persuasive. Indeed, Owen steps outside his own framework to group Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and Oman together as “monarchical security states.” Lebanon, which he calls a “constrained” presidential system, is probably more usefully thought of as a failed consociational system characterized by rampant corruption and a plethora of nonstate players, of which Hizbullah is but the most important and successful, that act above the law.

Presidentialism does not follow in any obvious way from these countries’ colonial pasts. In contrast, the security (or mukhabarāt, intelligence services) state does. In a security state, the state's monopoly over the means of coercion is exercised primarily by internal security or intelligence organizations (roughly speaking, counterparts to the FBI). These turn the instruments of violence inward, against real or imagined domestic opponents of the regime, often to the detriment of the classic mission of a country's military establishment, namely external security and the projection of power in the international arena. The security apparatus is often composed of rival organizations, some of which may be embedded within the military (e.g., Syria's especially feared Air Force Intelligence Directorate). It is where key power games are played; whoever controls it is “in power,” in the “fierce state” sense of being able to repress opponents and turn back rival claims to power, whether these arise through elections or coup attempts.

This type of state, not democracy, is what colonialism tended to favor in the Middle East. However different the patterns of French and British colonialism may have been, even just in the Middle East, they were similar in two key and related respects. First, the French and British were colonial powers of a particular sort: they set up institutions and promoted groups prepared to rule against the will of the majority, but claimed (and preached) adhesion to liberal values. After the League of Nations assigned them Mandates in 1920, their ostensible role as political tutors made them especially inclined to recruit and entangle local allies in the smoke and mirrors political systems they constructed; outside the Mandate system, the British in Egypt were especially inclined to this strategy. Second, consistently practicing a politics of divide and rule, the French and British crippled nascent civilian political organizations. They dismantled big tents and replaced them with small ones; they undermined autonomous coalition-building efforts among local forces, lest the resulting coalition turn against foreign rule; their own rivalries as competing powers led them to foster intrigue and subversion in the emerging regional state system. The French made an early effort to carve Syria up into small pieces by creating not just Lebanon (which remained on the map), but four separate “states,” one each around Damascus and Aleppo, and two more in Druze and ʿAlawite areas. Faced with armed rebellion, they were forced to revise the borders they had drawn, but they did not abandon the political logic that had suggested the policy. The fake independence imposed by the British on Egypt in the early 1920s doomed the country's “liberal experiment”Footnote ¹⁰: it discredited the monarchy, parliamentary government, and the rule of law, while inducing factionalism and incoherence within the Wafd, which might otherwise have become an Egyptian counterpart to the Indian National Congress. In Palestine, the internal divisions were even more basic and the results were more dramatic. Syria and Egypt were primed for instability, as was the region as a whole.

Contemporary security states build on this toxic political legacy. They neither presuppose nor allow “better” forms of cooperation than those left by the colonial powers, and like the colonial regimes that preceded them, they corrupt and exploit whatever higher principles they invoke—nationalist, pan-Arab, and Islamist as well as democratic. Security states rule by disrupting cooperative structures and destabilizing individuals and groups, not by building political organizations capable of channeling increasing participation or promoting the effective implementation of policy. They do not build state capacity; instead, they survive by crippling the opposition.

Owen repeatedly emphasizes the importance of external forces and factors in generating domestic outcomes. He traces the origins of the security state—and of the “Arab state system” more generally—to “colonialism, Arabism, and the new world order of sovereign states that was introduced after 1945” (p. 12). He argues that the limited “exceptionalism” of Arab authoritarianism “can be best explained not by reference to some essentialized component of Arab or Muslim ‘character’ or ‘culture’ but, rather, in terms of three historical factors.” The first of these was “the greater centralization of Arab security state structures” relative to state structures elsewhere in the developing world. The second was “a set of common challenges—oil, Israel, outside interference—along with the development of the practices of cooperation and of pooling of information that these regimes then employed to meet them.” The third was “the particular character of the Arab world in the context of world regional history,” which underwrote both a politically potent sense of common Arab identity (“Arabism”) and the development of individual state nationalisms. The latter were always vulnerable to criticism for steering energies away from pan-Arab unity, and thus a relatively thin reed on which to base regime legitimacy (pp. 157–63).

By the 1970s, Owen argues, “the direct influence of Arabism and the colonial legacy had been transformed into autonomous indigenous political structures, each with its own logic, its own dynamic, and its own modes of operation” (pp. 21–22). These are the structures Heydemann and Leenders seek to elucidate. The essays in Middle East Authoritarianisms analyze “recombinant authoritarianism: systems of rule that possess the capacity to reorder and reconfigure instruments and strategies of governance, to reshape and recombine existing institutional, discursive, and regulatory arrangements to create recognizable but nonetheless distinctive solutions to shifting configurations of challenges” (p. 7). “Authoritarian upgrading” challenges our tendency to view repressive regimes as rigid, unable to process information, and ultimately precarious. Three policy domains central to government control—the management of the economy, religious affairs, and cultural life—are examined in the first three parts of the book, with individual chapters focusing on either Iran or Syria.

Security states are associated with corruption and repression and the states considered in the books under review here display impressive levels of both. By 2011, Bashar al-Asad's enterprising cousin Rami Makluf “was said to control as much as 60 percent of the country's economy” (Owen, p. 52). This spectacular figure speaks volumes about the Syrian economy, but it also suggests important information about the regime's coalitional patterns. Under Bashar al-Asad, a new urban “wheeler-dealer class” captured the superficially liberalizing economic reforms the regime implemented in response to external pressures. This process is well described by Caroline Donati in “The Economics of Authoritarian Upgrading in Syria” (pp. 35–60). By 2011, this elite, dotted with so-called “sons of,” and advantaged by the political connections of their well-placed fathers, was centrally positioned in both Syria's political power structure and in its “plunder economy.” The new coalitions of which it was a key element had sidelined old Baʿthist elites and changed the nature of state intervention in society, scaling back social services that had been part of the social compact under Hafiz al-Asad.

Prior to March 2011, these developments looked like authoritarian upgrading, as had Hafiz al-Asad's unpopular decision to align Syria with Iran: Bashar had in many ways flipped his father's domestic coalition and retasked the state. But Bashar's reshaped regime soon confronted not just a social crisis compounded by a terrible, multiyear drought, but also news of rebellion in other Arab states. By distancing itself from the traditional positions of Arab nationalism and the commitments of the welfare state, the regime hollowed out its former legitimizing discourses, leaving it few ideological options beyond an appeal to sectarian fears. The armed rebellion soon mobilized young Sunni men from marginalized rural and peri-urban areas, “excluded from the new patterns of predation and redistribution” (p. 60).

Security states specialize in repression and can create “torture archipelagoes,”Footnote ¹¹ with competing security services (Syria has at least four) singling out their own targets and running their own prisons. Before and during the uprisings that began in 2011, different regimes employed different levels of violence in response to dissent and protest, and different regimes have also shown different propensities to employ violence over time. In “Prosecuting Political Dissent,” Reinoud Leenders offers a highly stimulating discussion of the seemingly “zigzag pattern” evident in Syria (p. 175), where the regime has moved back and forth between a tendency to judicialize repression and a willingness to resort to extreme forms of violence (most notably in the repression of Islamist elements between 1976 and the uprising in Hama in 1982, and again during the current uprising). Leenders argues that the uneven, back-and-forth pattern reflects “the regime's peculiar authoritarian conceptions of statehood and sovereignty, presented mainly vis-à-vis external audiences” (p. 171). These conceptions may produce reactions that seem either cynical or delusional, but they were shaped by “memories . . . of the unremitting interference, intrigues, and support to various coups by foreign powers in Syria prior to 1963” and of ongoing interference since then (p. 192). The regime views both courts and military force as key indicators of state sovereignty, recognition of which is one of its central goals: Leenders notes that “presidential addresses on Syria's place in the world and the region are . . . habitually riddled with references to international law, U.N. resolutions, and legal stipulations regarding noninterference in domestic affairs; in a simple phrase, juridical statehood” (p. 182). The regime chooses between judicial and extrajudicial repression depending on how it understands its opponents’ links to external players: it criminalizes, prosecutes, and incarcerates “normal” dissent, but it goes to war against any group it views as tied to or manipulated by external actors. Extreme violence checks perceived existential threats, while judicialized repression, less reliant on the security services, mitigates the danger of elevating the security services to the point where they might reach for autonomy and become a coup threat.

Corruption and repression matter, and the books reviewed here give us new ways of understanding how they work. But the key institutional characteristic of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, Heydemann and Leenders argue, is their tendency to “promote the proliferation of ‘rules of the game.’” This is the characteristic that underlies policy across different domains.

And it is in this unpromising environment, where the regime constantly changes the ground rules to its advantage, that courageous men and women have sought, again and again, to promote freedom.

DESTROYING THE CENTER

One of the great strengths of Soueif's book, and one of the ways her reporting of the Egyptian uprising echoes the “argument” of The Map of Love, her earlier and brilliant novel, lies in her narrative of why, in Egypt, there is no political force of any consequence to like. The books by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham and Jason Brownlee fill in this story, suggesting that Egypt is damned from both within and without. But the destruction of reformist forces is also a theme of the final section of Heydemann and Leenders’ Middle East Authoritarianisms, which considers “contestation, governance, and the quest for authoritarian legitimacy,” and especially of Günes Murat Tezcür's essay, “Democratic Struggles and Authoritarian Responses in Iran in Comparative Perspective” (pp. 200–21). Recombinant authoritarian regimes destroy the political center; unfortunately and far more ironically, in important places this has also been the effect of American foreign policy. In effect, crippling the opposition functions in recombinant authoritarian regimes the way legitimacy does in liberal democratic regimes: it allows the regime to maintain control during moments of crisis, even if only in the basic sense of depriving alternative coalitions of political oxygen.

Tezcür's essay, with its focus on electoral politics and regime stability in Iran, is a good introduction to this theme. Reformists surged to victory in local and parliamentary elections in 1999 and 2000, only to be thrown on the defensive by 2003. They were foiled by coalitional problems and deficient political skills. Neither difficulty was an accident.

Between 2004 and 2009, “the reformists, who were facing a very unequal playing field, could not develop a coherent and long-term strategy” (p. 216, emphasis added). When demonstrations materialized in 2009, “the regime did not need to employ mass terror simply because the opposition movement gradually lost its viability” (p. 218, emphasis in the original).

This engineered loss of reformist viability is a central element of democratic failure in the Middle East.Footnote ¹² Producing it is possibly the most important “mode of operation” employed by authoritarian elites. As a problem, it is at least as old as democratic aspirations. Alexis de Tocqueville's classic analysis of the French Revolution—a political convulsion that announced freedom but that accentuated political centralization and set the scene for nearly two centuries of political instability—insists on the link between cooperation, or coalition-building capacities among opposition forces, reformist success, and freedom. He condemns the monarchy for having deliberately dried up opportunities for people to work out and then test common solutions to their problems, simultaneously setting up its own collapse, the Jacobin Terror, and Napoleon's dictatorship.

Like many Middle Eastern rulers, the centralizing monarchs of Tocqueville's account had no ambition grander than the perpetuation of their own power, but in France, as in the Middle East, the resulting forms of “authoritarian upgrading” durably shaped state-society relations and, Tocqueville claims, both destroyed freedom's chances and made any political order vulnerable to sudden collapse, even when it looked impregnable. In France, taxation provided a formative political battlefield:

No cooperation, no freedom: it is perhaps not a very sophisticated argument, but it is a powerful one, and it underwrites political patterns across the Middle East. In Egypt, “anyone who tried to work together politically over the last sixty years was destroyed” (Soueif, p. 70). However dramatic the events in Tahrir Square may have seemed—Brownlee calls Mubarak's ouster “one of the most consequential developments of the early twenty-first century” (p. 2)—the 25 January Revolution was too small, too brief, and too superficial an event to create the space in which new social patterns could be learned. This can be seen most easily by comparing the events of January–February 2011 in Egypt to the slow reshaping of (West) Germany after the profound defeat of 1945, an event incomparably more traumatic and far-reaching than the departure of Mubarak.Footnote ¹⁵

In Egypt, the opposition quickly fractured: “The leaders of the political forces are like cells gone mad; they swim around frantically, they divide, they coalesce with other cells, then divide again; they accuse each other of not being cells at all” (Soueif, p. 70). Presidential elections did not prompt the creation of a cross-partisan reformist coalition: “Coalitions came together and disbanded again. The revolution's dream ticket was a coalition of Muhammad el-Baradei, Hamdein Sabahi, and Abd el-Moneim Aboul Fotouh, but we could not get them to work together” (Soueif, p. 206).Footnote ¹⁶ Soueif recounts what it felt like to be politically homeless, to see one's revolution go down the drain: “I stood behind the curtain [in the voting booth] with the pen in my hand. I had been all set to write ‘The Revolution Continues’ right across the ballot. But I put my tick in front of Morsi's name and went home ill and miserable.”Footnote ¹⁷ The rest is history. Egypt's profoundly authoritarian “deep state” has openly and brutally reasserted itself. Muhammad Mursi, the undistinguished and unprepared Muslim Brotherhood leader whom Soueif and a majority of voters elected in June 2012, was overthrown a year later in a thinly disguised military coup; he is now in prison. ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi, a former military intelligence chief and defense minister, stepped into power, and in May 2014 he arranged to have himself elected president. There has been a significant uptick in repression. In December 2013, Egypt's new rulers declared the Muslim Brotherhood a “terrorist organization.” In March 2014, 529 Muslim Brothers were sentenced to death in a single hearing; Amnesty International denounced the move as “injustice writ large.”Footnote ¹⁸ In a joint statement issued in June 2014, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch condemned mass killings, mass arrests, and torture: “Instead of addressing the urgent need for reform,” a spokesperson for Amnesty said, “Egyptian authorities have spent the last year engaging in repression on a scale unprecedented in Egypt's modern history”—not an easy standard to meet.Footnote ¹⁹

For decades, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was “the leading edge of the opposition” (Wickham, p. 46). Any understanding of Egypt's political options must therefore include an analysis of the group. Most Americans, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham notes, want simply to know whether or not the Brotherhood, which has sister organizations in other countries, has or might become more “moderate.” Wickham does not find this question especially helpful: “moderate” is a term that evades definition, and above all, the MB is not a monolithic movement with a linear trajectory. Taking into account the fact that the MB has been shaped at least as decisively by the authoritarian and repressive environment in which it has operated as by its own ideology, Wickham captures and tries to account for diversity, ambiguity, and change over time and across individuals and groups, especially at the leadership level. Her qualitative study, based on over twenty years of fieldwork and archival research, runs against the trend in political science toward large-n studies. She emphasizes the importance of individual biographies, though unfortunately passes up the opportunity to provide compelling portraits of major figures. The book includes a chapter that compares the Egyptian Brotherhood to sister organizations in Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco, but the focus is overwhelmingly on Egypt.

Wickham's analysis of the MB's “middle generation,” the cohort that joined the Brotherhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, seems especially pertinent to any account of how the MB played its cards during and after the 25 January uprising, and more generally to the problems opposition elements experienced as they sought to build cooperative structures. The “middle generation” is defined by both its generational position and its political propensity to build cross-partisan coalitions. Readers familiar with post-1945 European and especially French political history will be reminded of the anti-Nazi Resistance generation of young communists, schooled during the war to view Catholics as possible comrades and the republic as worth dying for, potentially transformative but soon at odds with the Stalinist old guard over both goals and alliances, and rapidly sidelined after the Liberation.

The MB was created in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna. The British still ruled Egypt. The Brotherhood was anticolonial and eventually anti-Zionist, and it looked to Islam for solutions to the problems of Egyptians and of Egypt itself. Beyond this, it “never offered a detailed and coherent vision of the Islamic order it sought to create” (p. 24). A secretive “special section” engaged in acts of political violence. In December 1948, the government banned the MB; later, Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir, Anwar al-Sadat, and Husni Mubarak would all repeat this move, when their efforts to turn the MB to their own purposes failed. In February 1949, al-Banna was assassinated, probably as payback for the assassination of Prime Minister al-Nuqrashi Pasha.

In July 1952, a group of midlevel officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in a bloodless coup. The initially warm relations between the Free Officers and the MB soon soured, and in January 1954 the Brotherhood was again banned. Following an attempt on ʿAbd al-Nasir's life in October 1954, the ban turned into vicious repression. Torture and imprisonment were the formative experiences of a whole generation of MB leaders. Within the movement, the survivors’ prison records or years in exile became qualifications for leadership positions. Wickham cites the observations of a reporter for al-Hayat:

This generation was not monolithic or uniformly conservative: ʿUmar al-Tilmisani (1904–86) spent seventeen years behind bars but encouraged the reformists when he became the MB's Supreme Guide in the 1970s. But by and large, the older generation was inclined to insularity: “They developed a mind-set that the whole world is against us,” a Brotherhood activist commented, adding “You can't expect them to forget all this and say yallah nidardish [Come on, let's talk]” (p. 67).

“Come on, let's talk” was the preferred stance of the “middle generation,” men and women who came of age politically during the years when al-Sadat, hoping to use the Brotherhood to neutralize leftist and Nasserist elements, eased up on repression. The relatively permissive environment continued through the first decade of Mubarak's rule. The middle generation's formative experience was therefore not prison, but rather involvement in professional unions, student politics, and parliamentary life. The group (of course only a part of the actual generation within the MB) stands out in the bleak landscape of Egyptian politics because of its lengthy and positive engagement with other groups in Egyptian society: “we looked at the early period of Islam,” a middle generation activist remembered, “and discovered that the Prophet was open to everyone” (p. 63). Why should the MB not be similarly open? Another activist noted, “we found no contradiction between democracy and Islam” (p. 65).

But the middle generation's story does not have a happy ending. As repression again tightened around the MB, the middle generation lost both “the battle for the hearts and minds of the group's base” (p. 139) and a long sequence of power struggles within the organization, a complex and important story that Wickham recounts with skill, closely tracking debates on key substantive issues: the meaning and reach of shariʿa, concepts of citizenship, women's rights, governance norms and practices within the movement, alliance strategies, and whether or not to apply for recognition as a political party.

A middle generation leader denounced the old guard's eventual victory, calling it the “Great Theft” (Abu al-ʿIla Madi, cited in Wickham, p. 87). But the middle generation had let itself be robbed, for “they never developed an institutional platform from which to mobilize support for their agenda among members of the group's base”:

It did not help that renewed repression in the mid-1990s “aimed to disrupt the work of the middle-generation activists,” correctly perceived by the regime as more of a political threat to Mubarak's rule than the MB's insular old guard (p. 79). The proximate result was a dispersion of political energy: MB dissidents and others formed the Wasat (“center”) Party. It came to nothing. In 2003–5, attempts to build cross-partisan alliances around the Kefaya (“enough”) movement and then the National Coalition for Reform and Change also foundered. The longer term result was the political mediocrity of the MB's leadership after the 2012 elections and the coalitional disasters that Soueif cites as dooming the revolutionary movement—but also the rise of a new generation, less tied to traditional organizational structures than older reformists, “young, urban, hip, technologically savvy, and in regular contact with other members of their generation through social networking sites” (p. 141). Both the bureaucrats and the bloggers played a key role in the unfolding of events in Egypt, but the first group was more decisive.

For want of a viable coalition, the revolution failed.

One of the more dismaying features of American policy in the Middle East is its tendency to disadvantage broad-based reformist groups—and then to lament the absence of such groups and ascribe the deficiency to deep-seated cultural factors, as though American policy had nothing to do with the outcome. This pattern has played itself out in very diverse settings: in Egypt, in Palestinian politics, and in Syria since 2011.

Jason Brownlee examines the contradictions—and identifies the priorities—of American policy in Egypt in order to explain “why protesters replaced a ruler but not a regime” (p. 3). Democracy Prevention is the most straightforwardly thesis-driven book in our set. Brownlee argues that external and internal actors have used each other to “co-constitute” (p. 4, cf. p. 173) Egyptian authoritarianism in ways that all but guarantee its survival: together, they have built “an autocratic security state that supports a US-led regional order built around Israeli security and the projection of US influence over the Persian Gulf” (p. 3). “Given the stakes for both sides,” Brownlee argues, “the United States is less like an external force and more like a local participant in the ruling coalition” (p. 10). American policies “strengthened local incumbents in four respects: national defense, coup proofing, macroeconomic stability, and domestic repression” (p. 11). While the book focuses on Egypt, Brownlee's argument raises important questions about the role of external players and the international system in shaping domestic polities, societies, and outcomes, not in some colonial past, but right now. And it shows how—over a period of decades, under diverse American administrations, and in ways that were generally understood by policymakers—the United States played an essential role in allowing Mubarak to structure the Egyptian political system in ways that gutted the political space between himself and the MB. Mubarak's interest in this strategy is clear. Many Egyptians found (and find) the MB scary. But so did and does Washington, and American policy, while attentive to other strategic concerns, was in this respect both shortsighted and perverse. Mubarak was perpetuating his own rule by limiting the alternatives and making them unattractive. Washington was shooting itself in the foot.

Brownlee's point is that American policy patterns were stunningly consistent and amounted to “democracy prevention.” Brownlee puts the watershed moment in the 1970s, when al-Sadat signed a separate peace with Israel, and Egypt became, in effect, an American client state, the more essential to its patron because of the elimination of Iran as a U.S. ally after the toppling of the shah in 1979. Circumstances changed over time, but the contradictions of American policy continued—and the authoritarianism of the Egyptian state deepened, as U.S. leaders “counted on their Egyptian counterparts to do the ‘profoundly unpopular’” (p. 154).

Under these circumstances, the opposition never had a chance, no matter how often Egyptians were invited to vote. Brownlee's first chapter traces how “internal violence meshed with international peacemaking” (p. 16) as al-Sadat “expanded the old Egyptian security state, tripling the number of riot police” (p. 41). Subsequent chapters show how American support and Egyptian cooperation survived moments of strain and significant discontent on both sides. As Mubarak honed his mastery of the “tricky business” of manipulating the legal and electoral systems, tilting the playing field decisively in favor of his continued grip on power, polling data “regularly showed that the Egyptian mainstream rejected U.S. policies from Baghdad to Gaza” (p. 97). But mainstream views didn't matter—not in the short run—because “laws” and constitutional amendments, and ultimately, the threat of torture and prison, consistently left the opposition wrong footed and hamstrung. “Egyptians are frustrated and embittered,” an October 2008 cable from the embassy in Cairo informed Washington, “but still seem characteristically quiescent and passive, willing to sit on the sidelines in a cafe and list the failings of the government, but not to attempt to do anything about it” (cited by Brownlee, p. 130). A month earlier, a more lucid cable, instead of claiming that Egyptians were “characteristically quiescent,” had noted that Mubarak had “systematically and ‘legally’ eliminated virtually all political opposition” (cited by Brownlee, p. 130). The Political Parties Law of 1977 (Law No. 40/1977, as amended by Law No. 177/2005) empowered a “Political Parties Committee” controlled by the president to act as gatekeeper to the electoral arena. Abu al-ʿIla Madi, who tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to secure authorization for the Wasat Party, called the law “a law to torture parties.”Footnote ²¹ Brownlee is attentive to measures that disabled interclass coalitions as well as secularist-Islamist ones. Electoral laws were frequently fiddled to produce outcomes favorable to the regime—not just in the easy and obvious sense of returning National Democratic Party majorities, but in the sense of setting opposition groups up for a fall. In ways that Wickham's and Brownlee's books go a long way in explaining, they fell. Brownlee's account of how the regime disposed of Ayman Nour, the liberal founder of the al-Ghad (“tomorrow”) Party and Mubarak's opponent in Egypt's first multicandidate presidential elections in 2005, is especially illuminating and depressing (pp. 88–96).Footnote ²² The opposition's lack of political maturity and its inability to forge coalitions, so fatal in and after 2011, were no accident.

But what about Syria? Like Mubarak, al-Asad had no interest in fostering the emergence of an organized and broad-based reformist opposition—but unlike Mubarak, he could not rely on American support. Yet in Syria too, though in a more limited way, American policy has not served either democratic goals or other American strategic interests.

For the last three and a half years, a complex and breathtakingly destructive conflict, part civil war and part international proxy war, has failed to dislodge the al-Asad dictatorship. It has also failed to generate an appealing alternative. The conflict began as a protest movement (demanding reforms), evolved into an uprising (demanding the removal of al-Asad), and turned into a civil war in which a wide array of external actors soon became involved, but at no stage was the opposition able to create anything approximating a united front. Instead, Syria has become, like neighboring Iraq, a fertile field for local and less local sorcerer's apprentices. The chief product of their magic, other than mere death and destruction, has been the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an extraordinarily brutal and retrograde militia that is well financed and stunningly effective in the field. In June 2014, ISIS seized Mosul, bulldozed a portion of the Sykes-Picot border between Syria and Iraq, renamed itself the Islamic State, and declared a new caliphate in the areas it holds.

The United States, by virtue of its other commitments and priorities in the region, could not have lent early and effective support to more democratically inclined elements within the opposition, even if it had evinced the will to do so. Now the fight is increasingly between ISIS and the al-Asad regime—an unattractive choice, even by the standards of a region in which choices so regularly end up being unattractive. And to make matters worse, the “Sunni-Shiʿi split,” previously exaggerated as an explanatory tool for understanding the complex drivers of current conflicts in the Middle East but certainly exacerbated by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, is increasingly a reality across the region, destabilizing social and political arrangements and perhaps constituting the final act in the process of “unmixing” once diverse Levantine populations.Footnote ²³

“ONLY CONNECT”Footnote ²⁴

The books reviewed here do not suggest that democracy is around the corner in the Middle East. That is the bad news—at least for people who want democracy in that region. The good news is that authoritarian resilience is not based on some deep cultural flaw or temporally remote event. Authoritarian resilience is based on power constellations and policy choices, some of which do reflect structural factors (e.g., longterm patterns of state development) and stable interests (e.g., those of the United States) and some of which are more accidental but are now robustly self-reproducing. But even the robustly self-reproducing patterns can change. We know from history that surprises happen and that stable authoritarian regimes are stable only until they are not. Our predictive powers in this matter have not proven especially impressive, in part because it is immensely difficult to get good information about secretive and repressive regimes. All of the regimes considered here are afflicted with inner contradictions and enjoy a limited repertoire of possible responses, and the international system is again in flux.

Change could happen. Can it be induced and directed by intentional action? Unintended consequences are not simply a trope of the “rhetoric of reaction”Footnote ²⁵; they are also what happens when powerful players do “stupid stuff.” We know that rationality operates best where choices are highly constrained. In other words, the more constrained the choices, the more likely actors are to end up with intended rather than unintended consequences.Footnote ²⁶ But in systems that are simultaneously disorderly and complex, unstructured by stable rules, choices are not constrained, and incumbent rulers hold most of the cards. They consistently capture and redirect efforts to promote incremental change. The essays in Middle East Authoritarianisms demonstrate how resourceful authoritarian regimes have been at turning potentially destabilizing economic, social, or political challenges, both domestic and international, into “upgraded” patterns of authoritarian rule.

Looking toward the future, Soueif suggests two quite different lines of reflection. One has to do with cooperation: “We see that we are divided, and that we have to make a huge and imaginative effort to forge a new common ground” (p. 214). “Only connect” is her primary political recommendation. She sees this as a challenge for Islamist and secularist forces in Egypt, but as sectarian fears—part cause and part result of weak connections—deepen across the region, it has a broader validity. Wickham's work on the MB is also a reflection on Sunni revivalism, a key topic as we move forward; similarly important are the complex interactions between religious and political actors considered in several of the essays in Middle East Authoritarianisms.

Soueif's other line of reflection has to do with violence: “Would we,” she asks, “have ended up in a better place if we had been more violent?” (pp. 140–41).

Violence is the historical work-around for situations where the status quo is no longer acceptable to important groups but the possibilities of incremental change are blocked. It is especially appealing when only a general assault on an all-encompassing power system—a system that links the political system, the economy, and the class structure—seems likely to allow the alteration of any piece of it. But Syria does not make violence look good. In June 2014, a young Syrian friend of mine questioned the ethics and efficacy of his decision, two years earlier, not to join in the militarization of the Syrian struggle. What if he and others like him had stayed and dirtied their hands, he asked. If he had, I think we can safely assume that he would now be among the dead, and that his life would have been sacrificed in vain. Violence can solve some political problems, but like other forms of political action, its usefulness is conditioned by the viability of the coalition that supports it—that is, on the strength of cooperative skills. Violence cannot substitute for a weak coalition, or serve as a shortcut that circumvents the problems weak coalitions create.

The books examined here demonstrate the usefulness of both comparative perspectives and in-depth explorations of single cases. They make the case for qualitative work and for combining the tools of comparative politics and international relations in order to explain authoritarian outcomes. They support, it seems to me, Owen's very limited notion of “Arab exceptionalism.” I wish they left room for more hope.