The recent devolution of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq into civil war and the continuing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan make Armies and State-Building in the Modern Middle East a timely contribution in a politicized field in Middle East studies. The book collects three of Cronin's previously published articles on the rise of standing, drilled, modern military forces in Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, along with a new comparative analysis about the role these forces played in colonial domination, the development of state institutions and political and social change.

Iranian, Afghan, and Saudi military forces have received less attention than the Ottoman and post-Ottoman armies. Until the 1980s, these states employed “nizam i jadid” (New Order) drilled infantry in far fewer direct military confrontations with European powers than the Ottoman Empire did in the nineteenth century. Nor did these states experience the repeated wars with Israel that propelled military authoritarianism in eastern Mediterranean Arab states in the twentieth century. Enmeshed in colonial geopolitics, rulers of these states rather used European military missions and the standing armies they trained to try to mediate colonial influence and ensure domestic power. Cronin argues that the similar social and political problems these states faced, such as managing strong nomadic tribes over large geographic expanses, and building state institutions with limited resources, means historical contingency is far more important than political models in explaining the divergent outcomes they experienced.

Qajar Shahs of Iran invited military missions from several different European states in the nineteenth century, seeking to maintain a strategic edge over Russia, but these efforts paved the way for an independent Russian Cossack brigade to establish political hegemony by the early twentieth century. Indeed, it was Riza Shah's expulsion of all military missions that allowed his regime to make a large army by conscription the foundation of his modernizing project. The paranoid attitude of the Pahlavi Shahs toward the military prevented it from becoming a center of political opposition, but this also led to cronyism and its collapse during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Although the new regime won the allegiance of the army through the Iran-Iraq war, it has also assembled the Revolutionary Guard and basij militias as political counterweights.

In contrast to Iran, standing Saudi and Afghan armies have devolved into tools for neocolonial influence and proxy conflicts between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Iran. Both states ultimately rejected conscription, fearing backlash from relatively stronger tribal forces. In the case of Afghanistan, after Soviet forces backed a coup of Communist officers in 1978, Pashtun warlords recruited the aid of Pakistan and the United States to retake power; the Afghan army has not effectively exercised a monopoly over force inside Afghanistan since that time. Saudi Arabia long wished to build its military power from a level far behind its regional rivals in the mid-twentieth century, but it also feared creating a corps of meritocratic republicans. With its oil rents, the Al Saud dynasty has instead empowered a large National Guard staffed only with loyal Najdi tribesmen, and hired Pakistani mercenaries, to counterbalance the regular army. In the process, Cronin argues, Saudi Arabia has “abandoned the goal of creating an army strong enough to defend its borders from external aggression” to the United States (239).

At a time when political analysts seem prepared to write off the nation-state in the Middle East to the point of idealizing the form, Cronin provides a strong reminder that a Eurocentric model of state-building focused on the military as the engine of nationalism and industrial growth is inappropriate to explaining postcolonial and neocolonial states. Instead of homogenizing citizen-subjects, Cronin demonstrates, these regimes have used military and security policies to exploit and reinforce ethnic or tribal divisions to maintain power and indeed reinforce the state itself. Baʿathist Syria and Iraq also employed these strategies, which have backfired in recent times, but regional alliances between their current regimes and powerful sponsors may yet prevent the dissolution of their armies.