Patel's Order Out of Chaos is about how communities create and maintain social order following the collapse of centralized political authority. Patel shows that the answer lies in information, and particularly in how it is disseminated, understood, and acted upon locally. This book's major contribution is to systematically and methodically examine why certain social features are better able to carry out these informative processes while others struggle to do so.
The empirical setting of the book is post-invasion Iraq, with particularly deep engagement in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Patel arrived in Basra shortly following the American-led coalition's overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. He vividly narrates how Iraqis struggled to navigate the shockingly quick and comprehensive collapse of the oppressive, omnipresent Ba'athist regime and its replacement with a patchwork of anarchy, criminality, and militia rule. Yet these transformations were uneven: some neighborhoods managed to reconstitute a measure of local order: garbage was collected, petty criminality subsided, and rhythms of “normal” daily life remerged. Other neighborhoods remained afflicted by rotting garbage, criminal activity, and general disorder. These patterns of neighborhood-by-neighborhood variation provide the central theoretical and empirical puzzle of the book.
The key lies in the social role of religion and, specifically, the Friday sermon which many of the city's Shi'a mosques instituted quickly following the invasion. Uniquely, these institutions and practices set the conditions for social order through their ability to help solve two important barriers to collective action: the first one of coordination, the second one of contribution. Coordination essentially sits at the intersection of knowledge and expectations: individuals must not only understand a given situation, but also expect that others understand the situation similarly (“common knowledge”). Contribution is based on the proposition that individuals prefer to shirk when their contribution to producing a public good is costly (the “free rider” problem).
Patel explains not only why Shi'a Friday mosques could fulfill these tasks but, crucially, why alternative actors—tribal networks, mass media, or even Sunni mosques—largely could not. Tribal networks, for example, were uneven and, as Patel argues, often functioned more as channels of patronage than networks of solidarity. Mass media was fractured and inconsistently consumed. And because of a more decentralized theological structure Sunni religious leaders found it difficult to convey consistent information to their adherents. But there was a catch: Patel shows how Shi'a Friday mosques were frequently able to create “common knowledge,” but this tended to facilitate social order only when leaders asked adherents to complete “short, specific, and low-risk tasks” (93). As the risks of those tasks rose, individuals increasingly free rode: coordinating neighbors to dump their garbage at a central site was much easier than convincing them to stand up to criminal gangs predating on residents.
This impressive book makes a series of contributions to our understanding of individual and group behaviors, Iraqi politics, and Shi'a political activism. This last point is especially welcome as research on Sunni political movements has far outstripped work on Shi'a actors. Indeed, Patel documents in significant detail how the differences between the two interpretations of Islam can be quite meaningful in terms of sociopolitical outcomes. The book also makes a headline contribution to our understanding of the connection between religious institutions and political action, emphasizing their informational role in a way that is mostly distinct from existing emphases in the literature on identitarian, distributional, and emotional factors.
The book also broaches more focused questions of religion and politics. One is on the potential conflict between religious leaders and their congregations. The book contains intriguing moments where religious leaders deliberately avoid offering judgments on certain political issues because, according to Patel, they understand they would likely not be obeyed. This is true of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani sidestepping issuing rulings on contentious national issues such as sectarian violence, but also a local imam who avoided asking his audience to make a costly contribution to clear a trash-clogged canal (91). Yet in other cases religious leaders wade directly into contentious issues: Patel shows how the decision to deliver Friday sermons itself was a break from established theological practice among most Shi'a: “most of those preachers in April 2003 were preaching their first-ever Friday sermon” (67). Under what conditions, then, do religious leaders engage their authority in the public sphere, and when are they more circumspect?
Patel's argument is powerful because it is secular: his religious institutions facilitated collective action because they were able to create common knowledge and even impose small-scale social costs on shirkers (e.g., shunning). Neither of these are definitionally religious activities—one could brainstorm certain secular actors who could do the same. Indeed, Patel's point in highlighting tribes and the mass media is to show how their failure to produce these outcomes stemmed from factors unrelated to their secularism. And the comparison to Sunni Islam makes the point in another way: neither is collective action an inherent advantage of religious actors over their secular counterparts.
Yet in the background there is the possibility that religion operates on a separate plane than alternatives. For example, the Friday sermons were technically two-fold, with a set of ritualistic and theological lessons preceding admonitions to not toss garbage pell-mell into the street or fire guns into the air. Sometimes these messages explicitly merged, when religious elites “couched their messages and proposed norms and sanctions in religious terms” and “embedded social and political messages in exhortations to comport oneself and one's community with Islamic values” (76). This suggests that common knowledge and shared expectations may indeed be shaped by a more complex moral universe than secular alternatives are able to muster.
