Iron fists in silk gloves

About this book

After predicting a wave of Middle East democratization that never happened, comparative scholars now face hard questions about the resilience of authoritarianism in this region. Among the most demanding puzzles is why, during the post-colonial era, autocratic states in the Middle East have exhibited such starkly different patterns of durability and contestation. Some incumbents enjoyed perennial stability even during economic and institutional crises, such as the al-Sabah dynasty of Kuwait; other sovereigns stumbled through periodic conflicts with mobilized opposition and retained only a tenuous grasp on power, such as the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan; and still other dictators led states that collapsed due to revolutionary unrest, such as the Pahlavi regime of Iran. What accounts for such contrasting outcomes? My dissertation answers this question by comparing historical sequences of late development, focusing on how international political forces influenced domestic coalitional alignments in the early stages of state-building in these aforementioned cases. Combining insights from fieldwork with careful historical research, I argue the depth of geopolitical support that founding rulers secured from foreign patrons early on shaped the popular coalitions they later built to anchor state power, and that the breadth of these coalitional bases ultimately determined long-term pathways of stability and development. In Kuwait, weak British assistance in the early twentieth century prevented rulers from crushing organized resistance and bolstering their fiscal and coercive autonomy. This standoff forced the regime to incorporate opposing social forces into a broad, inclusionary coalition whose institutional bargains would guarantee future populist support. In Jordan, modest American patronage commencing in the late 1950s enabled the state to stifle opposition parties but not amplify the financial and repressive capacities central to its vision of new order. This compelled the regime to cultivate a selective coalition around its tribal minority, a discriminatory strategy that sparked recurrent but manageable conflict. In Iran, almost unlimited US assistance starting in the early 1950s empowered leadership to smash its nationalist rivals and reinvigorate its fiscal and military bases. This victory resulted in the adoption of a narrow, exclusionary coalition reliant upon state elites and mass repression, thereby facilitating future revolutionary unrest.