Making Sense of the Arab State

Steven Heydemann is Ketcham Chair in Middle East Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University.

• Table of Contents TablesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Making Sense of the Arab StateBy Steven Heydemann and Marc LynchSECTION 1: DIMENSIONS OF STATENESS1. Seeing the State or Why Arab States Look the Way They DoBy Steven Heydemann2. Understanding State Weakness in the Middle East and North AfricaBy Raymond Hinnebusch3. Rethinking the Postcolonial State in the Middle East: Elite Competition and Negotiation within the Disaggregated Iraqi StateBy Toby Dodge4. Legibility, Digital Surveillance, and the State in the Middle EastBy Marc LynchSECTION 2: DIMENSIONS OF REGIME-NESS5. What We Talk About When We Talk About the State in Postwar LebanonBy Bassel F. Salloukh6. The “Business of Government”: The State and Changing Patterns of Politics in the Arab WorldBy Lisa Anderson7. Palace Politics as "Precarious" Rule: Weak Statehood in AfghanistanBy Dipali MukhopadhyaySECTION 3: CONTESTING STATENESS: SOCIETY AND SITES OF RESISTANCE8. State Capacity and Contention: A View from JordanBy Jillian Schwedler9. Water, Stateness, and Tribalism in Jordan: The Case of the Disi Water Conveyance ProjectBy Sean Yom10. Conclusion: The Specter of the Spectrum: Escaping the Residual Category of Weak StatesBy Dan SlaterContributors

“Making Sense of the Arab State is an exemplary volume that offers readers the conceptual tools for understanding recent trends in state development in the Arab world. This is a highly original contribution that should be widely read.”