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Introduction
Middle Eastern states have, if nothing else, increased enormously in power since their independence and therefore also in their autonomy over society. However, have they formed accompanying political legitimacy and embedded authority structures? Coercion and fierce rulers are part and parcel of Middle Eastern politics, but is this enough to speak of state-making?
This article focuses on how the states of the Middle East have consolidated after independence. State formation is a constant process and there are more conceivable outcomes of state-making than the strong Western nation state (Wendt and Barnett, 1993; Krause, 1996; Wendt, 2003; Migdal, 2004). States may be weak, grow stronger, then over time become weaker again. Formation is a process with multiple effects along the way that range from functional state failure, to state reformation, to occasional state collapse as well as to lasting weak state structures.
The history of state formation in the Arab Middle East1 challenges standard assumptions about war-making and the emergence of strong states based on the work of Charles Tilly (1975, 1990). In the Arab world, war has interacted with processes of state formation in ways that differ fundamentally from the European experience (Heydemann, 2000: 9). The extraction of resources for war-making has not led to legitimate political rule, as wars were funded by foreign military assistance or rents of one form or another, fought with imported weapons, and peace settlements were negotiated and guaranteed by external powers (Heydemann, 2000: 23). And yet, war-making had profound influences on social processes and transformations as well as on state-making. My comparison of Middle Eastern state formation through the lens of Charles Tilly's work validates many of his propositions rather than refutes his approach altogether. I propose the notion of rentierism2 to help amend the Tillyian model of state-making in order to make it applicable to Middle Eastern states.
Rentierism has indeed played an important role in structuring the character and dynamics of Middle Eastern states. It helps to explain such diverse cases as centralized and authoritarian Tunisia (lack of capital generates coercion), as well as tribal states in the Gulf (capital without coercion creates embedded authority), as well as the emergence of weak states in Iraq and Jordan. I will argue...