Rethinking Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa

Abel Polese is a Senior Research Fellow at Dublin City University, Ireland. He is a writer, development worker, scholar, amateur photographer and musician who is mainly interested in the dichotomy between formal and informal modes and structures of governance. He is the author of The Scopus Diaries and the Illogics of Academic Survival (2018).

Alternative forms of government and statehood exist in the Middle East and North African regions. The chapters in this volume demonstrate this and explore the notion of power from a non-statist perspective, highlighting the limits of states and their governance. This book was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

1. Introduction - Limited Statehood and its Security Implications on the Fragmentation Political Order in the Middle East and North Africa 2. From Westphalian Failure to Heterarchic Governance in MENA: The Case of Syria 3. 'What is in a Name?': The Role of (Different) Identities in the Multiple Proxy Wars in Syria 4. Competitive Statehood in Libya: Governing Differently a Specific Setting or Deconstructing its Weak Sovereign State with a Fateful Drift Toward Chaos? 5. Between the Cracks: Actor Fragmentation and Local Conflict Systems in the Libyan Civil War 6. Security Assistance in a Post-interventionist Era: The Impact on Limited Statehood in Lebanon and Tunisia 7. Hizbullah's Shaping Lebanon Statehood 8. Recognizing Fragmented Authority: Towards a post-Westphalian Security Order in Iraq 9. Competing for Control over the State: The Case of Yemen 10. A Dangerous Method: How Mali Lost Control of the North, and Learned to Stop Worrying