Partisans, Dynasties, Brotherhoods, Networks : Before and After in the State in the Middle East

This essay examines the alternatives to the modern state in the Middle East. The modern European-style state, and particularly of the assignment of responsibility for welfare functions to the state, is a relatively new feature of the regional landscape. The widespread failure of many of the region's states to fulfill these responsibilities in the second half of the twentieth century contributed to eroding the already frail legitimacy of formal state institutions, but it did not erase the need for, or expectation of, welfare provision by institutions that transcend private interests. In European and North American polities with long and stable histories of states, many of these welfare functions have been in recent years delegated to a “civil society” defined and delineated by the state; in the Middle East, the declining capacity of the state has instead been an impetus to imaginative constructions of institutional alternatives that challenge and undermine the state itself