Political systems of social power have proved remarkably persistent in Iraq and Lebanon. Policy interventions should focus on making these systems more accountable to society.
For the past several years, the Iraqi and Lebanese states have faced a seemingly imminent existential threat. The onset of protests and bottom-up challenges to the ruling elite has led to movements calling for revolution. Infighting between parties and leaders, exemplified in repeated delays in the choosing of prime ministers or cabinets, has revealed intense fragmentation. These realities have been stimulated by economic, demographic and climate change. They have challenged both the elite pact and the ability of political leaders to maintain public authority, leading many observers to argue that both states are on the brink of collapse. However, thus far such an eventuality has failed to materialize. Civil wars, insurgencies, massive explosions and government collapses have occurred, but the state has remained seemingly perpetually ‘on the brink’ without ever quite tipping over.
This paper has argued that the Westphalian, neo-Weberian definition of the state – in which power in effect resides in formal institutions – has often been taken for granted by Western policymakers engaging in the Middle East and North Africa. This has led much of the debate to focus on the likelihood of imminent ‘state’ failure or collapse.
However, the state in a more broadly defined sense has not disappeared in the region, nor has it been replaced with subnational modes of governance such as tribal or local community governance. Instead, the neo-Weberian ideal itself needs to be challenged, so that policymaking can be shaped by more informed assessments of conditions on the ground. In reality, the Iraqi and Lebanese examples show that in some cases a state neither ‘collapses’ nor disappears, even if particular institutions and actors within it manifestly can.
Focusing on the state not as an institutional form of government but as a broader and more elastic system of power reveals a different equation, and explains why both countries survive as states. Thus far, their systems of power have proven durable, withstanding elite fragmentation, political incoherence and uprisings.
A more realistic approach to understanding the question of state fragility and collapse in Iraq and Lebanon must consider the effects and prevalence of social power. Studying these states through the lens of power relations – and how leaders operate in both ‘horizontal’ (intra-elite) and ‘vertical’ (elite–citizenry) axes of society – reveals that the state is in fact the space in which elements of the elite cooperate and compete with each other, using the tools of ideology, economics and violence. Even when faced with mass protests, the elite commands enough of a social base, and is sufficiently willing to use coercion, to weather the type of uprisings that arose in both countries in October 2019.
The state in countries such as Iraq and Lebanon is often understood in negative terms; indeed, policy recommendations have sometimes even called for the removal of the state. However, Western policymakers should focus not only on the fragility or hybridity of particular institutions or actors per se, but also (and more importantly) on the systems of power themselves. These systems, within which elements of the elite negotiate both with one another and with their respective social bases, will reveal the true extent to which these countries are indeed ‘on the brink’ of collapse. This is not to say that authoritarianism will endure. Yet understanding its persistence requires the observer to acknowledge the power dynamics that are at the heart of the particular form which the ‘state’ takes in these countries. Policy interventions should focus on ensuring that the interactions which make up both horizontal and vertical power relationships are more accountable to society.
