1. War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East

Steven Heydemann

This volume responds to two significant and related gaps in the study of war in the Middle East, one empirical, the other theoretical. The first is a serious deficit in research on war making and war preparation as sources of state and social formation and transformation in the Middle East. With the partial exception of Israel, where the social and institutional effects of persistent conflict have received a measure of attention, the study of war in the Middle East has been shaped much more by military and diplomatic historians, theorists of international relations, and journalists than it has by their counterparts in comparative politics, comparative and historical political economy, sociology, social history, and anthropology.^[1] War has been a growth industry for analysts and researchers of conflict resolution, peace keeping, arms control, and negotiation, as well as specialists on foreign policy and strategic studies. Particular disputes are the subject of voluminous literatures: first and foremost the Arab-Israeli conflict, with the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars not far behind. Yet we know relatively little about how states and societies in the Middle East have been shaped and reshaped by their intensive and prolonged exposure to and participation in war making and war preparation, often conducted by regimes that have embraced militarization as an everyday tool of governance as much as (if not more than) a means to ensure national security. Despite the now thoroughly noncontroversial observation that war making, state making, and “society making” are mutually interdependent, there have been no more than a handful of studies that have explored how these dynamics interact in the Middle East.^[2] Without in any sense disparaging the contributions of the existing literature on war in the Middle East, it remains true that such research has been deficient in its attention to war as a social and political process.

The presence of a gap, however, is not in itself justification for a response. Many topics that go unstudied no doubt deserve their fate. But in this instance, the consequences of this relative neglect are twofold, and they make quite clear its empirical and analytic costs. First, we lack the knowledge base that would permit us to explain the effects of war making and war preparation on current political, economic, and social arrangements in the Middle East. If we take seriously the proposition that war is a social process, then understanding these effects deserves our attention. Second and just as important, we lack an analytical basis for determining whether the experiences of the Middle East might force social scientists to rethink the general assumptions that have defined research on the relationship between war and state formation in other cases. In some respects this latter concern is the more significant. In the absence of efforts to explore rigorously where Middle East cases align with or challenge current theories of the relationship between war and state formation, it will not be possible to construct alternative, more satisfactory, theoretical accounts. Without such accounts, our understanding of dynamics that have been central in shaping the contemporary Middle East will be at best incomplete and at worst distorted.

The contributions to this volume take both empirical and theoretical concerns seriously. They present considerable new material about the social, institutional, and political dynamics of war making and war preparation in the Middle East, and thus add significantly to what we know about these processes in the region. They also frame the material, in most instances, as a critical response to existing theories of how war making, state making, and social processes like the construction of citizenship interact. In many cases they highlight significant points of divergence between available theories and the realities of the Middle East and thus underscore the value of this region to the larger theoretical enterprise of understanding how war shapes patterns of social, institutional, and state formation and transformation.

Considering the scope and scale of war making and war preparation in the Middle East—the sheer intensity of militarization as a persistent and pervasive attribute of everyday life across the region—the paucity of research on war as a social and political process is puzzling, not least because academics typically are far too entrepreneurial to leave a significant phenomenon unstudied. Why then, has such an obvious and important research agenda been left to languish? Answering this question is necessary to help situate the second, theoretical, gap this volume hopes to address: the lack of fit between the experience of war in the Middle East and the research base that shapes theory building in the study of war, the state, and society.

In my view, the absence of research on war and the state in the Middle East has relatively little to do with an inherent lack of interest on the part of Middle East specialists but quite a bit to do with the peculiar genealogy of the research program on war and the state that emerged (or perhaps reemerged) in the United States in the 1970s as a result of the important work of Charles Tilly and the other contributors to his edited book The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Tilly’s volume helped consolidate a broader renewal of interest in “the state as a conceptual variable,” yet over time the research agenda it inspired became embedded within assumptions that gradually undermined its capacity to innovate and adapt.^[3] In other words, it is the path-dependent quality of research on war and the state—the extent to which it has become constrained by the conceptual frameworks around which it was originally organized—that explains, at least in part, the puzzling neglect by Middle East specialists of research on war as a social and political process.

This claim deserves elaboration. To an exceptional degree, contemporary research on war and the state has been organized around and shaped by an interest in explaining the macrohistorical dynamics of state formation in Europe.^[4] Researchers have focused particular attention on the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and have followed lines of inquiry that are broadly similar to those mapped out by Tilly—according distinctive weight to the role of war in the expansion of state capacities, the emergence of new patterns of human and economic mobilization, the organization of extractive institutions, and, for some, the transition from absolutist to republican forms of government.^[5] The coherence of this agenda should not be taken to imply convergence in its findings. Where Tilly and colleagues have explored links between war making and the gradual transition from absolutism to representative forms of rule, Downing argues that “extensive domestic resource mobilization” produced the destruction of representative governance and the rise of autocracy.^[6] Nonetheless, among scholars of the contemporary developing world, one response to the hegemonic status of Europe has been to take the generalizability of this larger research program as given and to regard the conceptual assumptions underlying it as unproblematically portable across time and space.^[7] Unfortunately, these efforts have tended to confirm for us little more than the fact that the twentieth-century developing world is not like eighteenth-century Europe. That is, the results of these projects tend to show, to take just one example, that war has not been positively correlated with the emergence of strong states and representative forms of governance in postcolonial Africa as it was in the transition from absolutist to republican France.^[8] Quelle surprise.

Yet the implications of this response are too troubling to treat dismissively, as many other critiques of the Europeanist impact on the organization of research have already pointed out.^[9] They reinforce an impression of the developing world as “non-Europe,” a domain in which outcomes (typically negative outcomes) are accounted for by the absence of attributes that explain outcomes that are coded as positive in the European context.^[10] Rather than question whether a given research framework offers an appropriate starting point, scholars who adopt approaches to the study of war and the state based on the experience of early modern Europe seem more concerned with figuring out why the contemporary developing world deviates from what is assumed to be the modal historical trajectory established by Germany, France, and England between 1500 and 1900.

Among those interested in explaining trajectories of state and social formation in the Middle East, the more common response to the prominence of early modern Europe in research on war and the state has been to take seriously the vast differences separating it from the contemporary developing world and to look elsewhere, typically inward, for explanations of state institutional formation, the construction of national markets, and the organization of state-society relations. On one level this is an appropriate reaction. Where an existing literature seems to hold little promise for explaining a particular puzzle, it is eminently reasonable to turn elsewhere. And this response also suggests that the gap identified here is less the result of neglect than of a rational decision by scholars of the Middle East reacting to the regional parochialism that has been so evident in research on war and the state. Yet this response also imposes significant costs. It focuses attention on mechanisms other than war in explaining institutional, political, and social outcomes in which war has been implicated in numerous settings, and it obscures the effects of a major, global force driving state and social formation and transformation. With these concerns in mind, a second aim of this volume is to strengthen connections between research on war as a social process and the study of political, social, and institutional change in one part of the contemporary developing world.

What is striking and noteworthy is that the current trajectory of research on war and the state did not become path constrained because the initial findings in this area generated increasing returns to scale theoretically for the scholars who applied them to settings other than Europe. In fact, the authors who helped revive interest in the topic of war and the state were quite cautious about the extent to which early modern Europe might hold out lessons that could be generalized to more recent periods and other regions. Tilly warned, for example, that “our ability to infer the probable events and sequences in contemporary states from an informed reading of European history is close to nil.” At the time, he was prepared to speculate only that “some general relationships among the ways of building state power, the forms of relationship between men and government, and the character of the political institutions which emerge from the process of state building which held within the European world still hold today.”^[11]

Thus, the current analytic hegemony of Europe in research on war and the state represents a consequence that was both anticipated and unintended. Why then did it happen? In my view this development reflects in no small measure the dramatic reversal of intellectual fortunes among scholars of the developing world since the late 1960s, as well as the failure of some of their successors to heed the cautions of Tilly and others. It underscores how shifts in the organization of research agendas within comparative politics over the past thirty years have worked, unintentionally, against the emergence of a more broadly grounded set of approaches to the study of war, the state, and society. To establish how this came about, however, requires a brief bit of theoretical archeology, excavating among the ruins of research programs that were buried in the seismic shifts that reconfigured comparative politics when modernization and systems theories crumbled during the 1970s.

For those who study a part of the developing world like the Middle East—whose uncertain standing in the social sciences epitomizes the ambivalent relationship between area studies and the disciplines—there is no small measure of irony in recalling that The Formation of National States in Western Europe had its origins in the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Comparative Politics, best known for its sponsorship of a series of influential books on political development in the “developing areas,” including the Middle East.^[12] In 1969 the committee’s members invited Tilly to direct a project on European state formation. The invitation grew out of the committee’s interest in using European cases to test and refine systems theories of political development and modernization that were derived from the imposition of organic-functionalist frameworks onto the developing world.^[13] Yet the interest in Europe among comparativists was not merely an attempt to make the world safe for systems theory. It also reflected a broader concern that Europe itself was on the verge of becoming marginal to comparative politics. The interest of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in European state formation was thus in part an effort to revitalize the study of Europe by incorporating it within (and subjecting it to) the field of political development.^[14] While it takes a long memory to recall a moment in American social science when comparativists worried about Europe’s marginal role in the advancement of theories that originated in the experience of Africa or the Middle East, Lucian W. Pye, chair of the SSRC committee when the Tilly volume was in preparation, made this argument in his foreword to the book.^[15] “One of the purposes of the study reported in this volume,” he noted, “was to discover the extent to which a review of state-building in Europe could usefully inform contemporary efforts at advancing both the practice and theories of political development.”^[16]

Pye and the committee, however, were to be disappointed, a fact he scarcely bothered to conceal in his rather grudging acknowledgment of Tilly’s effort. What seemed especially disturbing to Pye, apart from the importance the contributors attached to violence in the process of state formation rather than to the role of the state as dispenser of justice, was the project’s failure to find support for the ahistorical and universalizing assumptions of political development as defined by the Parsonian systems theories of Apter, Almond, Coleman, and others. Tilly made this difference of perspective explicit: “The analysis of political development,” he claimed, “has had about the same relationship to historical experience as a dog on a long leash to the tree at the other end of the leash. . . . Some political scientists want to break the leash or at least move the tree. The authors of this book want, instead, a leash which is very long but very sure.”^[17] Given the usual relationship between dog and tree, this analogy speaks volumes about tensions in the collaboration between historians and political scientists that Pye had singled out as one of the most significant benefits the project was expected to generate. I will leave it to the reader, however, to decide whether historians or political scientists were cast in the role of the tree.

Tilly’s critical response to the universalizing ambitions of the SSRC committee captured emergent strains in the relationship between history and political science and added one more voice to a growing chorus of criticism being directed against the methodological assumptions underlying the committee’s work, both from within and without.^[18] By the time The Formation of National States was published in 1974 the field of political development was fragmenting, breaking apart under the combined weight of its own totalizing ambitions and the sustained salvos of its critics.^[19] The work of Tilly and his collaborators helped, along with many others, to shift the study of state formation from the domain of political development and systems theory to the domain of macrohistorical comparative sociology and comparative-historical political economy. Within the SSRC, the Committee on Comparative Politics was decommissioned in 1972, even before the Tilly volume appeared. After some short-lived and undistinguished follow-on efforts, the SSRC Committee on States and Social Structures was formed in 1983, “bringing the state back in” and signaling in a decisive fashion the transition in analytic and empirical emphasis then under way in the social sciences.^[20]

While few mourn the passing of systems theory, what concerns us here is not the reorganization of postmodernization social science in general, but one specific effect: the increasing appeal of state-centered approaches, including a growing interest in American political development and the workings of the capitalist state, contributed to a dramatic inversion of perceptions within political science concerning the analytical relevance of particular regions.^[21] Europe and the industrialized West once again secured their position as the analytic metropole, while large parts of the Third World—Africa, South Asia, the Middle East—again became theoretically peripheral. Given this shift it is not surprising that while scholars of the Middle East found statist theory to be highly productive—even if only as the object of their criticism—the flow of ideas tended to be one way: from the analytic metropole outward to the analytic periphery.^[22]

Thus, comparative research on the state in the Middle East, including the very limited work that has been done on war and the state, almost inevitably has been framed as a test of theoretical claims derived from research on Europe against the experience of Middle East cases.^[23] Tilly himself, despite his own concern that European history might teach us relatively little about “probable events and sequences” in contemporary states, seemed to endorse precisely this choice of research strategies. He stressed, in a claim that evidences a certain complacency about the rightness of Europe’s leading role in the organization of research, that the “European historical experience, for all its special features, is long enough, well-enough documented, and a large enough influence on the rest of the world that any systematic conclusions which did hold up well in light of that experience would almost automatically become plausible working hypotheses to be tried out elsewhere.”^[24] Tilly has since retreated from this position, recognizing that The Formation of National States^[25] simply replaced one unilinear model of state formation with another. Yet scholars of the Middle East might nonetheless be forgiven for wondering what distinguishes the length or archival record of Europe’s historical experience from that of Egypt, Syria, or Iraq (or the Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal Empires). The larger concern, however, is that in his earlier work Tilly did not seem either to envision the kinds of distortions that would follow the “automatic” acceptance of European experiences as plausible hypotheses nor perceive of a way in which the rest of the world might influence Europe. And in fact, completing feedback loops—using findings drawn from the experience of Middle East cases to reshape the theoretical assumptions of the “metropole”—has happened only rarely.

My intent in raising (resurrecting?) these issues is not to invoke nostalgia for the era of systems theory—a construct of Rube Goldberg–like complexity and misplaced energy—simply because it provided a vehicle for the inclusion of developing countries at the core of the social sciences. Nor, on the other hand, do I mean to suggest that research that takes Europe as its reference point is somehow complicit in a larger Orientalist project, a position expressed by Said, Mitchell, and Bromley among others.^[26] The engagement between Middle East scholarship and European ideas has been far more reflective and self-critical than such an interpretation allows. Rather, my purpose is to underscore how larger trends in the organization of the social sciences have shaped research on war and the state in the Middle East and thus helped to produce the theoretical gap to which this volume is a response. Is there agency lurking somewhere in this sketchy account of institutional developments in the social sciences, a causal mechanism that would make clear how shifts at one level affect outcomes at another? There is, but agency is found largely in the diffuse and often opaque incentives and sanctions that guide individual choices about how to position one’s work: which assumptions one accepts as automatically plausible, which frameworks to adopt, which audiences to engage, and which arguments to challenge.

Where then, does this volume fit? War, Institutions, and Social Change establishes a starting point for shifting research on war and the state in what we hope will be seen as more productive directions for scholars and students of the developing world. We also hope to establish more clearly where the points of divergence and convergence lie in the comparative study of war, the state, and society and thus strengthen the foundations of cross-regional research in which European experiences are understood as no more and no less idiosyncratic and historically bounded than those of the Middle East. This is not in any sense a rejection of existing frameworks. Our starting point is not the incommensurability of theories that derive from the experience of different regions. Not only would this outlook simply promote multiple parochialisms, but it would obscure the extent to which our concerns overlap with the agenda of those who work on similar processes in different times and places. Like our colleagues who study Europe, we are interested in understanding the origins of distinctive institutional configurations, how state capacities, including extractive capacities, are formed and transformed by war, and how war preparation and war making affect patterns of state-society relations and techniques of governance.

Thus, the contributors to this volume explicitly view their work as theoretically engaged, not regionally constrained. Our aim is to work toward research agendas that more adequately take into account how differences in the social, institutional, political, and economic circumstances of war making and war preparation in the late-developing periphery change the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of research we design. At the end of the day our cases are different not because they are non-Western but because the conditions in which the dynamics of war making and war preparation have unfolded in the twentieth-century Middle East differ in crucial ways from those of pre-twentieth-century Europe. Moreover, our focus on explaining points of divergence led contributors to adopt an inductive rather than a deductive approach to their chapters. It encouraged caution in asserting the generalizability of claims that emerge from the detailed exploration of the dynamics that link war making, state making, and social change in specific historic instances. The contributions thus exhibit a richness of historical and ethnographic detail—in many cases presenting new archival or interview material—in their effort to establish precise causal mechanisms in specific cases ranging from the relationship between food security and tribal participation in the Arab revolt, to the effect of war on the organization of Israeli labor markets after 1967, to the impact of colonial rule on wartime patterns of popular mobilization in Syria and Lebanon, to the economic and institutional factors that make possible a reliance on repressive forms of war preparation as a strategy of rule in contemporary Syria and Iraq.

Second, the identity of our cases as late-developing peripheral states led us to broaden and treat more flexibly the disciplinary boundaries of research on war and the state. Contributors are drawn largely from the disciplines of political science and history but include the occasional sociologist and anthropologist, as well. Thus, while individual chapters often reflect the theoretical concerns of particular disciplines, they are not constrained by such concerns. More generally, my hope is that the volume reflects the sensibility that Geoff Eley described as “a mobile or eclectic interdisciplinarity, in which discussion of ‘the state’ is . . . removed from its most familiar political science location . . . [, and reflects a] mobility of context, in which discussion moves freely between a variety of conventional ‘levels’ of analysis, including not just the usual primary context of the territorial and institutionally bounded nation-state, but also the international state system, and the micropolitical contexts of social relations, locality, and the everyday.”^[27]

Points of Divergence and Convergence

The basis for my claim that European experiences should not be seen as offering an automatic starting point rests on a sense of how sharply the context of war making and war preparation in the twentieth-century Middle East diverges from that of early modern Europe. Moreover, what is most distinctively different about our context holds not just for the Middle East but for other late-developing regions. Although the following discussion does not begin to exhaust the relevant issues, it identifies some key points of divergence that are taken up by the contributors to this volume. These include war making as an indirect and mediated phenomenon; the transnationalization of war preparation and war making; war and the political economy of resource and social mobilization; and the role of war as a source of domestic social and institutional transformation.

First and most obvious, war has interacted with processes of state and social formation and transformation in ways that differ fundamentally from European experiences.^[28] Above all, it is not always the state that makes war. In the Middle East as in other developing regions, war making has been indirect, mediated, and deeply transnationalized. In some respects states in the Middle East can be seen as products of World War I and the postwar collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In some instances (the cases of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the unified republic of Yemen) war making and state formation are linked more directly. Yet the external imposition of state boundaries and institutions of state management through which the vast majority of Middle East states were created is far removed from the dynamics that link war making and state formation in early modern Europe.^[29] It was not until 1948 that states in the Middle East engaged one another directly in war as sovereign political units.^[30] Political decolonization was not complete until the early 1960s in North Africa and until the beginning of the 1970s in the Gulf.

For much of the last century, therefore, across large parts of the Middle East, war making was an enterprise that had immediate, often deadly effects and consequences for local populations but was nonetheless indirect with respect to local states, driven by the aims and interests of external colonial powers rather than local actors. World Wars I and II brought tremendous institutional, political, and social changes to the region, but these conflicts functioned as intervening or mediating variables, creating new possibilities both for colonial intervention and for bargaining on the part of local political actors. Chapters 2 through 5 in this volume explore the dynamics of war making under conditions of colonial intervention or control. Tariq Tell places the Arab Revolt of 1916 in the dual context of Britain’s efforts to undermine Ottoman authority in the Arab provinces, on the one hand, and a highly variable local agrarian economy, on the other. The decisions by individual tribes to participate in the revolt were driven not by a commitment to protonationalism, but by the opportunity war provided to trade participation for British guns and grain. As Ottoman troops retreated north, British resources helped to reconfigure domestic political coalitions in the territory that would later become Transjordan. War making altered the dynamics of local struggles over food security as grain-rich tribes of the north faced new challenges from the more grain-dependent tribes of the arid south, who had allied themselves with the imported political leadership of the al-Hussein, themselves sponsored by the British.

Elizabeth Thompson argues that World War II fundamentally transformed patterns of bargaining between French colonial authorities and local actors in Syria and Lebanon. Prior to the war, a wide range of Syrian and Lebanese social groups mobilized to secure services and benefits from the French mandate even as nationalist elites struggled to achieve independence. French authorities responded to social demands with a paternalistic form of welfarism that nonetheless redefined relations between local societies and the colonial state. Under wartime conditions, however, French authority weakened, local demands expanded, and a more articulated colonial welfare state was put in place, legitimated not on the basis of colonial noblesse oblige but on the rights of citizens to welfare. Yet these processes of state expansion and mass mobilization linked to war also reshaped local political conflicts concerning the identity of the state. They pushed domestic debates over public policy and the role of the state to center stage and brought new prominence to political forces in competition with the largely conservative and dominant nationalist elites, thus inaugurating postwar (and postcolonial) struggles over the organization of the Syrian and Lebanese states. In these cases, therefore, war interacted with colonialism, nationalism, and popular mobilization to produce institutional and social outcomes that figured prominently in postwar and postcolonial political struggles in Syria and Lebanon.

Robert Vitalis and I are similarly concerned with the institutional and social effects of World War II but, in chapter 4, focus on the role of Allied regulatory interventions in Syria and Egypt in shaping durable patterns of state-market relations, and we take a view different from that of Thompson regarding the political economy of the colonial state. While all three of us agree on the importance of the war as a critical juncture for postwar political and developmental trajectories, for Vitalis and I the most important attribute of the British colonial state in Egypt or the French mandatory regime in Syria was the narrow extent to which these states had created the institutional capacities to regulate local economies. Where Thompson perceives a more engaged and interventionist colonial welfare state, Vitalis and I find states whose interventionist capacities were sharply limited. In our account, it was the imperative of responding to war-induced shortages—the result of a near total shipping embargo—that created a new demand for domestic regulatory capacity, a demand that originated not with local actors, but among Western forces operating in the Middle East. To ensure an adequate supply of food and to cope with the effects of wartime inflation, Allied bureaucrats bargained with local politicians to construct a distinctive mix of state regulatory capacities. Acting through a regional organization called the Middle East Supply Centre, these bureaucrats imported into the region new state interventionist norms and administrative practices that then became embedded within dozens of new regulatory institutions—from trade oversight commissions to census bureaus to local supply boards. Allied interventions also helped shift the Syrian and Egyptian economies toward import substitution industrialization, creating the context for postcolonial conflicts over the organization of the political economy in Syria and Egypt—as well as in Lebanon.^[31]

In these cases, war making intersected with processes of state institutional change and social transformation but did so more as an intervening variable than as a direct cause of social, political, or institutional change. World Wars I and II produced new patterns of public-demand-making, popular mobilization, and state intervention. They reshaped domestic political arenas and state institutions. Yet throughout the Middle East their effects were mediated by the politics of colonial domination and local resistance, with significant implications for the specific kinds of state capacities and state-society relations war making helped to create. Indirect participation in World War II promoted the deepening of state capacity to regulate trade and agricultural production and supply in Syria and Egypt, but did little to alter the capacity of the state to tax. Considering the centrality of the link between war and the formation of extractive capacities among the states of early modern Europe, this key difference underscores the need to treat skeptically the claim that findings based on European experience represent a set of automatically plausible hypotheses for the rest of the world.

In the post–World War II period—the focus of the six chapters that make up part two of this volume—war preparation and war making were no longer mediated through the experience of colonial rule. Yet even under conditions in which states make war directly—only one of the several forms of war making examined in this volume—war in the contemporary Middle East exhibits attributes and dynamics that suggest important points of divergence between the cases and theoretical assumptions that derive from the literature on early modern Europe.

Most important for the contributors to this volume is the extent to which war in the contemporary Middle East is a transnationalized phenomenon, a reality whose significance Roger Owen stresses in the book’s conclusion. In the most basic sense the term transnationalized simply emphasizes that war preparation and war making are always, as Eley suggests, multilevel phenomena that are not contained by the boundaries of a territorial state, the political resources of local power holders, or the productive capacity of a domestic economy. Certainly we can interpret the experiences of Middle East states in World Wars I and II in this light, and chapters in this volume do so. Yet the observation holds for the contemporary period as well, in distinctive but no less compelling ways.

For the postindependence states of the Middle East, war preparation and war making—activities typically associated with the aggressive assertion of territoriality—have, ironically, rendered the state highly porous. Moreover, among the states that have been the most engaged participants in Middle East wars—Egypt, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Iraq—the transnationalization of war has been an explicit and conscious strategy of state elites. Preparation for war is funded by foreign military assistance or rents of one form or another, war making is undertaken with imported weapons, global strategic networks and global norms of sovereignty and nonintervention are mobilized to secure local military advantage, and peace settlements are negotiated and guaranteed by external powers. Almost inevitably these circumstances require that we look beyond the demands that war places on domestic institutions, economy, and society to focus on the organization and practices of transnational forms of war making and war preparation, as well as how the transnational and the domestic interact.

The questions that result from broadening our focus in this way have a direct bearing on established agendas of research on war and the state. What remains in such cases of the linkages between war and the extractive capacity of the state, between war and bureaucratization, or between war and technological change? Douglass North, for example, joining scholars from Joseph Schumpter to Goran Therborn to Charles Tilly and his collaborators, argues that a war-driven “fiscal crisis of the state . . . forced rulers to make bargains with constituents . . . the consequence was the development of some form of representation on the part of constituents . . . in return for revenue.”^[32] Can we therefore account for the absence of representative governments in the Middle East (or assume the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes) by noting that war making has not been accompanied by increased demands for taxation in the Arab world as was typically the case in early modern Europe? How does war making shape patterns of state-society relations when it does little to alter the scope of state autonomy? What are the causal mechanisms through which systemic resources are translated into domestic capacity to mobilize populations or to wage war? In other words, when war making and war preparation become transnationalized, how should we theorize their impact on domestic level processes?

Chapter 5, by Volker Perthes, and chapter 9, by Isam al-Khafaji, take up these questions, among others, for the cases of Syria and Iraq, respectively. In both countries significant state revenues, virtually the entire state budget in the case of Iraq, are secured “externally” through some combination of strategic and oil rents, sources of income that do not require the extraction of resources from domestic populations. Some of the consequences are not hard to anticipate, including the vast expansion of military bureaucracies and huge levels of military expenditure relative to the size of the Syrian or Iraqi populations—and relative to any reasonable assessment of threats. In both cases, the structure of state revenue—the availability of rents—helps explain the capacity of the Iraqi and Syrian (and, one might add, Israeli and Egyptian) regimes to supply military institutions at a level that exceeds what the local economy could support on its own.

The more interesting consequences are found elsewhere. One is the emergence of domestic political economies organized around the regional and international pursuit of strategic rents, a process in which political commitments are mined for their value as productive assets. Contrary to Mann’s assertion that the emergence of a capacity to tax domestic populations is so important that the survival of a state often hangs in the balance, in the cases studied here elites have placed much more emphasis on developing a capacity to extract resources from the international system than from their own citizens.^[33] As Perthes and al-Khafaji show in considerable detail—findings that call into question Korany’s rather suspect distinction between the “warfare state” and the “welfare state” in the Middle East—this mode of resource mobilization is often little more than extortion, has become an end in its own right, and, in the Syrian case, perpetuates an extraordinarily high level of war preparation despite the clear reluctance of the regime over the past thirty years to engage in a full-scale war.^[34] This strategy binds the processes of state building, state institutional formation, and the organization of state capacities to the maintenance of a level of threat, or perception of threat, sufficient to permit regimes to extract rents from regional and international alliance networks.

The domestic side of this strategy, moreover, is to strengthen connections between a highly transnationalized political economy of strategic-rent seeking and the use of militarism as a means of domestic social control and social mobilization. Furthermore, such connections complicate in useful ways the notion of a straightforward correlation between the presence of economic rents and state autonomy. Militarism may appear to authoritarian regimes as a highly centralizing and tractable form of mass mobilization. Yet militarism has everywhere been legitimated through ideologies of mass participation, aggressive nationalism, citizenship, and membership in a collective dedicated to the pursuit of a common goal. Even in the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, recourse to these ideologies creates linkages between states and societies, deepening the accountability of regimes for their performance in war. Reem Saad’s ethnography of an Egyptian peasant’s memories of war, in chapter 8 of this volume, is a powerful and telling example of this phenomenon.

Although war thus operates as a highly transnationalized phenomenon, the experiences of Syria and Iraq (as well as other states in the region) reaffirm its well-established importance in strengthening the capacity of states to mobilize and repress populations and to articulate especially aggressive forms of nationalist ideology. Yet, as Perthes and al-Khafaji also show, these capacities become embedded in and reproduced through war preparation and war making as routine modes of governance and domination, rather than emerging as responses to the exceptional and temporary exigencies of war.^[35] Indeed, it is precisely the normalization of war—the routinization of urgent threats to the nation, the transformation of the extraordinary into the everyday—that reflects the extent to which militarism organizes processes of state formation and state-society relations in a number of Middle East states.

The transnationalization issue is posed most sharply, however, in a case that may be unique to the region—the Palestinian experience of deterritorialized war making as a strategy of state formation, the subject of Yezid Sayigh’s chapter 7. As Sayigh argues, “It was war that enabled the [Palestine Liberation Organization] to emerge as the non-territorial equivalent of a state (paradoxical as the notion may be), assert its brand of nationalist discourse and practice, and structure its relations with Palestinian society accordingly[;] . . . war assisted the PLO both to acquire such institutional autonomy as it did and to obtain the resources (whether material, especially financial, or symbolic) that allowed it to occupy a state-like position in relation to its ‘domestic’ constituents.”^[36] War making and war preparation (functioning here, too, as independent variables) permitted a group of Palestinian political entrepreneurs to construct the institutional forms of stateness despite their lack of control over territory. “Palestine” thus became visible to and a legitimate participant in an international arena organized as a system of states. It acquired the right to make claims on the attention and resources of that system well before the emergence of Palestine as a territorial entity.

Sayigh also shows how, nonetheless, the absence of a national territory complicated the construction of Palestinian stateness, creating an environment in which consolidating political institutions, centralizing authority, and securing compliance involved tremendously complex, multilayered bargaining among widely dispersed “substate” political factions, multiple state actors, and networks of transnational organizations. To take just one example, political organizations that competed with the PLO for leadership of the Palestinian national movement had autonomous recourse to the means of violence, autonomous sources of revenue, high capacity to exit from central institutions, and independent access to the “domestic constituencies” of diaspora Palestinians. To borrow Tilly’s phrase, within the Palestinian community both capital and the means of coercion were characterized by high accumulation but low concentration.^[37] Under these conditions the formation of statelike institutions was contingent on the PLO’s capacity to define and enforce the terms of legitimate inclusion within the Palestinian national movement, to impose a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence by Palestinians resident in existing Arab states, and to assert its control over revenue flows whether in the form of taxes extracted from Palestinian populations or in the form of foreign aid. The PLO accomplished this task (to the extent that it did) by consolidating its standing as the legitimate representative of an abstraction, Palestinian stateness—gradually capturing the single most powerful political and symbolic resource of the national movement and wielding it effectively in its relations with competing organizations, Arab states, and the international community.

Issues of stateness, territoriality, transnationalism, and the political economy of militarism play out in very different ways in the case of the 1975–90 Lebanese civil war. In this instance, as Elisabeth Picard illustrates in chapter 10, the collapse of Lebanon’s formal political institutions under the strain of intense sectarian violence led to the emergence of a distinctive political formation: the sectarian militia. Lebanon’s militias arose initially to protect sectarian communities in the absence of a viable central authority. Yet they rapidly became highly organized mechanisms of predation, taxing the populations they protected and engaging in a wide range of criminal and predatory activities. And they drew not only on local communities of coreligionists but on a range of transnational networks from Lebanese diasporas to state-level and NGO alliance networks that provided both material and financial support. Here too, as in the cases of Syria and Iraq, militias exploited the civil war as a means for extracting resources from diasporas and the international system.

As their activities expanded, militia leaderships appropriated the symbols and practices of stateness and territoriality in an attempt both to legitimate their control over the means of violence and to institutionalize their authority. Nonetheless, despite Lebanon’s protracted civil war the state never fully disappeared. It remained a presence in part because its ruins affected the topography of what was built on top of them, but also because of the continued utility of the state for a number of actors, both domestic and external. For the militias the state remained an object of predation, but it also continued to mark a boundary between legality and criminality that the militias could exploit for their own purposes. Thus, the authority of state institutions to sanction certain kinds of activities, to license and authorize, was a significant asset for militia leaders looking to legalize and make systematic what might otherwise appear to be merely the ad hoc pursuit of extortion, smuggling, and theft. Militia economies, moreover, operated within the remnants of a national market, leading, as Picard shows, to extraordinary forms of economic collusion and cooperation among warring militias, whose capacity to maximize the gains from predation forced them to acknowledge the state as an economic space even as they sought to subvert it.^[38] The carcass of the state became an ecosystem that helped feed and sustain militia operations internally, while for external actors it provided the only recognizable armature around which interventions and efforts at diplomatic triage could be assembled. Ultimately, Lebanon’s militias failed to realize their statist ambitions, and through external intervention Lebanon’s state institutions gradually began to assert their authority over local communities. However, the militias and the militia-economies they created between 1975 and 1990 provide an example of microlevel processes of state formation that probably bear closer resemblance to the experiences of early modern Europe than do any of the other cases discussed in this volume, and provide some important clues as to why so many of those experiences ended in failure.

War, Institutions, and Social Change

I’ve focused thus far on attributes of war preparation and war making in the Middle East that cut across what Eley called “conventional ‘levels’ of analysis,” emphasizing how war as a mediated and transnationalized phenomenon directs our attention to processes that diverge from the local dynamics that figure most prominently in research on war and the state in early modern Europe. However, for virtually all of the contributors to this volume, the most significant effects of war are experienced at the level of local societies and domestic institutions. Almost without exception, the dependent variables in these chapters are domestic-level outcomes of one form or another, from changes in patterns of social mobilization to the rise of new strategies of social control to shifts in modes of economic regulation and levels of state institutional capacity. Since these are also the concerns that have shaped research on war and the state in Europe, our interest in war as a source of domestic transformation would seem to offer especially rich opportunities for the cross-regional and transtemporal flow of ideas and plausible hypotheses. Yet here, too, common ground should not obscure some significant points of divergence, suggesting that cross-regional exchanges of hypotheses will perhaps be more useful in exploring variation than in confirming similarity.

Research findings drawn from European experiences have tended to highlight the centralizing and consolidating effects of war on states. Yet as Joel Migdal in chapter 6, Reem Saad, Elizabeth Picard, and Isam al-Khafaji make clear, war can also sharpen competing identities and affiliations, erode national cohesion, and weaken the position of states that ground their legitimacy in the aggressive pursuit of national security. As demonstrated by the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, even conflicts that end in military victory can reopen the political arena to debates that previously had been viewed as settled. Migdal’s chapter offers graphic evidence of how the 1967 war resurrected the question of national boundaries, of statism, and of Israeli identity, transforming and polarizing Israeli society in ways that have decisively influenced local, regional, and international politics ever since. Saad emphasizes the extent to which participation in war on the part of Egyptian peasants redefined their understandings of citizenship, membership in the nation, and relationship to the state, making the state both more immediate but also less imposing. Al-Khafaji stresses the corrosive effects of protracted conflict on Iraqi society, an outcome exacerbated by the Ba‘thist regime’s cynical manipulation of identity politics as one of the mechanisms it deploys to secure its own survival. Even where war making is less corrosive to the consolidation of states and societies, however, it opens up new arenas of conflict, bargaining, and accommodation, as Thompson’s essay illustrates for the cases of Lebanon and Syria in the 1940s.

Rather than assume, therefore, that war advances the consolidation of state institutions and enhances the capacity of states to organize and control societies, the chapters in this volume focus on the capacity of war to turn the structure and roles of the state into highly contested issues of public debate. War makes more transparent the practices by which leaders have sought to construct the state as a set of autonomous institutions and to insulate these institutions from public examination. It calls existing political institutions and practices into question and subjects them to new levels of scrutiny and criticism. In Israel’s democratic political system, post-1967 challenges to prewar conventions and practices promoted a sharp political transition from labor to Likud and led to deep and still unresolved conflicts over the core identity of the Israeli state. In the nondemocratic states of the Arab world, war has exposed the fragility of authoritarian regimes and, less frequently, forced a retraction of state power. In these ways, war can create political openings that provide societies under authoritarian rule with moments of exceptional transformational potential.

As we see in much of the research on war and the state in Europe, the transformational capacity of war arises in part from the reciprocal nature of political and social obligations that take shape in the process of preparing for and making war, leading—under certain specific conditions, if we take Downing’s argument seriously—to new commitments and new levels of accountability for those who rule. Societies are never simply the objects of state control; they possess a range of mechanisms through which they struggle to impose diverse and conflicting preferences on rulers. These claims and preferences are often reinforced by the tendency of leaders to justify war making in universalist language and categories. The advent of mass conscription, to take just one example, is often accompanied by appeals to the universal equality of citizens and the universally representative character of political institutions that citizens are required to defend. Employing this language however, as Saad shows in the case of Egypt, can give rise to serious conflicts as individuals seek to exercise rights or to reconcile such appeals with existing norms and practices, or as rulers retreat from such claims once external threats recede.

Alternatively, military mobilization can strengthen the political institutions and the authority of political leaders in late-developing contexts as surely as it did in the rise of absolutist states. Theda Skocpol argued that certain forms of radical regimes excel “at conducting humanly costly wars with a special fusion of popular zeal, meritocratic professionalism, and central coordination.”^[39] Following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars, and during the long Iran-Iraq War, Syria, Israel, Iraq, and Iran have all experienced exceptionally, perhaps uniquely, high levels of mobilization. Beyond the administrative and financial consequences of managing, supplying, and coordinating sustained mobilization at such levels, whole generations of Arabs, Iranians, and Israelis have been encouraged by state elites to recognize the state and the military as essentially indistinguishable terms. Given the extent of military rule in the Middle East, the lack of distinction between army and state is not surprising. In more subtle ways, however, the self-definition of citizens as members of society is shaped and continually reinforced by participation in the armed forces.

In addition to direct military mobilization, states devote considerable resources to the mobilization of whole societies to support military objectives and to support a notion of the military as a social institution, one whose role in society is defined in explicitly political terms. The military is often consigned a leading role in the process of nation building, as the guarantor of national values and as the agent of “modernization.” Military mobilization thus becomes a process of state-directed and society-wide political mobilization organized around the privileging of certain kinds of social and political identities over others. Moreover, the rise of mass armies has significantly widened the social groups that are vulnerable to the incorporating and ordering effects of this mobilization. While the composition of the officer corps in the Arab Middle East is often determined by particularistic, ideological or other nonmeritocratic criteria, the personnel requirements of mass militaries have compelled Arab leaders to recruit from outside of narrow politically reliable constituencies and, as al-Khafaji demonstrates, extend the material and professional benefits of military service to previously excluded social groups. This has the potential, however, to enhance the organizational cohesion of groups who oppose the state and to provide them an arena within the state from which to attack it. As noted by Nigel Young, “War crystalizes the nature of the state more than any other activity, though, despite Bourne’s dictum, it is not always healthy for it in the longer term.”^[40]

Thus, war making generates conflicts regarding not only the nature of citizenship and political authority but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, regarding the definition of society itself. Al-Khafaji and Saad underscore this dimension of war making in Iraq and Egypt, respectively, showing, in the Iraqi case, the tight links between war making and the coercive imposition of new definitions of Iraqi identity that were deployed by the regime as powerful tools of exclusion and repression against Kurds, Jews, and Shi‘ites. Beyond these cases, the expulsion of nonresident populations following the Gulf War from states where many of these “nonresidents” were born or had lived for decades—Palestinians and Yemenis in particular—indicates that state-centric notions of citizenship have become much more central to definitions of society than membership in some larger nation or transnational community, such as that of “the Arabs,” or the Islamic umma, the community of Muslims. The general issue raised by these examples is how war renders more or less flexible the definitions of society and perceptions of its political roles, and how it creates an opening to examine the processes through which both states and state-society relations are defined and transformed.

What Does War Explain?

These elements of convergence and divergence suggest how a research agenda on war as a source of state and social transformation might usefully incorporate the experience of late-developing states. Can we also use this summary, however, as a starting point for generalizable conclusions about the effects of war preparation and war making on state and social formation, either in the Middle East or more broadly? Do these phenomena help us explain variation in patterns of state and social formation, and in state-society relations, across a range of state forms? Can we use the findings generated by these chapters to develop systematic comparisons about the effects of war on state and social formation in the Middle East and about how Middle East states and societies experience war preparation and war making? I argue that the answer to these questions is a tentative yes, understanding that while the following chapters provide data that make it possible to advance this aim, it was not their explicit intent to do so.

Such an agenda would need to encompass three distinct comparative projects. One is the project around which this introduction has been organized: comparing the experiences of early modern Europe with those of the twentieth-century Middle East, starting with the variables identified as relevant in the literature on early modern Europe. In other words, this comparison would test Tilly’s assumption that hypotheses generated out of the European experience represent an automatically plausible set of starting points. The second is an intraregional comparison among contemporary Middle East states to explain the relationship between war preparation and war making, on the one hand, and variation in patterns of state institutional design, state-society relations, and the organization of the political economy within this one region, on the other. The third project is a comparison between experiences of war making and war preparation in the twentieth-century Middle East (meaning the period from World War I to the present) and contemporary experiences of war making and war preparation in other regions, including both the developing world and Europe.

Inevitably, the design of these comparisons will differ, and the material in these chapters lends itself more readily to the first and second than to the third. The following chart sets out points of comparison by highlighting some of the apparent differences in the causal links between war making, war preparation, and state formation in early modern Europe and the Middle East. It is intended not as a comprehensive list but as a starting point that identifies some of the core relationships we need to explore in order to understand how war preparation and war making have shaped states and societies in the Middle East, and the extent to which hypotheses drawn from experiences of early modern Europe can assist us in this task.

What does this list tell us, apart from reinforcing the self-evident differences in context and process that separate these two sets of cases? On one level, these stylized comparisons can be seen as confirmation of the causal processes highlighted in the literature on war and the state in early modern Europe. Where key independent variables are absent, and the trajectories of state and social formation differ from those in which they are present, we can have a higher degree of confidence in the positive claims that link particular forms of war preparation and war making to the distinctive patterns of early state formation characteristic of European cases. However, more interesting patterns also emerge from the variation captured in this chart and suggest a number of possibilities for organizing a productive research agenda on the relationships between war, the state, and social change in the contemporary Middle East—that is, for determining what war does and does not explain.

These possibilities include a range of questions that have already been the subject of limited research, including how shifts in the organization of the international system, notably the consolidation of sovereignty as the dominant norm in interstate relations, structures patterns of war making and influences the effects of war on Middle East states. In this regard, Lustick has noted how the defense of sovereignty as a norm by external powers lead to a disconnect between defeat in war and survival of a national state, or between victory in war and territorial expansion, both of which helped to sustain and reproduce the territorial divisions that followed the transition from Ottoman Empire to colonial state in the aftermath of World War I and prevent the emergence of a Middle Eastern great power.^[41]

With respect to domestic processes, however—our focus in this volume—the chart underscores at least two key findings that are critical for explaining the effects of war on state and social formation in the post–World War II Middle East. First, war preparation matters more than war making. In fact, the intensity of war preparation is only loosely correlated with levels of external threat and with the actual outbreak of war. Moreover, the intensity of war preparation—understood as a social process in the broadest sense and not merely as a matter of provisioning or of episodic mass mobilization—is not tightly correlated with a capacity to engage in war making. Indeed, as noted here and in the following chapters, for the first half of the twentieth century war making for Middle East states may be most usefully understood as a form of exogenous shock that punctuated existing territorial, political, or social arrangements and helped to structure how those arrangements were reshaped. However, even after national states come to exist as independent political units, war making and war preparation remain only loosely correlated, and it is the latter that carries more weight in accounting for patterns and variation in forms of social mobilization, the dynamics of state-society relations, state fiscal policies, and styles of governance, especially within the dominant-party or single-party regimes that figure prominently in this volume.

Second, and relatedly, modes of resource extraction explain patterns of war preparation. Though the data are incomplete, there seems to be a significant correlation between the sources of state revenue, on one hand, and patterns of war preparation, notably the extent to which militarism dominates systems of governance and social mobilization, on the other. This relationship establishes the organization of state revenues as an independent variable and patterns of war preparations as a dependent variable, thus reversing the direction of causality found in at least one set of European cases.^[42] Where state elites have access to “external” economic resources—resources such as oil revenues, military grants, or other forms of rent that are generated through means other than extraction from domestic populations—their capacity to institutionalize a militarized system of rule is enhanced, and this capacity increases as the contribution of external resources to state revenue goes up. Therefore, in an explanation of how the Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and to some extent Algerian regimes are able to sustain authoritarian strategies of governance that operate in part through the pervasive militarization of everyday life, the fiscal autonomy of state elites stands out as a critical factor. Indeed, the presence of such external resources, and the interest of Middle East states in securing them, can be seen as necessary conditions for the production of the highly militaristic and authoritarian systems of rule found in the dominant- or single-party regimes of the Middle East. Alternatively, it seems difficult to imagine that the constellation of features associated with radical and militaristic forms of authoritarianism could become (or remain) so deeply consolidated under conditions in which rulers depended on citizens for revenue.

In addition, variation in the level of eternal resources correlates positively with variation in the intensity of militarization and of the authoritarian character of the regime. Precise data are hard to come by, but in general Iraq is characterized by the highest levels of external resources as a percentage of state revenue, the highest levels of militarization—defined as number of armed forces personnel per capita—and the most intensely authoritarian system of rule among the major single-party regimes of the region.^[43] Syria occupies a middle ground with respect to all three of these variables. Egypt exhibits lower levels of external resources as a percentage of state revenue, lower militarization, and a less intense form of authoritarian rule.

In making these claims, and in looking for the specific causal mechanisms that support these correlations, a third key finding becomes clear: regime type matters. The phenomenon of external resources, high militarization, and authoritarian rule are characteristic principally of the secularist, single-party regimes of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. For the tribal monarchies, exceptionally high levels of external resources relative to the size of their populations have permitted them to avoid either the mobilization of, or the need to extract resources from, domestic populations. Instead, war preparation and war making are delegated to more powerful states on a fee-for-service basis.

These hypotheses provide one starting point for a comparative assessment of how war shapes processes of state and social formation and transformation in the Middle East—the intraregional dimension of our comparative framework. But what about the cross-regional dimension, comparing European and Middle Eastern experience? Here, the possibilities seem to lie in using regional variation in the relationship between war and state formation to identify a broader range of trajectories and make clear the causal mechanisms that underlie them. Tilly, for example, argues that in Europe between 990 and 1990, “state structure appeared chiefly as a by product of rulers’ efforts to acquire the means of war.” My argument reverses this causal relationship. It suggests that the structure of revenues, the export into the region by colonial powers of a more fully articulated model of the national state, and the presence of a consolidated international state system weakened the link between war making and state structure.

This difference appears most vividly with respect to the fiscal sociology of the state, notably the interactions among war preparation, state capacity, levels of taxation, patterns of social mobilization, and possibilities for the emergence of representative government. Here, the possibility for drawing on the experience of the Middle East to shed light on debates among historians of Europe is not as far-fetched as might be assumed. For example, the experience of Middle East states would seem to contradict Downing’s claim that the intense mobilization of domestic resources, both human and economic, causes the transition from constitutional to autocratic forms of rule. Instead, Middle East cases suggest that the ability of state elites to avoid the intense mobilization of domestic economic resources makes possible the militaristic and authoritarian mobilization of their populations and the consolidation of authoritarian systems of rule. Alternatively, this hypothesis would lead us to expect that as levels of direct taxation increase (largely as a result of economic reform programs), the intensity of militarization and of authoritarian rule would diminish. However, the evidence for this is far from conclusive. In several cases in the Middle East (Tunisia and Egypt in particular), efforts to increase the extractive capacity of the state as part of a larger program of economic liberalization have overlapped with an intensification of authoritarian practices. Thus, while the Middle East does not yet offer much support for the link between taxation and representation, it seems to confirm the negative side of that equation. Low levels of direct taxation have helped state elites in the Middle East avoid moves toward greater representation.

In addition, the experience of the Middle East adds a useful new dimension to debates concerning the relationship between war and the capacity of the state to tax. As Campbell has noted, “Despite their relevance for debates in political sociology about the determinants of state policy in general, we still do not know whether taxes vary with war because citizens grant political elites more leeway, because the structural dependence of the state on capital investment subsides, or because war fundamentally alters the decision-making calculus of political elites.”^[44] What the experience of the Middle East suggests, however, is that in addition to the factors mentioned by Campbell, the composition of state revenue also plays an important role in shaping the relationship between war, variation in state fiscal policies, and how particular kinds of state capacities are formed.^[45] In the cases discussed here, levels of state dependence on private capital are in general low, citizens possess few mechanisms for influencing fiscal policy, and levels of taxation have not varied as a result of war despite protracted episodes of high mobilization. In fact, war preparation often operates as a mechanism for the downward distribution of state revenue, as suggested in the chapters by Perthes and al-Khafaji.

Conclusion

Even this cursory attempt to use the essays in this book to draw systematic conclusions about the effects of war preparation on Middle Eastern states and societies should help to make clear the stakes involved in responding to the first gap I noted at the outset—the need to expand the knowledge base about war as a social and political process in the Middle East. War preparation and war making are so deeply implicated in processes of state and social formation and transformation in the Middle East that the absence of research on its effects represents a critical shortcoming—one that this volume can only begin to address. What about the second gap, however, the lack of fit between existing, Eurocentric theoretical frameworks and the experiences of the twentieth-century Middle East? What conclusions can we draw on this front, however tentative they might be? What this volume helps to show is that neither of the two positions expressed by Tilly in his introduction to The Formation of National States is correct. We can neither dismiss the experience of early modern Europe as holding out few clues to the connections between war, the state, and society in the modern Middle East, nor accept the experience of Europe as leading automatically to plausible hypotheses for explaining those connections. In this introduction I have stressed the costs associated with an acceptance of Tilly’s second proposition (Europe as the automatic source of plausible hypotheses) and used the chapters in this volume to illustrate a few of the key points of divergence between existing theories and the experiences of states and societies in the Middle East. At the same time, however, the kinds of outcomes for which we are trying to account bear more than a passing resemblance to those that interest our colleagues who work on early modern Europe, including the big questions of how war configures and reconfigures states and societies and changes the terms of their interaction. These shared concerns offer one basis for optimism about the benefits of a research agenda in which early and late developers would be accorded equal weight. Moreover, this agenda need not be based on a one-way flow of ideas. While research on war and the state in early modern Europe cannot be anything other than archival, scholars of the contemporary world are not so constrained. Recourse to a level of data not widely available in 1600 and to methods such as ethnography and participant observation can point scholars of Europe toward relevant causal relationships and processes that might otherwise remain elusive, holding out the real possibility for a two-way flow of ideas and of hypotheses to be tested. If the current volume helps move research on war and the state in this direction, it will have accomplished a great deal.

Notes

Several people offered useful comments on this chapter, including Robert Vitalis, Roger Owen, Joel Migdal, Peter Katzenstein, Charles Tilly, Gregory Gause, James Gelvin, and an anonymous reader for the University of California Press.