1. See Lissak, Israeli Society and Its Defense Establishment: The Social and Political Impact of a Protracted Violent Conflict; and Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism.

2. Included among this handful are Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel; Lustick, “The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political ‘Backwardness’ in Historical Perspective,” pp. 653–83; Gongora, “War Making and State Power in the Contemporary Middle East,” pp. 19–50. In making this claim I distinguish between international relations literature that treats the state as a unit of analysis to explore system-level dynamics, where war or the absence of war is often the dependent variable, and work that is concerned with the domestic effects of war as an independent or intervening variable.

3. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” pp. 559–92.

4. The predominance of European cases in the study of war and the state has also been noted by Asian specialists. See Richard Stubbs, “War and Economic Development: Export-Oriented Industrialization in East and Southeast Asia,” pp. 337–55.

5. See Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe; as well as Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 900–1990; Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” pp. 169–91; Parker, Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800; Mann, States, War, and Capitalism; Gillis, The Militarization of the Western World; Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe; Burke, The Clash of Civilizations: War-Making and State Formation in Europe; Porter, War and the Rise of the State; Eley, “War and the Twentieth-Century State,” 155–74; and Rosenthal, “The Political Economy of Absolutism Reconsidered,” pp. 64–108. The dominance of European cases in research on war and the state reflects the condition of comparative politics more generally, a fact recently affirmed by Hull, “Comparative Political Science: An Inventory and Assessment since the 1980s,” pp. 117–24. Hull found that the “dominant focus for comparativists . . . continues to be Western Europe and North America. Africa and the Middle East have received the least coverage.”

6. Downing, The Military Revolution, p. 9.

7. This for example was the starting point of articles by Gongora, “War Making and State Power,” and by Herbst, “War and the State in Africa,” pp. 117–39.

8. Herbst opens his article with the following observation: “Most analyses assume that in Africa, as elsewhere, states will eventually become strong. But this may not be true in Africa, where states are developing in a fundamentally new environment. Lessons drawn from the case of Europe show that war is an important cause of state formation that is missing in Africa today” (“War and the State in Africa,” pp. 117–39).

9. It should be emphasized that this volume makes no claims to great originality in observing that categories and concepts that originated in the historical experience of Europe do not always travel well.

10. Simon Bromley also notes the transformation of the Middle East into “non-Europe” as a result of the kinds of frameworks that are used to study it. See Rethinking Middle East Politics, pp. 6–16.

11. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States, p. 82. Despite this claim, however, Tilly was quite inconsistent in his view of the utility of European experiences as a basis for research, as my subsequent references to this chapter indicate.

12. For some examples of this introspection, see Bill, “The Study of Middle East Politics, 1946–1996: A Stocktaking,” pp. 501–12; and Tessler, Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics.

13. The initial attempt by the Committee on Comparative Politics to explore European experiences of state formation in terms of political development theory took place through a planning committee organized under the direction of Gabriel Almond.

14. Verba, “Some Dilemmas in Comparative Research,” pp. 111–27.

15. In case this view seems skewed, it is worth recalling that Seymour Martin Lipset drew readily on case material from the Middle East, notably Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, in writing what is arguably one of the most influential studies ever written on the relationship between economic development and democracy, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. By comparison, several scholars of the contemporary Middle East point out its more recent exclusion from major studies of both democratization and economic reform. See Hudson, “After the Gulf War: Prospects for Democratization in the Arab World,” pp. 407–26. This shift on the part of the Middle East from inclusion to exclusion is an interesting and not trivial indicator of how the relationship among subfields has changed in American social science over the past forty years.

16. Lucian W. Pye, foreword to The Formation of National States in Western Europe, p. x.

17. Tilly, The Formation of National States, p. 3.

18. Among the sharpest, and intellectually most idiosyncratic, of the critiques by scholars who had participated in the work of the committee was that of Leonard Binder. See Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies, pp. 24–84.

19. Among those who made much more sophisticated theoretical use of history in accounting for trajectories of state and social change were Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India; Ake, “Modernization and Political Instability: A Theoretical Exploration,” pp. 576–91; and, perhaps most influential of all in the challenge it posed to Lipset, O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics.

20. Following the Committee on Comparative Politics, the SSRC established a Committee on the Comparative Study of Public Policy, but not much came of its work. My thanks to Kent Worcester for his keen grasp of SSRC committee history. One subsequent cohort of political development theorists, in a critical reaction against modernization and systems theory, now turned its attention to relations between state and society. A second cohort, reacting against the culturalist bias of much modernization theory, moved toward microlevel rational choice approaches—finding universality not in the organic functioning of political systems or in the sequencing and phases of development but in the self-interested motivations underlying human behavior. For the former, see Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. For the latter, see Bates, “Macropolitical Economy in the Field of Development,” pp. 31–54.

21. See Ira Katznelson, “The State to the Rescue? Political Science and History Reconnect,” pp. 719–37.

22. Among those who made productive use of state theory, Tilly in particular, in the study of the Middle East was Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980.

23. The Social Science Research Council–American Council of Learned Societies Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East tried to develop an alternative research program for the study of the state in the Middle East around the theme of weak states and strong societies. But following a contentious conference in the mid-1980s, in which it became clear that no consensus approach to the study of the state could be designed, the project was abandoned.

24. Tilly, “Reflections,” pp. 13–14.

25. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 14.

26. Bromley, Rethinking Middle East Politics; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; and Said, Orientalism.

27. Eley, “War and the Twentieth-Century State,” p. 156.

28. Note that this is quite different from Herbst’s claim, in “War and the State,” pp. 117–39, that war was not a significant factor in state formation in Africa. In fact, World War II was no less important in shaping state capacities in parts of Africa than it was in the Middle East.

29. On this point see Dirk Vanderwalle, Libya since Independence: Oil and State Building.

30. There were conflicts among what might be called protostates prior to this, however, including in the Hijaz. See Kostiner, The Making of Saudi Arabia, 1916–1936: From Chieftancy to Monarchical State.

31. Gates, The Merchant Republic of Lebanon: Rise of an Open Economy.

32. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, p. 113; Goran Therborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (May-June): 3–41.

33. This finding has very important implications for a wide range of relationships, including processes of state consolidation, the organization of state structures, and the dynamics of state society relations. On the link between taxation and state survival see Mann, “State and Society, 1130–1815: An Analysis of English State Finances,” pp. 73–123.

34. See Korany, “The Old/New Middle East,” pp. 135–50.

35. See Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria.

36. See Sayigh, chapter 7 of this volume.

37. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States.

38. This phenomenon is far from unique to Lebanon. David Keen considers these forms of economic exploitation to be a principle function of civil wars in general. However, Keen and Picard occupy very different positions with respect to the role of the state in civil war. In my view, Picard exhibits a more nuanced understanding of the tension between the militias’ dependence on and subversion of the state, and the continuing centrality of the state as a boundary between legality and criminality. Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars.

39. Theda Skocpol, “Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization.”

40. Nigel Young, “War Resistance, State and Society,” in War, State and Society, pp. 95–116.

41. See Lustick, “The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers.”

42. In Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 30, Tilly identifies three main patterns in the relationship between coercion and capital, and associates each with a particular trajectory of state formation and of state-society relations: coercion intensive (forced extraction of resources), capital intensive (negotiated extraction of resources), and capitalized coercion (combining force and bargaining in the extraction of resources). All three patterns, however, rest on the need for war makers to extract resources from populations residing within the territories they control.

43. Data on the number of armed forces personnel per capita can be found in Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, though the data on Iraq are spotty at best. Data on the extent to which governments rely on external resources is trickier, since neither Iraq nor Syria releases information on revenues from the sale of oil, and data on other forms of external rent are also closely held. For partial information see Ishac Diwan and Nick Papandreou, “The Peace Process and Economic Reforms,” pp. 227–55.

44. Campbell, “The State and Fiscal Sociology,” p. 166.

45. This claim about the relationship between the composition of state revenue and state capacities is also reflected quite centrally in Kiren Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East.