Rethinking ‘State’ and ‘Regime’ in the Middle East and North Africa: Conceptual, Historical, and Methodological Clarifications
This special issue addresses the persistent conceptual confusion around ‘state’ and ‘regime’ in academic literature on the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Much of the existing scholarship on the region has deployed these terms short of a conceptual distinction effort. Notions such as the ‘deep state’ (al-dawla al-ʿamīqa) are commonly used inside and outside academia to refer to some configuration of institutional and power relations that blur the lines between state and regime. Similarly, usages of ‘al-makhzan’ in Morocco, ‘le pouvoir’ in Algeria, or ‘al-sulṭa’ in Lebanon, seem to reproduce political discourses that may obscure more than they reveal. It remains unclear whether these terms describe varieties of the same political reality or entirely distinct phenomena.
Rather than presupposing that the conflation of regime and state in the literature on the MENA is necessarily a conceptual flaw, this special issue interrogates it to unpack its multiples dimensions. If the state/regime distinction is one with a difference, as the two distinct terms suggest, where does the difference lie and why have these concepts been conflated in the scholarship on the MENA? Conversely, if it is a distinction without a difference, how could we, as scholars, refine our conceptual usages to ensure historical accuracy and political relevance? Alternatively, it may be that the conflation of the two terms is productive. In that sense, the issue is not that scholars are ‘unable’ to see the difference, but that empirically there are interpenetrations between states and regimes.
Centring the blurred boundaries of state and regime in scholarship on the MENA, this special issue aims to explore their origins, the mechanisms of their reproduction, and the intellectual and political ramifications of this conflation. The goal is to advance new critical ways to understand it and methodological innovations to tackle it. In other words, this special issue weaves together an intellectual history of power and a political history of knowledge in the MENA by questioning the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘regime.’ Interrogating the confusion between these two concepts is not a matter of superficial intellectualism; it has significant analytical and political implications. Analytically, this special issue seeks to clarify what we are talking about, how it is talked about, where agency lies, and what hegemonic namings of and references to ‘power’ show and obscure. Studies on legitimacy, in particular, have suffered from this conceptual overlap, with symbols of the nation, figures of the regime, and state institutions often being examined through an indistinguishable vocabulary of regime/state/national legitimation. Politically, this special issue acknowledges the performative power of language and unpacks practices of knowledge production that perpetuate established patterns of domination.
This project was born from the experience of the two special issue editors in their teaching of Middle Eastern and North African politics and their observation of the difficulties their students faced in deploying the concepts of state and regime. In addition to fostering an interdisciplinary conceptual conversation, this special issue aims to equip the field of Middle Eastern Studies with useful methodological and pedagogical tools.
We invite scholars from the humanities and social sciences to grapple with the distinction, or lack thereof, between state and regime in the MENA, exploring its origins and impacts in academia and beyond. The call is open to scholars in and across the fields of History, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, International Relations, and Cultural Studies.
Topics of interest include:
- The relevance, or lack thereof, of the state/regime distinction;
- The genealogy of the state/regime conflation in the MENA;
- The role of language in shaping the state/regime relationship;
- Alternative methodologies for studying states and regimes;
- Comparative analyses of state and regime sociologies across MENA contexts;
- Historiography of states and regimes in the MENA;
- Intellectual and conceptual history of states and regimes in the MENA;
- Political history of knowledge production about states and regimes in the MENA, academic scholarship, policy-making circles, and the media;
- The impact of neoliberalism and state withdrawal on the state/regime distinction;
- The political geography of concept formation as it relates to ‘state’ and ‘regime,’ with a consideration of its Western/Eurocentric ramifications;
- Imperialism and knowledge production on states and regimes in the MENA;
- The discriminate use of ‘state’ or ‘regime’ vis-à-vis the Global North and the Global South;
- Political economy of knowledge production as it relates to states and regimes;
- Critiques of approaches to legitimacy and its impacts on the study of states and regimes in the MENA;
- Pedagogical experiences and suggestions in tackling the concepts of state and regime.
Submission Instructions:
Authors should submit a 300-word abstract and a CV by email to the journal’s editor, Dr. Matteo Capasso [[email protected]] and special issue guest editors, Drs. Kaoutar Ghilani and Karim El Taki [[email protected]].
We aim for a special issue of 7-9 original articles, preceded by an introduction by the editors. Selected authors will be expected to submit an original article of 8,000-9,000 words.