For the Islamic Republic, the politics of welfare and the problem of social order and security are inextricably intertwined. Media and scholarly accounts of Iranian society stress its youthful demographic structure and its frustrated middle classes. Yet Iran's baby boom ended in the 1990s and the country's average birth rate is now under replacement levels. Consequently, the predicaments of aging and generational security loom in Iran's future. Most of the pension funds allocated to care for this generation are held by large organizations that act as massive investment conglomerates, and have been highly active in acquiring state-owned enterprises auctioned off over the past decade's privatization program heralded by the supposedly populist President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As a result, Iran's formal labor force, like Brazil's union workers, or even closer to the West, California's nurses, is now heavily invested in stocks, bonds, and other assets. How did the Islamic Republic end up on the cutting edge of what Robin Blackburn has labeled "grey capitalism" - capitalism heavily reliant on the reinvestment of pension funds? Utilizing interviews from the Social Security Organization in Tehran and primary literature collected during fieldwork in the country from 2009-11, this paper traces the institutional origins and models of Iran's social security system, its fate during the early years of the Islamic Republic, and its role in the security and livelihoods of the country's middle classes today. In doing so, I show that the politics of the Green Movement, the 2009 uprisings against perceived fraudulent presidential elections, are deeply embedded in Iran's social security system and its contradictions.

Drawing on T.H. Marshall’s citizenship framework, the paper argues for a more expansive approach to “democracy” that would take into account social rights and economic citizenship. The strengths, weaknesses, and gender biases of past “social contracts” are briefly examined, along with their deterioration in the context of the neoliberal shift. Prospects for new social policy regimes in the three countries are examined and compared in light of societal demands, state capacity, and resources.

The political economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are often divided into three overarching types, including the oil monarchies, the non-oil monarchies, and the non-oil republics. But what explains variation in the welfare regimes within these categories, particularly among the non-oil economies which lack the rentier earnings needed to buy political compliance with comprehensive welfare benefits for citizens? Post-independence regimes in the non-oil economies adopted broadly similar systems, with limited social insurance schemes favoring government employees and especially members of the military and intelligence services. Yet the breadth and depth of coverage as well as the precise nature of social insurance schemes varies substantially within the non-oil economies and even within the more populist non-oil republics. A comparison of Tunisia and Lebanon is particularly interesting. The two countries are both upper middle income, non-oil economies with relatively small, educated populations yet they have vastly different welfare regimes. Among Arab countries - and, indeed, much of the Global South – Tunisia has a fairly developed welfare state with comparatively comprehensive social protections for citizens and a big public role in the welfare regime. Lebanon, on the other hand, has a residualist welfare regime that entails minimal state protection and public benefits and those are largely reserved for the poor (but, in practice, primarily those with political and social connections). Private providers predominate and the state has little regulatory capacity over the system. Varied levels of politicized "identity"-based cleavages in relatively homogenous Tunisia and fractionalized Lebanon partially explain these contrasting patterns of national welfare solidary. But these divisions reflect and complement a more explicitly political story about the nature of post-colonial state-building in the two countries. By tracing welfare regime construction in Tunisia and Lebanon and situating them in a larger set of regional country cases, the proposed paper promises to develop a greater understanding of redistribution within the MENA. This is an increasingly important empirical issue as scholars struggle to make sense of the political and economic foundations of the recent Arab uprisings and policymakers prioritize socioeconomic reform throughout the region. To address these questions, this paper relies on descriptive statistics on public and private social expenditures on health, education, and social protection as well as comparative historical analyses of the post-independence processes of building welfare institutions in the non-oil MENA economies, with a particular emphasis on Tunisia and Lebanon.

Drawing upon the methods of critical security studies, ethnographic discourse analysis, and institutionalist political sociology, I will proceed by exploring the social bases, meaning frames, and mobilization mechanisms for four distinct spheres of welfare politics in Egypt: military fraternalism, Brotherhood syndicalism, Salafi pietism, and “April 6” collectivism. Each of these forms recently has become “securitized” (resignified through security discourse and practice). And in each of these spheres, degrees of privatization, “religionization,” and universalization operate in varying and contradictory ways. Although Egypt has undergone economic “liberalization” and welfare retrenchment since the 1970s, welfare politics is very much alive there. The military provides welfare and social rights and privileges for its uniformed personnel, and sees itself as transforming farmers and working-class men into modern citizen-soldiers, endowing them with patriotic pride, social discipline and granting them access to housing and benefits; but the armed forces do not see themselves (as they do in Venezuela for example) as being interested in distributing welfare to all. The Muslim Brothers have a highly privatized, small-business and professional-syndicate-based notion of charity-centered welfare; it is not interested in stirring class conflict, promoting redistribution of wealth, or demanding universalization of social rights. Its campaign discourse is “religionized” of course, but also politically liberal and pluralistic of late. Salafi welfareism is distributive but not redistributive; that is, their welfare apparatuses distribute Gulf remittance income and petrodollar aid to the poor but with the explicit aim of producing a mix of economic dependency and moral compliance, rather than social independence or autonomy within a fabric of universal socio-economic rights. Meanwhile, the “April 6” brand of welfare politics, with the kind of agenda that drove the first wave of mass uprisings in nearly every Arab country in 2011, is based on critiquing both militarization and religionization that had limited and constrained welfare and social rights politics, rendering citizens dependent, morally policed, and socio-politically disempowered. This paper will draw upon local ethnography as well as transnational/international-level analysis of human security politics to map the overlap and contrast between these distinct spheres of welfare politics as they intersect with, derive from, and take up the structures of state institutions in Egypt, and sketch possible future trends for the transitional period.