Rulers cannot govern by themselves, but can foreign allies replace domestic support in times of conflict? Literature on power sharing has focused more on democratic contexts rather than non-democracies (Olson 1971; Van Gennip 2005; Girod 2015). However, whether during times of peace or conflict, authoritarian rulers must also strike a delicate balance between asserting total control and making sure those in power with them are satisfied, or else their house of cards comes crashing down. Throughout the tenure of autocratic regimes, we see that dictators will manage their ruling coalition through co-optation using economic benefits or they will choose to expropriate elites within their inner circle to consolidate power. Although authoritarian leaders will always need some level of domestic support for their regime maintenance, what explains their diminishing reliance on their elites, reduced concessions towards the ruling coalition, and increasing levels of expropriation? Considering elite expropriations by the dictator reveals their risk tolerance to this potential form of instability if the presence of foreign support reinforces their regime as a substitute for domestic support. This paper investigates patterns of state-society relations and micro-foundations of great power competition in post-conflict environments. My study evaluates the distribution of power between the dictator and the ruling coalition through the expropriation of elite assets and businesses. Focusing on the case of Syria, I examine whether Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war has led to a shift in domestic elite power sharing through the analysis of expropriation of elite assets and the consolidation of financial investments directly linked to the dictator without meaningful distribution among the ruling coalition. Using interviews, archival research, and process tracing, I analyze economic relations between the Assad regime and its domestic and foreign allies. I also examine the variation in reconstruction contract distribution by collecting data on the number, amount, sector, and identities of recipients. I find that foreign support acts as a proxy for the distribution of power within a dictatorship because it can replace domestic sources of power, thus reducing a dictator’s need to complete power sharing arrangements or fulfill favorable distributions of wealth with allies. This is shown through the increasing expropriation of elites after the beginning of Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian war in 2015. My findings reveal that foreign intervention enables this shift in the composition of the business elite and an increasing consolidation of assets within the hands of the executive.

The Arab Spring uprisings turned from ‘Spring of Hope’ to ‘Winter of Despair’. Egypt returned to authoritarian rule with the consolidation of Al Sisi's regime - despite the deepening economic crisis, currency devaluation and staggering inflation (reaching 40% in Aug 2023). How did these rapid economic and political changes in Egypt affect people living in poverty? This paper seeks to address this main research question by adopting a grounded approach to articulate people’s voices, explore their failed aspirations, and examine their changing relationship with the state. This paper argues that the heavy-handed nature of Sisi’s regime led to an even more authoritarian social contract whereby people are forced to forgo their socioeconomic and political rights in return for political stability. The paper questions the sustainability of such a social contract as it fails to address the growing ‘revolution of rising expectations’ – which inevitably leads to political instability on the long-run. The paper critically examines key features of Sisi’s ‘New Republic’ to explain how it controls social, political, and even digital spaces for public mobilisation. Therefore, despite the growing public frustration and deepening structural inequalities, people are unable to mobilise over socio-economic or political grievances – thus settling for this new social contract that trades off their socio-economic and civil rights for political stability. The paper draws on an empirical longitudinal study conducted in two deprived communities in Egypt: rural villages in Menia and Manshiet Nasser, an urban squatter area in Cairo between 2006 and 2016. The study tracks the same individuals (n=124) over a 10-year period and articulates their voices through a qualitative wellbeing questionnaire. The questionnaire aims to identify the changes in their wellbeing priorities, aspirations, and problems over time. It also directly articulates their views on the 2011 and 2013 uprisings and examines the perceived impact of these uprisings on the respondents’ economic and social wellbeing. The study reveals that – despite the growing dissatisfaction with Al Sisi’s regime – people are reluctant to call for or engage in different forms of popular contestation because they tend to blame the popular uprisings and their resulting political instability – rather than the regime - for their deepening economic suffering! Through its ‘New Republic’ rhetoric, the regime propagates a new authoritarian social contract. Why and how people settle for this social contract and for how much longer – are key questions this paper answers.

A large body of literature is concerned with how contemporary authoritarian regimes have been learning and transforming their autocratic tools with the rise of digital technologies (Tucker et al., 2017; Frantz et al., 2020; Feldstein, 2021; Schlumberger et al., 2023). Recent reviews of research on how political participation is limited and shaped by these digital authoritarian transformations presented contradictory findings. While some argued that societies likewise upgrade and learn, maneuvering and counteracting these new authoritarian tools (Hobbs and Roberts, 2018), others argued that it has further deepened the asymmetry between societies and dictators (Schlumberger et al., 2023) and has a “protest-reducing effect” (Weidmann and Rod, 2019). Therefore, an important question arises: How can we better understand the different levels and styles (dynamics) of societal reactions under these recent authoritarian transformations? This study posits that a micro-level analysis is needed to make sense of the contradictory findings of the macro-level analysis of political participation. Building on the existing micro-level literature on political participation and social movements, I specifically adopt James Jasper’s approach of “Strategic Agency” (2012) in investigating the varying political participation patterns in the Middle East autocracies (case selection is still under progress, and will be ready before the submission of the paper). The article will employ both qualitative and quantitative analyses drawing on a combination of political participation data and in-depth narrative interviews. Shifting the focus to the agency of civil society, the article not only aims to link the micro to the macro in understanding patterns of participation, but also to (1) move away from the dichotomy of “participate or not to participate” and rather investigate the innovative "modes" of political participation (Hay, 2007; Dalton, 2008) and (2) provide a better insight into how this strategic choice of individuals takes place under a highly digitized autocracy, in alternative, newly reinvented, and sometimes, hybrid (online-offline) civic spaces.

Populist authoritarians face a paradox. Recent scholarship emphasizes populists’ use of nostalgic rhetoric in their attempts to win votes. But how can populist incumbents justify their repressive rule when the golden age they promised remains unrealized? The heavy focus on rhetoric-based approaches in studies of populist brands of authoritarianism overlooks a strategy particularly well-suited for positioning these elites as rightful and necessary leaders. In this paper, we (audio)visualize the authoritarian toolkit to demonstrate how historically-themed, regime-produced videos offer an attractive and efficient legitimation tool. We unpack the cognitive and affective storytelling characteristics of audiovisual content that can communicate information-dense, emotionally evocative messages showcasing the appropriateness and necessity of the incumbent’s rule, even – indeed, especially – in times of crisis. Applying qualitative and quantitative content analysis to an original dataset of over 5000 videos released by government institutions under Turkey’s ruling AKP, we argue regimes use audiovisual curation of historical events and figures to disseminate Great Strength Great Threat narratives as a meaning-making legitimation strategy. These seemingly contradictory narratives portray selective historical legacies of glory, peril, and sacrifice among a designated Ingroup and position the incumbent as 1) rightful inheritor of those legacies, 2) strong performer, and 3) vital guarantor against internal and external threats. Our mixed methods, multimodal approach fills a gap in studies of the authoritarian toolkit while adding to political scientists’ toolkits for analyzing regime strategies more broadly.

In August 2021 a statue of Aphrodite was removed from a Burberry shop by the Kuwaiti government after it received multiple citizens’ complaints about the statue offending the cultural and religious insensitivities of Kuwait. And in 2011 in Oman, after Al Ain residents complained to a newspaper that nothing was being done to stop a goat grazier using the cemetery, an act they felt violated the sanctity of the cemetery, the municipality forced said grazier to relocate. These two examples prompt an important question: why, in response to citizen complaints, did the Kuwaiti and Omani governments respond? While this question may seem simple, current Middle Eastern scholarship and, indeed, wider political science, struggles to provide an adequate answer because of its inattention to the place of popular socio-cultural contestation in state-society relations. Where Gulf scholarship and wider political science does investigate culture, it does so in a top-down manner, examining how regimes use culture when presenting or portraying themselves to their populations. Using Kuwait and Oman as case studies, this paper argues that Gulf citizens regularly voice socio-cultural concerns and call on their governments to act, and that, conversely, governments are often aware of these concerns and will regularly respond to them. This paper does so by applying — for the first time to the Gulf monarchies — the theory of authoritarian responsiveness, which argues that authoritarian regimes often respond to their citizens concerns as a method of ensuring popular quiescence and regime longevity. The paper utilises data from fieldwork research carried out between January and June 2023 involving interviews with bureaucrats, activists, NGO members, academics, and ordinary citizens supplemented by other qualitative research sources, including newspaper archival sources. This paper sheds a light on the underexplored and under-theorised place of socio-cultural concerns in Gulf states by centring bottom-up socio-cultural contestation, and in so doing expands our understanding of the integral place of the socio-cultural in Gulf state-society relations. Moreover, as authoritarian responsiveness has yet to be applied to the socio-cultural sphere, this paper expands our understanding of the theory, and potentially the dynamics of authoritarian states more generally.

In April 2023, an attempted coup in Sudan devolved into a full-fledged civil war between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces. This followed two coups in the previous four years. Countries that have a coup d’état tend to be at greater risk for more coups, a phenomenon known as the coup trap. This is not the first time Sudan has been in the coup trap: between its independence in 1956 and 1989 it suffered five coups and ten coup attempts. Syria (1949-1970) and Iraq (1936-1941, 1958-1973) went through similar periods before, as in Sudan, consolidated authoritarian governments emerged. What caused these intensive periods of coup after coup, and what allowed one regime to end the cycle and consolidate power? I argue most post-coup governments are uniquely vulnerable to coups because they deliver unsustainable coalitions to power, set up ineffective ruling bodies through the military, politically polarize the officer corps, and normalize armed protest for officers with grievances. The coup trap ends when chance or the evolution of tactics ends these conditions, for example when coups from the top or failed coups allow the ruling coalition to narrow and increasing violence deters coups from below. To test these arguments, I use materials from the U.S. and U.K. archives, memoirs of political and military actors, and the extensive body of secondary literature on this period to collect data on the 51 failed and successful coup attempts in these three countries. For each attempt, I record information about the coalitions supporting it, motivations, mobilization of military units, foreign support, civilian involvement, the composition of the resulting government, and the fates of the losers. Using this information, I take a mixed-methods approach to test my hypotheses. I use causal process observations to theorize ways these characteristics heighten or diminish coup risk, then I fit survival models to test the effects of individual coup characteristics on the fates of governments. This paper represents an improvement in how we understand coup-making in general and in the Middle East. It moves the focus from “coup-proofing” as a policy choice to the circumstances that make coup-proofing possible. It also takes regional-level explanations for the decline in coups, such as the decline of Arab nationalism after the 1967 war or the increase in governments’ rent income, and tests if they can explain the changes in behavior of military and political forces in these three countries.