Colonial legacies have been implicated in a wide range of economic and political outcomes. Canonical literature in development economics and comparative historical analysis suggests that colonial legacies impact long-term levels of development, democracy and state capacity (Acemoglu et al. 2001, Banerjee & Iyer 2005, Fearon and Laitin 2003). While these works provide valuable insights into how history impacts the development of the modern state, less is known about how colonial legacies contribute to the onset of redistributive conflict post-independence. This paper examines the impact of land redistribution on authoritarian regime stability in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I argue that the impact of redistributive land reform on regime stability depended upon the nature of landed elite power inherited from the colonial period. European colonial administrations devoted significant resources to reconfiguring property rights and land tenure policies in MENA, the result of which was the creation of two types of landed elites: local and absentee. Absentee landed elites monopolized national politics as members of legislatures and ministries. Post-independence, regimes enacting land redistribution that targeted an absentee landed elite ran the risk of creating a political vacuum that perpetuated instability. Using large-N quantitative models and qualitative case studies, this paper tests the hypothesis that regimes that expropriated absentee landed elites were more likely to suffer political conflict and regime failure. I test my theory on an original dataset covering 18 Middle Eastern regimes (1950 to 2006) and present cross-sectional time series models linking colonial landed elite type, land redistribution and regime durability. The results suggest that land redistribution that targets absentee landed elites reduces the likelihood of regime survival. I examine the impact of such redistributive policies on the integrity of regime ruling coalitions by comparing stable Jordan with unstable Iraq post-land reform, showing that the Jordanian regime relied upon a rising, committed coalition of new, local landed elites whereas Iraq expropriated the absentee landed class with no viable coalition parters in play, resulting in a cascade of short-lived regimes. This paper contributes to debates on the role of colonial institutions and redistribution in autocratic contexts. My work on structural economic conditions in MENA negotiates the comparative politics and regional studies literature by proposing a non-exclusive relationship between colonial institutions and regime durability.

An emerging academic consensus interprets the maelstrom of turbulence sweeping today’s Middle East as symptomatic of nothing less than a region-wide crisis. The term ‘crisis’ is often used in a largely descriptive sense, to refer to whatever political impasse, humanitarian calamity, or military confrontation happens to be the troubling issue of the day. In this paper, I focus specifically on arguments about state crisis: that what we are witnessing is not the mere facts of warfare, territorial contestation, or conflict, but a challenge to the very institutions and apparatus of the modern state in the Middle East so fundamental that a epoch-defining shift in the structure and practice of government is now a genuine possibility. In this paper, I therefore pose two key questions: (i) how should we conceptualize crisis?; and (ii) how well does this concept help us explain the specific empirical case of the Syrian crisis? In the first part of the paper, I outline three approaches to understanding crisis in the Middle East (commonly encountered in the Sykes-Picot narrative, the comparative politics literature on authoritarianism, and neo-Marxist political economy of the Middle East) that ultimately prove analytically unproductive. In the second section, I therefore propose an alternative, more adequate account of crisis in terms of uneven development, a concept developed by critical and economic geographers that uniquely captures those spatial dimensions that are largely missing from conventional historical sociologies of state transformation, despite the centrality of territory to Weber’s seminal definition. In the third section of the article, I apply this perspective to the case study of modern Syria. Drawing on a rich vein of historical evidence, including Arabic-language archival records, economic reports, memoirs by officers and politicians, as well as compelling analysis by Syrian historians themselves, I argue that the current crisis is neither the by-product of an artificial state created by the French nor the result of the rapid neoliberalization of Syria’s previously populist authoritarian regime. Instead, I re-contextualize the current situation as the latest and most severe outbreak of a series of crises that have wracked the eastern Mediterranean since the mid-nineteenth century. The uneven development of the capitalist economy, and the subsequent dislocation of social and physical infrastructures, ultimately provides a more adequate account of state crisis in Syria than the dynamics of sectarian identity, authoritarian resilience, or resistance to neoliberal restructuring.

This paper will examine the legacy of the political struggle between 'centralizers' and 'de-centralizers' in the late Ottoman period and its impact on the subsequent history of state formation in the Middle East. In recent years there has a tendency to view Middle Eastern politics in terms of the divide between the secular and religious. While this perspective is no doubt useful, I argue here that, in many ways, modern Middle Eastern affairs has also been shaped by a political struggle between those who regarded the formation of a highly centralized social and political regime as the only way to deliver modernity and those who seek greater social and political liberty within a more pluralistic political formation. I will examine the debates between these differing factions during the late Ottoman period, particular within the context of the Young Turk movement, and endeavor to highlight how these debates continue to be relevant to understand politics in modern Turkey as well as other post-Ottoman states.