Lebanon has been in economic, social and political turmoil in the last few years. Since October 2019, the country has been rocked by large protests. While COVID-19 initially stemmed the protests, the latter have been reinvigorated by the August 4th explosion in the port of Beirut. In January 2021, smaller, but more violent protests have broken out as a result of the implementation of COVID-19 lockdown measures without sufficient governmental assistance. The political elite has refused so far to implement much needed anti-corruption and institutional reforms, despite being under domestic and international pressure to do so. The situation is of significant concern because it has the potential to rapidly escalate beyond the security forces’ ability to manage and lead Lebanon on the path of state failure. One way of estimating Lebanon’s prospects in the short term is by using a methodology developed previously to explain the socio-economic roots of the Arab uprisings in 2011. It assigns three levels of Collective Political Violence (CPV) – high, medium and low – based on the intensity of the protests, the reaction of the regimes, and the number of deaths during the upheavals. Using the maximum likelihood estimation and a trinomial probability analysis, five metrics are identified as indicators of CPV – namely, GDP per capita, at purchase power parity, level of democracy, the years of ruler or political establishment in power (a proxy for political corruption), ethnic-sectarian tensions, and a hybrid indicator, called the Youth Grievance Factor. Based on 2020 data, the paper estimates Lebanon 2021’s CPV level to be between 70 and 80 percent probability of being at level 2 (medium) and close to 20 percent at level 3 (high). These values are comparable to those of Jordan, Bahrain, and Algeria in 2011, when these countries experienced some form of civil unrest, but the regimes survived, without going through a civil war and ultimately becoming failed states such as Syria, Libya and Yemen. The methodology could also be applied in the assessment of other countries in the region, such as Iraq, which is still reeling from the war with Daesh and where the NATO mission has grown back to its full operational capacity.

In late 1987 public rallies began against the Soviet Union’s destructive environmental policies in Armenia. Within a year, protests engulfed most of the population, and by February 1988, other latent grievances surfaced and now, the demonstrators were demanding Armenians’ right to self-determination in neighboring Azerbaijani-controlled Karabakh. The success of this movement was based on its ability to present coherent critiques of the existing order, bring about a sense of credibility in legitimate politics and authority, and appeal to the masses’ ability to logically see the argumentation in their policies and strategy. At that time, some argued that lack of independence and democracy had to be accepted in return for the physical protection of Armenians from imminent or potential threat from neighbors and from Pan-Turkism. Can Armenia be an independent state, apart from the Soviet empire and apart from Russia? Will Armenia be able to achieve strategic and political viability as a sovereign state? What was the West’s narrative and expectations from former soviet countries once the empire fell? And, what were the consequences of the West’s inability to grasp the difference between independence as an ideology and independence as a daily reality? To investigate these and other questions, in 2017, the Institute of Armenian Studies at the University of Southern California began an oral history and documentation project involving the direct participants of Armenia’s independence movement. Based on the perspectives of persons observing or active in political processes in Armenia from 1988 to 1996, the project, which is called UNDERSTANDING INDEPENDENCE, attempts to look at “What went wrong?” and “What went right?” immediately prior to and immediately following the Soviet collapse. The interviewees, or “narrators”, are chosen through purposive and chain sampling. The methodology of these interviews combines both topical and biographical approaches in order to contextualize the time period. With the topical approach narrators share memories about one subject of interest such as a specific time period, a place, or an issue. In the biographical approach, narrators share details about their life and experiences as they reflect on different historical periods. Using the oral history interviews conducted in the first phase of the project, this paper will examine the nuanced experiences and the processes that led to Armenia’s independence movement. The study will analyze the perceptions that re-defined statehood, neighborhood, institutions, and shed light on how these personal memories challenge mainstream understanding of that period.

Central Libyan authorities established after national elections in 2012 and 2014 failed to exercise their functions and develop solid national institutions capable of responding to their citizens’ demands. Currently, national institutions are divided, ineffective, and highly contested by Libyans in all three regions of the country. Meanwhile, municipal councils that were elected in 2013-14 and again in 2019-20 have played an increasingly important role for governance and stability. Indeed, living in a stateless political context, Libyans overwhelmingly rely on local institutions, asking elected officials to deliver basic services, resolve administrative issues, and provide security. However, as the protracted national conflict has left the decentralization process incomplete, local municipalities do not have the means to provide consistent, high quality services in many communities. Thus, municipalities should be further empowered and supported to improve their effectiveness, responsiveness, and accountability. Furthermore, improving local governance along all its dimensions (e.g. quality of services, responsiveness, accountability, inclusiveness) is key to preventing violent extremism, which thrives in the contexts like Libya, which is characterized by weak state institutions, economic hardship, conflict, and political disenfranchisement. Relying on a quantitative (survey carried out with 2500 respondents) and qualitative (50 key informant interviews) data, this article first explains how decentralization can boost the quality of local governance in Libyan municipalities and, eventually, improving the living conditions of all Libyans. Second, the study suggests that empowered municipalities can build resilience and safeguards against forced recruitment and/or facilitation of violent extremist groups. Given the localized drivers of extremism within the Libyan context, it is critical communities are given the opportunity to create and develop their own livelihood opportunities. Finally, the study shows the challenges of decentralization that exist at many levels both within and outside of the Libyan state, including cultural, societal, political, legal, administrative, organizational, and financial.

The central question this paper is studying is why the Saudi state bureaucracy under Vision 2030 is inflating? is the Vision a neoliberal blueprint strengthing the private vis-a-vie public sector? And is the neoliberal framework helpful in understanding Vision 2030 policies? A new trend in which the Saudi state is moving toward a neoliberal governance structure aiming to open the private sector and minimize government presence in the market. In the Saudi case, an important divergence is noticed: the state utilized private sector instruments to stimulate the market instead of opening the private sector. Various government-owned companies, public entities, and authorities emerged, extending the Saudi public sector's size. Paradoxically, the state is heading against its managerial template to decentralize governance structure. What is the rationale behind such observation? I argue that contrary to Vision's goal, Saudi bureaucracy is expanding, absorbing, and reproducing a new managerial class of youth technocrats functioning as a depoliticization mechanism, creating a subservient class loyal to the new leadership. The economic policies at the local, national and global levels perform as a political instrument to harness and reproducing entrepreneurial yet cosmopolitan citizens aligning with the Vision state-building project. The paper's aim is two-folded: to fill the gap in state capitalism and neoliberalism under authoritarian literature in MENA and connect the dots that the neoliberal framework fails to tackle in the context of economic transformation for the authoritarian states. Through shedding light on the literature analyzing Saudi state structure, scaling measurement, and institutional approaches to the state structure are limited. The division between private and public in the Saudi context seems blurry. I will rely on Greaber's work on bureaucracy and the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony to explain the material and ideological dimensions of Saudi bureaucracy's araising role in citizens' depoliticization. I do not argue that Saudi Arabia is a unique case. Instead, I express the need to make sense of Saudi economic transformation in a new global context to advance our understanding of state-society relations' changing functions when the authoritarian state capitalism developmental model has lost ground.

After the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, Libya has never been able to re-establish a central government capable of controlling the integrity of its territory. An in-depth study of the genesis of the Libyan state as an externally designed political entity, and the impact of an oil-based distributive economy on national unity is essential for a better understanding of the reasons behind a precipitated disappearance of the state apparatus. Politics in Libya have been shaped by foreign powers’ interventionist impulses, which do not serve “to induce social change or development but only to sustain local political power brokers and fuel local political competition” (Anderson, 2017, p. 247). Thereby, this research aims to analyse the impact of foreign intervention on the local aggregation of power and governance by answering the following questions: How have historical and social legacies altered the distributive state’s institutional options? How Libya's natural resources and geopolitical agenda motivates big and regional powers to foster internal divisions in Libya? The present study includes an historical analysis of the creation of a distributive state wearing a façade of a modern nation to better-fit virulent anti-imperialist aspirations of newly independent states in Africa and the Middle East after World War II. In fact, despite the seeming opportunism of its political elite, Libya, throughout its short history, was always compelled to correspond to the external powers’ ideological or economic expediencies. The Political Economy of Foreign Intervention and Rentier State theory are used in order to explain the causes of the post-Gaddafi persistent statelessness, and to analyse an eventual new regime negotiation under regional patronage. The hypothesis is that a distributive state, under an external patronage, is the most appropriate type of governance. An external political and military interference, although undesirable, can boost “the consolidation of regional fiefdoms” (Lacher, 2020, p. 197) in order to guarantee economic protection to various contentious groups. In fact, the security of social groups has to be built into the fabric of state institutions from the beginning “to provide citizens with concrete reasons to defend political order” (Yom, 2011, p. 239). The research concludes that a more equitable redistribution of oil-generated income enabled the rulers to establish a consensus among the Libyan population, which is still relevant in reducing the current fragmentation of the country. Oil-led development will eventually resume currently halted and reversed institutional and administrative development.