Over the last twenty years, Political Scientists have increasingly turned to the concept of ‘authoritarianism’ to help explain the unexpected tenacity of non-democratic regimes in the Middle East. Rather than examining the causal factors which putatively resulted in the absence of Arab democracy, this recent literature has instead sought to identify the mechanisms by which existing regimes have ensured their survival. In the sub-field of Comparative Politics, scholars have studied the electoral manipulations, judicial biases and coercive tactics employed by the state for its own ends (Brownlee 2007; Bellin 2004; Posusney and Angrist 2005). In Historical Sociology, attention has focused on the social pacts, class alliances and economic formations which underpin authoritarian modes of governance (Hinnebusch 2006; Heydeman 1999; Pratt 2007). Despite the advances of recent work, this literature’s reluctance to scrutinize the normative understandings and ontological assumptions embedded in the term ‘authoritarianism’ has limited its ability to interrogate fundamental questions about authoritarian politics. This paper argues that the shortcomings of existing conceptualizations of authoritarianism are implicitly derived from the underlying models of social science upon which recent work in these two sub-fields is based. The paper proposes that a third model – that of interpretive social science – can generate substantive new insights into the workings of authoritarian politics in the Middle East. The paper identifies three widespread assumptions in the existing literature: (1) an essentially liberal definition of authoritarianism; (2) an exclusively macro-level, elitist and institutionalist perspective on politics; (3) a predominantly voluntaristic account of the structure/agency debate. After outlining the basis of interpretive (as opposed to empiricist or critical realist) social science (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006), the paper explains how interpretive approaches reformulate these three assumptions, namely by: (1) revealing the normative foundations and power relations embedded in the term ‘authoritarianism; (2) refocusing attention on informal micro-politics without losing the link to macro-level structures; and (3) reformulating the structure/agency problematic in terms of narrative explanation. The paper concludes that not only do interpretive methods have the potential to gather richer empirical data about authoritarian politics than empiricist or realist approaches, but that the interpretive model of social science can draw attention to key theoretical and substantive questions about Middle Eastern authoritarianism that are underexplored in the existing literature.

Polish (1980-) and Algerian (1989-) activists demanded social, political, and economic justice against coercive, corrupt, one-party police-states. Both authoritarian states responded with mass arrests, torture, and martial law, but Algeria collapsed in civil war while Poland transformed peacefully into a liberal democracy. “Structural variables” such as cultural values, material integration, or political inclusion fail to explain why highly motivated and radicalized Catholic Poles and Muslim Algerians, each militantly resistant to state coercion in the past, responded so differently to dehumanizing states of exception. I argue that the endurance of Poland’s labor-centralization regime and dissolution of Algeria’s client-centralization regime objectively structured the different activist evaluations of martial law in each country. Despite similar immediate suffering under Algerian and Polish martial law, the “objective” divergence in the retention of social resources generated discrete subjective meaning of the state of exception to beleaguered activists. Hence: (1) systems of citizen-subjectivity based on state-provided social resources best predicts peaceful/violent outcomes; and (2) these systems of state incorporation of workers or clients foster evaluative legacies over time that still shape protest strategies beneath the level of regime behavior. We must interpret activist interpretation by aligning objective social resources to subjective readings of state actions. The method will access the interpretive nexus of past and future actions against present conditions. Comparison shows discrete citizen-subjectivities under Polish and Algerian authoritarianism. Poland centralized its citizen-subjects through labor-intensive production sites: factories, mines, and shipyards; Algeria in capital-intensive extraction-distribution networks: party, bureaucracy, and lineage. Because Poland’s worker-centralization regime differentiated social resources from state solvency – the emergency state remained captive to labor-intensive factory-production – social activists retained the resources that once allowed them to compel sovereign concessions. Algeria’s client-centralization regime unified citizens’ social resources and state’s finances in the nexus of patron-client exchange, thus collapsing citizen subjectivity under state fiscal crisis. The two martial law situations confronted, then, Polish citizen-subjects and Algerian citizen-objects, similar in immediate dehumanization but separate in mediated subjectivities. Interpretation parses systemic and subjective deprivation. Under tyrannical exception Polish strikes appeared as futile as Algerian client alienation, but their subjective evaluations diverged. Poles read martial law as the sign of a vanquished dictatorship against a unified opposition; Algerians as the termination of political standing in a refined absolutist regime. The interpretive mode to grasp these “readings” is an historical Verstehen that divides experience into evaluative and immediate forms, depicting them as combined effect of material and ideological demands.

A blog is a distinctly individual and personal undertaking, yet is explicitly addressed to an anonymous and indefinite public, is published where anyone can access it, and is situated within a matrix of other blogs and websites connected to each other through a network of hyperlinks—hence the name “blogosphere.” Here I ask the following: to what extent does the blogosphere function as a public sphere—a space for democratic deliberation and political participation— in states that lack other democratic institutions (e.g. free and fair elections, an unrestricted press, parliamentary checks on executive power, etc.)? I argue that the blogosphere escapes many of the downfalls of the mass media model (most notably criticized by Habermas), but drawing on alternative conceptions of the public sphere, I point to functions the blogosphere performs which are overlooked by the Habermasian model of rational-critical deliberation. This paper aims to assess both what individuals are doing through the act of blogging as well as the political significance of the blogosphere qua public sphere, which requires a close analysis of the medium itself (in structure and practice) and how it operates in a particular political context. First I address the following set of questions drawing on the public sphere and blogging literatures: What are the special features that characterize the “publicity” of the blogosphere in comparison with other public spheres (for instance those based on oral communication) and how does the technology of the blogosphere change the notion and scope of the “public”? What kinds of subjectivities are enacted and produced through the blogosphere and how are identities articulated and performed? Here I consider both the overall structure and content of the Egyptian blogosphere through a discourse analysis of a small sample of blogs. I interpret blogging as a performative practice —that is, as the site of specific enunciations that both help constitute an identity category and situate the blogger within (or outside of) that category. Second, I explore the ways in which the blogosphere may undermine and shore up authoritarian rule through the case of Egypt. I analyze the meaning and consequences of the practice within the Egyptian political context, considering how blogging developed in the country, how it is being used, and how the state has responded. Finally, by taking a quotidian practice such as blogging as the object of investigation, I seek to problematize dichotomous understandings of “democracy” and “authoritarian” as categories of analysis.