The paper addresses a question that has remained largely unexplored among scholars of Middle East politics: how do Arab Armies recruit rank-and-file soldiers? Studying the social fabrics of military apparatuses is important in that recruitment mechanisms generate important insights into the size and effectiveness, the social composition and cohesion, and by extension the main dynamics of relations between armies on the one hand, and states and society on the other hand. Conventional wisdom on recruitment emphasizes the distinction of conscription vs. volunteer service. In this perspective, a pattern emerges in the MENA region pitting conscript armies typically found in republics against volunteer militaries largely characterizing monarchies. Drawing on the author’s field research in Tunisia, Jordan, and Morocco, however, allows for a more fine-grained analysis. First, many armies across the region developed hybrid recruitment patterns, with conscripts operating alongside volunteer soldiers. Second, recruitment patterns remain surprisingly volatile and witness frequent changes in general recruitment policies. The paper explores these recruitment patterns empirically and discusses the social and economic underpinnings for these dynamics. Recent developments indicate that a push for military professionalization, economic crises, and youth unemployment prompt military organizations to increase volunteer recruitment. Armies in the Middle East therefore serve as “employers of last resort,” with significant consequences for the social fabrics of military organizations.

Western militaries spend considerable resources on trainings designed to professionalize foreign militaries. We contend that professionalization may politicize foreign officers by reinforcing a belief that soldiers are superior to civilians. We test this theory through a survey of nearly 3000 self-described military personnel in Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia. In all three countries, we find that military personnel who identify as professional tend to be more supportive of military coups, of the military having veto power over security and economic policy, and of active-duty officers becoming the defense minister and the president. Through a causal mediation analysis, we find that this effect of professionalism on politicization may be caused by beliefs that the military is more fair, moral, and trustworthy than civilians.

This paper expands this panel’s sociological approaches into investigating how military regimes impact the urban structures of the societies they rule. When military regimes took form in many Arab countries between the 1950s and 80s, army officers altered the urban spaces of cities such as Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, and San’a. Adopted “Arab socialism” during these decades brought about ambitious infrastructure, social housing, and public service projects that made these Arab capitals share similarities with others in the USSR bloc. In Egypt, Nasser’s socialism made Cairo and other cities and small towns across the country spaces for the lower- and middle-classes to enjoy the benefits of the welfare state, yet under close security surveillance. Under a new military regime in Egypt today, Egypt’s ruling officers have advanced their new notions about the country’s economy and urban development that are presumably based on neo-liberal ideas under the close guidance of the IMF. However, this paper argues that in reality the officers' economic and urban perceptions are inspired by the oil-producing Gulf’s model that heavily focuses on real estate investments and mega construction projects as the main drivers for the national economy. As a result, military contractors and bureaucrats have targeted certain areas in Cairo for gentrification and construction investments that aim at serving the city’s elite and cater for regional capital. This paper is based on conducting field research in Cairo’s old slums, ‘ashwa’iyyat, which have been recently evacuated, demolished, and replaced by luxury developments. Most of these vacated ‘ashwa’iyyat are located in either historic Cairo, Islamic areas with potential for touristic investments, or are close to the Nile, where luxury apartment and office buildings could be erected. Through donations from Gulf states, particularly UAE, military contractors have constructed thousands of apartment buildings in desert areas in the outskirts of Cairo, and military bureaucrats hastily moved the inhabitants of the ‘ashwa’iyyat into them. Interestingly, Emirati real estate developers have taken control of many of the evacuated lands. As for the displaced inhabitants of the slums, they are confined in ghetto-like communities that suffer from heavy securitization and lack of jobs and basic services. In addition, military contractors are building numerous bridges and toll highways across the congested city in order to connect up-scale newly developed areas to each other and facilitate the mobility of neo-liberal consumerism. Evidently, the military ruling elite is gentrifying Cairo towards turning it into another Dubai.

This paper locates and traces the development of a norm against military interference in political affairs. As far back as 49 B.C., the Roman Senate forbade the Governor of Gaul, Julius Caesar, from commanding his troops to cross the Rubicon, a stream that separated Gaul from Rome. Entering Rome would require Caesar to cede authority to the Roman Senate. Thus when Caesar brought his troops across the Rubicon he violated the Senate’s control over the Empire’s military officials, sparking a civil war. Using this example as a starting point, this essay draws on theories of the state and colonialism to trace how the norm of civilian control over military officials developed through the period of European state development and Europe’s colonial state administrations. The study uses case studies of the former Syrian and Iraqi Mandates to draw out the global spread of the norm. Aware that crossing the Rubicon was a turning point in Rome’s politico-military relations, Caesar famously stated, “The die is cast.” This essay finds evidence that coup perpetrators and their opponents in Europe and its former colonial territories expressed similar sentiments about the military’s entrance into political affairs.

This study reconsiders military politics in Syria prior to the 1963 Ba?thi power grab in light of new sources. I undermine the presumptions that Ba?thi tactics of sectarian favoritism in the armed forces were unprecedented in post-independence Syria. I make the following arguments: first, attempts by the power elite to tame Syrian minorities were part of a broad sequence of events that spanned several regimes and informed politics in the Syrian officer corps; second, the various military strongmen who ruled Damascus intermittently from 1949 until 1963 distrusted minority officers and relied mainly on fellow Sunnis to exert control in the armed forces; and third, the combination of minority marginalization in Syrian politics and Sunni preferentialism inside the armed forces bred enmity and polarized sectarian relations in the officer corps.