In the early 1950s, long before the Ba‘th Party’s revolution and Hafiz al-Asad’s presidency, Syria witnessed its first experiment with authoritarian culture and a personality cult of “The Leader.” Army Colonel Adib al-Shishakli, Syria’s effective dictator from December 1949 to February 1954, instituted a “corrective movement,” promulgated an authoritarian constitution, dramatically increased the size and reach of Syria’s defense and security services, formed a personalized political party, engineered his near-unanimous “election” as president via popular referendum, consolidated and expanded state print and broadcast media, and used these media to exacerbate Syrians’ collective sense of insecurity and to construct his own cult of personality. In this paper I analyze the cultural expressions of al-Shishakli’s rule in the context of economic, political, and cultural changes sweeping the Arab and wider developing worlds, and with an eye to Syria’s past and its future. Al-Shishakli’s ambitious top-down reforms constituted a developmentally informed attempt to reorder Syrian political, economic, and social life on the model of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal, Iran’s Reza Shah, Yugoslavia’s Tito, and Argentina’s Juan Peron. More significantly, his use of mass media and political repression, and the broad cooperation of Syria’s political, economic, and cultural elites in these efforts, raises questions about the putative novelty of Hafiz al-Asad’s subsequent dictatorship. This paper draws upon a wealth of media sources and the accounts of participants and eyewitnesses to argue that the period of Adib al-Shishakli’s rule was far more significant for the subsequent history of Syria and the Arab world than scholars have heretofore noted. In both style and substance, Adib al-Shishakli’s dictatorship provided numerous models for the policies and practices of the Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafiz al-Asad, and Saddam Hussein regimes. A study of al-Shishakli’s rule also demonstrates that the authoritarian current in Syrian politics has much broader and deeper roots than scholars have previously observed.

The civil war in Syria has generated an unprecedented refugee crisis in the Middle East. According to the United Nations there are now over 4 million documented Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom have settled in the three border states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Received wisdom on these and other refugees is that their experiences of dispossession and dislocation undermines their ability to exert political agency in exile. Refugees are viewed as populations in need of care and protection; rarely do we expect them to mobilize or protest. Yet in the Za’atari Refugee camp in Jordan, refugees have engaged in consistently high levels of political contention since the camp opened in 2012. In Za’atari refugees protest, throw stones, stage riots, hold sit-ins and frequently challenge the management approaches adopted by the myriad organizations that serve as authorities in the camp. In contrast, the Syrians who have settled in Lebanon and Turkey have exhibited strikingly low levels of political mobilization. This paper exploits the variation in levels of contention across these three sites of refugee resettlement to identify the mechanisms that conspire to bring about contention and mobilization among marginalized or displaced populations. I argue that the refugee management regime governing the Za’atari Camp was marked by a particular configuration of space and authority that facilitated refugee mobilization. The refugees in Za’atari were concentrated in one place under the governance of myriad authorities whose actions were, at least at first, deeply uncoordinated. This combination of concentration in space and uncoordinated governance allowed the refugees to build communal structures capable of supporting sustained contentious mobilization through 2013 and 2014. This unique configuration was absent in both Lebanon and Turkey. In Lebanon, refugees faced a deeply uncoordinated management regime, but were prevented from concentrating in any one place. In Turkey, refugees were concentrated in camps like in Jordan, but were faced with a well-coordinated and largely monolithic governance authority that was able to tightly control social life in the camps. These arguments are supported with empirical evidence collected during the summer of 2015 in refugee camps and informal tented settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Data comprise 85 interviews with both refugees and authority figures, as well primary source documents and quantitative data from the United Nations and various implementing partners.

Rumors often serve to fill a void in knowledge when other forms of information are not credible or available, as is commonly the case in authoritarian regimes. In the context of a highly-censored autocracy, all “news” emanates from the state sector and is highly propagandistic in nature. As a result, rumor can serve to penetrate an autocratic regime's monopoly on information control. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, rumor served as an important source of information about citizen attitude toward the regime (Sassoon 2011). Citizens were expected to inform on one another and an individual's ability to collect such private communications impacted his or her evaluation in the eyes of the regime (Sassoon 2011, 127). Ba`th Party officials were highly concerned about the destabilizing effects of rumormongering as rumors could harm the objectives of the regime. As such, the Iraqi regime dedicated considerable effort to collect and document circulating rumors as well as to develop strategies for how to counter rumors thought to be subversive in some way. This led to the creation of a complicated system of information exchange – individual citizens exchanged private information with each other and were often incentivized (or forced) to report rumors in exchange for staying on the good side of the regime. This paper analyzes the content of over 2,000 rumors collected by Saddam Hussein’s regime over the course of the 1990s. I find that rumors tend to fall into one of six main substantive categories and there are distinct forms of geographical clustering of rumormongering in Iraq during this period. I argue that rumors often went beyond a straightforward informational purpose and would often criticize the regime and its agents as well as seek to foment collective mobilization against the regime. Rumors, therefore, represent a significant form of political non-compliance which provides an important window into understanding the concerns and behaviors of Iraqis living under the rule of Saddam Hussein.

The Arab Spring operated through diffusion, as waves of popular mobilization against authoritarianism rapidly spread across borders. The mechanisms of such diffusion among protesting citizens, from social networking to protest coordination, have attracted great attention. Unstudied, however, are the subsequent strategies of recalibration undertaken by surviving autocracies since 2011-12 as they reacted against democratic diffusion This paper fills that gap. The entrée to a new cross-national project, this paper crafts the concept of “diffusion-proofing,” defined as institutional and rhetorical strategies that deter citizens from emulating opposition protests witnessed in nearby states. Critically, while scholarship on authoritarianism tells us how leaders target domestic threats such as civil society, the impetus of diffusion-proofing is external. It encompasses not just coercion but also media manipulations to convince everyday citizens—the non-activist majority—that domestic conditions are *not* equivalent to other Arab societies undergoing protest, and that promises of future reform are credible. The end goal is to deny regionalism by drawing new lines of national identity preventing the public from “catching” the contagion of protest. This case-driven paper compares three states that skirted revolutionary uprisings during the Arab Spring and have undertaken diffusion-proofing measures since 2012: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria. I select these cases to expose the full range of diffusion-proofing strategies that may reflect different contexts. For instance, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are monarchies, while Algeria is a republic; only Algeria carries traumatic memories of a recent civil war; only Jordan experienced sustained peaceful protests during 2011-12, along with a civil conflict next door; and Saudi Arabia imposes the highest degree of latent repression. My research has exposed diffusion-proofing occurs in three ways. First, these regimes have manipulated their national media to generate new images and stories that subvert the earlier positive framing of protests as democratic and emancipatory. Instead, protests are framed as exterior to cultural values, destabilizing to national unity, and open to exploitation by extremists. Second, through education and public discourse, they have relentlessly broadcast the argument that economic circumstances do not resemble what was seen in, say, pre-revolutionary Egypt, Libya, or even Tunisia. Public works and welfarist measures bolster this contrasting rhetoric for the everyday citizen. Regimes have also enacted a third strategy of suffocating core opposition—that is, hardline activists. Shying away from violence that could invite comparisons with fallen autocracies, they have instead mired known oppositionists in licensing annulments, court cases, and visa disputes.