Middle Eastern Studies
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Middle Eastern Studies Chaoqun Lian1 Received: 15 October 2020 / Accepted: 19 October 2020 © The Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS), Peking University 2020
1. The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System, edited by Raymond Hinnebusch and Jasmine K. Gani, Routledge, 2020, 400 pages, $220 (Hardcover) This is an edited volume of some of the most recent reflections on the states and state system in the Middle East, reviving a once-heated debate represented by Lisa Andersen’s “The State in the Middle East and North Africa” (1987), Roger Owen’s State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (1992), Simon Bromley’s Rethinking Middle East Politics: State Formation and Development (1994), Nazih N. Ayubi’s Overstating the Arab State (1995), and other classics. The book is centered on a lingering puzzle: the Middle Eastern states and state system, in view of their vulnerability to conflict and instability, how is it that they are so resilient and durable? Indeed, even the widespread turbulence caused by the Arab Spring could not overcome the endurance or restoration of some of the most entrenched regimes in the region, and even the Islamic State, so far the largest challenge to the Sykes–Picot demarcations of the states in the region, failed to redraw any extant border between these states. The volume aims to yield new insights into this old puzzle by taking the Arab Spring not as “a unique or profound watershed, but a path-dependent outcome of the historical macro evolution” of the “trends that were embedded in the [regional state] system at its very founding and even before” (5). The book adopts a systematic, multi-level approach to examining the states and state system in the Middle East, which encompasses five different levels. At the global level, hegemonic powers intervene to construct and maintain the regional order. At the state level, varying types of regimes, including populist republics and monarchies, shape the regional system with rival legitimacy principles. At the sub-state level, tribes, armies, Islamist movements, protest movements, and other organized collective actors compete for state leadership to affect the trajectories of state building. At the trans-state level, regional states must constantly negotiate with supra-state ideologies (e.g., pan-Arabism and Islamism) and material * Chaoqun Lian [email protected] 1
Department of Arabic, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, No.5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China
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China International Strategy Review
networks (e.g., the flow of resources such as hydrocarbons and money). Finally, at the inter-state level, each state in the region must adapt to “the norms, practices and enmities of inter-state conflict and rivalry” (6) that constitute a complicated pattern of regionalism. The 25 thematic chapters of the book, in addition to an introductory chapter, address the following issues: the longue durée ma
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