Editor's note:
This essay is part of the “ Development, governance, and security in the Middle East: Obstacles and opportunities ” project, a series examining how governance failures in the Middle East and North Africa have hindered stable development and human security, in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
What happens when societies withdraw legitimacy from their governments?
How have regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region responded to citizens who defect, openly rejecting the economic rules of the game—the “authoritarian bargain”—that Arab regimes used for decades to manage state-society relations?
What forms of governance have emerged to contend with disaffected and mobilized publics?
The years since the uprisings of 2011 and a second wave of mass protests in 2019 offer insight into how Arab regimes have coped with the most significant challenges to their legitimacy and authority in modern history.
From the perspectives of governance and human security, their responses call into question their commitment to addressing the underlying causes of economic grievances.
Regime responses also raise important questions about the prospects for MENA citizens to play a meaningful role in setting economic priorities, broadening opportunities for economic inclusion, or holding governments accountable for their performance.
While regime responses to the challenges of mass mobilization have differed, reflecting wide variation among the region’s political economies, two broad patterns are discernable.
The first pattern is evident in a set of cases that transformed pre-2011 authoritarian bargains into repressive-exclusionary social pacts.
This category includes the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council 1 (GCC) as well as Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia (post-2020).
In these cases, regimes refined and expanded legal, regulatory, and technological mechanisms of repression and social control to prevent mobilization from below, suppress social demands for greater participation, and narrow the scope of economic and social rights.
The second pattern is evident among a set of regimes that pursued their own survival without regard for the economic and social costs caused by their resistance to popular demands for change.
This category includes the conflict-affected cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, as well as the nominally post-conflict cases of Lebanon and Iraq where governance is heavily inflected by legacies of prior conflicts.
In all cases, however, regime responses have disempowered societies, reshaping state-society relations to further insulate Arab autocrats from citizen demands for economic inclusion, accountability, and responsive governance.
Mass discontent and the mobilization of disaffected publics
In early 2011, publics across the Middle East exploded in protest.
Fueled in no small part by economic grievances, simmering discontent boiled over, tipping the region into turmoil from which it has yet to recover.
As in the protests that swept across Eastern Europe in 1989, the MENA uprisings seemed almost spontaneous, less a series of discrete events than a single wave.
Writing about the 1989 protests, political scientist Adam Przeworski wryly observed that while scholars would write “thousands of books and articles correlating background conditions with outcomes in each country … they will be wasting their time, for the entire event was one single snowball.
Imean it in a technical sense: As developments took place in one country, people elsewhere were updating their probabilities of success and as the next country went over the brink, the calculation was becoming increasingly reassuring.” Similar dynamics were at work in MENA in 2011.
Once protests broke out in Tunisia in December 2010, the snowball of mass protests rapidly spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain.
Syria was the last to tip, in March 2011.
As in Eastern Europe, however, the conditions that sparked the uprisings had been developing for years, if not decades.
From the 1980s onward, struggling to cope with slowing economic growth and burgeoning debt, rulers in MENA’s republican regimes gradually retreated from statist frameworks of economic governance.
They introduced economic reforms intended to expand the role of markets, promote private sectors as engines of growth, remove rigidities in labor markets to address the region’s massive unemployment crisis, and rein in the ballooning costs of subsidies and social provision.
The effects of MENA’s neoliberal turn, however, introduced new sources of economic and social dislocation.
In practice, reform programs bore little resemblance to the so-called Washington Consensus —an idealized template for navigating transitions from state-led to market-oriented economies.
Instead, Arab regimes appropriated and exploited reform to reinforce their grip on power, managing access to new economic opportunities as a political resource to reward loyalists, empower “ networks of privilege,” and shore up the social coalitions that helped to stabilize regimes politically, at least for a time.
What transpired across MENA in the 1990s and 2000s was not a transition from state to market, but from statism to crony capitalism.
Selective neoliberal reforms fueled the rise of a new economic elite and seemed to usher in an era of renewed growth.
Positive macroeconomic indicators were widely seen as signs that the region’s economies had turned a corner.
Yet for most people in the Middle East, the transition to crony capitalism was experienced in largely negative terms.
Over the course of the 2000s, inequality and corruption increased.
Social mobility declined, especially for urban middle classes that were historically a bulwark of regime support.
Youth unemployment levels in MENA were the highest in the world, pushing large cohorts of college graduates into low-wage informal labor markets.
Economic exclusion and rising commodity prices deepened economic precarity and food insecurity, hitting the least well-off with particular force.
In a 2015 study, the World Bank acknowledged the disconnect between robust macro-economic and human development indicators and rising levels of social dislocation and popular discontent:
“Judging by economic data alone, the revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring should have never happened.
The numbers from the decades before had told a glowing story: the region had been making steady progress toward eliminating extreme poverty, boosting shared prosperity, increasing school enrollment, and reducing hunger, child and maternal mortality.” Yet these positive indicators obscured “growing and broadly shared dissatisfaction with the quality of life—evident in perception data from value surveys but not in objective data … Ordinary people, and especially those from the middle class, were frustrated by their deteriorating standards of living due to a lack of job opportunities in the formal sector, poor quality public services, and the lack of government accountability.
The old social contract of redistribution without voice had stopped working.
In the Arab world, the middle class wanted a say and more opportunities.”
Repression, exclusion, and violence: Economic governance after mass uprisings
In the wake of mass protests, Arab regimes faced a critical juncture.
They could take steps to reform what the World Bank called “the old social contract,” expand opportunities for voice, broaden economic and social inclusion, and strengthen accountability.
This was the path universally recommended by international financial institutions as well as the United States and its democratic partners around the world.
It soon became clear, however, that Arab regimes had other ideas.
In the 13 years since the onset of mass protests and violent conflict, Arab regimes have followed two distinct pathways of economic governance.
The first, evident in the high-income GCC states and middle-income Arab states such as Jordan, Tunisia (post-2020), and Egypt, is a transition from social pacts anchored in regime commitments to redistribution and the legitimacy of the economic rights of citizens toward exclusionary-repressive social pacts that restrict economic rights and diminish opportunities for participation and accountability.
The second, evident in conflict-affected and post-conflict states including Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, is the deepening of predatory ruling coalitions—perhaps more accurately described as predatory power-sharing arrangements in the cases of Lebanon, Iraq, and Libya—in which corrupt, personalistic, illicit, and informal aspects of pre-conflict political economies have been generalized and further entrenched.
Recognizing that there is important variation among states within each of these categories, and that some features Iattribute to one category, such as high levels of informality and corruption, are present in countries Ihave grouped in the other, both modes of economic governance bode poorly for citizens who aspire to greater participation and economic inclusion.
Consolidating repressive-exclusionary social pacts
In one set of cases—those spared the worst ravages of insurgency and civil war, including the high-income states of the GCC as well as Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and, since 2021, Tunisia—regimes are overseeing transitions from decaying and ineffective authoritarian bargains to more exclusionary and repressive models of authoritarian governance.
As their citizens have become increasingly disaffected, these regimes have responded by clamping down on public access to state economic benefits and making it more explicit that such benefits are contingent on compliance.
In the past, these governments were largely tolerant in their response to economic demands from citizens—an important element of redistributive social contracts in which regimes were guarantors of economic security and social mobility.
T
...
Editor's note:
This essay is part of the “ Development, governance, and security in the Middle East: Obstacles and opportunities ” project, a series examining how governance failures in the Middle East and North Africa have hindered stable development and human security, in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
What happens when societies withdraw legitimacy from their governments?
How have regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region responded to citizens who defect, openly rejecting the economic rules of the game—the “authoritarian bargain”—that Arab regimes used for decades to manage state-society relations?
What forms of governance have emerged to contend with disaffected and mobilized publics?
The years since the uprisings of 2011 and a second wave of mass protests in 2019 offer insight into how Arab regimes have coped with the most significant challenges to their legitimacy and authority in modern history.
From the perspectives of governance and human security, their responses call into question their commitment to addressing the underlying causes of economic grievances.
Regime responses also raise important questions about the prospects for MENA citizens to play a meaningful role in setting economic priorities, broadening opportunities for economic inclusion, or holding governments accountable for their performance.
While regime responses to the challenges of mass mobilization have differed, reflecting wide variation among the region’s political economies, two broad patterns are discernable.
The first pattern is evident in a set of cases that transformed pre-2011 authoritarian bargains into repressive-exclusionary social pacts.
This category includes the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council 1 (GCC) as well as Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia (post-2020).
In these cases, regimes refined and expanded legal, regulatory, and technological mechanisms of repression and social control to prevent mobilization from below, suppress social demands for greater participation, and narrow the scope of economic and social rights.
The second pattern is evident among a set of regimes that pursued their own survival without regard for the economic and social costs caused by their resistance to popular demands for change.
This category includes the conflict-affected cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, as well as the nominally post-conflict cases of Lebanon and Iraq where governance is heavily inflected by legacies of prior conflicts.
In all cases, however, regime responses have disempowered societies, reshaping state-society relations to further insulate Arab autocrats from citizen demands for economic inclusion, accountability, and responsive governance.
Mass discontent and the mobilization of disaffected publics
In early 2011, publics across the Middle East exploded in protest.
Fueled in no small part by economic grievances, simmering discontent boiled over, tipping the region into turmoil from which it has yet to recover.
As in the protests that swept across Eastern Europe in 1989, the MENA uprisings seemed almost spontaneous, less a series of discrete events than a single wave.
Writing about the 1989 protests, political scientist Adam Przeworski wryly observed that while scholars would write “thousands of books and articles correlating background conditions with outcomes in each country … they will be wasting their time, for the entire event was one single snowball.
Imean it in a technical sense: As developments took place in one country, people elsewhere were updating their probabilities of success and as the next country went over the brink, the calculation was becoming increasingly reassuring.” Similar dynamics were at work in MENA in 2011.
Once protests broke out in Tunisia in December 2010, the snowball of mass protests rapidly spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain.
Syria was the last to tip, in March 2011.
As in Eastern Europe, however, the conditions that sparked the uprisings had been developing for years, if not decades.
From the 1980s onward, struggling to cope with slowing economic growth and burgeoning debt, rulers in MENA’s republican regimes gradually retreated from statist frameworks of economic governance.
They introduced economic reforms intended to expand the role of markets, promote private sectors as engines of growth, remove rigidities in labor markets to address the region’s massive unemployment crisis, and rein in the ballooning costs of subsidies and social provision.
The effects of MENA’s neoliberal turn, however, introduced new sources of economic and social dislocation.
In practice, reform programs bore little resemblance to the so-called Washington Consensus —an idealized template for navigating transitions from state-led to market-oriented economies.
Instead, Arab regimes appropriated and exploited reform to reinforce their grip on power, managing access to new economic opportunities as a political resource to reward loyalists, empower “ networks of privilege,” and shore up the social coalitions that helped to stabilize regimes politically, at least for a time.
What transpired across MENA in the 1990s and 2000s was not a transition from state to market, but from statism to crony capitalism.
Selective neoliberal reforms fueled the rise of a new economic elite and seemed to usher in an era of renewed growth.
Positive macroeconomic indicators were widely seen as signs that the region’s economies had turned a corner.
Yet for most people in the Middle East, the transition to crony capitalism was experienced in largely negative terms.
Over the course of the 2000s, inequality and corruption increased.
Social mobility declined, especially for urban middle classes that were historically a bulwark of regime support.
Youth unemployment levels in MENA were the highest in the world, pushing large cohorts of college graduates into low-wage informal labor markets.
Economic exclusion and rising commodity prices deepened economic precarity and food insecurity, hitting the least well-off with particular force.
In a 2015 study, the World Bank acknowledged the disconnect between robust macro-economic and human development indicators and rising levels of social dislocation and popular discontent:
“Judging by economic data alone, the revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring should have never happened.
The numbers from the decades before had told a glowing story: the region had been making steady progress toward eliminating extreme poverty, boosting shared prosperity, increasing school enrollment, and reducing hunger, child and maternal mortality.” Yet these positive indicators obscured “growing and broadly shared dissatisfaction with the quality of life—evident in perception data from value surveys but not in objective data … Ordinary people, and especially those from the middle class, were frustrated by their deteriorating standards of living due to a lack of job opportunities in the formal sector, poor quality public services, and the lack of government accountability.
The old social contract of redistribution without voice had stopped working.
In the Arab world, the middle class wanted a say and more opportunities.”
Repression, exclusion, and violence: Economic governance after mass uprisings
In the wake of mass protests, Arab regimes faced a critical juncture.
They could take steps to reform what the World Bank called “the old social contract,” expand opportunities for voice, broaden economic and social inclusion, and strengthen accountability.
This was the path universally recommended by international financial institutions as well as the United States and its democratic partners around the world.
It soon became clear, however, that Arab regimes had other ideas.
In the 13 years since the onset of mass protests and violent conflict, Arab regimes have followed two distinct pathways of economic governance.
The first, evident in the high-income GCC states and middle-income Arab states such as Jordan, Tunisia (post-2020), and Egypt, is a transition from social pacts anchored in regime commitments to redistribution and the legitimacy of the economic rights of citizens toward exclusionary-repressive social pacts that restrict economic rights and diminish opportunities for participation and accountability.
The second, evident in conflict-affected and post-conflict states including Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, is the deepening of predatory ruling coalitions—perhaps more accurately described as predatory power-sharing arrangements in the cases of Lebanon, Iraq, and Libya—in which corrupt, personalistic, illicit, and informal aspects of pre-conflict political economies have been generalized and further entrenched.
Recognizing that there is important variation among states within each of these categories, and that some features Iattribute to one category, such as high levels of informality and corruption, are present in countries Ihave grouped in the other, both modes of economic governance bode poorly for citizens who aspire to greater participation and economic inclusion.
Consolidating repressive-exclusionary social pacts
In one set of cases—those spared the worst ravages of insurgency and civil war, including the high-income states of the GCC as well as Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and, since 2021, Tunisia—regimes are overseeing transitions from decaying and ineffective authoritarian bargains to more exclusionary and repressive models of authoritarian governance.
As their citizens have become increasingly disaffected, these regimes have responded by clamping down on public access to state economic benefits and making it more explicit that such benefits are contingent on compliance.
In the past, these governments were largely tolerant in their response to economic demands from citizens—an important element of redistributive social contracts in which regimes were guarantors of economic security and social mobility.
Today, however, regime intolerance of economic claims-making has taken hold.
In this set of cases, where developmental outcomes have been generally stable or positive—despite brief but sharp declines during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—regimes have introduced repressive legislation criminalizing citizens’ economic claims and mobilization.
To extricate themselves from the authoritarian bargains of the past without ceding ground on political rights, they have securitized the link between citizenship and economic rights.
Egypt is perhaps the clearest example of where laws and regulations have been used to quash social and economic rights, including the threat of taking away citizenship.
The Egyptian government may bring the full force of its enormous repressive bureaucracy down on anyone it deems as disloyal.
Since 2013, the regime of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has used a wide array of rules, amendments, and regulations to ensure compliance and economic stability.
Economic dissent is now a criminal offense, and acts that the regime considers as endangering the economy are designated as terrorism.
This trend was especially visible in November 2013 when a law was passed to make protests and demonstrations essentially illegal.
The security services received ‘‘absolute power to cancel or postpone [a] demonstration, change the location, and modify the activity path based on ‘serious information or evidence’ regarding the existence of threats against security and peace which the security services themselves provide.” Responding to criticism of the law, Sissi “has defended restrictions on citizens’ right to demonstrate, saying that protests could cause more harm to the country’s already battered economy.” After the protest law passed, in September 2014, the government turned its attention to independent unions, restricting their operations with new regulations despite constitutional protection of freedom of expression and association.
Next came punishment for workers who participate in labor actions, the suppression of economic protests, and the targeting of independent unions by the security services.
By the end of 2017, labor protests had declined by two-thirds (see Fig. 1, below) from their post-2011 peak. 2 According to Human Rights Watch, “Since May 2016, police have arrested scores of striking workers from various industries.
Most were later released, but prosecutors have referred dozens for trial, including some before a military court.”
In other cases in this category, including Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, the post-2011 period has ushered in expansive restrictions on protests, labor activism, and freedom of expression.
More than 13 countries in the Middle East have introduced sweeping cybercrime laws in the past decade, imposing harsh penalties for speech that violates vaguely defined limits.
In 2022, a Saudi woman, Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani, was sentenced to 45 years in prison for posts on social media, though her sentence was later reduced.
Criticism of rulers and of regimes more broadly and of conduct deemed harmful to a country’s public image have been criminalized, with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International pointing to the widespread use of new laws to detain and silence critics.
As recently as this past August, Amnesty International charged the Jordanian government with “weaponizing the new Cybercrimes Law to target and harass journalists, activists and others for expressing opinions online that are critical of government policies and practices.”
The links are clear between such laws and the intent of regimes to impose exclusionary social pacts that reduce redistribution and shrink the role of the state as a guarantor of economic security.
In Egypt, for example, the Sissi regime allocates government funds as a way to maintain control, spending more in some areas to mollify popular anger about belt-tightening in other areas—for example, cuts in energy subsidies, floating the Egyptian pound, reducing food subsidies, and introducing a value-added tax.
The World Bank points out that Egypt has selectively expanded social protection to cushion against the effects of economic reforms.
Even in the high-income GCC states, as Justin Gengler and Laurent Lambert point out, “unlike during past periods of austerity … GCC governments are not targeting cuts to infrastructure and other capital spending.
Instead, they are reducing the generous and financially onerous welfare benefits and economic subsidies conferred to citizens as part of the implicit social contract binding subjects and rulers in the Gulf monarchies.”
Despite significant similarities in how this group of regimes is adapting economic governance post-2011, there is variation among them.
The non-GCC monarchy of Jordan has adopted strategies similar to its Gulf counterparts in its legal and regulatory responses to the uprisings of 2011.
Yet it has preserved to a greater extent a pre-uprising conception of citizenship and a more inclusive view of the economic and social rights of citizens.
Regime responsiveness to the wave of economic and labor protests that Jordan experienced in 2018, 2019, and more recently as the COVID-19 pandemic receded, was higher than in the cases of the GCC states and Egypt.
In Jordan, pre-COVID protests led to the appointment of a former World Bank official, Omar Razzaz, as prime minister, who then initiated a public dialogue about how to revitalize Jordan’s social contract.
Still, the Jordanian government’s tolerance for public protest is quite limited.
In 2020, it forcefully shut down teachers’ protests that began in 2019 and declared the Jordan Teachers’ Syndicate, representing some 140,000 teachers, to be illegal and forced it to disband.
Important variation is also evident in the extent to which regimes in this category continue to support wide-ranging social welfare programs.
Although several high-income states in the GCC introduced cuts in public spending post-2011, the scale of benefits they offer to citizens still vastly exceeds those provided in middle-income countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
The impact of this discrepancy in human capital investments is reflected in human development indicators (HDI), with the GCC states plus Oman averaging 0.874, compared to the average for middle-income Arab countries of 0.725.
There is also variation in the scale of exclusion and repression practiced by regimes in this category: Egypt under Sissi has moved furthest in repressing activities the regime views as unacceptable.
Kuwait, despite the closure of its parliament in May 2024, remains more tolerant of critical forms of expression.
Nonetheless, the regimes in this category have adopted similar tactics in expanding the criminalization and suppression of speech and the digital surveillance of citizens, and tightly restricting labor mobilization, protest, and economic claims-making by citizens. 3
Conflict and the deepening of predatory ruling coalitions
When mass protests erupted in 2011, followed by a second wave in 2019, regimes in conflict-affected states were defiant, defensive, and resistant to popular demands for political and economic change.
In some cases, including Libya, Yemen, and Syria, mass mobilization was a precursor to mass violence, sparking large-scale conflicts that remain unresolved.
In Iraq and Lebanon, regimes were similarly defiant in response to “second wave” mass protests that erupted in 2019.
They deployed violence more selectively than the other cases in this category—and were aided by the 2020 COVID pandemic in their efforts to clear public space.
Yet, they were no less fierce than their conflict-affected counterparts in their determination to resist popular pressure for economic and political reforms.
With regime change in Syria and the election of a president and prime minister in Lebanon, these cases may shed their status as members of this category.
It is still too soon to view either country as set decisively on a trajectory toward more inclusive governance.
In all three of the conflict-affected cases, as well as Iraq, the post-2011 period witnessed the deepening of corrupt, predatory ruling coalitions that were present prior to the onset of conflict but became further entrenched in its wake.
Actors such as communal-sectarian power brokers, wartime profiteers, regime cronies, and militia commanders—principal beneficiaries of wartime political economies—have become central to these predatory coalitions.
In these cases, economic governance takes the form of negotiation among ruling elites about access to public revenues, with little to no opportunity for citizens to play a role in setting economic priorities.
Access to and the distribution of public revenue are heavily patrimonial and often sectarian: ruling elites essentially look after their own constituencies.
Citizens’ attempts to mobilize to make economic claims on the state are typically met with repression.
In conflict-affected countries, economic trajectories since the 2011 uprisings reflect the negative developmental, social, and economic effects of large-scale, protracted violence.
Conflicts have varied in their intensity and scale, yet they have contributed to broad-based economic declines that exhibit similar features.
These include stalled or declining GDP growth; deteriorating productivity across economic sectors; destruction of critical infrastructure; lower levels of domestic and foreign investment; spiraling inflation and currency devaluations; increased unemployment; worsening poverty; rising levels of food insecurity and economic precarity; and declining human development indicators.
The human toll of mass violence is a paramount consideration, yet conflict also profoundly reshapes political economies.
Conflict-affected countries vary in the extent to which security landscapes have fragmented, the scale and capacity of nonstate armed groups, the extent to which populations have been displaced, and the roles of external actors.
Despite important variation, however, MENA wartime political economies share attributes that are consistent with the broader dynamics that have come to define intrastate conflict in recent decades.
These features, constituting what Irefer to as wartime economic orders, include the weakening of state institutions and their capture by warring parties, the splintering of national markets, and altered patterns of trade and production.
Mass violence also amplifies the informal features of patrimonial, personalistic political economies that were present prior to the onset of conflict but acquire growing prominence and reach as violence takes hold and formal market mechanisms erode.
During and following active conflict, central banks, ministries of economy, trade, and finance, along with state regulatory agencies, continue to function.
Yet their authority and reach are constrained if not directly undermined by the spread and consolidation of wartime economic orders across territories controlled both by insurgent forces and recognized regimes.
In these new orders, the boundaries between formal and informal, licit and illicit, public and private—boundaries that were highly porous even in prewar periods—become increasingly blurred.
They remain so, moreover, even as violence recedes, underscoring wartime economic orders’ persistence and resilience, including in post-civil war cases like Lebanon, where cross-border conflict with Israel has reignited, and Iraq, which has transitioned from conflict to post-conflict conditions even as the wounds of mass violence have yet to heal.
Despite territorial fragmentation that fractures national markets, disrupting the domestic movement of goods and people, wartime economic orders foster forms of cooperation, collusion, and exchange across conflict lines and between warring parties.
These informal ties can become important lifelines for civilian populations, yet they contribute to conditions in which corruption, predation, and criminality thrive and where the crucial legal distinction between civilians and combatants is all too easily erased.
Conflict thus destabilizes and reshapes prewar political settlements, reshuffling coalitions of winners and losers among established and newly empowered wartime economic actors.
Across MENA conflicts, both state and nonstate armed actors use coercive and predatory means to accumulate wealth through extortion, kidnapping, theft, smuggling, and “checkpoint economies” in which fragile supply chains are exploited to extract resources from the movement of goods and people.
State and nonstate armed groups alike cultivate direct transnational economic ties with foreign governments and patrons, building extensive cross-border economic networks that elude scrutiny, oversight, or regulation.
Armed actors who control the means of violence are thus among the principal beneficiaries of conflicts that expand opportunities for predation.
Syria and Libya are notable examples of these trends.
In the Libyan case, the family of former general Khalifa Haftar, the dominant military figure in eastern Libya, has become the axis around which a network of affiliated business cronies grew to become a powerful economic force in the east, while also extracting resources from central state institutions in the west.
In Syria, where neopatrimonialism and personalism were rampant prior to 2011, the onset of conflict led to the marginalization or exit from the country of segments of the business elites and the empowerment of wartime crony networks closely allied with the inner circles of the Assad regime.
In both cases, pre-conflict political economies that were patrimonial and clientelistic have not only persisted but have become increasingly pervasive, more broadly and deeply entrenched, and are now systemic features of wartime economic orders in all conflict-affected states and post-conflict states in MENA.
In recent years, violence has subsided in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
In December 2024, armed Islamist rebels overthrew the regime of Bashar al-Assad and initiated a process of political transition that holds the promise of a meaningful change in economic governance.
Nonetheless, as of this writing in January 2025, Syria’s conflict, like those in Yemen and Libya, cannot be said to have been fully resolved.
Lebanon is also exiting from a brief but deeply destructive period of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and it too may be on the cusp of long-overdue economic and political reforms.
Iraq has entered a fragile post-conflict phase marked by ongoing insecurity and violence.
In each case, conflicts have led to political if not territorial fragmentation and the weakening of regime authority and legitimacy.
In each, wartime economic orders have become consolidated under conditions of political, economic, territorial, and social polarization and fragmentation.
These trends are especially visible in the three cases that have been most severely affected by post-2011 violence: Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
In Syria, prior to its collapse in December 2024, the Assad regime nominally governed some two-thirds of the country, including the western economic heartland and major urban centers—a part of the country the French dubbed “useful Syria”—with the active presence of Iranian-backed militias.
The nominally nonstate Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) dominated the northwestern city of Idlib and its surrounding areas, while the Syrian National Army, a loose coalition of Turkish-backed armed groups, controlled parts of northern Aleppo province and areas adjacent to the territory in Syria’s northeast where the Kurdish Democratic Union Party holds sway.
Iraq’s political landscape is no longer as sharply fragmented as it was during periods of peak conflict from 2007-2011 and from 2014-2019.
Yet the central government’s legitimacy is low, Kurdish-majority provinces in the north are governed semi-autonomously by regional Kurdish political parties, and Iranian-backed militant Shia militias have become powerful political and economic actors, establishing political parties that field candidates in national elections.
In the Libyan case, the Government of National Stability, allied with Haftar, who commands the Libyan National Army, has centralized its authority over militias active in eastern Libya.
In western Libya, a loose and fractious constellation of militias dominates a fragmented territory under the fragile control of the internationally recognized Government of National Accord.
Yemen exhibits similar features.
Since 2014, insurgent forces of the Ansar Allah (Helpers of God) movement, commonly known as the Houthis (after the Zaydi Shia family from Saada governorate that formed and leads Ansar Allah), have dominated most of western Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa.
Two major and several minor political and armed groups confront the Houthis and simultaneously contend for control in central, eastern, and southern Yemen.
Leading actors include the Internationally Recognized Government and a southern Yemeni irredentist movement, the Southern Separatist Movement or the Hirak, with large areas of south-central Yemen contested by Islamist Jihadist armed group, s including al-Qaida.
As conflict ebbs, the longer-term effects of wartime economic orders come more clearly into focus.
As conflict ebbs, the longer-term effects of wartime economic orders come more clearly into focus.
In Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, conflict landscapes reflect the ongoing if uneven fragmentation of authority and governance among multiple armed actors.
The Assad regime’s collapse in Syria and the formation of an interim government dominated by HTS have created possibilities for a political and economic transition that will expand accountability, transparency, and inclusion.
As of this writing, however, fragmentation of governance and authority persists.
In all four cases, conflict reshaped rent-seeking coalitions, elevating wartime profiteers, militia commanders, and conflict entrepreneurs who rose to become a new generation of business cronies allied with regimes or rebel leaders, often at the expense of prewar economic elites.
Over time, these actors have become integrated into economic and political arenas, blurring the distinction between state and nonstate actors.
This distinction has eroded not only in areas under rebel rule but in government-controlled territories as well, where regimes have responded to the severe strains of protracted conflict and economic sanctions by resorting to predatory and criminal means to generate revenue.
In the Syrian case, legislation passed in 2015 and 2016 gave municipalities the authority to form private-sector holding companies and expanded the private sector’s role in the management of public assets through “public-private partnerships.” Explained as initiatives to strengthen the private sector, such laws have enabled wartime profiteers and regime cronies to launder and legalize their wealth by privatizing resources previously managed by state institutions.
How such legislation will fare under the interim government is unclear.
Moreover, similar patterns are evident in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, where rebel militias and state-sponsored armed groups have emerged as prominent political actors—not dissimilar to the trajectory of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Popular Mobilization Forces—sectarian nonstate armed groups—in Iraq.
Regimes governed by predatory ruling coalitions vary in the intensity of repression they use to silence citizen demands.
Syria under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad was among the most repressive regimes in the world, brutally intolerant of dissent, subjecting critics to harsh, abusive treatment, including arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial execution.
Nonetheless, public anger at the regime’s failure to address the collapse of the country’s economy compelled it to tolerate modest, limited expressions of economic grievances, so long as they did not mention the president, his family, or his inner circle.
In Lebanon and Iraq, publics enjoy meaningful opportunities to express criticism of governments and make economic claims on regimes.
Yet Hezbollah responded violently to mass economic protests that gripped the country in the fall of 2019, deploying loyalist thugs to attack and disrupt protest encampments.
Prior to 2024, when Israel severely degraded Hezbollah’s leadership and military capacity, it exerted pressure on the government to deflect accountability for its probable role in a massive explosion in Beirut’s port in August 2020.
Hezbollah, along with other communal power brokers representing Lebanon’s largest sectarian communities, fiercely resisted governance changes demanded by the Lebanese public and international financial institutions to deal with the deep, systemic dysfunctions that led to an economic crisis the World Bank deems among the three most severe globally in the past 150 years.
Censorship laws were also tightened and deployed more frequently to deter critics.
With the election of a new president and new prime minister in 2025, following a two-year delay caused by Hezbollah’s stalling tactics, Lebanon, like Syria, may undergo reforms that would improve the quality of economic governance.
Yet, deeply embedded sectarian-clientelist networks that pervade public institutions pose significant obstacles to change.
In Iraq, journalists and civil society activists who have criticized powerful political figures have been assassinated, detained, and threatened.
Mass protests that broke out in 2019, led by youth demanding accountability for corruption and the regime’s poor economic performance, were brutally suppressed by nonstate militias affiliated with powerful political figures.
In Libya, citizens in the west regularly take to the streets to protest the poor economic performance of the recognized government, yet their counterparts in the east experience a more repressive environment.
Asimilar pattern is evident in Yemen, with those living under the rule of Houthi insurgents subject to higher levels of repression than those in areas controlled by the internationally recognized government.
Regardless of these distinctions, however, there have been no circumstances, including severe cases of economic collapse, that have been sufficient to produce changes in the predatory practices of regimes in any of the countries in this category.
Conclusion: Pathways of exclusion and economic precarity
Since 2011, disparities in economic governance, development, and human security have grown across MENA.
The privileged citizens of high-income countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates benefit from expansive social welfare policies and enjoy some of the highest levels of physical security in the region—conditions that have made these two states the most sought-after destinations for young Arabs.
Yet even these privileged publics—groups that exclude expatriate workforces many times larger than citizen populations—are subject to exclusionary-repressive social pacts that sharply limit possibilities for voice, inclusion, and accountability.
The “old social contract,” in which citizens are compelled to accept welfare at the cost of participation and voice, has been reinforced by expansive legal and regulatory constraints, underpinned by coercion to stifle criticism, deter economic claims-making by citizens, and prevent mobilization.
Regimes in middle-income countries have moved in similar directions, but resource constraints and growing populations have required more far-reaching transformations of redistributive social pacts.
In these cases, regimes have withdrawn economic rights from citizens, reduced levels of public spending, and relied heavily on coercion to deter opposition.
Conflict-affected and post-conflict states, on the other hand, have moved in even darker directions.
Regimes in these cases have consolidated predatory ruling coalitions that shift the costs of conflict onto publics already reeling from the economic and social effects of mass violence.
In place of the authoritarian bargains that defined pre-conflict periods, regimes in these cases have put in place “predatory bargains,” in which rulers and loyalist elites dominate political economies, capture state institutions, and appropriate for themselves—even if claiming to act on behalf of specific sectarian communities as in Lebanon and Iraq—a disproportionate share of resources extracted from economic activity, whether formal or informal, licit or illicit.
In these cases, moreover, repression plays a central role in stabilizing and maintaining predatory bargains, and large majorities of citizens experience low human security and elevated levels of economic precarity, often including extreme food insecurity and lack of access to essential services such as health care.
Both sets of regimes share a determination to pursue pathways of economic governance that have as their foremost priorities the suppression and containment of mobilized publics they view as threats to regime survival.
This includes the rejection of reforms that might expand opportunities for voice, inclusion, and participation, and a willingness to impose on citizens the economic and social costs of regime-centric strategies of economic governance.
As a result, the years since 2011 have witnessed almost no progress in addressing the social and economic conditions that were important drivers of mass protests—progress that conflict and the COVID pandemic have made even more challenging.
Economic and political conditions across MENA continue to reflect deep, systemic social and economic challenges in terms of youth unemployment, debt levels, poverty, food security, as well as a generalized lack of political and civil freedom—underscoring a severe region-wide deficit of voice and participation.
Are there off-ramps that might shift economic governance in MENA toward development strategies that prioritize human security and the well-being of publics?
Are there conditions that might induce MENA’s rulers to initiate reforms that would move the region toward inclusive, participatory social pacts that give citizens meaningful opportunities for voice, participation, and accountability?
In responding to these questions, it is important to be clear-minded that MENA regimes have few incentives to make such changes.
Doing so would render their own grip on power and survival more precarious, while international and regional actors have largely retreated from demands for fundamental reform of social pacts.
International financial institutions continue to urge MENA governments to undertake reforms, yet in the midst of multiple regional conflicts, the decline of U.S. and European Union (EU) engagement in and support for democratization, the EU’s focus on preventing migration through support for regional autocrats, investments by GCC regimes in shoring up their authoritarian counterparts—most prominently in the massive levels of financial support provided to Egypt, but also through now-defunct efforts to pursue normalization with the former Assad regime—and the collapse of democracy in Tunisia, the only Arab country to undergo a post-2011 transition to democracy, offer scant reasons to imagine a brighter horizon for MENA publics in the years ahead.
If the overall prognosis for inclusive, accountable development strategies remains largely negative in the MENA region, the fall of the Assad regime and the emergence of a new political order in Syria, as well as the formation of a new government in Lebanon, offer grounds for cautious optimism.
In both countries, new leaders have expressed their commitment to economic and social inclusion, an end to corruption, and more responsive, accountable economic governance.
In both cases, such commitments confront enormous obstacles, not least the embedded residue of wartime economic orders and a severe lack of resources.
Syria and Lebanon now represent crucial tests of the willingness of the United States, EU, and the international community to support political and economic transitions that would transform both countries’ economic trajectories and help them overcome legacies of decades of misrule, corruption, clientelism, and conflict.
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Acknowledgements and disclosures
The author would like to thank Adam Lammon for his invaluable editorial support as well as Alexandra Dimsdale and Rachel Slattery for their support in the production of this paper.
Footnotes
Members of the GCC include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Data on labor protests provided by Prof.
Nadine Abdallah, with the author’s thanks.
Marc Lynch, “Legibility, Digital Surveillance, and the State in the Middle East,” in Making Sense of the Arab State, ed.
Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2024) 111-140.
Members of the GCC include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Data on labor protests provided by Prof.
Nadine Abdallah, with the author’s thanks.
Marc Lynch, “Legibility, Digital Surveillance, and the State in the Middle East,” in Making Sense of the Arab State, ed.
Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2024) 111-140.
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