~List of Illustrations

Advanced Industries of Arabia

~Coercion is increasingly central to the political economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its states may be the most militarized of those in any global region. Those states are also characterized by sprawling security and intelligence agencies. Paralleling accelerating growth in these state agents of coercion, especially...

~The idea of this book started from a two-year research project on Arab militaries as economic actors that brought the editors together in 2012. The project included field and archival research on four Arab armies, those of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Sudan, to investigate...

~“Bread, freedom, dignity” had been the demands of the masses of people who rose up to oust the corrupt, repressive military or military-backed...

~On a hot Ramadan day in the summer of 2014, the Egyptian lower and middle classes woke up to dreadful news: their newly elected president significantly reduced food and gas subsidies. Amid continuous power cuts, the government also...

~On July 3, 2014, Pakistani army troops struck against landless peasants in Okara, Punjab. The troops had come to punish residents of the village of Chak 15-4/L for trying to shut down the water supply. They fired...

~In 2001, while Turkey was in its most severe economic...

~On...

~Like many developing country militaries, the Jordanian Armed Forces’ original role was to suppress potential rivals to the regime1.Vatikiotis, Politics and the Military in Jordan: A Study of the Arab Legion, 1921–1957. and (later) to provide a source of employment.2.Author’s note: An earlier version of this article appeared in Middle East Report 267 (Summer 2013). In the 1950s, the Jordanian military was the second largest employer—after the agricultural sector—and between 1961 and 1975, the number of those employed in the military increased threefold, accounting for one-fourth of the domestic labor force.3.Baylouny, Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East, 53; Antoun, A Social Structural Transformation of a Trans-Jordanian Peasant Community. But as global development policies forced a shift away from state-led investment and industrialization, maintaining the prestige of the military as an institution (and the loyalty of its officers) required direct and sustained support from the government. The military was one of the few groups to escape the ravages of Jordan’s structural adjustment program; the armed forces’ subsidies, pensions, and employment programs actually increased—as did the military’s overall budget—while budgetary allocations for social services delivered to nonmilitary populations...

~Sudan stands as a paradigmatic case for a number of evolving trends in the politics of the region. It had its intifada (uprising) against a military ruler already in 1985, followed by a transitional...

~The 2011 “Arab Spring” provoked a range of responses from the armed forces of regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. Unlike a number of other Arab militaries confronted by political dissent in 2011, the Yemeni military was divided in their response, with some commanders rallying around the regime and others stepping...

~Libya displays a very different model when compared with other cases of Arab armies that have strongly invested in economic activities. A basic premise for the military’s economic role is...

~In March 2011, with nonviolent protests throughout the country, the Syrian revolution broke out in defiance of the regime’s harsh punishment of civilians, especially children. Armed groups soon organized an estimated 1,500 groups, ostensibly to defend civilians, many of them having adopted a jihadist ideology. Other fighters reject jihad, but realize the only hope for the establishment of a Free Syria is to defeat Assad’s forces. The seeds of the revolution had been planted with Bashar al-Assad’s suppression of the 2000 to 2001 “Damascus Spring” and were watered by the example of Tunisia’s and Egypt’s revolutions.1.The “Damascus Spring” was an attempt by urban intellectuals, professionals, and former political prisoners to secure reforms from Bashar al-Assad soon after he had assumed power. The regime of Bashar al-Assad violently clamped down on reformers (al-Hayat, September 27, 2000; al-Wathāʾiq al-Ṣādirat ʾan al-Haiy’ah al-Ta’sysiyyah, Damascus: n.d; MidEast Mirror, April 19, 2001, 18). The death by torture of a thirteen-year-old child galvanized the southern Syrian city of Daraʿa in the spring of 2011 and triggered the Syrian version of the “Arab Spring.”2.“Women in Daraʿa Demonstrate against Bashar al-Assad,” YouTube, 1:26, posted by “horanson1,” April 7, 2011,...

~This book takes the events following the “Arab Spring” as a cause for a renewed examination of the economic and political role of the military in the MENA region. Moreover, the authors studied the resource base and economic activities of paramilitary forces and nonstate armed groups (NSAGs), which form a significant part...

~The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not necessarily imply official endorsement by the Bonn International Center for Conversion.

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~Elke Grawert is a political scientist and senior researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), Germany. She did her PhD and State Doctorate (habilitation) at the University of Bremen. Her research focus is on violent groups and political economy in Africa and the MENA region. She has coordinated international,...