Papers by Steven Heydemann
State and Regime Violence: POMEPS Studies 55, 2025
Violence is seemingly an intrinsic feature of politics in the Middle East and is the focus of imp... more Violence is seemingly an intrinsic feature of politics in the Middle East and is the focus of important research programs that range widely across themes, cases, methods, and definitions of what constitutes violence. However, establishing the boundaries of what violence is and is not has been especially vexing. This brief paper offers a framework that addresses both definitional issues and the conceptual messiness of violence as a focus of research.
Syrian Regime Resilience and State Power Through Contracting Stateness: The Cases of al-Hasakeh and Aleppo., 2026
This chapter challenges the concepts of state weakness and state fragility that treat territorial... more This chapter challenges the concepts of state weakness and state fragility that treat territorial control and control over the means of violence as key indicators of state strength in the context of civil war. We demonstrate that
during the years of civil war in Syria, including periods when its survival was most precarious, the Assad regime’s capacity to manage processes of state contraction and state reassertion played a critical role in its endurance.
During these years, the Assad regime exploited stateness as a variable, to deploy, withhold, or discard altogether, to subordinate formal state functions to the requirements of regime survival. It capitalized on its transactional
approach to stateness to assemble and manage a complex of mechanisms—formal and informal, licit and illicit, public and private, state and non-state—that enabled it to manage existential threats. During its 13 years of war
the Syrian conflict was thus marked by what we call “contracting stateness”, on two fronts. The regime conceded control of significant swathes of territory, whether forced by insurgents or voluntarily. In addition, it radically
decentralized the use of violence through its heavy reliance on non-state Pro-Government Militias (PGMs). Exploring the dynamics of territorial retreat and the outsourcing of state violence, we draw on insights from two
case studies: Al-Hasakeh and Aleppo. Here surrendering territory and relinquishing the state’s monopoly on violence had regime- and state reinforcing effects. We argue that the regime’s command of informal, non-state resources and networks of influence permitted it to respond with extraordinary flexibility to the strains imposed on state capacity during Syria’s civil war, and to turn both the loss of territory and the outsourcing of the means of violence to its advantage, both during and after active combat.
Economic Development, Governance, and Human Security After the Arab Uprisings, 2025
This essay is part of the "Development, governance, and security in the Middle East: Obstacles an... more This essay is part of the "Development, governance, and security in the Middle East: Obstacles and opportunities (https://www.brookings.edu/collection/ development-governance-and-security-in-the-middle-east-obstacles-andopportunities/) " 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. hat 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 RESEARCH
The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics, 2024
Authoritarian learning plays an increasingly important role in global processes of autocratizatio... more Authoritarian learning plays an increasingly important role in global processes of autocratization and democratic backsliding yet remains understudied and undertheorized. This chapter reviews conditions
that elevate the role of authoritarian learning in the international system. It assesses the state of research with a focus on definitional debates concerning what authoritarian learning is and is not. In contrast to more restrictive definitions, the chapter presents an expansive definition of authoritarian learning as a process in which autocratic actors assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of ideas, rules, norms, and practices based on their observed utility. It argues that such processes are evident in
both authoritarian and democratic regimes, and operate at the domestic, regional, and international levels. Turning to research horizons in the study of authoritarian learning, it advocates for comparative work that will shed light on specific mechanisms and causal pathways of authoritarian learning.
Making Sense of the Arab State, 2024
Making Sense of the Arab State, 2024
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 2020
The Syrian conflict presents as a case that has been well-studied in the power-sharing literature... more The Syrian conflict presents as a case that has been well-studied in the power-sharing literature. It is typically coded as an ethno-sectarian civil war moving towards a decisive military victory by an authoritarian regime and thus unlikely to end in a power-sharing agreement. Yet Syria's experience offers important insights into the effects of new conflict environments on prospects for power-sharing in 'hard' cases. Syria's conflict exhibits attributes and is unfolding in an environment that requires rethinking simplistic correlations between the military and political outcomes of civil wars. Moreover, the form of political settlement that emerges in Syria may also complicate assumptions about the ability of victors to shape the terms of postwar settlements unilaterally. Whether a power-sharing agreement is reached in Syria-however remote the prospects for that might be-will be determined by factors that underscore the impact changing conflict contexts can have on how civil wars end.
World Development, 2020
This article examines post-2011 transformations of economic governance in the MENA region. It arg... more This article examines post-2011 transformations of economic governance in the MENA region. It argues that Arab regimes have responded to the threats posed by the 2011 uprisings not by embracing appeals for inclusive social contracts, but through the imposition of repressive-exclusionary social pacts in which previously universal economic and social rights of citizens are being redefined as selective benefits. These pacts are shown to represent a significant shift in economic governance and in state-society relations in the MENA region, evident in the growing institutionalization of “contingent citizenship” as a framework for the organization of state-society relations and the management of social policy. In stressing discontinuities in economic governance, this argument challenges claims that the reassertion of authoritarianism in Arab states after 2011 represents a “back-to-the-future” process exhibiting little change from the formally inclusive social pacts associated with pre-2011 models of authoritarian governance.
Daedalus, 2018
Civil wars currently underway in Libya, Syria, and Yemen demonstrate that patterns of economic go... more Civil wars currently underway in Libya, Syria, and Yemen demonstrate that patterns of economic governance during violent conflict exhibit significant continuity with prewar practices, raising important questions along three lines. First, violent conflict may disrupt prewar practices less than is often assumed. Second, continuity in governance highlights the limits of state fragility frameworks for post-conflict reconstruction that view violent conflict as creating space for institutional reform. Third, continuity of prewar governance practices has important implications for the relationship between sovereignty , governance, and conflict resolution. Civil wars in the Middle East have not created conditions conducive to reconceptualizing sovereignty or decoupling sovereignty and governance. Rather, parties to conflict compete to capture and monopolize the benefits that flow from international recognition. Under these conditions , civil wars in the Middle East will not yield easily to negotiated solutions. Moreover, to the extent that wartime economic orders reflect deeply institutionalized norms and practices, postconflict conditions will limit possibilities for interventions defined in terms of overcoming state fragility.
Beginning as early as 2012, the Bashar Assad regime in Syria has worked to put in place the legal... more Beginning as early as 2012, the Bashar Assad regime in Syria has worked to put in place the legal and regulatory authorities to implement an ambitious vision of reconstruction as a process of authoritarian stabilization. With its military victory close at hand, the regime's intent is to use reconstruction to reimpose its authority, tighten its control over Syria's society and economy, and fundamentally alter Syria's demography to achieve what Assad himself has characterized as a "healthier and more homogenous society."
Luigi Narbone, ed., Fractured Stability: War Economies and Reconstruction in the MENA, 2019
Atlantic Council Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, 2018
Drawing on the research presented by contributors to a special issue of Mediterranean Politics, t... more Drawing on the research presented by contributors to a special issue of Mediterranean Politics, this article assesses the analytic opportunities that emerge when the Arab uprisings are conceptualized as moments of transformation rather than as incipient, flawed or failed transitions to democracy. Highlighting critical issues that cut across and link the experiences of political relevant elites (PREs) and mobilized publics in the cases
of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, it identifies three sets of issues that warrant further comparative research: the effects of stateness and patterns of state-society relations on the trajectory of Arab uprisings; the role of identity politics and nonstate
forms of solidarity as drivers of political mobilization and collective action, and the impact of these forms of collective action on possibilities for establishing stable, legitimate forms of governance; and the limits of civil societies and civic sectors in influencing transformational processes.
Uluslararası İlişkiler/International Affairs, 2018
The Middle East is experiencing an extended period of turmoil and violent conflict. Two main expl... more The Middle East is experiencing an extended period of turmoil and violent conflict. Two main explanations exist to account for heightened levels of conflict and competition. The first attributes current conditions to the intensification of sectarian polarization in the Arab east; regional dynamics are best explained by identity politics, which serve as instruments of sectarian regimes. The second attributes current conditions to state weakness; states in the Arab east are fragile, lacking effective institutions and suffering from a deficit of legitimacy, allowing state elites to govern in ways that exacerbate social cleavages. We view both these arguments as insufficient to explain patterns and trends in regional conflict across the greater Levant and the Arab east. Instead, we argue that current regional dynamics are best explained in terms of competition to determine whether a regional security order will be governed by the norm of sovereignty or the norm of sectarianism. This struggle plays out in an environment of normative fragmentation, where neither norm is hegemonic. It is unfolding most directly through violent confrontations within states that contain multi-confessional societies and exhibit high levels of cross-border intervention.
AOSTRACT 'lie spread of protests throughout the Arab i'orld can be viewed as the product of socia... more AOSTRACT 'lie spread of protests throughout the Arab i'orld can be viewed as the product of social learning by Arab citizens-a wave effrct fricilitated by the rapid diffusion of ideas, discourses, and practices from one country to another and their adaptation to local contexts. Yet it less commonly recognized that Arab regimes' counrer-revolutionaty strategies have also been shaped by processes of learning and diffusion among regime elites, especially among those where protests began later in the sequence of events that constitute the Arab awakening. Accordingly, there have been two parallel processes at work in the unfolding and the potential unraveling of the Arab awakening.' one at the level of Arab societies and the other among authoritarian regimes. Initially, the first of' these processes worked to the advantage of protestors. As regimes adapted to the repertoires of contention developed by protesters and assessed the direction of regional and international trends, the advantage shifted in their direction. Several incumbents in the region became increasingly persuaded that their best bet lay in stra!egie.c of' repression, and, in essence, in hunkering down. and pursuing a range of measures to tide our uprisings which themselves seemed to confront dimitushing probabilities of success.
Luigi Narbone, ed., Fractured Stability: War Economies and Reconstruction in the MENA, 2019
Mediterranean Politics, 2012
This paper explores the dynamics and underlying conditions of the first few months of the uprisin... more This paper explores the dynamics and underlying conditions of the first few months of the uprising in Syria, from mid-March 2011 until the summer of that year. Together with the contributions from Dalmasso and Kandil, it exploits the opportunity created by the Arab uprisings to shed new light on patterns of social mobilization and collective action that research programmes focusing on authoritarian resilience had tended to overlook. Specifically, it presents an analysis that critically and loosely borrows from, communicates with and hopes to make a modest contribution to social movement theory (SMT). While threat and opportunity are necessary elements for popular mobilization, they are not sufficient. Both 'threat' and 'opportunity' therefore need to be contextualized within the specific social and political environment, real or perceived, of the 'early risers' in Syria, in order to appreciate their local significance. The article further argues that protestors, when under threat and faced with the opportunity, collectively rose up by capitalizing on their dense social networks. Strong clan-based or tribal social structures, circular labour migration, cross-border linkages and proliferating practices denoted as 'criminal' variably played a key role in cementing these social networks. It is also contended that these networks' ability easily to dissolve into one another due to their high degree of interconnectedness was instrumental in collective mobilization and their ability to pose a strong and enduring challenge to the regime.
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Papers by Steven Heydemann
during the years of civil war in Syria, including periods when its survival was most precarious, the Assad regime’s capacity to manage processes of state contraction and state reassertion played a critical role in its endurance.
During these years, the Assad regime exploited stateness as a variable, to deploy, withhold, or discard altogether, to subordinate formal state functions to the requirements of regime survival. It capitalized on its transactional
approach to stateness to assemble and manage a complex of mechanisms—formal and informal, licit and illicit, public and private, state and non-state—that enabled it to manage existential threats. During its 13 years of war
the Syrian conflict was thus marked by what we call “contracting stateness”, on two fronts. The regime conceded control of significant swathes of territory, whether forced by insurgents or voluntarily. In addition, it radically
decentralized the use of violence through its heavy reliance on non-state Pro-Government Militias (PGMs). Exploring the dynamics of territorial retreat and the outsourcing of state violence, we draw on insights from two
case studies: Al-Hasakeh and Aleppo. Here surrendering territory and relinquishing the state’s monopoly on violence had regime- and state reinforcing effects. We argue that the regime’s command of informal, non-state resources and networks of influence permitted it to respond with extraordinary flexibility to the strains imposed on state capacity during Syria’s civil war, and to turn both the loss of territory and the outsourcing of the means of violence to its advantage, both during and after active combat.
that elevate the role of authoritarian learning in the international system. It assesses the state of research with a focus on definitional debates concerning what authoritarian learning is and is not. In contrast to more restrictive definitions, the chapter presents an expansive definition of authoritarian learning as a process in which autocratic actors assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of ideas, rules, norms, and practices based on their observed utility. It argues that such processes are evident in
both authoritarian and democratic regimes, and operate at the domestic, regional, and international levels. Turning to research horizons in the study of authoritarian learning, it advocates for comparative work that will shed light on specific mechanisms and causal pathways of authoritarian learning.
of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, it identifies three sets of issues that warrant further comparative research: the effects of stateness and patterns of state-society relations on the trajectory of Arab uprisings; the role of identity politics and nonstate
forms of solidarity as drivers of political mobilization and collective action, and the impact of these forms of collective action on possibilities for establishing stable, legitimate forms of governance; and the limits of civil societies and civic sectors in influencing transformational processes.