State-Building in the Middle East and North Africa

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
State Building

Importing Modernity: European Military Missions to Qajar Iran

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Cronin
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
State Building ◽  
New Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Military Organization ◽  
Indirect Control

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Iranian polities began a protracted experiment with army modernization. These decades saw a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, and Iran, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization that was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in a desperate effort to strengthen their defensive capacity, and to resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Almost every indigenous ruler who succeeded in evading or warding off direct European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in the east, invited European officers, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as formal missions, to assist with building a modern army. With the help of these officers, Middle Eastern rulers thus sought to appropriate the secrets of European power.

Territory, Sovereignty, and New Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel I. Ahram
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
State Building ◽  
Regional Government ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
World War ◽  
Regional System

This article examines the interaction between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the Middle East and North Africa. Various groups have aspired — and have failed — to become states since the contemporary regional system's inception after World War I. Since the 2011 uprisings, movements claiming territory and sovereignty have emerged or become more viable throughout the region, including the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Rojava, Cyrenaica, Azawad, and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Each poses different challenges to the regional system and holds out different hopes for rectifying historical missteps in state-building.

scholarly journals State-Building Dilemmas After the Arab Spring

ICR Journal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-249
Author(s):  
Tengku Ahmad Hazri
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Limit State ◽  
State Building ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Government Authority

The alarming state of West Asia and North Africa (WANA) today reverses conventional wisdom regarding constitutionalism. For long the Holy Grail of constitutional reform was on finding the best way to limit government authority. Yet the sheer chaos and instability of Middle East regimes now leads many to wonder if indeed the real problem is not the lack of functioning statehood to start with. How could one “limit” state authority when the personal dictatorships across the land hardly qualify as functioning states at all? That the states disintegrated into chaos after the fall of the rulers - evident especially in the case of Libya - provokes the question whether the so-called state institutions were not merely extended shadows of one man, whose downfall naturally brought with it the end of the entire political infrastructure. 

Pitfalls of Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa Region

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Ramzi Bendebka
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
State Building ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Regional System ◽  
Political Choices

Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is a fundamental issue. As long as this fundamental issue is not well discussed, any reforms in the regional system, including integration and state building, would be insufficient in alleviating the challenges faced by Arab nations as they attempt unity in the region. Any understanding of how and why MENA states make political choices towards stability and unity, necessitates the understanding of how they view themselves in terms of representing identity. The objective of this study is to investigate the transformation and the changing nationalism in the modern MENA region. For instance, Arab society has courted several ideologies from Arabism or Arab nationalism and Arab Islamic nationalism, among others. Ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the context in which several ideologies interact with each other and affect nationalism in the MENA region. Although Arab nationalism continues to play an ideological role, what is its relation with Islam? Why Arab Islamic nationalism in the MENA region does not unite states or non-state groups like the cases of Iran and the Kurds? It is therefore useful for this article to illustrate firstly, the relation between Arab nationalism and Arab Islamic nationalism, secondly, the case of Iran nationalism and finally, the Kurds and their strive for a separate nationalism.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

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