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The Failure of the Regime or the Demise of the State?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2018

Rabab El-Mahdi
Rabab El-Mahdi*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt; e-mail: relmahdi@aucegypt.edu
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Extract

In English the terms “political system” and “political regime” are used to distinguish different constructs. The first was initially developed by behavioralists such as David Easton and Gabriel Almond to replace the older, institutionalist term, the “state”; the second typically designates the arrangements for producing a government. In Arabic, though, the words “system” and “regime” both translate as niẓām. This piece argues that when millions of citizens across the Arab region came out in 2011 chanting al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām, those chants marked a critical juncture in a long process reflecting the end of not just the existing regimes, but also the states as we knew them. Whether defined in terms of governing institutions and capabilities, as Lisa Anderson, Ellen Lust, and Ariel Ahram do, or in terms of discourse, imagination, and symbolic power, as Ellis Goldberg and Charles Tripp do, the state was withering away long before the uprising. Concomitantly, the heightened levels of repression and shifts within official discourse by the changing ruling elite after the uprisings signal a perceived threat to the state itself, and not just to a particular regime. And while this piece focuses on Egypt, unlike some of the other contributions in this collection, I argue that the nation-state, as a conceptual and material construct, is being challenged.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 328 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

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