chapter 3

Col on i a lism i n
the R egion
Foundations, Legacies, and Continuities

Mark L e Vine

Understanding the legacy of colonialism is impossible without considering its

­historical and political–economic roots. “Colonialism” and its sister term, “imperialism,”
refer to processes that go back millennia, to the great Bronze Age empires, when
political authority first expanded to include large territories with many communities
and cultures (crucially, with different languages) under a significant degree of political,
military, and economic control of one central(izing) system. But while the great ancient,
classical, and premodern empires—­from Egypt and Rome to Byzantium and the
Abbasids—­shaped the history and even ideologies of modern imperialism and colonial-
ism, the actual methods, structures, and rationalities of governance changed in funda-
mental ways with the onset of modernity.
Before rehearsing the history of the last half-­millennium, we need to acknowledge the
confused if implicate relationship between “imperialism” and “colonialism.” While their
lexical roots lie deep in the Roman past (their differences are apparent in their Latin
roots: imperium, which means “to command,” and colonus, which means “a farmer”),
the two English words first appeared only in the mid-­19th century (cf. Williams 1976, 87,
159–160). The difference between commanding others and directly controlling and
(re)working territory is at the core of the difference between the two terms, but how that
difference is expressed semiotically can change depending on the moment and place in
time and the kind of questions one is addressing.
For the purposes of this discussion, we can define “imperialism” as a broader category
of action, of which colonialism is a specific and particularly intensive type. Specifically,
imperialism involves the projection of political, economic, cultural, and/or strategic
power, almost always backed at some point by military power, which reflects a significant
degree of control over foreign governments, peoples, and/or territory well beyond the
home territory. On the other hand, the conquest and/or imposition of formal sovereignty,
50   Mark LeVine

control, governance, and/or administration over a particular territory marks a degree of

intensification of control that can more properly be described as “colonialism.” So the
British and other European empires could deploy imperial power through their control
of the seas, successful engagements in interstate military conflict, and their ability to
determine and even impose specific kinds of trade relations and treaties, to encourage
or even compel smaller countries to become indebted to their financial systems, and to
establish various kinds of protection agreements with local leaders in regions, like the
Persian Gulf or the African and Indian coasts, that lacked the presence of strong local
states. Their policies and actions became specifically colonial when they asserted and/or
imposed direct control, sovereignty, and governance over overseas territories, often but
not always after militarily subduing them (or threatening to do so).
Historians have described over a dozen types of colonialism (Shoemaker 2015), but
most of those fall outside the narrower definition I have suggested. For the purposes of
studying colonial legacies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), I believe
two broad types are most relevant within the paradigm I’ve outlined. The first can be
termed “administrative” colonialism; epitomized by British rule in India, it involves the
actions I have described: imposing or establishing a foreign regime of governance and
administration over a territory (whether the territory is formally declared a colony or
termed a “protectorate” or “mandate” doesn’t change the basic dynamics of this regime).
The ability of the British government to rule the Indian subcontinent with only 20,000
soldiers and administrators is the best-­known example of administrative colonialism.
The second type is “settler colonialism,” which itself can be differentiated into two
broad types. The more typical version is when a colonial power moves significant num-
bers of its own population into a conquered, occupied, and/or annexed territory in
order to establish what Crosby (1986) describes as “neo-­Europes”—that is, new societies
peopled by settlers from the home society (and other Europeans) designed to resemble
the home country as much as possible. Algeria is perhaps the epitome of this kind of set-
tler colonialism, which also includes many of the British, French, German, and other
European African and American colonies and those in Australasia established across
the 18th and 19th centuries. In almost all of these cases the insertion of a settler popula-
tion was either initiated by or continued in coordination with the colonial and metro-
politan governments. Other colonies and protectorates, such as Tunis and Egypt, saw
the immigration of large numbers of Europeans of various classes as part of the larger
process of colonial rule and/or opening of the southern and eastern Mediterranean
more fully to the increasingly European-­dominated world system.
However, there are other settler colonial enterprises that were, at least at first, not
sponsored and/or controlled by European powers. The first English colonists in North
America are the seminal example of such settlement outside of Europe, followed by the
Dutch settlements in what today is South Africa. The most important example of this
kind of “unsponsored” settler colonialism in the MENA region was, of course, the
Zionist colonization of Palestine, which proceeded without an official state sponsor
and indeed against the wishes of a somewhat hostile Ottoman state until the British
­conquest of Palestine in 1917 and the creation of the British Mandate. The more than
 Colonialism in the Region   51

1 million French settlers in Algeria, along with 150,000 in colonial Tunisia, constituted
two of the most important examples of state-­sponsored settler colonialism in the
MENA region.

Colonial Identities

Having delineated the relationship between imperialism and colonialism, as well as the
different types of colonialism relevant to this discussion, a periodization of the process
of imperial and colonial expansion and how its different manifestations impacted the
subsequent history of the MENA region can be imagined. The peoples of the MENA
have been subject to conquest, large-­scale migrations, and imperial states for millennia,
the most relevant premodern example of which are the Islamic conquests and the
broader spread of Islam across the region. The era of modern colonialism/imperialism
begins in the mid-­15th century with the Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the
Portuguese navigation around western and into southern Africa, and finally the Spanish
and Portuguese arrival in the Americas, which inaugurated the first era of truly global,
overseas empire. The Iberian powers were followed soon by the Dutch, English, and
French as they began their overseas imperial empires, while in Asia, the Qing, Safavid,
Mughal, and Russian empires all rose to their greatest heights between the 16th and
18th centuries.
We can describe this period as the era of “proto-­globalization,” when the emerging
modern world system hadn’t transitioned from mercantilist to industrial capitalism.
There were two main differences between the two groups of early modern expansionist
empires, and they involved control over territory and identity. Regarding territory, the
Iberian, English, Dutch, and French empires were all based on the conquest, acquisi-
tion, and/or at least significant control over territories literally across the ocean from
comparatively small states at the imperial center. On the other hand, the great land-­based
empires—­from the Ottomans in the West to the Qing in the East—­were territorially
contiguous, the result of expanding out of a core territory to include adjacent regions
over many centuries.
The difference in imperial geographies produced profoundly important differences in
identity between rulers and ruled, and consequently in the relationship between the var-
ious subjects of these empires and those at its geographic and political/administrative
center. However ethnically and/or religiously hierarchical and concentrated political
power, the land-­based empires—­epitomized in the MENA at large by the Ottoman,
Safavid, and Mughal empires—­were to some degree cosmopolitan, in that most, if not
all, subjects shared a common juridical relationship to the ruler and a broader, common
imperial identity (even if the majority of people living in the empire had little contact
with or even knowledge of the imperial state). All of these land-­based empires were
based on certain ethnic and/or religious hierarchies, and their expansion was seldom
free of violence and prejudice.
52   Mark LeVine

But such differences were not ontological hierarchies that imagined and treated p
­ eople
outside the center and/or who were not members of the dominant religious, e­ thnic, or
tribal group as essentially and inalterably “other” and thus inferior. And rarely, if ever,
did anyone question whether the minority members of these empires had a history, were
rational and capable of reason, or were even human. But the emerging and quickly dom-
inant overseas or “New World” empires that began with the Spanish and Portuguese
arrival in the Americas were marked from their very start precisely by the need to
define local and indigenous populations over whom Europeans would exert control and
ultimately sovereignty as somehow civilizationally, historically, culturally, and intellec-
tually separate from and inferior to themselves—­indeed, not fully, if at all, human.
Even after Pope Paul III declared that “indios” were in fact human and had souls with
his 1537 papal encyclical Sublimus Deus, they continued to be enslaved, murdered, and
worked often to death, while African slaves were assigned the position of, at best, three-­
fifths of a fully human person. Colonized peoples fared not much better in many cases.
What is as clear as it is too often ignored is the unique and uniquely pernicious nature of
the way conquered and controlled peoples were perceived under modern European
(and, more broadly, Western) colonialism and imperialism, which has had a profound
impact on the entirety of world history to the present day.

The Modernity Supernova

If the era of modern colonialism and imperialism began in the second half of the 15th
century, the MENA region in fact was one of the later regions to experience its full force.
First, the region was under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, which reached its
zenith through the 17th century and then remained strong enough to maintain control
over most of its Arab/North African territories until World War I. On either side of the
Ottomans the situation was similar; despite losing what remained of its Iberian territory
in 1492, the Moroccan Sultanate remained a powerful and independent force well into
the 19th century; the Safavid Empire reached its zenith at the same time as the Ottomans,
and while its decline was perhaps more precipitous (and accelerated under the successor
Qajar Dynasty), the country’s strategic location encouraged its role as a buffer between
Russian and British imperial interests. It was only well into the first full era of globaliza-
tion, in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Greater Syria, that the balance of
power shifted more fully toward the British and French empires (LeVine 2005b, chap. 3).
Yet during the three centuries between the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas
and the onset of European colonialism in the MENA, European imperialism/colonial-
ism became what could be termed the generative order of the modern world system:
what I term the “modernity matrix.” The modernity matrix is a set of four processes—­
imperialism/colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, and modernity as an ideology and
set of discourses—­that evolved beginning with the global singularity of 1492, when the
Eurasian–African system and the Americas were first brought together into a true world
 Colonialism in the Region   53

system. The reason I describe these four processes as a matrix is that each of the
“coefficients” (to borrow the mathematical term for the elements in a matrix) shares a
fundamental dynamic of hierarchization, exclusion, and domination; and together they
are intensified and augmented through their interaction with each other.
Why is imperialism/colonialism, and particularly colonialism, not merely primus
inter pares among the four coefficients of the matrix, but the “generative order” of the
larger system (cf. Bohm 1980)? While capitalism and at least protean forms of nationalism
existed before 1492, they were both fundamentally transformed by the kind of imperialism
and colonialism that emerged with the global singularity of 1492 and the rapid assertion
of colonial sovereignty over the Western Hemisphere. The unparalleled immensity of
the territories, resources, and, through them, wealth suddenly available to the Atlantic
European maritime powers with the “discovery” of the “New World” unleashed a global
economic, political, strategic, and through them cultural supernova. At first, this explo-
sion of wealth energized many of the land-­based cosmopolitan empires across Eurasia,
producing a “global trade boom” with the sudden influx of silver and increase in trade
across Eurasia that lasted 300 years (cf. O’Rourke and Williamson 1999; LeVine 2005b)
and encouraging the formation of new states in Africa (with the wealth generated by the
slave trade) and ultimately the Americas as the Europeans lost control of their neo-­
European settler colonies. But over the course of the next two centuries the full destruc-
tive force of colonial capitalist modernity proved too powerful and destructive, eroding
and ultimately dismantling the political economies of most every other political system
on the planet, leaving the major European imperial powers in control of the vast major-
ity of the earth’s territory and oceans.

From Necromodernity to
Decolonization

The success of the post-­1492 Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises was
­unsustainable, as they literally burned out from the unparalleled wealth that moved
through them and the burgeoning capitalist world system. At the same time, the politi-
cal and ideological order of the nation-­state depended on an unprecedented genocide
(beginning and continuing to the present day with indigenous Americans, with stops
along the way across Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Australasia), and mass
enslavement of African peoples, which together were responsible in good measure for
the rise of a mercantilist world capitalist system of unique scale, intensity, and ferocity of
exploitation of peoples as well as ecosystems. The level of violence, death, and mass
exploitation demanded by this world system required ideologies, identities, and govern-
mentalities defined by aggressively policed hierarchies, exclusions, alienation, exclosure
(just as territory within the nation-­state underwent capitalist “enclosure”), and in
many cases replacement—­what we can term a discourse of erasure and reinscription
54   Mark LeVine

(LeVine 2005a; cf. Holston 1989) that emerged as a core element of modern nationalism,
capitalism, and modernity as both an ideology and a set of processes.
The colonial foundations and architecture of the modernity matrix were reflected in
two of its core characteristics that are rarely, if ever, discussed together: the coercive-­
extortive nature of modern ideologies, practices and institutions of governance, and the
hierarchical and exclusivist nature of each of the coefficients of the matrix. The first
characteristic has to do with the nature of modern states. Scholars of the MENA region
have long studied the “Arab state” and its counterparts in Turkey and Iran through a
normative lens that has compared—­and judged it—­vis-­à-­vis the normative liberal
Euro-­American model of governance at the political, institutional, and cultural levels.
Not only does the focus on the Arab/MENA “state” as somehow sui generis and
deformed miss the complexity of MENA states, but, as the work of Timothy Mitchell
(1991, 1998) on the nature of both the “state” and the “economy” so eloquently demon-
strates, analyzing the state as if it is a concrete set of institutions and actors misses per-
haps the most important characteristic of the modern state: its discursive, spatial,
epistemological, and, through them, political fluidity.

Specifically, one of the central aspects of modern modes of power is how the state
functions not as a set of institutions that concentrate and redistribute power, but
rather as the effect of a series of operations that constantly redefine and shift the
“limits” or boundaries between what is inside and outside a “state” that in fact does
not have a concrete existence. As Mitchell puts it, So politics itself is happening not
so much by some agency called “state” or “government” imposing its will on some
other preformed object—­the social, the population, the people—­but rather that it
concerns a series of techniques that create . . . the effect of a state: the very distinction
between what appears as a sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects
on which that power works. (interviewed in Schouten 2013, 6)

When we consider the state as the result of a series of discursive and ideological
moves and practices, rather than merely the site where they take place, it becomes clear
how permeable the institutional structure of the state is and why it’s so common for
states to be thoroughly penetrated by ostensibly “outside” actors and forces who utilize it
for “their” ends—­that is, it’s riven with corruption and abuses of publicly authorized
power. This dynamic holds true whether it’s the corruption of the Ba‘athist regimes in Syria
and Iraq, the Egyptian military, the Moroccan Makhzen (the country’s ruling elite and
institutions), the Turkish “deep state,” or, it should be clear, the long ago bought-­and-­paid-­
for US government (which in fact is Mitchell’s primary example of this phenomenon).
Indeed, it also becomes clear that one of the most powerful legacies of colonialism as the
generative order of modernity is the literally manufactured state, such as Iraq, Pakistan, or
Nigeria, that has little, if any, historical grounding and is doomed to continue the colonial
practices in the territories in which it emerged long after its creation and independence.
If the state is best, or at least well, understood as an effect of various relations and
technologies of power, it is also a series of networks through which particular kinds
of economic and social order are established and maintained, what Foucault
 Colonialism in the Region   55

(2003, 244–246) termed “biopower” as circulated by specific forms of “biopolitics.”

Capitalism is at the heart of this system, and the nation-­state is its ideal political form,
but the generative order has from the start been colonialism. Foucault (1990, 136–138)
defines biopolitics as a “quintessentially modern political rationality” focused on the
proper organization and administration of human life and populations “to ensure, sus-
tain, and multiply” life and put it “in order.”
But modern biopolitics suffered from what Foucault (2003, 62) termed in a 1975 lec-
ture at the College de France the “paradox” of a “racism that society . . . direct[s] against
itself . . . and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization.” As
Columbia University English professor Rachel Adams (2017) eloquently explains, “State
racism is for Foucault the essential characteristic of the modern biopolitical state: it is
both the function of the modern state and that which constitutes it.”
If the basic function of the modern state was to “order life” in order to ensure the
smooth functioning of capitalism, executing that function was shaped by the reality that
modern states and governing structures have from the start shared many characteristics
with “rackets”—criminal organizations that export money, resources, and loyalty in
return for protection (especially in times of war) from threats that, more often than not,
they’ve helped create. Watching the Nazi system solidify before their eyes, Frankfurt
School founder Max Horkheimer and colleagues such as Theodor Adorno, Leo
Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm adopted the terminology of criminality in the United
States, realizing, as Horkheimer explained in 1942, that “the basic form of domination is
the racket. . . . The most general functional category exercised by the group is protection”
(Horkheimer [1942] 1985, 291). Adorno would similarly warn how in authoritarian soci-
eties “the threat of retaliation always loomed over those who broke ranks,” in what he
called “a closed, violent, strictly ruled ingroup—­a racket” (Adorno 2000, 68; cf. Jay 2020).
The more that wealth and power in a society are concentrated, the more like a racket it
becomes, especially when the dynamics of protection and extortion are attenuated by
the violence of colonial, racial, gender, and/or class domination—­what the Peruvian
sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000) termed the “coloniality of power.” At the heart of the
coloniality of power is what Cameroonian critical theorist Achille Mbembe (2000) first
described as “necropolitics,” which is the state’s “right” not merely to kill and to organize
people to be killed, but also to expose people to extreme violence and death, to force
entire segments of populations to a state of exception (Agamben 1995), to the barest and
most precarious existence—­all in order to preserve the established economic and politi-
cal hierarchies.
Bio- and necropolitics, each with its own forms of productivity and violence, can’t
exist without each other, though the balance changes over time. The first two eras of
modern capitalism, between the 15th and 18th centuries and during the long 19th
­century, ending with the eruption of World War I, saw a unique synergy between the
two, enabled by the generative role of colonialism and the violence attending it in the
unprecedented wealth produced by the capitalist system. After two world wars sepa-
rated by a nearly global depression, the pendulum had swung back toward a more pro-
nounced biopolitical order in the era of postwar decolonization and development in the
56   Mark LeVine

Global South, which was accompanied by the rise of welfare states in the West. But these
changed in the 1970s, when what some economists (derisively) term “cuddly capitalism”
was replaced by the “cutthroat capitalism” of the emerging neoliberal order.
If the state can be understood as both an effect of various types of routinely changing
power relations and a racket, what Charles Tilly (1985) famously described as the crimi-
nal nature of all states—­not merely their similarity to, but also their functioning as
extortion and protection rackets in the manner of mafias—­and the importance of war as
a way of deriving power and profit become clear. When war-­making and state-­making
are combined, the synergy of violence and criminality are uniquely powerful. What
Mitchell’s and Tilly’s arguments, taken together, tell us, then, is not merely that all states
are inherently colonial, and thus based on processes of exclusion, hierarchization, and
violence, but that they are also, inherently, criminal. Barring very specific political and
economic circumstances, such as the Great Depression and post–World War II recon-
struction when the desperateness of the situation gave workers and ordinary people
more power over government and capital, their institutional and political structures and
ideologies will always tend toward using their monopoly on violence and their cultural–
political hegemony to ensure the perpetuation of political–economic power by elites.
This is why it’s been so difficult for most state systems to function in the interests of the
majority of their populations.
This analysis of colonial and state power is lent further credence if we consider the
development of the most important sociological approaches of the last several decades:
decolonial and indigenous theories and methodologies. Decolonial and indigenous the-
ories and methodologies emerged out of the subaltern and postcolonial traditions
developed first by scholars of and in South Asia and the Middle East, epitomized by the
work of Edward Said on orientalism and the subaltern studies group’s new historiography
of colonial India.
There is no denying the epistemological (and political) power of postcolonial and
subaltern studies; they have generated some, if not much, of the most important and
innovative research on both colonialism and the periods before and after it since the
1980s, including in the MENA region. But there was a conceptual flaw in both postcolo-
nial and subaltern studies, and that was the lack of a broader understanding of the
coloniality of power, which for half a millennium has been the core generating power
and generative order of modern political systems and apparatuses. The recognition of
modern political power’s fundamental coloniality explains why colonial ideologies,
hierarchies, and policies so often continues both in the metropole and in former colonies
long after colonialism has formally ended, making any transition to a democratic, or at
least more just and equitable, political economy well-­nigh impossible in the postcolony
comprising the colonizing and colonized (Mbembe 2000).
And so, the situation that persists today is one where most states, regardless of
their global position, are inherently both colonial and criminal in their aims, practices,
and/or discourses of governance toward their citizens, all the more so when, rather
than being the agents of colonialism (that is, European states), they are its creation
(that is, the postcolonial states of the Global South). Indeed, this dynamic helps
 Colonialism in the Region   57

explain why, like the two partners in a long-­term abusive relationship, it seems
equally hard for former colonial/imperial powers to behave as such vis-­à-­vis their
former colonies or spheres of influence and for postcolonial states to stop behaving
as if they are still colonized.
Finally, no analysis of the coloniality of power in the context of the modernity matrix
would be complete without a discussion of the level of violence involved in the unfold-
ing of colonial capitalism and modernity: genocide on an unprecedented scale, killing
tens of millions of people; the enslavement of at least 12 million Africans; the develop-
ment of an extractive, then agricultural, and finally industrial capitalism that worked
millions of people to early graves, especially in the colonized world; and, finally, war
and colonial conquest on a global scale. All these constituted a series of wounds
which, like being stabbed or shot, take an instant to inflict but a lifetime—­collectively,
many generations—­to heal.
Franz Fanon eloquently captures this dynamic when he discusses the “enormous
wound” (énorme plaie) inflicted by the colonizer, whose every action serves to inflict
and maintain a “systematic negation of the other and a frantic decision to refuse the
other any attribute of humanity” (Fanon [1961] 2002, 240). This in turn produces the
kind of schizophrenic or split consciousness that both Fanon, and Du Bois before him,
made the centerpiece of their psychologies. As John Drabinski (2012, 130–132) put it,
summarizing Fanon’s thinking, “To be colonized is to be wounded.”
This is the context in which we must understand the particularly “creative d
­ estruction”
of colonial capitalism in the colonies and why it was far greater and more destructive
than in the metropole, reflecting a “necropolitics” at the core of capitalist modernity
based as much on death and displacement as on exploitation (cf. Mbembe 2019). Indeed,
we can understand colonialism as both the seminal and quintessential example of nec-
ropolitics. As former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo tellingly described it, “It is
virtually impossible to estimate the full social costs of colonialism, from its inception,
through its exploitative existence, to the huge human and material resources that went
into dislodging it from our continent” (Obasanjo 2000).
The other core characteristic of the modernity matrix, and particularly of the moder-
nity coefficient, is how from the start the very possibility of being “modern” depends on
creating a category of pre- or non-­modern political subjects against whom modernity is
defined. To quote Mitchell again with reference to modern cities, “The identity of the
modern city is in fact created by what it keeps out. Its modernity is something contin-
gent upon the exclusion of its own opposite. In order to determine itself as the place of
order, reason, propriety, cleanliness, civilization and power, it must represent outside
itself what is irrational, disordered, dirty, libidinous, barbarian and cowed” (Mitchell
1998, 165). Particularly in the context of the rise of Enlightenment discourses, liberalism,
and secular emancipatory politics, modern capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism all
engaged in the same process of separating out colonizers from colonized, attributing all
the positive characteristics of enlightened modernity to them, while depriving those on
the wrong end of the power spectrum of any agency, rationality, or possibility of devel-
opment, at least without a long and necessarily harsh European tutelage.
58   Mark LeVine

How did this dynamic affect the mechanisms of rule? To quote the first British viceroy
of Egypt, the Earl of Cromer (1908),

because of the mind of the Oriental . . . of the most slipshod description . . . [and] sin-
gularly deficient in the logical faculty . . . it may be doubted whether any instance can
be quoted of a sudden transfer of power in any civilized or semi-­civilized commu-
nity to a class so ignorant as the pure Egyptians. . . . Neither, for the present, do they
appear to possess the qualities which would render it desirable, either in their own
interests, or in those of the civilized world in general, to raise them at a bound to the
category of autonomous ruler with full rights of internal sovereignty.

Clearly, the need to define the colonized other as utterly lacking in the most basic
­elements of a modern identity, never mind modern political, economic, and sociocultural
structures, has from the start been the sine qua non for the justification for European
colonialism—­and the mass violence, displacement, and exploitation that have inevita-
bly accompanied it—­and the “civilizing mission” and “white man’s burden” that were the
only hope to cure these deficiencies.
If the processes, ideologies, identities, and governmentalities of modern capitalism,
nationalism, and the nation-­state are not merely derived from but inherently and
­inalterably colonial, then the impossibility for so-­called postcolonial countries to
develop and fairly administer what one Arab critic of globalization has termed a
“human nationalism” (LeVine 2005b), one comprising relatively representative politics
and economic systems that are equitable and not inherently corrupt, becomes far
more understandable. Less known yet equally important is the manner in which the
“coloniality of power” has long—­indeed, always—­functioned in MENA societies during
the modern era: before, during, and after colonial rule.
The Ottoman Empire managed to maintain its independence, however constrained
by loss of territory, wealth, and prestige, until World War I saw it stripped of its remain-
ing Arab territories. While the first wave of modernization reforms (the so-­called
Tanzimat undertaken by the Ottoman Porte beginning in 1839) were based largely on
traditional Islamic principles of governance (Abu Manneh 1994) that could have
encouraged the emergence of a “Levantine modernity,” by the latter part of the 19th cen-
tury, at the same moment the empire had become one of Europe’s “best colonies,” it also
began to see itself in the mold of the major European colonial powers: a “modern mem-
ber of the civilized community of nations” and the “committed advocate of reform in the
Orient.” It even desired to emulate the other “civilized” nations by sending colonists
to the “dark continent” to “bring the light of Islam into savage regions” (this account
taken from LeVine 2005a, 7–10; Minawi 2016; Deringil 1999; Kayalı 1997; Rogan 1999;
Brummett 2000).
Once it set out to become modern, the Ottoman state absorbed the inherently hierar-
chical, exclusivist, and colonialist paradigms that were at the heart of European moder-
nity, from privatization of land to “free trade” agreements. In striving to become as
modern as Europe, the Ottoman state became just another European imperial power
 Colonialism in the Region   59

spreading a modernity that was defined by the separation of and hierarchy between
­peoples and increased exploitation of the poor. Indeed, when we think of the empire in
this way, the move toward genocide against Armenians takes on a new significance, as a
predictable result of, rather than aberration from, an exclusivist colonial-­modern
rationality (cf. Berberian 2019; Bauman 1989).
It is worth comparing the experience of the late Ottoman Empire with that of the
Moroccan Sultanate on the other side of the MENA. The Sultanate was similarly strained
during the 19th century as it began losing territory to Spain and France (Britain mean-
while cemented its imperial power through brokering treaties and imposing a huge loan
on the Sultanate to repay its war debt to France and Spain). Finally, French and Spanish
protectorates were created in 1912 that lasted until 1956. But unlike the Ottoman state or
the numerous regions, territories, and peoples of the MENA region who saw some level
of imposed imperial/colonial rule, the Makhzen arguably benefited from the imposition
of foreign rule. That is, the French colonial government and its army (and to a lesser
extent the Spanish) modernized the Moroccan state and, as important, achieved an
unprecedented degree of control over formerly “dissident” territory—­the so-­called Blad
as-­siba (“land of dissidence”), the large swaths of the country that were rarely if ever
under the direct control of the sultan and had regularly to be forcibly compelled to swear
allegiance or pay taxes. Essentially, the French helped bring the majority of the Blad as-­
siba under the control of the Blad al-­Makhzen – the main urban centers and adjacent
territory that were traditionally controlled by the Sultan. Indeed, one might well imagine
that the sultanate would not have survived to the present day without its modernisation
à la française, with Morocco becoming a republic like its Algerian and Tunisian counter-
parts. But the Makhzen, with its centuries-­deep roots, was able to strengthen and even
deepen its penetration of society under French “protection,” successfully transition to a
modern monarchy, and, ultimately, become a colonizing power in its own right with the
occupation and annexation of the Western Sahara in 1975.

Tightening and Loosening the Ties

That Bind, from the Colonial
to the Global Eras

Most of the precolonial MENA constitutions had, like other constitutions of the era, two
distinct audiences and functions. The first was external, establishing the sovereignty of
the state over the territory in question against any potential internal or external chal-
lengers. The second was to establish a concept of citizenship and a relationship among
citizens, and between them and the ruler and his state. To some degree or another, all
these reimagined relationships could be related to the institution of the ahl al-­hall wa-­l-­‘aqd,
known in English as “those who loosen and bind” (literal meaning: “the people of
60   Mark LeVine

s­ olving problems and making contracts”). Although the concept is rooted in the Jewish
and then Christian concepts of the authority possessed by certain members of the com-
munity to determine what is permissible or not (cf. Ps. 20; Matt. 6:19; Acts 2:14–40), it
was more immediately drawn from one of the most important verses in the Qur’an
(4:59), which begins “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and
those in authority among you.”
Ahl al-­hall wa-­l-­‘aqd was deployed in medieval Islamic political discourse by jurists
like Ibn Taymiyya and al-­Juwayni to refer to the members of the religious and the politi-
cal elite in society who were tasked with selecting and, when necessary, deposing a ruler.
Also known as ahl al-­ikhtiyar (“the people who choose,” or electors—­i.e., of the next
imam or leader), the ahl al-­hall wa-­l-­‘aqd were those who possess the “might”—that is,
the shawka (“power and authority”)—to ensure that their choices would be accepted
most widely by the whole community and in so doing ensure stability as well as effec-
tive rule.
The question, whether in the classical era or today, has remained as to who has the
power to “bind and loosen” the highest level of political authority. In the modern era,
beginning with the Tunisian Constitution (cf. Brown 2001), the ahl al-­hall wa-­l-­‘aqd
came to take on a particularly important significance, related to the expanded meaning
of shura, or consultation, related to the spread of the idea of democracy in Islamic
thought, as evidenced by its use by well-­known religious modernizers like Muhammad
Abduh and his disciple Rashid Rida, who expanded the kinds of people who possessed
the shawka to be part of the ahl al-­hall wa-­l-­‘aqd to include increasing numbers of non-­
elite citizens, including even journalists.
When coupled with the ideas of shura (consultation) and ijma ‘(consensus), the insti-
tution of the ahl al-­hall wa-­l-­‘aqd illustrated the many concepts indigenous to Islam and
Muslim societies that could, like the so-­called “Protestant ethic” in Europe, push the
MENA region forward toward the kind of development that, after immense bloodshed
and oppression, the majority of Western countries achieved after World War II. But the
essential coloniality of modern political power, coupled with the ultimately overwhelm-
ing power of European imperialism and colonialism across the MENA, prevented such
a development most everywhere in the region (although it’s fitting that the one country
to enjoy a democratic transition since the 2011 Arab uprisings is Tunis, home of the
region’s first constitution exactly 150 years before). As Samir Amin so pointedly wrote,
the transformation from competitive to imperial capitalisms that Europe alone was
­fortuitously positioned to make thanks to its unique combination of luck, geography
(its location vis-­à-­vis the New World), and favorable resource stocks (especially coal)
constituted the “point of departure for the conquest of the world” (Amin 1989, 152).
That point of departure had developed quite a long and winding trajectory by the era
of high imperialism that began in the last quarter of the 19th century and continued
until World War II (see Table 3.1).
Each of these examples of European colonial rule reflects a different iteration of the
generative coloniality of power for the larger process of modernization across the
region, impacting the specific ways in which national identities and the political
 Colonialism in the Region   61

Table 3.1 Timeline of European Colonial Rule

Year Event

1798 French invasion and occupation of Egypt (ended by 1801)

1820 British-­designed Maritime Treaty in Persian Gulf
1830 French invasion and colonization of Algeria (completed in 1848)
1830 Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire
1830–1878 Increasing autonomy and ultimately independence of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro,
and Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire
1839 British conquer Aden, which is ruled as part of British India until 1937, when it
becomes a Crown Colony
1860 Creation of autonomous Mount Lebanon region under French protection
1870-­1882 First modern non-­indigenous Jewish settlements established in Palestine.
1881 Imposition of French protectorate in Tunis
1882 Imposition of British protectorate in Egypt
1882 Creation of first Zionist settlement in Palestine
1889 Beginning of Italian protectorate in Somaliland
1892 Establishment of Trucial States in Persian Gulf under British protection
1899 Anglo–Egyptian invasion, occupation, and establishment of a “condominium” in the Sudan
1904 Mauritania becomes a French colony
1909 First exclusively Jewish urban center (Tel Aviv) and kibbutz (Degania) established in Palestine
1910 Italian conquest of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (present-­day Libya)
1912 Imposition of French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco
1914 World War I (ends 1918)
1915 British support for Hashemite “Arab” Revolt in Arabia
1916 Qatar becomes British protectorate
1917 British and French conquest of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire
1917 Balfour Declaration signals British support for the Zionist movement and the establish-
ment of a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine while ignoring Palestinian rights
1920 San Remo Conference and official division of the Ottoman territories
1920 British establish a protectorate over northwestern Somaliland, known as British Somaliland
1923 Imposition of the League of Nations mandates over Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon,
Syria, and Mesopotamia/Iraq
1937 Aden’s status “upgraded” to British Crown Colony
1937 Peel Commission proposes first partition plan to divide Palestine between Jews and
Palestinians

structures that contained them emerged, as well as how capitalism evolved and interacted
with local political economies. While some countries, like Algeria and present-­day
Libya, took years and large-­scale violence to pacify, others, such as Somaliland and the
Gulf sheikhdoms, sought European protection. Still others, like Tunis, initially aided
European colonial ambitions before succumbing to them or, like Egypt, didn’t let their
own colonization get in the way of working with their colonizer to colonize jointly their
neighbor to the south.
As we’ve already seen, Morocco’s ruling system owes much of its resilience and even
the survival of the monarchy and the territorial integrity of the state (never mind the
62   Mark LeVine

successful occupation of Western Sahara) to the practices of governance and control put
in place by the French. Across the MENA in Iraq, which was created out of three sepa-
rate if neighboring and long-­interacting provinces of the Ottoman Empire, an in­de­
pend­ence movement erupted among “Iraqis” already by 1920. And yet even as newly
minted Iraqis revolted against British rule, the inclusion of a large segment of Kurdish
territory in the mandated territory of Iraq, Syria and the post-­Ottoman rump Turkish so
soon after the Kurds were promised an autonomous state in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres
represented one of the great political and ethnic erasures of the colonial era, matched
only by the equally devastating erasure of Palestinians from the territory that officially
bore their name, and the absorption of Armenia into the Soviet Union and Turkey.
Indeed, the betrayal of Palestinians’ as well as Kurds’ and Armenians’ expectations
highlights the lack of humanity at the core of the European colonial project. Yet their
abandonment by the Great Powers is only the most notable example of how imperial
“great politics” completely disregarded the promises it made to conquered people. The
entirety of the imperial and colonial enterprise in the modern era similarly failed to
­“civilize” and “uplift” conquered peoples, not because the burden on the “white man”
(i.e., Europe) was too great but, rather, as we’ve seen, because by its very nature and
structure colonially derived capitalism, nationalism, and modernity are based on and
require conquest, domination, hierarchization, and intensification of inequalities in
power, freedom, and wealth in order to survive and grow. This is why, as Homi Bhabha
(1984, 1994) has so eloquently stated, the vision of “civilization,” freedom, modernity,
and development inevitably created a system of mimicry which, like a mirage or rain-
bow in the distance, always recedes the closer the colonized move toward it, while dehu-
manizing the colonized along the way.
This dehumanization at the very heart of colonially derived and shaped European
humanism and Enlightenment is a core contributor in the rise of specific types of ethnic,
religious, and political violence across the MENA region in the past two centuries.
Needless to say, the history of interethnic, sectarian, religious, and internecine conflict
in the MENA long preceded modernity, as it did in every region of the globe. But the
introduction of European colonialities of power across the MENA shaped the way in
which violence was imagined, understood, deployed, and experienced, and its imbrica-
tion in political discourses and practices, in unique ways that profoundly shaped the
“limits” or borders of the colonial and post-­independence states and societies of the
region alluded to by Mitchell.
Thus, whether it was the Druze–Maronite “civil war” of the 1860s, the Armenian
genocide during and after World War I, the Zionist–Palestinian conflict of 1882 until the
present day, the Iraq–Iran war and Iraqi genocide of Kurds of 1947–1949, or the rise of
the Islamic State and civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Somalia today, the violence that has
so profoundly shaped the region was itself shaped in powerful ways by the shifting (im)
balances of power between the major European powers and the states and polities of the
MENA. To be sure, not all of these conflicts were caused directly by growing European
imperial and colonial presence, power, and/or control; but all of them were in part the
inevitable outcome of changing political and strategic economies across the MENA as
 Colonialism in the Region   63

Table 3.2 Timeline of Independence

Year of formal Country Notes
Independence

1918 Yemen (North) Independence from Ottoman Empire

1922 Egypt Unilaterally granted by UK
1923 Republic of Turkey declared
1925 Inauguration of Pahlavi Dynasty “Persia” changed to “Iran” in 1935
1932 Iraq and Saudi Arabia Iraq—­UK; Saudi Arabia—­uncolonized
1943 Syria and Lebanon France; completed in 1946
1946 Transjordan UK
1948 Israel Palestine permanently divided, 1 million
Palestinians exiled between 1948 and 1967
1951 Libya and Oman Libya—­UN; Oman—­UK
1956 Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan Morocco, Tunisia—­France; Sudan—­UK/Egypt
1960 Mauritania and Somalia France and UK
1962 Algeria France (war of independence 1956–1962)
1971 Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar UK
1977 Djibouti France

the balances of power shifted from local to European powers and financial interests,
even as many sub-­regions within the MENA actually saw significant growth and greater
autonomy because of the emerging system.
Highlighting the complexity of the situation, in the interwar era European control
was consolidated across the MENA even as many countries were granted “in­de­pend­
ence” before, during, and after World War II (see Table 3.2).
Despite official independence, countries, like most every mandate and protectorate,
remained more or less under French or British control for decades after the formal end
of foreign rule, at least until the coups d’état and revolutions that toppled the first gener-
ation of postcolonial regimes: in Egypt in 1952, in Iraq in 1958, in Algeria with the suc-
cessful National Liberation Front war of independence against France in 1962, in Syria
in 1963, in South Yemen in 1968, in Libya in 1969, and finally in Iran in 1977–1979. In the
midst of this era there was continual Western—­now largely US, British, French, and
Soviet—­intervention across the region, from planning and executing outright coups,
as happened in Iran with the 1953 CIA- and MI6-­initiated toppling of Mohammed
Mossadeq (where the aptly code-­named “Operation Ajax” wiped Iran clean of any
chance of a nationalist government for the next 25 years, until the Islamic Revolution)
and in Iraq in 1963 and 1968 with the two Ba‘athist coups (also likely supported, if not
spearheaded, by American and British intelligence services). Concurrent with this more
direct interference was the “tripartite aggression” of the Suez crisis in 1956 (when the
United Kingdom, France, and Israel teamed up to attempt to topple Nasser by initiating
an invasion of the Sinai), the creation of the Baghdad Pact in 1955, the US intervention in
Lebanon in 1958 in support of the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” French and then US support
for Israel’s military and nuclear programs in the 1950s and 1960s (especially after the
64   Mark LeVine

ostensibly miraculous victory in the Six Day War), and the all-­out US and broader
Western support for Israel, as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the so-­called moderate
Arab monarchies and republican governments across the MENA since the last two
decades of the twentieth century.
The ongoing coloniality of power across the region naturally produced its own oppo-
sition, whether in the form of revolutionary movements within military forces that
overthrew pro-­Western (and in some cases even post-­revolutionary) governments, or
various strands of secular and later religiously grounded organizations that were com-
mitted to the violent dismantling of existing systems (from the PLO and its various fac-
tions from the 1960s-­1980s, to al-­Qaeda’s war against the Saudi regime and then United
States in the 1990s, through the Islamic State’s desire to tear up Sykes-­Picot and literally
redraw the borders of the MENA region during the 2010s. But since the emergence of
the neoliberal world system in the late 1970s, the only successful revolution has been in
Iran with the creation of the Islamic Republic, which was considered by no less than
Foucault (who visited Iran during the protests that toppled the Shah) described as the
“first great revolt . . . of bare hands . . . against neoliberalism” (Foucault 1987, 11). By 1990
even the formerly staunchly Arab socialist Syrian regime joined Operation Desert
Storm to remove Iraq from Kuwait, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a
more or less complete realignment of the region by the early 1990s toward a monopolar
US-­led order, with only Iran, Hezbollah, a massively weakened and contained Iraq and,
for a while, Libya still in the confrontation camp.
To be sure, US hegemony has been challenged since then, first by the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001, then by growing Iranian assertiveness in the face of US sanctions,
the rebirth of an aggressive and self-­assured Russian foreign policy, and by the rise of
China as a major economic and strategic player across the MENA. But even after the
disastrous US invasion of Iraq—­the clearest example of a direct imposition of imperial/
colonial occupation since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait the previous decade—­the United
States remained the singularly important strategic, military, and economic actor in the
region, using its massive, military and security-­dominated aide packages, massive arms
sales, and diplomatic support for regimes across the region, as well as its network of doz-
ens of often massive military bases, spread out from Morocco to Pakistan, to ensure its
continued power and influence. How this has occurred is the subject of the next section.

The Rise of Neoliberal (Dis)Order

While the colonial era that began in the MENA with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in
1798 ended officially with the independence of the last of the Gulf sheikhdoms (the
United Arab Emirates and Bahrain) in 1971, the legacies of colonialism and the colonial-
ity of power remain to the present day. Indeed, they were (re)solidified and often
strengthened by the openings (infitah) to the emerging neoliberal economic order so
many societies underwent (LeVine 2005b), beginning with Sadat’s infitah program
 Colonialism in the Region   65

initiated one year after the 1973 Ramadan/Yom Kippur war, and which marked his
reorientation of Egypt’s geostrategic as well as economic relations away from the Soviet
Union and toward the West. The structural adjustment programs designed and often
imposed by the major Washington Consensus institutions (the US government, the
International Monetary Fund [IMF], the World Bank, and related institutions) soon
penetrated most of the Western-­aligned countries of the region, featuring the usual pol-
icy prescriptions of floating local currencies, lowering tariffs, and opening more fully to
foreign investment and trade, all of which necessitated an end to so-­called import sub-
stitution industrialization and the subsidies on which it depended (which usually meant
decimating local industries). At the same time, social spending and subsidies were cut—­
enless or until mass protests forced them to be reinstituted—­to reduce budget deficits,
while government income would be devoted increasingly to service the debts incurred
by bailout loans from international financial institutions. As Raymond Williams pointed
out in Keywords (1976, 160–161), “If imperialism is understood primarily as an economic
system of external investment and the penetration and control of markets and sources of
raw materials, political changes in the status of colonies or former colonies [did] not
greatly affect description of the continuing economic system as imperialist.”
Whether in the MENA region or across the world, Washington Consensus policies
usually led to anti-­austerity protests once the cuts in subsidies and support for ordinary
citizens were implemented. A “bread intifada” (intifaḍat-­ul-­khobz), erupted in Egypt in
January 1977 and was followed by protests in Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and across the
region. These same issues have continued to plague governments to the present day;
they are considered among the prime causes of the Arab uprisings (cf. Mossallam 2015)
as well as the return to protests (including Iran) in 2018–2019. As the paper of record of
the neoliberal order, the Financial Times, asked in a 2018 article, was the IMF “sowing
seeds of a second Arab spring” as repression replaced subsidies to contain the social
unrest such policies inevitably caused (England and Saleh 2018). Had FT’s editors read
Raymond Williams, they wouldn’t have had to ask.
David Harvey (2004), the leading theorist of the neoliberal order, was not telling most
citizens of the MENA anything they didn’t already know when he argued that contem-
porary, neoliberal globalization “represents the ‘new imperialism,’ ” one defined by
“accumulation by dispossession” (that is, controlling a country’s resources, land, and
labor), rather than anything resembling the free market and liberal democracy adver-
tised by its acolytes and salespeople. This was already the common experience and
understanding by the 1990s (cf. LeVine 2005b, ch. 5). If this reality is becoming more
inescapable today in the Global North, it’s been the defining feature of global capitalism
everywhere else for half a millennium. But there have been significant changes in the
dynamics of the modernity matrix and the role of colonialism and imperialism in them
since the mid-­1970s infitah programs ushered in the neoliberal age in the MENA.
If the initiation of neoliberal reforms began with Sadat’s 1974 infitah program the
­harbinger of the dynamics underlying the contemporary praxis of governmentality was
in fact the October War of 1973, which saw the OPEC oil embargo and the massive rise in
the price of petroleum and, with it, the profits accruing to the primary oil-­producing
66   Mark LeVine

countries and the major oil companies, whose historic profits in turn launched an
unprecedented “arms-­petrodollar” exchange cycle linking the Saudis and other major
Gulf producers besides Iraq even more tightly to the US. This dynamic had a precedent,
however, and it was in the previous attempt to ensure Saudi Arabis’ growing petroleum
profits would not harm the interests and profits of the major US oil companies.
In his “Limits of the State,” Timothy Mitchell (1991) explored how the major US oil
companies got the US government to change the way their profits were taxed after World
War II when the Saudis demanded an increase in the royalty payment from 12 to 50 per-
cent and, unwilling either to cut its profits or to raise the price of oil, Aramco arranged
for the increase in royalty to be paid not by the company but by US taxpayers by exploit-
ing, with the help of the State Department, a loophole in the tax law so that royalties
were treated as direct foreign taxes that could be subtracted from Aramco’s corporate
tax bill, thus preserving its immense profits while also directing a massive increase in
wealth to the Saudis. “This collusion between government and oil companies,” Mitchell
argues, “obliging U.S. citizens to contribute unaware to the treasury of a repressive
Middle Eastern monarchy and the bank balances of some of the world’s most profitable
multinational corporations, does not offer much support for the image of a neat distinc-
tion between state and society” (1991, 89–90).
Indeed, the case study of Aramco points to the foundation of the postcolonial order in
the MENA region. With the British and French empires spent, the United States now
globally ascendant, and the Soviet Union hot on its heels as the second global hegemon,
the stage was set for a not so “neo” imperial and colonial order globally, one in which the
MENA countries, which were largely in the “Western” camp now under the control of the
United States, eventually split in the 1950s and 1960s into those regimes that remained
anchored to the United States and former colonial powers and those, like Egypt, Syria,
Iraq, Algeria, Yemen, and Libya, that saw, through independence movements, coups,
and revolutions, “Arab socialist” systems of varying styles take power.
Whatever their political shortcomings, including large-­scale violence and repression of
their citizens, the socialist Arab regimes initiated large-­scale socioeconomic transfor-
mations in their countries that unleashed a veritable revolution in human development
across the region—­in literacy and education levels, health indicators, and similar
­markers—­by the late 1960s, and for countries like Iraq, Algeria, and Libya, blessed with
large petroleum reserves, well into the 1970s and beyond (that massive regime corruption
syphoned off a significant percentage of the wealth petroleum generated doesn’t gainsay
the large amounts allocated to social and economic development or the gains they
brought). The increasingly wealthy Persian Gulf countries, Iran as well as its Arab neigh-
bors, also saw extremely high levels of development as the money began pouring in after
1973. All this wealth was distributed throughout the region in the form of remittances as
millions of Arabs from poorer countries without oil reserves, such as Egypt and exiled
Palestinians, moved to the Gulf to work (cf. LeVine 2005b; Hanieh 2013; Chalcraft 2016).
Over the next two decades, however, oil prices sank precipitously, Iran and Iraq
became engaged in a brutal eight-­year-­long war, all of which made the structural
adjustment programs imposed across the MENA that much more painful for ordinary
 Colonialism in the Region   67

citizens. Many of the previous gains were lost and, with them, the “authoritarian bargain”
that enabled governments to trade democracy for high levels of human development. At
the same time, neoliberal polices and the social, economic and political imaginaries and
cartographies they called into being, created new opportunities for amassing wealth and
power within MENA societies, just as they did globally. Whether it was militaries get-
ting into manufacturing and then privatizing state-­owned businesses (Egypt); kings and
presidents gaining personal control over large sections of previously nationalized sec-
tors (Morocco, Yemen); the children of the political leadership flocking to Paris,
London, and Boston to get MBAs and financialize significant parts of their countries’
economies (Egypt, Libya); the emergence of reformatted business–government elite
networks (Syria); or merely the intensification of corruption, graft, and outright theft of
unfathomable amounts of the national economy (Tunisia, Yemen), the emerging neo-
liberal regime strengthened and entrenched some power networks while opening space
for new actors to challenge those that were less fleet of foot.
While the neoliberal realignment started in the 1970s and picked up steam in the
1980s, the watershed moment was the 1991 Gulf War that resulted after Saddam Hussein
invaded and occupied Kuwait in August 1990. This moment signified the rise of the
United States to hyperpower status and with it the Washington Consensus as the “only
game in town” when it came to most countries looking to “develop” or “modernize.”
Without Soviet patronage and support regimes like Syria’s and Libya’s began moving
toward the “Western” orbit, but as liberalization and privatization increased and social
safety nets and other elements of the previous “authoritarian bargains” began to fray
new kinds of political openings, albeit very controlled from above, began to occur.
To accompany the end, or at least renegotiation, of the authoritarian bargains, gov-
ernments seemed to “liberalize,” at least superficially and to a small degree, the space for
oppositional politics, even as repression against any forms of dissent or challenge to the
system was ramped skyward. On the one hand, there was, if not quite a flowering, then a
budding of civil society and parliamentary systems across the region, especially in the
moderate monarchies like Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait, and, to a lesser and far more
superficial extent, in Egypt. But this was also accompanied both by an intensive crack-
down on any truly oppositional politics as well as by any elements of civil society that
actually threatened the discursive and political and ideological boundaries or borders
between “states” and societies.

Deeper States and Upgraded

Authoritarianism

Whether “weak” or “strong,” shallow or “deep,” in monarchies as well as republics,

most states of the MENA and their societies have struggled to address the often incom-
mensurate demands for both liberalization and privatization (usually accomplished,
68   Mark LeVine

if at all, in a quite distorted and corrupt form) and for “bread, freedom, and social justice,”
as the rallying cry for the Arab Uprisings put it. These struggles were reflected in the suc-
cessive failure of post-­independence, then revolutionary, then post-­revolutionary states
to maintain the so-­called authoritarian bargain across the region and in how even redis-
tributive “revolutionary” states descended into little more than murderous military-­
ruled mafias, especially with the arrival of neoliberal “openings” in the mid-­1970s.
And yet, the move toward neoliberalism offered authoritarian states, if not long-­
suffering peoples and societies, the chance to reboot. As Steven Heydemann argues,
the ability of repressive regimes to adjust their policies of control in the neoliberal era
to accommodate and manage changing political, economic, and social conditions—­
what scholars have termed “authoritarian upgrading”—is crucial to their survival. As
he writes, “Authoritarian upgrading consists in other words not in shutting down and
closing off Arab societies from globalization and other forces of political, economic,
and social change. Nor is it based simply on the willingness of Arab governments to
repress their opponents . . . [but rather] is shaped by what might be called ‘authoritarian
learning’ ” (2007, 1–2).
This process accelerated as online public spheres and through them real-­world civil
societies began to develop and push for greater freedom and accountability. Until the
eruption of the uprisings beginning in late 2010, governments sought to contain, redi-
rect, when possible co-­opt pressure from below and, when necessary, even facilitate
“controlled forms of political contestation” as exemplified by the growing participation
of Islamist political parties in formal parliamentary political processes. At the same
time, regimes and the systems they protected and administered had to walk a tightrope
between ongoing demands to apply Washington Consensus policies and more success-
fully integrate into global markets while addressing the demand by various classes
(including burgeoning middle classes) for a level of economic opportunity commensu-
rate with the sacrifice of guaranteed education, jobs, healthcare, and subsidies that
defined the previous authoritarian bargains.
In this context, what Mitchell concluded about the “borders” between Aramco and
the US government almost three-­quarters of a century ago is relevant for the manner in
which MENA states function today:

It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through

which a certain social and political order is maintained. The point that the state’s
boundary never marks a real exterior can suggest why it seems so often elusive and
unstable. But this does not mean the line is illusory. On the contrary . . . producing
and maintaining the distinction between state and society is itself a mechanism that
generates resources of power. (1991, 90)

This description accurately conveys the reconfigurations of power, resources and

­ etworks that has accompanied the structural transformations of so many MENA
n
states in the neoliberal era. As with Aramco, the fact that so many ostensibly and
even legally “private” companies are understood to “lie outside the formal political
 Colonialism in the Region   69

system . . . disguis[es their] role, [and] is essential to its strength as part of a larger
political order” (ibid.).
As Syria scholar and Jadaliyya cofounder Bassam Haddad demonstrated in his
groundbreaking research on business networks in Syria under Bashar al-­Assad, in many
cases the changed relationships between regimes and the elites tied to them “paved the
way for forms of economic agency that maintained the security of the regime but dimin-
ished the development potential of the state and the private sector” (Haddad 2011, 11–14;
cf. Hinnebusch 2012) Much, if not all, of this was achieved outside of public view or even
knowledge, while at the same time the coalitions of intelligence, security, military, judi-
ciary, and criminal elements—­increasingly known as the “deep state” (dawla amiqa in
Arabic, derin devlet in Turkish)—that long exerted a deep but largely hidden influence
over governance in MENA countries was rendered at least partially visible through the
neoliberalization of the region’s political economies.
It should be clear from our discussion that all states, whether the Moroccan Makhzen,
the US government, or the Egyptian regime, exist at various depths into society beyond
the official boundaries between them, with the “deeper”—that is, more fully hidden—­
actors, policies, and apparatuses of power hidden precisely because so much of their
core function resembles the kinds of criminality against which states by their very defi-
nition are supposed to be defined. But even the deepest states can face political and eco-
nomic challenges that threaten their stability, which occurred in the second half of the
aughts as the global financial crisis and then recession took hold, and unemployment
and inequality increased. The boundaries were stressed to the breaking point with the
eruption of the Arab uprisings and, indeed, already a year earlier when the allegedly
fraudulent victory of then President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad led to the explosion of the
“Green Wave” protest movement in Iran.
From our perspective, what is most important to understand about these dynamics
is the fundamental change in the relationship between authoritarian states and the
societies they govern under neoliberal conditions. Authoritarian bargains guaranteed a
minimum level of concern, care, and order by governments for their citizens in order to
harness their productive power (to, in turn, strengthen the state)—what Michel
Foucault famously termed a “biopolitics.” With the turn to neoliberal policies, however,
something much closer to a necropolitics, or even necroliberalism, has taken hold, in
which increasing numbers of people become, on the one hand, superfluous and expend-
able, and on the other hand and sometimes simultaneously, monetized, and/or econo-
mized through the violence and death either inflicted upon them or which they can
inflict on other, even more marginalized and superfluous people. The immense brutality
of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the long-­term war it unleashed across central
Asia and the Middle East, the Iran–Iraq War that began not long after, the intensification
of Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories, the invasion and occupation of southern
Lebanon in 1982, the 1991 and then 2003 Gulf wars and the hundreds of thousands of
dead (and millions of injured) they produced, as well as the decades of ruthless authori-
tarian rule in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen—­all these coincided
with the neoliberal transformation that replaced any obligation to care and develop
70   Mark LeVine

populations with the marginalization and securitization of the majority of social classes
and communities outside the elite, a process exacerbated precisely by the rise in inequal-
ity and other negative factors associated with neoliberal policies.
If these dynamics sound like colonialism, that’s because they are very similar in terms
of the relationship between governments and large sections of the population; the colo-
niality of power that developed under colonial regimes is not merely similar to but gen-
erative of that under many present-­day regimes. This situation was made worse by the
fact that, just like under colonialism, the governments deploying these policies justify
doing so in the name of protecting and/or developing the people, if not the nation. The
rise of what today is referred to as “necropolitics,” at least vis-­à-­vis the MENA region, is
tied directly to the change in the fundamental governance regimes away from populist
development strategies based at least to some degree on the commitment by govern-
ments to provide basic healthcare, education, and other measures of development to
their populations and toward various combinations of political openings and greater
policing and repression. And as we draw closer to late 2010, when a young Tunisian fruit
seller in a dusty provincial town sets himself alight in protest against all the indignities
visited upon him by a callous and even deadly state, we see that the ability of govern-
ments to control the space and forces for politics outside of greater and more overt
repression, violence, and fraud have become increasingly thin.
Quite simply, if a government has signed on to an IMF-­sponsored loan or World Bank
or other Washington Consensus institution’s aid program, then by definition it will have
to enact policies that are at odds with the majority of its citizens’ welfare. And if that gov-
ernment is also already, as Horkheimer and Tilly, among others, help us understand,
structurally close to a mafia or racket, then these policies will reinforce the separation
between the rulers and the ruled. In this situation, in order to maintain some semblance
of support from populations that are potential enemies, governments will, like so many
before them, create and persecute “enemies”—Shi‘a, the Muslim Brotherhood, Kurds,
secularists, “terrorists,” etc.—who will increasingly be described as enemies of the nation.
And at this point, the road to mass violence and even genocide once again becomes
open, as the civil wars, invasions, and regional conflicts across the MENA have so
tragically shown.
But Tilly doesn’t just show how states structurally resemble organized criminal enter-
prises. Equally important, he demonstrates how crucial war-­making is to the solidifica-
tion and preservation of power by states, as both are “quintessential protection rackets
with the advantage of legitimacy . . . [that] qualify as our largest examples of organised
crime” (Tilly 1985, 169). If, as we have seen, the rise of modern capitalism and, along with
it, nationalism is umbilically tied to colonialism and imperialism, both of which pro-
ceeded through large-­scale violence and war, then it’s not surprising that neoliberalism,
as an extreme, market fundamentalist form of capitalism, has been equally dependent
on war and mass violence for its spread and consolidation as the hegemonic form of
governance regime today.
In their seminal but still underutilized 2003 book The Global Political Economy of
Israel, Israeli economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler demonstrate in great
 Colonialism in the Region   71

detail how the long-­established petrodollar coalition linking together the major Western
(US and European) powers to the major Gulf oil producers, whose immediate postwar
dynamics were revealingly discussed by Mitchell in his analysis of the US–Aramco–
Saudi relationship, morphed in the course of the last half-­century into what they term a
combined “weapondollar–petrodollar coalition.” Their finely detailed analysis revealed
the role of arms sales and war in ensuring the petrodollar cycle that in turn ensured the
funneling of billions of petrodollars back to the United States through weapons pur-
chases (as well as other major investments in Western economies, including real estate
and the financial markets). This then encouraged and exacerbated conflicts across the
MENA region and beyond. This process enabled members of the coalition to gain and/
or cement control of a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources and corporate
profits, to the extent that they have been able to ensure that their profits remain much
higher than their size, relative to the larger economy, would dictate.
As they write: “During the 1970s, there was a growing convergence of interests
between the world’s leading petroleum and armament corporations. . . . The . . . politici-
zation of oil, together with the parallel commercialization of arms exports, helped shape
an uneasy weapondollar–petrodollar coalition between these companies, making their
differential profitability increasingly dependent on Middle East energy conflicts” (2003,
201–202, also see 24–27). What is most important here is that in this process, and viewed
from within the larger context of neoliberal globalization, “the lines separating state
from capital, foreign policy from corporate strategy, and territorial conquest from dif-
ferential profit, no longer seem very solid” (ibid., 202).
In fact, the political and economic “depth strategy” deployed by the weapondollar–
petrodollar coalition—­the real “coalition” behind the interminable Israeli occupation,
the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the war on Yemen, and the authoritarian rebound
after the initial victories of the Arab uprisings—­has made possible an unprecedented
comeback by these sectors of the economy after significant retrenchment in the 1990s.
Not surprisingly, it has also ensured that Western governments see authoritarian regimes
as the best, if not only, reliable partner for maintaining this coalition into the future
and, because of it, stay silent or even endorse their unending violence against their
populations.

Disembedding Colonialism:
Building a Future of Bread, Freedom,
and Social Justice

One of the hallmarks of modernity, which has been accelerated and intensified in the era
of contemporary neoliberal globalization, is how the manner in which time and space
have been compressed as the ability to travel long distances ever more quickly (whether
it’s modern shipping, air travel, or instant communications) has literally “deterritorialized”
72   Mark LeVine

and “disembedded” people from the cultural, economic, and in some cases political
­ecosystems in which they have always existed. For those who do not fit into the norma-
tive and/or hegemonic local identities, social systems, or (political) economies, the
chance to be lifted out of them (whether ideologically or virtually—­or, for the luckier
few, literally) and join the global ecumene can be a godsend (for example, being
LGBTQ+, a religious minority, or even just a metalhead in a conservative Muslim coun-
try where ostracization and even persecution of gay or trans people are still rampant and
written into law).
For others—­whether it’s the millions of migrants working in the Gulf under misera-
ble conditions that are still better than what they’d endure at home, or the millions of
refugees fleeing war and environmental devastation—­deterritorialization is a brutal
reality that leaves little room for psychological or cultural considerations. And for those
who either can’t or don’t want to take advantage of the assumed benefits of globalization,
or see them as a threat to local/indigenous cultures, such deterritorialization or cultural
disembedding will likely be seen as a grave threat, particularly when coupled with
untrammeled support by the perceived main sponsors of neoliberalism, the United
States and Europe, for their own repressive governments.
As we saw with the rise of the mobile pan-­Islamic jihadis of the Afghan War era,
which became more institutionalized with the rise of al-­Qaeda and actually governmen-
talized with the Islamic State and its various offshoots, the neoliberal era can also pro-
duce deterritorialized and disembedded jihadis (cf. Dolatabadi and Seifabadi 2017),
whereas earlier the pain of colonialism and postcolonial repression produced poets
and revolutionaries. It’s further not surprising that among their first acts of state- and
society-­building would be to quite literally as well as discursively tear down the “Sykes-­
Picot borders” drawn by British and French colonial officials during World War I that
created the border between Iraq and Syria, which, at least for a little while, lost all coher-
ence or power while Daesh controlled huge swaths of territory astride the border
between the two countries.
As the sociologist Manuel Castells (1996) correctly predicted, globalization is divid-
ing the planet, within as well as between societies, between those who can and/or want
to create positive “project” identities that try to imagine and enable new forms of collec-
tive solidarity and build toward a collective future and those who adopt “resistance”
identities that are far more closed and hostile to those outside smaller and smaller circles
of identity and solidarity. The latter, not surprisingly, are prone to violence on ever larger
scales, especially when they clash with secular or sectarian/religious mafia states
(as in Syria and Saudi Arabia).
In the earlier section on decolonization, I discussed my belief in the importance of
adopting decolonial and indigenous theories and methodologies to analyze the histories
and contemporary dynamics of the MENA region (and globally). The Chicana cultural
studies theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) understood this dynamic better than most; her
research on the concepts of mestiza and “borderlands” or “frontier” identities, while
derived from her research along the Mexican–US border, is relevant to the MENA and
most other postcolonial societies as well.
 Colonialism in the Region   73

If the “colonial wound” remains “one of the most significant and ongoing effects of
coloniality” (Ureña 2019, 1649), Anzaldúa saw the border between the United States and
Mexico precisely as “una herida abierta (an open wound) . . . where the Third World
grates against the first and bleeds” (1987, 25, as quoted in Ureña 2019, 1649). Crucially,
however, Anzaldúa saw hope in the pain and suffering endured for centuries by what
she terms los atravesados (1987, 140), the millions of people forced to traverse the
borders between the Global South and North in order to survive after neoliberalism,
neo-­imperialism, and colonialism made life in their home countries untenable, even at
the barest level of existence (cf. Agamben 1995) and who, as Ureña points out, building
on Anzaldúa’s insights, provide us with “categories and approaches to decolonizing
knowledge . . . to promote the healing of the ‘human’ that is so often lost in the humani-
ties by reframing her fractured existence as a source of power and knowledge”
(Ureña 2019, 1649–1650).
Anzaldúa’s focus on disability as a crucial site for the formation of such identities is
seconded by the recent work of Iraqi anthropologist Omar Dewachi (2017) on the
wounds and disease caused by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. It also
pushes us to open ourselves as scholars to developing the “critical cosmopolitanism
beyond nationalism and colonialism” and the “radical and alternative knowledges” that
remain so hard to emerge in the Global South (cf. Grosfoguel 2008).
I saw this kind of intellectual openness in, or rather above, Tahrir Square on day 11 of
the #Jan25 Revolution, when I ran into a young protest organizer in a safe house above
the square wearing an “End the Occupation” T-­shirt. Curious (in fact, excited) by the
fact that a protester against the Mubarak regime would wear a shirt referring to the
Israeli Occupation, I asked him why he was wearing that particular shirt. Without
a moment’s hesitation, he answered with a smile, “Because we’re occupied, too”—the
smile clearly (confirmed by our ensuing conversation) signaling the power of that
realization. As he explained, beginning with the eruption of the al-­Aqsa Intifada in
September 2000 and intensifying with the mass protests against the US invasion of Iraq
two and a half years later, the emerging generation of Egyptian youth, who would lead
the 2011 uprising, came to understand how similar their own situation living under the
Mubarak regime was to that of Palestinians and Iraqis living under invasion, occupa-
tion, and the violence they demanded, enabled, and sustained.
And so when hundreds of thousands of people in Tahrir shouted in unison
“The People Demand the Downfall of the System” (ash-­sha’b yurid isqat an-­nizzam), the
system they were referring to wasn’t just the Mubarak government or even the larger
governing system in Egypt, which by then most Egyptians understood had become little
more than a massive criminal racketeering and extortion enterprise with a state attached
to it. Rather, it was the global system of war, violence, mass exploitation, and inequality
that had been imposed on Egypt and the Global South more broadly for centuries and
which was continuing in force under the present world system (this assumption was
confirmed in my numerous conversations with protesters during the course of the
­18-­day protests). This realization is precisely why the Arab Spring uprisings immediately
inspired and sparked a global “Occupy” movement.
74   Mark LeVine

Neither the Arab uprisings nor the global “Occupy” movement managed to
f­ undamentally change most of the structures of power, either in the MENA or globally.
But they did point to a way forward, and, as important, a vision of the future that finally
offered a robust alternative to the ever worsening status quo. As I write these lines in
early 2022, two years into the Coronavirus pandemic, with the ongoing uprising
in Sudan, the renewed massive protests in Tunisia against the autocratic moves by
President Kais Saied, and the still simmering Algerian protests all reminding us that the
Arab uprisings era is yet to close, it’s clear that the coloniality of power, which for half a
millennium has wreaked so much havoc around the world, is reaching the point of most
pandemics, where the virus has caused so much destruction that it runs out of people to
infect and thus, finally, starts to weaken. It remains to be seen whether, in the wake of a
decade of protests, civil wars, invasions, and now pandemics, a new and more “human”
paradigm for power might finally replace it.

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