Abstract
To discuss military responses to the recent social uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), it is imperative to explore explanations concerning military behavior in the political realm. First, this chapter explains the historical nuances of Middle Eastern militaries’ intervention in political affairs. Much of human behavior is path-dependent; the past informs the future. An understanding of military behavior in the midst of the Arab Awakening is incomplete without an understanding of civil-military relations in the Arab Middle East since World War II. Second, this chapter explores the contours of the theoretical debate concerning civil-military relations in the Arab Middle East. One cannot readily evaluate the merits of my argumentation without a robust understanding of what other scholars have said on this matter. Third, this chapter illuminates that there is no strict monocausal variable that explains the manner in which Middle Eastern militaries intervened in the Arab Awakening. In the course of most human events, multiple variables are at play. Finally, this chapter explains that we are entering a new era of civil-military relations in the MENA. Militaries are no longer the protector of Arab autocrats or the progenitor of regime change; rather, militaries across the MENA are acting as arbiters of social unrest, deciding whether to support “the street” or defend the regime.
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Notes
See Barry Rubin and Thomas Kearney, eds., Armed Forces in the Middle East: Politics and Strategy (London: Frank Cass, 2002), for their thoughts of the first two phases of civil-military relations in the Middle East.
Phrase refers to historical warriors in the Middle East usurping political power. See S. E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962).
Elizer Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society (New York: Praeger, 1970), 246–250.
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J. C. Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger, 1969), 16.
Of course, many scholars would disagree with this reductionist dichotomy of civil-military relations in the Western world. Haddad (1965) disagreed with scholars who suggested that a so-called “Oriental despotism” explained military coups in the Middle East. Haddad suggested that the military despotism that existed in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century as well as World War II far surpassed that in the Middle East. See George Haddad, Revolutions and Military Rule in the Middle East: The Northern Tier (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1965), 17.
Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: Random House, 2002), 3–23.
D. Rustow, The Military in Middle Eastern Society and Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1963), 9.
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Morris Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
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found in James Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East,” International Security 24, 2 (Autumn 1999): 133.
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For ethnic composition, see Finer, Man on Horseback; for rural vs. urban influences, see Shils, “Political Development”; for middle-class influence, see Halpern, “New Middle Class”; for size of a military, see Edward Feit, The Armed Bureaucrats (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); for the role of professionalism, see Samuel Huntington, Soldier and the State; Morris Janowitz, Political Development of New Nations.
See Peter Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), on military cultural influences.
Gabriel Ben-Dor, “The Politics of Threat: Military Intervention in the Middle East,” in World Perspectives in the Sociology of the Military, eds. George Kourvetaris and Betty Dobratz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977), 159–170.
Eva Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 36, 2 (2004): 139–157.
See Birthe Hansen and Carsten Jensen, “Challenges to the Role of Arab Militaries,” in Developments in Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East (Copenhagen, Denmark: Royal Danish Defense College, 2008), 32. See pp. 29–46 for an explanation on this third phase of civil-military relations in the Middle East.
Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 13.
David Bukay, “Is the Military Bulwark against Islamism Collapsing?” Middle East Quarterly 16, 3 (Summer 2009): 25–32.
Assaf David and Oren Barak, “How the New Arab Media Challenges the Arab Militaries: The Case of the War between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006,” The Middle East Institute Policy Brief 20 (October 2008): 1.
Oren Barak, “Representation and Stability in Postwar Lebanon,” Representation 48, 3 (2012): 321–333;
Florence Gaub, Rebuilding Armed Forces: Learning from Iraq and Lebanon (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2011).
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© 2014 William C. Taylor
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Taylor, W.C. (2014). The Past and Future of Arab Civil-Military Relations. In: Military Responses to the Arab Uprisings and the Future of Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410054_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410054_2
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