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| Adaptable Autocrats : Regime Power in Egypt and Syria
ISBN: 9780804782098
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Stanford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: History;
Divergent upheavals yield counterintuitive insights in this rickety academic study of the 2011 Arab Spring. Kent State University political scientist Stacher explains both the peaceful fall of Mubarak in Egypt-replaced by a military council that, he contends, replicated the old regime with new faces-and the bloody crackdown in Syria with a convoluted theory of state structure. Egypt's smooth transition, he argues, owes much to a strong, centralized government in which all power flowed from the president's office; once the generals supplanted Mubarak as the executive authority, they could swiftly remake the regime to placate Tahrir Square. Syria was less adaptable because it is a decentralized state where the dictator Assad shares power with the Ba'ath party, the military, and government ministries, making top-down revampings to appease discontent impossible; paradoxically, this fragmented structure caused Syria's rulers to unite to violently suppress the uprising. Like much political science, Stacher's treatise is really political journalism-his methodology is "formal and informal interviews"-overlaid with theory. Though dry and repetitive, his discussion of Syrian and Egyptian elites is well-informed and savvy. Still, the concepts with which Stacher maps this terrain feel too abstract, narrow, and inconsistent to make a compelling account of the Arab political earthquake. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Joshua Stacher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. He is a regular contributor to and on the editorial board of MERIP's Middle East Report. He has made media appearances and written commentary for NPR, CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Foreign Affairs , Jadaliyya , and The Boston Globe , among others. He is also a founding member of the Northeast Ohio Consortium on Middle East Studies. |
