Political scientists devoted to the study of Arab politics have long grappled with the “exceptionalism” of authoritarianism's durability, robustness, and resiliency in the Arab world, whether among republics or monarchies. Even as other world regions experienced moments of democratic transition, Arab states seemed immune to such changes. A robust literature of its own developed to explain this theoretically challenging and empirically puzzling reality. It was assumed that the Arab Spring would overturn much of this literature only to witness either the total collapse of some states (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq) or the return or reinforcement of previous authoritarian practices (Algeria, Sudan, Egypt).

One lesson derived from these experiences is never to discard your literature on authoritarianism, something that one would have been tempted to do with Joseph Sassoon's book in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring. Instead his book serves as a necessary primer for those trying to fathom how regimes facing multiple domestic, regional, and global challenges continue to maintain unfettered control over their societies. While more descriptive than analytical in its presentation, Sassoon convincingly identifies, via close reading of political memoirs, the full universe of factors that combine to create, enforce, and maintain political authoritarianism in the Arab republics and, by extension, the Arab monarchies since both regime types employ similar instruments of co-optation, coercion, and containment.

Sassoon has assembled over 120 memoirs from a broad range of political, military, intelligence, governmental, economic, journalistic, and literary figures, both those close to power and those in opposition, including former political prisoners, to structure an anatomy of authoritarianism in eight Arab republics—Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.

The author groups political memoirs into six categories—specific event biographies, autobiographies, memoirs of work and public service, staged memoirs, biographies written by others, and autobiography in the third person. One cannot help but be impressed by the extraordinary diversity of memoirists Sassoon has located and interpreted, ranging from relatively obscure individuals such as the Syrian Baʿathist official Mansur al-Atrash to famed Tunisian labor leader Habib ʿAchur to the controversial Algerian general Khalid Nezzar to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi ambassador to Washington Muhammad al-Mashshat to the globally recognized Egyptian feminist writer and activist Nawal al-Saʿadawi.

Using the insights derived from these diverse written sources, Sassoon identifies how the key instruments and agencies of state power were developed and deepened over decades to ensure that centralized authority remained supreme. Over five chapters the author provides granular accounts of how the ruling political party, the military, the security services, the economy, and the leadership were all mobilized on behalf of state power. While many of the general attributes associated with the mukhabarāt state are well known, Sassoon unearths fascinating if not shocking details of how far regimes would go to prevent autonomous civil society from asserting itself, including the widespread use of torture, creating massive security bureaucracies, monitoring the most minor of activities, and fostering an environment of fear.

The book's objective of deconstructing the authoritarian phenomenon seems somewhat compromised with its penultimate chapter devoted to the Arab Spring, whose convulsive uprisings overthrew every assumption about the “resiliency” and “robustness” of Arab authoritarian republics. Since four of the eight Arab republics (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq) are either failed states or on the verge of total collapse, it seems unclear what one is to make of the “resiliency” of Arab authoritarian republics. Yet even this paradox may resolve itself by the reappearance of the same authoritarian impulse among the republics still standing.

While the author justifies excluding Arab monarchies from the category of authoritarianism on the basis of the amount of research it would involve and the size of the book that would be produced, it seems that a truly comparative and theoretically enriching analysis may have been missed by not trying to determine how authoritarianism differed between Arab monarchies and republics, particularly since none of the monarchies were overthrown as a result of the Arab Spring. Other scholars have argued, for example, that oil rents and hereditary succession have served to bind militaries to incumbent regimes thereby preventing system breakdown, with the apparent exception of oil-rich Libya whose collapse is best explained by the intervention of foreign forces.

Among Sassoon's eight authoritarian republics only Tunisia gets somewhat of a passing mark in terms of its democratic transition, although many of the prerevolutionary personalities embedded in the two previous regimes of Habib Bourguiba (Burqiba) and Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli are today very much in positions of power and authority, beginning with the president himself, Béji Caïd Essebsi (Baji Qaʾid al-Sibsi).

While Sassoon's study does not generate new theories on Arab authoritarianism, it does provide the kind of rich and detailed account, supported by firsthand experiences, on how the architecture of despotism is conceived, constructed, and commanded across a range of putatively different regime types that all share the same goal of holding on to power at all cost. The book reads less as cogent political analysis than as sharp-eyed storytelling communicated in lively and jargon-free prose. One cannot help but be impressed by the scope, depth, and variety of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages that the author consulted.

Probably the broader intellectual and policy take away from Sassoon's study is the degree to which political authoritarianism has endured or revived not only in the Arab republics and monarchies but throughout the world. Although autocratic power has evolved into different institutional forms and has employed diverse cooptive strategies of control, whether as competitive authoritarianism, pure despotism, one party dictatorship, illiberal democracy, or totalitarian democracy, it remains in its essence the greatest threat to liberal democracy from which no regime or political system is completely immune, whether in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, or the United States.