Political scientists, development specialists, and policymakers assume a central place for states and state action as they define problems and design solutions. They ascribe to the state dominance over all other social organizations, viewing it as pervasive and inevitably triumphant. Even scholars such as Joel Migdal, Timothy Mitchell, and James Scott,Footnote ¹ who focus on the boundaries of the state, portray the state as more organized, technologically savvy, and capable of extending its power than social counterparts, putting the latter on the defensive. Scholars and policymakers alike also have arrogated to the state the moral monopoly to pursue certain imperatives that other organizational forms can and do aspire to provide. These include providing security and protection from predation, allocating scarce resources, and arbitrating values and interests in society.

States in the Middle East have never achieved this ideal state. The nation-state system in the Middle East emerged through a European-led, international project. As Lisa Anderson notes, only “sovereign states” would be granted recognition—a sine qua non of admission into the international state system—and thus reap the benefits of support. Moreover, these states never fully extended authority over their populations or economies. Family, kin, and religious networks—and the rules that structure engagement of their members—continue to play critical roles in addressing communities’ needs for security and development. In this essay, I explore how these alternative authorities are independent arenas of governance in and of themselves, and how they shape engagement between citizens and the state.

What are often regarded as “nonstate” actors fulfill functions that are arrogated to the state. Islamic shariʿa courts (or committees, as they often prefer to be called) and customary law-based, tribal ʿurf courts engage in dispute resolution.Footnote ² Families, neighborhoods, and religious communities resolve disputes over land, marriage, physical battery, and other civil and criminal matters, in forms that range from effective tribunals to mob justice. Community policing ensures security, at times in areas where state police fear to go. Charity organizations, kinship networks, and others step in to provide food, clothing, and shelter. They also establish and maintain infrastructure, as through local irrigation cooperatives in Syria.Footnote ³ Not only is service provision provided outside of the state, but so too is taxation. Social extraction, in which local residents make substantial contributions outside the state to public goods provision, provides the monetary, material, and physical resources that support these functions.Footnote ⁴ These are not stopgap measures or substitutes in the absence of a strong state, but rather arenas of authority and sites of politics in and of themselves.

The arenas that I have outlined —from shariʿa and ʿurf courts to family and neighborhood dīwāniyya—are governed by different rules regarding who is obligated to whom, acceptable forms of engagement, rewards for compliance, and sanctions for transgressions. Research across disciplines and geographies highlights how aspects of social institutions, the formal and informal rules governing social relationships between individuals within the community, affect governance and development. For instance, in-group and out-group sanctioning is assumed to affect the likelihood of conflict,Footnote ⁵ service provision,Footnote ⁶ and electoral behavior.Footnote ⁷ Norms of reciprocity, risk mitigation, and community obligation impact provision. The context within which these rules are embedded is also key. They may be in communities with more or less dense networks, which affects the likelihood of enforcement, or varied power balances, which may influence the degree of internal contestation.

Alternate arenas of authority, and the social institutions associated with them, also impact engagement with the state. Take elections, for example. Citizens understand that social norms and constraints oblige individuals to support members of their own group—variously defined through kinship, ethnicity, or locality. Thus, voters often expect legislators to distribute goods based on personal ties to individuals, as a member of the same family, tribe, neighborhood, or village, rather than as a constituent, and consequently support candidates with whom they have social ties, regardless of political positions. Consequently, voters reify and strengthen existing social patterns and clientelistic networks.

Moreover, politicians take these social arenas and institutions into account when choosing whether and how to run in elections. In Libya, a General National Congress (GNC) member explained how social institutions regarding obligations to coethnics and the maintenance of group boundaries impacted the elections. His tribe, and other smaller tribes in the area, had chosen members of the electoral list by “counting heads”—that is, using the size of each tribe to estimate support for potential candidates. They did so on the assumption that tribal members were obligated to vote for their tribal candidate. Moreover, they made these decisions at a wedding, a space in which their gatherings would be isolated from, and undetected by, larger tribes that may try to undermine their efforts. And they relied on social norms that reinforce group boundaries to maintain the appearance of cohesion. Fellow tribesmen could choose not to vote for their candidate without sanctions, but they would face social sanctions if they voiced this intention publicly—and especially if they publicly expressed support for a candidate of another tribe.Footnote ⁸ The inability to declare dissenting views impacted the expectations of other voters, the competitiveness of campaigns, and arguably, the outcome of elections.

Differences in social arenas and institutions also likely affect the extent to which politicians reward their supporters with service provision. In a study of Yemen and Lebanon, Daniel Corstange finds that “members of internally-competitive communal groups receive more, and better, payoffs for their political support than voters trapped in uncompetitive groups dominated by a single, hegemonic leader.”Footnote ⁹ Similarly, a survey conducted by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies found that 73 percent of students said they believed political connections are key to finding jobs, and that those whose political connections come from their membership in large families are able to capitalize on their “family's electoral weight.” The political strength of large families comes from the fact that they can “deliver the votes to politicians in larger numbers.”Footnote ¹⁰ This is easily understood in a context where social rules dictate that family members favor each other (and vote together).

Alternative arenas and social institutions also shape state elites’ strategies toward society, and consequently their ability to maintain their regime. Steven Brooke argues, for instance, that the Egyptian regime used—and even materially and symbolically supported—the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic Medical Association in attempt to alleviate social demands on the state. The result was not only the extension of healthcare, but also the establishment of a mechanism by which the authoritarian regime could “navigate the treacherous waters of economic liberalization.”Footnote ¹¹

A more appropriate story of the state and human welfare is thus one that recognizes that competing authorities are not incidental or subordinate to the state, but rather critical, enduring actors. The state is situated within separate but overlapping realms of authority, in which different actors produce goods in accordance with their own institutions. This perspective is consistent with the counternarrative to the state that has recently arisen, in which anarchy is viewed not as the lack of rule, but as the presence of alternate rules and a state of nature in which “good governance outcomes” conventionally associated with the state are achievable.Footnote ¹² But it also presses us to extend this view. Rather than conceptualizing politics in terms of struggles over resources played out on a unidimensional canvas with states attempting, and ultimately succeeding, in establishing authority over society, we more accurately understand politics as struggles within and between multiple, overlapping arenas of authority (of which the state is but one). Individuals are subjected to—and try to navigate—multiple authorities and institutional structures.

Despite strong evidence that the alternative realms of authority, and the associated social institutions, affect a wide range of outcomes, they remain ill-defined and often overlooked. Where elements of these social institutions are considered, conceptual distinctions between social institutions and related social characteristics (e.g., informal institutions, traditional governance, social networks, and social capital) are blurred; there is little agreement over which of these elements should receive attention, and even less attention to how these are interrelated. The result is that we are largely unable to discuss the variations in these realms of authority, or accumulate knowledge on the role of social institutions. It is useful to contrast the current conceptualization of political institutions with that of social institutions in the study of political behavior. Political institutions are viewed in terms of (relatively) well-developed conceptual categories (e.g., democracies and autocracies, centralized and decentralized administration, proportional representation and majoritarian electoral systems), which facilitates the development and testing of theories regarding the relationships between institutions and outcomes. Social institutions are not placed into such crisp typologies and, more importantly, even in research that focuses on the impact of social relations on politics, the role of social institutions is often overlooked or implicitly assumed. Yet more problematic, we lack a coherent vocabulary, using similar terms to explore concepts that bear little relationship to each other.

To address the questions of politics—regarding the power and resource distribution governing societies—we need not only to focus on the state and society in relation to it, but also to consider much more seriously the nature of politics in alternative arenas and the institutions that guide them. In doing so, we must guard against the tendency to establish the legitimacy of the state and denigrate arenas outside of it. Whether nonstate actors are, in fact, hostile to—or even bad for—the state is an empirical question, likely with varied answers. More importantly, it is a question that is beside the point. Regardless of whether nonstate authorities are more or less morally superior or socially desirable than state authorities, they exist and will continue to do so. Failing to recognize this skews our understanding of politics and limits our policy options. Perhaps more perniciously, a state-centric focus may reinforce a project of state building and order that reinforces the moral hegemony claimed by the state, while proclaiming, though not necessarily delivering, as Charles Tripp argues in this roundtable, security and welfare. The layered nature of authorities and the roles of social institutions need to be theorized, studied, and taken into account in policymaking and programming if we are to foster human welfare.