Elites and Elite Networks in the Middle East and North Africa

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

This panel explores how elites and elite networks structure patterns of repression and coercion, mobilization, and legislative policymaking in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Though the study of elite behavior in the region is not new, the panel aims to inspire a new generation of scholarship that builds on recent developments in the social scientific study of social networks. Collectively, the papers build on an understanding of elites--and the regimes they are embedded in--as complex, relational actors with a variety of competing interests. This understanding promises new empirical insight into the structure and organization of these interests and the myriad tools and strategies elites employ to achieve them in social and political life. This panel also aims to break new theoretical and empirical ground by exploring these dynamics in both comparative and historical perspective. To do this, the papers use a variety of innovative methodological tools and approaches, including social network analysis, social media analytics, qualitative methods, and public opinion data. In doing so, the panel aspires to bring together a diverse community of scholars focused on the Middle East and North Africa to center the region’s contribution to the comparative study of elite behavior.

Roya Izadi’s paper examines military elites’ business, political, and family networks to explain how regional autocrats configure their security forces in order to maximize their chances of survival. Exploring activism across sectors in Jordan, Biff Parker-Magyar shows that advantages in teachers’ occupational social networks allow them to sustain cross-cutting contentious action and resist capture by the elite networks that drive other movements. Ammar Shamaileh’s paper presents a parsimonious measure of the authoritarian regime network characteristics that shape elite politics within states and uses this to explore Syria over time, as well as the region as a whole immediately before the Arab Spring. Gilad Wenig’s paper provides new insight into the colonial-elite foundations of militaries in the region. Last, Caner Simsek’s paper (with Daniel L. Tavana) uses social network analysis and the tools of network science to map patterns of legislative co-sponsorship in the Kuwait National Assembly (KNA).

Sub Unit

• Division 57: Middle East and North African Politics

Individual Presentations

• British Military Networks in the MENA - Gilad Wenig, University of California, Los Angeles

• Authoritarian Regimes as Ruling Networks - Ammar Shamaileh, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

• Striking from the Schoolyard: State Worker Networks and Mobilization in Jordan - Elizabeth Parker-Magyar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Officers' Economic Ties and Leader Survival: Evidence from MENA - Ben Copans, University of Rhode Island; Roya Izadi, University of Rhode Island

Chair

• Steven Heydemann Smith College

Discussant

• Allison Spencer Hartnett University of Southern California