The State in North Africa: After the Arab Uprisings by Luis Martinez (review)

Waves of mass protests have engulfed the Middle East and North Africa since December 2010, prompting a huge debate on the reasons behind the outbreak of the uprisings and on the modalities they developed through. Similarly, scholars have also explored why authoritarianism remains the most peculiar political trait of the region and what accounts for the modest harvest in terms of political freedoms and civil liberties achieved by protest movements that were able to bring down long-standing dictators. The legitimacy and authority of the states in the Middle East and North Africa have received, on the contrary, significantly less attention. This seems surprising in consideration of the fact that states have collapsed or come very close to collapse in Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen over the past 20 years. In other cases, such as Algeria, they suffered from existential threats. Accordingly, it seems that states in the Middle Eastern region tend to be weaker than elsewhere, asking for plausible explanations of the phenomenon. Luis Martinez's new book does just that. By focusing specifically on North Africa—Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, and Algeria—the author analyzes the trajectories of these states from independence to the present day.

In a rather synthetic and readable book, Martinez presents an insightful and timely political history of North African countries that sheds light on the very fragile structure of states in the region. The key element in this regard would be the incapacity of post-independence countries to produce coherent and strong national identities, leading in turn to polities that have not enjoyed sufficiently high political legitimacy and social cohesion. In a context shaped by population growth, rampant unemployment rates, and accelerated urbanization, the failure of developmentalist projects from 1960 to 1980 determined the replacement of socialist, progressive, and third-world-ist aspirations with a paradigm based on the dual notion of security and stability. Such new state configurations were challenged by the rise of militant Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as by the 2010/11 Arab revolts that Martinez interestingly describes as attempts to limit the state's action.

Despite its merits, there are two aspects that the author might have explored better. First is the confusing boundaries that exist in the text between the notions of state and nation. While state-formation and nation-building give rise to the oft-mentioned and merged issue of the nation-state, these remain two distinct social processes: state-formation concerns penetration through force and nation-building involves standardization through culture. Recently, Sebastián Mazzuca and Gerardo Munck have proposed a useful distinction in this regard by pointing to three key dimensions: the territorial state, which deals with the holding of the monopoly of the force over a territory; the national state, which promotes a sense of nationhood over a population; and the administrative state, which delivers economic and social services.¹ While all North African states have experienced serious threats to their survival in recent decades, they have been challenged in different ways. In many cases, moreover, multiple and mutually reinforcing crises developed. For example, the underdevelopment of some regions (at the administrative level) has led to the reemergence and strengthening of regional, ethnic, or tribal belongings (at the national level) and, in turn, to the development of separatist movements and aspirations for the caliphate (at the territorial level). A clearer analytical identification of these dimensions seems therefore important to understand better the types and intensity of the challenges that North African states have dealt with.

Secondly, Martinez's book does not take into account seriously the North African states' different experiences under colonial domination. This period was critical for the formation of modern and centralized states. Following Lisa Anderson's classic work,² for instance, French and Italian colonial rule in Tunisia and Libya, respectively, set in motion very different processes of state-formation, strengthening the local bureaucratic administration in the former case and weakening it in...