In Chapter 2, I argue that military politics was laid down in a renewed pattern after the 1970s under enduring authoritarian regimes that were characterized as “demilitarized” or “civilianized.” In most cases, officers did not rule (or did not want to rule) but one of them was at the helm. I argue that Arab armies were state institutions of great importance, at least compared with other “ghost” or “void” institutional dynamics in Arab polities, and especially as the holders of last-resort heavy coercion. The creation and management of political quietism within armies was a key issue for such authoritarian regimes. This imperative of control was pushed to the limit in some cases: with the “social engineering” in the officer corps by Hafez al-Assad, or with the hijacking of the Yemeni military by Ali Abdallah Saleh, after the systemic positioning of close relatives (sons, half-brothers, nephews) in command posts. In the eclectic Libyan case, Qaddafi, though an officer, distrusted the army and spent decades tearing it apart. Conversely, the tradition of civilian control endured in Tunisia from Bourguiba to Ben Ali, though the latter was an army officer, quickly turned “securocrat.”

Chapter 4 analyzes the political dimension of the HECS framework in the context of Syria, contending that ideology played a key role in creating Syria’s vulnerabilities in the lead-up to the uprising. The chapter focuses on two key ideologies – Ba’athism in the 1970s and neoliberalism in the early 2000s – and their economic and agricultural policies. The Ba’athist regime under Hafez al-Assad effectively securitized food production to justify agricultural reforms designed to maintain the support of rural agrarian constitutiencies. The author shows that these Ba’athist policies, which included intensive irrigation, food and fuel subsidies, and large-scale hydroprojects, led to unsustainable water and agricultural practices and poor governance. Finally, the chapter examines the liberalizing reforms under Bashar al-Assad, which culminated in a 2005 shift to a social market economy, and concludes that they increased the vulnerability.