In-formalized polity and the politics of dynasty in Egypt and Libya

Abstract

The Arab Middle East has entered a moment of revolution, inevitable counterrevolution, and transition. Integral to this moment is a dialectical dynamic in which the formal and the informal conjugate, through unsettled tension and interaction between endless forces, voices and discourses; bid to re-imagine community; and seek to pin down their idealized community to preferences in terms of morality, polity, society and intellectual artefacts, including a particular brand of language. This moment concerns not only the mapping out of political identities and preferences. More importantly, it concerns what might be termed the resistance ‘turn’(along with implications for revolution and transition) in social science. This turn is guided by projects probing the subaltern and hidden forces and discourses that drive revolutionary change as well as how forces and discourses antithetical to change seek to capture the informal as one way of privatizing politics. This is primarily intended to reproduce power, through the occupation of the state, thus blurring the boundaries between the formal and the informal and ultimately redesigning politics as a dynastic project, a family affair, or a manifestation of ‘asabiyya-based impulse, recording political decay and, at the same time, signalling the onset of marginalized solidarities arrayed against the dynastic centre (Issawi 1950). Thus, the ‘story’of the formal-informal dyad is more than simply re-locating power play outside the institutional realm. More importantly, it is the informalization of the formal and the institutional that points to key lines of inquiry about state-society relations that are in need of critical theoretical and empirical investigation. This chapter can only hint at this problematique, aided by a mostly empirical analysis of in-formalization in the context of the dynastic politics of Egypt and Libya prior to the 2011 revolutions, drawing on Ibn Khaldoun's concept of ‘asabiyya, social cohesion and solidarity deriving from but not limited to blood ties (Mahdi 1957; Ibn Khaldoun 1958).