The Future of Arab State Power

In Chapter 2 of Rocky Harbors: Taking Stock of the Middle East in 2015, Roger Owen looks back into history and forward from the present to assess the future of Arab state power.

The events set in train by the Arab uprisings of 2011 have seriously weakened state power—in terms of a capacity to govern, to tax, and to protect citizens—in ways that pose a challenge to the whole postcolonial order in the Arab Middle East.

ROGER OWEN is the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Harvard University and was previously the director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to teaching at Harvard, he was a faculty member at Oxford University, where he served several times as the director of the Saint Antony’s College Middle East Centre. His books include Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820-1914 (1969), The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914 (1981), State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (1992), Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (2004) and, with Sevket Pamuk, A History of the Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (1999).