From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East. By Sean L. Yom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewFrom Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East. By Sean L. Yom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Pete W. MoorePete W. MooreCase Western Reserve University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe last several years of turmoil and upheaval in the Middle East attest to the region’s high level of permeability and the variance of regime durability. Efforts to explain the latter have typically ignored or barely examined the former. Sean Yom’s impressive From Resilience to Revolution takes up the central question of why some regimes survive while others fall. The book combines precise historical investigation into domestic political struggles with a contextualization of geopolitical intervention into those struggles. Within the study of the Middle East, it recalls previous efforts to understand how war has shaped states in the region (e.g., work by Ian Lustick and Steven Heydemann). But by constructing a comparative-historical lens to examine the cases of Jordan, Kuwait, and Iran, From Resilience to Revolution stands out. Yom’s nuanced transnational account broadens our understanding of regime durability in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Regimes survive, fall, and hang on, but they do so in historically and politically different ways.At the heart of the study, two “catalysts” comprise the transnational dynamics: domestic social conflict and subsequent geopolitical intervention by external powers. Take the first dynamic. Intense social conflict during the early stages of state and regime building can force leaders toward “coalitional broadening.” Yom argues that broader incorporation then requires institutions designed to extend patronage and protection to the rank-and-file supporters of the regime. Regime durability results from the political advantages of broader arrangements beyond reliance on repression. But, of course, twentieth-century social conflict in the Middle East did not unfold in insolation from the imperial ambitions of world powers. Yom therefore considers the depth of external intervention to be a decisive factor in ogoing processes of coalition and state building. The deeper and more sustained the external intervention, the less pressure leaderships face to construct encompassing coalitions. Unconstrained by domestic demands, narrow coalitions will suffice, which requires less socioeconomic investment but lays the foundations for future challenges and instability from groups left at the margins.A key conceptual contribution is Yom’s identification of durability outcomes as ranging from geopolitical seclusion to substitution and subsidization. Kuwait, a small Gulf monarchy, underwent wrenching social conflict in the 1930s at the same time as it came under British control. Yom considers the relatively muted British response to these struggles as a form of geopolitical seclusion. Kuwaiti leaders were left to deal with a restive political opposition anchored within the merchant community on their own, and eventually they built a broad coalition extending patronage across social groups. Kuwait witnessed bouts of unrest beginning in the 1980s. However, the early construction of an inclusive coalition and an elected parliament meant that those challenges could be contained within a monarchial system.Yom contrasts Kuwait’s trajectory with that of Iran’s. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, social conflict in Iran came in the form of nationalist and communist struggles against the Pahlavi monarchy. Unlike imperial aloofness in Kuwait, British and American intervention in Iran was rapid and deep. The pressure for broader coalition building faded, resulting in an exclusivist coalition supporting the monarchy. Faced with a revolutionary situation in 1978 and 1979, the monarchy was ill equipped to respond other than through repression. Since a social revolution is rare, and in some ways the Kuwaiti monarchy is regionally unique, one could be tempted to discount the transnational dynamic Yom highlights in favor of the contrast between Iran’s more robust, cross-cutting opposition and Kuwait’s merchant opposition. However, Yom’s historical comparison includes an important middle case of geopolitical subsidization, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, to broaden the study’s empirical application.Jordan’s more uneven record of external intervention, first with the British and then with the Americans, has resulted in “a costly pattern of tenuous survival” (207). The Hashemite monarchy, according to Yom, never built a broad or narrow coalition but rather constructed a state-centric “ethnocracy” in opposition to the country’s majority of Palestinian refugees. This social base would prove durable against mobilized opposition threats in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it could not finance a capable state. American cliency could make up for the financial gap, but “it did not extirpate the social roots of instability” (154). The Hashemite monarchy has survived, but at the cost of periodic and acute revolt since the late 1950s.Yom’s careful treatment of historical outcomes also helps reassess two other prominent theories of regime durability. In the wake of the 2011 uprisings, observers credited monarchy as the reason some countries escaped revolution. Variance among the three monarchies in this study casts doubt on royal exceptionalism. Moreover, the example of Bahrain’s monarchy battling its own mobilized opposition since 2011 fits the kind of tenuous survival Yom points to in Jordan, rather than neater bivariate outcomes of survival or failure. Finally, rentier state theories have long held sway in explanations of regime durability; resource wealth inoculates against regime failure. Yom builds on recent critiques of this linkage by showing that the causal linkages to resource wealth can only be assessed if understood against the historical and geostrategic context. Kuwait’s monarchy harnessed resource wealth to build a more inclusive ruling coalition, whereas the Pahlavis used Iran’s oil wealth, along with significant American assistance, to build a coercive apparatus.The use of case studies in an attempt to parse geopolitical shifts while tracing domestic currents requires careful empirics, and From Resilience to Revolution delivers. The historical sections on Jordan and Kuwait in particular are among the best studies of those cases in the literature. An important implication of Yom’s research is that regime types and their fate are essentially transnational. Whereas the fate of Middle Eastern regimes after 2011 is an open question, how external powers intervene should prove as politically consequential today as it did in the early twentieth century. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 79, Number 1January 2017 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689944 HistoryPublished online December 13, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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