Table of Contents Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: Making Sense of the Arab State By Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch SECTION 1: DIMENSIONS OF STATENESS 1. Seeing the State or Why Arab States Look the Way They Do By Steven Heydemann 2. Understanding State Weakness in the Middle East and North Africa By Raymond Hinnebusch 3. Rethinking the Postcolonial State in the Middle East: Elite Competition and Negotiation within the Disaggregated Iraqi State By Toby Dodge 4. Legibility, Digital Surveillance, and the State in the Middle East By Marc Lynch SECTION 2: DIMENSIONS OF REGIME-NESS 5. What We Talk About When We Talk About the State in Postwar Lebanon By Bassel F. Salloukh 6. The "Business of Government": The State and Changing Patterns of Politics in the Arab World By Lisa Anderson 7.

Palace Politics as "Precarious" Rule: Weak Statehood in Afghanistan By Dipali Mukhopadhyay SECTION 3: CONTESTING STATENESS: SOCIETY AND SITES OF RESISTANCE 8. State Capacity and Contention: A View from Jordan By Jillian Schwedler 9. Water, Stateness, and Tribalism in Jordan: The Case of the Disi Water Conveyance Project By Sean Yom 10. Conclusion: The Specter of the Spectrum: Escaping the Residual Category of Weak States By Dan Slater Contributors.