Description
While acknowledging geopolitical factors and state strategies as influential in perpetuating authoritarian rule in the Middle East since the 2010-2011 uprisings, this paper focuses on the political attitude of ‘ordinary citizens’—the large segment of people who don’t enjoy special political or economic privileges nor have vested interests in the governing system—being viewed here as active agents in perpetuating authoritarianism, rather than simply the object or victim of authoritarian control. Asking ‘why many Middle Eastern citizens, while significantly suffering under authoritarian rule, refrain from active dissent and occasionally resist democratic reform,’ the paper explores how public submission to and limited dissent against authoritarianism are partially the product of ‘citizen impunity’—ordinary citizens’ capacity to navigate hardships and authoritarian subjugation by manipulating formal systems, bypassing laws, and escaping public responsibilities—embraced over decades by the region’s populations, becoming definitive of public mentality and attitude.
To date, the concept of ‘citizen impunity’ remains poorly developed in the growing literature on authoritarianism, which continues to lack a rigorous people-centred understanding of public passivity toward, and complicity with, authoritarian rule. By contrast, many Middle Eastern thinkers have placed the issue of political passivity and citizen impunity at the heart of their intellectual endeavour and anti-colonial struggle with some, like Malek Bennabi and Bachir El-Ibrahimi, connecting political passivity under authoritarianism to the loss of moral values and indigenous identities. Recognizing the value of region-based efforts at explaining local political attitudes, this paper grounds its study of citizen impunity in the intellectual heritage and reformist projects of modern Middle Eastern thinkers, arguing that citizen impunity, this capacity to manoeuvre authoritarian systems and navigate hardships, although irregular, limited and unguaranteed, effectively gives many Middle Eastern citizens a sense of empowerment and agency that constantly attach them to the authoritarian status quo.
