Description
While acknowledging geopolitics and state strategies as influential in perpetuating authoritarianism in the Middle East, this paper focuses on the political attitude of ‘ordinary citizens’—people who don’t enjoy special political/economic privileges nor have vested interests in the governing system—being viewed here as active agents in perpetuating authoritarianism, rather than simply the object/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/anti-authoritarian struggle with some connecting political passivity to the loss of moral values, indigenous identities, and a bottom-up alienation from the ideals of equality and freedom as foundational to a healthy pluralistic society. 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, and inhibit domestic and foreign efforts against authoritarianism and toward freedom, equality and democracy.
