Summary of findings

The thesis comprises five analytical chapters, whose findings are outlined in Chapters 4-8. In addition to these specific research questions, several cross-cutting contributions deserve further consideration.

9.1.1. The elite-conflict nexus

In understanding violence as a strategic tool for political competition, its empirical manifestations illustrate how such competition occurs. Violence does not occur in

‘ungoverned spaces’ but rather in political orders characterised by the presence of multiple political elites competing with each other over access to power and resources.

Moving away from the ‘failed state’ framework, the role of elites is explored in relation to their contribution to subnational state-making practices and the emergence of local alliances and geographies of violence.

As analysed in Chapter 8, conflict patterns are conditional on the nature of the political competition that takes place in distinct political orders. Armed group fragmentation does not inevitably lead to higher conflict escalation when violence is used for signalling purposes, such as the local elites’ desire to extract political or economic rents from the government. This embeddedness reveals how local actors entertain political relations with regional and national elites, producing subnational political orders and governance spaces. Further, chapter 6 and 7 investigates how cohesive support bases are key to weather existential regime crises, allowing incumbents to effectively mobilise allies and supporters during coup attempts or anti-regime uprisings. Whilst not a guarantee of ultimate success, leaders relying on a fragmented support base face higher mobilisation costs which patronage resources (or expectations among local elites that such resources may dry up in the near future) are unable to sustain. Under the political marketplace framework, the relative cohesion of fragmentation of elite networks intensifies the volatile and instrumental nature of alliances.

9.1.2. Understanding elite inclusion

The research project also emphasised the importance of understanding inclusion as a multidimensional concept that does not merely relate to institutional representation.

Indeed, it shows that inclusion in state institutions is a poor indicator of elites’ relative power. Inclusion is instead interpreted as the ability of elite groups to maintain access to power hierarchies within or outside the state. Examples from across the region show that patronage-based practices aimed at co-opting key elites and constituencies through the conferral ministerial posts are unable to explain the rise of technocratic-led, consensus-based politics (Chapter 4); that regimes facing heightened unrest or succession challenges may reconfigure the ruling coalition through cabinet reshuffles or alliance upgrades, yet leaving the regime’s dominant position unscathed (Chapter 5 and 6); that power-sharing institutional arrangements are unlikely to be successful if a section of the elites are able to exercise disproportionate power through extra-institutional channels (Chapter 7); and that a desire of inclusion in the distribution of political and economic rents may produce subnational governance relations sustained by a latent threat of violence and a mercantilist relation between local elite groups and the regional power holder (Chapter 8).

These considerations call for a more nuanced understanding of the relation between inclusion and political stability. Focusing exclusively on institutional inclusion may indeed create channels for greater elite interaction and familiarisation but carries the risk of undermining political participation and create grievances both among the insiders and the outsiders, echoing situations of ‘political unsettlements’ and ‘stable instability’

(Pospisil and Rocha Menocal 2017).

9.1.3. Strategies of political survival

When facing heightened political competition, a variety of political survival strategies are available to political elites seeking to maintain their access to power. In the political marketplace, elite competition occurs among insiders seeking to negotiate a more advantageous position, or with outsiders striving to be included in the existing political settlement and benefit from rents distribution. To achieve these goals, political elites are shown to make significant or cosmetic concessions in order to appease their rivals, as well as to unleash violence when their requests are not accommodated.

Among the case studies proposed in this research project, I show that technocratic governance over the past three decades in Tunisia served to neutralise the emergence of

political opponents and tame political competition through consensus-based politics. At the same time, accommodation strategies through large-scale ministerial reshuffles (i.e.

crisis cabinets) are not common across the African continent (Chapter 5), but a wider reconfiguration of the ruling coalition along with other political concessions – civilian-led political transitions (at least nominally in some cases), technocratic governance, elections – took place following the elite-led removal of long-standing leaders in Algeria, Sudan and Zimbabwe (Chapter 6). In these cases, however, the removal of the leader was key to preserve the seizing group’s role uncontested.

9.1.4. How to study elites

In recent decades, elite studies have benefitted from the greater availability of datasets and empirical approaches, and from efforts towards improving conceptual clarity.

Throughout the thesis, I used original datasets on elites from across the region applying a variety of methods to the study their changing composition and behaviour. A large-n dataset was constructed to support an in-depth, country-based study of ministerial elites in Chapter 4; quantitative methods were used to draw inferences from correlations between violence patterns and elite and armed group fragmentation in Chapter 5 and 8;

while SNA techniques in Chapter 7 provided a background to study how the relative cohesion of subnational elite networks influences violence outcomes. Attention was paid to delineate their scope and applicability, and to define what type of political elites were analysed and why.

Taken together, these analyses show that empirical analyses of elite structures across Africa and the Middle East – which have long suffered from a dearth of empirical data and often relied on anecdotal information – can shed light on the interaction between political actors and domestic instability. This includes, among other things, the mechanisms regulating political appointments in state institutions, government responses and strategies of accommodation, as well as how political power arising from network positioning can undermine or consolidate institutional hierarchies. An additional dimension concerns the way in which regimes further subnational penetration and consolidation through the co-option of local elites, moving away from pure nationally-situated studies. Importantly, this is explored in Chapters 7 and 8, where the emergence of distinct subnational political orders, characterised by limited statehood and local practices of governance, is studied in relation to the civil war environments of Libya and Yemen.