Unpacking the ‘Security Services’

• In Event: Poster Session: Middle East and North African Politics & African Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of the Middle East and North Africa Region

Abstract

While recent years have seen a renewed focus on the role of coercive institutions in politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), scholarly perspectives on these institutions remain limited by offering a conflated understanding of the “security sector.” In this paper, we provide a detailed disaggregation of state intelligence and security services in authoritarian contexts, pointing to variation within institutional autonomy between these different elements of the coercive apparatus. In doing so, we offer a framework for scholars of civil-military relations and authoritarian politics to assess the relevant stakeholders within the coercive apparatus in cases that allegedly appear to have “healthy” civil-military relations. We illustrate our discussion with an investigation of cases from within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. By disaggregating the “security sector” into its constituent parts, we are able to gain a more nuanced understanding of coercive institutions’ role in politics, their relationships vis-a-vis one another, and their relationships with the regime. This allows us to enrich the study of civil-military relations by drawing attention to the often understudied areas of institutional autonomy in the security services and the relations between different elements of the security sector.

Author

• Rosalie Rubio, George Washington University