States Without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East By Billie JeanneBrownlee and MaziyarGhiabi. McGill‐Queen's University Press, 2025. 252 pages. $39.95, paper.

going through epochal changes represented by colonial, imperial, and inter-state conflicts, mass-scale human displacement, rapid modernisation in terms of access to digital technologies, international links with diasporas, and escalating tensions over the place of religion, cultural diversity, and socio-economic inequality. The analysts contend that the “‘Middle East’ is the laboratory of politics in the twenty-first century” (p. xxvi) and question the constitutive dynamics of political transformation. The book therefore focuses on the results of insurrections rather than their causes, yielding insights into how these transformations led to the rise of right-wing political cultures and how new authoritarian orders were constructed. The book makes three main arguments. The first is that the popular movements in the Middle East after 2011 should be seen as rebellion rather than revolution. Second, the region was dragged into a “Great Civil War” (p. xxix) after 2001 due to suppression of popular uprisings and the impossibility of either making progress or returning to the old order. Third, the displacements that emerged as a result of the uprisings and civil wars ultimately transformed politics and society. Key concepts such as revolt, civil war, and displacement are analyzed from historical, sociological, and phenomenological perspectives. This allows processes of transformation to be understood through lived experience. The authors use mixed methods involving “interviews, fieldnotes, commentaries, reports and other such data from around the region” (p. xv). The approach goes beyond structural explanations to capture how actors perceive these phenomena. The book is structured by these three themes. Each chapter demonstrates a transformative process that shaped political culture. In the first chapter, Brownlee and Ghiabi provide a foundation for the phenomenological approach by analyzing the tension between competing concepts in the context of the Middle East (p. 9). They argue that the popular movements known as the Arab Spring should not be classified as revolutions, as they were “momentary events” that failed to produce new, permanent political structures. Citing the revolt-revolution distinction developed by Furio Jesi, the authors contend that these events were unable to effect positive change. The defeat of the uprisings pushed society into the embrace of conspiracy theories—such as the great replacement scare in Tunisia or sectarian ideologies in Syria and Iraq—which paved the way for the rise of right-wing political cultures. In the second chapter, Brownlee and Ghiabi make the case that the “Great Civil War” has, since 2001, “created states without people” (p. 103). The political environment is thus devoid of “demos.” Moreover, human communities within the category of the people are recognized only if they have the potential to strengthen the privileges of the state. Thus, regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iran welcomed some categories of person but considered others expendable (pp. 103–104). In the third chapter, the authors explain that the meaning of displacement, in the aftermath of revolt and civil war, needs to be reinterpreted. It is not simply a geographical phenomenon but should also be seen as including cultural and emotional rupture. The book thus introduces “dépaysement” (p. 149), a multidimensional form of alienation, which is reinterpreted to include not only refugees forced to flee spaces, but also individuals who no longer feel a sense of belonging despite remaining in lands where they have lived for years. Brownlee and Ghiabi therefore explore concepts such as virtual belonging, post-traumatic political memory, and diaspora, showing how they affect identity, political engagement, and activism across borders. For example, Syrian exiles have used online spaces to build support, while historical experiences of repression have shaped public attitudes in Iran and Egypt. In an epilogue, Brownlee and Ghiabi focus on the question of what needs to be done (p. 161). Rather than making utopian or prophetic proposals, they advance a bottom-up model of human security that addresses problems like authoritarian consolidation, mass displacement, and the erosion of citizen-state relations. It also helps respond to needs and allows for the expansion of participation and autonomy. In addition, the chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of decentralization and horizontal governance, and it draws attention to the necessity of resistance. In this respect, the book contributes to the literature. The work advances innovations to political theory, especially how state-citizen relations transform and new political cultures arise. It terms the “mythological machine” the epistemic device through which narratives are produced and mobilized. This is exemplified by the sectarianization of revolts in Syria and Iraq, which transformed civic claims into civil war logics. It uses the cases of Egypt and Iran to illustrate the concept of “statolatry,” the state's reassertion of itself as a sacred ground of political identity. And it shows how refugee flows from Syria and Iraq demonstrate “dépaysement,” a multidimensional form of displacement—physical, imaginary, and virtual—typified by reimagined politics of diasporic communities and the virtual estrangement of those who remain in their homelands. However, the conceptual framework, although it gives the work a philosophical depth, may limit its accessibility and potential to appeal to a wider readership. In addition, reducing the region to generalized statements risks ignoring the historical, cultural, and political differences among its constituent countries. The case of Turkey, with its interplay of secularism, party politics, and state-society relations, demonstrates the limitations of generalized regional theories and underscores the necessity of context-specific analysis. This volume will be of interest to scholars of international relations, political science, social movements, and political theory, as well as those who analyze the processes of political transformation.

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