Strongwo/men Culture

Partisans of the State: Statopraxis - States without People - NCBI Bookshelf An official website of the United States government Here's how you know The .gov means it's official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site. The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely. Log in Show account info Close Account Logged in as: username Dashboard Publications Account settings Log out Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation Bookshelf Search database Books All Databases Assembly Biocollections BioProject BioSample Books ClinVar Conserved Domains dbVar Gene Genome GEO DataSets GEO Profiles GTR Identical Protein Groups MedGen MeSH NLM Catalog Nucleotide OMIM PMC Protein Protein Clusters Protein Family Models PubChem BioAssay PubChem Compound PubChem Substance PubMed SNP SRA Structure Taxonomy ToolKit ToolKitAll ToolKitBookgh Search term Search Browse Titles Advanced Help Disclaimer NCBI Bookshelf. A service of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Brownlee BJ, Ghiabi M. States without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East [Internet]. Montreal (QC): McGill-Queen's University Press; 2025. States without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East [Internet]. Show details Brownlee BJ, Ghiabi M. Montreal (QC): McGill-Queen's University Press ; 2025. Contents Search term < Prev Next > Chapter 4 Partisans of the State: Statopraxis War remains bracketed, and the partisan stands outside of this bracketing. Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan In the second part of our analysis of the culture of the right, we focus on the empirical elements that stand below the statolatry upon which the culture of the right bases it claims. We refer to this as statopraxis . Statopraxis, in our view, captures the biunivocal condition of politics after the defeat of popular revolts: it refers to the way the state moulds political culture through mythological claims and war-making ideology, either directly or through co-option of figures of public authority, and, in parallel, it refers to the way societal agents and ordinary people take up the role to enforce statist goals, autonomously from the state. The latter has its strongest expression in what we discuss as grassroots authoritarianism . As we have seen, the culture of the right is distinct from the ideas adopted by right-wing political parties. As a specific form of political culture emerging with the establishment of the modern nation-state, the culture of the right impregnates left and right, secular as well as religious groups (Islamic, Christian, Jewish, or other persuasions). In the first section, we analysed the ideological and discursive elements that characterise it, such as its relation to the past and future, the conception of the people, and the sacralisation of the state. In the next section, we discuss the empirical elements that enable a display of the culture of the right in the organisation and formation of the social order: militarism, the cult of the strongman, and grassroots authoritarianism, including in the digital sphere. The Culture of Militarism The cogito ergo sum of the state is, according to Carl Schmitt, protego ergo sum : ‘I protect therefore I am’. 1 This protection is metaphorical, as in the case of the prestige of the state which we discussed in chapter 3 , and physical, when it comes to the borders, territorial integrity ( chapters 5 and 6 ), and leadership of the nation-state. It refers to the territorial borders against invading neighbours or foreigners such as migrants and refugees, the integrity and security of the polity against infiltrating forces, and the moral prestige of the state’s institutional legitimacy and lineage and its mythological history. Besides the need for persuasive force, protecting the state as a divine entity or a God-given promise requires hard power. The military is the institution that best serves this purpose. Built upon hierarchical organisation and (blind) obedience to rules, the building blocks of military culture are also central features of the culture of the right. One could think there is a degree of mutuality and transition between them. Indeed, the historical assonance between the military and the right is enshrined in the history of nationalism across the world; it is visible also in the sociological formation of groups enlisting in right-wing movements. This is not only buttressed by what has come to be the commonality of intents between right-wing groups and the military but it is also mutually reinforced by their shared public ethics: a deferential attitude towards leadership; the belief that the army is the highest embodiment of state and nation; the positioning of the military as above the realm of politics (as metapolitical); but also, in times of crisis or legitimacy challenges, the army as arbitrator between conflicting parties and as avant-garde in the movement towards the future. Ultimately, this means that the army is the untouchable institution of the state. Consider global royalties dressing in military regalia as legitimising the code for statehood or the role of army generals in claiming the role of saviour of the state/nation. Modern history abounds with a deferential attitude to men-at-arms. In the Middle East, all the republics have been governed by generals for the best part of their recent history, except for Lebanon, Tunisia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Algeria’s post-liberation Revolutionary Council was made up of members of the army and most of its presidents were army generals (Houari Boumédiène, Chadli Bendjedid, Liamine Zéroual, but not Abdelaziz Bouteflika); similar examples appear in Libya (Mu’ammar Ghaddafi), Egypt (Jamal ‘Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, Abdelfatah al-Sisi), Syria (Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad), and Yemen (Ibrahim al-Hamdi, Ali Abdullah Saleh). Iraq has been the exception as Saddam Hussein never served in the Iraqi army, though he took the title of army general through his position in the Ba’ath Party. Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf do not adopt military regalia in public because the role of armed forces has for many years been outsourced or marginal, but there is ample evidence that the wars in Yemen and Syria have put the question of military experience at the core of state-making, a fact further buttressed by the stellar import of armaments among the Gulf monarchies. Israel, despite its claim to a democratic superiority, has been ruled for long stretches of its short history by former high-ranking military men: Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Benny Gantz, to name the most prominent. With the exception of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, all prime ministers of Israel have had an active role in the army or Mossad – Israel’s intelligence service – even though only some of them reached the rank of general (e.g., Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Benny Gantz). 2 Though Israel’s civilian government has putative control over the army, the military complex and its leadership is closely integrated in matters of domestic (occupation) and foreign politics. The sliding door between public office and military training grounds oils the wheels of this cooperative machine. Not coincidentally, Israel can be described as an army with a state . Across the region, militarism is a visible feature and mutates according to the political circumstances, the need to display the force of public authority and restrain opposition, and the individual persuasions of the people in power. Yet, militarism remains alive and thrives as a cultural component of politics as long as it is not overtly contested. 3 Nowhere more than in Egypt under president al-Sisi does this deferential attitude towards the military take centre stage. With the counterrevolution that toppled Morsi in 2013, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces ( scaf ) became the upholder of national sovereignty and the personification of the state. Militarism became a principal expression of this transformation in the political and social order of Egypt. On 25 January 2014, Tahrir Square in Cairo hosted celebrations for the anniversary of the revolution that had ousted Mubarak in 2011. Policing restricted access to the square to al-Sisi supporters only, many wearing masks of the general’s face or bringing in banners with his portrait. A stage blasted a song dedicated to the armed forces, ‘Bless your hands [ Teslam al-ayyadi ]’, with the refrain ‘may the military of my country be safe’. Written by Mostafa Kamel, it is a nine-minute multi-singer piece which was widely played following the coup of 3 July 2013 as a tribute to the army. 4 Through this public display of loyalty and reverence, together with the excessive use of violence against dissenters, scaf ’s position in Egypt’s post-Mubarak politics shifted in paradoxical ways. First, scaf declared itself guardian of the people’s revolution in 2011; then, it came upfront as guardian of the state against incompetent and conspiratorial Islamists; finally, it embraced ‘the revolution of the army and the people’ as the glorification of the state and the Egyptian nation. Through constitutional revisions, the army was placed beyond the reach of any legal and formal control, from all entities outside of itself. As an entity, the army was the state and, at the same time, it was beyond the state, a move that defies traditional state theory. Instead, this repositioning of the army recalls the notion of the ‘party’ as vanguard of the nation, the organisation in charge of the state in pre-1990s communist political orders. Practically, the change in the military oath exemplified this new status of the military. Prior to 2014, the customary oath was to the president of the republic. After a change in the text, the new oath was only to the military leadership, meaning the generals and the army command itself. Another interesting, though so far overlooked, example is that of the United Arab Emirates. Since the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the uae has entered a more vigorous phase of nation-making, one that is rooted in its role in military adventures and diplomacy across the region and beyond. In particular, the war on Yemen has been the ground for this new process of militarism. There, Emirati military personnel directly engaged in war operations, in some instances suffering casualties. In this context, the state declared its first martyrs, not in the name of religion or independence, but in the name of the state military. This shift did not simply represent a discursive transformation within Emirati politics, but it had sociological and cultural implications too. The dead soldiers of Emirati adventurism in Yemen belonged to poorer families, mostly from the Emirate of Fujairah, the poorest of the uae ’s seven Emirates, though the one with the largest national population. Royals from Dubai and Abu Dhabi paid tribute to them by staging visits to these areas in a push to show unity in diversity. Similar tributes have also become common in settings where the display of support for the political order or for the leading ideology had less explicit ties with the armed forces or militarism in general. Following the assassination of the irgc Qods Forces commander Qasem Soleimani (1957–2020), the irgc media bureau released a poster portraying the martyred general in military clothes in front of a crowd representing the youthful Iranian nation. This was one of many well-crafted public displays of political art that the bureau had completed over the past decade. The message was clearly expressed in militarist terms: all Iranians, and the youth especially, were executing a military salute behind the late general’s shoulder, a setting that resembled that of a Friday prayer, but in this case, there was no prayer involved. The message above the image read, ‘All forward with one voice my life sacrificed for Iran. Long life to our dear Iran.’ More surprisingly, not a single cleric was portrayed in the poster. Qasem Soleimani’s funeral, which took place in dozens of cities across Iraq and Iran, from Karbala to his hometown Kerman, was the largest state funeral held in Iran after the million-strong funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. A military man, with no religious credentials or aspirations (contrary to other lay politicians), Soleimani represented the heart and mind of Iranian resistance against US imperialism, the spirit of nationalism, and at the same time the way militarism became entrenched in the public culture of the day. This political culture does not express itself consciously and people who take part in the mourning ceremonies may well come from sections of the population that are at odds with the political doctrine of the Islamic Republic or with the role of the revolutionary guardsmen in politics. Yet, it is through these moments of affect that the culture of the right becomes rooted in the metaphors and narratives of blood and soil. Mahmud Dowlatabadi (b. 1940), one of the leading Iranian writers of his era and a critic of the Islamic Republic since the early days, wrote a short epigraph in a national newspaper, titled ‘The worthy son of Iran’. In the short excerpt he wondered whether it was the destiny of every Iranian child of worth to be destroyed. He also eulogised the general for ‘creating a dam against the bloodthirsty Daesh … and protecting our borders from them’. The novelist was subsequently criticised by diaspora opposition members, but his words did not fail to capture the emotions of the millions who took to the street to commemorate Soleimani, including people who had little sympathy or support for the Iranian political order. Others followed suit, like the exiled Ardeshir Zahedi, son-in-law of Mohammad Reza Shah and former Iranian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States and United Kingdom from the 1960s. Zahedi, a loathed figure in post-revolutionary state depiction, referred to Soleimani as an ‘honorable and patriotic soldier of the homeland’. 5 The same occurred among long-standing religious dissidents living in exile, Abdol-Karim Sorush and Mohsen Kadivar. A specific aspect within nationalist culture, militarism comes to prominence in moments of internal destabilisation, where civilian groups fail to form a solid political agreement over governance. In autumn 2022, Iran was rocked by the most widespread and confrontational wave of protests since the revolutionary years of 1978–79. Universities, schools, factories, workplaces, and the streets became avenues of dissent, and the display of anger towards the Islamic Republic by women and men in their twenties or younger was unprecedented. Pro-government groups staged counterdemonstrations, usually showing a consistent level of organised choreography, made of identical banners, national flags, and the leader’s picture. A distinctive performance during this wave of protests, however, was the result of the rise of the culture of militarism – and more broadly pro-security culture – espoused by demonstrators filling the streets in support of the Islamic Republic. People would bow and express their gratitude to the law enforcement and anti-riot police who were in attendance at the protests by attempting to kiss the policemen’s hands, by holding their hands on their hearts in a traditional gesture of respect, or by kissing the men on their shoulders as a sign of brotherly love and respect. Members of the Majles, Iran’s parliament, chanted slogans in support of the police and security forces during parliamentary sessions. These exposures are meant to highlight the difference between the disciplined, law-abiding, moral citizens who are pro-government and the vulgar, immoral, and law-breaking protesters, who confront the police – and for whom the police act as a repressive machinery. Connecting this with our previous discussion of militarism as enabling a culture of strongmen shows how this process in political culture has a deep gendered effect. The third case we aim to analyse is that of militarism in Israel. Since its foundation, the Israeli Defence Force ( idf ) has had a central role in the cultural and social life of Israelis. Haim Breshcht, in his book An Army Like No Other , describes the idf as the real historical creator of the nation and of the Jewish state. To give an idea of how far militaristic culture has gone in Israel he mentions an advertisement by a maternity hospital in Tel Aviv in the newspaper Makor Rishon . The advertisement portrays a foetus mobilised in Israeli military gear, reading ‘Recipient of the Presidential Award of Excellence, 2038’. 6 This type of public appeal to be part of an occupying military before the age of consciousness, or before being in the world, is further bolstered by early training and teaching in the use of weapons in adolescent and pre-adolescent school years. Pride in the military industry tested on the civilian Palestinian population on a regular basis is a signpost of the rootedness of the culture of the right through the enchantment of arms. Militarism becomes the way one becomes a citizen, where in the specific case of Israel, refusing military conscription means losing civil rights and being cast out. Those who do accept to serve in the army do so for the best part of their lives, active until the age of fifty-five as reservists with yearly calls of duty in boot camps. The army becomes the main social club for the (Jewish and Zionist) citizenry. 7 This trend entered a more muscular stage following the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, which triggered a full militarisation of Israeli society with no end in sight. That said, the roots of Israeli militarism are intertwined with the settler conquest and expulsion of the indigenous population of Mandatory Palestine. In the Zionist ideology, the army comes to perform a mythological, biblical agency actualising the word of the Bible. Ben-Gurion internalised the biblical trope and transposed it into military operations throughout the land, thus seeing the idf as operating in the light of a historical revanchism. In Return to Zionism , Gabriel Piterberg reports the following statement from the first Israeli president: ‘None of the Bible interpreters, Jews or Gentiles, in the middle ages or in our time, could have interpreted Joshua’s chapters as did the adventures of the Israel Defense Forces last year [1948].’ 8 The army comes to occupy an existential, sociological, and ethical dimension of being an Israeli citizen, which also means that militarism turns into a mundane, internalised dimension of life. Some Israeli officials do not shy away from describing Israel as a modern Sparta, 9 a fact that reached an apotheosis with former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s posting the following on X/Twitter: Israel needs now to live as a Silicon Valley in Sparta. Part of Israel’s colossal failure of October 7th was a result of complacency … We got soft … We forgot that we’re surrounded by the craziest terror savages on earth: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah and isis … Imagine San Jose neighboring Kabul. October 7th is as if savages with machetes tore down the screens of The Truman Show and we saw the barbarism hiding behind those tenuous facades. We realized that our neighbors aren’t Belgium, Canada or Vermont. We were cruelly reminded that Israel’s existence depends on our being constantly alert, vigilant, strong and very very tough. At the same time, we must continue to be the StartUp Nation: innovative, technology savvy, agile and connected to the latest and best stuff going on. It’s a challenge no other nation faces: To be a Silicon Valley in Sparta. 10 The army in the contemporary Middle East is less concerned with defence of the homeland from invading armies than with targeting the unwanted Other in the form of refugees, migrants, non-citizens, and opposition groups. In this shift, the army has more overtly embraced the tenets of the global culture of the right with its obsession with heterodox insiders, refugee flows, and the protection of the nation’s cultural legacy. Strongwo/men Culture An offshoot, integral part of militarism – and a core constituent of the culture of the right – is the cult of strongmen. This has variations across the region. Local cultural environments and gender codes as well as historical trajectories of state–society relations influence the making of ‘strongmen culture’. Overall, however, the culture of the right is enamoured with the idea of the strongmen and the gendered representation of active bodies. This is nothing new when we compare it to the cult of the body during the early twentieth-century nationalist movements across Europe (and equally, for instance, in India and Japan). Placing hope for national renewal and political change on a single man, a leader, or on a group of strongmen was a sentiment that many embraced at the time of high nationalism and state formation. For instance, many (but by no means all) Italian Jews supported the fascist militias and the leadership of Benito Mussolini in the 1920s up until the promulgation of racial laws in Italy. While most Jews in Germany were suspicious of and antagonistic toward the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism from the early days, the fascist movement in Italy enjoyed open and strong support from the Jewish community. Among the most renowned cases was that of Ettore Ovazza (1892–1943), a banker and public intellectual from a prominent Jewish family in Turin. Ovazza joined the black shirts ( camice nere ) participating in the 1922 March on Rome, the coup d’etat led by armed protesters in favour of Mussolini. 11 He was also among the founders of the journal La Nostra Bandiera ( Our Flag ) which had the explicit objective of persuading the Jewish community of Italy to join the fascist movement. In his book Diary for My Son , published in 1928, Ovazza confesses: Sometime, in the turbulent turning of centuries, a man is born who can proclaim himself shepherd of peoples, and this man is adulated and deified. Thus Moses was born, who gave the world the concept of the one God and the fundamental tables of civil life, thus Jesus of Nazareth was born, who while facing the interested deviations of the doctrine and the iniquities of the times launches the cry for liberation and the comeback for all those persecuted and he starts the greatest Revolution in history. Thus were born Mohammad [Maometto] and Gothamo Budda [ sic ] … Beside these great figures who belong to all the peoples and to the history of humankind, there are great figures in the history of different nations … To the prophets and the authors of our Risorgimento [Italy’s national unification process in the nineteenth century], the world war has added a rank of new fulgurant heroes, and has above all exalted two great spirits: Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini. 12 In conflating the assonances between the ‘sister religions’ of Judaism and Christianity, Ovazza was effectively embracing another religious sentiment, much less ancient and juridical, centred around new military men and their wartime experiences. 13 He was celebrating the irredentist calls of Mussolini and the poet-in-arms figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), an early enthusiast of the fascist movement and a frontier fighter for Italy’s military expansion in Istria, where he established the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro (aka Impresa di Fiume [the Endeavour of Fiume], 1919–1920). 14 Ovazza and his Jewish camerati were not alone in their embrace of the strongman cult. Across the border, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his personal diaries about his desire to abandon the image of what he described as the weak Jewish manhood characterising his co-religionaries living in Europe. His ideal of man was to be a Prussian Junker, a knight in arms and noble, the essence of Mitteleuropa macho imagination. It does not come as a surprise when we learn that Herzel completed the writing of his magnum opus Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) while listening to the symphonies of the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner, it should be remembered, was the author of the antisemitic pamphlet Judaism in Music , where he argued that Jews could not be part of the German spirit because their artwork was only aimed at financial gain rather than for the purpose of meaning and beauty. 15 It was the German composer, after all, that ‘loomed largest in his attempt to construct a new mythos for human being’. 16 The influence of muscular politics in Israel has its roots in the vision of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880–1940), who elaborated his ideas in the early 1900s while living (and studying) in Italy. He conceived of it as creating the opposite to the image of the Hebrew man in popular imagination. Ipcha mistrava , ‘deriving a result from its opposite’, was the Aramaic concept he used to call for this revitalisation of Jewish culture: Because the yid [the Jew, pejoratively] is ugly, sickly, and lacks handsomeness, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty, stature, massive shoulders, vigorous movements, bright colors and shades of colour … The yid has accepted submission; the Hebrew ought to know how to command … the Hebrew, with brazenness and greatness, should march ahead to the entire world, look them straight and deep in their eyes and hoist them his banner: ‘I am a Hebrew!’ 17 Jabotinsky’s influence over the making of modern Israel is profound and long-lasting, embraced by all political movements across the Zionist spectrum. He had a foundational role in the establishment of the Jewish Self-Defence Organisation in Odessa and the necessity of Jewish militias in Russia amidst the escalating violence of the pogroms and later applied in support of the Zionist project in Palestine. The pursuit of creating a modern Hebrew man (and indeed woman) as a citizen-in-arms, with defensive and offensive capabilities, is today a distinctive trait of the modern Israeli vision of society. A warrior ethos is what stands before the culture of the right, which is embodied by the idf as a culturally and logistically central maker of the Hebrew citizen. We shall look at some of the features of strongman culture in the next pages. But before then, let us take a look at examples from the region. 18 Though not as engrained, there are other countries where the ethics of strongmen bears significant societal influence. Egypt is one such case, especially following the counterrevolution led by al-Sisi. The formerly little-known general sitting on the board of scaf had activated a country-wide campaign rebranding his image as a saviour of the nation (and of the state), a plebian and transcendent figure with all the features of a military genius, a political statesman, and an ethical guide. Nothing comparable had existed at least since the Nasserist era. The propagation of the al-Sisi cult has moved hand in hand with the idea that the Egyptian people cannot be governed by less than an overwhelming and dictatorial authority. This idea transpired from al-Sisi himself, and repeatedly from pro-governmental voices, when amidst the depreciation of the Egyptian pound in 2024, al-Sisi said, ‘We are not a real country … It’s something that looks like one.’ 19 It is hard not to see the parallelism between this sentiment and the sentence attributed to Mussolini: governing Italians is not difficult, it is pointless . It rests upon the self-Orientalising mindset that wants so-called disorderly and reluctant-to-be-legible societies to be put in order by the iron fist of the strongman, often the military – or policeman. Rational force for irrational people. It doesn’t fall far from the representation of internal enemies of the state, such as ethnic, religious, or cultural minorities, unorthodox groups, as unfit for modern governance. The body as a display of one’s worth is a powerful element of the culture of the right. The rise of body-building culture, of intensive aim-oriented (muscle-oriented) gym training, and their reproduction and lifeworld through the internet is a distinctive phenomenon of a new aesthetic only apparently unpolitical. The cult of the body has ancient roots, but its modern manifestation overlaps and, in fact, intermingles with the rise of the nation-state and of nationalist movements, including grassroots movements. Jabotinsky’s call for a ‘broad-shouldered Hebrew man’ resonates with the long tide of muscular politics and show of strength as a central piecework of the culture of the right. The grassroots expression of this phenomenon is a topic beyond the scope of our work and more a potential subject of anthropological investigations. But reflecting on the state-led manifestations of bodily culture allows entry to the culture of the right. One of the most spectacular, almost caricatural, displays of bodily ideology occurred in post-coup Egypt under al-Sisi. It concerned the public broadcast of a police parade in October 2020. In a long queue, with trucks, vans, cars, and anti-riot fortified vehicles, 1,500 young men with sculpted oiled bodies, shirtless and with unworkably tight pants, performed acrobatic movements punctuated by muscular poses displaying their well-cured bodily infrastructure in the Cairo Stadium. 20 The parade mirrored the aesthetic athleticism of gay pride parades, without the unbridled joy and challenges to normative sexuality. (Readers of this section may see these comments as disguising the authors’ guilty envy for better working bodies; we admit that any such sentiment, if it is there, is unconscious and unwanted. Meanwhile Cairo security forces were arresting lgbtq + activists and subjecting non-conforming people to humiliating violence.) This celebration of the body ties in with the politics of nation-making. It is the public sign of a focus on the body as opposed to a focus on the spirit and the mind, on the dangerous intellect. Without naming it, a glorification of the body in Egypt is therefore a critique of the religious opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the left-leaning intelligentsia which is erudite (and with less athleticism), connected to global networks of expertise and social activism. The body is the means to defend the nation against the threat of others and the threat of itself, of dwelling upon unnecessary thoughts of critique. During his meeting with Arab ministers of youth and sports in Cairo in 2022, al-Sisi remarked that it is vital to encourage Arab youth to focus their energies on healthy lifestyle practices, such as physical activity and sports, rather than on pondering for too long ‘radical ideologies’. 21 There is a historical link between reclaiming the body and the rise of the culture of the right. In the early twentieth century, Christian and Jewish groups organised forms of muscular activism with the aim of training new active and self-defending bodies. The muscular body and the rejuvenation of the ancient mythological past had a strong nexus and has been a strong trope in the culture of the right. A casebook for this philosophy of masculinity is the worldview of Theodor Herzl, who crafted his political vision of Zionism upon a ‘distaste for the Jews’ as weak and victimised bodies with an inferior sexuality when compared to the white race. 22 For instance, Herzl was a member of Albia, an ultranationalist German fraternity dedicated to the art of duelling. Once expelled following Albia’s growing antisemitism, he started conceiving of the mythological past of the land of Israel as a vision of noble, Junker-like politics and of Palestine not portrayed as the promised land but as ‘Phallustine’, the place where the Jews could recover their masculine sexual force. 23 The sensualisation of bodies in the lifeworld of war and repression goes hand in hand with another use of sex and sexuality in Israel’s strategy. The most evident case was revealed in spring 2023 when a Palestinian man from Nablus assassinated one of the leaders of an emerging Palestinian insurgent group known as ‘Lions’ Den’, after having been blackmailed because of his sexual orientation. The man, tricked into having sex with an Israeli man who later revealed himself to be a gay idf soldier, was blackmailed into acting as an informant and eventually into carrying out the assassination of a Palestinian militant. The idf ’s 8200 unit is known to be ‘gay-friendly’, a category promoted by the idf itself in its social media outreach, often accused of pink-washing. It is also known that gay Israeli soldiers have been used in operations to blackmail Palestinians with a homosexual orientation and oblige them to act as informants out of fear of being exposed to their communities’ judgement. What emerges here is the apparently non-problematic exploitation of love and desire for the benefit of the state, even when it comes out of an exploitation of the patriarchal environment in which many Palestinians live. This masculine (macho) concern has evolved since the establishment of Israel. No longer concerned with reproducing old masculinist tropes, the idf has been at the forefront of promoting a transversal cult of physicality, gender friendly, and capturing the imagination of those who would not usually be persuaded by militaristic models of the body. This has occurred especially through the portrayal of female participation in the army with an emphasis on the sensualisation of the body in military clothes and, on the other hand, on the marketisation of idf -conceived martial arts such as Krav Maga in Europe and North America, progressively globalised also through film and series production as exemplified in Fauda . The first element, sensualisation, applies to female bodies. It features amply on social media, especially Instagram and TikTok, where there are numerous and widely followed profiles such as ‘Hot idf girls’ or ‘girlsdefense’, which counts more than a hundred thousand followers. This account has a long list of profiles of current or former (reservist) idf soldiers with a picture of them in a sexy pose, often highly provocative, on the left, and a photo of them in idf uniform on the right. The profiles which are advertised have high visibility and their bio descriptor includes, systematically, texts such as ‘I idf ’, ‘ idf reservist’, or ‘Zionist’. vice magazine has carried out a more nuanced version of this body celebration, blind to the politics of the occupation. 24 While portraying the sensual bodies of teenage soldiers, this type of coverage has the double edge of reinforcing masculine expectations of strongmen with muscular bodies and sexy women with feminine features, both with weapons. 25 This aspect has recently surfaced in Lebanon, where amidst the falling apart of the politico-economic order, the place of women continues to be one of the remaining pretenses of the national political culture. On International Women’s Day on 8 March 2023, the newspaper al-Modon published a frontline article titled ‘The Lebanese Woman … Army Soldier and Security Guard’. In the piece, the journalist highlights women’s active participation in the army, police, and security forces as the most telling feature of female citizenship and achievement. The annexed Lebanese Army video for this celebration concludes with a woman performing a military salute, captioned ‘Beside every great man … a great woman [ junb kull rajul ‘azim … imra’ah ‘azimah ]’. 26 The gendered dimension of militarism combines with the use of women’s participation in the state project while not challenging, indeed reinforcing, the tenets of the culture of the right. The second element of the culture of the right and the use of bodies in Israel centres on the industry of self-defence, to which we briefly referred when speaking of Jabotinsky’s propagation of Jewish self-defence. Born out of necessity in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, Krav Maga mutated as it moved out of the ghetto and into the realm of the Zionist state’s nation-making. In this journey from resistance to oppression to oppression of resistance, Israeli close-combat arts became a founding myth for the nation-sate. No one embodied this journey more than Imi Lichtensfeld (1910–1998), the Hungarian wrestler who migrated to Palestine and developed this technique for use in the proto-units of the idf . Trained at his father’s gymnasium, named Hercules after the Greek human-divine hero known for his strength, courage, and sexual stamina, Lichtensfeld was a multi-discipline athlete of international fame. He developed his philosophy of defence confronting fascist violence against Jews in Europe and later exported this knowledge/experience to Palestine to support the Zionist expansion. French philosopher Dorlin refers to Krav Maga as an offensive technique in a ‘continuous space of imminent violence’ and the basis for Israel’s national ideology of ‘offensive defence’. 27 Israel is a worldwide exporter of self-defence techniques, which together with its counterinsurgency strategies and spying software are considered highly strategic assets in its defence and war-making. As a ‘security society’, military, paramilitary, and citizen-led defence are means to protect the state and the land of its citizens. It is not surprising, therefore, that Krav Maga has become a trademark of the global right outside of Israel too. For instance, in Leipzig, Germany, neo-Nazi groups run a Krav Maga centre which was identified as the hub of violent attacks against anti-fascist and migrant demonstrators. The irony of neo-Nazis adopting a technique developed for Jewish self-defence, marketed as a useful, practical defence technique, is lost in its embrace by the idf and Israel’s state security industry. 28 This connivance has deeper political implications. Martial arts exist on the assumption of the possibility of violence, even when they do not pursue the performance of violent acts. For a discipline such as Krav Maga, which is built upon and marketed as an empirical, pragmatic response to real-world situations of danger (the threat of rape, burglary, knife attack, terrorists, etc.), the assumption for those practising it is to be ready for attacks by immoral, malicious enemies at any time. Violence, in this setting, produces solidarity among individuals who are potentially the object of it and makes possible the adoption of a common cultural-political frame of response, which is a defence-attack culture as instructed by Krav Maga . Through training, a person perceives the world as a hostile environment where attacks are always possible and imminent and for which immediate devastating – though short of fatal – reactions are necessary. This mindset aligns with a survivalist worldview, one that is always ready to react to emergencies or danger, two pillars which credit the political imagination of the right. Throughout the world the rise of right-wing movements has had strong links with the rise of the culture of aggressive self-defence. Mixed martial arts ( mma ) is described as the fastest-growing sport in the world. It has gained popularity and has been put on display in right-wing mobilisations. 29 Initially banned because of its hyper-violent outcomes, mma has been included in the US-based Ultimate Fighting Championship ( ufc ) and given ample media coverage by Donald J. Trump through public tournaments and merchandising. In this way, it has become a ‘perfect way to channel ideologies and narratives about national defence, military-style discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets’. 30 Across the world, the embracing of mma (and the like) as a means of statopraxis and the emboldening of the culture of the right occurs through tournaments and in the praising of these techniques by officials and cultural promoters of the state. Sambo in Russia, of which Vladimir Putin is an advanced practitioner, is widely taught within Russian policing, psychiatric, security, and armed institutions. 31 Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and Putin ally, has cultivated a version of right-wing Islamist militarism, with martial arts holding a ritual place in Chechen fighting clubs, which in turn have allegedly served to train Kadyrov’s own militia, known as 141st Special Motorized Regiment (aka Kadyrovites). Kadyrov’s promotion of mma has been formalised with the creation of the Akhmat mma tournaments and clubs – named after his late father, killed in a car bomb attack in 2004. To underpin its right-wing nature, the semi-official chant of these clubs is ‘Akhmat Sila’, ‘Akhmat Power’. 32 In the Arab world, mixed martial arts and ufc are in strong expansion although they are not overtly embraced by political leaders. The Emirates have invested a great amount of financial assets in the sport, which does not clash with the political alliances adopted by the ruler Muhammad bin Zeid al-Nahyan (aka MbZ). The sheikhdom is also the hub and the biggest investor in the discipline. Across the Middle East, the only Krav Maga training centre outside Israel is located in Dubai. Outside the uae , mma is equally expanding in popularity. For example, after attending the military academy at Sandhurst, Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the son of Bahrain’s ruler, invested in the mma industry. 33 Even in Iran, where the state is no proponent of mma or other extreme fighting sports, there is a growing scene, often mediated by traditional disciplines such as Greco-Roman or free wrestling, a sport that has an ancient and moral tradition in Iran. In 2021, there were reports about an underground women’s mma fighting scene in Iran, hinting at the expanding influence despite governmental strictures. The spread of aggressive self-defence techniques and the marketisation of mma has implications for the way public culture shifts in its reinterpretation of social norms and people’s agency in state–society relations. Beside the sensualisation of the body and the adoption of military-like training to be used in everyday life occurrences, aggressive self-defence promises to put the ‘initiated’ individual on higher ground compared to the brutal undisciplined body of non-initiated individuals, conceived as barbarians. Thus, it confirms one of the tenets of the culture of the right, i.e., physical superiority begets a higher place in the moral hierarchy. The capacity to operate and to perform with physical domination upon others in society, whether as self-defence against potential threats or as a preventive display of bodily superiority over enemies, gives agency to individuals. This agency, especially when espoused by a militaristic and security-oriented vision of politics, 34 produces what we refer to as ‘grassroots authoritarianism’. Grassroots Authoritarians Militarism, strongmen culture, and the top-down definition of ‘who is the people’ or ‘how a people should look’ are core features of authoritarian political orders. Streamlined in public culture, they are put into practice and given agency through mundane iterations of everyday life. They are given political agency. While agency is most often understood as a form of action and expression by those not having power and against the grain of public authority or those higher in the socio-economic order, we cannot dismiss the way agency at a grassroots level can be equally reactionary, what we refer to as ‘grassroots authoritarianism’. This is a development that follows the outbreak of civil war conditions across the region, either as actual material conflict or as the condition in which people feel they are living. Grassroots authoritarianism implies semi-organised or autonomous individuals (though perceiving themselves as part of an ‘imagined’ collective), who actively intervene in the social field by reproducing state-led ideology and the alleged moral imperatives of public authority. Grassroots authoritarians’ intervention is autonomous but consciously or unconsciously linked to the vision and mission of the political order in enforcing discipline, punishment, control, ‘correction’, and expulsion of forms of social behaviour or cultural identity (performance) that are considered at odds with the normative order. While rarely acknowledging formal ties to public institutions, it is not unusual for grassroots authoritarians to maintain clandestine networks of support to and from the state or elements within the state’s ruling and enforcement cadres. Though the state and people in power may play the game of ‘rhetorical condemnation [and] haphazard prosecution’ 35 against grassroots authoritarians, they never seriously act or object to it, for instance by calling for public scrutiny into the operation of social groups involved in grassroots authoritarian actions. A paradigmatic example of grassroots authoritarians is that of Jewish Israeli settler organisations and militias. These groups operate as a frontier army, with advanced military equipment and logistics, but without public accountability for their actions. The settlers’ direct and concerted collaboration with the idf is publicly known and well-documented. Their objectives are to expand the frontiers of the Israeli state in the West Bank and elsewhere and to secure Jewish settlements in strategic areas, guaranteeing access to resources and roads. This puts the settler movement in Israel at the edge of the definition of grassroots authoritarians and closer to the definition of paramilitary groups, as known in the context of South and Central America. Contrary to the paras , however, settlers are not officially on the payroll of the Israeli state. They mobilise for what they consider their rightful homeland and based on their hatred of non-Jewish people in that land. However, they receive systematic support in the form of logistical resources, monetary benefits, and material concessions, besides having moral and legal state protection against domestic and international accusations or judicial prosecutions. idf commanders, including West Bank commanders, regularly visit settlements and provide lectures and training to local militias. Following the October attacks in southern Israel, the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, distributed 10,000 weapons to illegal settlers as a policy to integrate ‘civilian security teams in the Border Police in mixed Jewish–Palestinian towns’. 36 The relation of grassroots authoritarians with the law is one interesting way to understand their twilight nature. In some circumstances, these groups exonerate themselves from the law and transgress it to undertake public action aimed at their material or ideological interests. In other instances, they see themselves and portray their duties to the public as the last line of defence against the breaking of national laws and interests. Existing between transgression and deference to the law, their agency can be a powerful disruptive force in everyday politics, but this often comes with reactionary outcomes. Beside the grassroots form of territorial control, settlers’ organisations have a powerful influence over the culture of the right in Israel. As we discussed earlier, they adopt the tenets of this public culture in the form of militarism (e.g., displays of weapons and military-style operation); glorification of local militia leaders; enchantment with the mythological history of the land they live in and the lands they claim to be theirs; reconfiguration of public culture towards a muscular form of Judaism and the pursuit of the ‘new Hebrew man’ where the body is potent and glorified; and maintenance of traditional forms of social and gender hierarchies within their walled communities, with women being relegated to the role of mothers and home workers and men to the role of war-makers and security providers. 37 Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir are the leading exponents of this trend, though far from the only example. The movement is part of the Religious Zionist parties which have emerged as one of Israel’s ascending political movements, receiving the third-largest share of votes in the country’s 2022 parliamentary elections. Their influence, however, goes beyond electoral politics and is built upon their rootedness in settlers’ communities and in the capacity of having translated the already hawkish culture of Israeli politics to the extremes. This is giving way to the adoption of settler modes of governance of the public space outside the Occupied Territories, such as in Tel Aviv and other coastal cities. Prior the 2023 October attacks, south of Tel Aviv in Bat Yam, Ben-Gvir’s followers were setting up a civilian armed militia to patrol the streets against what they refer to as the increasing threat of Arab labourers from Jaffa and the West Bank. 38 The move suggests that, in the event of appeasement and compromise in the strategy to deal with Palestinians across Israel’s occupied lands, much like the actions of South Africa’s white supremacist militias amidst calls to reform or practise a softened version of apartheid, Jewish grassroots groups will take the lead in the repression of non-Jews and non-conforming Jews autonomously from the state of Israel. Moving to Israel’s north, in Lebanon, we can find other forms of grassroots authoritarianism. Hezbollah members, for instance, enforce social control on the public space in neighbourhoods where the party has its foothold, especially in the southern peripheries of Beirut, known as Dahiyeh. The enforcement affects public codes of conduct, especially for women, but also, and more importantly, it acts to control the space against infiltrators, given the history of anti-Hezbollah operations over the past decades. Obviously, this infrastructure of social control is put to good use during events that go beyond the spatial remit of the aforementioned areas. For instance, during the so-called Lebanese Revolution of 2019 ( al-thawra ), a protest movement calling for the dismissal of all leading political parties and the authorities of the state – emblematised in the slogan killon ya’ani killon (‘all of them means all of them’) – plainclothes members, allegedly belonging to Hezbollah and Amal movements, clashed with street protesters. This intervention occurred autonomously from the internal security forces ( ‘amn al-dakhili , isf ) or the police ( darak ), but it had the objective of enforcing public control over dissent. This trend towards grassroots security is visible also beyond Hezbollah’s militants. In Achrafieh, a neighbourhood historically close to the Maronite community, Nadim Gemayel, a member of the Lebanese parliament, created Ashrafiyyeh2020, a neighbourhood watch that patrols the roads and alleys of the suburb. Groups of men walk the streets from dusk to dawn, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. With torches and batons, the sight of local inhabitants patrolling the streets is reminiscent of the militias during the civil war, though the founder of the group guarantees that their work is carried out in syntony with law enforcement institutions. Indeed, the phenomenon is expanding in conjunction with the withdrawal of the Lebanese state from its obligation of public order and governance. In June 2022, a Christian militia under the name Jnoud al-Rab (‘Soldiers of the lord’) attacked an lgbtq + stand with a flower billboard announcing ‘Love always blossoms’, destroying it and declaring a war on homosexuality, satanism, and the defence of the existing regulatory regime on gender codes in the country. Prior to this event, they had shut down a concert by famous Lebanese group Mashru’ Leila in the 2019 Byblos International Festival. In an interview with the magazine L’Orient du Jour , their leader declared they were guided ‘by the word of Christ’. 39 A working-class group of men, the Jnoud acts autonomously from the state and political parties – though reports suggest that they are close to Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (Quwwat Lubnaniyah), the far-right group sitting in the Lebanese parliament. Te Jnoud’s coat of arms includes a white and red crossed shield, the wings of Saint Michael, and the Bible. A motto frames the image: ‘Always ready my Lord’, with the face of the group’s leader Abdo Lahhoud in the background. Besides attacking lgbtq + events and organisations, this militia has also been proactive in Islamophobic actions and online activism, which in the context of Lebanon targets refugee communities of Palestinians and Syrians. Their actions rest upon a general ill sentiment towards refugees and unorthodox groups, therefore finding support beyond their immediate rank and files. They are one expression of the evolving and expanding culture of the right in Lebanon. At the secular end of the spectrum in the grassroots authoritarianism of Lebanon stands the ssnp . Headquartered in Makdisi Street, a street just north of the trade and restaurant area of Hamra Street, party members consider the area an internal district of the ssnp , confirmed by the ample display of flags, road blocks and banners, disparate but regular presence of uniformed militia men and women, and the occasional unauthorised closure of the street for party-related commemoration, as has occurred on recurrent visits by the authors to Beirut in the month of October, year after year. This public presence also has the effect of providing security for businesses and offices and the buildings in which they are housed. The embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic is on Makdisi Street, in a tacit acknowledgement of the connection with the ssnp – and Syria’s historical connection to West Beirut, consecrated during the Lebanese civil war. In 2011, when protesters demonstrated against the repression of people in Damascus and other Syrian cities carried out by the Syrian state, ssnp members intervened as the first line of pro-Syrian defence. Members of the party attacked protesters with sticks and held a counterdemonstration which ended up in expeditionary interventions against anti-Syrian protesters, much akin to the work of anti-riot policing. 40 The ssnp also provides funding for night patrols and community security vigilantes in small towns and cities, especially following Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2018–19, which caused a massive spike in the crime rate. These groups usually work from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., most days of the week. They hold no formal power, they cannot make arrests, but they can stop suspected criminals and take them to the police or the internal security forces. With gun ownership widespread, these vigilante groups operate instead of the police. In Iraq, the Hashd al-Sha’abi (Popular Mobilisation Units – pmu s) have performed the role of enforcers of public control over dissent. Their operation has given way to a militaristic social group that confronts its antagonists with violence. Especially following the war against isis , the pmu s have progressively turned into an official arm of the Iraqi state and a tool used by pro-Iran parties in the Iraqi parliament; step by step they have moved towards the adoption of a militaristic culture, with a strong hierarchy and the enforcement of strict codes of conduct. Many vigilante groups have started to operate with the purpose of guaranteeing safety of the public (from themselves), while claiming autonomy from the main pmu s such as Kata’ib Hezbollah, Kata’ib Ahl al-Haq, or Ahl al-Kahaf. Here we witness a process that is similar to what happened in Central America following the end of decade-long civil wars. Militias can turn into gangs (see the epilogue of this book) forcing protection rackets on private citizens and businesses. Racketeering for restaurants and shop-owners, checkpoints along major routes by non-state groups, and involvement in criminal enterprise involving narcotics, psychoactive substances, petrol, and other high-profit-generating commodities have become daily business in a disrupted governance system. 41 The failure to deliver on basic economic and security needs has prompted the emergence of grassroots groups, stepping in through a new model of authoritarian citizenship. In a less volatile – though rapidly changing – environment, we can see a centralised model for grassroots authoritarian groups as embodied by Iran’s basij-e mosta‘zafin , ‘The Organisation for the Mobilisation of the Oppressed’, better known as basij . This volunteer army was created in the 1980s with the objective of defending the Islamic Revolution against its enemies: it soon turned into a long and flexible arm of the state in matters of Islamisation of the public space, social control of dissent – including in educational settings – and display of regime support. Though a powerful example of authoritarianism at the grassroots level, the basijis have a formal and direct line of hierarchy within the irgc , and so they cannot be analysed as an autonomous social group. Instead, in Iran, it is drug-related crime and cleansing of the urban space that are carried out by grassroots groups with an authoritarian ethic. Given the country’s very large drug-using population, a number oscillating between two and five million users, ‘addiction’ in the public space has become a motif of concern for the public and a source of recurrent criticism towards municipalities and the police. To supplement the lack of police initiative, which is focused on other forms of criminal enterprise, including the targeting of political dissent, local groups of young men with physical stamina are dispatched by informal rehabilitation centres (also known as detoxification camps ) to collect drug users. These men act either on the invitation of the police or following calls from local neighbourhood groups or families. 42 ‘Arrested’ individuals are kept in informal settings and forced to kick their habit in many instances in a violent and dehumanising way which has resulted in several deaths in custody. Citizen-led policing has the effect of buttressing calls for them to be ‘tough on crime’ and ‘tough on drugs’, two long-lasting pledges of right-wing groups across the globe. It also engrains the mechanism through which vigilantism spreads as a local means of authority and public control beyond the remit of anti-addiction intervention or drug control similarly to other cases in Latin America. The mechanisms used to punish drug users are indeed transposed into other fields of societal intervention. In times of need, they can be equally legitimised to cleanse the public space of the homeless or are adopted to repress political protests. Part of the evolution of grassroots authoritarianism is a side effect of widespread disruption in the potential, capacity, and legitimacy of the state – as in the case of Lebanon and Iraq. It is equally ascribable to the transition towards outsourcing of governance to non-state agents and citizen-led groups, which some authors have critically described as a neoliberal turn or criminal governance – as in the example of Iran – aimed at imposing on, or at least at persuading through more than rhetorical means, the public. 43 Digital Grassroots Authoritarians So far, what we have described as being the role of statopraxis and grassroots authoritarians can be placed in continuity with the historical role of paramilitary militias, volunteer patrols, temperance enforcers, and non-state ideologues of state authority. Their revamping in contemporary times is a sign of the changing nature of the political game. Yet, grassroots authoritarianism is not just a re-proposition of an old model. When it comes to its modes of communication and dissemination, it is highly novel. Its encroachment in the digital sphere is evidence of this. The Twittersphere (now X) is the mainstream environment to observe and study how user-led (grassroots) authoritarian practice builds up the ideological contours of the culture of the right. The content of what is being said can vary from one end to the other of the political spectrum, but the means to put it into practice or to intervene in forms of digital vigilantism are strikingly similar, including the collusion between citizen-led and state-run digital activism. Let’s consider the Iranian women’s movement against the compulsory imposition of the hijab which went viral under the hashtag #zan-zendegi-azadi. The movement was prompted by the death of Mahsa Jîna Amini, a woman from the city of Saqez in Iran’s western region of Kurdistan who died in the custody of the morality police ( gasht-e ershad ) on 16 September 2022. In the weeks following her death, protesters reclaimed the slogan zan, zendigi, azadi (in Kurdish žina, žian, azadi , ‘woman, life, freedom’, an original motto coined by pkk ideologue Abdullah Ocalan) to contest the Islamic Republic’s morality police and, contextually, the ruling polity. These protests soon extended throughout the country and connected with existing contentions over welfare, rights, corruption, and state-led violence. Parallel to the protests on the ground, a massive online movement emerged. On Twitter/X, this movement accounted for the most popular trend in hashtags in Twitter’s Persian-language history, amassing about 80 million posts up to 28 October 2022, about five weeks after the start of the protests. Marc Owen Jones, a leading expert on digital information wars, analysed a large dataset of samples from the online activity connected to the hashtags and concluded that many of the accounts were part of a concerted propaganda campaign on behalf of anti- and pro-Iranian accounts, many of which were created in the month of September. This suggested that these accounts were in good part fake or bots. Beside this aspect, which is recurrent in the online life of protests, what stood out was the level of hate-mongering and toxic accusations between discussants on online portals. ‘Apologist of the Islamic Republic’, ‘terrorist’, ‘blood-thirsty’, and other strong labels were regularly used to target people who did not embrace the call for ‘regime change’ or uncompromising positions, including the call to cut diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic, abandoning the jcpoa , or even calls for direct US-led military intervention. Pro-government accounts mirrored this by accusing all critics of the Islamic Republic as being ‘foreign enemies and agents’. US-based journalist Farnaz Fassihi, working for the New York Times , and Negar Mortazavi, who is a columnist for the Independent , were targets of systematic, misogynistic, and violent threats online. In one instance, when Mortazavi was meant to attend a public panel discussion on the Iran protests, the event was cancelled because of a bomb threat call by an anonymous individual. The online campaign against the National Iranian American Council ( niac ), a non-partisan lobby group that has been a diplomatic avenue of mediation between the US government and the Islamic Republic, was another case in point that occupied a consistent place in the delegitimisation of anti-war, pro-diplomacy voices on Iranian policy in the US. It is common to see this hatred expressed through gendered offences, with threats of ‘rape’, slurs such as ‘whore’ and ‘son of a bitch’, ‘pimp’, etc. This was made paradoxical given that the Iranian protest movement had mobilised under the slogan of ‘woman, life, freedom’. This online aggression spilt over into real life, with many instances of violence towards people, in Europe and North America, who were thought to be supporters of the Islamic Republic or not conforming to the calls for aggressive action against it. In some instances, having a beard or being darker in complexion would be sufficient to trigger a physical attack against people taking photos of protesters. The rhetoric and content of the diasporic protests manifested strong commonalities with the neo-con agenda, in part broadcast through foreign-funded news organisations such as Iran International (Saudi Arabia and Israel) and Manoto (Monarchists). The protest movement of 2022, in this way, rejected any group that over the past decades had had working relationships with the Islamic Republic, including niac , the reformists, and even diplomats in the US State Department. In a rapid escalation of the rhetoric of ‘the enemy’, the online protest movement adopted long-lasting elements of neo-con language and strategy on Iran, supporting maximum pressure, conflict escalation, and ‘regime change’. Digital grassroots authoritarians became enablers of the culture of the right, even though theirs is a minority inside and outside of Iran. They become partisans in a fight where the domestic and the international intersect through the online world – and transpire into the world of the street protests. The rise of digital technologies grounded conflicts in the online world, which in turn has produced similar transformations to the rise of partisan war-making in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if we think of Schmitt’s theory of the partisan. In a way similar to what Schmitt considered the effect of the advent of motorised vehicles and communication technologies in modern warfare as having brought the partisan into new ground for war-making, we consider the creation of digital grassroots groups as the new stage of the partisan fight and interstate, interregional conflicts. 44 We are not arguing that online partisans are carrying out the same task as real-world partisans. But we must acknowledge that ‘the [online] partisan does not fight on an open battlefield and does not fight on the same level of open fronts’, as Schmitt wrote. Instead, ‘he forces his enemy into another space’ – this is the new space of online social media where users are often anonymous or fake – and by doing so ‘[the online partisan] displaces the space of regular, conventional theatres of war to a different darker dimension – a dimension of the abyss’, which is the abyss of information wars through asymmetrical attacks and concerted state-led propaganda. 45 With technological advancement in the use of equipment, partisans of twentieth-century conflicts became dependent on third-party (international) support to put their new tools to good use. These are provided either by Western capitalist allies, spearheaded by the United States, or by socialist-oriented countries under the aegis of the Soviet Union. 46 Today support for such groups comes from proponents of the culture of the right, such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United States, or the Islamic Republic and Russian state media industry. The result is a clash of cultures within the right, rather than a clash of civilisation as they are, instead, portrayed. The cyberisation of partisan conflict has a deep impact on the making of political subjectivities. It is no surprise that Elon Musk’s company Starlink was asked by the State Department to provide internet access to Iran’s protesters through its satellite system, thus showing the potential of private logistical infrastructure for the purpose of geopolitical conflicts. More than that, it is the Mojahedin-e Khalq ( mek ), the exiled cultish opposition movement led by Maryam Rajavi, which has taken the lead in the (pseudo)grassroots partisan-led online war. The mek ’s main opposition activities concern the spread of false information and the harassment of commentators, intellectuals, and public figures who do not embrace neo-con political rhetoric against Iran (and are in favour of regime change). Based in Albania, the group runs ‘bot factories’ operated by thousands of mek members who, in this way, affect the algorithm of discussions by the creation of fake accounts and violent commentaries. As confirmation of their political strategy, the mek leadership has had a strong, lasting relationship with dozens of liberal and right-wing politicians in the US and Europe, including Vice-President Mike Pence, John Bolton, and John McCain as well as mp s from the UK. The same applies to the most visible and influential diaspora activist against the Islamic Republic, Masih Alinejad. Alinejad has now lived more than two decades in the US working as a voa contractor and setting up the portal ‘My Stealthy Freedom’, where she posted images of women inside Iran taking off their hijabs, giving them resonance globally. Her declared feminism, however, has stood in evident contrast with the political allies that she has cultivated over the years. Throughout Trump’s first term in power, Alinejad became a regular supporter of Mike Pompeo’s maximum pressure and war-mongering policies on Iran. Later, during the Biden administration, she shared pictures of herself with Morgan Ortagus, a Republican Party member with strong anti-abortion and extreme conservative views and a staunch Trump supporter. The contrast between Alinejad’s embrace of the ‘woman, life, freedom’ slogan and her neo-con support reflects an oxymoronic condition between online activists and on-the-ground struggles. The online space is increasingly policed not only – and no longer overtly – by state authorities but also by profiles that are, or pretend to be, ordinary citizens or netizens of the world. Diasporic individuals, because of their distance from on-the-ground politics, tend to be hyperactive participants in these campaigns (see chapters 6 and 7 ). This adds to the dissonance between ideas, imaginaries, practices, and demands emerging at the local level of protests and negotiations, and the ideas, demands, and pressures generated from diasporic online communities and fake publics. The two camps, though fluid and not monochromous, are hard to differentiate when participating in online activism or in information gathering. When steered for specific political ends under the manipulation of state agents, this brings into play the game of self-censorship, which results in silencing dissident voices out of fear of being targeted by putatively fellow citizens or being reported to the authorities, back home or in host countries. A more sinister – and in the strictest sense of the word, fascistic – feature of the culture of the right is also on display: the policing of silence. Citizens (or netizens) are encouraged and supposed to be proactive in their support for the country, the leadership, and their advancement of national interests in the cybersphere or in antagonising the enemy. The citizen must become a partisan of the online combat to defend the state and to attack the enemy. Why didn’t you [or she/he/they] take a stance or share on this issue in your online profile? is a question that resonated strongly during the Iran protest in autumn 2022. Thomas Zeitzoff wrote that social media platforms can ‘serve as a quasi NextDoor app for communal violence’. 47 The extent to which online activism is affecting the political culture is hard to determine and there is ample and much-needed scope for new research in this field. However, what can be inferred is that the online space of dissent has been quantitatively occupied by state-led publics, grassroots authoritarians, and fake accounts in the form of bots and trolls. This is a step towards the formation of fake publics that legitimise state-led discourse and give the impression of ruling over docile subjects of power with the support of active partisans of the state. The mass number, by real and fake accounts, generates information and news that is hard to distinguish from real and pre-existing profiles. It is impractical, due to the time it takes, for an ordinary citizen surfing the net to discern a statement made by a profile belonging to a real person from one generated by a bot or a troll account. This confusion produces indeterminacy and detachment from political engagement because of the incapacity to understand the world of events and opinions, while it also dissuades the verbalising of personal opinions out of the fear of being attacked by cyberbullies in plainclothes (accounts not identifiable that do the job of the state: digital grassroots authoritarians). Because of the sheer number of fake accounts, manipulated and managed by the fake public online industry, 48 real individual accounts are outnumbered and disappear in the ocean of information, becoming untraceable and voiceless. In Algeria, during the outbreak of the Hirak movement in 2019, Amro Ali refers to the intrusion of uae troll farms promoting anti-Amazigh sentiment clothed in their putative alliance with the former colonial power, France. The strategy to derail a social movement started from the alteration of knowledge production and the digital cyber-operations led by uae petrodollars. How does the creation of fake publics affect emerging visions of citizenry? Let us start with an example. In October 2017, Saudi Arabia was the first country in the world to provide citizenship to a robot. The machine, called Sophia, was made in Hong Kong by Hanson Robotics as part of a pr operation to cast the Saudi kingdom as at the avant-garde of the tech economy. 49 However, it also made us reflect on what kind of citizenry the kingdom imagines for its population. The Saudi state has not stripped citizenship from its citizens, opting for harsh penalties and punishment against dissidents, as in the case of Saudi protesters in the Eastern provinces or against the Shi’a cleric Shaykh Nimr al-Nimr, who was executed in January 2016. Other Gulf monarchies, such as Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, have resorted to stripping citizenship rights from people deemed dangerous to the political order, especially when individuals belong to political minorities (demographic majorities as in Bahrain). In the uae , citizen classification is based on three categories: those having a family tree book determining their khulasat al-qaid (purity of lineage), with antecedents that possessed full citizenry and state benefits; those without a family book but with other documentation attesting their lineage in the uae ; and those stateless, known as bidun jinsiya , ‘without nationality [ Bidoon ]’. The latter group has been offered Comoran Island citizenship as a substitute that can help them navigate the national and international administrative spheres of their otherwise legally outlawed lives. In the 2010s, the uae and Kuwait were even in discussion with the Comoran government to transfer the Bidoon population of the two Arab monarchies to the East African island. 50 There seems to be some undercurrent of similarity between these plans and those now espoused by the British government as exemplified in the latter’s plan to transfer asylum-seekers to Rwanda, or the plans to transfer those remaining Palestinians in Gaza to a satellite location outside the Gaza strip. The manoeuvring of citizenship rights is a development that has emerged in the post-9/11 security framework adopted by states in the European and North American context as well as by Middle Eastern states from where members of terrorist cells and groups originated. This is a new practice that goes hand in hand with the infatuation of regional leaders with the liberal economic order and the pursuit of effective membership in the liberal world economy. The monetisation of citizenship is a global trend, but hyperliberalism in the pursuit of capital and financial accumulation has coincided with a tightening of social control over groups that could have a destabilising effect on the nature of power, such as religious or ethnic groups that are not from the Sunni tribal groups in power. In this way, we can see how grassroots, citizen-led or netizen-led activities online echo developments in state–people relations and the actuation of norms and measures that have the objective of engineering what is a citizen and how a citizen is expected to perform . Meanwhile we are witnesses to the expansion of fake public discussions and promotion through robotic accounts (bots) and paid partisans of the state, including through privately owned foreign companies. These developments acquire different faces, from the effective control of social space and the censoring of public expression, as mentioned, through the work of grassroots authoritarians; the armed forces of para-state and para-military groups such as settler militias and volunteer groups in Israel, Iraq, and Iran; to the online vigilantism of diasporic accounts and the industry of bots and trolls delimiting the scope of discussion and digital presence. Through this concerted flux of grassroots agency, we are witnessing the rooting of the cultures of the right in the Middle East. This culture has agency and deep political implications, cutting across religious, societal, regional divides in a way that is incomparable to any other political phenomenon in previous decades. We are seeing the rise of states without people, where there is no ideological space for citizens but only space for partisans. Partisans, Not Citizens! The Great Civil War has created states without people . These states lack the fundamental demos on which to re-enact political life and social organisation. The category of ‘the people’ becomes an empty box used in bolstering state prerogatives. It is recognised only inasmuch as it contributes to the making of a state and its existential plans. Citizenship itself becomes contested not as a bond between people living in a land and therefore as an organisational solution to life; instead, it becomes a non-historical bond legitimising the culture of the right, ‘a mush’ characterised by a void, clothed in the myths of blood and soil. In these historical and symbolic conditions, states become empty boxes: the category of ‘people’ is displaced along physical and ideational spaces. It is confined to a liminal condition, which compels people to search for and imagine a new home or a promised land, which is projected as a mythological memory. However, a home ( oikos ) differs from a polis : the latter is a community based on the civic and the social; the former, instead, needs to be homogeneous, constituted by unpolitical elements, i.e., blood, family, religion, mythologies. Hence, a state without people is a state where there is no space and no ethical ground for the category of people conceived in its unobstructed, open-ended non-definition. It is a state governed by the logic of the partisan, not of citizenry. © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2025. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons ( cc-by-nc-nd ) licence, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust, which permits noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction provided the author and McGill-Queen’s University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal is on land which long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous Peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. In Kingston it is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek. We acknowledge and thank the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose footsteps have marked these territories on which peoples of the world now gather. Bookshelf ID: NBK613248 Contents < Prev Next > Share Views PubReader Print View Cite this Page Brownlee BJ, Ghiabi M. States without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East [Internet]. Montreal (QC): McGill-Queen's University Press; 2025. Chapter 4, Partisans of the State: Statopraxis. PDF version of this title (4.5M) In this Page The Culture of Militarism Strongwo/men Culture Grassroots Authoritarians Digital Grassroots Authoritarians Partisans, Not Citizens! 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