The problem is closely connected to the troubled relationship with Western modernity. The modern nation-state is one of that project\u2019s principal products. It did not emerge from Arab societies\u2019 own experience, nor does it represent a continuation of their long history. This is the perspective of Bertrand Badie, who views the modern Arab state as an \u201cimported\u201d product of modernity.<\/p>\n
\nPostcolonial ruling elites tried to substitute modernisation for modernity, developing practical programmes based on modern values. The state was to lead modernisation and development, giving it a necessary autonomy from social forces in general and traditional forces in particular. In this account, that autonomy makes the idea of a separate \u201cdeep state\u201d meaningless in the Arab experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Rapid global change adds further ambiguity by redefining the state and its institutions while intensifying the struggle to control them. The state still claims a legitimate monopoly over coercion and violence and embodies national sovereignty. These claims legitimise its use of force against internal and external threats and sustain its central domestic and international role, even as other organisations, both domestic and transnational, compete with it in some functions.<\/p>\n
Re-examining the deep-state concept is especially important in Arab and Muslim countries, so that it does not become a justification for dismantling state institutions. This is particularly pressing amid debate over the crisis of state-building and the reforms it requires. Yemen, Libya, Syria and Sudan demonstrate the grave dangers of state fragility, weakness and failure.<\/p>\n
There are two reasons for caution. First, dismantling institutions can expose the state and its resources to internal and external dangers, disabling its basic responsibilities: providing security, confronting threats and maintaining a public order that protects citizens. Second, there is no guarantee that replacement institutions will protect rights and freedoms or permit electoral transfers of power. Turkey\u2019s experience under Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan makes that concern especially relevant.<\/p>\n
Any attempt to define the deep state must engage with different theories of the state, its relationship to authority and legitimacy, its ability to articulate a public interest amid competing private interests, and the degree of autonomy it enjoys from contending social forces.<\/p>\n
These questions are closely related to the democratic state and modern citizenship: the idea of the state as a guarantor of individual rights and freedom against the tyranny of social forces.<\/p>\n
Do we need the concept of a deep state in these circumstances? Or does it obstruct a fuller understanding of the state, its role, functions and limits in relation to individuals and social forces at this stage of human development?<\/p>\n
Academic research can help refine the concept and assess its explanatory potential. Many studies distinguish the state in its various forms, including the authoritarian state, from the deep state. That distinction is particularly relevant to the crisis of the Arab national state, which can be both centralised and overgrown while remaining strikingly weak and fragile.<\/p>\n
Studies distinguishing authority from power, and examining formal and informal structures of authority in contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern states, can also clarify how deep states take shape. Weak institutionalisation has encouraged a broadly shared feature: personalised rule centred on a leader or \u201cstrongman\u201d.<\/p>\n
A study of Iran\u2019s deep state in the May\/June 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs<\/em> argued that the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would bring the Islamic Republic\u2019s greatest political change. His office made him the country\u2019s most powerful figure, with overriding authority across the state. A successor could therefore substantially change domestic and foreign policy. Yet Iran may be a misleading comparison because of its distinctive political system and religious foundations. Its constitutional arrangements give unelected officeholders extensive powers above elected authorities, including supervisory and directive functions.<\/p>\n\nConcentrating power in a leader or strongman is also a central feature of other monarchies and republics. Domestic and foreign observers\u2019 expectations of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reflect this: they point to the major changes he has introduced through powers delegated by his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and anticipate further changes when he becomes king.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Egypt, another centralised state, has experienced radical shifts in political and economic orientation as power passed from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar Sadat, then Hosni Mubarak and eventually Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Power has continued to be exercised without fundamental changes to the system\u2019s underlying structure.<\/p>\n
The same applies to other Gulf and North African countries, especially Algeria. State institutions are weak in relation to a strong leader who reshapes them within the limits of the balance of power and his ability to control institutions where power is concentrated, particularly the security services.<\/p>\n
In this setting, the deep state intervenes or becomes visible when the basic features and mechanisms of rule are threatened, or when the interests of influential figures in informal power structures and networks are endangered.<\/p>\n
<\/svg><\/div>\nTrying to define the concept<\/h2>\n Returning to Turkey, the original model associated with the concept, state institutions can be seen as containing a core of zealous loyalists to the secular nationalism forged by Mustafa Kemal Atat\u00fcrk. He founded the Turkish republic on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor and Anatolia.<\/p>\n
The succession of military interventions beginning in 1960 offers evidence for this argument, especially when elected governments sought reforms affecting the republic\u2019s founding principles. Accounts of Turkey\u2019s deep state describe networks spanning government, retired generals and organised crime, operating beyond regular political and military oversight.<\/p>\n
\nIn this interpretation, Turkey\u2019s deep state is a presumed clandestine network of senior military figures and civilians who, over decades, suppressed opponents and those considered threats to secularism, sometimes through killing. It functions as a shadow government, using propaganda to spread fear or destabilise civilian administrations whose policies it rejects. Erdo\u011fan\u2019s policies have eroded many features of that older network.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As the term has spread, its meanings have diverged with differences in political systems, levels of political development and cultures. Political scientist Robert Springborg, a specialist in Egypt and the Middle East, highlights its movement from the region to the United States\u2014an unusual direction of travel for a political concept\u2014and its particular relevance to the region\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n
Springborg points to Egypt, where the bureaucracy, military and security services undermined Muslim Brotherhood rule and maintained a military-dominated political order. This proposition needs closer scrutiny, however. It reduces the struggle after the 2011 revolution to a confrontation between the Brotherhood and the deep state, marginalising other political and social forces.<\/p>\n
His distinction between Turkey and Egypt is nevertheless important. In Turkey, the clandestine deep state is not simply a governing instrument at the incumbent regime\u2019s disposal. It is an independent network claiming the right to set the boundaries within which governments may operate. In Egypt, by contrast, it is an extension of the regime, largely overlapping with formal institutions and relying on them to govern. The formal regime and deep state are, in this model, two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n
Springborg regards the Egyptian model as more representative of the Middle East and North Africa. The deep state becomes the \u201creal\u201d state: the institutions and networks through which the regime rules, or a combination of both. This understanding extends beyond Arab countries.<\/p>\n
\nDespite these differences, \u201cdeep state\u201d is often used to identify invisible forces supposedly behind complex political and security events that the available evidence cannot explain. That usage encourages conspiracy theories, rather than convincing explanations on which sound policy can be based.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The term may also be invoked by forces seeking radical changes to the state\u2019s structure\u2014not merely public policy, but constitutional arrangements and political practices established over decades. Their goal may be to secure complete control for a radical opposition or establish new rules for exercising power. They may call for dismantling state institutions on the grounds that those controlling them obstruct necessary change.<\/p>\n
The concept consequently enters fierce debates about democracy and the powers elected governments should exercise over the state, especially security institutions. These often evade oversight and accountability and imagine themselves above both the state and the law.<\/p>\n
The dispute extends beyond political leadership to the bureaucracy, which is charged with independently administering public affairs and preserving institutions and the state amid competing political and social pressures. There is no inherent problem when institutions secure peaceful electoral transfers of power. The problem arises when they obstruct those transfers, or when those seeking to dismantle them intend to create replacements that guarantee their own control.<\/p>\n
Modern theories, particularly theories of the democratic state, stress its autonomy from social forces and their preferences. That approach can make the distinction between state and deep state meaningless. Autonomy may be justified through claims about the public\u2019s limited knowledge of government, or through ideological hegemony: the penetration of state ideology into circles far wider than the relatively small number directly engaged in government or public politics.<\/p>\n
Theories of the state\u2019s relationship with society also consider changes driven by science, technology, communications and international relations under globalisation. These changes have produced competitors to the state. They raise a basic question: does a deep state actually exist as an entity operating alongside, or independently of, formal institutions?<\/p>\n
What does \u201cdeep state\u201d mean when the state\u2019s own role and functions are changing? What does it mean in developing countries struggling with state-building while experiencing authoritarian rule and an expanding bureaucracy with interests of its own?<\/p>\n
Is it equivalent to a parallel state, a state within a state or a shadow state\u2014terms suggesting invisible, informal structures whose members control decisive choices and can implement them? Is the deep-state problem confined to democracies with mechanisms for peaceful transfers of power?<\/p>\n
Answering these questions requires a more precise concept and distinctions from related terms. Its emergence has prompted differing explanations of its relationship with political systems.<\/p>\n
\nSome regard the deep state as a product and extension of authoritarian rule that obstructs coherent democracy. Others see weaknesses in democracy that allow it to be captured by a deep state. A third view treats it as a safeguard of democratic continuity: groups or institutions with broad powers to preserve established arrangements and keep the state functioning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The underlying idea is that even if the state is understood as an instrument of dominant social classes or forces, it retains relative autonomy from the very groups whose interests it defends.<\/p>\n
The term is less frequently used to explain revolutions, when the state, its agencies and instruments become the explicit objects of political and social struggle, through which power and social relationships are reordered.<\/p>\n
Despite efforts to rethink the state under market-driven, capitalist globalisation, it remains the best available mechanism for managing social, political and ideological conflict.<\/p>\n
One interpretation would therefore see the deep state as a situation in which emergency methods of exercising authority are used amid acute social or ideological division, or to prevent open civil war. It might also describe groups embedded within institutions and society whose mission is to preserve the state and its essential operations when political competition becomes particularly intense.<\/p>\n
This differs from the capture of the state by dominant social forces able to impose their will on everyone else. It also differs from an informal power structure expressing that capture, following its own agenda regardless of who formally governs, while channelling decisions through visible authorities legally entitled to issue them.<\/p>\n
In that latter arrangement, the hidden structure provides continuity for decisive policies. Its control over officials need not be constant: it can be intermittent, exercised through protection for senior officials and insulation from the consequences of repeated failures.<\/p>\n
Under another reading, the deep state becomes a higher level of public administration, maintaining the state\u2019s continuous work despite changes in the political leadership formally controlling decisions. Elected politicians may prevent administrators from acting independently, or at least from contradicting government policy. Elected governments generally seek to preserve administrative stability and integrate the bureaucracy into policymaking. Much depends on the administration\u2019s institutionalisation, strength and independence in established democracies.<\/p>\n
\nThe problem in developing countries is that weak institutionalisation leaves room for networks of interests and centres of power to act independently in defence of private interests. These networks can span civilian, military, political, media and security institutions, and may extend beyond national borders.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Weakness also affects political institutions and the establishment of accountable government. In this setting, the deep state may refer to an entity operating outside lawful and legitimate structures of authority.<\/p>\n
The Middle East offers historical and contemporary examples. One explanation emphasises the external origins of resources used to build and sustain states, rather than their generation within domestic political economies.<\/p>\n
Such resources have come through conquest and plunder, as with the Mamluks; colonial powers, in territories under colonial rule; and revenues from fossil-fuel exports or geopolitical influence in postcolonial states. In this interpretation, states in the Middle East and North Africa developed primarily to control potentially rebellious populations, rather than to fulfil three central tasks of government: providing security for everyone, developing the national economy and building inclusive societies, economies and political systems.<\/p>\n
Groups and agencies inside states may resort to informal methods to achieve objectives that legal and institutional constraints would otherwise prevent. Security services commonly receive considerable autonomy. Secrecy also separates them from judicial, legislative and executive bodies, whose scrutiny is limited in the name of national security.<\/p>\n
These privileges can make security institutions a state within the state, or place them above it, beyond conventional or public accountability. Sometimes they are not formally subordinate even to the military. This creates competing power centres, as Egypt experienced in the 1960s, extending through the police, intelligence agencies, ruling party and economic, financial and media institutions.<\/p>\n
Paternalistic authority and the imbalanced relationship between state and society in developing countries can produce characteristics associated with the deep state. Officials may regard themselves as guardians of national values and believe society requires their tutelage against internal and external threats. They may distrust the capacity of the government, state or even army to protect the country. A continuing sense of being targeted encourages conspiracy thinking, persecutory fears and grandiose self-perceptions, sometimes leading to counter-conspiracies.<\/p>\n
In such a model, legality can give way to a claim to legitimacy grounded in the network\u2019s internal power relations. The influence of actors outside formal institutions creates uncertainty and fears that can affect transfers of power after elections.<\/p>\n
Many studies note that the visible state\u2019s policies frequently align with the presumed deep state\u2019s interests. This overlap is especially pronounced in authoritarian systems.<\/p>\n
The deep state then embodies interconnected traditions of authoritarian politics. A recurring interpretation of the Middle East and North Africa emphasises the long concentration of power among those controlling coercive force and the people recruited to assist them. Patronage becomes the principal political bond through which spoils, advantages and privileges are distributed.<\/p>\n
<\/svg><\/div>\nThe state, authority and legitimacy<\/h2>\n The deep-state debate is best situated within the broader discussion of political legitimacy and its relationship with legality. In its simplest definition, the state is the central authority claiming a monopoly on legitimate force within its territory and using it to preserve civil peace and enforce law. Its absence creates the conditions for widespread disorder.<\/p>\n
Yet a state can exist while being unable to exercise central authority. The erosion of legitimacy is now a major problem in many countries, including Western ones. It was once discussed mainly as a difficulty of state-building and political development.<\/p>\n
Ian Shapiro, an editor of Cambridge\u2019s Contemporary Political Theory<\/em> series, draws attention to challenges confronting Western states as well: urban decay, class and ethnic conflict, failing political legitimacy and unresolved dilemmas of political association. These challenges require many political concepts to be re-examined, including the state as the main expression of contemporary societies\u2019 political union.<\/p>\nSocial-contract theories ground the state\u2019s legitimacy and its monopoly of coercion and violence in an alternative to the \u201cwar of all against all\u201d associated with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588\u20131679).<\/p>\n
One prevalent arrangement, especially in deeply divided societies, is a hegemonic state in which one ethnic group dominates others as an alternative to open conflict. The dominant group controls the instruments of government while enjoying enough general acceptance to sustain a claim to legitimate coercion when necessary.<\/p>\n
This arrangement creates a duality because dominant social groups do not coincide exactly with the state\u2019s formal structure. Studies of political authority\u2019s social roots, particularly in developing countries, have examined this through relationships between influential officials and socially powerful groups: economic interests, business and financial ventures, family connections, ceremonial ties, sectarian affiliations, marriage alliances and media empires.<\/p>\n
Such relationships do not necessarily establish the existence of a deep state. They may instead reveal power exercised without a legal basis or accountable authority\u2014a distortion of the state and its legitimacy. Elected legislators and executives may themselves belong to these networks and use public office to advance private interests at the expense of the public.<\/p>\n
From this perspective, the deep state poses a more distinct conceptual problem in advanced, firmly institutionalised states than in many postcolonial states, whose Western institutional models were imported without a full understanding of their underlying logic.<\/p>\n
In his study of contemporary authoritarian rule in eight Arab republics, Joseph Sassoon describes networks linking political parties, intelligence services, armies, presidencies and public and private economic actors. He portrays the human and institutional interactions that others might call deep states without explicitly relying on the term.<\/p>\n
In From Deep State to Islamic State<\/em>, Jean-Pierre Filiu likens the rulers of many postcolonial Arab republics to Mamluks. Like those medieval predecessors, they lack centuries-old dynastic legitimacy, often come from lower social strata and have used the military as a route to social advancement.<\/p>\nAnother interpretation, developed through the Iraqi case, traces the Arab state\u2019s duality to colonial rule. Rather than creating a modern democratic nation-state, British authorities constructed a dual arrangement: formal Iraqi institutions alongside a shadow state of concealed power and patronage networks founded on loyalty and deference.<\/p>\n
The connection between political authority and social forces is widely recognised. It may take the form of pressure groups seeking to influence policy, or more flexible strategies through which social interests penetrate structures of power.<\/p>\n
What matters in these theories is the distinction between the state\u2019s relatively closed core and the surrounding components through which social forces exert influence, including through markets.<\/p>\n
The state, in this view, has a dual nature. A distinct apparatus, materially separate from competing social forces, can manage their conflict through its own instruments and maintain the balance required for stability and regular social relations.<\/p>\n
Its reach extends throughout everyday life. On one level, the state is connected to social classes and their struggles. On another, a second state operates behind the first, possessing political power to undo, corrupt, destroy or transform its functions.<\/p>\n
The growing complexity of technical and economic tasks has also encouraged a separation between political leadership and the state. The latter exercises enormous influence over citizens, including in advanced capitalist societies. No one can escape its direct intervention through taxation, lawmaking and enforcement, redistribution of resources and life chances, and varying degrees of coercion.<\/p>\n
This presence is particularly forceful in developing countries where the state\u2019s authoritarian treatment of citizens may conflict with individual freedom.<\/p>\n
Freedom is central to the modern state, yet authority is also essential to protecting it. The conservative American sociologist Robert Nisbet argues that liberty cannot exist in society independently of authority.<\/p>\n
\nPower\u2014the capacity to influence others through knowledge, personality or resources\u2014is not the same as authority, which rests on recognised offices and legitimate entitlements to make decisions. When established authority disintegrates, naked coercion can take its place, displacing the consent on which authority depended.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is a recurrent problem for democratic societies. The relationship between civil strife, fragmented authority and despotism is an old concern in political thought, including Aristotle\u2019s analysis of political breakdown: those claiming they alone can restore order may seek to do so through force.<\/p>\n
The erosion of traditional institutions that long provided sources of order and freedom poses a challenge for Western democracies. The declining influence of law, churches, families, local communities, schools and universities is read by some as a warning of social and moral disorder. Organised power may fill the vacuum left by weakened social authority, becoming difficult to distinguish from organised violence.<\/p>\n
Declining legitimacy reinforces the idea of a deep state in Western societies as an expression of political power. A crucial distinction is between a state exercising authority through a legitimate institutional hierarchy, with vertical and horizontal relationships, and a deep state exercising power outside legitimate rules.<\/p>\n
The formal state possesses coercive institutions and media, cultural and religious frameworks, and can also employ surveillance and disinformation. The deep state, in the distinction proposed here, relies on unlawful coercion, violence or threats, or on inducements offered through patronage and favouritism.<\/p>\n
The bureaucracy can become a principal organised force of passive resistance to political leaders\u2019 programmes when it considers its interests threatened. This raises a fundamental question about the relationship between the state, as a defender of established social authority, and elected leadership: how far may the latter alter the arrangements on which the state rests? What do those changes mean for continued electoral transfers of power?<\/p>\n
In some democratic settings, institutions described as a deep state may therefore defend democracy against fascistic or authoritarian forces seeking to overturn political competition and alternation in office, including some populist and conservative right-wing movements.<\/p>\n
That possibility demands caution. The concept can be exploited by forces seeking to dominate society through invisible mechanisms of power while undermining legal safeguards that protect individual rights and freedom.<\/p>\n
<\/svg><\/div>\nOpinion articles published by Zawia3 do not necessarily reflect the editorial team\u2019s views. We publish them because readers should have access to important ideas and debates, even when we disagree with them entirely.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ashraf Radi examines the deep state as a political concept: when do informal power networks undermine democracy, and when does the accusation itself threaten institutions and rights?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12988,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[411],"tags":[],"kateb":[1779],"class_list":["post-17541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-op-ed-en","kateb-ashraf-radi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/\u0627\u0644\u062f\u0648\u0644\u0629-\u0627\u0644\u0639\u0645\u064a\u0642\u0629-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17542,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17541\/revisions\/17542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17541"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=17541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}