"Limited Statehood and its Security Implications on the Fragmentation Political Order in the Middle East and North Africa"

The domestic dimension of sovereignty, or statehood, can take a number of shapes within a continuum punctuated by different degrees of state’s capacities. Stephen Krasner and Thomas Risse conceptualize statehood as the effective domestic dimension of sovereignty, thereby referring to the organization of public authority within a state and its level of effective control.At the opposite of consolidated statehood lies ‘limited’ statehood, which can manifest itself within a wide range of degrees of intensity and modalities.Given its functionalist but refined understanding of different varieties of statehood, limited statehood represents a potentially useful but under-exploited analytical category which, while not subsuming similar existing approaches such as hybrid governance, hybrid political order, ungoverned spaces and heterarchy, can relate to all of them and provide fruitful cross-fertilizations. Taken together, the articles contained in this Special Issue are an attempt to assess the degree to which such nuanced notions of statehood shed light on the evolving nature of conflict-torn political orders, such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Mali and other polities such as Lebanon and Tunisia, where the role of external actors remains crucial. All articles of the SI engage, in some form or another, with problematizing and questioning conceptualizations of post-Westphalian sovereignty