Book Project

Regressive Redistribution: The Politics of Inequality in Post-Colonial Autocracies

A growing literature on land redistribution under autocracy shows that authoritarian regimes often pursue land reforms under with the ostensibly progressive motives of disempowering landed elites and restructuring rural order. Such land reforms became a central policy in decolonizing regimes, where anti-colonial politics drove regimes to redress the inequalities associated with colonial regimes and their domestic elite allies. Despite land redistribution’s central political and economic function in the process of decolonization, I find that post-colonial land reforms rarely achieved their stated goals and that more often than not, such reforms exacerbated inequality in the long-term.

This book develops and tests a theory linking indirect colonial rule to long-run inequality in the Arab world. Looking at variation in co-ruling strategies in British-occupied Arab states, this book shows how the imposition and form of indirect colonialism drove rural elite predominance in national politics and paved the way for their post-colonial persistence. Using novel biographical datasets of colonial and post-colonial elites and archival and field research, the book qualitatively and quantitatively traces how incumbent rural elites remained key veto players under decolonizing autocrats and how their power and influence resulted in patterns of regressive redistribution that ultimately led to the Arab region’s designation as the world’s most unequal.

Drawing on cross-national evidence and case studies of Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt, the multi-method empirical analysis contextualizes land reform as part of a broader process of post-colonial state-building, documenting how redistribution often benefitted incumbent landowners or regime elites at the expense of the rural poor and middle class. This book contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, authoritarian politics, regime change, and redistribution in non-democratic regimes, both within and beyond the MENA region.

My manuscript workshop (April 2022) was sponsored by the Center for International Studies at USC. An earlier version was presented at the Project on Middle East Political Science Junior Scholars Book Workshop (November 2019).