Upon studying this definition of the modern state posed by Weber, my mind instantly went to contemporary police states operating solely through violence to ensure their domination over society, and how the modern-day state is inherently interlinked with the constant threat of state-sanctioned violence. I had initially studied Politics of a Vocation by Max Weber in an introductory course on Political Sociology. Essentially, without a state's ability to legitimately deploy violence, the state can no longer function as a dominating force, making this use of physical force a core component of the state's power. The state’s legitimacy is authorized by its political position and the conforming general populace the state holds authority over.

Violence, or using the threat and intimidation of violence is often seen exercised by the state through institutions such as prisons, the police, and the military. With this defining feature of the state, the state can also extend this legitimacy to other actors, giving them the license to exert violence on behalf of the state and essentially granting other actors the ‘right’ to exert physical force. This isn’t to say that the state is the only actor that exerts physical force within a territory, but it is the established and incontestable ‘right’ that the state holds to exert physical force that makes legitimized violence the state’s defining feature. Essentially, this monopoly on violence that the state holds legitimizes state-sanctioned violence and the use of physical force due to the state's political position and function of ensuring its stability. The “state”, being the dominating organized political force within a territory, obtains the power of legitimized physical force through its authority over the political system in which the general populace conforms to, highlighting the architecture of state power. Weber defines the modern state essentially as a “human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” ( Weber, 1946, p. German sociologist Max Weber famously defined the modern state in Politics as a Vocation. Reflections on the Arab Spring should encompass a nuanced engagement with the conditions and structures of the state that provoked millions of people spanning borders to take to the streets against their governments, shifting away from the gross oversimplification that designates it as merely a success or failure. As discussed in his book, a much more fitting analysis of the Arab Spring would be to describe it as an open-ended revolt – a prolonged dismantling of structures that marks the end of post-colonial societies. As Hamid Dabashi argues, this desire to characterize the Arab Spring as a success or failure is due to our contextualization of revolutions purely in the Western context.

These uprisings were and continue to be complex social movements spanning various countries and contexts. My response to this assessment, as a researcher and academic, is that it is neither a success nor a failure. The conclusion most come to is identifying it as merely a failure, pointing to the fact that many of these nations sprung into political upheaval, war, or authoritative regimes once again, especially in reference to Libya and Syria. Reflections and discourse on the Arab Spring are typically centred on a dichotomous assessment that categorizes it as merely a success or failure, focusing entirely on the outcomes of these countries as a result of the widespread uprisings in 2011. While revisiting the Arab Spring, I have found Max Weber’s theory of the modern-day state helpful in better understanding these processes and forms of power. In my research focusing on social movements within the Middle East and North Africa, I examine the conditions that gave birth to resistance, and how contemporary conditions can exhibit the architecture of state power and the nature of a government’s authority. As participants of the Arab Spring, bystanders, and international audiences contemplate the events that transpired a decade ago in the Arab world, theories rooted in sociology can be utilized when reflecting on these uprisings. Catalyzed by the protest self-immolation of a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, anti-government protests sprung up across the region in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain. The Arab Spring – a series of anti-government uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa – occurred 10 years ago as of this year.

Max webber and violence