Shouting in a Cage: Political Life After Authoritarian Co-optation in North Africa(Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics)

Durable authoritarian rule often rests on the co-optation of challengers. The conventional story is straightforward: rulers entice opposition groups to “sell out,” offering them benefits if they set aside their antiauthoritarian aspirations and become part of the system. However, co-optation does not always neutralize former adversaries, and even seemingly domesticated opponents can turn on their rulers. Co-optation does weaken opposition—but it is not as simple, reliable, or transactional as existing theories claim. Shouting in a Cage offers new ways to understand co-optation’s power and its limits by examining two co-opted parties, the Wafd Party in Egypt and the Istiqlal Party in Morocco. Sofia Fenner argues that co-optation is less a corrupt bargain than a discursive contest—a clash of competing interpretations. Co-opted parties conjure up imagined futures in which their short-term choices will lead to the realization of their long-term democratic goals. Meanwhile, other actors point to the disconnect between these parties’ antiauthoritarian aspirations and their participation in authoritarian systems. Fenner demonstrates that co-opted parties come to look hypocritical precisely because they refuse to give up their oppositional commitments. Their credibility sapped, they become unappealing allies and, eventually, political afterthoughts. However, such parties retain a surprising capacity for opposition, rooted in the literal and metaphorical idea of “party as family.” Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in North Africa, Shouting in a Cage broadens our understanding of political behavior under authoritarianism.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Note on Transliterations, Names, and Titles Introduction Part I. Co-optation in History and Theory 1. The Wafd and the Istiqlal 2. Conceptualizing Co-optation Part II. A Changed Life: How Co-optation Neutralizes Opposition 3. Co-optation as Interpretative Dilemma: Istiqlal’s Democratic Journey 4. Co-optation as Interpretive Dilemma: The Wafd at War Part III. Life Goes On: How Co-opted Opposition Survives 5. Party-as-Family 6. Generation After Generation: Making Sense of Confrontational Turns Conclusion: Authoritarianism as Tragedy Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sofia Fenner is assistant professor of political science at Colorado College. She is a coauthor of Coercive Distribution (2018).

Review :
This is the book on co-optation that we never knew we needed. Fenner’s book does something that only the very best books in the social sciences do: it takes a concept that readers think they already understand and forces them to rethink what it means, why it occurs, and how it works. This book offers a new way to understand why political parties become co-opted and how they survive it. The officially recognized opposition parties of the Arab world’s authoritarian regimes are often viewed as mere handmaidens to dictatorship. In this remarkable study, based on years of rich archival and ethnographic research in Egypt and Morocco, Sofia Fenner offers an alternative and wholly convincing perspective, describing how the rigors of life under dictatorship force once-independent political parties to invest in survival at the expense of trying to garner mass support. Though this renders them unable to claim a share of power, it endows them with a capacity for resilience and even ferocity that speaks to their independent origins and their future potential. This is the work of a gifted scholar that is necessary reading for all scholars of authoritarian regimes, democratization, and political parties. Historically rich and intellectually compelling, Shouting in a Cage challenges conventional thinking about opposition co-optation and reconceptualizes it as practice and process while elegantly centering narrative as a central political force. Co-optation is one of political science’s strangest concepts—always invoked yet seldom examined. Sofia Fenner meticulously gives form to this amorphous idea with a creative pairing of neutralized parties in Egypt and Morocco. This is an illuminating analysis of the terrible options facing political parties under authoritarianism. Thought-provoking.