A book from my library, chosen because it speaks to the present. Not a topical title, but a reading that helps to see, behind the news, how power is built and negotiated.
Trust and Rule
An American sociologist who never wrote about Syria or Lebanon explains why a government cannot disarm those who collect its taxes and provide its security. Tilly calls “trust networks” the families, brotherhoods, confessional communities and tribes to which people entrust what they hold dearest, and shows that rulers can only ignore them, buy them or integrate them: the middle way, which he calls “brokered autonomy” and illustrates with the Ottoman millet system, is the one that has held for centuries east of the Mediterranean. It is the frame in which I read the Lebanese state bargaining with Hezbollah and today’s Damascus governing through the clans.
The typology of relations between trust networks and rulers (patronage, brokered autonomy, evasive conformity) is on pp. 31-32 and 106 of the Cambridge edition.
Recommended since November 1, 2026. It changes from time to time.