This book provides readers with a fresh analysis of the Arab state by using a new theoretical framework: hybrid sovereignty. Hybrid sovereignty is used as an analytical tool to explain the survival of traditional patterns and forms of authority within the formal modern statehood. The author looks at various issue areas to make his argument: citizenship, the issue of minorities, electoral engineering, the failure of central rule, tribalism, and the lack of impersonal bureaucratic mechanism. He concludes that based on the problems at state-society level boundaries of statehood, the Arab state can be identified as hybrid-sovereign.