Chapter 4 examines how obscenity is used as a regulatory mechanism by focusing on dead enemy bodies, using the cases of Muammar Qaddafi and Osama bin Laden. Images of violently dead bodies have been circulated and mobilized in the service of the war-on-terror. This framing shapes the understanding of what war is, via which images of war are deemed legitimate grounds for visual consumption. In considering the technologies of erasure in the war-on-terror, images of Qaddafi reinforced the notion of the inevitable failure of dictatorship. The dead body image of Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was not publicly released despite widespread demand to see it, but its visibility was characterized as a security risk. The chapter elucidates the visual grammar of images that are overtly related to foreign policy actions such as counter-terrorism or democracy promotion. These larger policy discourses are supported and reinforced by the production and circulation of images of dead enemies in particular ways. By the rupture of the dead body taboo, viewers are instructed to engage with images in specific ways, and thus to engage the policy subjects of those images in particular ways, sustaining a larger narrative of security.

In Chapter 2, I argue that military politics was laid down in a renewed pattern after the 1970s under enduring authoritarian regimes that were characterized as “demilitarized” or “civilianized.” In most cases, officers did not rule (or did not want to rule) but one of them was at the helm. I argue that Arab armies were state institutions of great importance, at least compared with other “ghost” or “void” institutional dynamics in Arab polities, and especially as the holders of last-resort heavy coercion. The creation and management of political quietism within armies was a key issue for such authoritarian regimes. This imperative of control was pushed to the limit in some cases: with the “social engineering” in the officer corps by Hafez al-Assad, or with the hijacking of the Yemeni military by Ali Abdallah Saleh, after the systemic positioning of close relatives (sons, half-brothers, nephews) in command posts. In the eclectic Libyan case, Qaddafi, though an officer, distrusted the army and spent decades tearing it apart. Conversely, the tradition of civilian control endured in Tunisia from Bourguiba to Ben Ali, though the latter was an army officer, quickly turned “securocrat.”

The Libyan case study in Chapter 3 reveals how harrowing the introduction of democratic elections can be in countries without national unity or any of the attributes of a modern state. Qaddafi’s ideology of a stateless, egalitarian society based on an idiosyncratic blend of Islamic and Marxist concepts left Libya’s transitional regime largely without a bureaucratic apparatus to implement policies. Qaddafi had also reinvigorated Libya’s tribal system by favoring his own and punishing the region and tribes that were the base of support for the prior monarchical regime. Competitive elections in Libya were implemented in a country without a national military that could monopolize the use of violence. In its place, during the civil war, a welter of regional, local, tribal, and ideological militias – some more powerful than the “national military” – emerged and prevented transitional governments from being able to provide peace and security for Libyans. There was also a military strongman in Libya, General Haftar, seeking to utilize the near anarchic conditions to forge a military authoritarian regime – by reining in the militias and providing desperately needed security.