Rebalancing, Capacity, and the Limits of Political Mediation in the Arab World

Why do MENA governance systems sustain functional coherence under compounding structural stress? Existing accounts emphasize adaptive capacity and institutional upgrading. This article identifies a structural tendency those accounts underweight: the progressive displacement of political mediation by execution capacity, and the specific fragility that displacement generates under compounding stress. Drawing on authoritarian resilience literature, principal-agent theory, and comparative case analysis, the article develops the concept of the Coordination Saturation Trap, the condition in which coordination centralization produces throughput constraints that compound silently through normal operations. Three mechanisms are identified: vertical overload, information compression, and substitution fatigue. The article traces these mechanisms across a composite governance configuration and two comparative cases, identifies three system trajectories with observable indicators, and argues that external support frameworks systematically accelerate the saturation dynamic by rewarding throughput performance and underinvesting in distributed coordination capacity.