"Wasta and corruption are not nice, but without them some MENA countries would not function at all."

Informal intermediation and corruption are, regardless the nature of the political system of a country, widely spread all over the world. Regarding the MENA region, they are quite important thus playing an important role in the lives of most people. Getting something through someone, the wasit, who knows someone else, as in wasta and fasad, are found in all forms of the segmented societies of the MENA region, ethnic groups, ‘assabiyahs, tribes, patron-client relations, etc. Wasta is also expressed in different ways. Cronyism, defined as preferential treatment of friends or colleagues on the part of public officials, can be found in almost all countries of the MENA. Other forms of wasta are more specific to certain countries. Nepotism, for instance, can largely be found in Syria. Tribalism, on the other hand, is more pronounced in countries based on tribal societies such as Libya or many other Gulf countries. The first part of the statement “Wasta and corruption are not nice” can be applied to any country in the world. In a certain way it is naïve because it understates the costs of wasta and corruption in the MENA region. On the other hand, the second part of the statement “but without them some MENA countries would not function at all” underlines the particularity of the relation between the regimes and wasta and corruption, the dependency in order to survive. My argument in this paper is that wasta and corruption, by creating dependencies, have two opposite effects, a destabilizing and stabilizing effect, but that the latter is stronger than the former. First of all, I will discuss the costs of both mechanisms, showing why the negative effects are stronger in this part of the world. In the second part of my essay, I will argument why wasta and corruption are mechanisms of regime maintenance, thus showing not only why they might be useful but crucial to