n an urban environment with a large number of economically marginal residents the price of food is always a key issue, and it's been a major concern for despots for a long time: one recalls the Roman emperors placating the masses with bread and circuses, and Marie Antoinette's infamous "let them eat cake".

Micro is what it's all about: urban insurrections involve a very small percentage of the population. Overall employment rates mean less than the ability to absorb young people coming into the labor force, and GDP growth has little impact on the ability of poor people to put food in their stomachs or the ability of the government to supply cheap food.
Food security and affordability are a major driver in all CENTCOM areas, and interplays with drought/weather patterns and urbanization/rural abandonment.

Urban systems are just plain complicated.

Lately, I have been fascinated with the structure of governments in these areas, from North Africa to Afghanistan.

All have governance systems built on the original Persian satraps, later appearing as Greece, then Roman provinces, all arranged in top down hierarchies from empire/nation, down to provinces, and in turn, down to districts and subdistricts, all inferior sub-entities under the empire/nation.

It's interesting to me that the later rulers/occupiers/dictators all kep[t the structure, assuring the subservience of sub-national government entities to the empire/nation.

Not that "form" must dictate result, any more than geography or climate does, it is a substantial influence.

Older systems of City-States (cities, towns and the regions associated with them) pre-dated the empire/nation satraps/provinces) and provided formats for numerous alternative and changeable affiliations within a framework that, in reality, was a lot closer to "democracy." No doubt, local rulers could be as bad as any, but they faced many obstacles to deep insanity, not to mention loss of local support, loss of revenues from trade, and loss of people (voting by feet).

I wonder how much the actual top-down structure of these empire/nation's governance systems will continue to minimize emergence of local and representative governance, whether in Iran, Iraq, or Egypt?

I have long suspected that, once we were gone, Iraqis would (and are) developing alternate systems of cities and regions that will, in the end, break the "eternal" mold of conquerors' governance systems.

What was one of their first big constitutional steps in Iraq? Article 123 that provides for regions and alternative systems and structures.

Absent structural changes, will most Egyptian aspirations be limited? Still under a system biased towards centralized controls, as our "provinces" plan for Iraq was?