The critical political weakness of the praetorian republics ruled physically or metaphorically from bunkers is that their states have little if any autonomy from traditional social forces that managed, typically during the turbulent nationalist phase that followed the end of colonial rule, to seize control of those states. Algeria's “deciders,” for example, represent political clans anchored in both society and state institutions. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen rule their countries through military/security/party structures that are in turn controlled by alliances of these leaders’ families and tribes. Although Saddam Hussein had relied heavily on tribes and tribal alliances to rule Iraq prior to 1991, after that time the weakening of the state apparatus resulted in a dramatic increase in tribal power and Saddam's reliance on it (Glain 2000; Jabar 2000). Confined to the Green Zone in Baghdad, the bunker liberated by the Americans for returning political exiles still relies on tribal alliances and sectarian militias to manage the fractured society. The same is true in Syria, where the Alawi sect, of which Syrian President Hafez al-Asad was a member, has come to control virtually all important state structures, although other Alawis have opposed the regime now led by Hafez's son Bashar (Perthes 1997: 181–4). In the Sudan, tribal alliances lurk behind General Omar Bashir's military organization and Hassan Turabi's National Islamic Front, reorganized in 2000 as an opposition party, the Popular National Congress.

In each of these cases except Algeria, the social forces that have penetrated and come to control the state are tribal or religious minorities, typically ones distrusted if not despised by much of the remainder of the population. Their rule is, therefore, seen by much, if not most of the population as being fundamentally illegitimate and intended to serve the interests of that social force, rather than the country as a whole. In these circumstances, coercion is necessarily the primary and, in some cases such as that of Iraq or in much of Sudan, virtually the only means by which government can ensure the public's compliance. In Algeria, 132 years of colonialism pulverized the social forces, but the national liberation struggle fostered new clans based on friends and cousins. The society is “‘folded’ into its State and vice-versa” without those blankets connoted by civil society (Jean Leca, foreword to Liverani 2008: xii).