1.1 Introduction
The Arab Uprisings represented a series of events of rare intensity in the history of the Middle East, as mass, popular and largely non-violent revolts took place, starting in December 2010 in Tunisia and reverberating throughout the region. These protests threatenedâand in four cases resulted in the overthrow ofâapparently stable autocratic regimes. The nature and the extensive domestic, regional and international impact of the Uprisings merit attention in and of themselves, but coming hard on the heels of a global financial crisis and given the resonance of the Arab Uprisings with protest movements beyond the region they appear all the more significant. The relevance of the Uprisings is not just academic: the Middle East is one of the most frequently conflictual regions in the world; it is central to the global political economy as a source of hydrocarbons and a global logistical nexus; it is a source of and transit point for migratory flows towards Europe; and many of its autocracies have been supported as key allies by Western governments.
The Arab Uprisings in 2010/11 caught people, governments and many academics by surprise (Gause 2011). Participants and observers both within the region and beyond were surprised at the apparent ease with which mass mobilisation wrong-footed supposedly resilient authoritarian regimes, galvanising protesters, dismaying regime supporters, and leaving Western governmentsâ policies in disarray. In Western capitals and media, great hopes of swift democratisation were pinned on the Arab Uprisings and they were quickly branded the Middle Eastern equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Soviet bloc dictatorships in 1989 (Kaldor 2011). However, few significant democratic transformations have taken place, with only Tunisia formally qualifying as a democracy by 2017 and substantive progress towards democracy often shaky even there. Other countries in which Uprisings took place have experienced the survival of authoritarian rule through repression (e.g. Bahrain), counter-revolution (Egypt), civil war and the collapse of state structures (Libya, Syria), or processes of reform and âfaçade democratisationâ (Morocco, Jordan) designed to maintain the substance of authoritarian regimes untouched (Malmvig 2014). Both change and continuity have characterised the post-Uprisings period (Hinnebusch ed. 2015; Rivetti and Di Peri 2015), and in this book we outline and discuss what public opinion survey data can tell us about the ways in which ordinary Arab citizens perceive the socio-economic and political changes or lack thereof in the wake of the Uprisings. We do so by looking at three cases that are generally taken as epitomising the different trajectories of post-Uprising countriesâTunisia, Jordan and Egyptâand for which relatively more information is available.
In Jordan, protesters demonstrated for changes in governance but not for the toppling of the king and there was no regime change. King Abdullah II responded to protests with political and economic concessions, but these left the political system substantively unchanged. In the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions between December 2010 and February 2011, relatively peaceful demonstrations led to the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and embryonic moves towards democracy. It should be emphasised that although regime collapse was more pronounced in Tunisia than in Egyptâwhere the armed forces took powerâlarge parts of the regime remained intact (Anderson 2011). While reforms are ongoing in Tunisia (Marzouki 2015) and democracy remains a possibility in principle, in Egypt ruling elites struggled against each other but resisted any substantive change: the first freely elected post-Mubarak executive and legislature ignored popular demands and were overthrown by a military coup in 2013, with a new constitution agreed and a former army chief, Abdul Fattah El-Sisi, elected President in 2014. While Islamist parties were elected to power after the first post-Uprisings election in Tunisia and Egypt, in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood ruled thanks to support from the Salafist Nour alliance, while in Tunisia the more moderate Ennahda party agreed to resign in favour of a national unity government in 2013 following mass demonstrations. Their experience in power had been controversial due to their own failures and to the polarised environment within which they operated.
In Tunisia, the rise of Salafism (Marks 2013) soon after the revolution endangered the transition because Salafists wanted the implementation of an ultra-conservative version of Islamic law, which forced Ennahda to distance itself from them. There were also protests in 2012 against moves by the âTroikaâ, the Islamist-led government, to revise womenâs rights in the proposed new constitution. All this polarised Tunisian society, with large sectors of the population holding on to the secular heritage of the previous regime. Ultimately, Ennahda resigned and a technocratic government replaced the âTroikaâ, leading to the consensual adoption of a new constitution. The successful 2014 legislative and presidential elections placed the country on the path of democratic consolidation. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhoodâs Mohammed Morsi was elected President in June 2012 with a paper-thin majority, but by December a Brotherhood-Salafi alliance in Parliament and in the Constitutional Assembly alienated non-Islamist forces by driving through a new Constitution giving a significant role to Islam, restricting freedom of speech, association and protest, and granting significant concessions to an already powerful military. Although the new Constitution was easily approved in a referendum, the Brotherhood-Salafi allianceâcontent to ignore non-Islamists forces while cuddling up to the militaryâwas met with increasingly forceful opposition on the streets. Popular demonstrations grew into widespread protest in June 2013, of which the army took advantage to overthrow Morsi and impose military rule. In December 2013 the Brotherhood was declared a terrorist group, and in January 2015 the new Constitution banned religious political parties.
Explanations for the Uprisings abound in the literature, including comparative work examining larger regional trends and individual case studies where events and developments are examined in great detail. While all these works focus on both structural factors and agency by identifying the crucial actors involved in the Uprisings and their aftermath, there is very little understanding of how the socio-economic and political transformations which the Uprisings generatedâor lack thereofâinfluenced ordinary citizens. This book focuses on two broad areas which responses to public opinion surveys have identified as of central concern for the populations of countries in the Arab world: socio-economic cohesion/dislocation and political voice/exclusion. Our findings suggest that these issues, which drove people to demonstrate in 2010/11, are far from being resolved and that populations continue to have little confidence in their governments in general and in their ability to deliver on concrete issues that matter to people, whether in the social, economic or political sphere. On the contrary, peopleâs expectations have largely been ignored or have gone unfulfilled on a range of issues from social security to still-endemic unemployment; trust in governments has declined drastically; the economy remains the single largest challenge (and cause of migration); corruption remains pervasive, political reforms have been either cosmetic or reversed (or, in Tunisiaâs case, they remain shaky) and people have little faith that things will change. Neither national governments nor their international counterparts have been able or willing to address this potentially toxic mix of factors. Indeed, international financial institutions (IFIs) and Western governments (Hanieh 2015) quickly recast the Uprisings as a struggle merely for formal democracy and the overthrow of autocracy, while neglecting the profound socio-economic malaise that decades of neo-liberal reforms had inflicted. This made it possible to stress the need for an orderly transition to democracy while continuing the very economic policies which ordinary citizens blamed for the increasingly precarious lives they were leading.
1.2 Background
The Arab Uprisings began in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid as a protest against the policeâs arbitrary treatment of Muhammad Bouazizi, who committed suicide by setting himself on fire outside the townâs police station in desperation at police harassment. These protests quickly snowballed into increasingly broad-based nationwide demonstrations, despite government attempts to repress them and prevent awareness of them spreading. The protests moved from countryside towns towards the capital, thanks in part to social mediaâs ability to bypass discredited state-controlled national media. An increasingly desperate regime asked the armed forces to fire upon peaceful protesters; the Armyâs refusal effectively forced President Ben Ali out of office. These events gripped not only Tunisia but the entire Arab region and increasingly caught world attention. Opponents of autocracies across the Middle East watched the Tunisian regimeâinfamous for the extensive reach of domestic security services in its âsoftâ autocracyâin disarray in the face of widespread peaceful popular mobilisation. In early 2011, protests then took place across the region but most notably in Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Syria. The most significant of these in terms of scale and regional impact were protests in Egypt starting on January 25 and sparking nationwide protests on January 28. By February 12 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had been forced to step down.
Governments reacted quickly, and whe...