The Arab Uprisings Explained

New Contentious Politics in the Middle East

Marc Lynch

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537490
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

Why did Tunisian protests following the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi lead to a massive wave of uprisings across the entire Arab world? Who participated in those protests, and what did they hope to achieve? Why did some leaders fall in the face of popular mobilization while others found ways to survive? And what have been the lasting results of the contentious politics of 2011 and 2012? The Arab uprisings pose stark challenges to the political science of the Middle East, which for decades had focused upon the resilience of entrenched authoritarianism, the relative weakness of civil society, and what seemed to be the largely contained diffusion of new norms and ideas through new information technologies.

In this volume, leading scholars in the field take a sharp look at the causes, dynamics, and effects of the Arab uprisings. Compiled by one of the foremost experts on Middle East politics and society, The Arab Uprisings Explained offers a fresh rethinking of established theories and presents a new framework through which scholars and general readers can better grasp the fast-developing events remaking the region. These essays not only advance the study of political science in the Middle East but also integrate the subject seamlessly into the wider political science literature. Deeply committed to the study of this region and working out the kinks of the discipline, the contributors to this volume help scholars and policymakers across the world approach this unprecedented historical period smartly and effectively.

1

Introduction

MARC LYNCH

The period of contentious politics unleashed by Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation in December 2010 in Tunisia has reshaped the terrain of regional politics and challenged the theories that have dominated the literature on the comparative politics of the Middle East. The broad outlines of the story are familiar.¹ In the face of massive popular protests, the Tunisian president, Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali, was deposed, followed a month later by the removal of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. A wave of protest then swept across the region as Arab citizens, inspired by the example of change broadcast on al-Jazeera and spread over increasingly ubiquitous social media, rose up to challenge their own entrenched authoritarian rulers. By the end of February 2011, virtually every country in the Arab world was beset by tumultuous demonstrations demanding fundamental political change.

Whereas Ben Ali’s and Mubarak’s regimes gave in, the next wave of challenged leaders fought back. Some, like Morocco’s king, offered limited, preemptive political concessions, while some wealthy regimes like Saudi Arabia’s combined repression with lavish public spending. Others, determined not to share the fate of their deposed counterparts, responded to peaceful challenges with brutal force. Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi unleashed the full force of his army on peaceful protesters, triggering a virtually unprecedented international military intervention to prevent a slaughter of rebels in the city of Benghazi. In Bahrain, a carefully negotiated political power-sharing bargain collapsed as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) troops poured in to the tiny island and the al-Khalifa dynasty began a systematic purge of its political opponents. The Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, clung to power as virtually every sector of society and even the military turned against him. Syrian troops unloaded the fury of a Baathist regime on protesters in Deraa, which led to the escalation of protests across the country. The viciousness of these responses to popular challenges suggested that the institutions of authoritarian rule had not lost their relevance. Some regimes seemed to right themselves quickly, while others appeared to slide toward civil war.

Like most of the regimes and almost all U.S. policymakers, American political science was ill prepared for this tumult. For the last several decades, the political science literature on the region concentrated on the resilience of entrenched authoritarianism, the relative weakness of civil society, and the apparently limited effect of the diffusion of novel norms and ideas through new information and communications technologies. The first responses to the uprisings probably overstated their novelty and scope in the heat of enthusiasm for long-denied popular challenges. Now, however, political scientists should take stock of the uprisings and what they did and did not signify.

Whether the upsurge in contentious political action will bring enduring political change remains highly uncertain. We also cannot yet define and measure the political changes that have occurred. Even the fall of the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt only opened the door to new political struggles, which left many of the revolutionaries at home and observers abroad deeply concerned. In Egypt, the old regime reasserted itself through a military coup on July 3, 2013, which overthrew the elected government of Mohamed el-Morsi. The dizzying pace of the Arab spring has now slowed to a gritty, desperate, and increasingly bloody set of interlocked battles for power. A counterrevolution led by Saudi Arabia and the monarchies of the GCC has at least temporarily blocked further change. As a result, “most of the Arab political openings are closing faster and more harshly than happened in other regions—save for the former Soviet Union, where most new democratic regimes quickly drifted back toward autocracy.”² Does this mean that the protests of 2011 will resemble most closely the postcommunist experience of highly mixed political outcomes following a regionwide wave of protests?

This volume has three principal goals. First, it seeks to bring together the best political science analysis of factors relevant to regime change and contentious politics. To that end, we revisit various literatures to determine where the prevailing hypotheses seem to be supported and where revisions to widely accepted propositions may be warranted. Second, we compare the region’s upheavals with those of other regions and historical periods.³ We hope to avoid the mistakes made by earlier scholars attempting to explain previous waves of political change, such as the neglect of the old-regime autocrats in the study of post-Soviet revolutions, or the extrapolation from the highly unusual Spanish transition, in which a pact was reached without massive mobilization. We thus make no assumptions about the outcomes of these protests, nor do we subscribe to a teleology of democracy or an assumption of inevitable failure. Finally, in order to avoid monocausal or overdetermined explanations, we look closely at the wide range of actors, sectors, and structural forces affecting the region’s politics.

We argue that the Arab upheavals of 2011 require a dynamic model of political contention that takes into account the interaction of diverse actors across multiple levels of analysis. We place considerable emphasis on the timing, sequence, and pace of events, which undermine an easy comparative method based on the characteristics of specific cases. The integrated political and media space in which these revolutions unfolded may be one of the most distinctive aspects of this period, rooted in the long-term growth of the pan-Arab media such as al-Jazeera and the consolidation of transnational activist networks in the years leading up to the protests.⁴ But those common themes played out in distinct political arenas, each with a unique institutional history, ethnic and sectarian composition, and political balance of forces.⁵ The force of these protests eventually ran aground in the face of the strength and determination of those regimes that did not succumb to the original ferocity, revealing important patterns in the nature of regime resilience and the value of different forms of survival resources.

We distinguish three phases in the uprisings, each with its own dynamics and logic. The first is mobilization, the process by which virtually unprecedented levels of popular contention exploded across a highly diverse set of Arab countries nearly simultaneously. We seek to account for both the commonalities in this regional mobilization, especially changes in the information environment and the international context, and the national and subnational variations in the protests’ timing and composition. Here we explore a wide range of factors, including questions of ongoing mobilization during the transition, different approaches to former regime officials and institutions, accommodations to the military and entrenched elites, and the role of regional and international actors.

Second, we explore the regimes’ responses, ranging from accommodation to repression, abdication to civil war. We consider the importance of the strength and durability of state institutions; of divisions within the regime, including unanticipated splits between militaries and political regimes; and tension between hard-liners and moderates, public sector and private sector, in the policy arena. The decisions made by the militaries have played a particularly important role.

Finally, we offer necessarily preliminary thoughts on political outcomes, keeping in mind that the enduring nature of those outcomes in even the most advanced cases of change, such as that in Egypt and Tunisia, will not be known for years. Nevertheless, we believe it likely that these political outcomes will be highly heterogeneous, with some regimes shifting toward more democracy and others sustaining some version of an autocratic status quo, and that this variety merits explanation. We also warn against the premature coding of cases. The short-term fall or survival of particular leaders may be ultimately less important than the deep underlying structural transformations of the regional and domestic political environments in these countries.⁶ Thus, theories built on the “outcomes” of monarchical survival may come to look foolish in the medium range if these underlying forces continue to build, and some of the seemingly transitional regimes may come to uncomfortably mimic their predecessors. Egypt’s “outcome,” for example, looked very different before the military coup of July 3, 2013.

The Puzzle: What Needs Explanation?

The new wave of contentious politics should be seen as a partial but serious challenge to much of the conventional literature on the comparative politics of the Middle East. The uprisings destabilized not only the regimes themselves but also the findings of a sophisticated literature that developed over the previous decade to explain the resilience of authoritarian Arab states.⁷ The political science of the Middle East in 2011 faced a situation similar to Sovietology in 1991, when extremely few scholars correctly predicted the timing and nature of change, even though in immediate retrospect such change came to seem inevitable and, at the time of the writing, the fate of the Soviet Union was not yet known.⁸ As in those earlier cases of unexpected change, we seek to find out how the impossible became the inevitable.

The distinctive changes that demand explanation in this volume are not the fates of specific regimes but the speed and magnitude of mobilization across multiple countries and the divergent political outcomes. As in Africa and the postcommunist realm, a relatively synchronized wave of political ferment across multiple countries seems likely to produce highly heterogeneous outcomes. But the developments of the last few years clearly warn against any easy assimilation of these cases into a “transitions to democracy” literature.⁹

Although most contemporary political science on regime change begins with the literature that grew out of the transitions in Latin America and southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, these paradigmatic cases of pacted democratic transition seem to be less useful comparisons. Focused on the prospects of deal making between regime soft-liners and opposition moderates, these studies tended to conclude that democracy was most likely to emerge where a rough balance of power existed among political forces and that mobilization during the transition would make democratic outcomes less likely. As Daniel Brumberg points out in chapter 2, the assumptions and distinctive conditions that informed the “transitology” literature have less resonance in the turbulent conditions of today than the postcommunist world after 1989, the varieties of political change in Africa in the early 1990s, and the “color revolutions” in the 2000s in Eastern and Central Europe. Even though they differ significantly, these waves of regional change produced a heterogeneous mix of outcomes—some democratic, some authoritarian, and many complex hybrid regimes with old patterns of informal power layered beneath new formal institutions.

It overstates the case to claim that political scientists focused on the Middle East completely missed the potential for mobilization. Political scientists were keenly aware of disruptive forces such as al-Jazeera and Arab satellite television, a global trend toward democratization, a youth bulge and a crisis of employment, transnational Islamism, globalization, and the upsurge of civil society and the demands for democracy from within and abroad. But they noted that in almost every case, Arab autocrats had proved to be more capable than their global counterparts at resisting such pressures. A robust and closely observed set of explanations for how these authoritarian states had managed those challenges bred skepticism about the ability of mobilization to defeat entrenched regimes.¹⁰

This literature pointed to a variety of factors to explain authoritarian resilience: access to oil and strategic rents, overdeveloped security forces, sophisticated strategies of dividing and co-opting the opposition, and political culture. These Arab states seemed to have demonstrated their capacities to adapt to a wide range of challenges and to perpetuate their dominant position in both domestic affairs and foreign policy. Fueled by strategic rents and the vast influx of oil revenues in the 1970s, Arab states constructed large and oppressive apparatuses for state control, surveillance, and repression. Their close reliance on overdeveloped and self-protective militaries, along with massive intelligence services, seemed to allow regimes to withstand challenges that might have threatened autocrats outside the region. Political opposition was expertly co-opted, divided, repressed, and contained to the point that opposition parties served as much to maintain the political status quo as to articulate grievances or push reforms.¹¹ As Eva Bellin argued, “It is the stalwart will and capacity of the state’s coercive apparatus to suppress any glimmers of democratic initiative.”¹² This will and capacity seemed adequate to meet the successive challenges of the 2000s, and by 2009/2010, the authoritarians seemed to have a decisive upper hand.¹³

At the same time, some parts of the literature had been tracking the dynamics of contentious politics across the region. The literature on civil society and democratization that had dominated the 1990s had lost momentum.¹⁴ But studies of Islamist movements captured the changing scope of political opportunity, as well as the intricate linkages between cultural and electoral politics.¹⁵ Studies of popular and youth culture, urban politics, and popular protests such as Egypt’s Kefaya movement captured the sense of agency and frustration spreading throughout Arab political society.¹⁶ Studies of the new media and public sphere captured some of the degree to which the terms of political debate and the balance of power between state and society were shifting. Almost all analyses of the region pointed to the long-term risks of closing political systems at a time of institutional decay, a growi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theories of Transition
• Part I: Regional and Cross-National Dimensions
• Part II: Key Actors
• Part III: Public Opinion
• List of Contributors
• Index