The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East

By Columbia University Press

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231537490

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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 growing gap between rich and poor, and a rising generation of frustrated, disenfranchised, and impatient youth. But few predicted the precise nature of the eruption. This was not because of a failure to observe the trends, but rather a tendency to accord inadequate weight to these discordant trends or else an entirely appropriate scholarly caution in the face of popular and activist enthusiasm.¹⁷

It is, of course, too soon to tell whether the literature’s focus on robust authoritarianism was misguided. Hybrid authoritarianism has proven more resilient than many hoped or expected in the early days of 2011. Indeed, the ferocity of the pushback against popular mobilization across the region following the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the descent of multiple cases into civil wars rather than smooth transitions, and the continuing power of the old guard in both Egypt and Tunisia all suggest the continuing relevance of authoritarian structures. The vexed and complex relationship between state formation and regime type seems to be particularly salient here, as very strong states in Egypt and Tunisia saw their regimes jettisoned; very weak states in Libya and Yemen fell into civil conflict; and regimes managing divided societies, including Syria and Bahrain, dug in their heels and reacted assertively and violently. Continued focus on the resilience and strength of state institutions may help Middle East specialists avoid mistakes in other regions by not surrendering to enthusiasm for the democrats and keeping a close eye on the autocrats. At the same time, this continued focus on the real power of states and authoritarian regimes may blind us to the manifest changes in the tenor and substance of politics across the region. Most Arab autocrats may have survived thus far, but almost all are offering previously unthinkable concessions, and their people are more mobilized than at any time in the recent past.

The Speed and Magnitude of Mobilization Across Multiple Countries

The dramatic and rapid upsurge of popular mobilization did not come out of nowhere, as some people may have imagined.¹⁸ Indeed, for most of the decade of the 2000s, popular protest had increasingly characterized Arab politics: protests about Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and the invasion of Iraq between 2000 and 2003, protests focused on domestic political change from Egypt to Lebanon and the Gulf in the mid-2000s, labor and judicial protests in Egypt, and economic protests across North Africa in the late 2000s.¹⁹ But the mobilization of 2011 had several distinctive qualities. It was massive, incorporating sectors of society that had not previously joined protests and linking together protest sectors that had previously remained isolated from one another. It was surprising, often shocking both the regimes and the protest organizers themselves. It was fast, with protests going from minimal to overwhelming national convulsions seemingly overnight. They were often (though not always) driven by new protest actors, a self-conscious youth category of social action that used distinctive means (social media, SMS [short message service, or texting], popular coordinating committees) to challenge the rules and red lines of traditional political engagement. In addition, they mobilized previously nonmobilized sectors into the streets, particularly the urban middle class, which had previously remained sullenly aloof from political protest.

The regional nature of the mobilization, with clear diffusion and imitation effects across multiple countries, is important as well (see chapter 3).²⁰ Each incident of protest mobilization cannot be explained in terms of unique national conditions. Instead, they erupted nearly simultaneously, despite national differences. They displayed common repertoires of contention such as identical slogans, the use of Friday prayers as protest focal points for days of rage, and the occupation of central urban nodal points. Without prejudging the explanation for these shared features, al-Jazeera’s coverage in particular seemed to unite the political space in unusually intense ways. The very definition of these upheavals as Arab may presuppose analytical conclusions that should be left open: were Iran’s Green movement protests of 2009 part of the same wave? What about the rising contentious politics in Africa, Spain, or—for that matter—Wisconsin?

The surprising nature of the mobilization also points to hypotheses developed in response to the rise of protests out of nowhere in Eastern Europe in 1989.²¹ Both Timur Kuran and Suzanne Lohmann contend that the act of protest can lead to the revelation of previously falsified preferences across society.²² Protest by a small number of early movers signals to others in society, who are privately dissatisfied but less willing to take risks, that others share their grievances. If those early movers go unpunished, it raises their confidence about the riskiness of expressing their dissent. As more people join the ranks of the protesters—including, for Lohmann, people understood as like us rather than professional activists or a clearly marked sectarian or ethnic group—then people with higher thresholds of risk will join in. At a certain point, societal incentives shift, and a cascade dynamic sets in as huge numbers of people flip from the previously socially safe position (regime support) to the newly socially safe position (protest). In the Arab uprisings, framing the protests around demands for dignity permitted joining the jobless and the employed, the highly educated and the poorly trained, the rights advocates and the religious activists, men, women, young and old. (Of course, this remarkably inclusive mobilization proved particularly difficult to sustain as politics routinizes and different groups made different kinds of claims.)

But as several chapters in this book note, this cascade model only imperfectly captures the dynamics. The extent of popular discontent was well known in Egypt and many other Arab states (see chapters 5 and 15), with pervasive and open criticism of leaders rather than the fearful silence assumed by Kuran. The cascade may have been driven more by updating the calculations of the prospects for success than by new information about the distribution of preferences (see chapter 4). This mobilization also contained an element of emotion and anger; it was not simply the revelation of thresholds but the transformation of underlying preferences for and beliefs about the moral legitimacy of regimes. The demand for dignity and the shattering of the barrier of fear—two slogans often heard—speak more about changing identities and values than about updating calculations of risk and opportunity.²³

The course of these mobilizations also varied widely, as we explore in this book. In some cases, protests built and grew (Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Bahrain), while in others they petered out (Jordan, Saudi Arabia). In yet others, they flagged only to reignite after being given up for dead (Morocco). In some cases, activists failed repeatedly to spark protest before finally breaking through, often in response to ill-advised regime violence (Syria). In some cases, protesters turned to violence, whereas in others they practiced an impressive degree of nonviolent self-restraint. In some cases, protests began in rural areas (Tunisia) before moving to the cities, whereas in others they were primarily an urban phenomenon. Distinctive urban geographies, such as the existence of a central public square to seize, profoundly shaped the possibility of protest (see chapter 9). In some cases, the protest remained confined to either traditional opposition parties or to youth movements, but in others it grew to encompass wide sectors of society. In Bahrain, for instance, some 60 percent of the citizen population, by some measures, had joined the protests by early March 2011.

Then there were the dogs that did not bark. Lebanon and Iraq, two traditionally unstable and turbulent political arenas, remained surprisingly insulated from the regional turmoil. Protests in Jordan did not catch on to form a large-scale popular challenge. Calm in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may not be surprising given their great wealth and small populations, but the same cannot be said for Saudi Arabia, which had many of the antecedent conditions that would predict turbulence (large underemployed youth population, media censorship combined with high satellite TV and Internet penetration, divisions within the royal family, unpopular foreign policy).

One argument that we assess is the distinctive role of youth in shaping and driving these protests (see chapter 14).²⁴ Some analysts argue that across many Arab countries, youths, as self-aware and self-identified actors, have even become a novel category for political analysis. These analysts point to objective grievances of the youth sector, such as underemployment and the difficulties of marriage, noting that they may have been disproportionately disadvantaged by neoliberalism. They also point out that many of these young people, especially urban youth, are digital natives, conversant with information technology of all sorts and socialized into communicative norms completely at odds with the long-standing traditions of the internalized deference and self-censorship characteristic of Arab authoritarian societies.²⁵ In some cases, these youth activists were clearly the agents of the uprisings, but it is less obvious that they were necessary for the uprisings, to say nothing about being sufficient. As protests spread throughout the region, countries with few previously prominent youth activists seemed just as prone to sudden outbreaks of protest as did those with many activists. Evidence from Egypt even shows that middle-aged people participated at a higher rate than did youth in the protests during the revolution.

Crucially, mobilization took different forms, and its success cannot be judged solely on the survival or failure of regimes.²⁶ Kuwait, for instance, did not see regime change but did witness the largest and most enduring political protests in its modern history, forcing the resignation of a long-serving prime minister and the dissolution of its parliament. Although Moroccan and Jordanian protesters failed to dislodge their kings, they nonetheless reshaped the terms of political action. The new levels of political engagement, circulation of information and opinion, and willingness to challenge the political status quo that have become political norms may prove to be a more enduring transformation than the fate of any one regime.

Another argument concerning mobilization pertains to the importance of labor movements in channeling economic grievances and bringing into the streets people who had little interest in formal political institutions. In Tunisia, for instance, such labor movements seemed to play a critical role, and in Egypt, wildcat strikes had spread rapidly for years and politicized a wide swath of urban society (see chapter 10). In the 1980s, economic protests against reforms mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were a common feature of political life and helped drive significant democratic moves in several countries, including Jordan and Tunisia. Many analysts point to the pervasive impact of neoliberal economic reforms, which hollowed out the middle class while enriching a new class of well-connected insiders and impoverishing the already struggling poor. Highly visible corruption and conspicuous consumption during hard times may have provided one of the many sparks for the uprisings.

Islamist movements were a distinct actor in most of these cases, typically with a higher level of organizational strength than other challengers and also with a particular ability to trigger regime and international fears (see chapter 11).²⁷ The discussion about transition to democracy is heavily shaped by those fears, as many analysts continue to believe that Islamists are distinguished by their lack of true commitment to liberal democracy. The near future will test many previously held assumptions about Islamist movements. The removal of the hard ceiling on their ability to gain power tested their oft-stated commitments to democracy, pluralism, and tolerance, and Egypt’s military coup and bloody repression of the Muslim Brotherhood will test its commitment to nonviolence. It is too soon to know whether the common assumption that they will dominate free elections in perpetuity will prove correct. Having evolved to survive repressive environments, they may or may not adapt successfully to radically changed opportunities and constraints, and their organizational advantages in getting out the vote may be swamped by a high turnout in transitional elections. They may face internal divides; they may be forced to choose between appealing to a conservative religious base or a mainstream public; or they themselves may not know how far to push their ideological commitments.

Finally, in explaining the nature of this mobilization in 2011, we must explain the failure of earlier protests to develop the same momentum. As we noted earlier, there is a long history of mobilization in Arab societies but few examples of their successfully forcing regime change. Why did the protests against IMF reforms in Jordan and several North African countries in the late 1980s not lead to more enduring political transformation? Why didn’t the labor strikes in Tunisia between 2004 and 2008 catalyze a movement back then? Why did Egyptian protesters consistently fail to mobilize large-scale protest from 2006 to 2010 despite the manifestly growing discontent and increased repression? Indeed, on the eve of Egypt’s January 25 uprisings, most protest organizers were frustrated by their inability to spark large-scale participation and by the regime’s self-confident repression and political manipulation.

The ability to create master frames linking disparate social forces into a single protest movement may be a critical intervening variable explaining the successful mobilization.²⁸ In the past, according to this argument, different forms of protest could be seen all over the region, but they did not link up into a single identifiable movement with clear demands and a master narrative. Again, the discourse of demands for human dignity, personal respect, and government accountability extended the appeal of these movements well beyond the interest groups that had animated labor protests, student strikes, Islamist rallies, and previous efforts to mobilize opposition.²⁹ It remains very much an open question whether two decades of international democracy assistance and civil society building programs contributed in a meaningful way to the emergence of the individuals and groups with the competencies to effectively challenge their regimes.³⁰

Decisions about nonviolence and violence, and the general breaking of taboos and red lines, lay at the heart of the contentious nature of politics.³¹ It always has been misleading to speak of nonviolent revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia, where thousands of citizens were killed in street clashes and countless police offices and Egypt’s National Democratic Party (NDP) headquarters were torched. But there is a key difference between the nonmilitarized uprisings and the decision by Libyan and Syrian protesters to take up arms. Why some protest movements turned to armed insurrection while others remained relatively peaceful even in the face of extreme provocation is one of the most vital questions raised by these cases. Is peaceful mobilization more effective by commanding moral force with the international community and persuasive appeal to fence-sitters in the population and the regime? Is armed insurrection more likely to rapidly shatter the regime or to attract international support?

Responses by Regimes

Why did some regimes respond to the outburst of protest with political concessions and preemptive dialogue, and others take hard lines? Why did the military sometimes decide to shoot at the protesters and, in other cases, exercise restraint?³² Why did some regimes decide to sacrifice their leaders (Egypt, Tunisia) in hopes of protecting their core interests, and others (Syria) remain loyal?

In two key cases of significant change, Egypt and Tunisia, the president and top regime officials abandoned power—or were sacrificed by their armed forces—in the face of a mobilized population, leaving the military to broker a transition to a new regime. The case that best fits the pacted model is probably Yemen, in which Ali Abdullah Saleh was eventually eased from the presidency after long, internationally facilitated negotiations, and his replacement was ratified in a popular referendum. Efforts at a pact failed in Bahrain, however, when a deal between soft-liners in the regime with moderates in the opposition failed in the face of provocations by opposition radicals, a pushback by regime hard-liners, and the Saudis’ forceful intervention to tip the balance back toward the minority-dominant autocracy.

The credibility of regime reform offers also is important. Although Morocco’s constitutional reforms did not affect the core of monarchical rule, they did reshape the political debate, divide and co-opt parts of the opposition, and help the king ride out the storm. In other countries, however, offers of reform were quickly dismissed. Under what conditions do oppositions accept such offers as credible and binding, and when do they reject even generous offers in favor of continued protests? Here the shadow of the past weighs heavily, as in the Yemeni opposition’s dismissal of sweeping reform offers from President Saleh on the grounds that he had made and broken such promises many times in the past. Mechanisms of signaling credible commitment or the emergence of third parties to enforce bargains also may have worked in the past, although to date the former have been difficult to generate, and the latter (primarily the role of the military in Egypt and Tunisia) have proven contentious as well. On the flip side, the Saudi regime proved successful in heading off large-scale protests, in part by throwing huge amounts of money at both economically frustrated citizens and the Islamist networks and institutions that might otherwise have taken the lead in mobilizing dissent.³³

The very uneven strength and penetration of the state apparatuses across the region shaped the regimes’ responses. In Egypt and Tunisia, where we find relatively strong states, the rebellions were met with disciplined responses and prompt decisions to sacrifice the regime, or at least its incumbents, in favor of the stability of the state itself. In the countries with the weakest states—Libya, Yemen—the prospect of removing the regime signaled the collapse of the state, and the rulers’ ineffectual resistance led to prolonged and ineffective rebellion. Where the regime’s project is state building itself, in countries like Algeria and Syria, the regimes (and their military forces) see themselves as the builder and protector of the state, and they are prepared to be brutal in putting down rebellions that they see as challenges, not merely to their regimes, but also to the coherence and autonomy of the state itself. This is particularly true for relatively large unwieldy states in which sectarian and ethnic divisions have bedeviled politics in the recent past.

What about the monarchical exception? It is striking that all of the region’s monarchies have survived, compared with the collapse of five nonmonarchical regimes. Some have used this pattern to argue for a particular logic of monarchical institution that provides for greater legitimacy, more flexibility, or more effective cross-national cooperation.³⁴ But others point to confounding factors. The monarchies of the GCC enjoyed several distinct advantages not shared by the regimes that fell. Oil and gas revenues bestowed financial advantages that allowed these regimes to co-opt or crush the opposition and to offer economic incentives to angry citizens. The geostrategic position of these regimes also gave them greater international support, as oil-dependent and Iran-fearing Western governments shied away from challenging Gulf regimes. Finally, these regimes cooperated more effectively than is the norm in Arab politics, with Saudi Arabia and the wealthier GCC states providing cash, media and political support, and, in extremis, military intervention to protect their own.

The regimes’ use of violence seems to be an inflection point in the fate of mobilizations. Regimes have faced the classic repression/dissent nexus with fascinating results.³⁵ The failure to repress forcefully allows mobilization to escalate, which could trigger an informational cascade like that described by Kuran and Lohmann. But violent repression—particularly when images are captured and disseminated through social media and al-Jazeera—seems also to trigger protest escalation and to spread dissent into previously quiescent quarters by generating outrage and revealing the true face of the regime. For decades, most Arab regimes seemed to have found a Goldilocks equilibrium of just the right amount of violence and repression to deter challengers. But in 2011, some lost that equilibrium and repeatedly misjudged the timing and extent of repression.

International positions vis-à-vis regimes and violence also raise important questions and reveal great variation. Why did the United States and the European powers move to sanctions against some regimes but not others? Why a military intervention in the name of a responsibility to protect in Libya but not in Syria or Yemen or Bahrain? Why did the United States push for a transition away from Hosni Mubarak, a key regional ally, relatively quickly, despite the massive interests at stake for both itself and Israel? Why did it hold back from similar calls against King Hamad of Bahrain? Why did Saudi Arabia and the GCC intervene so forcefully in Bahrain? Often, the answers to these questions are not surprising: there are few options for military action in Syria; Saudi oil makes it unlikely that any U.S. president could oppose it on a matter defined as existential; and so forth. But the popular expectations of the United States do not necessarily factor in those practical limitations, and nervous regimes may lack confidence in what seems obvious.

Political Outcomes

It would be premature to define the dependent variable as revolution, much less democratic transition (see chapter 2). As yet, only Tunisia has the makings of a true revolution, and even that remains uncertain. Other states, from Egypt to Yemen to Syria, may yet experience genuine political transformations that bring to power different ruling elites and incorporate social groups into the ruling bargain in different ways. But this has not yet happened, and it is not possible at this point to conclusively code the outcome of political change in any of the Arab cases. Core conceptual questions still need more attention: How heavily should we weigh the departure of leaders against the perpetuation of the old regime’s institutions? Do elections signal an end to the transitional period, and if so, does it matter whether those elections are won by the opposition, by old regime figures, or by popular forces unpopular with other protesters, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (see chapter 12)? Are outcomes best seen at the level of society rather than the official political realm?

The transitions literature argued that democracy was most likely to result from a painful and costly stalemate among political forces that led them to accept political rules allowing for the peaceful resolution of an uncertain conflict. But Michael McFaul’s work on postcommunist transitions found quite the opposite: It was situations of unequal distributions of power which produced the quickest and most stable transitions from communist rule. In countries with asymmetrical balances of power, it was the ideological orientation of the more powerful party that largely determined the type of regime to emerge.³⁶ This points to an important question for comparative research: What is the balance of power among social forces in transitional cases, and what outcomes do they tend to produce?

McFaul also points to the ideological preferences of the more powerful parties as a crucial factor, with democracy most likely to result when democrats have the upper hand and impose that system. In the Middle Eastern cases, the most powerful party is likely to be either Islamist or the remnants of the old regime, neither known for their deep commitment to democracy. What is the balance of power in each case between democrats and autocrats (and, for that matter, Islamists)? The optimistic case for Egypt is that like the success stories of postcommunism, the democrats have the upper hand as long as mobilization is sustained, given the high value placed on democracy in the public sphere and the long struggle for democratic reforms by an array of social forces over a decade. In Tunisia, the Islamists of al-Nahda and an array of leftist and liberal trends seem, at least for now, united around a commitment to creating a democratic constitution. In other cases, this is far less clear, and in some places, there may be very little ideological competition at all, as political actors compete merely to protect and advance their own personal interests or clientelistic networks. In Jordan, Morocco, and many Gulf states, a case can be made that there is significant popular and elite support for the status quo, which gives autocrats the upper hand against even mobilized democrats. In such cases, the main battle is not between democrats and autocrats but among competing princes and between the regime and conservative Islamist networks.

Then there is the question of continued mobilization. The emergence of turbulent, contentious societies may ultimately be more important than who sits in the presidential office. McFaul argues that continued mobilization is positive, not negative (despite the transitions literature), for producing democratic outcomes, since it can prove that the balance of power is in the opposition’s favor, imposing democracy on elites. Mobilization is one of the few ways for