Why Alliances Fail: Islamist and Leftist Coalitions in North Africa

By Matt Buehler

Since 2011, the Arab world has seen a number of autocrats, including leaders from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, fall from power. Yet, in the wake of these political upheavals, only one state, Tunisia, transitioned successfully from authoritarianism to democracy. Opposition parties forged a durable and long-term alliance there, which supported democratization. Similar pacts failed in Morocco and Mauritania, however. In Why Alliances Fail, Buehler explores the circumstances under which stable, enduring alliances are built to contest authoritarian regimes, marshaling evidence from coalitions between North Africa’s Islamists and leftists. Buehler draws on nearly two years of Arabic fieldwork interviews, original statistics, and archival research, including interviews with the first Islamist prime minister in Moroccan history, Abdelilah Benkirane. Introducing a theory of alliance durability, Buehler explains how the nature of an opposition party’s social base shapes the robustness of alliances it builds with other parties. He also examines the social origins of authoritarian regimes, concluding that those regimes that successfully harnessed the social forces of rural isolation and clientelism were most effective at resisting the pressure for democracy that opposition parties exerted. With fresh insight and compelling arguments, Why Alliances Fail carries vital implications for understanding the mechanisms driving authoritarian persistence in the Arab world and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780815654582

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3607-6 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3613-7 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5458-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Buehler, Matt, author.

Title: Why alliances fail : Islamist and leftist coalitions in North Africa / Matt Buehler.

Description: Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press, 2018. | Series: Modern intellectual and political history of the Middle East | Published in collaboration with Georgetown University–Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018040637 (print) | LCCN 2018042578 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654582 (e-book) | ISBN 9780815636076 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815636137 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Coalitions—Africa, North. | Opposition (Political science)—Africa, North. | Political parties—Africa, North. | Africa, North—Politics and government—21st century.

Classification: LCC JQ3198.A979 (ebook) | LCC JQ3198.A979 B84 2018 (print) | DDC 320.96109051—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040637

Manufactured in the United States of America

To my parents, Mark and Peggy Buehler

Contents

List of Illustration and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Understanding Alliances

Toward a Social Theory of Opposition Politics

2. Rural Regimes, Urban Regimes

Divergent Pathways of Regime Formation

3. All about the Base

The Origins of Left-Islamist Alliances in North Africa

4. Zooming Out

National-Level Alliances in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania

5. Zooming In

Subnational Alliances in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania

6. Resurrecting Alliances?

Left-Islamist Coalitions in the Arab Uprisings and Aftermath

Conclusion

Appendix A. Utilized Arabic and French Newspapers and Magazines

Appendix B. Cited Interviews

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustration and Tables

Illustration

1. Left-Islamist alliances in North Africa

Tables

1. Cases of alliance formation and endurance

2. Conceptualizing alliance formation

3. Conceptualizing alliance endurance

4. Collapsible and enduring left-Islamist alliances in North Africa

5. Social bases of Moroccan leftists and Islamists

6. Social bases of Mauritanian leftists and Islamists

7. Logit of co-optation of leftist politicians by Morocco’s loyalist parties

8. Mauritanian Islamist mayors and co-optation by Abdel Aziz’s loyalist party

9. Comparing voter turnout in Moroccan elections

Acknowledgments

While a book’s byline often includes only one author’s name, it is in reality not the product of a single, sole author. In fact, it emerges from the combined efforts of a multitude of individuals and institutions. I am thankful that numerous people and institutions both in the United States and overseas supported this book until completion. While I take responsibility for whatever errors or omissions remain herein, I would like to recognize those people and institutions that contributed to its publication.

My first thanks go to individuals at the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. First and foremost, I would like to thank Jason Brownlee. Jason was an ideal mentor not only in the sagacious advice he shared but also in his professional comportment—his creativity, meticulousness, and work ethic. The best mentors lead by example, and no one does that better than Jason in his own indefatigable commitment to and passion for excellence in scholarship and teaching. Clement Henry inspired my interest in North Africa at the University of Texas and has been a reliable source of advice ever since. I fondly recall visiting Clem after he joined the American University of Cairo. We discussed Tunisian politics of the 1950s and 1960s in the dark while tolerating Cairo’s intermittent electrical blackouts following the 2013 coup d’état. Even today, when I get stuck with a problem or obstacle, thinking about how either of these two men would handle the situation always helps me find the right path. Other individuals—Joshua Stacher, Mounira Charrad, Ami Pedahzur, and Catherine Boone—similarly provided comments that helped me clarify some of this book’s ideas and refine its core argument.

Initial revisions of this book occurred, primarily, at three institutions where I encountered new colleagues who furnished crucial advice and guidance. At the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Qatar, I thank Mehran Kamrava, Zahra Babar, and the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS). From Mehran, I learned to think about myself not only as a scholar but also as a writer. He showed me how a book’s discussion of complex ideas should not obstruct the fluidity and power of its prose. I enjoyed my time in Doha and with CIRS tremendously. The organization’s tireless commitment to supporting and producing original, empirically grounded research in the Middle East serves as an example for us all. I am also very grateful to CIRS for furnishing a subvention grant for this book after passing peer review and including it within its book series, both of which helped expand its distribution.

The Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee contributed by organizing a book workshop with Francesco Cavatorta, Jillian Schwedler, and Curtis Ryan. These scholars provided in-depth commentary at a critical stage of revisions. My departmental colleague Jana Morgan also attended, contributed invaluable feedback, and first conceived the book’s title, Why Alliances Fail. My department head, Richard Pacelle, bankrolled the workshop and has been a key supporter of my work and professional advancement. Few people are lucky enough to have such a good boss. Curtis Bell, Ian Down, Patricia Freeland, Kyung Joon Han, Wonjae Hwang, Nathan Kelly, Anthony Nownes, Brandon Prins, Krista Wiegand, and other department colleagues furnished advice on chapters of this book and other related projects. I also express gratitude for the support of the University of Tennessee’s Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and its director, Matthew Murray.

Final revisions occurred in 2017 at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. There, I interacted with Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, Elizabeth Nugent, and other fellows who enriched my research. I am particularly grateful to Tarek Masoud and Melani Cammett, who shared their wisdom and expertise with me in workshops, and Nicholas Burns and Hilary Rantisi, who hosted me as the program’s administrative directors.

This manuscript also received feedback at various conferences and workshops. Therein, I received advice on the book and related projects from professional colleagues. Whereas some of these colleagues contributed direct advice to the manuscript, others provided more indirect feedback by way of conference papers and article manuscripts during peer review. Other colleagues were discussants and copanelists at conferences, compatriots during fieldwork, or coparticipants in writers’ circles. Specifically, I thank these individuals: Holger Albrecht, Lindsay Benstead, Dina Bishara, Steven Brooke, Laryssa Chomiak, Sabri Ciftci, Janine Clark, Daniel Corstange, John Entelis, Sarah Feuer, Kim Guiler, Ian Hartshorn, Ahmed Khanani, Ricardo René Larémont, Adria Lawrence, Bill Lawrence, Marc Lynch, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, Nadia Marzouki, James Miller, Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, Pete Moore, Fait Muedini, Paul Musgrave, Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, Sarah Parkinson, Erin Pettigrew, Stacey Philbrick-Yadav, Alan Rutenberg, Stuart Schaar, Abye Tasse, Ann Marie Wainscott, and Steven Ward. Over the years other colleagues provided more general professional advice in correspondences, lunches, and various other interactions, notably Mhammed Abderebbi, Zoltan Barany, Michael Herb, Wendy Hunter, Amaney Jamal, Manal Jamal, Stephen Juan King, Ellen Lust, Helen Milner, John Scheb, Tobias Schumacher, Mark Tessler, Frédéric Volpi, and Kurt Weyland. Syracuse University Press also recruited excellent anonymous peer reviewers for the book. I am very thankful that these individuals carefully read it and provided such helpful, constructive, and thorough comments. This book’s acquisition editor with Syracuse University Press, Alison Shay, and the editor of the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East series, Fred Lawson, also provided crucial comments. Also at Syracuse, I thank Lisa Kuerbis, Fred Wellner, and Annette Wenda for completing the book’s marketing materials, its front cover, and its copy editing. I would also like to acknowledge and thank photojournalist Mohammed El Hamzaoui for permitting me to use his photo for the book’s cover. I also thank Mediterranean Politics and British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies for allowing me to use small selections of previously published material. Again, although all remaining mistakes in this book are my own, I am thankful for whatever feedback and assistance these aforementioned people furnished. I apologize if someone was omitted.

Several additional organizations should be recognized for providing either financial, logistical, or administrative support for this book, namely, the American Institute for Maghreb Studies, the Project on Middle East Political Science, the Boren Fellowship, the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange, the Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis, the University of Nouakchott, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Tennessee.

Numerous people in North Africa also contributed to this book. Unfortunately, not all of them can be thanked here. I thank all of the leftist and Islamist politicians, party officials, and staffers who talked with me, helped me find reliable information, and provided their insights. I would, however, like to recognize those people who provided exceptional help during my time in North Africa, notably Réda Oulamine, Ihssan el-Hafidi, Mustapha el-Khalfi, Rachid Lazrak, Oubeid Imijine, and the journalists of as-Sabah newspaper. I also thank Morocco’s at-Tajdid newspaper and Mauritania’s La Tribune newspaper for permitting me to access their back-issue archives.

Finally, completing this manuscript would have been difficult without the many years of Arabic training I received in the United States and Arab world. Thus, I am especially thankful for the Arabic instruction I received from the faculty at the University of Damascus in Syria, where I also met my future wife, Elodie Dabbagh Buehler. Without her support and love, this book would not have been possible. Our son, Thomas, joined along the way and has thankfully distracted me from work and writing, reminding me of the joy of simple things in life. I also want to thank my three brothers—Chris, Josh, and Zach—and the Buehler and Dabbagh families. Finally, my deepest gratitude go to my parents, Mark and Peggy, who provided invaluable financial, logistical, and emotional support. But most important, they imparted me with the tenacity and grit necessary to bring a project like this to completion.

Introduction

From the Persian Gulf in the East to Morocco’s Atlantic coast in the West, Arab autocrats faced unprecedented popular uprisings against their regimes beginning in late 2010. What resulted was that four dictators—Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi—fell from power. Optimism soared that these countries might become democracies. Yet by 2014 it was clear that only one state, Tunisia, had transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy successfully. Many of Tunisia’s neighbors either reverted to authoritarianism, Egypt, or descended into chaos, Libya and Yemen. For millions of citizens, the conclusion to the story of the Arab uprisings was not one of democratization.

Although Tunisia’s young democracy still faces challenges, a number of factors—including higher levels of military professionalism and economic development—made its transition far more successful. One crucial, understudied factor that aided Tunisia was that a stable alliance of opposition parties with divergent ideological backgrounds supported the transition. Such a coalition—what scholars have termed a cross-ideological alliance—consolidated in 2005 long before Tunisia’s revolution broke out, contributed to its success in 2011, and shepherded the country through its aftermath until 2014. Tunisia’s opposition parties succeeded in maintaining an alliance to contest the authoritarian regime when it was still standing strong and to provide an alternative, once it had collapsed. In cases of democratization, such opposition alliances have often played a pivotal role. When opposition parties can get together to build an alliance, especially one that endures over time, they can harmonize demands, pool resources, and exert collective pressure.¹ Yet when parties act alone, regimes more easily marginalize them. For Tunisia, much like instances of democratization in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and eastern Europe, the fact that opposition parties with divergent ideologies built a durable, long-term alliance aided its successful democratic transition. Across the developing world, an alliance’s success or failure to endure over time often paralleled the success or failure of broader efforts to bring regime change and, ultimately, democratization.

After Ben Ali fled, Tunisia’s opposition coalition appeared on the scene and announced its name, the Troika Alliance. Although Tunisia’s opposition parties had begun cooperating in a coalition in the mid-2000s long before Ben Ali’s downfall, the regime’s collapse attracted attention to their alliance. Whereas some Tunisians criticized the Troika as a three-headed monster of ideological contradictions, others endorsed it as an exemplar of compromise. The Troika was a coalition of strange, unexpected allies: it featured a pact between Tunisia’s leftists and Islamists. With Ben Ali’s regime gone, the leftists and Islamists mobilized their alliance based on strategic logic. On today’s political scene, parties are not divided by ideology, Samir Ben Amor, secretary general of one of the leftist parties, said. The real division is between the parties of the revolution and those that opposed it. Between the parties that struggled for the revolution, and those that did not take honorable positions towards it.²

In two of Tunisia’s neighbors, Morocco and Mauritania, a similar story unfolded, albeit with a different result in alliance stability. Modeling Tunisia, citizens in Morocco launched protests on February 20, 2011, in more than fifty cities. Casablanca and Rabat experienced the largest demonstrations—sixteen thousand and eight thousand protesters, respectively. Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital, saw small protests on February 25, but they swelled to more than ninety thousand participants by 2012. In Morocco’s secondary cities, protests were smaller but more violent.³ In a mining city, rioters stormed the state phosphate company, took two managers hostage, and left $13 million in damage.⁴ Though the unrest of Morocco and Mauritania neither matched that of Tunisia or Egypt nor led to the bloodshed of Bahrain or Syria, it produced exceptional instability unseen in decades.⁵ The unrest created a unique situation wherein leftists and Islamists could have coordinated their opposition. It could have been a catalyzing moment for opposition parties to build alliances.

How did Morocco’s and Mauritania’s leftists and Islamists react to this surging unrest? Like Tunisia’s Troika, did leftists and Islamists unite in stable alliances to push for change? The short answer is no. Although Morocco’s and Mauritania’s leftists and Islamists had experimented with alliances in the late 2000s, which ultimately failed, they were not revitalized in 2011 to mobilize for reform. The long answer is more complicated. It requires us to delve into the political histories of these opposition parties to explain why some have become gradually more vulnerable to regime co-optation. That is the purpose of this book. It aims to explain why Tunisia’s leftists and Islamists united in an enduring alliance to spearhead change in national politics, while Morocco’s and Mauritania’s did not. In succumbing to the co-optation strategies of Morocco’s and Mauritania’s authoritarian regimes, some parties have become weak opposition organizations and, hence, unreliable allies in coalitions.

Unlike in Tunisia, leftists and Islamists did not unite to back protests in Morocco. Morocco’s Islamist party entered the protests, while its leftist party did not. Fearful that publicly supporting protests could provoke regime repression, the Islamist party’s president, Abdelilah Benkirane, did not endorse the protests officially.⁶ Yet unofficially, his party’s supporters flooded the protests. A majority of the Islamist party’s leaders,⁷ and even its mild-mannered former president,⁸ joined the protests by March 2011. Even Islamist leaders who did not protest expressed support. Only pressure from the street, the Islamists’ parliamentary leader asserted, would force the implementation of true reforms.⁹ While it would be an overstatement to say that Morocco’s Islamist party caused the uprisings, or that its members constituted a majority of protesters, it is clear many of its leaders and especially its youth wing participated in or endorsed the demonstrations.¹⁰

Morocco’s main leftist party had been the regime’s chief opponent between the 1960s and the 1990s. In 1998 a leftist became prime minister, inaugurating alternance (at-tanaawub), which was the first time an oppositionist became the head of government by election. The leftist party was less assertive by 2011, however. Speaking to the party’s general assembly, its octogenarian president announced that the objectives of Morocco’s protestors were a copy of the leftist party’s demands from earlier decades. For years, our party has been ready to seize this opportunity, and we will benefit from this situation.¹¹ But the leftist party declined to take action, and its president announced that it would not support protests. Few leftist leaders demonstrated or endorsed the protests.

A similar dynamic occurred in Mauritania. However, in this Arab country sandwiched between Morocco and Senegal, the Islamists were the unreliable allies, not the leftists. While leftists and Islamists had built alliances in the late 2000s, these partnerships had been short and fragile. The two opposition parties had allied in August 2008 to resist a coup, but the Islamists withdrew from the coalition less than a year later. The Islamists resurrected the alliance in 2012, but they abandoned it, again, within months. Mauritania’s Islamists have had irregular, sporadic commitment to alliances with leftists. Although numerous differences distinguish Tunisia from Morocco and Mauritania, the latter two did not share in the former’s democratization success, in part because of the absence of stable, enduring left-Islamist alliances in national politics. This book traces how regime strategies of co-optation caused alliance collapse in Morocco and Mauritania. It explains why alliances failed.

Surprisingly, however, this trend of alliance failure by regime cooptation did not hold for all domains of politics. In larger cities and labor unions in Morocco and Mauritania, leftists and Islamists succeeded in building stable alliances that predated and endured the 2011 Arab uprisings. In these domains of politics, leftists and Islamists allied to assert common demands and push for reforms. When regimes sought to spoil their alliances through co-optation, they resisted and maintained coalitions. This puzzle motivates this book’s central question: Under what conditions do alliances between leftists and Islamists succeed or fail?

The Argument: The Rural Basis of Divide and Rule

To answer this question, this book uncovers the circumstances under which opposition parties succeed or fail to build durable, long-term alliances. Success is defined as an alliance’s capacity to endure over time, while failure is when it collapses. This book introduces a new theory of alliance durability, tests it with original evidence from left-Islamist coalitions in North Africa, and discusses its applicability to other Arab countries. This book argues that the nature of an opposition party’s social base—the grassroots constituencies upon which it depends—shapes the robustness of its alliances. When an opposition party with urban origins absorbs new rural constituencies mired in illiteracy and entangled in clientelist hierarchies, then it falls vulnerable to co-optation and, thus, becomes a weak alliance partner.

By explaining why left-Islamist alliances succeed or fail, this book is about opposition coordination in the Arab world. But it is also about the phenomenon of co-optation and what constellation of social forces enhances the efficacy of this strategy of regime control. By developing a theory that emphasizes an opposition party’s social base, and its importance for regime co-optation, this book engages three major theories that seek to explain alliance failure. The first theory stresses ideological conflict, arguing that discord over programs, policies, and values can cause alliances between opposition parties to collapse.¹² A second theory concentrates on commitment problems between parties: because parties cannot credibly commit to refrain from betraying each other, such mutual mistrust causes alliances to fail.¹³ The final theory emphasizes the authoritarian regime and how it engineers its internal institutions to break alliances. By manipulating laws that control electoral participation and party legality, a regime can shatter opposition alliances.¹⁴ This book examines these theories for alliance durability, showing their strengths and shortcomings in explaining why coalitions have succeeded or failed in North Africa.

To show what fosters durability in alliances, we need to understand the social origins not only of the opposition parties that make them but also of the authoritarian regimes that break them. Since the postcolonial era, the states of Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania have followed different pathways in regime formation. Whereas Tunisia centered its authoritarian regime in urban areas and the middle class, it uprooted the rural social structures upon which political power was traditionally built. Morocco and Mauritania reinforced such rural social structures. Like other developing world autocracies, these two latter regimes consolidated power, as Catherine Boone writes, by partnerships and brokerage relations with nonstate authorities in rural areas who had power and influence over ordinary farmers who were their followers, clients, kinsfolk, and subjects.¹⁵ Traditional politicians based in the countryside became these regimes’ core supporters.

Given diverging legacies of their formation, these regimes adopted different tactics to deal with opposition alliances in the 2000s. Legacies of regime formation conditioned regimes’ strategies of divide and rule. Because Tunisia’s regime had marginalized traditional social structures in rural areas vital to authoritarian rule in Morocco and Mauritania, it chose direct repression—rather than indirect co-optation—to combat alliances between leftists and Islamists. Morocco’s and Mauritania’s regimes, by contrast, used subtler strategies of co-optation to break alliances. These regimes exploited the fact that some opposition parties had been gradually drawn into the politics of rural areas. Traditional politicians affiliated with the leftist party, in Morocco, and the Islamist party, in Mauritania, were co-opted away from their opposition parties and integrated into loyalist parties of authoritarian regimes. Subsequently, loyalist parties rewarded these opposition politicians who had defected from their parties by giving the constituencies of their districts greater clientelist benefits. Over time, this process of co-optation has made Morocco’s leftists and Mauritania’s Islamists far less assertive opposition parties. By exploiting an opposition party’s rural social base, regimes can carry out their strategy of co-optation and woo oppositionists away from alliances, causing coalitions to fail. This book uncovers the conditions under which opposition parties succumb to co-optation and regimes can execute this strategy of control most effectively.

Even when one of the opposition parties depends on such a rural social base, it is possible that an alliance may still form for short-term, strategic reasons. But it is unlikely to endure over time. In effect, a strategic reason was a necessary but not alone a sufficient condition for an alliance to succeed. For these cases of coalitions in North Africa, a change in the political opportunity structure—usually a common threat—initiated alliances between leftists and Islamists. However, an urban social base provided the anchor that made it durable over time. Indeed, in the domains of politics in which leftists and Islamists did not acquire rural social bases and retained their historic urban ones, in labor unions and city governments, the opposition parties built durable, long-term alliances. Such enduring alliances are crucial because they create a platform from which opposition parties can agitate for change against authoritarian regimes, oversee their country during democratic transitions, and construct new governments in the uncertain years thereafter. What is needed is a theory that explains variation in the durability of alliances that accounts for both strategic reasons and deeper social structural influences.

Original Evidence

To test this new theory that explains the durability of opposition alliances, this book compares three types of coalitions between leftists and Islamists. Together, this comparative approach covers three North African countries and analyzes nine different cases of alliances (coalitions in national, labor, and city politics). Left-Islamist alliances did not endure equally, however. Cases existed in which alliances formed and endured over time, formed and then collapsed in less than a year, or did not form at all. By examining the sources behind this variation in alliance durability, this book advances new approaches in comparative politics wherein controlled comparisons are conducted not only across states but also within them, in different subnational arenas of contestation.¹⁶

Evidence for the book was gathered over almost two years of fieldwork in North Africa in which both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect information from primary Arabic-based sources. Nearly two hundred field interviews, which provide this book’s foundation, were conducted in Arabic. About 70–80 percent of interviews were completed with leftist and Islamist politicians, whereas 20–30 percent were done with secondhand observers, like journalists.¹⁷ Interviewees included the first Islamist prime minister in Moroccan history, Abdelilah Benkirane. They also included seventeen other past or current ministers, scores of parliamentary deputies, local politicians, party officials, and unionists.¹⁸ Utilizing professional connections from interning as a translator journalist at as-Sabah Arabic newspaper in 2009, I located interlocutors.¹⁹ This identified key decision makers who had intimate knowledge about how alliances were negotiated, how their terms finalized, and why they succeeded or failed. Arabic and French primary documents from the parties confirmed interview-based evidence. Four months of research in the archives of two newspapers, Morocco’s Arabic at-Tajdid and Mauritania’s French La Tribune, also verified information.²⁰

As is increasingly common in works of Middle East politics,²¹ and comparative politics more generally,²² this book supports its argument with statistics. An original data set was constructed to examine whether trends in co-optation, discovered through fieldwork, were more generalizable within Moroccan and Mauritanian politics. Because the context differed considerably, analogous data for Tunisia were not available. The data set supports regression models that predict the conditions under which opposition politicians—mayors and communal representatives—get co-opted into proregime loyalist parties.²³ Statistics show how droves of Moroccan leftist and Mauritanian Islamist politicians representing rural districts have succumbed to co-optation, defecting from the opposition to regimes’ loyalist parties.²⁴ Follow-up interviews with politicians who fell to co-optation show the underlying mechanisms behind this regime co-optation strategy. To date, this data set constitutes the first quantitative attempt to describe individual-level patterns of co-optation within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Why Compare Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania?

Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania provide ideal sites in which to examine alliances between leftists and Islamists. They are relatively similar countries, with French colonial histories, limited rentier resources, and underlying Arab-Berber cultures. Yet alliances therein experienced tremendous variation in durability. Some coalitions between leftists and Islamists endured for years, whereas others failed after months.

The alternative of comparing these North African states, for instance, with Egypt, Syria, or a Persian Gulf state would introduce new antecedent conditions—like the presence of sectarian minorities or rentier oil wealth—that invites the risk of incomparability. Contentious relations between leftists and Islamists in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, for example, intersect conflicts between Sunni citizens and their non-Sunni neighbors, especially Christian minorities. In many Persian Gulf states, relations between leftists and Islamists are obscured by conflicts between Sunni and Shia. Moreover, these regimes’ massive oil rentier wealth helps pacify opposition politics. Thus, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania make sense for this book, considering other countries available for comparison.

Because many comparative studies of North Africa include Algeria, a rationale should be furnished for why this book omits it.²⁵ Algeria’s tragic civil war between 1991 and 2002, which led to approximately 150,000 deaths, makes relations between its regime and Islamists somewhat exceptional.²⁶ Algeria’s rentier wealth