We are grateful for Dr. Allinson’s engaging review of our book. We would like to highlight core differences in our approach and analysis. To reiterate, our book offers four explanatory variables—state and political institutions, civil society, gender and women’s mobilizations, and international influences and interventions—for the divergent outcomes across our seven Arab Spring cases and the absence of robust democracies. We compare the Arab Spring protests to those that occurred during the so-called third wave of democratization, finding that the Arab region cases we explore lacked the prerequisites for effective democratization, including a supportive international environment. Indeed, even Tunisia—initially the one successful and highly celebrated case of democratization—suffered economically, leading to the political dysfunction that generated the presidential coup of July 2021.

A key point of divergence in our analysis that both complements and contradicts existing explanations is that we do not consider every uprising to be a revolution. We prefer to use a stricter definition of revolution, differentiating a social revolution from a more limited political revolution; indeed, the latter occurred in Tunisia. That is, there was no transformation of the mode of production or of social relations, but rather there were significant changes to the political system: the introduction of political pluralism and an array of new freedoms. We are sympathetic to Dr. Allinson’s notion of revolutionary situations, but the forces required for successful revolutionary outcomes were limited or absent, and in the cases of Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, coercive international and regional interventions subverted any prospects of even negotiated pacted transitions.

We appreciate Allinson’s careful attention to the operationalization of the four variables at the center of our framework for explaining divergent outcomes, and we concur that revolutions and counterrevolutions can be interlinked processes. Our main point of contention with classifying the Arab uprisings as revolutions is predicated on measurements and outcomes. We posit that counterrevolutions precede a revolution and are thus causally a product of their reversal. With the exception of Tunisia’s political revolution prior to 2021, we disagree with Allinson’s contention that the cases examined in the book constituted revolutions; conversely, we view them as failed uprisings that stifled revolutionary potential. Similarly, Hosni Mubarak’s ousting from power in 2011—facilitated in large part by the military—enabled the military to gain greater influence in politics and governance, cementing its grip on power culminating in the 2013 coup d’état against the country’s only democratically elected government, that of the late Mohamed Morsi.

In addition to a systematic exploration of domestic developments, we dedicate a chapter to illustrating how various forms of coercive and noncoercive interventions, as well as multiple and overlapping domestic, regional, and international interactions—succeeded in subverting democratization. In doing so, we rely on Lisa Wedeen’s prolific work on Syria in our discussion (pp. 85–88) and argue that political legacies of authoritarian rule undermined the ability of opposition political parties to contest the Ba’th Party’s firm grip on power after 2012, resulting in Bashar al-Assad’s dubious electoral victory in 2014.

Nevertheless, we concur with Allinson’s argument that understanding and explaining the failure of the Arab uprisings requires a multilevel analysis of domestic, regional, and international factors and forces that worked in tandem to undermine democratization and revolutions from taking hold.