In this book, Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds address both why some uprisings result in overthrows and where democratization can be expected to take hold post-breakdown. In the introductory chapter, the authors insist that the results of the Arab Spring must be explicable by less proximate causes, such as historical legacies and entrenched structural characteristics of the cases included in their study. This approach goes beyond reductionist explanations based on specific acts just prior to the uprisings, attempting instead to offer a broader theory of democratic transition and consolidation.
In Chapter 3, the authors define uprisings as nonviolent mass protests occurring over multiple days and geographic sites, involving the seizure of public spaces by protestors. Accordingly, the reader expects that a serious consideration of most Arab-majority states will be included in the analysis. However, the authors argue that such uprisings only occurred in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria (see p. 60). Cases like Morocco, with sustained demonstrations reaching tens of thousands of protestors spread across 40 localities, as well as large protests in Jordan, Algeria, and Kuwait, are for the most part left out.
The Arab Spring tackles many of the arguments presented in existing studies, offering those less well-versed in the topic an easy means to catch up. The driving factors explaining authoritarian collapse versus continuation are oil rents, an argument rooted in rentier state theory developed decades ago (e.g., Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, The Rentier State, 1987), and hereditary succession, a regime-stabilizing mechanism highlighted by scholars like Sean L. Yom and F. Gregory Gause (“Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On,” Journal of Democracy 23 [October 2012]: 74–88) and Roger Owen (The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life, 2014).
Glaringly absent from the discussion is Michael Herb’s argument in All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in Middle Eastern Monarchies (1999), which delineates how different institutional arrangements within hereditary rule determine regime strength. Herb’s explanation stems from analysis not only of the enduring dynastic regimes in the region but also of those that fell in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Iran half a century ago. Here, historical legacy teaches us that there is nothing ironclad about hereditary succession, leaving us to question why it should matter so much for Middle Eastern dictators today. The response of Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds is that foreign powers sustained these past monarchies (p. 59), which disregards the continuing importance of foreign influence in the region today. Moreover, in the rest of the world, the majority of enduring authoritarian regimes are nonhereditary.
By insisting that oil and hereditary succession determine the outcomes of the Arab Spring, rather than just increase the likelihood of them, the authors take a few questionable positions. Syria, clearly not an oil-rich country, is counted among dynastic states despite the fact that it had a single familial change of power and that “Syria’s Asad never enjoyed undisputed authority, having to share power with other elites” (see Raymond Hinnebusch, “Introduction: Understanding the Consequences of the Arab Uprisings: Starting Points and Divergent Trajectories,” Democratization 22 [no. 2, 2015]: 205–17). Equally questionable is whether Asad would remain in power today without foreign assistance from Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Libya and Bahrain, both oil-rich cases, are treated as if no serious chance of overthrow existed during the Arab Spring (Chapter 4). Yet there are reasons to doubt these conclusions. The authors themselves and others underscore the fractionalized nature of the Libyan military that quickly gave way to the formation of militias at odds with one another. To Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds, Saudi forces mattered little in saving the Bahraini regime from collapse, despite an estimated 40% of the population turning out in antiregime demonstrations. In all three cases, foreign intervention played an important if not decisive role, but the path-dependent nature of the argument laid out in this book cannot allow for this more proximate, unpredictable factor to be determinative of the fates of these regimes.
In Chapters 5 and 6, the authors consider two questions: What accounts for a completed transition away from the ancien régime after overthrow? And, in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, what determined democratization versus authoritarian backsliding? There must be a “usable state” in order to maintain a governmental transition. Thus, it is not surprising that the weak states of Yemen and Libya descended into civil war post-breakdown. Likewise, it is difficult to contend with the authors’ notion that the entrenched practice of military entanglement within the Egyptian political system stemming from colonial times contributed to its eventual return to power.
Chapter 6 focuses on an argument that higher level of economic development led to a stronger civil society in Tunisia relative to Egypt before the uprisings. Yet cases like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates contradict the assumption that economic development and a strong civil society go hand in hand; a repressive state can be economically prosperous. The idea is that well-developed social and political organizations will increase the numbers as well as strength of different actors in the post-regime power vacuum, resulting in democratic compromise (pp. 183–84). Although the authors claim that a lack of plurality among Egyptian civil society organizations (e.g., pp. 205, 215) allowed Islamists to take over in the posttransitional period, they do not provide evidence for this claim. Instead, they focus on the strength of civil society. However, the strength of civil society and a plurality of actors are not one and the same.
The premise that Egypt had a weak civil society rests on a shaky foundation of anecdotal evidence from seemingly cherry-picked secondary sources in favor of the argument. Conversely, Mona El-Ghobashy (“Constitutionalist Contention in Contemporary Egypt,” American Behavioral Scientist 51 [July 2008]: 1590–1610) and Imad Salamey (“Post-Arab Spring: changes and challenges,” Third World Quarterly 36 [January 2015]: 111–129.) cite the rise of government watchdog groups, professional unions, and human rights organizations like Kefaya (“Enough!”) as evidence of Egypt’s flourishing civil society in the past 25 years. Although the Tunisia General Labour Union was one of the strongest transitional actors, a direct comparison with the lackluster Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) is unjustified. Joel Beinin’s work on Egyptian labor movements documents millions of Egyptian workers participating in more than 2,500 demonstrations between 1998 and 2008, usually without the support of the ETUF. Likewise, Marie Duboc (“Challenging the Trade Union, Reclaiming the Nation: The Politics of Labor Protest in Egypt, 2006–11,” in Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East, 2014) finds that more than two million Egyptian workers organized such events between 2004 and 2010.
Another attempt to demonstrate a weaker Egyptian civil society employs World Values Survey (WVS) data with a table of self-reported rates of organizational membership in Tunisia and Egypt from 2013 (p. 205). By selecting a year after the Arab Spring, one should expect the data to reveal the current reality—rather than a cause—of posttransitional differences, and it is therefore unsurprising that membership is low in Egypt, which was undergoing a retrenchment of authoritarianism at this time. A fairer comparison would consider the 2008 WVS in Egypt, which reveals higher rates of memberships in all types of organizations, including (strikingly) professional associations at 10.9%, which is almost double the highest rate of organizational membership in Tunisia (at 5.5%). If we are to take historical legacies seriously, then we must also consider that the first “modern civil-society organization” was established in Egypt back in 1821, burgeoning into more than 25,000 such organizations by 1996 (see Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Reform and Frustration in Egypt,” Journal of Democracy 7 [no. 4, 1996]: 130).
Hundreds of books have been written on the Arab Spring, but the vast majority seek to explain either why it occurred in the first place or what led to its outcomes. Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds tackle both issues, offering a fresh perspective on the events. The conclusion that the Arab Spring “will be remembered less as a momentous change in the region’s political makeup than as a momentary break in a longer, more dismal story [of authoritarian durability]” (p. 228) is somewhat depressing, though. I end this review on a more hopeful note by highlighting that this prognosis misses some important democratic gains in places ignored by this book, such as Algeria’s lifting of emergency rule and Morocco’s constitutional reform ensuring the appointment of the prime minister from among popularly elected officials. Such outcomes shift our attention to the role of human agency in shaping the legacy of the Arab Spring, as protestors in these cases may not have sought the ouster of their leaders, preferring instead a more controlled path of democratization.
Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds provide an exploration and synthesis of the extensive literature on the Arab Spring in a manner that is theoretically sophisticated, insightful, and complex. For these reasons, this book should become a key learning resource for students of Middle Eastern politics.
