The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily those of the US Government.
Over the past decade, mass mobilization has shaken politics around the world. The 2011 Arab uprisings ousted long-standing dictators and led to reactionary crackdowns, foreign intervention, and civil wars. In Ukraine in 2014, protestors ousted Viktor Yanukovych. Protests erupted in established democracies as well. In the United States, the Occupy movement focused attention on inequality and corruption, and protests in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore highlighted police brutality and systemic racism. Major protests over austerity and neoliberal reforms also occurred in places such as Brazil, Chile, and Israel.
In short, mass mobilization has dramatically affected politics around the world—across region and regime type. However, are there parallels between protests in these very different contexts? Would we understand the politics of protest better if we studied them across the barriers of regime type and region?
Popular Contention, Regime, and Transition attempts to address such questions by putting the 2011 Arab uprisings in comparative perspective. In doing so, the edited volume attempts to directly compare protest movements across autocracies and democracies using Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly’s (2001) Dynamics of Contention as an analytical model for cross-regime comparison. The primary goal of the book is “to put the recent Arab revolts in comparative perspective” as a means “to flesh out similarities and draw parallels between democratic and authoritarian-like regimes” (p. 16). In doing so, Eitan Y. Alimi, Avraham Sela, and Mario Sznajder aim to study the “intricate, contingent, and indeterminate interplay among popular contention, regime, and transition” globally (p. 5).
The volume is motivated by the assumption that contentious politics across different regional and institutional contexts must have key similarities; otherwise, “we would have no basis for comparison, let alone for theorizing” (p. 10). In established democracies, such as the United States, certain groups “have always been systematically excluded, discriminated against, oppressed, and repressed under highly authoritarian systems of rule,” such as Jim Crow laws and the violent repression of antiwar activists in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 11). While democracies can sometimes employ authoritarian practices to maintain social and political control, autocracies do not always use violent repression as a first resort: “More often, authoritarians exercise mixed strategies aimed at dividing and weakening their domestic opposition and, at the same time, employ political and economic forms of neopatrimonialism” (p. 12). Thus, it is necessary to compare how protests occur across regime type.
The volume is divided into three sections on (1) structural factors and how they enable protest movements, (2) the ways in which processes of political contention occur, and (3) the drivers of political transitions. Several of the chapters offer important insights into some of the broad factors that structure how protests take place, and the contingent dynamics occurring during protest movements themselves. However, the arguments in the volume are often either overly broad or largely descriptive. These weaknesses perhaps illustrate a broader tension in the Dynamics of Contention framework between overly schematic structural explanation and appreciation of contingent factors that are difficult to generalize.
For example, Jack Goldstone argues that the susceptibility of personalist regimes to popular revolt provides a parsimonious explanation for why leaders in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Egypt all faced significant threats to their power amid mass mobilization. This is a potentially helpful starting point for assessing why uprisings gained so much more momentum in some countries than in others. However, by classifying regimes as different as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya as “sultanistic,” Goldstone leaves open many questions about potential differences in publics and how they experienced life in these very different political contexts. Moreover, analyzing the Arab uprisings through the lens of personalist leaders (a framework that Mario Diani and Caelum Moffatt also employ) ignores the dramatic differences in the authoritarian institutions that were created in places such as Egypt and Libya, which partly accounts for their different postuprising trajectories—a military takeover versus civil war.
Valerie Bunce compares the drivers of regional diffusion of protest movements in 1989, the Color Revolutions, and the Arab uprisings. One of Bunce’s key takeaways is that “when states within the same region share similar cultures, experiences with the international system, patterns of interactions between regimes and citizens, and political-economic systems, they are more likely to support the cross-national spread of change” (pp. 131–32). Similar to Goldstone’s account of personalist leaders, this analysis is a potentially useful starting point, but Bunce’s key variables are overly broad. For example, what constitutes “similar cultures” or “patterns of interaction between regimes and citizens?” Bunce also claims that Egypt helped to generate region-wide protests because of its pivotal geostrategic importance and political similarities to other countries in the region (p. 129). But what exactly makes a case “pivotal” (p. 132) in the eyes of publics in other countries in the Arab world? Was Egypt more pivotal to publics in Libya and Syria where major uprisings broke out than in Algeria and Morocco where authoritarian governments contained protest movements? Using Bunce’s framework, in early 2010 were the countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) more prone to region-wide uprisings than in Latin America or West Africa, for example? If so, how could one demonstrate this before region-wide protests actually broke out?
Throughout the volume, several arguments hinge on analytic categories that seem more like post hoc generalizations than clear explanatory variables. For example, Gregory Maney classifies the legitimacy of regimes in the Arab world as as “low,” “medium,” or “high” without giving a clear metric for how he determined this, or what makes a regime “legitimate” in the first place. What exactly does it mean, for example, that in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi’s legitimacy was “low,” whereas Mubarak’s legitimacy was “medium” (p. 154)?
In contrast to the sometimes overly general theorizing of the chapters looking for macrostructural explanations, Karen Rasler argues that contingent factors endogenous to protest movements can shape outcomes as much as structural preconditions. Rasler’s emphasis on contingency is an important complement to broader structural explanations that risk ignoring the specificity of individual cases. However, this emphasis on contingency perhaps also reveals a broader tension in the overall volume between description of how particular protests took place and overly schematic explanations seeking to uncover broad parallels in mass mobilization across region and regime type.
In sum, Popular Contention, Regime, and Transition aims to address two key questions: “What can cycles of contention in other parts of the world tell us about revolts in the Arab world, and … what can the cycles of contention in the Arab world tell us about contentious politics more generally?” (p. 277). While these questions are important, the edited volume as a whole does not systematically address them. Rather, it reveals tension between overly broad structural explanations and description of the contingencies of particular cases.
While several of the chapters provide useful insights into the Arab uprisings and other protest movements (especially Vincent Boudreau’s comparison between Southeast Asian and MENA cases), there is a lack of dialogue between the chapters. Thus, many of the questions that the editors pose about how protest movements work across regime type remain unanswered.
