We are very grateful to the editors of Perspectives on Politics for putting together this symposium and to the commentators for their thoughtful responses. Given that the respondents are three major scholars whose work is firmly anchored within the very field that our article challenges, we are not surprised that their responses are both vigorous and critical. In this rejoinder, we address their major points of contention with the goal of further advancing the discussion about the role of political science scholarship on the Middle East within broader debates about authoritarianism and mobilization in comparative politics.

The symposium participants argue that political science scholarship on the Arab world did a remarkably good job at identifying trends in the region. According to this quite generous assessment, scholars facing the next unanticipated crisis may take political science scholarship on the Arab world “as a model rather than as a cautionary tale” (p. 416). We beg to differ—even though we are intrigued by how quickly some scholars have adapted their old arguments about unwavering authoritarian stability to suggest that their accounts actually explain state weakness and societal mobilization. Overall, as we wrote in our article, we agree that much of the political science literature on the region is both excellent and still highly relevant today. However, we continue to maintain that comparative politics would be enriched by taking a critical and honest look at some of the shortcomings of this field, in addition to building on its strengths.

First, do we mischaracterize the political science literature on the Middle East by claiming that an overemphasis on questions about “authoritarian persistence” sometimes sidelined other research topics? The commentators correctly point out that scholarship on the Middle East is not monolithic (p. 415), and that top scholars (in political science and other disciplines) have, in fact, engaged in a wide variety of inquiry (pp. 413–414). We wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, our argument explicitly draws on previous critiques ^{Footnote 1} and innovative research agendas ^{Footnote 2} by top political scientists who focus on the region.

However, the fact that the political science scholarship on the Arab world is diverse and sometimes self-reflective does not mean that there are not major tensions within the literature. Explaining the absence of democratization in the region has been a major link between scholarship on the Middle East and broader debates in comparative politics about issues such as rentier economies, ^{Footnote 3} electoral institutions, ^{Footnote 4} elite coalitions, ^{Footnote 5} coercive state apparatuses, ^{Footnote 6} strategic aid, ^{Footnote 7} and civil society. ^{Footnote 8} It is in this respect that we raise the concern that a continued emphasis on authoritarian persistence risks “treating the recent uprisings essentially as non-events if they do not lead to democratization” (p. 395). Our critique is aimed at broader trends within comparative politics as much as at political scientists’ work on the Middle East.

As the course of the uprisings in places like Egypt illustrates, there is not always a direct connection between mobilization and institutional democratization. This makes it increasingly important to take seriously critiques that much of comparative politics continues to study authoritarianism primarily as the absence of democratization, implicitly relying upon the transitological assumptions it claims to eschew. As Jason Brownlee astutely noted shortly before the uprisings, even as political scientists try to explain the internal dynamics of authoritarian regimes, their entire project is motivated by and “cannot escape an ontological dependence on procedural democracy. . . . So long as authoritarianism and democracy are mutually exclusive regime types, the first will be understood as a temporary, preparatory state leading to the second.” ^{Footnote 9} It is unclear whether existing efforts ^{Footnote 10} have succeeded in providing an alternative research agenda for studying authoritarianism (in the Middle East or elsewhere) apart from democratization.

Second, the respondents are absolutely correct to point out that mass mobilization depends on highly contingent factors that are impossible to predict (p. 410). That was in fact one of the main points of our article. As we show in our comparison with Eastern Europe in 1989, the Middle East is not unique in this respect. More recent events, such as the ouster of Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych (for the second time), ^{Footnote 11} continue to highlight the unpredictability of mass mobilization, and the difficulty of foreseeing outcomes driven by iterative, contingent, and often low-probability events. ^{Footnote 12} Whether political scientists correctly identified the unlikeliness of mass mobilization in the Arab world prior to 2011 calls for further in-depth case studies and cross-national comparisons. However, political scientists’ emphasis on stability before the fact is not merely reflective of a failure of prediction, but also a manifestation of theoretical blind spots that we need to confront seriously and openly.

Third, can inductively studying local events and discourses surrounding the Arab uprisings help to reshape research agendas about authoritarianism and mobilization? These dramatic events highlight that studying the Middle East through the lens of “politics under authoritarianism” cannot accommodate a reality in which the sites of salient political and social conflict are often not directly related to regime type. The uprisings reveal a much broader set of struggles, which transcend questions tied to institutional democratization or its absence. ^{Footnote 13}

Indeed, as Jillian Schwedler points out, one of the main problems “with the regime type and other state-as-unit forms of comparison . . . is that they fail to capture really interesting dynamics within cases, including in-case variation.” For example, focusing on regime type misses “how discourses (by regimes as well as their challengers) adopt new tropes, draw references to similar justifications, and so on.” ^{Footnote 14}

Along the lines that Schwedler suggests, scholars are already producing valuable research on such topics as the role of emotion ^{Footnote 15} and ideology ^{Footnote 16} in the uprisings. This innovative work can highlight the frequently ambiguous character of political opposition, and the shifting salience of factors such as nationalism and religion for mass mobilization. ^{Footnote 17} It can also potentially reveal similarities in how socio-political marginalization, media messaging, and collective fears impact political participation across various regime types—democracies, autocracies, and everything in between.

Political science scholarship on the Middle East has much to offer comparative politics. More can be done, however, to integrate various strands of research, rethink the normative and theoretical assumptions of focusing on politics under authoritarianism, and critically examine how recent events in the region speak to questions about mobilization (or its absence) across different institutional contexts.