Mobilizational Origins: Contingency and Economics

Explaining origins of mobilization is tricky. Across the vast literatures on contentious politics, civil society, political violence and modern revolution, scholars have reached little consensus on why citizens rebel under authoritarian rule – that is, what variable causally triggers the decision of any given individual at any given moment to publicly oppose the government. No matter how many interviews, surveys and experiments comparativists conduct, there may never be a unified answer that generalizes across every national case. It is unlikely the Arab Spring will resolve this debate. For one, exact moments of mobilization elude prediction because individual preferences are largely invisible to observers and are often falsified within the public sphere (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2011; Kuran Reference Kuran1995; Kurzman Reference Kurzman2004). For another, scholars have not yet reconciled the utility-maximizing approach of rational choice theory with non-instrumental approaches to protests that focus upon values, cognition and emotions – factors that surely shape the choice of obedience versus rebellion, but which defy easy measurement (Kurzman Reference Kurzman2012; Pearlman Reference Pearlman2013). When asked by Western researchers why they had participated in the Arab Spring, so many demonstrators have responded with a brutally honest yet opaque answer: because the ‘the wall of fear’ had been broken. That such simple data can be interpreted in numerous ways through different theoretical filters shows there is still much to learn about this realm of individual decision-making.

Most of all, organizational and ideological factors long assumed to be impulses for collective action in the Middle East were absent in the Arab Spring protests (Achcar Reference Achcar2013; Bayat Reference Bayat2013; Khosrokhavar Reference Khosrokhavar2012). For instance, new opposition forces did not take after established civil society organizations, opposition parties or religious actors such as the Muslim Brotherhood. They were amorphous and leaderless. Neither did they implicate motivating ideologies such as Arab nationalism, Marxist-Leninism or Islamism; they did not draw upon religious principles or external ideals, but instead channelled public frustrations against governments in collective demands for karama (dignity) and justice. Results from the second wave of the Arab Barometer survey project, presented in two chapters in Marc Lynch’s edited volume The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East, validate this. By and large, the Arab activists who drove the 2011–12 protests preferred democracy over authoritarianism, distrusted political authority and desired secular institutions over Islamist policies – important findings highlighted in the chapters by Hoffmann and Jamal (Reference Hoffmann and Jamal2014) and Tessler and Robbins (Reference Tessler and Robbins2014).

In short, they were not the usual revolutionary suspects. Indeed, that protests came from unexpected sources invokes more recent ethnographic work on social resistance in the Middle East which diverges sharply from mainstream work on opposition politics (Aarts and Cavatorta Reference Aarts and Cavatorta2013; Allal Reference Allal2010; Bayat Reference Bayat2010; Chomiak Reference Chomiak2011). Unlike institutionally recognized entities such as Islamist movements and civil society non-governmental organizations, new voices seldom framed as ‘opposition’ by political scientists – football fans, phosphate miners and entrepreneurs, among others – have long found creative ways to subvert repressive laws and puncture the myth of invulnerable authoritarianism. The Arab Spring renders this point even more visible: scholars must broaden their analytical framework and consider a broader range of actors that can engage in political struggle, and they need to move beyond the highly formalist and elite-oriented approach of the past.

From cognitive factors to ideological impulses, causal triggers that can predict the decision to protest at the individual level remain elusive. However, scholars can still locate the permissive conditions that, all else being equal, make the decision to publicly mobilize against autocracy more likely. Hanieh’s Lineages of Revolt and Diwan’s edited volume Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings take on this challenge. They shift the unit of analysis from the protesting individual to the collective level – in particular, the urban middle class that drove most national protests. Using different methodologies, these works conclude that the Arab Spring had a material determinant in the form of prolonged economic crisis dating back decades that entailed lethargic structural growth, high youth unemployment and unresponsive state services.

That economic grievances lay behind political rebellion is hardly a groundbreaking idea. Numerous studies on the Arab Spring link relative deprivation with protest activity (Amin et al. Reference Amin, Assaad, Al-Baharna, Dervis, Desai, Dhillon, Galal, Ghanem, Graham and Kaufmann2012; Hosny et al. Reference Hosny, Kandil and Mohtadi2014; Malik and Awadallah Reference Malik and Awadallah2013). Thanks to such work, scholars know that while the first protests of each uprising may have originated from different spaces, from the rural towns of Tunisia and Syria to the metropolitan capitals of Egypt and Jordan, the consequent national movements of opposition that formed were mostly driven by young middle-class urbanites who had generally underachieved economically relative to their educational and social status. Peasants, migrants and others subsisting on the margins of society certainly participated, but did not lead these movements or remain its vanguard. Neither, too, did the wealthy, a point that Brownlee et al.’s The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform notes – small rentier states like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that feature universal welfare provisions and virtually no joblessness among citizens saw no troubles. Of course, oil wealth alone does not immunize a regime from conflict. Libya and Bahrain both have significant hydrocarbon resources, but unequal redistribution across provincial and sectarian cleavages, respectively, helped spawn opposition within disenfranchised urban areas.

However, Hanieh’s and Diwan’s volumes do not merely correlate antecedent underdevelopment with political instability. Uniquely, they trace out the fuller causal chain of analysis to expose the economic events and historical processes that put urban citizens under siege in the first place. In sum, simple deprivation alone is not the culprit; in historical and comparative perspective, it seldom is. What made popular uprisings especially likely was something new – collective recognition of worsening inequality between wealthy elites and the middle classes, a gap largely spawned by neoliberal economic reforms.

Hanieh (Reference Hanieh2013: 174) utilizes qualitative macroanalysis to expose ‘the historically structured processes of class and state formation and their interlinkages across different spaces and scales – rural and urban; national, regional, and global’. Some may have difficulty with the often-dense jargon of a book inspired by Marxist-inflected dependency theory. Diwan’s work presents a different challenge. The centrepiece is the masterful chapter written by Diwan himself (2014: 29–56), which utilizes a number of econometric tests to explore the weaknesses of the regional political economy. The essay alone justifies acquiring the book; the other nine chapters are disjointed, with some focusing on non-economic topics such as Islamism and others exploring external cases like Indonesia.

If readers can get beyond the polemical tone of Hanieh’s work and the more descriptive chapters of Diwan’s volume, they will be rewarded with a rich proposition that combines the former’s historical structuralism with the latter’s quantitative sleuthing. The urban middle sector, wage-earners and salaried alike, was a likely candidate to support new protest movements because it had suffered creeping material dislocation due to neoliberal reforms since the 1980s. Hanieh penetrates the bargained nature of capital accumulation that governed the Arab world after the Second World War. At that time, large preindustrial states like Egypt pursued statist policies of late development, such as import-substitute industrialization, and were rewarded – like other late developers – with early returns, as the Arab world grew faster than almost any other region during the 1960s and 1970s. Such prosperity allowed states to consolidate power on the strength of social pacts that swapped quiescence from swelling urban centres for prosperity and stability. However, that bargain collapsed with the fall of oil prices in the 1980s, which hit the oil-rich states the hardest but also pummelled oil-poor ones such as Egypt and Tunisia due to the dramatic decline in regional trade, capital flows and foreign aid.

As they veered towards bankruptcy and default, many Arab states turned to neoliberal reforms, hoping to stave off budgetary meltdowns while upgrading their bloated statist economies. As Diwan shows, neoliberal imperatives like privatizing public enterprises, reducing costly social services and enacting free trade did restore some fiscal solvency, but it also removed many of the economic protections enacted decades earlier. At the same time, the urban middle class grew. By the 2000s, youths (generally, those aged 18 to 34) represented not only the biggest demographic segment in most Arab countries, but also the most well-educated and aspirational generation the region had ever seen. Yet this generation suffered dimmer prospects for upward mobility than their parents due to the consequences of neoliberal reforms, among them the rising cost of living, declining public employment, stagnant wage levels and still-weak private sectors dominated by crony capitalism.

Hanieh and Diwan show that neoliberal shifts entrenched perceptions of inequality and injustice, and helped create a new socioeconomic stratum – business elites with close ties to incumbent regimes. As other studies have also shown, this new cohort of crony capitalists differed from old economic elites. For instance, in Egypt and Syria, they quickly took over old sectors such as banking and retail, or else monopolized new ones like technology and investment while benefiting from extensive international financial ties (Haddad Reference Haddad2012; Heydemann Reference Heydemann2004; Kandil Reference Kandil2012). This new elite included not just technocrats and large-scale entrepreneurs but also savvy politicians and regime insiders. For instance, in Tunisia, which was hailed by the European Union during the 2000s as a stable and well-governed state, the nepotistic takeover of the burgeoning private sector enabled the extended family of President Ben ‘Ali to control $13 billion of assets by 2010, equal to one-quarter of Tunisia’s GDP. Similar patterns could be found, albeit on a less extravagant scale, in other targets of neoliberal reform like Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Syria and Yemen – all prime sites of uprisings.

In short, economic inequality engendered by neoliberalism created the permissive conditions for popular uprisings. Yet many political scientists might accept this finding with scepticism, and rightly so – innumerable cross-national studies have shown that the relationship between inequality and protest is highly inconsistent (Davenport Reference Davenport2007). This compels a deeper search for causal mechanisms. Hanieh’s book gives little guidance, with its deterministic presumption that class conflict made the Arab Spring inevitable. Diwan is somewhat better in employing an external hypothesis to connect structuralist origins to revolutionary outcomes, the redistributional argument of Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson (Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2006). Acemoglu and Robinson’s controversial yet well-cited proposition assumes that political regimes are institutionalized forms of income distribution, and so all state–society confrontations are simply conflicts over redistribution. Middling levels of inequality produce the highest likelihood for revolution, for it means the middle classes have just enough resources to mobilize (unlike most peasants and migrants) but also enough autonomy and deprivation to see the injustice of their position (unlike business elites).

Between the different methods and details of Hanieh’s and Diwan’s works, two concerns linger. First, the search for mobilizational triggers may be futile. This may bring about discomfit: while putting faith in absolute prerequisites is seldom sound, Middle East specialists are no different from other comparativists in their aim towards greater causal precision. The second concern involves historical processes. Clearly, the legacies of the past shape the current travails of states, societies and economies; but how far back does one traverse? Well-received studies on economic development in Latin America, Africa and East Asia all link postcolonial outcomes with antecedent colonial events that occurred centuries earlier (Kohli Reference Kohli2004; Mahoney Reference Mahoney2010). By contrast, while much Middle East political science scholarship gives due credit to Ottoman or Western colonial practices, such as work on state formation and economic institutions, the Arab Spring literature as represented in these works is remarkably presentist in reaching back only a few decades.

Still, these two books do a laudable job, given their task, by framing structural conditions as the distal cause of the Arab Spring while leaving contingency largely untouched. While this puzzle regarding the societal origins of popular mobilization continues to attract research, another issue now comes into the limelight – the proximate factors on the ground that influenced how protests escalated domestically and spread regionally over time. Herein emerges the second puzzle of the Arab Spring.

The Spread of Contention: Escalation and Diffusion

During 2011–12, national uprisings were not identical. They varied in terms of escalation and scale, from the unarmed mass demonstrations of Tunisia and Egypt that overcame those dictatorships, to the modest marches of Morocco and Jordan that eventually petered out, to the armed insurgencies and violent wars of Libya and Syria, and to the scattered riots in Saudi Arabia and Oman. Further complicating matters, the fact that most Arab societies generated some kind of spontaneous opposition that utilized similar slogans, strategies and targets suggests that a process of diffusion had also occurred, such that activists across borders were learning, emulating and adopting from one another.

The first part of this puzzle, variations in protest escalation, eludes easy answers, much like the earlier question of contentious origins. Beinin and Vairel’s updated edition of Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa shows why. It locates social movement theory (SMT) as the most promising candidate to explain variations in protests. Its foil is classic social movement theory. For many conventional social movement theorists, the ebbing or waning of protests reflects how opposition activists react to their organizational resources and opportunity structures, such as threats from state repression, the availability of elite allies and effective leadership (Tarrow Reference Tarrow1998; Tilly Reference Tilly2004). This structuralist approach remains popular within comparative politics, and Middle East scholars have utilized it well to study Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood (Hafez Reference Hafez2004; Wiktorowicz Reference Wiktorowicz2004). Ostensibly, social movement theory can generate many testable hypotheses to explain observed divergence in protest movements – for instance, that demonstrations were more likely to grow and turn violent if militaries responded with lethal firepower, as in Libya and Syria, or that opposition groups were more likely to demobilize peacefully if regimes gave credible promises of reform, as in Morocco and Jordan.

A master handbook on social movement theory might test such hypotheses systematically. Beinin and Vairel’s volume is not that handbook. Rather, it warns against generalizing across countries altogether by emphasizing the specificity of each uprising. The book begins with chapters on pre-Arab Spring social movements in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Here, the shortfalls of classic social movement theory become apparent: the absence of physical resources and viable opportunities under authoritarianism during the 2000s did not foreclose the rise of new social movements with enduring impact, from the Women’s Association of Hezbollah in Lebanon to mass marches by unemployed administrators in Morocco. As Beinin and Vairel’s introduction (Reference Beinin and Vairel2013: 29–32) contends, social movements are not the effect of structural factors so much as open-ended sites of contestation driven by individual efforts and changing perceptions.

Bonnefoy and Poirier’s later chapter (Reference Bonnefoy and Poirier2013) on Yemen shows this argument in action. What Western observers saw as a cohesive revolutionary campaign that ended in the deposing of long-serving President Salih was instead a messy overlap of university students, party affiliates, provincial separatists, religious minorities and civil society voices, all with conflicting interests and overlapping identities. The movement did not so much mobilize as result from mobilization. For instance, the physical act of encamping in Change Square in the capital of San’a brought these actors in close contact, catalysing contingent alliances atop pre-existing tribal and religious networks while also creating new routines of civic resistance. In addition, other players made their influence felt, among them Saudi Arabia, provincial elites and the Yemeni military, which frequently changed the stakes of the protest game and forced each group to change tactics. In the end, they conclude, this was not a straightforward tale of heroic youths battling the state throughout 2011, but a chaotic collision of different actors with no linear logic of revolution. The entire dynamic of the street was unpredictably remade with each passing day: ‘the interactions generated by the mobilization process generated new practices and opportunities that profoundly transformed the expectations, strategies, and perceptions of everyone involved’ (Bonnefoy and Poirier Reference Bonnefoy and Poirier2013: 245).

Such narratives caution against causal generalizing by emphasizing instead the muddled uniqueness of every case. Indeed, the fact that the resurgence of mass politics in Yemen did result in a historic outcome in the downfall of President Salih, who had reigned supreme for over two decades, seems like a side-story. According to this approach, observed differences in protest escalation defy explanation – such as why Jordan’s protest movement was large but orderly, organizing over 7,000 peaceful events during 2011–12 before winding down without violence, whereas in Libya scattered demonstrations in the eastern city of Benghazi spiralled into a full-blown armed insurgency by spring 2011.

The relativistic focus upon the inimitable constellation of social forces, geopolitical actors and state institutions typifying every case reflects the ‘relational’ turn in social movement theory advocated by some social scientists (Jasper Reference Jasper2010; McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001; Selbin Reference Selbin2010). However, most comparativists have yet to embrace this theoretical shift. For instance, Middle East specialists have applied classic social movement theory to Egypt and Syria, resulting in theoretically sound (if predictably structuralist) arguments – such as that Arab activists simply found more creative ways of generating mobilizational resources and exploiting political opportunities to begin revolutionary campaigns in these autocratic settings (Alimi and Meyer Reference Alimi and Meyer2011; Korany and El-Mahdi Reference Korany and El-Mahdi2014; Leenders Reference Leenders2013). Others emphasize the importance of opposition strategy and cross-cutting alliances, noting that only when revolutionaries worked with ideological rivals, like capital and labour uniting in Tunisia, could they monopolize public spaces and present a united front capable of toppling the incumbent dictatorship (Goldstone Reference Goldstone2011a; Holmes Reference Holmes2012).

Such theoretical ferment may eventually produce consensus regarding the determinants of protest escalation, but for now the landscape of explanation remains highly fragmented. This portends many more studies, but it will also delay the persuasive answering of other questions related to mobilization, such as the ‘punishment puzzle’ (Davenport Reference Davenport2007). The punishment puzzle refers to the inconsistent relationship between coercion and protest, which was on full display during the Arab Spring. In the regional context, why did violent repression in some instances discourage and ultimately destroy opposition, as in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, whereas in other instances it contributed to the radicalization of unarmed movements into revolutionary insurgencies, as in Libya and Syria? Partly due to prevailing caution against generalization, Middle East scholars have spent more time analysing why regimes chose to use repression or restraint rather than comparing its effects upon social forces and resistance strategies (Josua and Edel Reference Josua and Edel2015). Answering this and other challenges requires resolving deeper debates within social movement theory first.

Though analysts may disagree on why the Arab Spring protests escalated in different ways, or sometimes not at all, less controversy surrounds why they spread geographically in the first place – that is, the regional diffusion of opposition throughout 2011–12. Previously termed the ‘contagion’ or ‘demonstration’ effect, Patel et al.’s chapter from The Arab Uprisings Explained defines diffusion as ‘the transfer of an innovation – for example, a new product, policy, institution, or repertoire of behavior – across units, such as enterprises, organizations, sociopolitical groups, or governments’ (Patel et al. Reference Patel, Bunce and Wolchik2014: 58). The December 2010 protests of Tunisia incited similar demonstrations across the Arab world because youth activists across borders were receptive to learning new strategies, eager to emulate the success story of Tunisia and able to coordinate around common symbols and themes (Harrelson-Stephens and Callaway Reference Harrelson-Stephens and Callaway2014; Saideman Reference Saideman2012; Weyland Reference Weyland2012). Scholars of post-communist politics have noted how this regional ‘cascade’ of opposition mirrored, at least in the early stages, the revolutions of 1989 (Hale Reference Hale2013).

Diffusion can occur through various mechanisms, which are still under scrutiny; among them are cognitive heuristics, geopolitical linkage and institutional similarity. What made the Arab Spring an exceptional case of diffusion was the role of digital media as a driving force. This is the topic of Howard and Hussain’s Democracy’s Fourth Wave: Digital Media and the Arab Spring. This study does not fawn over digital media as did the popular press during 2011–12, which often ascribed new revolutionary sentiment as purely the product of SMS messaging and online networks like Facebook. The authors warn that bytes and bits do not substitute for real human action; announcing a revolt on Twitter does not make it so, much less make it successful. However, in the right context, they find that digital media exerted a multiplier effect by enhancing the density, speed and responsiveness of communications between protest actors across borders.

Middle East scholars have already studied how the informational landscape of the Arab world changed greatly after the 1990s. During the mid-2000s, experts saw a new ‘Arab public sphere’ emerging, as satellite television and social networks – which governments could no longer control as they did older broadcast media – spurred open debates over hitherto forbidden topics, such as foreign policy and political corruption (Lynch Reference Lynch2006). However, Howard and Hussain’s work (Reference Howard and Hussain2013: 32–3) goes further in exposing the causal links between digital media and Arab Spring activism. For instance, they correlate technological infrastructure with protest activity. Hence, that Tunisia and Egypt had the first sustained uprisings is not surprising, as they had among the highest levels of internet access, mobile phone distribution and social networking in the region. Second, digital usage tended to spike before major events on the ground: ‘the intensity of political conversations that took place preceding major street protests supports the idea that virtual networks materialized before street protest networks’ (Howard and Hussain Reference Howard and Hussain2013: 117). Third, the content shared online – viral slogans, bloody images, strategies of resistance, urban maps and normative values, among others – helped create a shared mental frame among activists, circulating quickly across different public arenas and making clear that the common opponent for the new opposition was authoritarianism.

In sum, digital media facilitated the diffusion of protest: ‘they provided the very infrastructure that created deep communication ties and organizational capacity in groups of activists before the major protests took place and while street protests were being formalized’ (Howard and Hussain Reference Howard and Hussain2013: 120). This is a telling statement, and one that distinguishes the topic of diffusion from the topic of mobilization. Studies of mobilization focus upon process; they flit back and forth between the person and the group, between individual behaviour and collective action, in order to unpack how and why resistance escalates. Studies of diffusion focus more upon outcomes via the spatial transmission of protest itself. That rebellion in Bahrain, marches in Morocco and demonstrations in Kuwait differed in size and scope matters less than the fact that they all happened following the first movers of Tunisia and Egypt.

Varying Regime Outcomes: Coercion and Personalism

The greater confidence shown in explaining outcomes over processes leads to the third and final puzzle of the Arab Spring, one that shifts attention from mobilization within society to the institutions of the state. Given the diffusion of popular unrest throughout the region during 2011–12, why did the region’s autocratic regimes meet such divergent fates? Dictators did not survive opposition uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere, however, they maintained power regardless of how much societal resistance coalesced, from the Syrian regime’s tenuous survival during civil war to the quiet and protest-free experience of Qatar and its reigning Thani dynasty.

Middle East comparativists are well-equipped to explain variations in regime outcomes, as they have been among the leading scholars of authoritarian politics over the past two decades (Anderson Reference Anderson2006; Brown and Shahin Reference Brown and Shahin2010; Schlumberger Reference Schlumberger2007). Indeed, many regional specialists cautioned against the chiliastic forecasts of democratization rippling through the international media during the Arab Spring, noting that the rise of contentiousness from below did not necessarily mean the downfall of autocratic regimes or the inevitable establishment of liberal democracies in their place (Anderson Reference Anderson2014; Brynen et al. Reference Brynen, Moore and Salloukh2012; Hudson Reference Hudson2015).

That most dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa endured the Arab Spring intact preoccupies Brownlee et al.’s The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform, which asks why such a historic outpouring of mass politics resulted in such a ‘modest harvest’ of regime change. They first rearticulate the importance of oil rents in giving many rulers an invaluable resource to overcome protests, either through well-timed distributions of patronage or else by underwriting large coercive apparatuses. This is an established argument; oil wealth largely accounts for the so-called ‘exceptionalism’ of the monarchies during the Arab Spring, for instance (Yom and Gause Reference Yom and Gause2012). What determines, then, outcomes for states not blessed by the gods of geology? Brownlee et al. pinpoint the decisive factor as whether or not regime elites, especially those in charge of the military, remain loyal in the face of societal mobilization. They point out the ‘sobering reality’ that only when generals defected to the opposition did revolution succeed, for that robbed authoritarian rulers of their coercive organs (Brownlee et al. Reference Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds2015: 219).

Middle East comparativists have long conceded the importance of a loyal coercive apparatus in enabling autocrats to defeat opposition (Ayubi Reference Ayubi1995; Bellin Reference Bellin2004, Reference Bellin2012). Likewise, newer studies on civil–military relations explore why the military split from authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and to a lesser degree Libya, highlighting how factors such as economic payoffs and institutional professionalization shaped the calculations of senior officers while dooming embattled presidents (Lutterbeck Reference Lutterbeck2013; Makara Reference Makara2013; Nepstad Reference Nepstad2013). Brownlee and his coauthors, however, posit a new and striking idea. During the Arab Spring, what determined whether the coercive apparatus would remain loyal was dynastic personalism – that is, whether or not rulers had ensured it remained under the control of family members. Dynastic personalism provides a powerful disincentive for defection, something monarchs know well: for most relatives in charge of, say, the police or army, blood ties make it impossible to separate their own status from the ruler’s interests and reputation (Herb Reference Herb1999). With defection impossible and the consequences of defeat so grim, the dominant strategy for incumbent elites is to stick together and fight until the end, which results in regime survival unless there is outside intervention, as in Libya.

This contrasts with prevailing studies that see dynastic personalism as detrimental to authoritarianism because it encourages endemic corruption, weakens bureaucratic functions and incurs public anger (Chehabi and Linz Reference Chehabi and Linz1998; Goldstone Reference Goldstone2011b; Hess Reference Hess2015). Yet comparing Egypt and Syria shows how personalization can be beneficial (Brownlee et al. Reference Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds2015: 55–9). Both of these republican dictatorships had institutionalized plans for hereditary succession; Hosni Mubarak in Egypt planned to gift his position to son Gamal, whereas Syrian president Bashar al-Assad took over from his father, Hafez al-Assad, in 1999. Yet only in Syria did the Assad family also colonize the state apparatus with dozens of relatives and hundreds more close friends, associates and religious kin in core autocratic institutions, especially the military and security services. Thus in Egypt, army generals could abandon the Mubarak regime, knowing their institutional autonomy would safeguard their power through any transition, whereas in Syria the military and ruling party doggedly fights on with assistance from Hezbollah and Iran given the impossibility of surviving any regime change.

In sum, structure and institutions governed the fate of Arab autocracies, with the gift of oil plus the practice of dynastic personalism explaining divergence in regime outcomes (Brownlee et al. Reference Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds2015: 66–85). This is a theory with expansive causal scope. Much like materialist explanations about mobilizational origins, it accounts for cross-case outcomes during 2011–12 in the nearly 20 countries that make up the Arab world. Like any early theorizing, however, a closer look at specific cases raises some questions. Here, Lynch’s The Arab Uprisings Explained shines. While this book’s varied chapters speak to many issues, the essays regarding authoritarian politics are most enlightening.

First, Springborg’s chapter on civil–military relations casts doubt on the importance of dynastic personalism in ensuring elite cohesion within Arab autocracies. For instance, the armies of Morocco and Jordan are professionalized rather than personalized, and have institutional autonomy – but are still loyal to the ruling monarchies (Springborg Reference Springborg2014: 152). During the Arab Spring, thousands of peaceful protests occurred in these two countries, yet leaders forbade security directors and military generals from utilizing violence against crowds. These agents of coercion showed restraint not because they had personal ties to the royal family but because high levels of institutional discipline precluded the possibility of disobeying direct orders. In sum, something other than personalistic ties can generate loyalty and cohesion from regime elites during crises.

Heydemann and Leenders’ chapter on authoritarian learning likewise suggests a different causal mechanism than dynastic personalism when explaining regime longevity, especially with the Assad dictatorship (Heydemann and Leenders Reference Heydemann and Leenders2014: 79–82). In their estimation, no regime change occurred in Syria despite its civil war simply because the leadership made optimal strategic choices. Early on, it played different opposition factions against one another in order to prevent the formation of a cross-cutting national movement, as happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Throughout 2013–14, it exploited Western fears of radical Islam and terrorism to ensure international military intervention against the Islamic State group, now its primary opponent, which has further enhanced its domestic security by relieving pressure upon its besieged military. The regime made such decisions by learning from the mistakes of fellow Arab autocrats who had already lost power, emulating models of autocratic durability elsewhere, and above all adapting to changing contexts. Such authoritarian-style diffusion is something that calls for further research, not least because it shifts attention back from structure and institutions to agency and strategies.

These critiques should not detract from the value of Brownlee et al.’s analysis. Though their hypothesizing may stumble in specific cases, and the proposition about personalism demands further testing, the authors have big explanatory ambitions. Their argument’s theoretical depth is rivalled only by its geographic breadth. Neither the riddle of mobilizational causes nor questions about the spread of protest have yet garnered such a sweeping causal framework, one that tries to account for every national outcome.

From Reflection to Research

Collectively, these six works undertake the disciplinary task of explaining the three puzzles that drove the Arab Spring – its economic and social origins, the mobilizational process and diffusion of these uprisings, and finally the varying regime outcomes that resulted from such popular unrest. They represent the first wave of rigorous theorizing, and it comes just a few years after an historical rupture shook the field of Middle East politics. While imperfect, they provide a strong foundation for future research by furnishing a convenient division of intellectual labour across three different questions, and touching upon the many literatures and data streams that can answer those questions.

To put such efforts in perspective, consider another regional earthquake that redefined a comparative subfield – the revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Those events upended the field of communist studies and Sovietology, and many ongoing projects had to be completely retooled. More than anything, it took time for regional scholars to adjust to the new reality by collecting new data, recalibrating old theories and reflecting upon erroneous assumptions about the durability of socialist party-states and the roles played by social forces in legitimating them (Hanson Reference Hanson2003; Janos Reference Janos1991; Stokes Reference Stokes1993). For some questions, such as why post-communist democratization did not succeed everywhere, researchers would not reach consensus until after the 1990s (Bunce Reference Bunce2000; McFaul Reference McFaul2002).

Ironically, scholars of post-communist politics were among the first to lambaste Middle East comparativists for failing to predict the Arab Spring, and for missing vital cues by being too immersed in stale paradigms such as durable authoritarianism and civil society (Howard and Walters Reference Howard and Walters2014). However, this is not a fair criticism. For one, comparativists have never excelled at prediction, but that is because prophesying is not the goal that defines scholarship. The task instead is retrospectively to explain major outcomes, continually finding the best possible fit between theory and data in order to generate new knowledge that can illuminate present conditions. For another, Middle East scholars themselves were the first to concede that they had not foreseen these uprisings, and immediately pledged to revisit their erroneous assumptions about durable authoritarianism (Gause Reference Gause2011; Lust Reference Lust2014; Pace and Cavatorta Reference Pace and Cavatorta2012; Schwedler Reference Schwedler2015). These six works constitute the first theoretical returns, and they present a wealth of provocative ideas.

In moving forward, though, nascent research should abide by several points of caution. First, causal theorizing about mobilizational origins must be bounded. There is a reason, as Asef Bayat (Reference Bayat2013: 463) observes, that ‘every revolution is a surprise’. Not only is prediction a difficult task, but individual-level triggers that definitively account for every instance of rebellion or resistance are impossible to verify. It is telling that the most compelling work about the origins of the Arab Spring concerns long-term structural conditions of economic crisis that raised the possibility of social conflict without guaranteeing it. The sheer contingency of human behaviour demands surrendering aspirations for deterministic causation on the micro-level. At the level of social groups and political regimes, however, more pragmatic balance is needed between structure and agency. The goal should be middle-range theorizing – to create causal frameworks comprehensive enough to account for different causal pathways, integrated enough to tie those pathways and outcomes back into a unified understanding of the region, and still specific enough to account for the actors and processes operating in each national context. Brownlee et al.’s volume epitomizes middle-range analysis in its explanation of divergent regime outcomes, one that balances theoretical depth with geographic breadth.

Second, scholars must more carefully address issues of temporality, something that runs throughout the study of protest escalation and diffusion but is never fully engaged. The insurrections of Tunisia and Egypt were over by mid-February of 2011. They lasted just weeks. By contrast, every uprising that followed unfolded more slowly, lasted longer and failed to dislodge rulers without violence. The downfall of leaders in Libya and Yemen occurred only after protracted fighting; in Morocco and Jordan, peaceful protest movements continued mobilizing for more than a year but achieved little. That the rate of success diminished so rapidly after early 2011 underscores the importance of timing and sequence: as months passed, the possibility of peaceful victory against autocratic rulers in other parts of the Arab world diminished radically. Why? One possibility is that authoritarian leaders learned optimal survival strategies from their peers’ mistakes over time, such as when to repress versus when to tolerate, a diffusion process that mimicked what occurred amongst activists. Or perhaps the dynamic of contention during the Arab Spring was not built for long-term sustainment – demands for dignity could ignite outbursts of protest, but over time the lack of any comprehensive ideology or identity to replace old societal cleavages meant that all but the most hardcore activists would eventually demobilize. Such vistas of research need greater consideration.

Finally, research must better incorporate geopolitics into theorizing, especially regarding the last puzzle of regime outcomes. Middle East specialists know the perils of great power meddling well, from regional history to the Arab Spring. Saudi forces helped quell the Bahraini revolt; NATO intervention sealed Qaddafi’s fate in Libya; and Syria’s civil war worsened by magnitudes due to the involvement of outside actors, from Iran and Hezbollah to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and America. Ongoing work on regime outcomes all note these intercessions but do not ask more penetrating questions that could help create a more systematic framework linking geopolitical causes to domestic effects. For instance, under what conditions will an outside hegemon, like America, intervene to support one revolution (Libya) but be complicit in another’s quashing (Bahrain)? How did international non-state actors, from regional organizations like the Arab League to transnational civil society foundations, reconfigure the domestic balance of power between regimes and opposition? How have regional and external actors, from Saudi Arabia to Russia and China, countered the spatial diffusion of protests with countervailing strategies, such as propagating and diffusing narratives of stability and prosperity that may have discouraged copycat uprisings after 2011–12? Such queries must figure prominently in future scholarship, not least because outside forces continue to mediate the national struggles raging in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Much as in the past, the future trajectories of states within the Middle East and North Africa will be heavily buffeted by external actors and processes.