The stunning wave of uprisings that swept across the Arab world in early 2011 inspired great hopes that a region long seen as the bulwark of resilient authoritarianism would finally achieve political liberalization, if not democratization. Almost as quickly as this optimism arose, however, it started to be dashed. Five years on, a picture of desolation emerges as Libya, Syria, and Yemen have sunk into civil war; Egypt has fallen under a dictatorship disturbingly similar to that evicted in 2011; constitutional reforms in Morocco and especially Jordan have remained insignificant; and Tunisia’s fledgling democracy, the one exception of real progress, is threatened by fundamentalist terrorism and comeback efforts by “old regime” insiders.

This remarkable sequence of a flowering spring followed by a freezing winter poses a difficult, double puzzle for scholars. What can account for the amazing upsurge of popular contention, as well as its rapid failure in most cases? Why did so many people across a whole region suddenly run the risk of challenging their repressive rulers? And why did these courageous efforts bear so little fruit?

Among the growing number of books published on the Arab Spring, Marc Lynch’s collection provides a particularly comprehensive and thorough analysis. Twenty experts place the uprisings in a broader theoretical perspective; explore their “regional and cross-national dimensions”; examine crucial actors, such as bankers, labor movements, the military, Islamist movements, parties and elections; and investigate public opinion. While the “dynamic framework” proposed in the introduction (pp. 18–23) is loose and generic, a fairly coherent picture emerges from this valuable volume, which insightfully elucidates the double puzzle.

As David Patel, Valerie Bunce, and Sharon Wolchik argue in an instructive comparison with the fall of communism and the later “color revolutions,” the Arab tsunami of contention clearly resulted from diffusion processes, facilitated by the unified communications environment created by Al Jazeera and social media (Lynch’s point in Chapter 5). The primary mechanism was demonstration effects, especially the inference derived from the overthrow of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali that revolts against oppressive dictators seemed to have good chances of success, as Nathan Brown highlights. Challengers overgeneralized, embracing the rash belief that what succeeded in Tunis and Cairo was feasible across the whole region, despite stark cross-national differences.

Yet while oppositionists and protesters learned from the Tunisian and Egyptian precedent, so did the elites of incumbent regimes, as Steven Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders stress in a particularly perceptive analysis. Therefore, diffusion was soon contained and overwhelmed by counterdiffusion. Moreover, while rebellions spread with little active promotion from the outside, the fearful Gulf monarchies led by Saudi Arabia strongly pushed for counterrevolution, with special impact on Bahrain and Egypt, as Curtis Ryan explains.

These counterrevolutionary efforts, which confronted enthusiastic protesters in a notably calculating, systematic way, were facilitated by the weak organization of the main challengers. While the largely spontaneous eruption of crowd protests had given contention its powerful initial impetus, it proved difficult to maintain. Amorphous revolts therefore proved no match for determined rulers, who learned how to employ repression in calibrated dosage.

The stronger organizations that existed in a few countries, such as Egypt, acted with greater caution than the enthusiastic masses, and mostly played a limited role in the uprisings and their aftermath, as Vickie Langohr demonstrates in a particularly well-grounded analysis for trade unions. Quinn Mecham shows in an equally thorough study that Islamist movements initially stayed on the sidelines as well. Where free elections were held, however, the parties based on these deeply rooted organizational networks usually garnered significantly higher vote shares than the fragmented, ill-organized groupings representing the uprisings’ main protagonists.

The distrust between Islamist and secular forces created big obstacles to democratic consolidation, however, proving insurmountable in Egypt and continuing to plague Tunisia. Even more damaging were the profound ethno-cultural cleavages in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, which exploded into civil war and destroyed the state as such. As Daniel Brumberg emphasizes in an especially insightful and convincing analysis, democratic compromise is infeasible where politics revolves around such deep-seated, intense identity conflicts.

Above and beyond these important insights on the Arab Spring and winter, a fundamental theoretical lesson emerges from this well-rounded collection: The institutionalism that many political scientists currently embrace, especially its rationalist version, makes only limited contributions to an understanding of the Arab uprisings and their diverse, disappointing outcomes. The virtual invulnerability of monarchies seems to have resulted more from traditional legitimacy than formal institutional structure. Among republics, prior regime type had little bearing on the processes and outcomes of the protests; neither Robert Springborg’s use of the concept of Sultanism nor his and Clement Henry’s finer-grained regime classification (p. 129) can account for the similarities and differences among country trajectories.

Instead, socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural factors seem to play a much more important role. Tunisia, for instance, has benefited from its comparatively high modernization level, which has undergirded a strong trade union movement. Even more clearly, ethnic, religious, cultural, and regional cleavages have posed enormous obstacles to any efforts to construct liberal, democratic regimes in Libya and Yemen, not to mention Syria. While these cleavages were deliberately stoked by colonial powers and old regimes (as Brumberg emphasizes), they had prior roots and have long assumed a weight of their own. In fact, these underlying factors shape the nature of crucial institutions, such as the military, which has much greater institutional solidity in fairly homogeneous nations like Egypt and Tunisia, compared to deeply divided states like Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

In sum, Lynch has assembled an impressively comprehensive volume that sheds valuable light on this unexpected upsurge of contention and its disappointing outcomes. As is common, authors pay much more attention to Egypt and Tunisia than the true “basket cases” of Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Most chapters are informative and full of interesting, relevant insights (although the jargon-filled discussion of space as an “actor” in Chapter 9 is unclear). The two survey-based chapters, however, which examine political attitudes among Arab publics and young people, respectively, have only a tenuous link to the book’s main topic. Much of the data were collected years before the Arab Spring (pp. 283, 287, 292); the impact of attitudes on political behavior and outcomes is questionable, as the authors acknowledge (pp. 253, 262, 276); the findings do not add up to a coherent picture (pp. 279–80; 278 vs. 283); and the presentation suffers from missing labels (pp. 28183, 285).

Moreover, the volume would have benefited from a more focused discussion of the analytical highlights in the introduction and conclusion. The initial framework (pp. 16–23) includes virtually every factor and level of analysis, and the conclusion is surprisingly brief for a long volume (pp. 313–16). While the chapters offer many important pieces of the puzzle, the reader is left with the difficult task of putting them together into an overall picture.

Notwithstanding these limitations, The Arab Uprisings Explained constitutes an important addition to the literature on a fascinating and hugely relevant wave of regime contention. Many of the chapters deserve an ample readership.