In January 2011, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians descended on Tahrir Square in Cairo demanding democracy under the slogan “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.” For some, these protests represented a new, emboldened democratic spirit. Instead, I argue that the claims to democracy and the contentious practices of the Revolution drew on a longer tradition of “bread uprisings” that have been used to articulate demands of citizenship and basic dignity for decades. In this chapter, I trace this history of bread protests in Egypt. I show how the legacy of populist president Gamal Abdul Nasser was appropriated by the Egyptian people. It was later repurposed to articulate rights-based claims to food subsidies, and to justify popular revolt. This same popular tradition of protest was invoked during moments of electoral liberalization in the 2000s, during the 2011 Arab Spring, and even after the introduction of constitutional rights to food in 2014. To the extent that newer practices of participation have been introduced, they have often been combined with the established repertoire of the bread uprising.

This chapter shows how power-sharing contributed to Tunisia’s democratic breakdown in 2021. The populism and polarization produced by the 2015–19 grand coalition paralyzed the country between 2019 and 2021. The new populist president, Kais Saied, clashed with the parties in parliament, while the extremist factions in the assembly clashed among themselves, inhibiting governance. When disaffection with the political class reached a fever pitch during COVID-19, Saied decided to strike, shuttering the parliament and cracking down on the political parties. In a nationally representative survey conducted in 2022, I find that a desire to dissolve all political parties (populism) and to dissolve Ennahda in particular (polarization) were by far the two strongest predictors of support for Saied’s takeover, more so than frustrations with the economy or fears over the COVID-19 pandemic. Experimentally, priming respondents that Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi was now on trial increased support for Saied’s moves by almost 15 percentage points. Rather than saving the transition, the continued pursuit of power-sharing produced precisely the populism and polarization that helped overturn it.

This chapter describes the 2010–11 revolution that kick-started Tunisia’s democratic transition and the initial transitional year that followed. It illustrates the two major axes of polarization that would define Tunisian democracy: one between the old regime and the revolutionaries, and the other between the secularists and the Islamists. It then describes the initial attempts to bridge these divides through compromise and consensus. Interim Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi initiated major compromises on the revolution’s demands of anti-corruption, security sector reform, and political lustration, finding consensus between the old regime and the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the winning Islamist and secular parties in the 2011 elections likewise chose consensus, agreeing to govern in a grand coalition. These choices to share power and find common ground facilitated Tunisia’s early transitional years, allowing the political elite to rein in polarization and uncertainty and avoid spoilers that may otherwise have thwarted the transition to Tunisia’s first-ever democratically elected government in December 2011.

This chapter illustrates the dark sides of continuing to pursue power-sharing after establishing the rules of the game. It outlines why the major political parties in Tunisia decided to keep governing together through another grand coalition government between 2015 and 2019, and how these efforts both worsened polarization and sparked the rise of populism. It first shows that the decision of Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda to enter into a grand coalition ceded space for the emergence of hardline parties on either end of the spectrum, worsening polarization. Second, the extended power-sharing inadvertently sparked populism as well, by tainting all of the mainstream parties as part of the establishment and fueling the rise of populist outsider Kais Saied. Drawing on interviews and original election surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, I show that the grand coalition led the party system to collapse, with frustrated voters shifting to populist and extremist forces instead. Had the political parties not entered into a grand coalition, they may have kept Tunisians invested in the two major, moderate parties and staved off the rise of these populists and extremists.

This chapter describes how the 2011–14 grand coalition government in Tunisia navigated growing polarization in 2012 and especially 2013. That year, two major political assassinations and dueling protests led to fears of a coup or a descent into civil war. But the political elite’s norms of power-sharing, compromise, and consensus helped to bring them back from the brink and strike a grand bargain that put the transition back on track. Through an inclusive national dialogue mediated by civil society, Tunisia’s Islamist and secularist forces found common ground over a new, progressive constitution that was approved by near unanimity. Meanwhile, the revolutionary and old regime forces likewise compromised to include the old regime in elections but allow a transitional justice mechanism to hold the worst abusers accountable. Power-sharing thus enabled Tunisia’s transition in 2014 to establish a new constitution and electoral law – the rules of the game that would govern its new democracy.

I begin Chapter 9 by situating the lessons from the Irish case study within a broader theoretical context. Although there are particularities to all case studies, theoretical frameworks can be developed from in-depth investigations in specific contexts. In this chapter, I explore the relevance of the moral psychology of fairness and feelings of relative deprivation across several other case studies: in the United States, Sudan, Chile, France, and during the Arab Spring in North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Economic inequalities across multiple global regions are a key explanation for civic unrest, feelings of unfairness, and attempts at radical social change. The rise of populism and authoritarian leaders is the subject of the following chapter.

This chapter delves into the geopolitical landscape of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, often considered an ‘island of stability’ amid the turbulence in the broader Middle East. While this notion holds true in comparison to neighbouring countries like Iran, Iraq and Yemen, the chapter highlights that the Gulf region is not immune to internal and external conflicts. It discusses the impact of significant events such as the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the political dynamics of the Gulf states. The analysis spans four parts, each focusing on a key conflict: the Iran–Iraq War, the liberation of Kuwait, the 2003 Iraq War, and the war in Yemen since 2015. These conflicts have not only shaped the formation of the GCC in 1981 but have also significantly influenced the broader regional system. Emphasising the period since 1979, the chapter explores how over four decades of wars, revolutions and inter-state tensions have affected the security and stability of the Gulf states. Despite a generation passing since the last inter-state war, the ongoing fragmentation of Yemen into civil wars involving regional actors signals a transformation in the nature of conflicts. The chapter also highlights the challenges to regional stability, including the difficulty in reaching a comprehensive agreement addressing Iran’s ballistic missiles programme and its support for non-state actors. As the possibility of increased US disengagement from the Gulf looms, questions about the future security architecture in the region and the role of external participants gain prominence. The chapter raises concerns about potential security vacuums and the responses of regional actors in such a scenario.

This chapter advances three arguments about the politics of company creation regulation in Saudi Arabia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. First, the liberalization of these regulations was rent-conditional. The formation and implementation of these policies occurred during periods of rising or high oil rents, but were absent during the downward trend in oil prices between June 2014 and January 2016. Second, relative to earlier periods, the ability of business and religious elites to veto economic reforms was diminished. Third, in light of this shift, the threat of popular unrest to regime stability had a non-trivial, causal effect upon the pursuit and pausing of company creation liberalization. Non-elite pressure on the Al Saud’s rule reached an unparalleled fever pitch during the Arab Spring. Record-breaking transfer payments to appease discontent were feasible in 2011, allowing regulatory liberalization to continue. However, when the fiscal realities of the 2014 oil price slump became apparent, liberalization and public munificence were sacrificed to inhibit the development of economic power outside the regime’s coalition and to maintain comparatively high military spending. Only once oil rents recovered would the reform agenda be revived.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

This chapter analyzes the popular dimensions of Egypt’s 2013 counterrevolution, using an original dataset of protests during the post-revolutionary transition. It shows that Egypt’s revolutionaries were unable to consolidate the social support of the revolution, and that this failure allowed counterrevolutionaries to channel broad disaffections with revolutionary rule into a popular movement for restoration. The dataset covers the final eighteen months of the transition and includes approximately 7,500 contentious events sourced from the major Arabic-language newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. These data reveal, first, the extent to which social mobilization persisted after the end of the eighteen-day uprising. The transition period was awash with discontent and unrest, much of it over nonpolitical issues like the deterioration of the economy, infrastructure problems, and unmet labor demands. Second, statistical analyses show that this discontent came to be directed against Mohamed Morsi’s government. The earliest and most persistent anti-Morsi protests emerged in places where the population had long been highly mobilized over socio-economic grievances. Later, they also began to emerge in places with large numbers of old regime supporters. Ultimately, these two groups – discontented Egyptians and committed counterrevolutionaries – came together to provide the social base for the movement that swept the military back to power.

This chapter analyzes Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 coup, one of the most prominent counterrevolutions of the 21st century. Drawing on approximately 100 original interviews with Egyptian politicians and activists, it argues that Egypt’s counterrevolution only became possible when revolutionaries squandered their initial capacity to hold the old regime’s military in check and presented them with an opportunity to rebuild their popular support. Specifically, the chapter makes the following claims: (1) revolutionary forces began the transition with considerable leverage over the former regime, grounded in their ability to threaten a return to mass mobilization and their backing from the United States; (2) after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, his administration’s poor management of the post-revolutionary governance trilemma, particularly its decision to prioritize the concerns of old regime elements over those of his secularist allies, caused the revolutionary coalition to fracture and Washington to begin questioning its support; and (3) these developments created opportunities for the military to bolster its domestic and foreign support and sapped revolutionaries’ capacity to resist a counterrevolutionary coup. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that, though the task facing Egypt’s revolutionary leaders was not easy, a counterrevolutionary end to the transition was far from a foregone conclusion.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

This chapter argues that an adequate assessment of revolutions (and the role of law in revolutions) is often stymied by historical exclusions and theoretical myopia. Historical exclusions centralise certain experiences and present sanitized and one-sided narratives of the revolutionary experiences they centralise, especially with respect to violence, slavery, and colonialism. On the basis of such ideological uses of history, theoretical accounts paper over these social and political realities in order to legitimate particular revolutionary constitutions and to elevate them to the status of a paradigm or ideal type. This paradigm serves as the yardstick by which other experiences are assessed. The main feature of this paradigm is that it postulates a distinction between political and social revolutions. It presents the American Revolution of 1776 as an exemplar for the political revolution that concerns itself with the establishment of government under law. In contrast, the French Revolution of 1789 is presented as an exemplar for the social revolution that also seeks to tackle social injustice. The deficiency of this paradigm construction is not merely methodological, but also substantive and normative. It reduces the plurality of the revolutionary phenomena, it ignores the revolution’s dialectical nature, and it presents a certain type of revolutionary constitutions as ones that legitimate the polity.

This chapter presents several examples of peaceful social movements having a significant, durable impact, and going through an initial irregular phase, when an inflection point (i.e., singularity) is reached. New social movement (NSM) theory is presented, as participating in pursuing a “big idea” that emphasizes social issues, accomplished through social relations, symbols, and identities based in the culture. Several examples are analyzed. The civil rights movement is dicussed, the inception (initial singularity) of which is attributed to Rosa Parks, who refused to comply with a bus-driver’s order to leave her seat in the “colored” section for a white passenger once the “white” section was full, and the bottom-up initiative of boycotting buses as a reaction to Rosa Parks’ incarceration, plus the carpooling civic initiative. In the Basque Country the terrorism of ETA suddenly and unexpectedly (singularity) stopped, as a result of societal peace-seeking orientation and specific (cooperation-based) economic development. The Polish Underground Peaceful Solidarity Movement succeeded through an aggregation of multiple societal bottom-up freedom initiatives. The initial Tunisian Arab Spring movement, called the Jasmine Revolution, was an unexpected and unpredicted people’s reaction to the corrupt government, successfully initiating substantial changes. Similarly, the Arab Spring movement in other countries (e.g. Egypt) unexpectedly brought cross-religious people’s cooperation and mutual support. Ukrainian Euromaidan was perceived as a “critical case of mass protests,” leading to a governmental change from pro-Soviet to pro-Western orientation. It united people from various locations and social strata, preparing the nation to resist any further pressures.