Roots of the Arab Spring: Contested Authority and Political Change in the Middle East - Hardcover

Rand, Dafna Hochman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081224530X ISBN 13: 9780812245301

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In December 2010, the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable vendor set off a wave of protests that have been termed the "Arab Spring." These protests upended the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen while unsettling numerous other regimes throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Dafna Hochman Rand was a senior policy planner in the U.S. State Department as the uprisings unfolded. In Roots of the Arab Spring, she gives one of the first accounts of the systemic underlying forces that gave birth to the Arab Spring.

Drawing on three years of field research conducted before the protests, Rand shows how experts overlooked signs that political change was stirring in the region and overestimated the regimes' strategic capabilities to manage these changes. She argues that the Arab Spring was fifteen years in the making, gradually inflamed by growing popular demand—and expectation—for free expression, by top-down restrictions on citizens' political rights, and by the failure of the region's autocrats to follow through on liberalizing reforms they had promised more than a decade earlier.

An incisive account of events whose ramifications are still unfolding, Roots of the Arab Spring captures the tectonic shifts in the region that led to the first major political upheaval of the twenty-first century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dafna Hochman Rand is Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security. She formerly served on the staff of the National Security Council and as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff.

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Preface

In the mid-2000s, I traveled to Morocco, Tunisia, and Bahrain to conduct research on the political strategies enabling authoritarian governments to persist in the Middle East and North Africa. Middle East comparative politics specialists considered the endurance of authoritarianism in this region a puzzling anomaly. Most of the developing world had at least experimented with some type of democratization from the 1970s through the 1990s—even if many of these states later regressed back to "hybrid" regime types, neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian. Yet the states of the Middle East and North Africa remained undemocratic, lagging on all of the global rankings that measure political freedom and civil liberties.

After conducting over a hundred interviews in these three countries, sitting in on parliamentary sessions, and participating in civil society and political activities, my search for a generalizable explanation for the democracy deficit in the region seemed beside the point. Though there were constitutional, bureaucratic, and socioeconomic explanations for authoritarian endurance, this endurance did not appear to be the most apparent trend in the region. On the ground, from the Casbah of Rabat, Morocco to the ports of Bahrain, the most remarkable characteristic of the region's politics during the first decade of the twenty-first century was its widespread dynamism, including a pervasive uncertainty about the future of both regional and local politics.

Of course, the authoritarian state appeared just as strong as I had expected. Internal security services, including, in some places, despised secret police, exercised powerful oversight roles, often interfering in daily life. Political opposition activists traded stories—some real, some imagined—of arbitrary detentions and deplorable prison conditions. The rulers commanded a pervasive physical presence, with pictures of leaders adorning everything from public buses to hotel lobbies, reminding the citizens of the established political order. Yet in Morocco I also found journalists and women's rights activists trying to push the monarchy's limits. These groups and individuals were seizing upon the relatively permissive atmosphere under a new king to publish daring and critical newspaper articles, to mobilize protests in front of parliament, and to advocate for minority and human rights. In Bahrain, I saw a political opposition deeply divided, and a public growing increasingly disillusioned with a new king whom most had expected would be a reformer. In Tunisia, the public was increasingly fed up with the methodical efforts by the president and his cronies to transform a once moderate, pluralistic state into one of the most closed political systems in the world.

Thus, my field research suggested that the autocrats in the region were not at all uniformly "robust," as described at the time by Middle East and North Africa experts. While it was true that many of these leaders had ruled for decades, and had successfully overcome intense public opposition and intermittent crises, by the twenty-first century, most were nervously trying to manage the varied political changes occurring around them. Some were doing so more successfully than others. Often, economic, social, or political reforms could appeal to popular and elite allies, minimally allay opposition or civil society demands, and solidify the autocrat's rule by building credibility or by coopting opposition groups. In the short term, these strategic efforts seemed to be working: The autocrats appeared in some cases to be cleverly staying one step ahead of the changing political pressures surrounding them—whether by revising press codes to rein in the expanding media space or by revising constitutions to carefully limit the electoral participation of political challengers. But their ability to stay a step ahead of the game was precarious at best. It seemed apparent that top-down efforts to manage the changing dynamics could easily go awry, and could generate unknown and unintended consequences.

My field research found a degree of flux at odds with both the widespread conclusions reached by academics studying the Middle East and North Africa at the time, as well as the consensus among policy makers working on the region. Both groups considered the regimes and rulers of the Middle East and North Africa robust, persistent, and strong. At the time, scholars and policy makers were focused not on the dynamism in the region, but rather on analyzing the explanations for what appeared to be a nearly monolithic freedom deficit. Given this overarching lens, few academics or policy makers were searching for political cracks—sources of instability. So focused on the vast power imbalance between the state and societies, neither community dedicated sufficient analysis to the potential sources of political change.

Many scholars subscribed to what was loosely dubbed "the authoritarian resilience research agenda"—offering a set of hypotheses to explain how the region's autocrats used economic, institutional, and electoral means to wield power, typically by outwitting and outmaneuvering other actors, including the international community and political opposition. As the author of one seminal article argued, these autocrats' "robust and politically tenacious coercive apparatus" could overcome "any opposition with strength, coherence, and effectiveness." While regionalists had previously explained Middle East and North African authoritarianism by studying external rents and foreign patronage, the natural resource curse, or the Islamic world's religious and cultural traditions, over the past ten years they were focused increasingly on the micro foundations of authoritarian rule. They honed in on the institutional logics governing constitutions, party systems, and electoral rules. This literature also explored how selective economic growth, cronyism, and economic crises sustained authoritarian systems. As regional scholars explored the ways in which institutions enabled authoritarian rule, they found that many leaders were choosing proactive strategies to deliberately divide and co-opt opposition factions, particularly Islamist parties and movements from secular opponents.

By emphasizing how and why the region's regimes were so extraordinarily successful at staying in power, however, this research agenda often painted, with broad brush stokes, a picture of a stagnant region. The Middle East regionalist scholars pursued a very useful set of research questions by focusing on the nuts and bolts of authoritarianism, but they sometimes marginalized, whether intentionally or not, the political orientations, attitudes, and changing views of the region's citizens. Hypothesizing why authoritarianism survived not only reflected a bias toward studying elites, but also diminished the attention paid to social movements in the region, whether youth, workers, or the new communities that were developing online. The prevailing scholarly approach, in short, inadequately addressed the potential of individuals to mobilize.

In Washington during this time period, U.S. policy makers began advocating for a "Freedom Agenda" in the Middle East and North Africa. They turned their attention—at least temporarily—to the promotion of democracy and human rights in a region where both were flagging, in addition to new trade and investment programs. New U.S. government funds focused on the capacity of independent civil society organizations and media, as well as small business and entrepreneurship promotion programs, most notably under the new Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and the multilateral Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) program. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered unprecedented public support for democracy and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 081224530X
• ISBN 13: 9780812245301
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 184
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland