Revolution, Nonviolence, and the Arab Uprisings*

Abstract

This article combines insights from the literature on revolutions with that on nonviolent protest in order to assess the causes and outcomes of the Arab Uprisings. The article makes three main arguments: first, international dynamics were the precipitant cause of the Arab Uprisings; second, because the region's 'neo-patrimonial' regimes were particularly vulnerable to shifts in state-military relations, the hold of elites over state coercive apparatuses played a decisive role in determining the outcomes of the revolutions; and third, the organizational character of the protest movements, including their use of information and communication technologies, helped to raise levels of participation, but limited their capacity to engender major transformations. Of particular interest to scholarship on non-violent movements, the article demonstrates the ways in which, as the revolutionary wave spread around North Africa and the Middle East, protestors in states outside the original onset of the crisis overstated the possibilities of revolutionary success. At the same time, regimes learned quickly how to demobilize their opponents. The lesson is clear: the timing of when movements emerged was just as important as their organizational coherence and levels of participation. There are two main ways of approaching the study of revolution in the contemporary world -and they are both wrong. On the one hand, revolutions appear to be everywhere: on the streets of Cairo and Damascus; in the slogans of anti-austerity protestors; and in the potential of new technologies to reshape people's lives. But can revolution really be popular protest, campaign against inequality, and technological breakthrough at the same time? This issue is further complicated by a second equally common, but apparently contradictory, meme -that revolutions are irrelevant to a world in which the big issues of governance and economic development have been settled. As Arno Mayer (2001: 3) puts it, in the contemporary world, revolutions appear to offer 'little promise and pose little threat'. With the passing of state socialism in the Soviet Union, it is supposed, revolutions appear more as relics of a bygone age than as important points of reference. Both of these positions are untenable. While the former makes revolution so all-encompassing that it becomes an empty term without substantive content, the latter is overly complacent, failing to see the enduring appeal of attempts to overturn existing conditions and generate alternative social orders. The Arab Uprisings of 2011 are the latest reminder of the consistent appeal of revolutionary struggles. Contact detailsTo point to the enduring appeal of revolutionary struggles does not mean homogenizing the experience of revolutions. Revolutions are not static objects of analysis, but processes that change in modality across time and place (Motyl 1999: 23; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001: 13; Tilly 2006: 9). Revolutions have been conducted by nationalists in Algeria, communists in Afghanistan, Russia, and...

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