Tracking the “Arab Spring”: Why the Modest Harvest?

Brownlee, Jason; Masoud, Tarek; Reynolds, Andrew

doi:10.1353/jod.2013.0061

Cited by 55 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Following the neo‐liberal project, what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” the state in Egypt was complicit in pushing the poor out of their tenure rights in favor of the needs of the corporations (Bayat, :95) For Bayet, the discontents were “triggered by developmental deficits, social problems, political repression, or corruption” (Bayat, :22), to which may be added a democracy deficit. Moving beyond the “proximate variables … such as the diffusion of social‐networking tools and the posture of the army,” Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds (:30) suggest that “there were no structural preconditions for the emergence of uprisings.”…”

Section: Human Development Index In 2010 and 2016 In The Arab Spring mentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of the Arab Spring on democracy and development in the MENA region

Khondker

2019

Sociology Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In evaluating the consequences of the Arab Spring 8 years later, this paper not only focuses on the short‐term consequences of the uprisings that swept through a number of countries in the Middle East and North African region but also analyzes the long‐term prospects for democratization and development in the MENA region. The impact of the Arab Spring, despite its promises and the expectations of the rest of the world, has been dismal. While only Tunisia made a successful transition to a democratic polity with a constitution guaranteeing the basic rights of the people, the rest of the Arab Spring countries remain in the grip of the authoritarian rule, and countries such as Syria, Libya, and Yemen have been degenerated into bloody civil wars with dwindling hope of peace and freedom. On economic front, the growth has been tardy, showing little difference with countries that were unaffected by the Arab Spring. Yet, the paper concludes, echoing historian Eric Hobsbawm's view, that revolutionary outcomes need not be judged as failure too quickly as they are likely to be partial success in the long term. The impact may be observed in the area of social opening, newer class alliances, and the emergence of a less rapacious, reformed, hybrid authoritarianism.

show abstract

Section: Human Development Index In 2010 and 2016 In The Arab Spring mentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of the Arab Spring on democracy and development in the MENA region

Khondker

2019

Sociology Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…15 Again building on Brownlee et al (2013), I distinguish between countries where regime change took place and those were it did not. In three of the nine, the full set of institutional rules was replaced, leading to a fundamentally different type of political system, but, as Table 1 indicates, the outcomes are quite different.…”

Section: Arab Uprisingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trust and Tolerance across the Middle East and North Africa: A Comparative Perspective on the Impact of the Arab Uprisings

Spierings

2017

PaG

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The protests that swept the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are expected to have influenced two key civic attitudes fundamental to well-functioning democracies: trust and tolerance. However, systematic comparative assessments of the general patterns and particularities in this region are rare. This contribution theorizes the uprisings' impact and presents new society-level measurements of trust and tolerance for the MENA, synchronizing over 40 Arab Barometer and World Values Survey surveys on Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen, from before and after the uprisings. The analyses firstly show political-institutional trust falling in the uprisings' aftermath in countries that went through democratic reform or regime change. It appears that politicians misbehaving and reforms not resolving social problems hurt people's trust in politics. Secondly, in democratic transition countries Egypt and Tunisia, a decrease in social trust reflected the pattern of political-institutional trust indicating a spill-over effect. Thirdly, ethnoreligious tolerance dropped region-wide after the uprisings, indicating that the aftermath of religious conflict impacted the entire Arab region. These results support rational-choice institutionalist theories, while at the same time refining them for the MENA context.

show abstract

“…The question has shifted from whether the so-called 'Arab spring' overturns accepted wisdoms about the Middle East to 'why did the 'Arab Spring' yield so modest a harvest?' 1 Posing the question in this way returns the study of comparative politics in the Arab world to the status quo ante the uprisings: a debate alternating between searching for faint signs of 'democratic transition' on the one hand, and the attempt to understand an apparently resilient authoritarianism on the other. 2 The intervention of democratization theorists into this long-running debate stresses political cultural explanations for the failure of democratic transition, such as the Sultanistic character of pre-Uprising regimes, the role of religion in public life 3 or the lack of trust, rooted in authoritarian inheritances that obstructed negotiated transitions.…”

Section: Take Down Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Class forces, transition and the Arab uprisings: a comparison of Tunisia, Egypt and Syria

Allinson

2015

Democratization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article intervenes into an ongoing debate on authoritarian regimes in the Arab world following the uprisings of 2011, in particular addressing the perceived failure of those uprisings to bring about 'transition' to liberal democratic models. Drawing upon the method of comparative historical sociology used in seminal analyses of democratization and dictatorship in Europe, Asia and the Americas, the article seeks to explain the varying trajectories of the Arab Uprising states in terms of several structural factors, namely the balance of class forces, the relative autonomy of the state and the geo-political context. The article provides an empirical comparison of the cases of Egypt, Tunisia and Syria as points on a continuum of outcomes following the Arab uprising. The article mounts a critique of the absence of class analysis in mainstream transition theory and hypothesises instead an important role for workers' movements in bringing about even basic elements of liberal democracy. The empirical comparison is shown to support this hypothesis, demonstrating that in Tunisia, the state where the worker's movement was strongest a constitutional settlement has been reached while Syria, the state with the weakest and least independent workers' movement has descended into counter-revolution and civil war: the case of Egypt lying between these two poles.

show abstract

Tracking the “Arab Spring”: Why the Modest Harvest?

Cited by 55 publications

References 22 publications

The impact of the Arab Spring on democracy and development in the MENA region

The impact of the Arab Spring on democracy and development in the MENA region

Trust and Tolerance across the Middle East and North Africa: A Comparative Perspective on the Impact of the Arab Uprisings

Class forces, transition and the Arab uprisings: a comparison of Tunisia, Egypt and Syria

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About