Revolution and authoritarianism in North Africa

The Arab Spring has raised many great questions about the study of North Africa. One of the most pressing is over the general failure of specialists to anticipate the uneven effects of the unrest: why this particular round of protests, in a region long used to mass demonstrations and dramatic displays of dissent against government incompetence and corruption, should lead to the demise of three of its seemingly most entrenched rulers and sufficiently unnerve the others to make extraordinary concessions. For F. Gregory Gause (Saudi Arabia in the new Middle East, Washington DC: Council on Foreign Relations, 2011), Michelle Pace and Francis Cavatorta (‘The Arab uprisings from a theoretical perspective’, Mediterranean Politics 17: 2, July 2012), and others, a key cause of this oversight was the dominance of the paradigm of authoritarian resilience in Middle East studies. ‘Explaining the stability of Arab authoritarians was an important analytic task, but it led some of us to underestimate the forces for change that were bubbling below, and at times above, the surface of Arab politics’ (Saudi Arabia in the new Middle East, p. 90)

Authoritarianism · Demise · Democracy · Democratization · Development economics · Dissent · Economics · Middle East · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Regime change · Sociology · Unrest · African Studies and Geopolitics · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Political and Social Issues

• The Workers’ Movement and the Arab Uprisings

  Open Access•Roel Meijer•International Review of Social…•2016

  Add to list