Holding that the 2011 anti-authoritarian Arab uprisings were “fundamentally linked” to previous dynamics of authoritarianism, Beyond the Arab Spring explains this political change through, first, identifying the conditions that figured in the establishment of persistent authoritarianism in the region and, second, pinpointing the causes of their collapse so abruptly in some instances. The book argues that political change in the Arab world was a result of a complex multiplicity of factors and interactions between them. The volume rejects uni-causal explanations and instead opts for a multi-causal and multi-level analysis stressing the catalytic effects that variables have on each other.
The first section of the book provides a concise overview of fourteen countries in North Africa, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula that experienced unrest during the so-called “Arab Spring” focusing on social, elite and institutional structures. The authors stress the variations within the region emphasizing the plurality of authoritarian forms. Subsequently, the book addresses key additional thematic issues, including the political role of culture, political Islam, electoral politics, monarchies, oil and rentier economies, economic liberalization, Arab media and external influences. While each theme is discussed individually in a distinct chapter, where the relevant scholarly debates also receive attention, the overarching discussion analyses how these issues affected authoritarianism and regime change in the region.
While stressing the paramount role of security institutions in prolonging authoritarianism through means of coercion, the authors add that state institutions, nonetheless, constitute only one part of the complex texture of authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes employed additional institutional and cultural strategies to perpetuate themselves. The Arab state monopolized the media to create a compliant and depoliticized Arab citizen; exploited regional and domestic threats to tighten its grip; used oil, rent and economic liberalization profits to build strategic alliances; and manipulated electoral processes to feign legitimacy. The volume further argues that external factors, such as democracy promotion, could have also contributed to authoritarian persistence by polishing the “rough edges of authoritarianism” (273).
And yet, analogizing many of these strategies to a double–edged sword, Brynen and his collaborators point to their ultimate failure in guarding some regimes and instead unleashing a wave of anti-regime protests. The iron fist of the state security apparatus, neo-patrimonialism, managed elections, and uneven economic development, all contributed to the outbreak of long-standing resentment. The social media revolution had an instrumental role in translating these resentments into collective action in the form of sustained organized protests. Once the protests began in Tunisia and spread to other Arab states, by virtue of cultural permeability, military institutions directly impacted the trajectory of events because they constitute important socio-economic players in most Arab states. Ultimately, according to the authors, the military's degree of institutionalization and sectarian affiliation with the regime shaped its response to the 2011 uprisings and political transition. While institutionalized militaries assumed the intermediary role (Tunisia and Egypt), less institutionalized militaries fragmented (Libya and Yemen), and militaries that share the regime's sectarian identity backed the regime (Syria, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).
An important virtue of this volume is that it presents a highly comprehensive text to students of Arab politics. Nonetheless, there are a few shortcomings. First, while the authors consider authoritarian persistence and the 2011 collapse to be fundamentally linked through multiple interacting explanatory variables, they do not consider the potentially varied impact of these variables. For example, it is highly likely that factors such as political Islamism or external influences contributed to the persistence of authoritarianism in a more significant manner than to the uprisings. While transnational Islam, civil war and regional instability, were active variables in authoritarian persistence, they were inert during the uprisings having little if any impact on instigating and retaining the popular protests.
Second, while the book provides sufficient attention to each of the themes and variables separately, it fails to provide an adequate account of the dynamics of their interaction, despite emphasis on the intertwined and multivariate nature of political settings in the region. Although the book's third section is dedicated to the synergistic nature of the variables, notably absent from the section is a discussion of the interactive influence of political Islam and monarchical rule (discussed individually earlier in the book), thus failing to demonstrate how they figure in the aggregate equation of political rigidity and change. Finally, the volume neglects the temporal dimension of events. Why authoritarianism suddenly collapses at a certain juncture and not earlier is important for elucidating the conditions of authoritarian persistence and collapse.
These criticisms aside, Beyond the Arab Spring is a rich guide to contemporary Arab politics for both students and policy makers. Attempting to explain political phenomena veritically in a complex and heterogeneous region is an enormous and challenging undertaking. The efforts presented here are to be applauded.
