Generational shocks that upend the perceived stability of entire regions catalyze a curious trend in political science scholarship. They shatter old assumptions and realign intellectual priorities, but they also elicit cottage industries of edited volumes devoted to exploring the postshock era of those regions. The collapse of the Soviet Union induced a decade of anthologies about post-Communist democratization, for instance; the 1997 Asian financial crisis produced countless compilations about shifting state-business relations in East and Southeast Asia. Such digests allow regional specialists to present research in bite-sized chapters, giving more freedom than journal-style articles to play with new ideas and propose new hypotheses. Yet for that reason, they also often sound more like a cacophony of dissonant observations, and struggle to deliver a unifying theoretical punch that explains rather than describes the new regional terrain.
Enter this edited volume by James Gelvin. This book reflects well how scholars of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have grappled with the monumental events of 2011–12 known as the Arab uprisings, or the Arab Spring. The wave of revolutionary contestation unleashed in those years challenged authoritarian regimes and state institutions, transformed civil societies and social movements, and created new geopolitical patterns partly fueled by a corollary upsurge of armed conflicts in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. For the past decade, those uprisings have been the periodizing benchmark for almost all edited political science volumes about the MENA. There are many—by my count, nearly four dozen from major English-language trade presses and academic publishers since 2011–12—and they converge upon an increasingly tired trope. There was the Arab world before the Arab Spring and there is the Arab world after, and the latter is decidedly gloomier: There is less economic justice and more violent conflict, and simultaneously most dictatorships are not only still standing but even more ruthless.
The Contemporary Middle East, however, is among the best of this bunch. It has two manifest strengths. First, it begins with some interesting, identifiable themes. In his introductory chapter, Gelvin sets the tone—most Arab dictatorships still suffer from a “crisis of legitimacy,” and outside of Tunisia remain as repressive as ever against popular protests and contentious politics (p. 8)—and from there posits five other post–Arab Spring shifts to nudge the reader along the analytical pathway set by the book. The MENA has experienced more sectarianized conflict, more malleable state sovereignty, more Saudi–Iranian competition, less American hegemony, and less fixation on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Not all these themes percolate to the subsequent 14 chapters—the Israeli–Palestinian factor, for example, is barely mentioned at all—but they still leave the reader with an important point: Domestic politics in the MENA remains indissolubly linked to regional dynamics and the international system; indeed, we cannot explain internal changes without attending to the external context. Perhaps this explains why, as well, the MENA has been periodized repeatedly such that any given year feels like a “post”-shock aftermath. In the 1990s, scholars wrote about the post–Cold War landscape; in the 2000s, they evaluated the post-9/11 or post–Iraq War epoch; and now, they must engage the post–Arab Spring era. “When it comes to dividing history into periods based on one or another characteristic,” Gelvin muses, “possibilities are limited only by the imaginations of historians” (p. 7).
What, then, makes the post–Arab Spring age theoretically interesting? Here, the book’s second strength shines through. The individual chapters are, simply, well-written and interesting, and deliver plenty of provocative thought. They cluster into four sections. The first contains four chapters about social and economic development, authored by Joel Beinin, Ishac Diwan, Laurie Brand, and Kevan Harris. They echo that prospects for regional prosperity are dour. Outside of a few wealthy oil-rentier states, countries face the dual squeeze of demographic growth and shrinking public goods. The losers, of course, are populations: As Brand notes in her chapter, the high expenditures of many Arab states into education compared to the frightening underperformance of their schools suggests that something, structurally, has become broken in how powerholders see the task of serving publics and creating markets. More broadly, the authors remind readers that deficits of regional development are inextricably tied to bigger variables that both predate the Arab Spring. Among them are the technocratic transformation of state institutions, neoliberalism imposed by multilateral organs like the International Monetary Fund, unprecedented distortions in global capital flows, and evolving social understandings of income and class status.
The second section presents four chapters from Aoumar Boum, Peter Mandaville, Nathan Brown, and Lindsay Gifford. Their contributions eclectically engage notions of identity, religion, and belonging, and for that reason are the most difficult to pin down. For instance, Boum gives a searing take on the musical lexicon of social resistance in North Africa, embodied by the use of hip-hop by some activists “as effective weapons for galvanizing broader support” against autocratic abuses (p. 95). Meanwhile, Brown opens a matter-of-factly window onto whether Islamist movements truly understand the task of not capturing power in all its glory, but of administering government in the quotidian, boring ways that typify modern bureaucracies. Each chapter is written beautifully, conveying resonant expertise; but each also barely touches upon the volume’s organizing themes. So it goes also for the other richly textured chapters, which should be read as individual essays for fuller appreciation.
The third section consists of four chapters that are country-based case studies outlining the domestic and foreign policy changes that have transpired since the Arab Spring. F. Gregory Gause III deals with the royal politics of Saudi Arabia, Henry Barkey unpacks Turkish foreign policy under Erdoğan, Gelvin provides a striking take on the Syrian civil war, and Harith Hasan tackles (with aplomb) the unenviable task of how sectarianization has sabotaged Iraqi state-building. The impressive, field-based knowledge of the authors is on full display here. They weave in the book’s overarching ideas about eroding state sovereignty and embattled authoritarian legitimacy to explain why elites have shuffled, institutions have evolved, policies have adjusted, and violence has sometimes erupted. These are snapshots, but impressive snapshots nonetheless that will give even seasoned researchers of these countries pause.
The fourth and final section comprises three chapters by Fred Lawson, Marc Lynch, and Aslı Ü. Bâli. They address how new wars have recast regional alliances and international relations in the MENA. They hence squarely take up Gelvin’s opening gambit regarding the complex interplay of domestic and external factors. While each deals with a different topic, these authors do not mince words in evoking how much has changed over the past decades due to the outbreak of multiple, overlapping civil wars. Lawson sees a “profound transformation” in the region’s security complex and construction of state interests (p. 237); Lynch declares a “fundamentally new structure of regional politics,” exemplified by the use of proxy actors by regional and international powers within local conflicts (p. 251); and Bâli notes that the uses and abuses of international law—to both punish and condone costly interventions into civil conflicts—has “transfigured the basic rules of the postwar collective security order” (p. 271).
In sum, this is a rare case of an edited volume where the sum is greater than its parts. It should find enthusiastic readership among not only experienced MENA researchers and scholars but also graduate students embarking upon their dissertations and attempting to capture what has truly altered in the post–Arab Spring era. Much has, indeed, and the authors present an abundance of evidence and stimulating ideas to make that case resoundingly.
