Since 2011, the antiregime insurrections across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring have elicited a large scholarship. Like the scholarship attending other rare moments of regional transformation, such as the collapse of communism in 1989–91, this new cottage industry has varying quality. More than a hundred English-language academic books have already been published on the Arab Spring, but most have been little more than well-detailed narratives. Needed now are more rigorous investigations about not just how but why the Arab Spring happened—the origins of social rebellion, the dynamics of economic crisis, and the durability of authoritarian regimes.
Roger Owen's book helps fill this gap, providing fresh ideas with promise but ultimately stumbling in its causal logic. Owen aims to explain why autocratic republics proved far more susceptible to downfall than their monarchical peers during the Arab Spring. Although eight kingdoms are located in the region, cases of regime breakdown engulfed presidential dictatorships run by civilian strongmen who appointed themselves for life while surrounded by large coercive apparatuses. These cases include unarmed uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, violent insurgencies in Libya and then Syria, and internal factionalism in Yemen. While contingent variables like financial crises and systemic forces like international pressures made breakdown more likely, the real explanation for regime collapse, according to the author, stems from a single institutional factor—the struggle to ensure smooth succession within the president's family or clique, which divorced the leadership from institutional bases of potential support.
A doyen of modern Middle East history, Owen brings historical depth and comparative perspective to his institutionalist thesis. Early chapters are descriptive, laying out general organizational patterns within the autocratic republics, which include Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq, in addition to the aforementioned five countries. All Middle East state builders faced the same exigencies at the onset of the postcolonial dawn. Geographic boundaries were new and porous, agrarian economies demanded organization and modernization, and political opposition from all quarters was rife and rowdy. Yet monarchs in kingdoms like Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia had an inherent advantage: Royal incumbents naturally enjoy lifetime tenure, and long-institutionalized succession lines neutralized infighting, enabling these monarchs to seek out new social allies immediately. Republican elites faced far more precarious circumstances.
Throughout the middle chapters, Owen elucidates the consequences of this institutional burden through brief case studies. However the Republican elites consolidated power—building new mass parties, privileging organs of repression, manipulating ethnic and tribal divisions—leaders were haunted by the question of succession. In appointing themselves for life, presidents sought to pass on power to their sons or close allies. They thus personalized power within an extremely slim ruling clique, which injected eviscerating practices of clientelism and patrimonialism within institutions that would have otherwise linked the regime to mass support, such as ruling parties, the military establishment, and even tribal networks. This situation also sharply divided political society between those who supported such succession and those who wished for more plurality. At the same time, presidents were forced to maintain the vestiges of republicanism by holding periodic elections and plebiscites. Though ostensibly rigged, such efforts meant that the very legitimacy of the regime could be theoretically questioned by citizens. Absolutist kings, by contrast, have no institutional need for such referenda.
The last chapters begin to infer the causal logic. Here, Owen transitions from description to explanation, though in a notably tentative tone. When unexpected events like the Tunisian fruit vendor who self-immolated triggered a contentious wave of protests that diffused across the region, the autocratic republics were inherently more susceptible because they had limited their support networks to very narrow social bases, such as hard-line party cadres, loyalist military officers, and ethnic or tribal clients. Thus, the story ends with the dramatic revolutions and civil wars of the Arab Spring, which bypassed most kingships but devoured most presidencies.
This work significantly engages a long-understudied topic in the literature on political regimes. Only a handful of Middle East comparativists have explored the politics of succession in nonmonarchical dictatorships, and only one—Jason Brownlee—broadened the scope of comparison to include non-Arab cases. Yet recent scholarship on durable authoritarianism indicates that the supply of autocratic rulers who seek lifetime tenure has only diminished marginally over the past two decades, and so this subject deserves further study. Further, Owen's book is a promising portent of more analytic scholarship about the Arab Spring that does not merely recite timelines but rather isolates the dynamic processes driving each regime outcome. It took some years before Sovietologists and Central and Eastern Europeanists retooled themselves as postcommunist experts; Owen's work exposes a similarly gradual shift within the Middle East studies community.
As such, Owen's analysis shines more in presentation than persuasion, as it is devoted more to providing a blunt-edged explanation than a precise causal explanation. For instance, it is unclear whether the author's argument explains why large-scale insurrections were more likely to occur in these dictatorships or, rather, why these dictatorships seemed so inept in handling public unrest. The former claim is doubtful because the monarchies of the Arab world also lack support among their citizenry; indeed, one saw revolutionary mobilization (Bahrain) and two more experienced two-year periods of unprecedented, sustained, urban protest (Morocco, Jordan). The latter notion has more purchase, but then the argument evokes extreme path dependency that is not logically justified by the author: Endemic insecurity at the onset of state building engendered weakly institutionalized regimes that were destined to disintegrate. Owen rejects cultural explanations for the convergence of Arab state builders upon a common institutional pattern, but provides no other reasoning for it besides the historical truth that it happened.
Neither does Owen consider rival hypotheses. One begs attention. Oil, or more broadly hydrocarbon wealth, may explain the weakness of autocratic republics. The literature on rentier states, though aging, still furnishes the useful reminder that the resources possessed by dictators prefigure the survival strategies at their disposal. The richest oil states were kingdoms like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and they defused the first signs of protest with the promise of greater economic redistribution and more generous social welfarism. But so, too, did republican Algeria utilize its hydrocarbon wellspring to head off early demonstrations. Poorer kingdoms with more modest budgetary reserves were precisely those that could not purchase peace, namely, Bahrain, Jordan, and Morocco. Above all, most of the autocratic republics that fell during the Arab Spring all lacked profuse oil and gas rents; Libya had some but grossly misallocated it. The point here is not to swap institutionalism for rentierism as an explanatory logic, but rather highlight the need to systematically weight other potential hypotheses.
Yet in all fairness, these critiques underscore more the contemporary nature of the Arab Spring than this work's lack of diligence. The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life is much like other early forays into ongoing historical moments, useful for insight but lacking in rigor. This is to be expected, and future work on authoritarianism and Middle East politics would do well to build upon the narratives and arguments presented here.
