Non-Democratic Legitimacy During the Arab Spring

This article places the “monarchy-republic gap” into a larger theoretical context of shifting paradigms of research to explain why monarchies in the Gulf faced fewer protests than other regimes in the Middle East in 2011. In so doing this article synthesizes the New Institutionalism focus on stability with the emphasis of social movement theory on changing patterns of political contention in order to reconceptualize the notion of regime in a way that draws from larger social science debates rather than a narrow usage common in Middle Eastern Studies. It argues that three mechanisms of monarchism — the distribution of decision-making power, the distribution of economic resources and the distribution of cultural norms — can better explain the variations in protests between the Gulf monarchies and other regimes as well as within the Gulf monarchies.

2012

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 2014

During the Arab Spring, revolutionary insurrections targeted republican dictatorships while largely bypassing the eight ruling monarchies. Popular domestic explanations for such royal exceptionalism, such as cultural legitimacy and economic wealth, not only lack analytic validity but also ignore the most pertinent reason for monarchical persistence-more effective strategies of opposition management. Presidential regimes reacted against protests with mass coercion, which radicalized opposition and mobilized further resistance, while most ruling kingships refrained from systematic violence and neutralized dissent through nonrepressive means, such as co-optation. What accounts for such striking policy convergence? This essay suggests an innovative answer: the royal leaderships atop the Arab monarchical regimes constitute an epistemic community, one predicated on not just a collective perception of threat from regional democratization, but also shared normative beliefs regarding their historical rarity and dynastic superiority. Under this framework, dense communal ties facilitated the diffusion of noncoercive strategies of opposition management, and helped enshrine promises of mutual security within existing institutions such as the Gulf Cooperation Council. Based upon a combination of historical analysis and fieldwork, this essay argues that such transnational circulation of ideas and strategies did not merely aim to prevent democracy, but specifically promoted a special subtype of authoritarianism-ruling monarchism-as a viable type of political order.

The demonstrations in the Arab countries, which started in early 2011,carried the Middle East and the legitimacy of its regimes into the world agenda once again. Within that context, this study discusses the problems in their socio-economic and political structures of the Arab regimes. In so doing, the study especially emphasizes the Arab states’ authoritarian structures, the bases on which they establish their legitimacy, and how economic and some democratic applications and institutions allowed such structures to persist. After discussing these basic problems of the Arab regimes, the study questions and investigates the capacity of these regimes to resist change, the desire and capacity of people to transform them, and finally the interplay between the Arab political culture and possibility of a change. The main conclusion of this article is that a profound regime change is only possible in conjunction with a change both in socio-economic conditions and in the political culture that feeds them.

Comparative Politics, 2012

and beyond, a wave of political protest, unprecedented in scope and ambition, swept the region in 2011. In short order, two deeply entrenched authoritarian rulers were jettisoned from office, 1 and by early summer the leaders of at least three other Arab regimes appeared to be in grave jeopardy. 2 In the wake of this wave, nearly every authoritarian regime in the region scrambled to concoct the "right" mix of repression and cooptation in the hope of stemming the protest. And even authoritarian regimes as distant as China took nervous notice of developments in the region. 3 For Middle East specialists, the events of the Arab Spring proved especially jarring, even if welcomed, because of their extensive investment in analyzing the underpinnings of authoritarian persistence, long the region's political hallmark. The empirical surprise of2011 raises a pressing question-do we need to rethink the logic of authoritarianism in the Arab world or, even more broadly, authoritarian persistence writ large? What follows is a reconsideration of the "robustness of authoritarianism" in the Arab world and beyond. The surprises of the Arab Spring, and especially the internal variation within the region, suggest new theoretical insights as well as new empirical realities that govern the dynamics of authoritarianism in the twenty-first century. At the same time, recent events confirm some long-held truisms about the dynamics of authoritarian durability. In addition, the events of the Arab Spring suggest insights into a host of other issues, including the dynamics of military defection; the logic of social mobilization; the complementary roles of structure, agency, intention, and contingency in complex political phenomena such as political uprisings (and, consequently, the limits *This article builds upon the author's previous article, "The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East," Comparative Politics, 36 (January 2004): 139-57, which was published before she was a member of the Editorial Committee of this journal. Events in the Middle East warrant going back to that article because of its original theoretical significance and impact on the profession, and because the magnitude of the events in the Middle East today warrant our close attention. Manuscripts submitted by members of the Editorial Committee or Advisory Board of Comparative Politics are externally peer reviewed in a double blind process. Authors who are Editorial Committee or Advisory Board members do not participate in publication decisions on their manuscripts.

In the previous chapter, we have considered some important causes of the Arab revolutions. In the present chapter, we are going to discuss some important events of these revolutions both at their initial stage and at subsequent phases. However, in the present chapter we will not follow the chronological order of events but focus on other aspects. In particular, we will define similarities and differences in the course of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and pay special attention to the turning points of the Arab revolutions, especially, the overthrow of July 3, 2013, in Egypt. The present chapter makes an attempt to analyze different versions of the transition to democracy, to show the costs and political, economic, and social perils of the struggle to establish democracy quickly and by radical means (using the example of the recent events in Egypt). This chapter studies the issue of democratization of Egypt and some MENA countries within a globalization and historical context. The present chapter makes an attempt to show in which measure and to what extent revolutions correlate with democracy. It points to the unreasonably high economic and social costs of a rapid transition to democracy as a result of revolutions or of similar large-scale events for countries that are unprepared for it. The authors believe that in a number of cases authoritarian regimes turn out to be more effective in economic and social terms when compared to emerging democracies, especially of the revolutionary type that are often incapable of insuring social order and may have a swing back to authoritarianism. Effective authoritarian regimes can also be a suitable form of transition to an efficient and stable democracy.

2018

Lucas' contentions that the institutional differences between dynastic and linchpin monarchies translate to greater regime survival in dynastic monarchies as compared to those in linchpin monarchies. Methodology I utilize various methods to answer my research questions. In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine hypotheses H1 (prevention) and H2a (control) using narrative process-tracing and semi-structured interview data. I carried out interviews in Jordan from June to September 2016 in Amman, Madaba, and four other sites in the country. In all, this yielded interviews from over 25 people. The sample included students, NGO directors and other civil society actors, freelance researchers, journalists, lawyers, and activists, including members of the Jordanian Hirak (movement). These methods allow me to examine collective action and regime reactions as well as the "view from the ground" of protests in a monarchy. In Chapters 5 and 6, I again examine hypotheses H1 and H2a using narrative process tracing, this time comparing Tunisia and Bahrain to each other and to Jordan. In Chapter 7, I further examine H1 and H2a with an original dataset of collective action events. 3 The dataset was constructed using both the interview data gathered in Jordan as well as a variety of news sources including al-Jazeera,

Journal of Arabian Studies, 2014

Over three years into the Arab Spring, the Middle East is characterized by a striking difference in durability between monarchies and republics. Beyond this difference, some significant gaps within the group of the eight Middle East monarchies have so far been overlooked. Drawing on the existing monarchy research, we first make the case that there were three distinct types of durable monarchies prior to the Arab Spring. Confronted with social and political crises, each type reacted differently to the challenges presented to them after 2011. While five “rentier” and “dynastic” Gulf monarchies (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (United Arab Emirates)) mainly rely on material distribution and family rule, the non-oil “linchpins” of Jordan and Morocco, attracting additional external funds, undertook constitutional changes in an attempt at procedural legitimation. The Sultanate of Oman, however, falls in between. This “linchtier” monarchy used modest material cooptation, a selected personal reshuffling at the top of the regime as well as targeted institutional adaptations. We illustrate our findings with similarly structured brief case studies of the three prototypes of Qatar, Jordan and Oman.