Government and Opposition, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp.

682–704, 2015
doi:10.1017/gov.2015.19
First published online 17 July 2015

Review Article
Sean Yom:* The Arab Spring: One Region, Several Puzzles, and
Many Explanations

Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel (eds), Social Movements, Mobilization,

and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd edn (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2013).

Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud and Andrew Reynolds, The Arab

Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015).

Ishac Diwan (ed.), Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab

Uprisings (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2014).

Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the

Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).

Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth

Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

Marc Lynch (ed.), The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics
in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

The Arab Spring began in December 2010 with the self-immolation

of a Tunisian fruit vendor following harassment by the police. That
act of sacrificial resistance sparked a wave of popular uprisings
against authoritarian rule across the Middle East and North Africa.
During 2011–12, the scale and intensity of such social mobilization
were unprecedented. Though authoritarian rulers fell from power in
only a handful of cases – among them Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and
Yemen – most Arab countries experienced significant episodes of
social unrest. This defied the paradigm of authoritarian resilience

* Sean Yom is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. Contact

email: seanyom@[Link].

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 REVIEW ARTICLE 683

that had characterized scholarship on the Middle East and North

Africa for the previous decade: that these dictatorial regimes were
uncontested in their absolute power, and their societies incapable of
seriously challenging their rule. Indeed, the very slogan of the Arab
Spring, reverberating through innumerable crowds in different Arab
countries, betrayed the tenuous nature of assuming the immunity of
authoritarianism to contentious societies: al-sha’b yurid isqat al-nizam –
the people want the downfall of the regime.
Accompanying these iconic events was an academic publishing
boom. From 2011 through spring 2015, more than two hundred
English-language academic books and over a thousand journal arti-
cles in all languages concerning the Arab Spring were published.
Most were descriptive, intending to review these events rather than
draw upon theory to explain them. They came in a dizzying variety,
from general readers for non-specialists (Filiu 2011; Gelvin 2012) to
exhaustive chronologies for regional observers (Dawisha 2013; Lynch
2012). Ubiquitous were large edited volumes, each bursting with
country-specific chapters in which field-savvy researchers analysed the
actors and groups involved in ongoing protests (Al-Sumeit et al. 2015;
Gerges 2014; Kamrava 2015; Khatib and Lust 2014). Vivid persona-
lized narratives from activists and journalists also abounded for those
seeking primary accounts (Alhassen and Shihab-Eldin 2012;
Noueihed and Warren 2012).
Having waded through this ocean of descriptive writing, Middle
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

East comparativists are now grappling with the vital task of how to
explain the Arab Spring. The six works reviewed here do a great
service in moving comparative knowledge forward. None presents an
all-encompassing theory for the Arab Spring. Instead, when read
collectively, these books break down the Arab Spring into three
different explanatory puzzles. Each draws upon different literatures
and streams of evidence, and each has attracted so much attention
from these books and other studies that convincing answers are
already emerging.
First, how did the Arab Spring begin – that is, what were the
causative origins of popular mobilization in these non-democratic
states? Economic stress and contingent decision-making figure
prominently in the answer. Second, how did national insurrections
that varied in length and escalation become a truly regional wave of
contention, spreading so quickly across borders? Such a question
invokes social movement theory and ideational diffusion – a term
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 684 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

popularized decades ago but which is now acquiring new

significance. Third, why did regime trajectories and outcomes vary so
widely, from revolutionary insurrections to leadership survival to civil
war? Institutional factors matter most for this inquiry, particularly
the effects of dynastic personalism and coercion. Societal origins,
regional diffusion and regime outcomes: these are the central themes
of explanation for the Arab Spring. Through these lenses, Middle
East specialists are bringing new insights into comparative politics,
with the potential to go further.

MOBILIZATIONAL ORIGINS: CONTINGENCY AND ECONOMICS

Explaining origins of mobilization is tricky. Across the vast literatures

on contentious politics, civil society, political violence and modern
revolution, scholars have reached little consensus on why citizens
rebel under authoritarian rule – that is, what variable causally triggers
the decision of any given individual at any given moment to publicly
oppose the government. No matter how many interviews, surveys and
experiments comparativists conduct, there may never be a unified
answer that generalizes across every national case. It is unlikely the
Arab Spring will resolve this debate. For one, exact moments of
mobilization elude prediction because individual preferences are
largely invisible to observers and are often falsified within the public
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

sphere (Goodwin 2011; Kuran 1995; Kurzman 2004). For another,

scholars have not yet reconciled the utility-maximizing approach of
rational choice theory with non-instrumental approaches to protests
that focus upon values, cognition and emotions – factors that surely
shape the choice of obedience versus rebellion, but which defy easy
measurement (Kurzman 2012; Pearlman 2013). When asked by
Western researchers why they had participated in the Arab Spring, so
many demonstrators have responded with a brutally honest yet
opaque answer: because the ‘the wall of fear’ had been broken. That
such simple data can be interpreted in numerous ways through
different theoretical filters shows there is still much to learn about
this realm of individual decision-making.
Most of all, organizational and ideological factors long assumed to
be impulses for collective action in the Middle East were absent in the
Arab Spring protests (Achcar 2013; Bayat 2013; Khosrokhavar 2012).
For instance, new opposition forces did not take after established civil
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society organizations, opposition parties or religious actors such as

the Muslim Brotherhood. They were amorphous and leaderless.
Neither did they implicate motivating ideologies such as Arab
nationalism, Marxist-Leninism or Islamism; they did not draw upon
religious principles or external ideals, but instead channelled public
frustrations against governments in collective demands for karama
(dignity) and justice. Results from the second wave of the Arab
Barometer survey project, presented in two chapters in Marc Lynch’s
edited volume The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in
the Middle East, validate this. By and large, the Arab activists who drove
the 2011–12 protests preferred democracy over authoritarianism,
distrusted political authority and desired secular institutions over
Islamist policies – important findings highlighted in the chapters by
Hoffmann and Jamal (2014) and Tessler and Robbins (2014).
In short, they were not the usual revolutionary suspects. Indeed,
that protests came from unexpected sources invokes more recent
ethnographic work on social resistance in the Middle East which
diverges sharply from mainstream work on opposition politics (Aarts
and Cavatorta 2013; Allal 2010; Bayat 2010; Chomiak 2011). Unlike
institutionally recognized entities such as Islamist movements and
civil society non-governmental organizations, new voices seldom
framed as ‘opposition’ by political scientists – football fans, phos-
phate miners and entrepreneurs, among others – have long found
creative ways to subvert repressive laws and puncture the myth of
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

invulnerable authoritarianism. The Arab Spring renders this point

even more visible: scholars must broaden their analytical framework
and consider a broader range of actors that can engage in political
struggle, and they need to move beyond the highly formalist and
elite-oriented approach of the past.
From cognitive factors to ideological impulses, causal triggers that
can predict the decision to protest at the individual level remain
elusive. However, scholars can still locate the permissive conditions
that, all else being equal, make the decision to publicly mobilize
against autocracy more likely. Hanieh’s Lineages of Revolt and Diwan’s
edited volume Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings
take on this challenge. They shift the unit of analysis from the
protesting individual to the collective level – in particular, the urban
middle class that drove most national protests. Using different
methodologies, these works conclude that the Arab Spring had a
material determinant in the form of prolonged economic crisis
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dating back decades that entailed lethargic structural growth, high

youth unemployment and unresponsive state services.
That economic grievances lay behind political rebellion is hardly a
groundbreaking idea. Numerous studies on the Arab Spring link
relative deprivation with protest activity (Amin et al. 2012; Hosny
et al. 2014; Malik and Awadallah 2013). Thanks to such work, scholars
know that while the first protests of each uprising may have origi-
nated from different spaces, from the rural towns of Tunisia and Syria
to the metropolitan capitals of Egypt and Jordan, the consequent
national movements of opposition that formed were mostly driven by
young middle-class urbanites who had generally underachieved
economically relative to their educational and social status. Peasants,
migrants and others subsisting on the margins of society certainly
participated, but did not lead these movements or remain its
vanguard. Neither, too, did the wealthy, a point that Brownlee et al.’s
The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform notes – small rentier
states like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that feature universal
welfare provisions and virtually no joblessness among citizens saw no
troubles. Of course, oil wealth alone does not immunize a regime
from conflict. Libya and Bahrain both have significant hydrocarbon
resources, but unequal redistribution across provincial and sectarian
cleavages, respectively, helped spawn opposition within disen-
franchised urban areas.
However, Hanieh’s and Diwan’s volumes do not merely correlate
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

antecedent underdevelopment with political instability. Uniquely,

they trace out the fuller causal chain of analysis to expose the eco-
nomic events and historical processes that put urban citizens under
siege in the first place. In sum, simple deprivation alone is not the
culprit; in historical and comparative perspective, it seldom is. What
made popular uprisings especially likely was something new –
collective recognition of worsening inequality between wealthy elites
and the middle classes, a gap largely spawned by neoliberal economic
reforms.
Hanieh (2013: 174) utilizes qualitative macroanalysis to expose ‘the
historically structured processes of class and state formation and their
interlinkages across different spaces and scales – rural and urban;
national, regional, and global’. Some may have difficulty with the often-
dense jargon of a book inspired by Marxist-inflected dependency
theory. Diwan’s work presents a different challenge. The centrepiece is
the masterful chapter written by Diwan himself (2014: 29–56), which
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utilizes a number of econometric tests to explore the weaknesses of the

regional political economy. The essay alone justifies acquiring the
book; the other nine chapters are disjointed, with some focusing on
non-economic topics such as Islamism and others exploring external
cases like Indonesia.
If readers can get beyond the polemical tone of Hanieh’s work
and the more descriptive chapters of Diwan’s volume, they will
be rewarded with a rich proposition that combines the former’s
historical structuralism with the latter’s quantitative sleuthing. The
urban middle sector, wage-earners and salaried alike, was a likely
candidate to support new protest movements because it had suffered
creeping material dislocation due to neoliberal reforms since the
1980s. Hanieh penetrates the bargained nature of capital
accumulation that governed the Arab world after the Second World
War. At that time, large preindustrial states like Egypt pursued statist
policies of late development, such as import-substitute industrializa-
tion, and were rewarded – like other late developers – with early
returns, as the Arab world grew faster than almost any other region
during the 1960s and 1970s. Such prosperity allowed states to
consolidate power on the strength of social pacts that swapped
quiescence from swelling urban centres for prosperity and stability.
However, that bargain collapsed with the fall of oil prices in the
1980s, which hit the oil-rich states the hardest but also pummelled
oil-poor ones such as Egypt and Tunisia due to the dramatic decline
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

in regional trade, capital flows and foreign aid.

As they veered towards bankruptcy and default, many Arab states
turned to neoliberal reforms, hoping to stave off budgetary melt-
downs while upgrading their bloated statist economies. As Diwan
shows, neoliberal imperatives like privatizing public enterprises,
reducing costly social services and enacting free trade did restore
some fiscal solvency, but it also removed many of the economic pro-
tections enacted decades earlier. At the same time, the urban middle
class grew. By the 2000s, youths (generally, those aged 18 to 34)
represented not only the biggest demographic segment in most Arab
countries, but also the most well-educated and aspirational genera-
tion the region had ever seen. Yet this generation suffered dimmer
prospects for upward mobility than their parents due to the con-
sequences of neoliberal reforms, among them the rising cost of
living, declining public employment, stagnant wage levels and
still-weak private sectors dominated by crony capitalism.
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 688 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

Hanieh and Diwan show that neoliberal shifts entrenched

perceptions of inequality and injustice, and helped create a new
socioeconomic stratum – business elites with close ties to incumbent
regimes. As other studies have also shown, this new cohort of crony
capitalists differed from old economic elites. For instance, in Egypt
and Syria, they quickly took over old sectors such as banking and
retail, or else monopolized new ones like technology and investment
while benefiting from extensive international financial ties (Haddad
2012; Heydemann 2004; Kandil 2012). This new elite included not
just technocrats and large-scale entrepreneurs but also savvy politi-
cians and regime insiders. For instance, in Tunisia, which was hailed
by the European Union during the 2000s as a stable and well-
governed state, the nepotistic takeover of the burgeoning private
sector enabled the extended family of President Ben ‘Ali to control
$13 billion of assets by 2010, equal to one-quarter of Tunisia’s GDP.
Similar patterns could be found, albeit on a less extravagant scale, in
other targets of neoliberal reform like Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Jordan,
Syria and Yemen – all prime sites of uprisings.
In short, economic inequality engendered by neoliberalism created
the permissive conditions for popular uprisings. Yet many political
scientists might accept this finding with scepticism, and rightly so –
innumerable cross-national studies have shown that the relationship
between inequality and protest is highly inconsistent (Davenport
2007). This compels a deeper search for causal mechanisms. Hanieh’s
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

book gives little guidance, with its deterministic presumption that class
conflict made the Arab Spring inevitable. Diwan is somewhat better
in employing an external hypothesis to connect structuralist origins to
revolutionary outcomes, the redistributional argument of Darren
Acemoglu and James Robinson (2006). Acemoglu and Robinson’s
controversial yet well-cited proposition assumes that political regimes
are institutionalized forms of income distribution, and so all
state–society confrontations are simply conflicts over redistribution.
Middling levels of inequality produce the highest likelihood for
revolution, for it means the middle classes have just enough resources
to mobilize (unlike most peasants and migrants) but also enough
autonomy and deprivation to see the injustice of their position (unlike
business elites).
Between the different methods and details of Hanieh’s and
Diwan’s works, two concerns linger. First, the search for mobiliza-
tional triggers may be futile. This may bring about discomfit: while
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putting faith in absolute prerequisites is seldom sound, Middle East

specialists are no different from other comparativists in their aim
towards greater causal precision. The second concern involves
historical processes. Clearly, the legacies of the past shape the current
travails of states, societies and economies; but how far back does one
traverse? Well-received studies on economic development in Latin
America, Africa and East Asia all link postcolonial outcomes with
antecedent colonial events that occurred centuries earlier (Kohli
2004; Mahoney 2010). By contrast, while much Middle East political
science scholarship gives due credit to Ottoman or Western colonial
practices, such as work on state formation and economic institutions,
the Arab Spring literature as represented in these works is remark-
ably presentist in reaching back only a few decades.
Still, these two books do a laudable job, given their task, by framing
structural conditions as the distal cause of the Arab Spring while
leaving contingency largely untouched. While this puzzle regarding
the societal origins of popular mobilization continues to attract
research, another issue now comes into the limelight – the proximate
factors on the ground that influenced how protests escalated
domestically and spread regionally over time. Herein emerges the
second puzzle of the Arab Spring.

THE SPREAD OF CONTENTION: ESCALATION AND DIFFUSION

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During 2011–12, national uprisings were not identical. They varied in

terms of escalation and scale, from the unarmed mass demonstra-
tions of Tunisia and Egypt that overcame those dictatorships, to the
modest marches of Morocco and Jordan that eventually petered out,
to the armed insurgencies and violent wars of Libya and Syria, and to
the scattered riots in Saudi Arabia and Oman. Further complicating
matters, the fact that most Arab societies generated some kind of
spontaneous opposition that utilized similar slogans, strategies and
targets suggests that a process of diffusion had also occurred, such
that activists across borders were learning, emulating and adopting
from one another.
The first part of this puzzle, variations in protest escalation, eludes
easy answers, much like the earlier question of contentious origins.
Beinin and Vairel’s updated edition of Social Movements, Mobilization,
and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa shows why. It locates
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 690 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

social movement theory (SMT) as the most promising candidate to

explain variations in protests. Its foil is classic social movement
theory. For many conventional social movement theorists, the ebbing
or waning of protests reflects how opposition activists react to their
organizational resources and opportunity structures, such as threats
from state repression, the availability of elite allies and effective
leadership (Tarrow 1998; Tilly 2004). This structuralist approach
remains popular within comparative politics, and Middle East scho-
lars have utilized it well to study Islamist movements like the Muslim
Brotherhood (Hafez 2004; Wiktorowicz 2004). Ostensibly, social
movement theory can generate many testable hypotheses to explain
observed divergence in protest movements – for instance, that
demonstrations were more likely to grow and turn violent if militaries
responded with lethal firepower, as in Libya and Syria, or that
opposition groups were more likely to demobilize peacefully if
regimes gave credible promises of reform, as in Morocco and Jordan.
A master handbook on social movement theory might test such
hypotheses systematically. Beinin and Vairel’s volume is not that
handbook. Rather, it warns against generalizing across countries
altogether by emphasizing the specificity of each uprising. The
book begins with chapters on pre-Arab Spring social movements in
Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Here, the shortfalls of
classic social movement theory become apparent: the absence of
physical resources and viable opportunities under authoritarianism
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

during the 2000s did not foreclose the rise of new social movements
with enduring impact, from the Women’s Association of Hezbollah
in Lebanon to mass marches by unemployed administrators in
Morocco. As Beinin and Vairel’s introduction (2013: 29–32)
contends, social movements are not the effect of structural factors so
much as open-ended sites of contestation driven by individual efforts
and changing perceptions.
Bonnefoy and Poirier’s later chapter (2013) on Yemen shows this
argument in action. What Western observers saw as a cohesive revo-
lutionary campaign that ended in the deposing of long-serving
President Salih was instead a messy overlap of university
students, party affiliates, provincial separatists, religious minorities
and civil society voices, all with conflicting interests and overlapping
identities. The movement did not so much mobilize as result from
mobilization. For instance, the physical act of encamping in Change
Square in the capital of San’a brought these actors in close contact,
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catalysing contingent alliances atop pre-existing tribal and religious

networks while also creating new routines of civic resistance. In
addition, other players made their influence felt, among them Saudi
Arabia, provincial elites and the Yemeni military, which frequently
changed the stakes of the protest game and forced each group to
change tactics. In the end, they conclude, this was not a straightfor-
ward tale of heroic youths battling the state throughout 2011, but a
chaotic collision of different actors with no linear logic of revolution.
The entire dynamic of the street was unpredictably remade with each
passing day: ‘the interactions generated by the mobilization process
generated new practices and opportunities that profoundly trans-
formed the expectations, strategies, and perceptions of everyone
involved’ (Bonnefoy and Poirier 2013: 245).
Such narratives caution against causal generalizing by emphasizing
instead the muddled uniqueness of every case. Indeed, the fact that the
resurgence of mass politics in Yemen did result in a historic outcome in
the downfall of President Salih, who had reigned supreme for over two
decades, seems like a side-story. According to this approach, observed
differences in protest escalation defy explanation – such as why
Jordan’s protest movement was large but orderly, organizing over 7,000
peaceful events during 2011–12 before winding down without violence,
whereas in Libya scattered demonstrations in the eastern city of
Benghazi spiralled into a full-blown armed insurgency by spring 2011.
The relativistic focus upon the inimitable constellation of social
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forces, geopolitical actors and state institutions typifying every case

reflects the ‘relational’ turn in social movement theory advocated by
some social scientists (Jasper 2010; McAdam et al. 2001; Selbin 2010).
However, most comparativists have yet to embrace this theoretical
shift. For instance, Middle East specialists have applied classic social
movement theory to Egypt and Syria, resulting in theoretically sound
(if predictably structuralist) arguments – such as that Arab activists
simply found more creative ways of generating mobilizational
resources and exploiting political opportunities to begin revolu-
tionary campaigns in these autocratic settings (Alimi and Meyer 2011;
Korany and El-Mahdi 2014; Leenders 2013). Others emphasize the
importance of opposition strategy and cross-cutting alliances, noting
that only when revolutionaries worked with ideological rivals, like
capital and labour uniting in Tunisia, could they monopolize public
spaces and present a united front capable of toppling the incumbent
dictatorship (Goldstone 2011a; Holmes 2012).
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 692 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

Such theoretical ferment may eventually produce consensus

regarding the determinants of protest escalation, but for now the
landscape of explanation remains highly fragmented. This portends
many more studies, but it will also delay the persuasive answering of
other questions related to mobilization, such as the ‘punishment
puzzle’ (Davenport 2007). The punishment puzzle refers to the
inconsistent relationship between coercion and protest, which was on
full display during the Arab Spring. In the regional context, why did
violent repression in some instances discourage and ultimately
destroy opposition, as in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, whereas in other
instances it contributed to the radicalization of unarmed movements
into revolutionary insurgencies, as in Libya and Syria? Partly due to
prevailing caution against generalization, Middle East scholars have
spent more time analysing why regimes chose to use repression or
restraint rather than comparing its effects upon social forces and
resistance strategies (Josua and Edel 2015). Answering this and other
challenges requires resolving deeper debates within social movement
theory first.
Though analysts may disagree on why the Arab Spring protests
escalated in different ways, or sometimes not at all, less controversy
surrounds why they spread geographically in the first place – that is,
the regional diffusion of opposition throughout 2011–12. Previously
termed the ‘contagion’ or ‘demonstration’ effect, Patel et al.’s
chapter from The Arab Uprisings Explained defines diffusion as ‘the
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

transfer of an innovation – for example, a new product, policy,

institution, or repertoire of behavior – across units, such as enter-
prises, organizations, sociopolitical groups, or governments’ (Patel
et al. 2014: 58). The December 2010 protests of Tunisia incited similar
demonstrations across the Arab world because youth activists across
borders were receptive to learning new strategies, eager to emulate the
success story of Tunisia and able to coordinate around common
symbols and themes (Harrelson-Stephens and Callaway 2014;
Saideman 2012; Weyland 2012). Scholars of post-communist politics
have noted how this regional ‘cascade’ of opposition mirrored, at least
in the early stages, the revolutions of 1989 (Hale 2013).
Diffusion can occur through various mechanisms, which are still
under scrutiny; among them are cognitive heuristics, geopolitical
linkage and institutional similarity. What made the Arab Spring an
exceptional case of diffusion was the role of digital media as a driving
force. This is the topic of Howard and Hussain’s Democracy’s Fourth
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Wave: Digital Media and the Arab Spring. This study does not fawn over
digital media as did the popular press during 2011–12, which often
ascribed new revolutionary sentiment as purely the product of SMS
messaging and online networks like Facebook. The authors warn that
bytes and bits do not substitute for real human action; announcing a
revolt on Twitter does not make it so, much less make it successful.
However, in the right context, they find that digital media exerted a
multiplier effect by enhancing the density, speed and responsiveness
of communications between protest actors across borders.
Middle East scholars have already studied how the informational
landscape of the Arab world changed greatly after the 1990s. During
the mid-2000s, experts saw a new ‘Arab public sphere’ emerging, as
satellite television and social networks – which governments could no
longer control as they did older broadcast media – spurred open
debates over hitherto forbidden topics, such as foreign policy and
political corruption (Lynch 2006). However, Howard and Hussain’s
work (2013: 32–3) goes further in exposing the causal links between
digital media and Arab Spring activism. For instance, they correlate
technological infrastructure with protest activity. Hence, that Tunisia
and Egypt had the first sustained uprisings is not surprising, as they
had among the highest levels of internet access, mobile phone
distribution and social networking in the region. Second, digital
usage tended to spike before major events on the ground: ‘the
intensity of political conversations that took place preceding major
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street protests supports the idea that virtual networks materialized

before street protest networks’ (Howard and Hussain 2013: 117).
Third, the content shared online – viral slogans, bloody images, stra-
tegies of resistance, urban maps and normative values, among others –
helped create a shared mental frame among activists, circulating
quickly across different public arenas and making clear that the
common opponent for the new opposition was authoritarianism.
In sum, digital media facilitated the diffusion of protest: ‘they
provided the very infrastructure that created deep communication
ties and organizational capacity in groups of activists before the major
protests took place and while street protests were being formalized’
(Howard and Hussain 2013: 120). This is a telling statement, and one
that distinguishes the topic of diffusion from the topic of mobilization.
Studies of mobilization focus upon process; they flit back and forth
between the person and the group, between individual behaviour
and collective action, in order to unpack how and why resistance
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 694 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

escalates. Studies of diffusion focus more upon outcomes via the

spatial transmission of protest itself. That rebellion in Bahrain, mar-
ches in Morocco and demonstrations in Kuwait differed in size and
scope matters less than the fact that they all happened following the
first movers of Tunisia and Egypt.

VARYING REGIME OUTCOMES: COERCION AND PERSONALISM

The greater confidence shown in explaining outcomes over

processes leads to the third and final puzzle of the Arab Spring, one
that shifts attention from mobilization within society to the institutions
of the state. Given the diffusion of popular unrest throughout the
region during 2011–12, why did the region’s autocratic regimes meet
such divergent fates? Dictators did not survive opposition uprisings in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere, however, they main-
tained power regardless of how much societal resistance coalesced,
from the Syrian regime’s tenuous survival during civil war to the quiet
and protest-free experience of Qatar and its reigning Thani dynasty.
Middle East comparativists are well-equipped to explain variations
in regime outcomes, as they have been among the leading scholars of
authoritarian politics over the past two decades (Anderson 2006;
Brown and Shahin 2010; Schlumberger 2007). Indeed, many
regional specialists cautioned against the chiliastic forecasts of
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democratization rippling through the international media during the

Arab Spring, noting that the rise of contentiousness from below did
not necessarily mean the downfall of autocratic regimes or the
inevitable establishment of liberal democracies in their place
(Anderson 2014; Brynen et al. 2012; Hudson 2015).
That most dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa
endured the Arab Spring intact preoccupies Brownlee et al.’s The Arab
Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform, which asks why such a historic
outpouring of mass politics resulted in such a ‘modest harvest’ of
regime change. They first rearticulate the importance of oil rents in
giving many rulers an invaluable resource to overcome protests, either
through well-timed distributions of patronage or else by underwriting
large coercive apparatuses. This is an established argument; oil wealth
largely accounts for the so-called ‘exceptionalism’ of the monarchies
during the Arab Spring, for instance (Yom and Gause 2012). What
determines, then, outcomes for states not blessed by the gods of
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geology? Brownlee et al. pinpoint the decisive factor as whether or not

regime elites, especially those in charge of the military, remain loyal in
the face of societal mobilization. They point out the ‘sobering reality’
that only when generals defected to the opposition did revolution
succeed, for that robbed authoritarian rulers of their coercive organs
(Brownlee et al. 2015: 219).
Middle East comparativists have long conceded the importance of a
loyal coercive apparatus in enabling autocrats to defeat opposition
(Ayubi 1995; Bellin 2004, 2012). Likewise, newer studies on civil–
military relations explore why the military split from authoritarian
rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and to a lesser degree Libya, high-
lighting how factors such as economic payoffs and institutional pro-
fessionalization shaped the calculations of senior officers while
dooming embattled presidents (Lutterbeck 2013; Makara 2013;
Nepstad 2013). Brownlee and his coauthors, however, posit a new and
striking idea. During the Arab Spring, what determined whether the
coercive apparatus would remain loyal was dynastic personalism – that
is, whether or not rulers had ensured it remained under the control of
family members. Dynastic personalism provides a powerful disincentive
for defection, something monarchs know well: for most relatives in
charge of, say, the police or army, blood ties make it impossible to
separate their own status from the ruler’s interests and reputation
(Herb 1999). With defection impossible and the consequences of
defeat so grim, the dominant strategy for incumbent elites is to stick
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

together and fight until the end, which results in regime survival unless
there is outside intervention, as in Libya.
This contrasts with prevailing studies that see dynastic personalism
as detrimental to authoritarianism because it encourages endemic
corruption, weakens bureaucratic functions and incurs public
anger (Chehabi and Linz 1998; Goldstone 2011b; Hess 2015). Yet
comparing Egypt and Syria shows how personalization can be bene-
ficial (Brownlee et al. 2015: 55–9). Both of these republican dicta-
torships had institutionalized plans for hereditary succession; Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt planned to gift his position to son Gamal, whereas
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad took over from his father, Hafez
al-Assad, in 1999. Yet only in Syria did the Assad family also colonize
the state apparatus with dozens of relatives and hundreds more close
friends, associates and religious kin in core autocratic institutions,
especially the military and security services. Thus in Egypt, army
generals could abandon the Mubarak regime, knowing their
© The Author 2015. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press
 696 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

institutional autonomy would safeguard their power through any

transition, whereas in Syria the military and ruling party doggedly
fights on with assistance from Hezbollah and Iran given the impos-
sibility of surviving any regime change.
In sum, structure and institutions governed the fate of Arab auto-
cracies, with the gift of oil plus the practice of dynastic personalism
explaining divergence in regime outcomes (Brownlee et al. 2015:
66–85). This is a theory with expansive causal scope. Much like mate-
rialist explanations about mobilizational origins, it accounts for cross-
case outcomes during 2011–12 in the nearly 20 countries that make up
the Arab world. Like any early theorizing, however, a closer look at
specific cases raises some questions. Here, Lynch’s The Arab Uprisings
Explained shines. While this book’s varied chapters speak to many issues,
the essays regarding authoritarian politics are most enlightening.
First, Springborg’s chapter on civil–military relations casts doubt
on the importance of dynastic personalism in ensuring elite cohesion
within Arab autocracies. For instance, the armies of Morocco and
Jordan are professionalized rather than personalized, and have
institutional autonomy – but are still loyal to the ruling monarchies
(Springborg 2014: 152). During the Arab Spring, thousands of
peaceful protests occurred in these two countries, yet leaders forbade
security directors and military generals from utilizing violence against
crowds. These agents of coercion showed restraint not because they
had personal ties to the royal family but because high levels of
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

institutional discipline precluded the possibility of disobeying direct

orders. In sum, something other than personalistic ties can generate
loyalty and cohesion from regime elites during crises.
Heydemann and Leenders’ chapter on authoritarian learning
likewise suggests a different causal mechanism than dynastic person-
alism when explaining regime longevity, especially with the Assad
dictatorship (Heydemann and Leenders 2014: 79–82). In their esti-
mation, no regime change occurred in Syria despite its civil war simply
because the leadership made optimal strategic choices. Early on, it
played different opposition factions against one another in order to
prevent the formation of a cross-cutting national movement, as
happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Throughout 2013–14, it exploited
Western fears of radical Islam and terrorism to ensure international
military intervention against the Islamic State group, now its primary
opponent, which has further enhanced its domestic security by
relieving pressure upon its besieged military. The regime made such
© The Author 2015. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press
 REVIEW ARTICLE 697

decisions by learning from the mistakes of fellow Arab autocrats who

had already lost power, emulating models of autocratic durability
elsewhere, and above all adapting to changing contexts. Such
authoritarian-style diffusion is something that calls for further
research, not least because it shifts attention back from structure and
institutions to agency and strategies.
These critiques should not detract from the value of Brownlee
et al.’s analysis. Though their hypothesizing may stumble in specific
cases, and the proposition about personalism demands further test-
ing, the authors have big explanatory ambitions. Their argument’s
theoretical depth is rivalled only by its geographic breadth. Neither
the riddle of mobilizational causes nor questions about the spread of
protest have yet garnered such a sweeping causal framework, one that
tries to account for every national outcome.

FROM REFLECTION TO RESEARCH

Collectively, these six works undertake the disciplinary task of

explaining the three puzzles that drove the Arab Spring – its economic
and social origins, the mobilizational process and diffusion of these
uprisings, and finally the varying regime outcomes that resulted from
such popular unrest. They represent the first wave of rigorous theo-
rizing, and it comes just a few years after an historical rupture shook
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

the field of Middle East politics. While imperfect, they provide a strong
foundation for future research by furnishing a convenient division of
intellectual labour across three different questions, and touching upon
the many literatures and data streams that can answer those questions.
To put such efforts in perspective, consider another regional
earthquake that redefined a comparative subfield – the revolutions of
1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Those events upended
the field of communist studies and Sovietology, and many ongoing
projects had to be completely retooled. More than anything, it took
time for regional scholars to adjust to the new reality by collecting new
data, recalibrating old theories and reflecting upon erroneous
assumptions about the durability of socialist party-states and the roles
played by social forces in legitimating them (Hanson 2003; Janos
1991; Stokes 1993). For some questions, such as why post-communist
democratization did not succeed everywhere, researchers would not
reach consensus until after the 1990s (Bunce 2000; McFaul 2002).
© The Author 2015. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press
 698 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

Ironically, scholars of post-communist politics were among the first

to lambaste Middle East comparativists for failing to predict the Arab
Spring, and for missing vital cues by being too immersed in stale
paradigms such as durable authoritarianism and civil society
(Howard and Walters 2014). However, this is not a fair criticism. For
one, comparativists have never excelled at prediction, but that is
because prophesying is not the goal that defines scholarship. The
task instead is retrospectively to explain major outcomes, continually
finding the best possible fit between theory and data in order to
generate new knowledge that can illuminate present conditions. For
another, Middle East scholars themselves were the first to concede
that they had not foreseen these uprisings, and immediately pledged
to revisit their erroneous assumptions about durable authoritarian-
ism (Gause 2011; Lust 2014; Pace and Cavatorta 2012; Schwedler
2015). These six works constitute the first theoretical returns, and
they present a wealth of provocative ideas.
In moving forward, though, nascent research should abide by
several points of caution. First, causal theorizing about mobilizational
origins must be bounded. There is a reason, as Asef Bayat (2013: 463)
observes, that ‘every revolution is a surprise’. Not only is prediction a
difficult task, but individual-level triggers that definitively account for
every instance of rebellion or resistance are impossible to verify. It is
telling that the most compelling work about the origins of the Arab
Spring concerns long-term structural conditions of economic crisis
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

that raised the possibility of social conflict without guaranteeing it. The
sheer contingency of human behaviour demands surrendering
aspirations for deterministic causation on the micro-level. At the level
of social groups and political regimes, however, more pragmatic
balance is needed between structure and agency. The goal should be
middle-range theorizing – to create causal frameworks comprehen-
sive enough to account for different causal pathways, integrated
enough to tie those pathways and outcomes back into a unified
understanding of the region, and still specific enough to account for
the actors and processes operating in each national context.
Brownlee et al.’s volume epitomizes middle-range analysis in its
explanation of divergent regime outcomes, one that balances theo-
retical depth with geographic breadth.
Second, scholars must more carefully address issues of temporality,
something that runs throughout the study of protest escalation and
diffusion but is never fully engaged. The insurrections of Tunisia and
© The Author 2015. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press
 REVIEW ARTICLE 699

Egypt were over by mid-February of 2011. They lasted just weeks. By

contrast, every uprising that followed unfolded more slowly, lasted
longer and failed to dislodge rulers without violence. The downfall of
leaders in Libya and Yemen occurred only after protracted fighting;
in Morocco and Jordan, peaceful protest movements continued
mobilizing for more than a year but achieved little. That the rate of
success diminished so rapidly after early 2011 underscores the
importance of timing and sequence: as months passed, the possibility
of peaceful victory against autocratic rulers in other parts of the Arab
world diminished radically. Why? One possibility is that authoritarian
leaders learned optimal survival strategies from their peers’ mistakes
over time, such as when to repress versus when to tolerate, a diffusion
process that mimicked what occurred amongst activists. Or perhaps
the dynamic of contention during the Arab Spring was not built for
long-term sustainment – demands for dignity could ignite outbursts
of protest, but over time the lack of any comprehensive ideology or
identity to replace old societal cleavages meant that all but the most
hardcore activists would eventually demobilize. Such vistas of
research need greater consideration.
Finally, research must better incorporate geopolitics into theoriz-
ing, especially regarding the last puzzle of regime outcomes. Middle
East specialists know the perils of great power meddling well, from
regional history to the Arab Spring. Saudi forces helped quell the
Bahraini revolt; NATO intervention sealed Qaddafi’s fate in Libya;
[Link] Published online by Cambridge University Press

and Syria’s civil war worsened by magnitudes due to the involvement

of outside actors, from Iran and Hezbollah to Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and America. Ongoing work on regime outcomes all note these
intercessions but do not ask more penetrating questions that could
help create a more systematic framework linking geopolitical causes
to domestic effects. For instance, under what conditions will an
outside hegemon, like America, intervene to support one revolution
(Libya) but be complicit in another’s quashing (Bahrain)? How did
international non-state actors, from regional organizations like the
Arab League to transnational civil society foundations, reconfigure
the domestic balance of power between regimes and opposition?
How have regional and external actors, from Saudi Arabia to Russia
and China, countered the spatial diffusion of protests with counter-
vailing strategies, such as propagating and diffusing narratives of
stability and prosperity that may have discouraged copycat uprisings
after 2011–12? Such queries must figure prominently in future
© The Author 2015. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press
 700 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

scholarship, not least because outside forces continue to mediate the

national struggles raging in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Much
as in the past, the future trajectories of states within the Middle East
and North Africa will be heavily buffeted by external actors and
processes.

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