Arab Armies, Economy, and the Arab Spring Since this panel is based on a two-year research project that most presenters have been collaborating in since June 2012, this paper sets the theoretical approaches and the general argument for all presentations. Then, it attempts to draw general patterns and underscores differences. This paper investigates whether economic interests were behind the different ways Arab military institutions reacted to the uprisings during the last two years. In addition, it investigates whether such interests influenced the way Arab militaries participated in the processes of forging post-revolutionary regimes. The paper focuses on four Arab armies that historically either owned business enterprises or were involved in patron-client relations with business elites in their countries: the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Sudan. The paper argues that economic positions and interests of the Arab military institutions can explain their support, inactivity, repression or violent suppression of protest movements, and active engagement or inactivity in the socio-political processes of transformation that followed the Arab Spring uprisings during the last two years. The paper combines and applies two theoretical approaches to identify economic motives of state militaries and other armed groups in the four studied Arab countries. The first is a political economy approach, which explores the resource base of the armed actors within the formal and informal structures of each of the four studied regimes. The paper assesses the behavior of these armed actors towards popular movements in view of potential gains or losses of power derived from economic privileges. The second is a social theory approach, which examines the preservation, consolidation, or creation of new institutions and structural frameworks of the armed forces and other militant groups during transformation processes after the uprisings. This approach emphasizes that armed forces constitute and consolidate their institutions based on social relation with other socio-economic agents and with similar or opposed interests within their regimes. In the light of these two approaches, the paper taps into a wide variety of primary and secondary sources to investigate the four cases. Scrutinized primary sources include official state documents, publications of ministries of defense, Arabic media reports, interviews with officers at different rankings, with leaders of non-state armed groups, and with economic actors who share interests with or have interests opposed to the economic institutions of the military.