Many scholars have argued that the failure of Jordan’s Arab Spring democracy movement is due to the lack of cohesion among protestors. In these scholarly accounts, this misfortune stemmed primarily from traditional monarchic legitimacy that diluted big transformative hopes, or simply from the unshakable Jordanian-Palestinian societal rift that divides Jordanian masses into two vertically competing blocks. Others believe that the Muslim Brothers – a major player in the political arena, is relatively weaker in Jordan when compared to its presence elsewhere in the region. Unlike the prevailing view, I show that the democracy movement in Jordan was coherent enough for the state to reckon with for about two years before successfully repressing it by end of 2012. In fact, I show that the Muslim Brothers secured major concessions from the state in that period, such as the return of an exiled leader, and the return of previously confiscated assets. I also show how a successful mass mobilization by public schools teachers that crossed the ethnic division line, won the right to unionize. Building on a political economy model for democratic concessions that is nested in the triangular industrial relations of state, capital, and labor; I argue, alternatively, that it is the lacking of labor disruptive capacity that ailed the democracy movement in Jordan. I show in this paper how the trajectory of Jordanian capitalism installed specific structural impediments to labor organizing in the country, primarily by depending on low-skill and low-pay foreign workers in the strategic sectors for the state. With labor’s inability to put significant pressures on the capitalist class, which in its turn could sway state officials in favor of reform, the democracy movement lost steam with its inability to create major disruptions for the elites. This research builds on economic data analysis, newspaper research, and in-depth interviews between 2013 and 2018 with thirty-two democracy activists, trade unionists, and business and state representatives in Jordan. To support this claim, I compare the failure in Jordan with the only lasting successes of the Arab Spring, in Morocco and Tunisia, where labor organizations led and protected the protests on their way to gain major democratic concessions in 2011.

In recent years a rapidly growing literature from history (Beinin, 2016), political science (Buehler, 2015; Hartshorn, 2018; Zemni, 2013) and sociology (Allinson, 2015; Feltrin, 2018.; Yousfi, 2018), has argued that unique success of Tunisian democracy after the 2011 Arab revolutions is best explained by the strength of organized labor. This supports the long tradition of comparative historical work arguing for the working class origins of democracy (Bellin, 2004; Rueschemeyer, Huber, & Stephens, 1992; Therborn, 1977; Usmani, 2018). The relative autonomy of the national labor federation in Tunisia (UGTT) meant that workers in Tunisia were able to participate in revolutionary and post-revolutionary politics en bloc, rather than by neighborhood, soccer club or workplace (Beinin, 2016). However existing scholarship has been less successful in explaining why it is that workers were able to obtain this autonomy in some places but not others. In the Tunisian context, it has been common to explain the coexistence of labor autonomy and dictatorship by pointing either to the fact that the UGTT was founded prior to independence, or to its nationalist legitimacy obtained by its role in the independence struggle (Beinin, 2016; Bellin, 2002). However these explanations fail on two levels. First, while it is true that the UGTT obtained its autonomy under French rule, this avoids rather than answers the question because it is no less of a puzzle to ask how labor achieved such a high level of strength under French authoritarianism. Second, they ignore the UGTT’s capture by the state and decline to near irrelevance between 1956 and 1969 (Toumi, 1989); obtaining autonomy from one despotism is no guarantee of retaining it under another. To address the question of labor autonomy, this proposal will offer a comparative historical study using a mix of archival sources and interviews to study three periods: the French protectorate and the Bourguiba and Ben Ali regimes. I will try to argue that this phenomenon requires understanding the interaction of elite political conflict and structural changes in the economy. This allows us to build towards a model capable of explaining why Tunisian labor failed so poorly in the 1960s, but relatively well since the 1990s, which in both cases goes strongly against broader global trends in both rich and poor countries.

The Arab uprisings brought to the fore basic questions about contentious politics in the Arab World. It vivified questions about the complex role of labour and social movements in the basic dynamics of change. In Lebanon, the labour movement was able to set up institutions and practices that managed to improve working and living conditions, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. Following the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, the labour movement was strongly undermined by state policies. Since 2011 and the onset of the Arab uprising, it has shown signs of revival, especially with the sustained mobilisation of public sector employees demanding a new salary scale that was partially approved in 2017. In parallel, Lebanon witnessed in the summer of 2015 a series of demonstrations and sit-ins organized by a group of civil society organizations against the government for its failure to develop a long-term waste management strategy. As demonstrations continued, these demands expanded to express the need to change the political system in place. In this context, the paper aims at studying labor and social mobilizations during this period while it examines the assault of neo-liberal policies on labour as well as strategies of the government apparatus to repress protests and movements. What did cause this turnaround? What marks the distinctiveness of these movements when compared with those of the reconstruction period? In terms of research design, this study relies on conventional process tracing and the construction of a detailed timeline of major process events through content analysis of governmental documents and articles and op-eds in the major media, and interviews with pivotal policy actors from government, trade unions and issue experts. The paper explores the impact of neoliberal policies on the structure and trajectory of labour mobilizations in Lebanon and their movements for change. The paper also focuses attention on neo-liberal globalization’s repercussions on social mobilizations through professional practices of political aid.

Scholars have pointed out that labor and democracy movements in Egypt witnessed an upsurge in the 2000s paving the way to the Egyptian uprising of 2011. To explain the unprecedented wave of labor unrest and youth mobilizations, scholars have emphasized the role of hardships and the acceleration of neoliberal polices in the 2000s. But since hardening life conditions and neoliberal attacks are the norm of both the 1980s and the 2000s, other factors are necessary for explaining this unpreceded protest wave. Two main changes stand out. There were alterations to Egyptian capitalism, and subsequent political realignments that took place between the 1980s and the 2000s. I first argue that the concomitance of three factors gave more workers leverage and disruptive capacities. The adoption of an export strategy, and the increasing dependence of the state on the growing competitive export sectors gave workers in these sectors leverage. At the same time, despite the neoliberal turn, Egypt still had a significant public sector, with unionized workers, and a history of labor militancy. The decline in state-labor corporatist relations, and in state repression in comparison to the 1980s also played a role. Second, changes in Egyptian capitalism were associated with political realignments of the 2000s — which led to the disintegration of the NDP social base, hindering the ruling party’s ability to mobilize support. It also led to an opening of a political opportunity in the 2000s, which created space for the opposition to mobilize around the 2005 parliamentary elections, invigorating youth activism. The Egyptian state then faced massive social unrest and a growing political opposition. The ability of the vibrant democracy movement to put forward a clear political reform program by the end of 2010, the continued mobilizations of disruptive labor sectors, and the excessive exclusionary policies of the regime in 2010 undermined the legitimacy of the state, and led to mass mobilizations by 2011, forcing the regime to concede to Mubarak’s removal.