Why do some protests call for moderate reforms while others demand regime change? This distinction was evident during the Arab Spring, when some countries primarily experienced ‘radical’ protests demanding regime change and others only experienced calls for reform. This project seeks to explain why protest groups call for regime change, rather than reforms. Existing work on the adoption of radicalism tends to rely on structural explanations, such as relative deprivation or modernization. However, other research suggests that the relative position of individuals within their social group is more relevant in predicting adoption of radical beliefs. As such, it is argued protests making (radical) demands for regime change are a result of organization by new political movements, which rely on individuals that are isolated from a country’s political culture. While established political movements can draw on long-standing supporters to attend protests, new political movements lack the organized base that would turn out to protest for particular cause. Instead, new movements must rely on protest attendees who are not socialized in the political system and are more likely to express opposition to the government in absolute terms. It follows that more politically socialized individuals should be more likely to participate in moderate protests, while those who are not should be more likely to join radical protests. The theory is tested at both individual and group levels. At the individual level, a survey experiment of Lebanese adults is conducted to explain the effect of political socialization on participation in either moderate or radical protests. Some respondents are primed with a question about the Lebanese government's worst policy, intended to channel negative sentiment toward the government into a specific grievance. Then, respondents are asked whether they would participate in either moderate or radical protests. The findings show that respondents who receive the socialization prime are more likely to participate in moderate protests, while those who do not receive the prime are more likely to participate in radical protests. A group-level test is conducted using original data on protests, protest demands and participants gathered from 19 Arabic-speaking countries between 1992 and 2014. Findings show that protests without clear organizing groups or organized by groups that recently entered a country's political arena are more likely to call for regime change. Cumulatively, results suggest that political socialization plays a key role in both shaping individual protest participation and group-level protest demands across the Arab World.

The increasing dominance of human rights discourses and the international and regional diffusion of repressive tactics and their discursive justifications may have induced changes, probably also learning processes, in authoritarian regimes’ legitimation discourses. It is well established that authoritarian and democratic governments alike seek to be regarded as legitimately holding power. But they are also interested in presenting the state’s exertion of force as legitimate. In some instances, repression as such may even serve the purpose of preserving and creating legitimacy. Although state repression is often depicted as the opposite of legitimation, coercive actions can also have the function of generating legitimacy in the eyes of certain parts of the population. While state repression is not in decline, the question arises whether its discursive framing has changed in recent years, and if so, how and why. This paper presents a conceptualization of the suggested links between legitimation and repression. Based on the integration of research findings from recent authoritarianism studies, including its international dimensions, with insights from conflict studies, especially framing theory, it identifies two important aspects of this mechanism: First, different types of repression justification can be distinguished along the dimensions of content and structure. Second, the main reason why the legitimation of repression may be successful lies in the different (domestic and international) target groups of repression and legitimation. The paper examines the link between legitimation and repression by qualitatively comparing two authoritarian regimes – Egypt and Uzbekistan – both synchronically and diachronically. First, current repressive policies together with their justification are investigated. After presenting the frames that regime elites have recently used to legitimize the repression of domestic Islamist movements, these findings are contrasted with the legitimation discourse concerning other targets of repression as well as with the repression of Islamists in former times. The second part of the empirical analysis investigates whether beyond endogenous factors the justification of the repressive policy is a result of international or regional influences. The mechanism at work could be diffusion, lesson-drawing or learning.

Both classic works of political philosophy and modern social scientific research underscore the significance of political tolerance in a well-functioning democracy. By extension, if this civil libertarian norm is vital to already established democratic regimes, then such attitudes are all the more crucial in the context of democratization. Yet, in such a setting—where, arguably, tolerance matters most—this trait is often found in exceedingly short supply. How, then, might we augment tolerant judgements during this transitional period and guard against normatively undesirable outcomes? In order to theorize potential mechanisms, this study examines the determinants of political tolerance in the context of two countries that recently experienced the breakdown of long-entrenched autocratic rule, though with markedly different consequences to date: Egypt and Tunisia. The analysis marshals underutilized survey data, including the most recent waves of the Afro- and Arab-Barometers, to test the robustness of prior findings and advance a novel component in the tolerance equation. First, to better operationalize political tolerance, I go beyond measuring mere affect toward a particular group (the typical gauge in previous comparative studies, given the data limitations), combining that attitude with a desire to limit the same group’s access to the public sphere. Next, in addition to testing the influence of established demographic, dispositional, and contextual factors on tolerance judgements, I hypothesize that “party channeling”—which is effectively a proxy for the salience of formal political diversity and the nascent commitments to the democratic process that this institutional arrangement engenders—is an impactful driver of political tolerance in that it makes acute what is normally a long-term learning process. The empirical findings lend preliminary support for this party channeling theory of democratic learning. The article concludes by articulating some preliminary intuitions on how the key hypothesized antecedent—that is, political diversity—may emerge in this context.

Social entrepreneurship is a relatively recent approach to socio-economic development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that has emerged in the early 2000s and has been ‘booming’ since the Arab uprisings. Social entrepreneurs address social issues through business means. They have adapted the international neoliberal discourse emphasizing innovation, sustainability, entrepreneurship and active citizenship and seek strategic, cross-sector partnerships with the state, private sector, donors and communities. Yet, little research has been conducted on this phenomenon and how it relates to strategies of authoritarian renewal of the political regimes in power in the MENA region. In general, there is a substantive literature on neoliberalism and authoritarian renewal in the MENA region. Some of the questions on how societal actors respond to neoliberalism and authoritarian renewal have been addressed. Notwithstanding the contributions of these literatures, there is a lack of knowledge on how and to what extent state, societal actors, business and international actors actually join up and despite their commitment to socio-economic development contribute to authoritarian renewal. Social Entrepreneurship research, on the other hand, neglects the political and it hardly engages in critical analyses. With regard to the MENA region, only few studies cover social entrepreneurship but remain rather descriptive and ignore the political entirely. This paper addresses these gaps through a diverse case study of social entrepreneurship networks (SENs) – composed of state institutions, private sector actors, support organizations and social entrepreneurs – in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco in the period between 2003 and 2014. It does so through a social network analysis based on semi-structured interviews and secondary material. Empirical data collection took place during field research between 2011 and 2013. The main argument is that SENs contribute to authoritarian renewal in several ways: They include select actors/groups of actors and raise a new elite generation of socio-economic leaders; generate (im-)material resources such as finance and international linkages and they engage in problem-fixing of pressing socio-economic issues. However, the three cases analyzed in this paper suggest that the engagement of the different types of actors in a SEN and the existence of a political agenda on socio-economic development to which social entrepreneurs can be aligned plays a decisive role in how and to what extent SENs contribute to authoritarian renewal. Related to that, not the state type (monarchy/republic) but the engagement of the state matters.