Authoritarian stability is a major concern of contemporary comparative politics. Scholars have long debated what makes regimes stable, arguing for the importance of state power (Slater 2010), legislatures (Gandhi 2008), political parties (Magaloni 2008, Svolik 2014), international support (Levitsky and Way 2010), new technologies of rule (Heydemann 2007) and rentierism. Tenacious authoritarian systems in the Middle East loom large in these discussions, whether as outliers or as paradigmatic cases. Yet the concept at the center of all this scholarly attention, "stability," remains worryingly underconceptualized. Indeed, the primary empirical measure of regime stability in political science is still the number of years a regime lasts. Stability-as-duration fails us in at least three ways: (1) it cannot distinguish between regimes whose tenures are uneventful and those that barely hang on to power; (2) it elides shifts and policy changes that take place within a single regime (i.e., it assumes that stability is stasis); and (3) it leaves us unable to define what makes stability appealing—surely political actors who speak longingly of "istiqrar" do not only mean that they want the current regime to last as long as possible. This paper offers a more meaningful and illuminating concept of stability that can better anchor empirical research. Thinking through academic and colloquial diagnoses of stability over the nine years of the long Arab Spring, I suggest that stability inheres in state-society units rather than in regimes. A stable system is one in which the kinds of challenges most likely to emanate from society are challenges with which the regime has historical experience and to which it has adapted. This is a coevolutionary model of stability: patterns of social life, economic shifts, and other stressors (often originating from state policy) produce certain kinds of threats to regimes; regimes, for their part, evolve over time to respond to some threats rather than others. I demonstrate the analytical leverage of my approach through a case study of Morocco in 2011. Despite dramatic, sustained mobilization, Morocco's "Arab Spring" protests were (and still are) regularly dismissed as not posing any real danger to regime stability. Indeed, observers often remark that Morocco "didn't have an Arab Spring," though it witnessed protests both larger and more long-lasting than many breathlessly-covered demonstrations elsewhere. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, I explore this seeming disconnect, locating its justification in patterns of state-society interaction established long before February 20.

This paper analyzes why, in recent years, entrepreneurship has become an organizing principle guiding contemporary youth policy across Arab autocracies. I begin by arguing that the turn towards entrepreneurialism must be understood in the context of autocracies’ search for sustainable forms of rule in the post-welfare era. In recent decades, as ongoing neoliberal economic reforms undermined regimes’ ability to respect traditional welfare-oriented social contracts, some regimes crumbled under formidable oppositions during the Arab Uprisings, while others survived by selectively honoring old social contracts while suppressing resistance. However, today, regimes face a numerically sizable young generation who has inherited expectations of modern transitions to adulthood, characterized by longer education and marriage after securing stable wage employment. Yet, economic conditions and policies mean that youth suffer from failed modern transitions and protracted unemployment and waithood, a combination which risks breeding an economically and politically disaffected future citizenry potentially threatening regime stability in the long run. Scholars have analyzed regimes’ adaption to unraveling social contracts primarily by focusing on the reconstitution of ruling elites, while largely ignoring the political risks emanating from the absence of a functioning model of autocratic popular citizenship consistent with regimes’ much slimmer commitments to providing jobs, welfare, subsidies and other public goods. Through an ethnography of Jordan’s regime-led Youth Empowerment Sector, I assess the effectiveness of entrepreneurialism as a post-welfare autocratic citizenship model. I begin by analyzing how youth are interpellated as market actors by pushing a definition of the entrepreneur that rests on a separation between the innovator and the possessor of capital; by promoting the illusion that youth already possess the means of production (in their phones and laptops); and by promoting a positive, moderately transgressive, go-getter attitude that obfuscates social and economic barriers to starting a business. I then argue, through a reading of Friedrich Hayek’s approach to justice, that the primary effect of entrepreneurialism is to bring forth a sense of procedural, market justice among Jordanian youth that destabilizes attachments to the social, substantive justice model that formed the basis of the old social contract. Whereas the exact effects of market justice on acquiescence to authoritarian power is difficult to measure, this paper sheds light on why autocrats are so invested in these practices, while contributing to understanding modes of individual endurance and hope in contemporary neoliberal autocracies.

How do autocratic regimes attract and maintain women’s support? This paper will explore the mechanisms of autocratic bargain with women through the examination of the welfare transfers took during the Justice and Development Party’s rule (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi-AKP) in Turkey, 2002 to present. The Turkish case is significant for two reasons. First, the Turkish case is archetypical in demonstrating women’s support for an autocratic regime because as women constitute the majority of AKP’s supporters. Second, the AKP has a long record in government, which enables one to study trends that emerge over time. The examination of the Turkish case relies on original data collected during the fieldwork in the summers of 2013 and 2014. The primary sources consist of both qualitative and quantitative sources. The former includes interviews, party and government documents, brochures, reports, bills and laws, and speeches by the top brass while the latter, quantitative data, is the micro-level Household Surveys between 2003-2016 by Turkish Statistical Institute (Türk ?statistik Enstitüsü— TÜ?K). Through the examination of sources in Turkish and English and mixed method, this article argues that the arguments about institutional arrangements to increase women’s representation, such as quotas and reserved seats, fall short in explaining the mechanisms of autocratic appeal to women in Turkey. Rather, a meticulously tailored combination of clientelist distribution of material benefits, such as cash and in-kind transfers, which target women of a certain class, and non-material benefits, such as the creation of an Islamic social network that provides women with emotional and social support, are at play. It should be emphasized that both processes, namely the distribution of material benefits as well as the creation of an Islamic community, are closely tied to the economic liberalization that has undermined women’s economic power as well as diminished a sense of community. Put simply, autocratic regimes have benefited from the declining social safety nets as they enable autocrats to distribute clientelist welfare transfers that are selective and gendered.

The post-colonial state in the Arab region and its subsequent state-led development policies ushered in an era of tight social control. The state created corporatist structures to control groups representation, and their organizations and social demands. Unlike Latin America, the initial period of popular incorporation and social mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s was used predominantly to solve elite conflicts for power grab (not for economic imperatives and social transformation). Various elite factions appealed to popular constituencies to prevail over their rivalries. Populist elites, therefore, appealed to powerful social classes of the colonial era (labor, middle class professionals, peasants, urban notables) to serve as a bastion and legitimate foundation for the post-colonial regimes. These social groups were embedded into a network of patronage with the populist leadership that did not allow them to have autonomous organizations. The decay of state corporatism in the Arab region in the 1980s did not give rise to either more competitive and democratic politics (Brazil, Chile, Venezuela) or new repressive regimes to suppress demands of previously privileged groups (Peru and Argentina). How did the decline of corporatist arrangements in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Algeria represent an evolution of authoritarianism? And how did the authoritarian regimes in these countries stay immune against popular demands for radical changes? I argue that the legacy of popular incorporation strategy of depoliticization and demobilization on the one hand, and continuity with the composition of the ruling elites undermined the autonomy and capacity of collective action of different social groups and perpetuated the one-dominant party rule. The dismantling of the corporatist structures in Latin America resulted in reconfiguration of the party systems and changes in the ideological orientation/positions of traditional parties which ultimately led to the two divergent trajectories of democratization or a harsh repressive turn. I deploy comparative historical approach to show how political variables of the legacy and the strategy of populist elites and the lack of alternative political opposition in the Arab region enabled old military-technocratic elites to loosen up their control over society and maintain their grip on power. I also use pair comparisons to put the Arab countries in cross-regional perspective with the Latin American countries.