This panel analyses the transformation of social mobilization and of state responses since the time of the Arab uprisings. While a considerable amount of work has been produced on the uprisings and their significance for Middle Eastern politics (Gerges 2014), less attention has been paid to the new forms of social mobilization and of authoritarian learning that have been generated by these events.
This panel brings together specialists of social movements and politics from below (and from outside) with specialists of regimes and institutional transformations to analyze the interactions between protest movements, modes of social mobilization, and the "surviving" authoritarian or transitional states of the region. The common thread between all the presentations is an interest in specifying the interactions between the longer-term mechanisms of 'authoritarian upgrading' (Hinnebusch 2012) and the mechanisms of social mobilization revealed during the Arab uprisings (Pearlman 2013).
The panel examines three processes of change in the region. First protest movements and social mobilization have commonly been assessed to be too weak to directly undermine the regimes in place (Wiktorowicz 2004, Bayat 2010). The panelists analyze recent mechanisms and processes to evaluate how they diverge from earlier forms mobilization. They consider if and how these uprisings have introduced new repertoires of collective action and how these have affected relations between state and society (Tarrow 1993).
Second, the panellists revisit the principal mechanisms and factors that underpinned the actions of authoritarian regimes in traditional protest situations (Brownlee 2007, Schlumberger 2008) to map the evolution of these practices in the aftermath of the uprisings. They analyze the short to medium-term adaptations of the regimes to the new forms of social mobilization and collective action of opposition actors in the post-uprisings period.
Third, the panellists reflect on the convergences between institutionalist and social movement approaches to Middle East politics that would be most useful to explore today (Goodwin 2012, Leenders 2013). An emerging research program is beginning to explore whether new forms of social mobilization - informal, non-hierarchical, spontaneous, and often rejecting formal institutionalization - challenge established understandings of how oppositions and resistance to authoritarianism affect the stability of embedded authoritarian regimes. Whether social movement frameworks can adequately capture and explain these forms of social mobilization and, if not, how to develop the analytical tools to understand their origins and dynamics, is a question of urgency for understanding the social and political trends unfolding in the Arab world today.
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The experience of Arab uprisings since 2011 offers an opportunity critically to evaluate patterns of authoritarian governance in the Arab world and the transformations they have undergone since the outbreak of mass protests in early 2011. Specifically, the paper will assess the governance experiences of this period to assess competing claims about the causes of authoritarian resilience and of the outbreak of mass protests that continue to present a significant challenge to autocratic regimes across the Middle East. Drawing on evidence from a range of cases, including Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, and the GCC, the paper will focus on the economic policy responses of Arab governments to protest movements animated, in part, by deep-seated economic grievances. It will use the political economy of regime responses to mass political movements to shed important light on the underlying dynamics of authoritarian governance in the Arab world since 2011, and what theoretical conclusions we can draw from an assessment of these dynamics.
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The Arab Uprisings that began in 2010 and continue into the present have led many scholars of Middle East politics to take a hard look at our theories and hypotheses about robust authoritarianism, social movements, and forms of political dissent. Many have been concerned with the failure to predict, while others have focused on why major uprisings spread to some locations and not others, and still others have concerned themselves with the resilience of the authoritarian structures.
This paper does not claim to identify the "what's missing" from these debates, and as thus will not resolve and of those questions indicated above. However, it seeks to employ a different lens--actually, two lenses--to look at the uprisings from a new perspective in order to identify patterns or developments that might have remained less noticed. Because most of the literature on revolutions, social movements, and even democratization utilize a hypothetical "stages" continuum (and sometimes even teleology) to identify the various elements of uprisings or transitions, the "space" of analysis is typically at the nation-state level (which states saw major uprisings, which were successful, etc.) while the "time" of the uprisings is seen as moving from a particular moment that marks a significant rupture from the past. What happens when we "slice" up the uprisings--and even the region--into different conceptual units? What new insights emerge?
This paper will utilize substantial primary material from Jordan and secondary material from elsewhere in the Middle East to explore the uprisings through an approach that does not put the uprisings per se as the central unit of analysis. It will utilize critical approaches to temporalities, memory, and geography to illustrate--through largely interpretive and sometimes ethnographic lenses--that the lived experiences of the uprisings often have little in common with the theoretical models of stages, rupture, and spacial clusterings that are most common in the field of political science.
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Dr. Frederic Vairel
The aim of this paper is to understand how self-limitation works in contemporary Moroccan mobilizations and what this case study can bring to broader social movements’ knowledge. When it comes to study social movements self-limitation, social movements analysis, be it the resources mobilization theory or its more recent and sophisticated form the “political process” model, provides limited help. Since its elaboration during the 70s, the main object of the field was the disruptive dimension of large numbers protracted mobilizations. Most of the literature deals with contentious politics, the civil rights movement, antiwar and anti-nuclear movements, LGBT pride movements, environmental protests whose magnitude, claims and political agendas, repertoires and numbers of activist groups where disrupting public order. In that perspective, MENA is no exception since most of the literature deals with Islamism.
Moroccan mobilizations, particularly the February 20 Movement, can provide some clues in order to understand how and for what reasons activists carefully self-limit their mobilizations. In 2011, despite their spread in various part of the territory, contestation dynamics did not reach national amplitude, by spin-off processes from one site to another. I will look institutionalization processes of the Moroccan protest space and protesters and security forces learning effects. Both were the reason for extremely cautious behaviors in an effort to avoid escalation. I will also address how actors of the Moroccan contentious space calculate their moves and will explain why self-limitation is not linked to any local moral economy. In other words, regardless of the radical posture claimed by members of the Movement - or coined by their critics in an attempt to delegitimize them - the issue of mobilizations and public controversies was nothing more than the reform of the monarchy. Finally, the paper will describe the relation between the contentious space and institutional politics. Political parties and unions offered only limited support to mobilization, when they did not oppose it: the 2011 demonstrations were an accurate indicator of the depoliticization of institutional politics.
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Dr. Hesham Sallam
The Arab Uprisings of 2011 posed some serious challenges to conventional wisdom in political science research about the durability of authoritarian rule in a region that was once thought of as exceptionally resistant to democratic development. Relatedly, the uprisings brought to light a host of actors, processes, and relationships that were at the peripheries of theoretical discussions on authoritarian politics. Among these actors are protest movements organized around loose, non-hierarchical networks and that operate outside of the realm of formal organized politics. Using an inductive study of the case of Egypt between 2011 and 2013, this paper attempts to theorize the role of protest movements in the Arab Uprisings and, accordingly, identify a set of research agendas aimed at enhancing the theoretical and historical depth of our understanding of the origins of the uprisings, as well as the divergent trajectories they followed.
The paper argues that in the particular case of Egypt protest movements played a major role in aggregating a variety of political and economic grievances that were crowded out of formal opposition politics in light of the growing irrelevance of opposition political parties as a result of cooptation and repression. During the lead-up to the uprising, such movements also played a role in politicizing a variety of social and economic agendas that traditionally fell outside of purview of formal politics. While protest movements were essential to setting the permissive conditions for the popular mobilization that occurred in the winter of 2011, evidence from multiple experiences of nation-wide protests between 2011 and 2013 suggest that the sustainability of mobilization—and thus the likelihood that it could generate sufficient pressure on the state—is largely dependent on the short-term support it receives from organized political groups and actors that normally occupy the formal political sphere. Evidence also suggests that the loose, non-hierarchical modes of organization that these movements adopt have made them more resistant than formal political organizations to authorities’ strategies of cooptation and repression. Yet these same structures have also limited the capacity of such movements to participate effectively in formal politics during the post-Mubarak period. Thus, the paper argues that these trends enhance our understanding of the major paradox of the Egyptian uprising, namely: powerful waves of popular mobilization that are able to extract short-term concessions from the ruling authority, but ones that are unable to effect meaningful long-term changes in the realm of formal politics.
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Dr. Francesco Cavatorta
Co-Authors: Stefano Maria Torelli
The prominent role Salafism – in all its guises – has played in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution and subsequent process of regime change has raised numerous and legitimate questions about the commitment of Salafist groups to democracy and to social pluralism. All Tunisian political actors have reacted negatively to Salafist activism because of the apparent obstacle to the process of transition. Even the Islamist party Nahda, despite being accused of encouraging and protecting Salafists, ultimately took a tough stance against Ansar a Sharia (AST), the most significant Salafi groups in the country, declaring the group a terrorist organisation.
It seems quite paradoxical that political parties and social movements that had gone through the harsh repressive measures of the Ben Ali regime resorted to rather a rather similar strategy to deal with the challenge of AST. What explains this repressive turn in light of the oft repeated mantra of former dissidents, and scholarly work (Hafez, 2003; Hamidi, 2011), that repression only breeds radicalization?
The answer to this question is particularly important in so far as the case of Tunisia is quite exceptional because it is not a case of authoritarian learning in the face of new types of social mobilisation. Despite the difficult and volatile process of regime change Tunisia has not reverted back to authoritarian rule, but significant sectors of its political and social elites have been able to deal with the challenge of Salafism largely through calls for repression. This has to do with both internal and external factors. On the one hand, the inability of political and social groups to deal with the reality of a Tunisia that they had ignored the existence of has led to calls for stamping down radical religious movements that organise through mosque-based networks in poorer areas, representing therefore both an ideological and a class threat. On the other, the international community, as if to test the moderation of the Islamist Nahda, has demanded a clamp down an Salafists as well to which Nahda, eager to please, has positively responded. Repression however has not eliminated the demands of AST’s Salafism nor has it significantly undermined some of the social prestige it enjoys. In short, the presentation investigates how past practices of Islamist mobilization and state repression frame the options for new forms of Islamist activism and state policing in a post-revolutionary Tunisian polity.
