When embattled autocrats threatened by the Arab Spring’s mobilizations turned towards their armed forces for support, the stage was set for the military elite to shape the outcome of the critical junctures in 2011. Some acted as the regime’s gravediggers when they defected whereas others tried to impede change and answered the autocrats’ call for repression. Accounting for the top brass’s divergent behavior remains one of the fundamental puzzles of the Arab Spring. To do so, I argue that it is essential to problematize the relationship between the senior officers and their subordinates, rather than to treat the officer corps, let alone the military at large, as a unified actor. Just as importantly, I maintain that institutional interactions between autocratic rulers, the military elite and the mid-ranking and junior officers, shaped by decades of coup-proofing tactics, predetermined whether the military elite had a vested interest in the status-quo and, when that was the case, the capacity to defend it. In other words, I contend that institutional legacies from the post-decolonization decades need to be reexamined for a deeper understanding of opportunities and constraints structuring the top officers’ behavior in 2011. The three cases under study cover the whole range of combinations presented by the Arab Spring: a military elite that had the incentive, but not the capacity, to defend the status-quo (Egypt); a military elite that had both the incentive and the capacity to do so (Syria); and, finally, a military elite that had neither the incentive, nor the capacity, to keep the ruling elite in power (Tunisia). By analyzing these cases, I aim to present a theoretical framework applicable to other contexts as well, both inside and outside the Middle East.

After the undertaking of the security sector’s reform in the wake of the Tai’f agreement purpose of de-confessionalizing the political space, Lebanon’s army has undergone a deep transformation. Although the expectations have not completely come into fruition, given the permanence of Syrian custodianship and Damascus’ influence on Lebanese political and military elites, Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have progressively enhanced their legitimacy in the national dimension as protector of state security. This paper contends that in the post-Tai’f period, LAF have been successful in accomplishing an endogenous process of de-confessionalization, which currently makes the army the only veritable super partes institution of the state. These dynamics have been pushed through after the outbreak of Syria’s crisis in 2011, for LAF have played a major role in defending Lebanon’s sovereignty against Syrian interferences. However the army’s role is compressed between external and domestic forces. In the pursuit of external threats’ proliferation, an interest-based reorientation of all of the Lebanese confessional parties has been bringing about a transformation of Lebanese civil-military relations, with the army acting in its capacity as a vehicle of carrying forwards an improvement of Lebanese sovereignty. In the same time, enduring political fragmentation is refraining this phenomenon, resorting the traditional Lebanese doctrine of “keeping the army weak and small”. Exploring the evolution of Lebanon’s civil-military relations, this paper investigates to what extent the convergence between the constitutional hybrid sovereignty and the need for an enhanced national sovereignty has been occurring

The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 have shaken the otherwise seemingly well-established authoritarian regimes of the Arab world. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the uprisings resulted in a surprising and unexpected regime change. In the eighteenth century under the Ottoman influence these countries were very similar in terms of political administration, institutions, and military organization. The divergence in paths started with the European colonization at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries with each of these countries coming under different colonial rulers: Tunisia under French, Egypt under British, and Libya under Italian rule. In the post-colonial era each of these countries have experienced strong authoritarian rule with a high level of military-politicization, although the specific organizing principles of the military and security forces have varied in each country. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the level of military politicization affected regime-change in the Arab Spring period. The revolutionary outcomes have been very different in each of these countries: Egypt and Tunisia had a relatively peaceful overthrow of their reigning governments, while Libya descended into a bloody civil war that might have ended much differently had it not been for the outside intervention of the United States and the EU under the umbrella of NATO. Yet before we can understand the variation in revolutionary outcome we must explore the variation in the paths leading to revolution. This paper will argue that the differences in outcomes may be explained by exploring the differences in civil-military relations, as well as the various characteristics of the military apparatuses themselves. In particular, this paper claims that the level of politicization of the military and the degree of openness to pro-reform movements can explain the outcome of the uprisings. First it will present a typology of civil-military relations in the Middle East and North Africa. Secondly, it turns to three case-studies, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, in order to explore how the politicization of the military led to successful revolutions in those three cases. Finally it will comment on the possible contribution this research can provide the existing literature on civil-military relations in general, and the Arab world in particular.

As recent events have proved, the Soviet Union (and now Russia) and Syria have been close allies since World War II and such relationship appears as a direct legacy from the Cold War. Since the very beginning of the forties, the Soviet Union determined that geopolitical factors were to be taken into account in its strategy and their importance expanded in the following decade. From 1944 onwards, this partnership was enacted in several occasions. In 1944, Syria signed a Friendship Agreement with the Soviet Union while it was still under the French Mandate. In some respects, the Soviet Union supported and fought for the Syrian independence and conversely Syria recognized the Soviet Union as a close power. In 1952, two years before the Egyptian crisis when Nasser received arms supplies from the Soviet Union, Syria received military support from the Eastern bloc. Contrary to the Egyptian events, the Soviet support was not ensued by a massive wave of protests. During the summer of 1957 - summer of madness (Philip Anderson, 1995) -, the Soviet Union became deeply involved in the Syrian affairs and threatened the United States and its allies to launch a third World War if they attacked Syria. In return, Syrian politicians agreed that the Soviet Union held a "special" position vis-a-vis Syria (Khaled al-Azm, 1965). My communication will analyze the Syrian perspective in order to understand how and why some Syrian politicians started to request the Soviet Union help, what it meant for them, and what types of strategies they adopted to become closer to the Soviet Union, and therefore, how the Soviet Union strategy interacted with local elites. Neo-institutionalism may be used in order to determine the nature of the relations between the two countries. More generally, they provide some insights of more general application to the study of the dynamics of the interplay between the “Third World” and the superpowers. The Soviet assistance to Syria and its impact on the national political scene have to be reconsidered. Writing on this issue has just began and has to be clearly defined. Four dimensions interacted: political agreements, the economic and technical support, arm supplies, and cultural relations. Each of them needs to be explored in itself and then to be connected with each other in order to understand how the Soviet foreign policies were launched toward Syria and how Syrian politicians played with these different tools.