The debate on the nature of political rule and change in the Arab World has, over the last decades, mainly focused on ‘the regime’ with its analyses of (liberal) institutions such as elections, parliaments, political parties or civil society. This has led to a myriad of studies trying to unearth the ‘internal obstacles’ for political reform. Culturalist explanations (Islamic unadaptedness to capitalism or its authoritarian political culture), institutional accounts of regime survival strategies or the everlasting pragmatism of international relations (‘it is better to have our known dictators…’) all vied for causal explanation. This, in turn, led to a work of ‘labeling’ the nature of the persisting authoritarian regimes in the region: hybrid state, semi-authoritarian state, liberalized autocracy, de-liberalized state… With the ousting of President Ben Ali from Tunisia, academics had trouble situating the failure of what until recently was seen as a particularly entrenched authoritarian systems. What emerged was the idea that the corrupt ruler and his family had harvested all the generated benefits of the economic reforms and, in their greed, forget to spread the wealth to the population. Reducing the Tunisian revolution to a binary opposition between Ben Ali and the Tunisian people is too simplistic to apprehend what happened. In my presentation I will argue that the Tunisian revolution was made possible by the internal contradictions that the Tunisian economic policies of the last two decades have created. The neoliberal growth strategies have, for more than a decade, resulted in a complex compliance of most social classes and groups. When the internal contradictions of the economic organization became too difficult to manage for the government, social groups started to question the status quo thus making visible a tension between the political formula and the social structure of the country. Using a political economy and political sociology of the revolution, I will reframe the Tunisian Revolution in a narrative that analyses how the policies of economic reform have induced the uprising and how the social groups have defined their agency and how they have developed new forms of struggle and political alliances.

The question of democratization has dominated the study of political change in the Arab world over the last 20 years. Despite, the wide range of different explanations, a bulk of the analyses can be divided into two broader branches. First, transitologists believed that the Arab World was, just as elsewhere, subject to a linear transition to (liberal) democracy. Secondly, and opposed to the first branch, a growing group of sceptics began to criticize this ‘transition paradigm’ and argued that we should rather pay attention to “what in fact is going on” in the Arab World (Valbjørn&Bank, 2010). According to these scholars of “post-democratization studies”, Arab authoritarianism had proven again and again its renewal, resilience, persistence, robustness, etc… Yet, none of these perspectives seem to provide a satisfying answer to understand the current social upheavals with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions as mains events. In this paper, I want to formulate a critique these mainstream debates, stating that these accounts are subject to an ideological blindness (i.e. seeing change always in relation to this one possible narrative: a transition to liberal democracy). Secondly, I want to outline some new critical perspectives on political change and take into account the dialectical relation between local politics and global capitalism. In doing so, I want to explain how transition cannot be understood in terms of mainstream assumptions linking economic liberalization to democratization. Neither can it be understood as just a form of crony capitalism, in the course of which a small minority of domestic corrupt elites skim off all the capital surpluses. I want to emphasize (1) how neoliberal reform reflects a profound shift towards market-oriented modalities of authoritarian government; (2) how it leads to differentiated forms of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner&Theodore, 2002) that characterize the localization of wider political interests that involve local, regional, national and global actors who are assembled through and within new political configurations (Smith, 1998); (3) how, neoliberalism is not some political rationality immune to change itself. As such, I want to explore the transformative and contingent character of neoliberal government. The socio-economic crises and social protests of the neoliberal austerity programs in the 1980s are some of the political dynamics that have set into motion new perspectives on government, new modalities of state intervention and new ways of market-support which may have radically changed the ways of neoliberal government but not necessarily the balances of (class) power.

This paper investigates the interaction between workers and activists/intellectuals in Egypt against the background of neoliberal reform or increasing “accumulation through dispossession” (Harvey 2006) since the nineties. It is based on fieldwork conducted between 2008-2011. The main argument is that the saliency of working class industrial action during the last decade has interpellated layers of activists and intellectuals from political parties, NGOs , newspapers, etc. – orienting them “back to class” and encouraging the formation of class-based subjectivities. Conversely, activists and intellectuals have injected the movement with notions of a political struggle for democracy and civil rights. The totality of these relations are analyzed through an application of a combined paradigm which incorporates Hegelian, Marxian, Vygotskian perspectives and elements from Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). The dialectic between workers and activist-intellectuals is defined as a Subject: a shared system of activity striving towards self-consciousness and self-determination (Blunden 2010). In addition, the role and nature of Egyptian activist-intellectuals are theorized from a Gramscian frame of reference, which distinguishes not only between organic and traditional intellectuals, but also between their political, technical, ideological and aesthetical functions. Within the Subject two different processes are entwined. On the one hand, class struggle brings about a spontaneous rise of activist-intellectuals from the ranks of the workers themselves. On the other hand, existing activist-intellectuals are incorporated in the unfolding system of activity through a specific mode of cooperation: solidarity. Apart from solidarity there are also processes of colonization and commodification at work which attempt at subsuming working class subjectivities into other projects: Islamism, nationalism, liberalism, etc. The workers’ struggle in the industrial city of Mahalla al-Kubra serves as a concrete case-study of the development of a shared system of activity between workers and activist-intellectuals based on solidarity. Lastly, the impact of the Egyptian revolution on the development of the Egyptian class Subject is discussed, highlighting its role in bringing this shared system of activity to a new level of organization and consciousness.

Literature on democratisation in the Arab world has generally focused on the region’s resistance to democracy and the endurance of its authoritarian regimes. However, recent Arab revolts and uprisings have unsettled established paradigms and have called for reconceptualising academic debates on transitional politics in the Region. The Domino effect of economic and political contestation from Tunisia to Yemen has spurred initial but groundbreaking reflections on democratisation attempts from below. This paper attracts attention to the rather irregular and asymmetrical patterns of political change in the Arab world. It studies the Lebanese case in the wave of Arab revolts and illustrates how the longstanding albeit defective Arab democracy is, paradoxically enough, and contrary to liberalizing ventures in Tunisia and Egypt, experiencing a backlash. Shackled by exogenous and endogenous constraints causing bipolar cleavages in the country, the small Arab republic is facing various a trade off between liberalisation and stability. Against the backdrop of Arab change, the Lebanese case conveys various lessons as to the limitations of consolidating democracy in an unstable environment.

How can we account for dynamics of unrest and social change in post-revolutionary Iran? A supposed "rentier" state, social cleavages and coalitions have been in flux since the 1979 Revolution. The trajectory of social change in Iran challenges the common portrayals of its state-society relations as subsumable under a rubric of clientelism or populism. The rentier concept dominates conceptions of the country's political economy, nowhere more so than in the internal democratic factions of the elite and the social movements that surround them. This ideal-type of a state free from the "resource curse" lurks in almost every analysis of the country's politics and history. Yet this characterization belies the reality of contentious politics in Iran, given that the unruly middle classes who spearheaded 2009's oppositional Green Movement are as embedded, if not moreso, in resource flows from the government as the urban poor and rural semi-proletariat. I argue that, instead of a politics of production that leads us into the blind alley of "rentierism," we can better comprehend post-1979 social change by looking at the politics of distribution. Adapting the historical sociology of welfare states, I analyze changes in state-society relations in Iran through the conceptual apparatus of "welfare regimes," particular configurations of social policy that de-commodify daily life and are intertwined with a country's political economy and state formation. Iran currently possesses dual welfare regimes: a corporatist-conservative welfare regime inherited from the Pahlavi era, and a revolutionary welfare regime that arose in 1979 and solidified during the Iran-Iraq war. Using local government reports, archival documents, interviews with welfare administrators in Iran, and ethnography at several sites in Tehran and other cities, I show how social cleavages and grievances in Iran are conditioned by the state's mix of social policy. I also argue, however, that social policy played a key and unobserved role in empowering the "new class" which became the vocal center of Iran's vibrant democracy movements.