The Arab Spring demonstrated the extent to which military structure and decision-making determine whether peaceful uprisings lead to democratization, renewed authoritarianism, collapse, or civil war. Other authors have attempted to address this question but most have been limited by the time and scope of their arguments. Many early arguments about military behavior misread the outcome in Syria, some focused on only three or four cases and thus missed key variables, and others focused so closely on the Arab Spring that they failed to account for the ways previous cases undermined their theories. Military behavior in the Arab Spring must be explained on its own, but the Arab Spring also provides an opportunity for broader theorizing about military response to popular uprisings and demands for democracy. The militaries in the Arab Spring were more diverse in structure and behavior than in previous regional waves of uprising, like Eastern Europe in 1989, Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, or Latin America in the 1980s. As such, the events provide a fertile ground for building larger theories about the military in democratization while addressing the specifics of the Arab Spring cases. Based on research from the author’s upcoming book, "Revolts and the Military in the Arab Spring," to be published in 2018 by IB Tauris, this paper looks at seven popular uprisings, six Arab Spring cases and the 1977-1980 Iranian Revolution, and shows the key role military structure plays in regime survival and regime transformation. Using the civil-military relations and coup-proofing literature, the author breaks down the key facets of military structure into seven characteristics. He uses those variables to measure two key features of military structure: distance from the regime and internal cohesion. He then shows how different configurations of these features lead to military coup, successful repression, collapse, or civil war. In cases of regime collapse, other military structure variables are used to predict whether the outcome of the transition will be democratization, utopian revolution, or renewed authoritarianism. Unlike many studies of military behavior in the Arab Spring, the paper uses variables and methodology that are transportable other regions and time periods, building on both the Middle East literature and the democratization literature. As such, it provides both a better explanation for military behavior than other, more narrowly drawn, explanations of the Arab Spring, as well as using the Arab Spring to make broader observations about military structure and democratization.

Economic liberalization policies in the 90s led to substantial military autonomy in Egypt but much less in Iran. Why? This paper examines the effect of privatization on the degree of military autonomy attained by these militaries. Prior to the economic reforms, the centrally-planned states of Egypt and Iran utilized their militaries to implement development projects. Post-liberalization in the 90s, these militaries expanded into new economic sectors such as finance, manufacturing, and trade. The expansion impacted the balance of civil–military relations (CMR) differently in each case: Egypt’s military took over the state while Iran’s Revolutionary Guard became a coalition-maker. This paper argues that modes of privatization are crucial in explaining CMR variations. Economic reform led to varied capitalist development trajectories, which conditioned the empowerment or disempowerment of militaries vis-à-vis the private and semi-public sectors. Rapid privatization in the absence of strong market institutions increased militaries’ opportunities for asset-stripping. Conversely, economic policies that strengthened both market institutions and private sector growth, or facilitated an increase in number of competing economic actors, constrained a military’s economic leverage. The ultimate results were divergent control patterns since the two militaries had varying degrees of success in capitalizing on their economic power and translating it into political leverage.

The militaries’ economic role(s) in the Middle East have attracted much attention since the 2011 Arab uprisings. Specifically, The Egyptian Armed Forces (EAF) had been singled out as running a “business empire” with an incredibly wide-ranged statistic of “5-40% of the economy,” circulating in the literature. Obviously, one should ask is the military business market share as small as 5% or as big as 40% then? Or, more reasonably, has that share been oscillating and not monolithically the same, since 1952, as the literature currently have us believe? In triangulating the evidence to address the question of Middle East militaries' economic roles, this paper locates Turkey, Egypt and Israel together within the general political-economy phenomenon of the oscillation that took place as the three countries transitioned from welfare states with state-led enterprises into experimentations in free market economy. No study has paired these three countries’ trajectories together to systematically show similarities and differences. More specifically, the paper argues that in establishing the National Service Products Organization (NSPO) in 1978, to perform post-Peace Treaty developmental economic activities, Egypt was only mimicking a similar establishment of Turkey’s own Armed Forces Pension Fund (OYAK) of 1960, that was set, by law, following mutiny in the Turkish military, against Menderes policies that in the name of civilian control, cut resources for the military as a class, albeit within an overall entrepreneurially rising Turkish bourgeoisie in the 1950s. Sadat avoided such civil-military agitations by re-defining the military’s “developmental role” in a peace economy, thereby adopting aspects of Turkey’s model. Moreover, the Egypt’s military is equally compared to two traditions of “self-sufficiency” and “strategic sectors” of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), that currently dominate the High Tech business as a “strategic domain.” Thus, in this paper’s conceptualization, the three countries are to be understood within a Dynamic Regional Order that includes practices in the Middle East at large. The paper locates the very paradox of three armies’ contemporary neoliberal economic enterprises in the longer historical trajectory of war and peace economies; developmental and “modernization” literature; and recommendations for what was deemed “sound civil-military relations,” back at the time. The research findings tell, in in novel ways, the shared inception stories of military economic enterprises and their current contemporary perils. Methods for this comparative research design include examining primary documents, laws, media coverage, and anthropological ethnographic fieldwork interviewing in Turkey, Egypt and Israel on research trips (2011-2016).

Since the British mandate, Jordan has been linked to nearly every major violent conflict in the region. From multiple interstate wars, a civil war, and through to today’s regional conflicts, the effects on Jordan’s socio-political and socio-economic development have been profound. This paper analyzes Jordan’s relationship to its longest war, the case of Iraq beginning in the 1980s. The two countries share historical and social linkages in which war has played a large role. The character of violent conflict in Iraq has shifted from multiple instances of inter-state conflict in the 1980s to international sanctions, occupation, and metastasizing sub-state conflict tied to America’s wars on terrorism. How have these changing patterns of violent conflict shaped socio-economic development in Jordan? How has the Jordanian state responded? The argument of the paper is that while regional violence has provided the Hashemite regime with short term capital flows, the long term effect has been chronic fiscal crisis. Since the 1980s and accelerating in the new century, the Jordanian state’s provision of public goods has declined in response to fiscal crisis. By contrast, the military and security capacities of the state have drastically increased pushing Jordan more toward the model of military corporatism found in Egypt and Pakistan. In terms of theory, the paper contributes to a wider scholarly literature focused on how war shapes states and economies. With a few exceptions, work on Middle Eastern cases has lagged. Much of the literature views war and war preparation as either strengthening states and their economies or demolishing them. Jordan’s experience presents a hybrid outcome at odds with standard expectations. Preparing for war and crisis has engendered a fiscal crisis, weakening parts of the public sector, at the same time it has bolstered security capacities. The dilemma the country now faces is a security sector evolving into a corporate/political actor while by contrast regional crises no longer generate resources to mediate the deepening fiscal crisis. In addition to utilizing a secondary revisionist literature on Jordan’s political economy and its links to Iraq, this paper utilizes extensive interview research with Iraqi and Jordanian traders, businessmen, and former ministry officials. It also marshals newly available tax and fiscal data from governmental and international lending agencies in Amman. This paper is part of a larger project examining Jordan’s relationship to regional war since 1916.