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Abstract
Instead of writing off the post-uprising period in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a failed attempt at democratisation, this article argues that the region is still undergoing an ambiguous and contingent process in which democratisation survives as one likely path among others. From this alternative viewpoint, the uprisings have multi-faceted, complex and uncertain consequences that constitute the beginnings of a long-term transitional phase in which various forces of political development continue to coexist in competing fashions. We argue that amidst this ambiguous process, the uprisings have introduced game-changing dynamics with regard to democratisation. We further attempt to identify these dynamics and discuss the potential value of the post-uprising experience as an asset for regional democratisation. For this purpose, we underline at least three crucial aspects of the post-uprising experience regarding democratic development in the region: (1) the demonstration of the potential for political change, (2) the contribution to the democratic learning curve, and (3) the emergence of Tunisia as a ‘transition game’. This study aims to serve as a guiding analytical exercise in the study of democratisation within ambiguous political environments, such as the post-uprising MENA region, where identifying the direction of democratisation may prove difficult.
Acknowledgements
We greatly thank the Third World Quarterly editors and anonymous reviewers for their patient assistance as we revised our work. In particular, one reviewer’s very useful and meticulous feedback counted much in our paper’s improvement. We also extend our special thanks to Mehmet Yegin and Hasan Selim Ozertem for their valuable feedback, as well as John Dykes, Kemal Atay and Ahsen Kocaman for their editorial assistance. One of the authors also acknowledges the Center for Religious Studies at Central European University for their generous support towards the completion of this research journey.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Leyla, “قامت الثّورة لماذا,” .
2 Gersman, “Islam and Democracy after the Arab Spring.” Also, for an alternative study like ours, see Lynch, New Arab Wars.
3 Cavatorta, “No Democratic Change,” 135.
4 O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, 1.
5 Concerning the relationship between conceptions on democracy, we think there exists a sequential relationship as follows: democratic development -> democratisation/democratic transition -> democracy (democratic consolidation). However, in the contexts where our explanations equally apply to democratic development and democratisation, we use the two terms interchangeably.
6 Teorell, Determinants of Democratization.
7 Carothers, “Democracy Assistance,” 7.
8 Berman, “Lessons from Europe,” 37.
9 Schedler, “What Is Democratic Consolidation?,” 97.
10 Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm.”
11 Hinnebusch, “Introduction: Understanding the Consequences”; Lynch, Arab Uprisings Explained.
12 Valbjørn, “Reflections on Self-Reflections.”
13 Brownlee, Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform.
14 See e.g. Feng and Zak, “Determinants of Democratic Transitions.”
15 Older interviews are mostly elite interviews conducted during field research in 2012, 2013 and 2016. These interviews aimed at discussing certain pulses of democratisation with interviewees. Rather than using it systematically, we used the interview data mostly for illustrative purposes. As for the interviews in 2019, we systematically used them to explain the Tunisian case. They consist of remote interviews with scholars from the region with think tank and research center backgrounds. There were only few that we could contact, especially through personal networks. We also tried to contact many others from the 2018 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, but there were very few positive responses. We contacted them as we thought that they could provide us with a regional snapshot. In our interviews, we briefly asked them how the people and elites living in other Arab countries see the Tunisian experience.
16 See Bellin, “Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East.”
17 Lynch, Arab Uprisings: The Unfinished Revolutions, 1.
18 Kuran, “Now Out of Never.”
19 M. Bishara, Invisible Arab.
20 Korany and El-Mehdi, Arab Spring in Egypt, 9.
21 See Dinçer, “Explaining Duration of Leadership Change.”
22 Berman, “Lessons from Europe,” 31.
23 For a comparative debate on consensual politics, see e.g. Hecan, “Comparative Political Economy of the IMF Arrangements.”
24 Welzel and Inglehart, “Role of Ordinary People in Democratization,” 126.
25 Interview with Michael Hudson, August 20, 2014, also published in Turkish monthly magazine Analist, 9 (2014), 39–41.
26 Korany and El-Mahdi, Arab Spring in Egypt, 2.
27 Cavatorta, “No Democratic Change,” 142–3.
28 The data is generated by searching for four keywords – protests, demonstration, riot and mass mobilisation – in primary newspaper sources in the Lexis-Uni database. For further details, see Clark and Regan, “Mass Mobilization Protest Data,” V3.
29 This certainly begs a specific empirical investigation of the recent protests to see how much the Arab uprisings affected people’s participation in the recent protest movements. Yet there are many clues that the legacy of the Arab uprisings is a part of the recent mass mobilisation psychology and associated discussions. See e.g. Dunne, “Fear and Learning in the Arab Uprisings”; Kirkpatrick, “Arab Spring, Again?”; and Malsin, “Middle East Protesters.”
30 Carothers, “How Democracies Emerge,” 24.
31 Interview with Dr Tariq al-Bishry, Former Deputy of Council of State, January 2, 2013, Cairo, Egypt.
32 Diamond, “Toward Democratic Consolidation,” 8–9.
33 Ibid.
34 Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies,” 17.
35 Ibid.
36 Hardig, “Beyond the Arab Revolts,” 1132.
37 Ibid., 1133.
38 Tessler, Jamal, and Robbins, “New Findings on Arabs and Democracy,” 89.
39 Eligati, “Foreign Funding in Egypt after the Revolution.”
40 Abdou et al., “How Can the US and International Finance.”
41 Yerkes, “State–Society Relations,” 10.
42 Eligati, “Foreign Funding in Egypt after the Revolution.”
43 Kausch, “Foreign Funding in Post-Revolution Tunisia,” 1–2.
44 Ibid., 2.
45 Ibrahim, “معوقات التحول الديمقراطي”, .
46 Ibid.
47 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2012 - Libya”.
48 Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies.”
49 Diamond, “Toward Democratic Consolidation,” 15.
50 Cevadi, “هل ينهي.”
51 Muasher, “Path to Political Parties.”
52 Kausch, “Political Parties in Young Arab Democracies,” 2.
53 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2012 - Libya”.
54 Kausch, “Political Parties in Young Arab Democracies,” 3.
55 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2013 - Libya”.
56 Al-Muslimi, “Viability of Yemen’s New Political Parties.”
57 Alwazir, “Yemen’s Enduring Resistance.”
58 Ibid.
59 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2012 - Yemen”.
60 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2015 - Yemen”.
61 Interview with Professor Nadia Mostafa, Cairo University, May 30, 2016, Cairo, Egypt.
62 Interview with Al-Bishri.
63 Aras and Falk, “Authoritarian ‘Geopolitics’ of Survival in the Arab Spring,” 323.
64 Ounnissi, “Ennahda from Within,” 6–7.
65 Interview with Amr Musa, then one of the members of the constitution committee, January 2, 2013, Cairo, Egypt.
66 Interview with Mostafa.
67 Dinçer and Hecan, Legacy of Statehood.
68 See Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay.”
69 Diamond, “Three Paradoxes of Democracy,” 49.
70 Mansour, “Egypt’s Human Rights Movement.”
71 TIMEP, “TIMEP Brief: Freedom of Association.”
72 Interview with Nathan J. Brown, August 21, 2014, also published in Turkish monthly magazine Analist, 9 (2014), 30–31.
73 Mansour, “Resist or Flee.”
74 Ibid.
75 Altai Consulting, “Libya Civil Society Mapping”; also, interview with Fatima A. El Moussawi, The Civil Society Knowledge Centre, Beirut, Lebanon, August 15, 2019.
76 Abdou et al., “How Can the US and International Finance.”
77 Darrag, “Politics or Piety?”
78 Ibid.
79 Interviews with Dr Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Chairman of Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, December 13, 2012, Cairo, Egypt; and Amr Musa, Former Head of Arab League, January 2, 2013, Cairo, Egypt.
80 Dinçer, Hecan, and Özgüler, Tunisia’s Muslim Democrats.
81 Malsin, “Middle East Protesters.”
82 Starr, “Democratic Dominoes.”
83 Carothers, “How Democracies Emerge,” 24.
84 See Bellin, “Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East.”
85 Shehata, “الأحزاب الهوياتية.”
86 Schedler, “What Is Democratic Consolidation?”
87 Ibid., 91.
88 Arab Center, Washington, DC, “Tunisia in Transition.”
89 See O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” 56.
90 Interview with Dr Fouad Farhaoui, Université Moulay Ismail-Maroc, Paris, France, August 9, 2019.
91 In a closed meeting with Dawa Party members in Ankara in 2013, a member said that they were actually expecting the uprisings first in Egypt rather than in Tunisia. Similarly, in another meeting in Ankara in 2011, Egyptian activist Ahmad Zahran said that “[They] suddenly realized that the Tunisians did that first and [they] looked bad, [they] had to do something.”
92 For a review of Masri’s book on Tunisia, see Lepro, “Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly?”
93 Interview with Dr Ali Hussein Bakeer, independent researcher, Ankara, Turkey, August 4, 2019.
94 Interview with Farhaoui.
95 See Cook, “Tunisia: Saving Democracy.”
96 See eg Al-Shobaki, “Egypt Is not Tunisia.”
97 See note 91.
98 D. Bishara, “Power of Workers.”
99 Interview with Bakeer.
100 Interview with Dr Amer Al Sabaileh, Jordan Times, Amman, Jordan, August 6, 2019.
101 Interview with Fatima A. El Moussawi.
102 Interview with Farhaoui.
103 We have scanned all Arabic newspaper resources available in the Lexis-Uni database. We used four keywords: Tunisian experience, Tunisian model, Tunisian inspiration and Tunisian success. We framed our search with two additional keywords: democracy and politics (in Lexis-Uni, our search terms in Arabic were: ديمقراطية or سياسة and التونسية التجربة or التونسيا النموذج or التونسيا الإلهام or التونسي النجاح). Finally, we checked all results to ensure their relevance. The MENA results include: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Sudan, Morocco and Egypt. In particular, Jordan and Qatar-based sources cover Tunisia more.
104 Ibid.
105 Interviews with Farhaoui and Bakeer.
106 In this sense, a recent study by Volpi and Gerschewski, “Crises and Critical Junctures,” is an example of ongoing scholarly efforts to better understand almost decade-old Arab uprisings from within-crisis dynamics and from actors’ perspective.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Osman Bahadır Dinçer
Osman Bahadır Dinçer is a Research Fellow at the Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC), in Bonn, Germany. Before joining BICC, he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Central European University in Budapest. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Engaged in research at the International Strategic Research Organisation (USAK) between 2005 and 2016, he also led the organisation’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies after 2012. As a comparative political scientist, his research focuses on Middle Eastern politics, with particular reference to the state, social and political movements, democratisation and Turkish foreign policy.
Mehmet Hecan
Mehmet Hecan is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Political Science at Boston University. Before starting his doctoral studies, he worked as a Research Assistant for an Ankara-based think tank, USAK's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, between 2013 and 2016. As a comparativist, his research concentrates on two different areas: while he studies the comparative political economy of European countries, he is also interested in exploring democratisation dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly concerning the state.