BEYOND THE ARAB SPRING MEHRAN KAMRAVA Editor Beyond the Arab Spring he Evolving Ruling Bargain in the Middle East HURST & COMPANY, LONDON Published in Collaboration with Georgetown University’s Center for International and Regional Studies, School of Foreign Service in Qatar First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL © Mehran Kamrava and the Contributors, 2014 All rights reserved. Printed in India he right of Mehran Kamrava and the Contributors to be identiied as the authors of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781849043472 paperback www.hurstpublishers.com his book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources. CONTENTS Acknowledgments he Contributors vii ix Mehran Kamrava Introduction 1 PART 1 CONTEXTUALIZING THE ARAB SPRING 1. he Rise and Fall of Ruling Bargains in the Middle East Mehran Kamrava 2. Global Ainities: he New Cultures of Resistance behind the Arab Spring John Foran 3. he Arab State and Social Contestation Nadine Sika 4. Islamist Movements and the Arab Spring Abdullah Al-Arian 5. Political Party Development Before and After the Arab Spring Shadi Hamid 6. Revolution and Constitution in the Arab World, 2011–12 Saïd Amir Arjomand 17 47 73 99 131 151 PART 2 CASE STUDIES 7. Renegotiating Iran’s Post-Revolutionary Social Contract: he Green Movement and the Struggle for Democracy in the Islamic Republic Nader Hashemi 8. Challenging the Trade Union, Reclaiming the Nation: he Politics of Labor Protest in Egypt, 2006–11 Marie Duboc v 191 223 CONTENTS 9. A Microcosm of the Arab Spring: Sociology of Tahrir Square Bahgat Korany 10. Protests, Regime Stability, and State Formation in Jordan Ziad Abu-Rish 11. he Persian Gulf Monarchies and the Arab Spring Russell E. Lucas 12. Bahrain’s Fractured Ruling Bargain: Political Mobilization, Regime Responses, and the New Sectarianism Quinn Mecham 13. Yemen and the Arab Spring homas Juneau 14. he Fragmented State of the Syrian Opposition Bassam Haddad and Ella Wind 15. Beyond the Civil War in Libya: Toward a New Ruling Bargain Dirk Vandewalle Index vi 249 277 313 341 373 397 437 459 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his book grew out of one of the research initiatives undertaken by the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. In addition to the contributors to the volume, the group beneited from the insights and comments of a number of scholars and experts who took part in the research initiative at various stages. Grateful acknowledgment goes to Hatoon Al-Fassi, Mazhar Al-Zo’by, Zahra Babar, John Crist, Michael Driessen, Shahla Haeri, Jackie Kerr, Rami Khouri, Fred Lawson, Miriam Lowi, Mari Luomi, Suzi Mirgani, Gerd Nonneman, James Olsen, and Ahmad Sa’di. All provided invaluable feedback in discussions leading up to the project’s crafting and on earlier drafts of the chapters. Dwaa Osman also read and commented extensively on many of the chapters, and Sana Jamal provided invaluable assistance with the editing process. My colleagues at the Center for International and Regional Studies, where the project was conceived and completed, were instrumental in helping create a most supportive and intellectually stimulating work environment. heir support and assistance with this volume, as with everything else I have written or edited since 2007, is most deeply appreciated. Grateful acknowledgment also goes to Qatar Foundation for its support of research and other scholarly endeavors. vii THE CONTRIBUTORS Ziad Abu-Rish is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Ohio University. He holds a PhD from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and is a board member of the Arab Studies Institute. Abu-Rish also serves as a senior editor of the Arab Studies Journal and co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine. Abdullah Al-Arian is assistant professor of history at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. His research focuses on social movements and political Islam in the Middle East. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt. Saïd Amir Arjomand is distinguished service professor of sociology and director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies. He is the author of he Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to l890; he Turban for the Crown: he Islamic Revolution in Iran; and After Khomeini: Iran under his Successors. He is also the editor of several books, including Constitutionalism and Political Reconstruction; Constitutional Politics in the Middle East; he Rule of Law, Islam and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran (edited with Nathan J. Brown); and Social heory and Regional Studies in the Global Age. Marie Duboc is assistant professor of Politics at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Her research interests focus on social movements in the Middle East. In 2012–2013, she served as a postdoctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and was previously an academic visitor at St. Edmund Hall, ix THE CONTRIBUTORS University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the School of Advanced Social Science Studies (EHESS) in France. John Foran is the co-director of the International Institute for Climate Action heory and professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Taking Power: On the Origins of hird World Revolutions. He is currently working on a book titled Taking Power or (re)Making Power: Movements for Radical Social Change and Global Justice, and is engaged in ethnographic research on climate justice movements. He has authored a number of articles and chapters, and edited volumes on twentieth-century revolutions, including Iran, and on the prospects for radical social change in the twenty-irst century. His most recent paper is “From Critical Globalization Studies and Public Sociology to Global Crisis Studies and Global Justice Work: A Manifesto for Radical Social Change.” Bassam Haddad is director of the Middle East Studies Program and associate professor in the Department of Public and International Afairs at George Mason University, and is a visiting professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: he Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011), and most recently co-editor of Dawn of the Arab Uprising: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). He is co-founder and editor of Jadaliyya ezine and is the executive director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for ive organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East. Shadi Hamid is a fellow at the Project on U.S.-Islamic World Relations at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, and the author of Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2014). He served as director of research at the Brookings Doha Center until January 2014. Prior to joining Brookings, Hamid was director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is currently vice-chair of POMED, a member of the World Bank’s MENA Advisory Panel, and a regular contributor to he Atlantic. Hamid received his B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University and PhD in politics from Oxford University. x THE CONTRIBUTORS Nader Hashemi is the director of the Center for Middle East Studies and an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His intellectual and research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, in particular debates on religion and democracy, secularism and its discontents, Middle East and Islamic politics, democratic and human rights struggles in non-Western societies, and Islam–West relations. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic heory for Muslim Societies and co-editor of he People Reloaded: he Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future. homas Juneau is a senior analyst at the Canadian Department of National Defence, where he has worked since 2003. He is also assistant professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Afairs, University of Ottawa. He is the author of Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical realism and Iranian foreign policy (Stanford) and first editor of Iranian Foreign Policy since 2001: Alone in the World (Routledge) and L’Asie centrale et le Caucase: Une sécurité mondialisée (Laval). He has published articles in Middle East Policy, Orbis, and International Studies Perspectives. he views expressed in his chapter are his own. Mehran Kamrava is the director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and a professor at the same institution. In addition to a number of journal articles, he is the author of Qatar: Small State, Big Politics; he Modern Middle East: A Political History Since the First World War, 3rd edn; and Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. His edited works include he New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity; he International Politics of the Persian Gulf; he Nuclear Question in the Middle East; and he Political Economy of the Persian Gulf. Bahgat Korany is a professor of international relations and political economy at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and director of the AUC Forum. He has been an elected member of Canada’s Royal Society since 1994 and a visiting professor at various universities, from Paris to Oxford. In addition to around eighty-ive book chapters/articles in specialized periodicals from Revue Française de Sciences Politiques to World Politics, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Italian, xi THE CONTRIBUTORS Chinese, and Japanese, Korany has published twelve books in English or French. His irst book, Social Change, Charisma and International Behavior, was awarded the Hauchman Prize in Switzerland. His he Changing Middle East (2010) has been noted by CNN as predicting the “Arab Spring” a year before it happened. He is on the editorial board of such periodicals as International Studies Quarterly, International Political Science Review, El-Siassa El-Dawliyya, Mediterranean Politics, and many others. He is currently the lead author of the tenth anniversary special volume of the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report. Russell E. Lucas is an associate professor of Arabic studies and director of global studies in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. His book, Institutions and the Politics of Survival in Jordan: Domestic Responses to External Challenges, 1988–2001, was published by SUNY Press. He has also published articles in a range of journals including: Journal of Democracy, International Studies Quarterly, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Arabian Studies, Journal of Middle East Culture and Communication, and the Middle East Journal. He is currently writing a new book on the politics of the Arab monarchies. He has previously taught at Florida International University and at the University of Oklahoma. Quinn Mecham is an assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College. Mecham served as a Franklin Fellow at the State Department in 2009–10. He worked on the secretary of state’s policy planning staf, with responsibility for the Gulf, political Islam, and global religious afairs. His current research focuses on Islamist political movements and Muslim political parties. Recent publications include an article in Foreign Policy magazine: “Erbakan’s Unintended Legacy” (March 2011) and “Why Do Islamist Groups Become Transnational and Violent?” published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies Audit of the Conventional Wisdom in August 2006. Mecham graduated from Brigham Young University and received his master’s and doctorate degrees from Stanford University. Nadine Sika is an assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt. Sika is the author of Educational Reform in Egyptian Primary Schools Since the 1990s, as well as a number of articles. She received a PhD in comparative politics from the Univerxii THE CONTRIBUTORS sity of Cairo. Before joining AUC, she was visiting scholar at the Political Science Institute of the University of Tübingen (Germany) and assistant professor of political science at the Future University (Egypt). She is currently consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and member of the board of directors of Partners in Development, an independent Egyptian think tank. Dirk Vandewalle teaches in the Government Department and at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is the former chair of Dartmouth’s Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program. His research and teaching focus on the links between economic and political development in the Gulf states, North Africa, and Asia, and on development in oil states more generally. He is the editor of several books and volumes on Libya and North Africa, and is currently writing a manuscript on the economic emergence and prospects of the Gulf countries, based on research from a Fulbright Regional Research Award in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. He has written numerous articles on economic development issues in the Arab world, and received, in addition to two regional Fulbright research awards, a Social Science Research Council Award for advanced research in Morocco and Yemen. He is on the editorial board of several scholarly publications, and lectures and consults widely in policy, business, and academic settings in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Vandewalle was political advisor to the UN Special Representative for Libya during the pre-assessment period in the summer of 2011, and is a senior political advisor to the Carter Center’s electoral observation team in Libya. Ella Wind is a graduate student in Middle East Studies at New York University, focusing on the political economy of Turkey and the Levant region. She is also a contributing co-editor for Jadaliyya’s Syria Page. xiii INTRODUCTION Mehran Kamrava he political upheaval that reverberated throughout the Arab world from December 2010 onwards caught many scholars of the Middle East of-guard. Until that point, much of the scholarship on Middle Eastern politics had concentrated on the durability of authoritarianism,1 not1 A small sample includes Eva Bellin, “he Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics, 36, 2 (Jan. 2004), pp. 139–57; Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in the Age of Democratization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Stephen J. King, he New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009; and Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michele Penner Angrist (eds), Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005. My own thoughts on the subject were equally pessimistic: “Despite the global resurgence of democracy in recent decades and the spread of the ‘third wave’ of democratization across South America and Eastern Europe, authoritarianism has shown remarkable resilience and staying power in the Middle East … Given that in the Middle East the state is by far the more powerful and dominant partner in state–society relations, any meaningful moves toward a greater opening of the political process are likely to be initiated from within the state itself.” Mehran Kamrava, he Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War, 2nd edn, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011, pp. 372–3. 1 BEYOND THE ARAB SPRING withstanding what could be described as something of an “Arab Spring” in early 2005. In this latter period, which served as a dress rehearsal for the events that transpired in 2011, Iraqis went to the polls for the irst time since the fall of Saddam, Syria withdrew from Lebanon after mass protests in downtown Beirut, Saudi Arabia staged municipal elections, and determined opposition by Egyptian activists forced Mubarak to give meaning and substance, albeit temporarily, to his promises of reforms.2 Nevertheless, authoritarianism persisted unabated for another ive years. he inal chapter of the Arab Spring has yet to be written. However, the unexpected nature of these Arab uprisings has provoked lively debate and fruitful scholarship around some of the existing assumptions regarding the region’s domestic politics.3 In recent decades, a robust scholarship has emerged on the durability of authoritarianism in the Middle East and the remarkable resilience of the region’s political regimes. Much of this work is based on rigorous analysis of the patterns of socio-political behavior in the Middle East, both at the regional level of analysis and at that of individual states, and in particular on the carefully crafted “ruling bargains” between regimes and their citizens. Both in the Middle East’s monarchies and in the many presidential republics, a ruling bargain emerged between the governed and those governing that aimed to consolidate state–society relationships and maintain various forms of authoritarian rule. In broad terms, the implicit bargain underlying the nature of political rule in the region has required citizens to surrender their political and social rights to participatory government. hey are expected to accept the legitimacy of the ruling regime, however grudgingly, and are rewarded with a variety of goods and services in return, most of them tangible but some also intangible, as well as socio-economic beneits. he scope of state muniicence extended to the citizenry was dependent on the state’s inancial capacity, making the ruling bargain stronger in some states and weaker in others, 2 Steven A. Cook, “Adrift on the Nile: he Limits of the Opposition in Egypt,” Council on Foreign Relations, he New Arab Revolt, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2011, p. 57. 3 See, for example, Jean-Pierre Filiu, he Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprising, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; Marc Lynch, he Arab Uprising: he Uninished Revolutions of the New Middle East, New York: Public Afairs, 2012; and Roger Owen, he Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 2 INTRODUCTION or at least in relation to some citizens more than others. he elites judged to be crucial to the regime received substantially more than the average citizen, thereby introducing a distinct element into the ruling bargain that became part and parcel of the resentment directed towards local regimes. Although much of the academic literature has been devoted to the durability of these ruling bargains, recent events indicate that inadequate attention has been paid to the potential causes for their erosion. he chapters in this volume probe some of the existing analytical assumptions in order to develop a new understanding of the drivers behind the historic change in the Middle East that began in late 2010 and early 2011. he book is divided into two parts. he irst part is designed to contextualize the Arab Spring, while the second focuses on individual case studies. Part 1 begins with a chapter that traces the rise and fall of ruling bargains in the Middle East and the growing primacy of only one of the elements of the ruling bargain, namely fear, as the main tool of governance across the Middle East and especially the Arab world, a process which began in the 1960s and the 1970s and lasted into the 2000s. he concept of a “ruling bargain,” the chapter argues, has been employed in the study of Middle Eastern politics for a long period of time. hese bargains can be deined in terms of the implicit, unspoken assumptions on which the general parameters of state–society relations were premised. According to these assumptions, states presented themselves as defenders of broadly deined, vaguely articulated, and changeable notions of “national interest”—in terms of providing security, economic opportunities, social goods, fulillment of national aspirations, and so on and so forth—in return for general political quiescence on the part of social actors. Diferent actors held diferent understandings and conceptions of the ruling bargain, some aspects of which were based on formal arrangements, and were at times even codiied in national constitutions, some were based on informal arrangements and understandings. he bargains had several components, but fear and coercion were undoubtedly among the most important. As states could deliver on fewer and fewer of the promises and premises of their rule from the 1970s onwards, fear and repression became more and more pervasive. Various survival strategies were employed, ranging from heightened coercion to occasional concessions, resulting in the perpetuation of authoritarianism throughout the 3 BEYOND THE ARAB SPRING region. Attempts to co-opt, or at least to divide, opposition groups and activists were equally common. As Marsha Pripstein Posusney observed some time ago, “electoral engineering poses a formidable obstacle to democratization.”4 here are also always constituents who buy into the regime narrative, or are part of the patronage networks that have been deliberately created or have evolved over time, and are the beneiciaries of opportunities created by the state. Social actors seldom operate in a political vacuum in which the state is completely irrelevant to social welfare and the public good, however these terms are deined. In their ideal form, the ruling bargains that were originally crafted in the 1950s and the 1960s may have died some time ago. But their mutations remained in efect in one form or another across the Middle East, from Iran in the east to Algeria and Morocco in the west. Once the element of fear was broken, it was only a matter of time before the ossiied instruments of state coercion and the old methods of repression ceased to produce the desired results. It is at precisely these periods—when social actors feel empowered, and when the state’s instruments of repression no longer inspire the fear and intimidation that they once did—that opportunities for revolutions emerge. Revolutions are rare historical occurrences in which social actors create or exploit institutional weaknesses in the state and capture political power. hey are, therefore, essentially contests for political power. While this was true until relatively recently, John Foran argues that the revolutions that rocked the Arab world in 2010–11 are part of a new type of revolution—though they may be political in nature, and perhaps even in genesis, they are essentially movements motivated by popular notions of social justice, “new types of progressive experiments.” In this sense, they should be viewed in the same mold as the May 1968 revolution in France and the Zapatista movement in Mexico in the 1990s: they are revolutions inspired more by a yearning for basic human dignity than by anything else. According to Foran, this helps explain the non-ideological character of the Arab revolutions, the slogans of which tell a much bigger story: “Employment is a right, you band of thieves!” Foran’s arguments highlight the growing sophistication of Middle Eastern societies over the four to ive decades that preceded the Arab 4 4 Marsha Pripstein Posusney, “he Middle East’s Democratic Deicit in Comparative Perspective,” in Posusney and Angrist, Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance, p. 9. INTRODUCTION Spring. During this period, Middle Eastern youth had become increasingly educated and yet remained underemployed or unemployed while national wealth and opportunities were squandered by leaders more interested in oice and power and worldly pleasure than concern for the greater good—heroes rose and fell in rapid succession, and the people looked on as their countries lagged behind the rest of the world in one development indicator after another. With the beneit of hindsight, it was only a matter of time before revolutions erupted across the region. hese revolutions were made possible, Nadine Sika argues in the next chapter, through the failure of the formal social and political institutions of the regimes in power and their gradual replacement with new, alternative institutions in the form of social movements that challenged the authority of the state. By focusing on the cases of Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, Sika examines processes of regime formation through the employment of social and political institutions designed to control and manage the public sphere. After some initial successes, these institutions morphed into instruments of personal power, as in Egypt and Tunisia, and oligarchic or sectarian concentrations of power, as in Tunisia (and Bahrain). As state institutions were used to create greater levels of social exclusion, society increasingly became an arena for contestation. In each of the three cases Sika examines, the causes of social contestation were almost uniformly the same—the narrowing of political space at the hands of the state and a concomitant growth of social, economic, and political grievances. But the outcomes were diferent, depending on the state’s willingness, and capacity, to use force and violence against its citizens. he importance Sika attaches to institutional variables is further conirmed in a number of subsequent chapters that also focus on speciic case studies. he volume then turns to a question of vital importance for the region’s future: how are Islamists likely to fare as a result of the changes ushered in by the Arab Spring? On an electoral level, the Islamists have thus far achieved a moderate degree of success. According to Abdullah Al-Arian, they may even be able to play a constructive, central role in transforming the norms of governance that Brownlee views as obstacles to the success of any meaningful form of democracy. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood have historically served as signiicant social movement actors who have accumulated “a long record of democratic participation.” As the Arab uprisings began to unfold, Islamist movements 5