When Mohammed Bouazizi, in late December 2010, sethimself alight in front of the governorate of SidiBouzid in Tunisia, sparking revolutions across theArab world, euphoria and wishful thinking spreadthat the Middle East and North Africa was finally onthe path to a democratic transition. A decade later,it has become evident that the Arab uprisings werenot only more complex and bloodier than initiallyexpected, but that they set the region even furtheraway from democratisation. If anything, the 2009Green Movement in Iran, the 2011 Arab uprisings andthe 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey resulted either instates collapsing and descending into civil wars, orin authoritarian regimes surviving waves ofprotests, calibrating their tools of repression andholding a tighter grip over their societies. Thissubstantial authoritarian reversal was only possiblethrough a combination of traditional means ofrepression and innovative techniques for controllingyounger generations relying on Twitter, WhatsApp andFacebook for social and political dissent. People,activists and academics are more than everdisillusioned with the prospects of democratisationin the Middle East and North Africa, relentlesslyemerging as a region in transition to ‘nowhere’.

The year 2011 was not the first instance of scholarshiplooking for signs of transformation of the MENAregion into models of Western liberal democracies.During the heyday of Modernisation Theory in the1950s, scholars looked at MENA as a region on thepath to catching up with liberal models. However,this optimism was confronted with the depressingreality of outbreaks of civil wars, cold wars, coupsd’état, and abolition of multi-party systems infavour of either absolute monarchies or single-partysystems. In the 1990s, scholarship moved to focus ondetecting early signs of democrati-sation, as it wasbelieved that MENA would soon follow Eastern Europeand Latin America. High and optimistic expectationsduring the 1990s were soon replaced withdisappointment and frustration. The Middle Eastseems to go in full-circle movements between hopesfor democratisation and authoritarian retrenchmentin a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward pattern.For decades, social scientists were concerned withthe question of why the Middle East remainedresistant to democratisation despite waves ofchanges, often implying some sort of uniquenessabout the region. ‘Robustness’, ‘resilience’,‘endurance’, ‘durability’ and ‘upgrade’ ofauthoritarianism have become timeless keywords inthe study of the MENA region.