Shamiran Mako and Valentine Moghadam’s After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa represents an important new contribution to scholarship on the fate of the Arab Spring and to questions of democratization, democratic stagnation and democratic reversal more broadly. Mako and Moghadam set out to explain the divergent results of the uprisings that spread across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. They divide seven cases into two groups. The first consists of those states that experienced regime or constitutional change (Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco) and the second those that “failed to bring about reforms or were repressed or descended into civil wars”: Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen (p. 3). Using a Millian comparative method of difference, Mako and Moghadam account for this divergence on the basis of four variables: state and political institutions, civil society growth and capacity, gender and women’s mobilizations, and international connections and intervention (pp. 13–23).
Mako and Moghadam develop this argument across five thematically organized substantive chapters. The second chapter deals with “pathways to democratization” and offers a comparative perspective on the Arab Spring uprisings. At the heart of this chapter lies a consideration of Samuel Huntington’s “Third Wave” of democratization, to which the Middle East and North Africa appeared an exception in the 1990s and 2000s. Mako and Moghadam’s central contention here is that “pre-requisites for democracy are societal conditions and collective action,” in addition to states that have enough capacity to withstand both transition processes themselves and the threat posed by external intervention to such processes (p. 54). Drawing on existing sociological and feminist work Mako and Moghadam argue that the depth of social movement mobilization has important consequences for the quality of subsequent democratic settlements (p. 36). They ascribe the apparent merging of revolutions, social movements and democratization from the last quarter of the twentieth century to “rising educational attainment, the presence of modern middle classes and the participation of women along with the absence of a centralised party” (p. 35).
There then follow four substantive chapters based on the conceptual framework. In the chapter on “states and political institutions,” Mako and Moghadam argue that the sole example of (partially) successful democratic transition in the region (in Tunisia) was in part a result of the country’s “institutional legacy” (p. 96). From the perspective of states and political institutions, Tunisia’s transition resembled more closely that of previous Mediterranean or Latin American cases because the Tunisian military enjoyed neither the size nor the centrality to the state of, for example, its Egyptian counterpart, combined with a more vibrant civil society in which the trade union federation (the UGTT) and feminist organizations played a leading role (p. 69). The worst-faring states were those such as Yemen and Libya, in which institutions were weak or dismantled, and Syria where they were assimilated to the “presidential monarchy” of the Assads (p. 85).
The counterpart of state capacity, in Mako and Moghadam’s argument, is the vibrancy and breadth of civil society organization. Mako and Moghadam by no means share the fetishization of NGOs and other putative civil society organizations common in 1990s political theory and political science. In a stimulating argument, they distinguish between civil society organizations in advanced capitalist democracies, wherein such organizations often blunt or divert any form of radical challenge, from authoritarian contexts where civil society organizations are more likely to come into conflict with states and regimes (p. 103). Again, the density of civil society was greatest in Tunisia and least in Syria and Libya and, with some caveats, tracked closely the respective divergent outcomes of these states.
In what is the most notable contribution of the book, Mako and Moghadam devote a chapter to gender and women’s activism as a variable in their own right. The authors argue that women may or may not need democratization but successful democratization needs women: the absence or repression of women’s rights and feminist organisations tends to be correlated with the failure of democratic transition, and the opposite with success (pp. 138–39). Once more, it is in Tunisia and, to some degree, Morocco that the authors find the densest and most active forms of women’s mobilization contributing to democratic constitution-making. Mako and Moghadam attribute this outcome in part to the complex legacy of Bourguiba’s personal status law and other reforms of the post-independence period in Tunisia, although they take a nuanced view of “state feminism” in the region (pp. 139–42).
In the final substantive chapter on the impact of external influence, Mako and Moghadam distinguish between what they see as potentially prodemocratic forms of external influence through the promotion of civil society and military intervention of various kinds, which they see as harmful to democratization processes (pp. 183—91). Military intervention was most present in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, with Tunisia benefiting from the relative lack of attention paid to the country in the world system. Egypt’s transition process was hampered, in contrast, by the overweening role of the United States and the GCC countries led by Saudi Arabia. Bahrain’s revolt was, of course, simply crushed by an intervention emanating from Saudi Arabia.
Mako and Moghadam thus find their conceptual framework of variation across states and political institutions, civil society, gender and women’s mobilization, and external intervention validated across their empirical analysis. The book makes a major contribution in foregrounding gender as a variable in the explanation of outcomes in the Arab Spring. There are also points where the argument raises more questions than it answers.
The first concerns the object of explanation: mobilization, democratic transition, revolution, or the mixture of these in the “refolutions” described by Timothy Garton Ash and Asef Bayat (p. 33). Throughout the book the Arab uprisings are referred to as ‘revolutions’ in inverted commas, which suggests some scepticism in the use of the term. At other points, however, the authors refer—correctly, in my view—to counterrevolutionary policies and “political revolutions” (p. 33). The discussion of Theda Skocpol’s definition of revolution suggests that the authors identify revolutions with successful instances of social revolution, which, as they rightly note, are very rare; yet shortly after this. they explain that political revolutions are both possible and more common (p. 32). What is the relationship between the social and political revolutions? Is it possible to have, for example political revolutions (such as democratic transitions) that are simultaneously forms of social counterrevolution? And are revolutions only defined as such if they are successful? If so, how would we ever be able to explain revolutions that fail or are defeated?
The object in need of explanation also may not be how revolutionary mobilization has been frustrated or democratic transitions poorly managed, as if all actors involved shared the same interest in democratization as the outcome. Rather, the 2011 uprisings faced well-organized counterrevolutionary elites who achieved their objectives—among which was frustrating any move toward meaningful democracy. This is, in other words, a story of success rather than (just) failure.
A connected question is the relationship between democratization and the “modernization” prerequisites that Mogahdam and Mako follow the existing literature in identifying: higher national income per capita and rising educational attainment (pp. 29–32). The correlation between such variables and the existence of electoral democracy is well established for the reasons offered by the mainstream of democratization literature. There is no reason, however, to assume that the opponents of democratization or of political or social revolution represent holdouts to progress as embodied in such variables. Indeed, those opponents may themselves be supremely “modern” in the sense of being well-educated, financialized elites connected to global networks. A more concrete example can be found in Lisa Wedeen’s Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgement and Mourning in Syria (2019), which shows how a narrative of modernity, progress and social mobility was central to building a coalition of support for the Assad regime’s brutal repression of the uprising.
A similar critique might be raised of the role of civil society in Moghadam and Mako’s argument. Their use of this concept is nuanced and distinguishes helpfully between the civil society organizations of advanced capitalist societies, which tend to blunt oppositional movements, and those of authoritarian contexts, which are far likelier to raise challenges to the ruling regimes. Yet even within the latter context, it is quite possible for both pro-regime mobilization and civil society organizations to occur and play a significant role in propping up authoritarianism. Civil society may not challenge but rather sometimes support nondemocratic regimes. Tunisia’s robust civil society does not seem to have prevented a return to authoritarianism. Another example would be the “Tamarrod” campaign in Egypt that brought mass support to the 2013 coup, including long-standing members of the Left Nasserist opposition such as Hamdeen Sabahi and leaders of the independent trade union federation such as Kamal Abu Eita. A similar role in a different context was played by the so-called National Unity Gathering in Bahrain that mobilized largely Sunni support for the Khalifas. The question of sect and sectarianization in general is one that, without implying any need to reify these concepts, is notably lacking from the substantive analysis.
Along with this nuancing of the endogenous aspects of the argument, the nature and origin of external influence—which Moghadam and Mako rightly point to as crucial for the outcomes of the Arab Spring—could be clarified. This is particularly the case in relation to Syria where the authors seem to imply that the main external intervention consisted of Gulf and Western support for opposition militias (pp. 206—8). This intervention certainly had an effect. One of the consequences of militia competition for (mainly private Gulf) funding was the Islamization and sectarianization of the uprising. Yet these countries had militias to fund because of defections from the Syrian Arab Army after six months of violent repression in 2011 of all forms of protest. As Mako and Moghadam note, Iran provided substantial support to the Assad regime from the beginning of the uprising: far more consequential was the Russian bombing campaign that began in 2015 and effectively saved the regime while killing large numbers of civilians. Recognizing this imbalance would actually strengthen Moghadam and Mako’s argument, given the stress they place on external intervention. It is also unclear whether the authors take at face value the election result of 2014 in which Bashar al-Assad was reelected with 88.7% of the vote. As Andrew Gelman noted in a Washington Post article in 2014 (“Why it’s Pretty Obvious the Syria Vote Totals are Fabricated”) these results are highly questionable. The number of votes received by each candidate tally exactly with their respective percentages, as if there were no miscounts, lost ballots, and so on—a result almost unheard of in free elections. Again, the example of this almost certainly manipulated election adds to the logic of Mako and Moghadam’s underlying argument.
I offer these points in a spirit of discussion and dialogue given the significant overlap between our two books. At the time of writing, as young women in Iran currently mobilize to shake the foundations of the Islamic Republic, the contribution of Mako and Moghadam’s After the Arab Uprisings is more relevant than ever.
