On the evolutions of the Arab Spring

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-105
Author(s):  
Gilberto Conde
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
The State ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Human Costs ◽  
Democratic Transformation ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military

This article looks back at the 2011 Arab Spring where the movements that brought hope to the region and beyond seem to have gone astray. The military has taken over in Egypt, while Libya, Syria and Yemen have descended into civil strife with tremendous human costs. Bahrain has witnessed repression that has overwhelmed the opposition, and while Tunisia, the country where Arab Spring began, has avoided the violence characterizing the aforementioned states, change has remained rather limited. As for other countries that rode on the same wave of mobilizations, hopes for democratic transformation have been subdued in somewhat less violent contexts but with varying degrees of pressure from the state. This article examines what has happened to the Arab Spring countries, why and what is required to democratically transform the region.

scholarly journals The army as the main driving force of Egypt's transformation in 2011-2013

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (11) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Antonіі Palamar
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
State Transformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military

Following the 2013 coup that toppled Egypt’s democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, from power, the country has been led by military general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Eight years on, he retains the president’s office, and Egyptian parliament has decided to actually extend his term until 2030, ignoring the revolutionary demands that prompted millions of Egyptians to bring Hosni Mubarak's 29-year rule to an end in January 2011. Despite the hopes of the Arab Spring, Egypt has not only stopped democratic transit, but has begun to move toward authoritarianism. Tens of thousands of people are kept in overcrowded prisons. Freedom of speech, media independence, and opposition movements are being suppressed in the name of the stability of the state. Tortures, unjustified detentions, police attacks, and death sentences have become a strategic tool in the hands of Egypt’s military leadership to combat possible escalation of protest movements.This article reviews history of the military leadership's influence on Egyptian public policy, outlines basic principles and methods of this influence, investigates the army's participation in the state transformation during the Arab Spring, and examines the policy of post-revolutionary military power in the country.The paper sheds light on the military elite, as a significant interest group, which until 2011 had no influence on the formation of the political agenda in Egypt. This study has confirmed that the Muslim Brotherhood's seizure of power in 2012 and the subsequent desire to quickly Islamize the country under the guise of democratic slogans forced the military to oppose not only Islamization but also the democratization of the country. After the revolution, the military became the only force that could keep control and rule the country, using undemocratic methods to secure its own regime and suppress opposition movements. Finally, Egypt's transformation is still ongoing, as the demands of the 2011 revolution for democratization and liberalization of socio-political life remain unfulfilled, and the current military rule is largely reminiscent of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, which was overthrown during the Arab Spring.

Mutiny and nonviolence in the Arab Spring

2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Erickson Nepstad
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
The State ◽  
Security Force ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military

Recent studies of civil resistance indicate that security force defections can heavily influence the outcome of nonviolent uprisings against authoritarian regimes. Yet we know little about why, when, and how mutiny occurs. In this article, I ask: what factors influence the likelihood of military defections during a nonviolent conflict? In reviewing various literatures, I identify ten factors that facilitate or obstruct mutiny. I propose that two of these are particularly influential: (1) whether troops receive economic or political benefits from the regime; and (2) whether troops perceive the regime as fragile, based on the international community’s response to the conflict. Specifically, I argue that troops who receive benefits from a regime are more likely to remain loyal while those who receive no such benefits are more likely to defect. However, even the most underprivileged troops are unlikely to defect if they believe that the state is strong enough to withstand a major civilian uprising. Soldiers’ perception of regime strength is partly shaped by whether outside nations support the opposition, thereby weakening the state, or send troops to reinforce the regime’s control. Using a qualitative comparative method, I illustrate these dynamics through an examination of several Arab Spring uprisings: Egypt, where the military sided with civil resisters; Bahrain, where troops remained loyal to the state; and Syria, where the military split. Then, to encourage more research on this topic, I use these three cases to generate additional hypotheses about defections that others can test against a wider set of cases. I conclude with a discussion of the questions that future researchers should explore and the types of methodological approaches that are needed in this field of study.

Cracking national integration after the events (the Arab Spring) and its impact On regional stability

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Muhannad Al Janabi Al Janabi
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Regional Stability ◽  
National Integration ◽  
Arab Region ◽  
Political Media ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Arab Spring

Since late 2010 and early 2011, the Arab region has witnessed mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain and other countries that have been referred to in the political, media and other literature as the Arab Spring. These movements have had a profound effect on the stability of the regimes Which took place against it, as leaders took off and contributed to radical reforms in party structures and public freedoms and the transfer of power, but it also contributed to the occurrence of many countries in an internal spiral, which led to the erosion of the state from the inside until it became a prominent feature of the Arab) as is the case in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq.

scholarly journals Arab Spring Failure: A Case Study of Egypt and Syria

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-53
Author(s):  
Raid Khan ◽  
Amna Mahmood ◽  
Asif Salim
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military ◽  
Democratic Norms ◽  
Rule Out

The Arab Spring was assumed to reform the prevailing regime pattern and to bring socio-economic reforms. However, it failed to get its intended outcomes at large. The objectives of the revolution that are to bring a positive transformation in the social, economic, and political domains were not attained effectively and was considered a failed revolution in the case of Egypt and Syria. The present paper focuses on exploring the reasons and factors behind its failure in the particular context of Egypt and Syria. Although Egypt observed regime transition from dictatorship to democracy, yet within one and a half year, a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Morsi, and the military regime was reinstalled. In the case of Syria, since 2011, a civil war is going on where Bashar-ul-Asad still holds dictatorial powers. The study reveals that the lack of stable political institutions, weak democratic norms, and the absence of a vibrant civil society paved the way for state authorities to rule out the attempts of protestors. Excluding a few of the countries, the rest of the Middle Eastern countries are still ruled by the powerful elites. The successes of the Arab Spring are still to be awaited.

Coup-Proofing in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Region

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Lutterbeck
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Common Finding ◽  
North African ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military

Coup-proofing—that is, measures aimed at preventing military coups and ensuring military loyalty—has been a key feature of civil–military relations in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states. Just as the MENA region has been one of the most coup-prone regions in the world, coup-proofing has been an essential instrument of regime survival in Arab countries. The most commonly found coup-proofing strategies in the region include (a) so-called “communal coup-proofing,” involving the appointment of individuals to key positions within the military based on family, ethnic, or religious ties; (b) providing the military with corporate and/or private benefits in order to ensure its loyalty; (c) creating parallel military forces in addition to the regular military, so as to “counter-balance” the latter; (d) monitoring of the military through a vast internal security and intelligence apparatus; and (e) promoting professionalism, and thus political neutrality, within the military. The experiences of the “Arab Spring,” however, have shown that not all of these strategies are equally effective in ensuring military loyalty during times of popular upheavals and regime crises. A common finding in this context has been that communal coup-proofing (or militaries based on “patrimonialism”) creates the strongest bonds been the armed forces and their regimes, as evidenced by the forceful suppression of the popular uprising by the military in countries such as Syria, or by parts of the military in Libya and Yemen. By contrast, where coup-proofing has been based on the provision of material benefits to the military or on counterbalancing, as in Tunisia or Egypt, the armed forces have refrained from suppressing the popular uprising, ultimately leading to the downfall of these countries’ long-standing leaders. A further lesson that can be drawn from the Arab Spring in terms of coup-proofing is that students of both military coups and coup-proofing should dedicate (much) more attention to the increasingly important role played by the internal security apparatus in MENA countries.

How and Why Has the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan Changed since 2011?

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Mohammad Abu Rumman ◽  
Neven Bondokji
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Campaigning ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Arab Spring

In the wake of the Arab Spring, many younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan left the movement, especially after 2015, establishing new political parties due to ideological shifts over the nature of the state and questions of civil liberties. Four factors influenced this transformation: identity crisis, the movement's organizational rigidity, members' personal experiences during and after the uprisings, and a growing desire to separate political campaigning from religious outreach.

Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior during Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Albrecht ◽  
Dorothy Ohl
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Moving Target ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military

A few years into the most recent wave of popular uprisings—the Arab Spring—studying regime trajectories in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Yemen still seems like shooting at a moving target. Yet what has not escaped notice is the central role military actors have played during these uprisings. We describe how soldiers have three options when ordered to suppress mass unrest. They mayexitthe regime by remaining in the barracks or going into exile,resistby fighting for the challenger or initiating a coup d’état, or remainloyaland use force to defend the regime. We argue that existing accounts of civil-military relations are ill equipped to explain the diverse patterns in exit, resistance, and loyalty during unrest because they often ignore the effects of military hierarchy. Disaggregating the military and parsing the interests and constraints of different agents in that apparatus is crucial for explaining military cohesion during such crises. Drawing on extensive fieldwork we apply our principal-agent framework to explain varying degrees and types of military cohesion in three Arab Spring cases: Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Studying military hierarchy elucidates decision-making within authoritarian regimes amid mass mobilization and allows us to better explain regime re-stabilization, civil war onset, or swift regime change in the wake of domestic unrest.

scholarly journals Political elites of the Arab world and their influence

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
A. Sh. Abhari ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Arab Spring ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Military ◽  
Shed Light

The debate between political scientists about the "Arab Spring" revolutions is still escalating. Especially regarding the forces operating at the scene. Attempts by the military elite to retain power and try to maintain the status quo at any cost, leaving the doors wide open for foreign intervention The foreign interventions of countries that are trying to use the wave of the Arab spring to achieve their goals have especially complicated the situation in the Arab world. In this article I will try to shed light on some factors influencing the results of the “Arab Spring” revolutions.

The State of Being LGBT in the Age of Reaction

2019 ◽  
pp. 266-281
Author(s):  
Mehmet Sinan Birdal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
The State ◽  
Lgbt Rights ◽  
Current Regulation ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
The Arab Spring

This chapter provides an overview of LGBT politics in the Middle East and North Africa region, with a specific focus on Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey. It argues that LGBT movements in these countries must be understood within the context of how the state is engaged in a broader range of authoritarian and/or state-centered regulations of social movements after the period of the Arab Spring. It also illustrates how the current regulation of LGBT rights has historical roots in the understanding of sexual identities during the colonial era. The chapter argues, therefore, that the understanding of LGBT rights as part of a “progress” or “democratization” narrative is simplistic and does not account for the historical and structural conditions that created the contexts and possibilities for contemporary LGBT organizing.

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