New Light on the Arab Uprisings

Abstract

Out of the wave of literature on the Arab uprisings—some of which is forgettable as “instant history”—I cannot think of two better books than those under review here. They are quite different but they complement each other. Jason Brownlee has a story to tell: how the United States consistently has favored authoritarianism over democratization in Egypt. The coauthors of Beyond the Arab Spring—Rex Brynen, Pete Moore, Bassel Salloukh, and Marie-Joelle Zahar (assisted by Janine Clark)—contextualize the uprisings in terms of ongoing debates on political science about persistent authoritarianism and transitions. Along the way, they explore the role of political culture, Islamist movements, the new media, and the international community, among other things. Together, these volumes provide the student or general reader with both the empirical depth of a case study and the theoretical breadth of a survey. The first part of Beyond the Arab Spring provides a succinct summary of the uprising trajectories in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria through 2012. But the more valuable material is to be found in Part Two's insightful discussion of theoretical issues, and Part Three, where the authors offer some judicious if tentative conclusions about the “long road ahead” for the Arab world. Building on earlier work going back into the 1990s, the “Montreal school” of Brynen et al. offer nuanced commentaries on some of the leading propositions in comparative politics. They show that political culture, for example, needs to be treated not as something primordial but as contingent and constructed—and reconstructible. Oil wealth, they argue, is not a cause of authoritarian but rather a structural condition that distorts economies in a particular way that can privilege the incumbents and disadvantage a nascent civil society.