Doctoral Dissertation Research: Uprisings and Political Outcomes in the MENA Region

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Title: Uprisings and Political Outcomes in the MENA Region This project seeks to explain the emergence and outcomes of contemporary regional revolutionary waves. Recent Middle East-North African history provides exceptional cases to test and enrich related theories. Beginning late 2010, the Arab Spring concatenation of mass movements challenged regimes? right to rule, police states, and economic-development orientations. By early 2011, many saw these uprisings as initiating democracy and social justice across MENA. Yet, uprisings emerged in only six MENA countries; others had reformist or few protests; and later outcomes contradicted demands. Consider the political despair, the imprisoned or dead, the masses made refugees, compared to popular calls for socioeconomic wellbeing or democratic empowerment. Of the six uprisings, four ousted long-standing rulers (Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya) and two were deflected (Bahrain, Syria). Tunisia alone would then transition to political democracy; Egypt's military and Bahrain's monarchy institutionalized autocratic counterrevolutions; and Yemen, Libya, and Syria descended into internationalized civil wars. This project seeks to explain these three interrelated outcomes: namely, why uprisings emerged in some regional countries and not others (revolution emergence); why some uprisings ousted rulers and others did not (initial political outcomes); and lastly, why cases produced political democracy, counterrevolution, or civil war (major political outcomes). This project addresses theoretical debates on the oppositional movements, political and economic regimes, and global relations impacting revolutions. The project analyzes the contingent dynamics of social, state, and global actors contending to transform or retain autocracy and neoliberalism, and the institutional-structural terrains conditioning these struggles and outcomes. By splitting cases into multiple episodes and outcomes, not single isolated-linear processes, this project enhances knowledge of successful/positive, failed/negative, and reversed cases amid revolutionary waves. This project uses comparative historical-sociological methods for in-depth case studies and comparisons, and multi-level, combinatorial, and interactive causal analysis. First, the project uses fuzzy-set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 21 MENA countries to locate causal combinations for revolution emergence, no emergence, and reformist protest. Fuzzy sets allow fine gradations in degrees of set membership in potential causal factors, rather than neatly-defined fixed sets, which enables evaluating complex causation. This project creates composite indexes to determine countries' set membership scores in oppositional mobilizing structures, sultanistic-autocratic regimes, rentier states, uneven development, and neoliberal globalization, with fs/QCA locating necessary and/or sufficient combinations of these factors for the specified outcomes. These combinations are analyzed vis-à-vis case interaction/revolutionary diffusion. Second, this project uses within- and cross-case analysis for three full and three mini case studies. Case analysis prioritizes the impact of movement composition and action-forms, state-military structures, and global relations on the initial and major political outcomes. Dense event timelines are created using event-level data from organizational reports and systematically-gathered newspaper data, generating analytical sketches of actors' activities and interests, protest events and cycles, and institutional changes. Semi-structured in-depth interviews of movement organizers further ground this project. By processually studying positive, negative, and reversed cases, this project will explain why many Arab Spring cases defy existing revolution theories and inform movement activists and political leaders on the nature, durability, and change of autocratic regimes and exploitative economic systems.