Did Middle East Studies Miss the Arab Spring?

The new Foreign Affairs issue features an article by F. Gregory Gause III who argues that Middle East scholars – himself included – did not see the unprecedented events of the so-called “Arab Spring” coming and were as surprised as everyone else when events unfolded as they did. He attributes this to three factors underappreciated by scholars: 1) civil-military relations, 2) state-economy interactions, and 3) strong Pan-Arab sentiments.

Gause hits the issue dead on regarding the first issue. Civil-military relations have indeed been low on the academic agenda in Middle Eastern studies since the spate of military coups of the 1950s and 1960s abated. There were the few, like Steven Cook, who wrote about Arab (not Turkish or Israeli) military relations, but by and large, most scholars seemed to prefer writing about social capital or other trendy issues.

In my mind, civil-military relations sounded like a boring and irrelevant subject, something that Latin American specialists did and was relevant to their region. But ever since the militaries of Tunisia and Egypt turned on their benefactors, the military of Libya fragmented, and Syria’s (apparently) remained steadfast in its loyalty to the dictator, I have come to appreciate the complexity and importance of military politics. Gause will find little argument from me on this point.

However, it is not altogether clear that had scholars focused more on civil-military relations, the events of the Arab Spring would have been less of a surprise. It would have indeed provided evidence of the fragility of these regimes, but in fact, such evidence has not been lacking. Gause’s second factor is a case in point. He argues that Middle East scholars underestimated the destabilizing effect of neoliberal economic reforms on non-oil-rich states. Two points are relevant here:

1. While Gause is probably correct in his related assertion that oil-rich states remain relatively stable, I believe that this issue needs to be investigated in light of the events in Libya and Bahrain. The uprisings in those two countries can be blamed on contingent factors, like ethnic strains or economic waste, as Gause does, but it is far from established that these contingent factors are responsible for allowing mobilization to grow much further than the regimes’ comfort levels. I will feel more comfortable in such assertions after systematic studies have been done.

2. More to the point, Gause’s argument about the destabilizing effect of neoliberal economic reforms is not news to Middle East scholars. Many scholars in fact have argued all along that the status quo was inherently destabilizing and unsustainable, whether because of the austerity of structural adjustment programs, growing corruption, unpopular American hegemony over the region, or ideologically bankrupt, authoritarian regimes. Particularly problematic (in my eyes, at least) was the exclusion of the younger generations from the “ruling bargain” of the 1950s and 1960s due to contracting state financial obligations.

After some time, it became difficult for scholars explain the persistence of these regimes, given all the reasons for discontent. Thus, the scholarly focus began to shift to authoritarian stability, not because there were no reasons to believe instability would occur, but precisely because there were so many. Scholars cannot ignore empirical reality; Mubarak’s 31 years in power, Assad’s (Hafez) 29 years and his son’s subsequent 11 years (so far), Qaddhafi’s 41 years, and so on, need to be explained given the very real expectations that such long-term authoritarian, corrupt rule would not succeed.

The question now, after the events to date of the Arab Spring, should most appropriately be “why now?” rather than focusing on why it happened in the first place. Why did the revolts occur this year, rather than last year or ten years ago? This is a much trickier question, one that could involve both contingent events and others related to systematic factors.

I think that previous research has given scholars clues as to some important factors worth investigating. The first comes from social movement scholarship, which has influenced many studies of Middle Eastern issues in recent years. Social movement scholars point to movements’ opportunities, strategies, and capacities to organize, rather than simply looking at the existence of grievances to explain variations in social movement activity. While the details have yet to fully emerge, it appears that the youth of countries like Egypt and Tunisia, and possibly others, like Syria, have been organizing for several years, not simply to voice their protest, but with the intent of carrying out a nonviolent revolution.  Discontented and not beholden to their regime’s ruling bargain, the youth organized both on the ground and in cyberspace to eventually capture the imagination of a large segment of their country’s population.

This brings us to a second factor, the highly important but difficult to predict “snowball effect.” Once a critical mass of individuals are seen defying authorities (to protest, for example), others are more likely to perceive lower risk to themselves and therefore more likely to join the defiance. This is well explained by Timur Kuran in a 1991 article in World Politics, “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989.” It is often contingent and unpredictable events, however, that are the triggering events for such snowball effects, making them difficult to predict. Making prediction even harder is the fact that citizens of authoritarian regimes have an incentive to hide their true preferences from others, out of fear of the authorities, until the snowball cascade is well underway. Despite these apparently unsystematic factors influencing the outcome, it is nevertheless apparent that some sort of cascade similar to what Kuran described has recently been at work in many countries.

Further investigation of these two factors may uncover important clues to answering the question of “why now?” While much works remains to be done, significant scholarly groundwork has been done by scholars preceding the Arab Spring, giving us much to build upon. Although it is important to look at what scholars missed before the events of the last few months, it is equally, if not more important, to look at what they did NOT miss, and use it in future scholarship on successful and unsuccessful uprisings. Scholars, while pleasantly surprised by the Arab Spring, may have missed less than we think.