The “Arab spring” is an expression coined to describe the wave of uprisings that swept across the region after the successful toppling of Ben Ali in January 2011. The Tunisian example soon inspired other countries to take the streets, leading to the fall of the Mubarak regime, the ousting of Ali Abdullah Salah in Yemen, the foreign intervention-backed removal of Kaddafi while triggering sizeable protests in Bahrain and Syria and other countries in the Arab world.
These events stood in stark contrast with the general consensus in the field of Middle Eastern studies on the irrelevancy of looking into signs of democratization on the Arab world. Seeing that the region had missed the third wave of democratization, scholars had turned their attention to interpreting the durability of authoritarian regimes. Therefore, the “Arab spring” prompted many scholars to review their initial claims and paradigms, raising question about their legitimacy and usefulness. The question that then arises is the following: does it matter that Middle East Studies failed to predict the
Arab Spring? This question is raised in a context where social sciences are now expected to reach accuracy in a quantified and mathematical fashion in order to predict future events (Mitchell, 2004).
Generally speaking, one must recognize that the field of Middle Eastern studies had not anticipated the possibility for Arab countries to democratize. This is partly due to the fact that Middle Eastern studies had been marked by decades of Orientalist literature, with academics depicting the Arab world as tradition-bound, backward, mired in Islamic pre-modernity and as fundamentally different from the modern and rational West. The aim of that division was to justify Western’s intervention in the Orient presented as a “surrogate or underground self” (Said, 1979: 3).
Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism was to challenge those preconceived notions or “idées reçues” on the Arabs, heralding a new scholarly tradition that rejected the essentialist approach of studying the Arab world. However, Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11 reignited Orientalist claims – as attested by Bernard Lewis’ essay The Roots Muslim Rage - prompting the policy world to encourage scholarly work on counter-insurgency and Islamic fundamentalism (Hudson, 2005). In the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and the third wave of democratization sweeping all across Eastern Europe, academics were left to wonder about the absence of such developments in the Arab world. Consequently, academics took to explore the factors of authoritarianism resistance through a wide variety of factors such as culture, religion, institutions or political economy. For instance, analysts argued that economic reform undertaken by autocrats were deployed as a strategy for regime maintenance. Arab governments manipulated selectively economic liberalization to strengthen their hold on power, in an attempt to “upgrade authoritarianism” (Heydemann, 2007). Through limited economic liberalization, the regime was able to co-opt the private sector who was able to have privileged access to certain business ventures and enrich itself with the complicity of state actors, transforming a potential power contender into a beneficiary and supporter of the system (Heydemann, 2007: 15). Broadly speaking, it was generally thought that Arab governments had built effective mechanisms to counter-act any attempt to democratize.
Consequently, the Arab spring came as quite a shock for the field of Middle Eastern studies, compelling many scholars to publish new pieces making amends and apologizing for previous errors (Gause, 2011; Laipson, 2011). This is not the first time this mea culpa is made by the field: Timothy Mitchell observes that scholars regularly recognize their inability to predict major political events. This apologetic stance is not specific to the Arab world specialists, it is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the expectation that social sciences can and should create a universal science. Based on facts and figures, the thinking goes, social sciences should be able to predict future trends with almost mathematical precision (Mitchell, 2004: 76).
In light of this expectation, it was believed that the field would learn from past mistakes and self-correct in the future. But does it really matter that scholars failed to predict the Arab Spring?
I argue that it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter that Middle East studies failed to foresee the Arab uprisings. First, I disagree to some extent with the claim that scholars failed to previse the Arab revolts. Influenced by James C. Scott’s book Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), a body of literature had previously looked into the ways the people adopted strategies of resistance to authoritarian regimes without challenging them directly. While these strategies were described as venting mechanisms reinforcing authoritarian regimes, academics never fully discounted the possibility of an uprising. For instance, Lisa Wedeen and Myriam Cooke have shown how the official propaganda of the Assad regime served as a locus of creative resistance for many artists (Wedeen, 1999; Cooke, 2007). Other academics have explored the strategies that individuals use to resist the state. Diane Singerman argued that Egyptians were not passive actors, as they actively engaged with their government on a daily basis through the use of “informal” networks in order to fulfill family needs. For instance, the claims for housing forced the Mubarak regime to turn a blind eye on the illegal constructions that were springing up in Cairo (Singerman, 1995). There was also a wide literature on a more confrontational aspect of politics, focusing on the workers’ movement (Shehata, 2009; Clément, 2009) and the Kefaya movement (El Mahdi, 2009). Asef Bayat went as far as asserting that urban street protests have the potential to turn passive informal networks into a unified movement when individuals are facing a “common threat” (Bayat, 2009). In hindsight, his description of street politics appears to be prophetic in the case of Egypt.
In addition, the role of scholars shouldn’t be to predict the future. Expecting academics to predict the Arab Spring reveals a lot about the to role that they are supposed to play according to the policy world. In reality, they are blamed for having missed an event of strategic importance for the US government, as made blatant by Martin Kramer’s argument in his book Ivory Towers Built on Sand (2001). Through his piece, he critiques what he describes as a tendency on the part of Middle East academics to reject any tie with policy-makers. From its inception, he believes, the area Middle Eastern studies were meant to serve government interests. In the aftermath of the Second World War, funding knowledge on the region was perceived as a natural prolongation of a military strategy of protecting US interests. Therefore, the recent tendency of Middle Eastern experts to refuse any connection to the policy world is an aberration for Kramer. Yet, for all the criticism on the bias of Middle Eastern experts, Kramer is not void of his own partiality. He overlooks the detrimental consequences of the connivance between the academic and policy world. For instance, it is this relationship between the policy world and Middle Eastern studies that justified the time-honored policy of the US government of supporting dictators in the Arab world, as part of the plan of fighting Islamic fundamentalism. As observed by Tareq Ali, had scholars predicted the Arab spring, they would have probably prompted Arab governments to take all measures to nip these movements in the bud (Ali, 2012).
Thirdly, it is too soon to dismiss previous academic work on authoritarian resilience as it still has a lot of value in interpreting current events. How can we understand the resilience of the Assad regime without studying the way the regime has built an alliance with minorities and the business class for instance (Haddad, 2012)? How can we explain that the army sided with the people in Egypt and Tunisia and not in Bahrain and Syria? There has been a tendency to idealize or romanticize the Arab Spring without looking at the intricacies and complexities of the uprisings in the context of each country taken individually. As pointed out by Lisa Anderson, one shouldn’t analyze the Arab uprisings in a monolithic way. While Tunisia’s revolution started from the rural area and reached Tunis the last, the Egyptian mass mobilization started from Cairo from the first day. Most importantly, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya face a different set of challenges. While Egypt and Tunisia’s effort will be concentrated on democratization, Libya still faces the daunting task of constructing a civil society and a state that can overcome kin and tribe divides. Put differently, the diversity of the Arab world calls for a multi-faceted analysis instead of relying on sweeping generalizations on the alleged coherence of the “Arab spring” (Anderson, 2011).
Lastly, revolution does not necessarily entail meaningful change. This is all the more apparent when probing into the case of Egypt’s transitional phase during which the SCAF was reluctant to release its grip from power. As explained by Bayat, Egypt’s peculiarity lies in the rapidity of the regime fall. Because the revolution occurred in such a short time span, it did not give enough time for an actual opposition to organize itself and lead the transition to democracy. As a result, the opposition relied on the remnants of the Mubarak era to take on the responsibility to reform the old political system (Bayat, 2011). The access to power of the Muslim Brotherhood – one of Mubarak’s fiercest opponents- does not diminish that threat in any way, as shown by President Morsi’s recent attempt to issue decrees that would have put him above the law. In Jason Brownlee’s words, “facile anti-Mubarakism should not be mistaken for democratization. On the contrary, selective populism without popular sovereignty is a quick route to post Mubarak authoritarianism” (Brownlee, 2011). In other words, it is probably too soon to discard previous findings of Middle Eastern studies.
Bibliography
Tareq Ali interviewed by Julian Assange in The World Tomorrow (June 26 2012), Video retrieved from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dboKS5iBCwAsef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Stanford University Press (2009)
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