Journal Article10.5129/001041512798838021
Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring
TL;DR: The Arab Spring has proven astonishing and exhilarating to Middle East analysts and activists alike as mentioned in this paper, starting in Tunisia and spreading quickly to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and beyond.
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Abstract: The “Arab Spring” has proven astonishing and exhilarating to Middle East analysts and activists alike. Starting in Tunisia and spreading quickly to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and beyond, a wave of political protest, unprecedented in scope and ambition, swept the region in 2011. In short order, two deeply entrenched authoritarian rulers were jettisoned from office, and by early summer the leaders of at least three other Arab regimes appeared to be in grave jeopardy. In the wake of this wave, nearly every authoritarian regime in the region scrambled to concoct the “right” mix of repression and cooptation in the hope of stemming the protest. And even authoritarian regimes as distant as China took nervous notice of developments in the region. For Middle East specialists, the events of the Arab Spring proved especially jarring, even if welcomed, because of their extensive investment in analyzing the underpinnings of authoritarian persistence, long the region’s political hallmark. The empirical surprise of 2011 raises a pressing question—do we need to rethink the logic of authoritarianism in the Arab world or, even more broadly, authoritarian persistence writ large? What follows is a reconsideration of the “robustness of authoritarianism” in the Arab world and beyond. The surprises of the Arab Spring, and especially the internal variation within the region, suggest new theoretical insights as well as new empirical realities that govern the dynamics of authoritarianism in the twenty-first century. At the same time, recent events confirm some long-held truisms about the dynamics of authoritarian durability. In addition, the events of the Arab Spring suggest insights into a host of other issues, including the dynamics of military defection; the logic of social mobilization; the complementary roles of structure, agency, intention, and contingency in complex political phenomena such as political uprisings (and, consequently, the limits
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Citations
How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors proposed a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor the subset they deem objectionable.
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References
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TL;DR: The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest as discussed by the authors. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals.
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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
TL;DR: The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov New York: Public Affairs, 2011 409 pages $16.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] as discussed by the authors.
989
The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective
TL;DR: In the Middle East and North Africa region, only two out of twenty-one countries qualify as electoral democracies, down from three observed in 1972 as mentioned in this paper, while the number of electoral democracies has nearly doubled since 1972.
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Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization
Jason Brownlee
- 01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: Brownlee et al. as mentioned in this paper show that the mixed record of recent democratization is best deciphered through a historical and institutional approach to authoritarian rule, exposing the internal organizations that structure elite conflict and why the critical soft-liners needed for democratic transitions have been dormant in Egypt and Malaysia but outspoken in Iran and the Philippines.
Deterrence or Escalation?: The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies of Repression and Dissent
TL;DR: The authors proposed an alternative Rational Actor (RA) model from which are derived three propositions: (1) an increase in a government's repression of nonviolence will reduce the nonviolent activities of an opposition group but increase its violent activities; (2) Consistent government accommodative and repressive policies reduce dissent; inconsistent policies increase dissent.
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