Revolts and the Military in the Arab Spring: Popular Uprisings and the Politics of Repression by Sean Burns (review)

Less than a decade ago, few reliable scholarly analyses were available on Middle Eastern military establishments. Doing research in the region and on this particular topic was fraught with many difficulties: the regimes did not publish trustworthy data; access to local officials, practitioners, and experts was extremely limited and, when granted, the discussions’ usefulness was often questionable; and one had to be mindful of the personal safety of one’s interlocutors let alone one’s own, when pursuing this line of inquiry. Judging by the volume of new publications since the 2011 Arab upheavals, at least some of these obstacles have become more manageable, or more likely, they were less intimidating in several countries during a brief window of opportunity after 2011. Sean Burns’s new book joins several volumes and dozens of scholarly articles that have focused on the role and performance of Arab armies during the revolts at the beginning of the decade.

Revolts and the Military in the Arab Spring is based on Burns’s dissertation, but it does not, like so many “dissertation books,” read like a doctoral thesis. The book is divided into an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion. What sets apart this volume from earlier ones on this topic? First of all, “it focuses on outcomes, not only military behavior or decision making,” and it demonstrates “how military structure determined what the various militaries chose to do in the face of popular uprisings and examines whether those actions were successful” (p. 2). The introduction and the first chapter — taken up mostly by a useful but elementary discussion of civil-military relations — persuasively explains why Burns’s analytical approach may be more useful than that of other recent studies on the subject and, along the way, makes some interesting points regarding the Arab uprisings. For instance, discussing revolutionary diffusion Burns points out that “two diffusion waves were happening at the same time,” because it was not just activists that were sharing information on various social media, but “authoritarian leaders were also learning from one another” (p. 8).

Second, Burns correctly believes that we can learn more about these armies if we consider not only the role they played in the uprising itself but continue to examine their actions in the post-revolt transition phase. Unfortunately, this promise is only partially delivered on in this volume. Some armies (e.g., the Egyptian) receive close attention in the postrevolutionary phase, while others, most notably the Tunisian, get little coverage in the section devoted to that country’s transition (pp. 85–94). That is too bad, because such an analysis could have been quite enlightening given that Tunisia is the only country where the realistic chance of democratic consolidation has been preserved. Thus, the question of what we and the less successful regimes in the region could learn from the Tunisian army’s transition is left unanswered.

Third, seven case-study chapters consistently follow the outlines presented in the first chapter: the discussion of the country’s historical background is followed by the concise tabulation of the given military’s structure based on seven variables (representativeness, cohesiveness, distinctiveness, bureaucratization, subordination, expertise, and external focus) that are useful, though they are quite similar to some of the earlier works on this issue. Regrettably, the coverage is a bit uneven; clearly Burns is more familiar with some of his cases than with others. Also, the chapters’ historical discussions tend to be too long — going back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries seems unnecessary, and a couple of footnotes pointing the reader to the best sources would have been sufficient.

Fourth, unlike similar volumes on the subject, Burns includes an informative and well-conceived chapter on the 1978/79 Iranian Revolution, which serves as a very useful case to compare with the aforementioned country studies. He wisely utilizes the Iranian case to show “a military...