Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism

Introduction. Contentious Politics, Political Opposition, and Authoritarianism

Introduction Contentious Politics, Political Opposition, and Authoritarianism Holger Albrecht On 12 December 2004, a small group of political activists gathered in front of a court building in downtown Cairo, surrounded by hundreds of security personnel. What raised particular attention of the police and bystanders was the demonstrators’ message—in short, Kifaya (Enough)!—which expressed an outright demand to put an end to President Hosni Mubarak’s rule. In February 2006, Syrians demonstrated in the streets of Damascus against the publication of cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper . On 20 September 2006, in a highly contested presidential election in Yemen, an opposition candidate representing a coalition of opposition parties , Faisal Bin Shamlan, lost to incumbent president Ali Abdullah Saleh in what came to be regarded as the first real multicandidate presidential election in Yemen. Despite some marked differences, Syrian demonstrators, Egyptian political activists, and Yemeni opposition figures have in common the playing out of contentious politics, that is, activities in which “ordinary people, often in league with more influential citizens, join forces in confrontations with elites, authorities, and opponents” (Tarrow 1998: 2). From a naïve perspective, the mere empirical observation of struggles in streets, parliaments, and the media might not seem very puzzling: Should power and conflict not constitute the very core of human interactions in politics? However, a look at contemporary politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is worth a more careful treatment. In this region, authoritarian structures of political rule are robust at a time when all other world regions have experienced the emergence of democratization processes. Thus, an assumption based on our common understanding of authoritarianism could hold that the restriction of contentious politics, including political opposition 2 / Holger Albrecht and resistance, should be critical to an authoritarian incumbency’s struggle for regime stability and endurance. Surprisingly or not, while high levels of statist coercion do exist throughout the region, contentious state-society relations have emerged and prevailed over time, at high levels, in different countries, and in various social, cultural, and organizational forms: Islamist movements with strong popular backing, political parties, dissent among professional syndicates and universities, and nongovernmental organizations and self-help associations , to name only a few of these forms. This book accounts for such various modes of contentious politics under Arab authoritarianism and focuses in particular on political opposition. The aim is to contribute to an in-depth understanding of contentious politics in a largely stable authoritarian environment, applying empirical insights to conceptualize political opposition as a specific form of contentious state-society relations in various countries of the region. Answers are proposed to a number of intriguing and interrelated topics and questions: First, what specific forms of political opposition have emerged in the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East and North Africa? Second, how do the characteristics of authoritarian regimes determine the characteristics of opposition groups in the countries concerned? Third, how does political opposition behave in an authoritarian environment that structures constraints and opportunities for political activism ? Fourth, what are the institutional arrangements governing contentious state-opposition relations in the MENA? Fifth, what is the outcome of contentious relations between states and oppositions? And, even more intriguing: Does opposition matter in states that do not allow for the peaceful turnover of political power? Toward a Conceptual Framework of Political Opposition How does contentious politics work under authoritarianism? Not much has been offered conceptually to provide answers to this puzzle, primarily because a substantial bias has long obstructed research on nondemocratic states at large. Based on the assumption that authoritarian regimes would experience systemic change along certain waves of democratization processes, opposition and contentious collective activism has almost exclusively been addressed by looking at the potential overthrow of incumbent regimes; thus, terms and underlying concepts, such as civil society (in the context of democratization theories) and social movement collective activism (in the context of theories on revolutionary change), suffer from a profound democracy bias and largely fail to take into account that contentious activism might persist under stable and durable authoritarianism. Introduction / 3 Taking these conceptual predicaments into account, this book examines at length political opposition, a term with an established everyday meaning that remains seriously unexplored as an analytical category in studying contentious politics. The advantage is to identify contentious state-society relations within an institutionalized political framework: opposition as an antipode to government. Political opposition is one part of a binary referential...