Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa by Frédéric Volpi (review)

Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa is advertised as offering a new approach to understanding the political causality behind the 2011 uprisings in North Africa. Author Frédéric Volpi wishes to present them from the inside, so to speak, "to retain the implications of meaning-making in the construction of the causality" (p. 4), rather than presenting them from the outside, identifying "factors that constrain (or facilitate) human action in a regular fashion" (p. 2) in the manner of a natural scientist. He rules out any "structural" explanation for differing outcomes of the Arab Spring, using Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds,¹ whose per capita income explanation is indeed highly reductionist, as his convenient straw men.

Volpi assumes that Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia share a common starting point of "one known institutional model—in this case more or less open authoritarian regimes . . ." (p. 172)—having a relatively stable routine of governance. He adequately describes the evolution of each regime from independence until 2011 in a full chapter subtitled "Structuring the Option for Change" but nowhere does he systematically compare their vulnerabilities much less explain why, at least in retrospect, it was Tunisia rather than one of the others that triggered the Arab Spring. Nor does Volpi point out any connection between Moroccan king Hasan II's opening to the opposition in 1998 and his son's tactics in 2011, opening the Moroccan government to another tamed opposition. Each regime supposedly had rational-legal legitimacy based on elections (and "pseudo-politics" in Morocco and Algeria), although Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi's "neo-sultanistic approach . . . ensured a low level of political institutionalization" (p. 68) in Libya. All four countries also developed patronage networks, based on oil revenues in Algeria and Libya and on business networks in Morocco and Tunisia. The one significant difference, helping in subsequent chapters to explain the more flexible Moroccan and Algerian responses to extensive popular mobilization and unrest, was their multi-party politics, compared to Tunisia's more rigid dominant single party and Libya's virtually nonexistent party system. Completely overlooked was the Tunisian coalition of opposition parties, including the Ennahda Movement as well as secular parties—formed long before 2011—that helped to consolidate the January 14 Revolution.

From a supposed common starting point and excluding any "structural" explanations lest they obscure revolutionary creativity, the countries entered phase two of "impossible uprisings" and new arenas of contentious politics, a process of "deinstitutionalization" of the regime and the emergence of new practices by protesters and incumbents. Volpi reasonably argues that conflagrations were unpredictable and initially imperceptible; he observes that it took several days (December 17–28, not weeks, p. 73) before Muhammad Bou'azizi's self-immolation acquired revolutionary momentum in Tunisia. But Volpi did not really get inside the movement to observe who disseminated the news of the attempted suicide, much less how it was misrepresented as the plight of unemployed graduates. Nor did he understand how far the practices of Zine El-'Abidine Ben 'Ali and his wife, Leïla, had deviated from Habib Bourguiba's republican norms, much less compare their deviations to lesser ones of their companion authoritarians. While Volpi shows some familiarity with the political economy literature, he made no effort to compare the relative density of Tunisia's private sector and civil society with those of other three countries. He does, however, usefully compare the ineffective responses of Ben 'Ali and Qadhafi to those of the Moroccan and Algerian regimes. He might have probed further, however, to get at the sources of the "pseudo-politics" that protected the latter two—a Moroccan makhzen (government) well versed in the arts of manipulating civil society and an equally experienced Algerian security state.

Volpi also missed the inside story of Tunisia's amazing creation of transitional institutions. He correctly notes that transitional prime minister Béji Caïd Essebsi facilitated the inclusion and institutionalization of the "opposition-led National Council for the...