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Introduction Authority in Flux: Three Drivers of Change in the Middle East and North Africa The self-immolation of a fruit and vegetable vendor in a central Tunisian town in December 2010 seemed an unlikely spark for revolutions across three continents. Tunisia’s populist uprising initially began as local affairs— workers and youth congregating in the town square to express years of pent-up frustration against petty bureaucrats considered corrupt and abusive . The demonstrations began in towns far removed from Tunisia’s coastal elite—in Sidi Bouzid, Menzel Bouzaiene, al-Ragab, and Miknassi— with protestors demanding economic opportunity as well as greater dignity, justice, and political freedom. The protestors were united in opposing the cronyism and repression that had characterized President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s twenty-seven-year rule.1 By January 2011, the streets of Tunis were filled with lawyers, engineers, young women, and old housewives, a broad cross section of the Tunisian middle class. These were average citizens who, it had appeared to most outside observers, had accepted the authoritarian political order. Within eighteen days, the protestors unseated one of the most entrenched authoritarian regimes in the world. With Ben Ali’s hasty departure, his ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) party quickly dissolved, and the infrastructure of a regime that had seemed so omnipotent began to crumble. Inspired by the Tunisians’ peaceful ouster of their dictator, activists, youth, workers, and other average citizens took to the streets, from Cairo to Benghazi to even sleepy Muscat. By the end of 2011, none of the Arab states of the Middle East remained untouched by the wave of uprisings dubbed the ‘‘Arab Spring.’’2 Antigovernment protests emerged everywhere, 2 Introduction albeit in different forms. The protests quickly grew, fusing cries for economic justice with demands for greater political rights. By mid-2012, the upheaval had toppled four entrenched dictatorships, generated irreversible political crises elsewhere, and dramatically reshaped the politics of the region. That the dissolution of long-standing authoritarian regimes happened so quickly came as a surprise to many, within the region and beyond. The conventional view, shared by both policy makers and academics, considered the region’s authoritarian systems resilient, and presumed their invulnerability to populist upheaval.3 Prior to 2011, in light of the autocrats’ strong security forces and other mechanisms designed to control political mobilization, bottom-up upheaval sufficient to challenge the regimes in the region seemed unlikely. By early 2011, however, the supposedly clever and adaptive rulers were now backed into a corner, cowed into surrender. As the spark spread from the Tunisian Casbah and Cairo’s Tahrir Square across the region, it became clear that the political structures that had seemed so robust were actually vulnerable. The unrest revealed how ruling parties and even in some cases internal security services, such as ministries of interior, were more insecure than previously understood. It is too soon to gauge how each individual Arab state will emerge from the uprisings that began in 2011. Each revolt has thus far yielded varied political trajectories. As Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya embark on precarious , and by no means certain, paths toward democratic transition, elsewhere authoritarian retrenchment and consolidation are likely. In some cases, such as in Morocco and Jordan, the governments are making careful constitutional and electoral reforms to expand some political rights, even as they try to stay ahead of any potentially combustible mass mobilization. In Syria, civil and ethnic strife will likely endure. This book does not explain the varied outcomes of the uprisings of 2011, nor why protest movements varied in intensity from country to country. Instead, it offers a macro explanation for the Arab Spring’s origins. Explaining the Arab Spring: Drivers of Political Change Three systemic drivers of change, which emerged over the course of two decades, contributed to the uprisings of 2011 by changing the relationship between the region’s ruling authorities and their publics. The three drivers USE (2024-04-26 12:47 GMT) Introduction 3 are (1) an increased popular demand for free expression, which expanded the public sphere, opening a substantive debate among the public that was beyond the state’s full control; (2) a set of top-down reforms restricting political rights and civil liberties; and (3) a stalemate in the liberalizing reform programs of the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of which had been introduced by a new generational cohort of leaders, sons or other relatives who had succeeded their fathers. Even as the coercive apparatuses...

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