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This chapter examines whether the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provided a concrete background to illuminate the preludes to the Arab Spring by focusing on the experiences of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. It first considers the common features of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen before discussing the implementation of the MDGs in those countries. It also assesses the effects of the Arab Spring on the MDG progress in each country with respect to indicators such as eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting general equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and ensuring environmental sustainability. The chapter proceeds by analysing the impact of the Arab Spring on Arab civil society and concludes with an overview of prospects for the Arab world in the post-2015 era.

This concluding chapter addresses general questions raised by the events from 2010 onwards in countries of the Middle East and North Africa. How unified, or diverse, were the phenomena covered by the term ‘the Arab Spring’? How did power politics, within and beyond the region, affect outcomes? Why was democratization so difficult to achieve in so many of these postcolonial societies? Did civil resistance constitute a serious challenge to those advocating resort to political violence and terrorism? Did the Arab Spring contribute unintentionally to a revival of authoritarian ideas and practices in the region and elsewhere? What lessons can be learned about the possibilities of political change, and the capacity of civil resistance to achieve it?

The purpose of this chapter is to present new empirical research on the Arab Spring and, specifically, to focus on the attitudes of residents of one country in the Middle East towards the Arab Spring. This research was conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has been one of the main migrant destinations in the world for the last two decades. This allows for comparisons regarding attitudes towards the Arab Spring across individuals from different regions of origin such as GCC, South Asia, and Western countries. The attitudes of university students are important because the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has experienced a substantial increase in the 17 to 23 years of age population. Existing reports suggest that, by far, those involved in Arab Spring protests were young individuals. The analysis places particular emphasis on the correlation of attitudes towards the Arab Spring with three key aspects: religiousness, attachment to the GCC countries, and attachment to country of origin.

Digital media have allowed spatially distant communities to realize shared grievances and political goals in many nondemocratic countries. It is also through digital media that citizens document, and sometimes test, the weaknesses and limits of state power. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have extended the capacity of societal actors in many cases, but are not as effectively used by states to improve governance. Thus, the condition of limited statehood had made many Arab regimes surprisingly brittle, especially during the mass mobilizations of the Arab Spring. Over the course of a year, popular movements for democracy cascaded across the Middle East and North Africa. Weighing multiple political, economic, and cultural conditions, we find that information infrastructure—especially mobile phone use—consistently appears as one of the key ingredients in parsimonious models for the conjoined combinations of causes behind regime fragility.

The central message of this book is that change leading to empowerment must start at the highest level of government decision-making. Empowerment requires resisting authoritarianism and achieving a balanced relationship between citizens and the ruling power. Regimes' obsession with military security has come at the expense of legitimacy, public services, and wider human security. This has led to the deterioration of already inadequate living standards and social conditions. For some regimes this policy failure has led to state failure. Yet democratization waves are spreading through the region. Though the core tenets of democracy are the same everywhere, the Arab world must develop its own mode of democratic governance based on the primacy of social justice. In an institution-based society, everyone must adhere to practices of transparent decision-making, with oversight and accountability at all levels. While the Arab Spring marked a start toward democratization, the path remains difficult. This book proposes that democratization begin with establishing a stable and peaceful means for transferring power in a state ruled by law and with codified, objective standards for decision-making. Toward this end, states must pursue transparency, balanced media reporting, effective conflict management, and support for communal and individual identity.

Drawing on Levitsky and Way’s model, this chapter offers a sophisticated assessment of Tunisia’s political liberalisation. Of all the region’s countries, it alone emerged from the Arab Spring significantly more democratic than when the protests began. Ostensibly, Levitsky and Way’s model can account for this outcome. Not only did does Tunisia have high linkage to the EU and US, but the West has high leverage over it. In such circumstances, the Ben Ali regime’s high organisational power is of secondary importance. Yet this being the case, why did he remain in office for so long? The chapter argues that the EU and US consistently failed to put as much democratising pressure on him as they could have done, and that the regime’s organisational strength was not as great as it seemed owing to the persistent alienation of the country’s armed forces.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Arab Spring—the series of revolts that swept through the Arab world during the spring of 2011. This phenomenon rolled specifically through five different countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria—either toppling the government (as in Tunisia and Egypt) or ending in a bloody conflict (as in Libya, Yemen, and Syria). The organizing force behind this string of revolutions was primarily young Arabs who were technologically savvy, politically deprived, and unmoved by the antiquated rhetoric of their rulers masquerading as tribunes for the people. As the personal accounts of revolutionaries in this volume reveal, these revolts were not random; rather, the Arab people started to resist when the security states slowly began to show their true face, targeting dissenters and buying loyalty through cronyism, nepotism, and brutality.

This chapter examines parties and party system change across the MENA countries since December 2010. The discussion begins with a brief overview of party systems in the region on the eve of the Arab Spring, thereby providing a quick introduction to the selected cases as well as a benchmark against which to measure change. Party system change is determined via indicators such as the effective number of parties, party system fragmentation, electoral volatility and the entry of new parties into the system. The analysis of the indicators of party system change is coupled with a discussion of empirical data on the political environment during and in the immediate aftermath of the elections, including issues such as regime classification, rotation of power, coalition structures, prohibited parties, and societal cleavages. The author explains how - despite the fact that some old regimes fell and elections were held - the traditionally dominant or hegemonic political parties stayed preeminent in a number of MENA countries. Finally, this chapter shows what party system change tells us about the prospects for democracy some five years after the outbreak of the Arab Spring.

This chapter reflects on the existence or not of a new wave of democratisation in the wake of the Arab Spring. It is true that simultaneity, contagion, diffusion and emulation do feature in the political dynamics of change following the Arab Spring. However, rather than a democratic tsunami, there were ebbs and flows of a ‘wave of political change’ that has involved differing transformative processes in each country. Secondly, the author offers a typology of political regimes as well as a classification of MENA regimes prior to the Arab Spring, in order to identify the starting point of political change. Thirdly, different types of political change processes are defined and categorised: two general processes of political change (democratisation and autocratisation); and, five specific processes of political change affecting democracies (democratic regression, democratic deepening and consolidation of democracy) or authoritarianisms (political liberalisation and authoritarian progression). And finally, the author presents the methodological framework used in this book to study political change in the MENA countries. This change is analysed with reference to three dimensions: pluralism and political competition (party/representation systems and electoral integrity); government (constitutional reforms, government and state powers, and good governance; and public rights and liberties (political rights, civil rights, rule of law, and civil society).

This chapter analyses what the political transformations following the Arab Spring mean from the perspective of different International Relations theories: neo-realism, institutionalism, social constructivism and critical theories.  The chapter first points to the direct effects of foreign policy intervention in transitions to democracy worldwide, including the MENA region, notwithstanding the traditional support some non-democratic or aggressive regimes have received from consolidated democracies.   Second, the chapter reviews the work of a number of prestigious International Relations’ scholars on the Arab Spring and reviews how leading International Relations journals of different theoretical leaning have treated the Arab Spring in the period 2011-15. The chapter illustrates how similar topics are treated in each theory in rather inverted ways. While neo-realists do not focus on the Arab Spring itself but rather on the possible threats that derive from it and their consequences, critical theorists reverse the analysis and locate it in the economic causes and implications of armed interventions as well as the excessive processes of vigilance and control. If liberals engage in a debate on the defence of the R2P doctrine, constructivists are more aware of the contradictory effects of democratic diffusion and cognitive uncertainty. Finally, the chapter concludes on the prospects and need within International Relations for further theoretical development on the Arab Spring.

Drawing on Levitsky and Way’s model, this chapter advances an innovative explanation for the endurance of Algeria’s competitive authoritarian order. Like its Moroccan and Mauritanian counterparts (two of the volume’s other case studies), the Algerian regime emerged from the Arab Spring largely unchanged. Levitsky and Way offer a compelling account of its survival. The European Union’s and United States’s medium links to and low leverage over of the country prevent them from putting decisive democratising pressure on it. While the scope, cohesion and experience of its security apparatus give it sufficient organisational strength to withstand any domestic challenges. Nevertheless, the West could have pressed Algiers to liberalise harder and with greater consistency. And, in a departure from Levitsky and Way’s theory, President Bouteflika did not create and rely on a single ruling party.

This chapter argues that the EU’s response(s) to the Arab Spring can be best described as hybrid and is (are) closely reflective of the very hybridity of the EU’s international identity. On the one hand, despite genuine normative impetuses, a largely realist approach and exclusive identities and roles prevailed in crisis management and short-term reactions driven by intergovernmental decision-making. The EU’s crisis management responses are examined in the cases of three different groups of Arab countries – those having witnessed regime change, civil conflict and regime resilience. On the other hand, a more liberal outlook and inclusive identities and roles were embodied in strategic or long-term responses in the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy, although the latter’s inherent contradictions and lack of innovation in relation to past policies eventually deprived them of the value-based and progressive effect envisaged on paper. Finally, the EU returned to crisis mode in managing the Syrian refugee inflow that was framed as a ‘crisis’ and took the ‘fortress Europe’ identity to its utmost degree from 2015 onwards.