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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 introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It contrast to the long held view of revolution scholars that regimes are normally stable and coherent, it sets out the notion that regimes are inherently volatile, regardless of how long they survive. In other words, instead of treating stability as unproblematic and piling up sets of conditions that lead to revolution, stability is treated as the problem. The chapter presents the reasons for conceiving regimes in this way, and offers suggestions for how they should be studied. It demonstrates how internally differentiated ruling blocs work together to maintain their regimes while at the same time compete for control over them. The result is ongoing power struggles, muted most of the time and explosive during times of crisis. It is those silent manoeuvres and explicit battles between the military, security, and political institutions that propel regimes down specific pathways, and ultimately determine the direction and pace of regime change.

This chapter does a comparative analysis of democratic transition in Indonesia following the Asian financial crisis and collapse of the New Order military regime, and the Egyptian transition following the 2011 revolutionary uprising that unseated President Hosni Mubarak. The historical similarities between the two cases are numerous and include the established principle of extensive military involvement in internal politics and the national economy and extend to the nature of the collapse of military dictatorship. Democratic transition and consolidation is not easy but it was a process that was relatively well managed in Indonesia and the military ultimately withdrew from national politics to become a more professional institution. The success of democratic consolidation in Egypt will require a similar professionalization of the military and this chapter analyzes this prospect through the lens of constitutionalism and political reforms. It is uncertain how this complex interplay between civilian and military authorities will play out in the Egyptian context and whether the democratic transition will lend to easy consolidation or end in a series of ups and downs.

Today’s rulers have two main strategies of self-preservation. With one hand they purchase legitimacy in the eyes of the ruled; with the other hand they keep down anything that can threaten their hold on power. The way the regime deals with society is through an intricate good-cop, bad-cop act.

During the reform period, the state has consolidated itself as one dedicated to self-preservation, stability, and economic growth. The reign of Hu and Wen from 2002 to 2012 was entirely devoted to keeping the wheels moving. They did try to lift their gaze from the economic statistics and took to the flowering language of ‘harmonious society’, but there was no determination in it. They left to their successors a state that is in control and fiscally solid and that is presiding over an economically strong nation, but also one that is a bit of a bluff in strength and that maintains stability at the cost of an epidemic of organised crime. As to where the state might be moving with the post-2012–13 leadership, it is in the balance.

Party-states are dictatorships. All the known ones in history have been dictatorships, and the remaining ones, including China, are dictatorships. Communist rule in China was dictatorial before the communists were in control of all of the country, established itself as a brute dictatorship nationally in 1949, and continued to be a deadly dictatorship under Mao. China today is a sophisticated dictatorship in which citizens are allowed many freedoms but only up to a point. At that point, when necessary, and often enough that no one is in doubt, the party-state clamps down, sometimes in crude and sometimes in subtle ways, and with whatever force is necessary. It bears being set down at the start and then not forgotten that the regime that presents itself to the world as reformed is one that still rules, ultimately, by fear, intimidation, violence, and death.

Much of what the post-Mao leaders have said and done suggest an end of ideology, and that is a plausible hypothesis. However, the party-state is a structure that craves ideology. The state has its justification from the party, but the party needs its own justification and has nowhere else to turn for it than from the realm of ideas. The party demands obedience, but if that is to make sense, it must be working for a purpose that legitimises its claim on obedience. Since the party-state claims much—an absolute right to lead and an absolute duty on others to follow—it would seem to need a purpose that is grand and imposing. Along the continuum from the death of ideology to the revival of ideology, three hypotheses present themselves, which the author calls ‘the triviality hypothesis’, ‘the welfare hypothesis’, and ‘the power hypothesis’.

A welfare state is known by the services it provides to its population. Not by whether or not it delivers welfare services—under all the author’s three hypotheses we would expect to see a state that is activist in service provision—but by the kind of services it provides and how it is done. It is therefore not enough to ask if there are welfare policies, but it is necessary to look in some detail into how those policies are shaped. But services are not only provided; they also have to be paid for. The state does that by extracting taxes from its population. A part of the welfare test must be to examine how the state treats its population in taxation, in addition to how it treats it with services. The combined examination of taxes and services is the standard model of welfare-state analysis. This is the ‘narrow test’ of the welfare hypothesis which the author will pursue in the present chapter.

The chapter deals with the issue of how to identify technocrats outside and within the political system and determine the nature and extent of political influence. Drawing on organizational sociology, elite research and comparative politics, the chapter maps the available answers, from the most general idea of the ‘technostructure’ to the specific (and rare) occurrence of a fully technocratic government.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relation between time and space in the essay “Uchinaru henkyō.” A certain inconsistency is identified in Abe’s argument, for he appears at moments to conceive of time as a pure movement that unfolds strictly prior to the intervention of space. This is shown to be impossible, and yet Abe’s text also reveals that time and space exist as fundamentally interrelated. This chapter both follows and diverges from Abe to reveal that an entity’s exposure to spatiotemporal inscription takes place from the initial moment of its appearance, and it is for this reason that entities are unable to present themselves as such. Although Abe tends to oppose the movement of time to the fixity of space, the notion of alterity he sets forth involves a generalization of movement to include within it space as well as time.

This chapter, the second on the collective behaviour of the party, the ways Irish nationalists behaved in division votes in the House of Commons is examined. This is essential to explaining the changing efficacy of the party’s leadership and policies. The chapter relies on data collected by Valerie Cromwell and deposited in the UK Data Archive in 1991. Every vote taken in the House of Commons for the years 1901, 1906, 1911, and 1916 has been factored into the analysis. It explains the participation rate of Irish party MPs in the context of the other sitting parties and also considers party cohesion. Finally, the chapter considers the similarity of the Irish party to their British counterparts using the statistical data generated.

This chapter studies the role of several epistemic communities in the realm of area studies—in particular Sovietology, Middle Eastern studies, and China studies—when these communities produce knowledge about the future. Future claims made by academics are predominantly linear (Chapter 2) and predictions about radical junctures—sudden changes in a political trajectory—are very rare. Within these communities whose members can be counted by the thousands, great conformity towards dominant and consensual paradigms prevails and scholars tend to rally around the study of the same issues as they want to anticipate the social demand. This is the ultimate paradox of experts’ future telling, building linear and consensual claims about the future, which in turn make radical changes in political trajectories all the more surprising (chapters 4 and 5).

Chapter 2, by Chandra Lekha Sriram, offers comparative lessons and challenges in understanding transitional justice from a global perspective, with some examples from and reflections for the MENA region. She identifies four types of challenges in discussing the topic, which have arisen from experiences in other regions but are equally relevant in the region. The first is how the impact of transitional justice can be assessed, if at all. The second is that of who is calling for transitional justice, and what the views of it are, particularly from the grass-roots level. The third is that of the effects of institutional design of specific transitional justice measures. And the final challenge is the appropriate scope of such measures, including whether they should include a range of social and economic concerns.