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Of all the Arab Spring's popular uprisings, Libya's rebellion against the regime of Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi stands as one of the most idiosyncratic and unexpected. This chapter focuses on how Libya's new leaders will be able to reshape or in part create ex nihilo a new ruling bargain when faced with some of the structural legacies of the past. This reconstruction process has already started in earnest. The recent national elections were the first tangible sign of a consultation process that hints seductively at a new understanding of how the state and the country's citizens will interact. As a result of its history, its emergence as an oil economy, and the idiosyncratic vision of Qaddafi, Libya emerged as a country where neither state institutions nor the country's ruling bargain between the state and its citizens were clearly articulated.

In the context of the Arab Spring, Bahrain's tenuous and controversial ruling bargain came under intense pressure and rapidly evolved into a high-stakes political standoff, punctuated by periods of unilateral political decision-making and multilateral demonstrations of force. Both the remarkable levels of popular mobilization and the sectarian framing of the conflict in 2011-12 have dramatically altered the character of the underlying ruling bargain in Bahrain. The Bahraini monarchy has so far survived the remarkable popular challenge, but it has done so by making short-term decisions that will make it very difficult to sustain the traditional ruling bargain over the longer term. By increasing popular levels of both anger and fear, the regime's response to the uprising has deepened the social divisions within Bahrain. A path forward will require difficult political compromises if it is to be jointly forged through the actions of domestic stakeholders.

By the 1990s and the 2000s, little of the original ruling bargain remained. All that needed to be done for the one-legged bargain to collapse—in fact for the whole basis of rule to crumble—was for the grip of mass fear to be broken. And, when that happened, the Arab Spring followed. The chapter then provides a summary of the series of uprisings that came to be known as the Arab Spring, and how and why the Tunisian Revolution and Egyptian Revolution unfolded in the form of mass-based uprisings while the Libyan and Syrian rebellions took the form of civil wars. The chapter ends with a discussion of what the central elements of emerging sources of legitimacy—the evolving ruling bargain—are likely to be.

Instead of overhauling state-society relations, the Yemeni version of the Arab Spring is leading to more of the same: a perennially unstable country where elite factions dominate the political landscape. President Salih built a complex system of patronage that integrated military, tribal, and business leaders and allowed him to govern through a combination of bargaining, co-optation, and coercion. The result was a personalized system with brittle institutions, while channels for expressions of the popular will were weak. The ruling bargain in Yemen prior to the onset of the Arab Spring, in sum, was the product of a complex struggle among a loosely knit group of elite factions. The 2011 uprising modified the balance of forces among the regime’s factions and changed the rules of the game. Nonetheless, the ruling bargain has not fundamentally changed. Dissatisfied groups remain on the periphery, while civil society, despite unprecedented mobilization, has been unable to insert itself into networks of power. As a result, for the foreseeable future Yemen will likely witness on-going elite struggles for control over a weakening state, high popular frustrations because of unfulfilled aspirations, the constant threat of violence, an al-Qaeda insurgency and a deteriorating economy.

There was something of a dress rehearsal “Arab Spring” in early 2005, after which a ruling bargain emerged between the governed and those governing aimed at consolidating state-society relationships and maintaining various forms of authoritarian rule. In broad terms, this implicit bargain under-writing political rule has been one in which citizens surrender their political and social rights to participatory government, are expected to accept the legitimacy of the ruling regime, however begrudgingly, and in return are rewarded with a variety of goods and services, most of them tangible but some also intangible, as well as socio-economic benefits. While much of the academic literature has been devoted to the durability of these ruling bargains, current events would indicate that inadequate attention has been given to the potential causes of their erosion. The chapters in this volume probe some of the existing analytical assumptions and develop a new understanding of the drivers of the historic change in the Middle East beginning in late 2010 and early 2011.

This chapter focuses on the upsurge of labor action in Egypt since 2006. It analyzes the nature and demands of these protests, and examines what the notion of a “ruling bargain” has entailed for the Egyptian labor movement and how this arrangement has been questioned. The political economic context is critical to situate labor grievances against a background of rising casualization and the changing role of the state since the adoption of liberalization policies (infitah) in the late seventies. However, this chapter argues, although local in scope, workers’ collective action has not been rooted in a moral economy of protest that simply seeks economic and social concessions in return for allowing the continuation of the political status quo. By focusing on the defensive nature of grievances, the moral economy framework creates a dichotomy between economic and political demands, which overlooks the dynamics of labor protests and their relationship to authority.

This chapter argues that in each of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the ruling bargain has evolved but has not radically changed since the Arab Spring. It analyzes why GCC countries have had fewer and less severe protests than the rest of the Arab world. While the challenges facing the Persian Gulf monarchies are not fundamentally different than those facing other Arab governments, they faced different degrees of popular protest. The chapter also notes that just as the degree and severity of protests has varied in the GCC, the reactions of their monarchs have also differed—and not always in ways proportional to the nature of the protests. Finally, it examines how citizens in the GCC states view the evolution of their countries’ ruling bargains. While there is growing dissatisfaction with the Persian Gulf monarchies, the discontent is contained. The economic safety net from petroleum wealth has kept the floor from falling out on Gulf citizens. This classic “rentier trade-off” of economic wellbeing in return for political quiescence seems to still hold. On the other hand, marginalized groups in the Gulf are sustaining political activity because of new technologies and greater international interest in Arab activism.

This chapter explores the similarities and differences in the Arab state formation process, which led to the different political outcomes in the post-uprisings era. Through focusing on three main countries, namely Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, it argues that the nature of the states concerned, the extent to which the regimes were able to hegemonize both civil society and political society, in addition to the historical use of the coercive apparatus against the citizens, are the most decisive factors for these different outcomes. The chapter will first shed light on the state formation process of Arab states. Second, it will analyze the economic liberalization projects initiated by Arab regimes from the 1990s onwards, and their impact on the different regimes’ ruling bargains. Third, state-society relations will be tackled in order to further our understanding of how the past two decades have led to the exclusion of large segments of Arab citizens, which led to the subsequent rise of social movements challenging the authority of the state. This chapter highlights some of the differences between the public protests taking place in three distinct countries focusing primarily on the outcomes of the uprisings.