Continuity and change before and after the Arab uprisings

Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt

Paola Rivetti, Rosita Di Peri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317374343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Arab uprisings of 2011 have sparked much scholarly discussion with regards to democratisation, the resilience of authoritarian rule, mobilisation patterns, and the relationship between secularism and Islam, all under the assumption that politics has changed for good in North Africa and the Middle East. While acknowledging the post-2011 transformations taking place in the region, this book brings to the forefront an understudied, yet crucial, aspect related to the uprisings, namely the interplay between continuity and change.

Challenging simplified representations built around the positions that either 'all has changed' or 'nothing has changed', the in-depth case studies in this volume demonstrate how elements both of continuity, and rupture with the past, are present in the post-uprising landscapes of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. Public policy, contentious politics, the process of institution making and re-making, and the relations of power connecting national and international economies are at the core of the comparative investigations included in the book. The volume makes an important contribution to the study of North African politics, and to the study of political change and stability, by contrasting the different trajectories of the uprisings, and by offering theoretical reflections on their meaning, consequences and scope. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Continuity and Change before and after the Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco: Regime Reconfiguration and Policymaking in North Africa

PAOLA RIVETTI^*

ABSTRACT While the scholarship on the Arab uprisings is increasingly complex and intellectually refined, this special issue considers an aspect that so far has failed to attract sustained scholarly attention, namely continuity and change. This introduction provides the framework underpinning the special issue as a whole and discusses all the articles composing it, while elaborating on the scientific contribution that the examination of continuity and change before and after the uprisings can make to our understanding of politics in the region.

The Arab uprisings have generated a significant amount of scholarly reflections on how politics functions in the Middle East and North Africa, with scholars broadly shifting between the dynamics of either democratic change or authoritarian continuity. There is a vast literature on the causes of the uprisings and on explanations for how they occurred in some countries and not in others, but it is accepted as conventional wisdom that the politics of the region, both in the short and the long term, has changed for good.¹ This is potentially the case, but one should be aware that the complexity of earth-shattering events is considerable and that it takes time to tease out their impact.² It should thus be highlighted that in the examination of any revolutionary process there should also be an emphasis on what has not suddenly changed from one day to the next, and more attention should be paid to long-term processes of change, whose culminating moments are revolutions, instead of conceptualising revolutions as unexpected and sudden events. It is both academically and politically problematic to look at the uprisings solely relying on ‘change’ as the dominant perspective because we can always detect a certain amount of continuity in the political, social and economic relations of societies having witnessed massive upheavals.

This special issue presents contributions exposing the overlapping of continuity and change. More specifically, it investigates them in the context of state building, institutional reforms, contentious politics and economic relations in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. By examining the political dynamics in these three countries, where the protests have resulted in very different trajectories of regime reconfiguration, the articles identify patterns of both continuity and change and expose the very problematic nature of the notions of ‘regime change’ and ‘regime stability’. For instance, it is rather unclear how to label post-July 2013 political events in Egypt. Some would suggest that there is an inevitable return to the paradigm of authoritarian resilience after a brief interlude of intra-regime negotiations that allowed pluralism to emerge,³ while others would contend that it is a rather classic case of failed transition and that genuine change is only being suppressed in the short term.⁴ Adopting a different perspective, the special issue aims to examine the process of regime transformation and reconfiguration and brings to the forefront of scholarly attention the similarities and differences in the cases of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.

One of the most relevant debates through which the uprisings have been examined centres on the usefulness of the two dominant paradigms in the study of the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, namely transition to democracy and authoritarian resilience.⁵ While the study of authoritarian resilience flourished in the past decades and has resulted in theoretically rich accounts of why regimes have been so durable, the examination of political change in the Middle East had suffered for some time from the over-presence of ‘transitology’, as detailed in numerous works since the mid-2000s.⁶ The dominance of the ‘transitological approach’ to political change has determined a sort of neglect of a serious analysis of how Middle Eastern societies have actually changed, to the point that criticising ‘transitology’ became academically more appropriate than engaging social or political change. Studies on activism and social change did abound in the field, but a ‘transitological bias’ characterised them and it is only after the mid-2000s that scholars engaged civil society, activism and social movements in authoritarian contexts with no teleological focus on democratisation.⁷ In fact, it is not a coincidence that scholarly interest in authoritarian resilience emerged after criticism of ‘transitology’ had become established in the field of Middle Eastern studies. The uprisings contributed to make it clear that these two dominant paradigms—democratisation and authoritarian resilience—are far too rigid to grasp and explain the complexities on the ground. Indeed, both paradigms understand social and political phenomena as conducive to either democratisation or to the strengthening of authoritarianism, displaying a degree of inflexibility that prevented scholars from ‘seeing’ the uprisings coming.

This does not mean that the scholarship should have predicted the uprisings,⁸ but more attention should have been given to actors and processes that were considered irrelevant or marginal and turned out instead to be extremely significant. In addition, although the outbreak of the protests has in some cases boosted scholarly interest in the democratisation paradigm⁹ and ‘democracy spotting’,¹⁰ it can be legitimately argued that even if successful transitions to democracy were to occur, democratisation theories would be ill equipped to account for them.¹¹ This is the case not only because a different set of marginal actors—others than the ‘usual middle-class suspects’ of mainstream democratisation theories—have been empowered as the protagonists of the protests, but also because contentious state–society relations have been developing differently from the template provided by orthodox theories of transitions to democracy.

Thus, the most important aim of this special issue is to invite scholars to look for relevant political processes in specific loci of negotiation and conflict among social and political actors, exploring the contradictions between the literature and the actual dynamics on the ground while reconsidering some of the seemingly granitic assumptions of both democratisation and authoritarian resilience. In order to offer an empirically grounded substantiation of this, the special issue compares and contrasts three case studies. While the uprisings have followed very different trajectories in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, some of the contributions to this special issue demonstrate that the dynamics of continuity and change may be surprisingly similar in the three countries. For instance, Gianluca Parolin’s revealing analysis of the processes of constitution making in Tunisia and Egypt exposes the attempt on the part of the political elites in both countries to exclude radical revolutionary fringes in order to be able to proceed with moderate and unthreatening ‘pacted constitutions’. Adam Hanieh’s comparative examination of the negotiations between the three North African regimes and international financial institutions also reveals common characteristics in the content and logic of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending conditions to these three countries.

To be sure, there are also important differences in the way in which Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt have gone through the uprisings and subsequent political turmoil. Some contributors demonstrate that the stark differences the three case studies present can be enlightening as to why dynamics of change and continuity have unfolded following specific national patterns, thus shedding further light on the workings of politics in the region. In this sense, the comparative analysis proposed by Raymond Hinnebusch of post-independence state-formation processes and path-dependent institutional and social conditions of the three countries is of particular significance. In fact, it sets out the factors and processes that have determined the patterns followed by the uprisings—with a look to likely future political and social developments. In a similar vein, Florian Kohstall’s comparative examination of higher education reforms in Egypt and Morocco elucidates the different approaches to reform that the Moroccan monarchy and Mubarak’s administration had adopted, elaborating on the two regimes’ different management of contention and revolt, thus illuminating the reason why the uprisings had such different outcomes in the two countries.

The focus on specific actors, policies or processes is rewarding also in the case of articles focusing on individual countries, such as Raquel Ojeda García and Ángela Suárez Collado’s detailed examination of regionalisation policy in Morocco; Fabio Merone’s sharp class-based analysis of the Tunisian revolutionary process and emergence of the Salafist Ansar al-Sharia; Matt Buehler’s insightful examination of trade unions in Morocco; and Rosita Di Peri’s in-depth analysis of the tourist sector of Tunisia. All these articles indeed stress a common dynamic throughout North Africa, namely that actors, be they the Moroccan king or Tunisia’s radical Islamic revolutionary constituencies, have tried to turn to their advantage the ‘revolutionary’ moment created by widespread protests, seizing or attempting to seize the opportunities political turmoil offered, no matter what the broader scenario—whether regime survival or change—might have been. However, not all attempts at seizing these ‘windows of opportunities’ resulted in success, with some actors failing spectacularly, as the contributors explain in their analysis.¹² Regardless of the final result, the articles highlight the relevance of the transnational dimension of the ‘Arab Spring’. In fact, this was of crucial importance both to national actors, because they could make their protests resonate within a wider, international arena, and to authoritarian regimes, as their fear of being wiped away, as occurred in neighbouring countries, resulted in ‘authoritarian learning’. In order to grasp these dynamics, the focus on specific actors and policies is of great help, as it allows for a detailed analysis of complex processes unfolding on the ground. In fact events in the region highlight that, beyond authoritarian resilience or democratic transformation, there are deeper and more enduring trajectories of continuity and change in the way in which actors and structures interact.

Regime Reconfiguration and the Historicity of the Uprisings

Although the uprisings have exposed a number of contradictions, the tendency to focus on regimes’ broad transformations has continued and the conclusion of this special issue partially returns the theme. Howeve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Continuity and Change before and after the Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco: Regime Reconfiguration and Policymaking in North Africa
• 2. Change and Continuity after the Arab Uprising: The Consequences of State Formation in Arab North African States
• 3. Constitutions against Revolutions: Political Participation in North Africa
• 4. The Project of Advanced Regionalisation in Morocco: Analysis of a Lampedusian Reform
• 5. From Reform to Resistance: Universities and Student Mobilisation in Egypt and Morocco before and after the Arab Uprisings
• 6. Enduring Class Struggle in Tunisia: The Fight for Identity beyond Political Islam
• 7. Labour Demands, Regime Concessions: Moroccan Unions and the Arab Uprising
• 8. An Enduring ‘Touristic Miracle’ in Tunisia? Coping with Old Challenges after the Revolution
• 9. Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the post-2011 IMF and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt
• 10. No Democratic Change … and Yet No Authoritarian Continuity: The Inter-paradigm Debate and North Africa After the Uprisings
• Index