Abstract
Reflecting on another pivotal epoch, Engels, in his 1891 postscript to The Civil Wars in France, lauds Marx’s
remarkable gift, first provided in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for grasping clearly the character, the import, and the necessary consequences of great historical events, at a time when these events are still in process before our eyes, or have only just taken place.
The featured book in this panel discussion, After the Arab Uprisings, joins a new crop of books on revolution by tackling key questions: Why were only some Arab mass social protests of 2011 accompanied by relatively quick and nonviolent outcomes in the direction of regime change, democracy, and social transformation? Why was a democratic transition limited to Tunisia, one that ultimately stalled? Why did region-wide democratization not occur?
The book analyzes the seven countries that were most affected by the Arab uprisings—Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Yemen—and offers an explanatory framework of four variables to discuss these very divergent outcomes, from the procedural democratic bargains and transition in Tunisia to the internationalized civil conflicts in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Mako and Moghadam examine the state and political institutions, civil society, women’s status and movements, and the nature of international influences. Their framework of these momentous events considers domestic and geopolitical factors and forces, they show how the four explanatory variables interacted to account for both causes and outcomes, and they extend their analysis to the present day.
In examining the travails of Tunisia’s democratic transition, Mako and Moghadam compare ‘third-wave’ and ‘fourth-wave’ democracy waves, arguing that in addition to a modern and vigilant civil society and strong feminist presence in both civil society and political society, a sustained democratization requires a supportive global environment. Feminist mobilizations are foregrounded as consequential drivers of societal changes and the transformations of gender regimes. Broadening spatial and temporal scales, the analysis of the Arab uprisings and their aftermath pays attention to factors largely neglected in previous accounts. The book identifies governments, political parties, feminist organizations, and international organizations as key actors and agents influencing the direction and outcome of each country’s uprising. Importantly, their approach challenges previous gender-blind theories of revolution. This theoretically and empirically rich account provides a holistic and cross-disciplinary approach to understanding social movements, democratization, and contentious politics.
Additional commentaries by eminent scholars, like Jack Goldstone, Lisa Hajjar, Andrey Korotayev, and Alisa Shishkina, weave together a richly textured tapestry of substantive arguments to broaden debates on and for advancing theories of social change and revolution.
