The people want to bring down the regime: explaining trajectories of the North African regimes in the Arab upheavals 2010/2011

Abstract

The transnational protest wave that engulfed most of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa had significantly different intensity, took different trajectories, and produced different outcomes in different states. Four North-African cases discussed in the article illustrate three typical outcomes – fall of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, civil war in Libya, and authoritarian durability in Algeria. Using the literatures on political regimes and on contentious politics I show that these variation can be explained through combined effect of three factors: (a) different strategies of preserving cohesion within the authoritarian coalitions; (b) partially interconnected differences in the organizational strength of the regimes; (c) high levels of uncertainty typical for the periods of mass political mobilization. Although the last factor includes a degree of indeterminacy into the explanation, this should not be seen as an analytical weakness, but rather as an inevitable consequence of the fact that politics is an area of practical action not entirely reducible to retrospective theoretical deductions.