New Actors and Issues in the Post-Arab Uprisings Period


Book Description

The Arab uprisings that emerged in reaction to unemployment, high inflation, corruption, and the lack of liberty under authoritarian rule in the Middle East and North Africa paved the way for social and political transformations in the region. As a consequence of these uprisings, new actors have gained prominence, while regional issues have become more aggravated and complicated, challenging existing national borders. The involvement of a broad range of regional and external actors in various parts of the region has created new conflicts and alliances. New Actors and Issues in the Post-Arab Uprisings examines how the post-Arab uprisings period, with its diversity of issues and actors, challenges existing policies and national borders in the Middle East. This collection provides readers with a deeper understanding of the political and social changes that are underway through diverse perspectives on various critical issues.




Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings


Book Description

Scrutinises the political strategies and ideological evolution of Islamist actors and forces following the Arab uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.




After the Arab Uprisings


Book Description

A holistic and cross-disciplinary approach to understanding why a regional democratic transition did not occur after the Arab Spring protests, this accessible study highlights the salience of regime type, civil society, women's mobilizations, and external intervention across seven countries for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars.




Qatar and the Arab Spring


Book Description

Qatar and the Arab Spring offers a frank examination of Qatar's startling rise to regional and international prominence, describing how its distinctive policy stance toward the Arab Spring emerged. In only a decade, Qatari policy-makers - led by the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, and his prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani - catapulted Qatar from a sleepy backwater to a regional power with truly international reach. In addition to pursuing an aggressive state-branding strategy with its successful bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar forged a reputation for diplomatic mediation that combined intensely personalized engagement with financial backing and favorable media coverage through the Al-Jazeera. These factors converged in early 2011 with the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolts in North Africa, Syria, and Yemen, which Qatari leaders saw as an opportunity to seal their regional and international influence, rather than as a challenge to their authority, and this guided their support of the rebellions against the Gaddafi and Assad regimes in Libya and Syria. From the high watermark of Qatari influence after the toppling of Gaddafi in 2011, that rapidly gave way to policy overreach in Syria in 2012, Coates Ulrichsen analyses Qatari ambition and capabilities as the tiny emirate sought to shape the transitions in the Arab world.




Democracy's Fourth Wave?


Book Description

Did digital media really "cause" the Arab Spring, or is it an important factor of the story behind what might become democracy's fourth wave? An unlikely network of citizens used digital media to start a cascade of social protest that ultimately toppled four of the world's most entrenched dictators. Howard and Hussain find that the complex causal recipe includes several economic, political and cultural factors, but that digital media is consistently one of the most important sufficient and necessary conditions for explaining both the fragility of regimes and the success of social movements. This book looks at not only the unexpected evolution of events during the Arab Spring, but the deeper history of creative digital activism throughout the region.




Non-State Actors in World Politics


Book Description

The involvement of non-state actors in world politics can hardly be characterised as novel, but intensifying economic and social exchange and the emergence of new modes of international governance have given them much greater visibility and, many would argue, a more central role. Non-state Actors in World Politics offers analyses of a diverse range of economic, social, legal (and illegal), old and new actors, such as the Catholic Church, trade unions, diasporas, religious movements, transnational corporations and organised crime.




Non-State Actors in the Middle East


Book Description

As the recent revolutions in the Middle East have demonstrated, civil society in this part of the world is on the move. The increasingly important role of non-state actors – a phenomenon of globalization- has characterized developments throughout the region, affecting the struggle for democracy and for peace. This volume brings together scholars primarily form the region to analyse the varied activities and contributions of NGOs, the private sector and the new media, from Morocco to Iran, along with the involvement of diaspora groups. The chapter on facebook in the recent Egyptian revolution captures the role of this new media while the study on similar technology in Iran outlines the barriers raised by the authorities in the current struggles there. Even the fledgling process of democratization in Saudi Arabia is driven by non-state actors while the veteran women's movements in the Maghreb serve as an example for the post-Arab spring era in those countries. Providing one of the first assessments of the role of non-state actors in the Middle East, this book will be essential reading for students of Political Science, Sociology and Civil Society, amongst others.




The Arab Winter


Book Description

The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship, civil war, extremist terror, or all three. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure, much less an inevitable one. Rather, it was a noble, tragic series of events in which, for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history, Arabic-speaking peoples took free, collective political action as they sought to achieve self-determination.




The Arab Uprisings Explained


Book Description

Why did Tunisian protests following the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi lead to a massive wave of uprisings across the entire Arab world? Who participated in those protests, and what did they hope to achieve? Why did some leaders fall in the face of popular mobilization while others found ways to survive? And what have been the lasting results of the contentious politics of 2011 and 2012? The Arab uprisings pose stark challenges to the political science of the Middle East, which for decades had focused upon the resilience of entrenched authoritarianism, the relative weakness of civil society, and what seemed to be the largely contained diffusion of new norms and ideas through new information technologies. In this volume, leading scholars in the field take a sharp look at the causes, dynamics, and effects of the Arab uprisings. Compiled by one of the foremost experts on Middle East politics and society, The Arab Uprisings Explained offers a fresh rethinking of established theories and presents a new framework through which scholars and general readers can better grasp the fast-developing events remaking the region. These essays not only advance the study of political science in the Middle East but also integrate the subject seamlessly into the wider political science literature. Deeply committed to the study of this region and working out the kinks of the discipline, the contributors to this volume help scholars and policymakers across the world approach this unprecedented historical period smartly and effectively.




Continuity and change before and after the Arab uprisings


Book Description

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.