Chapter 6. the Ebbing and Flowing of Political

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2019-06 Protest and Democracy University of Calgary Press Arce, M., & Rice, R. (Eds.). (2019). Protest and democracy. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/110581 book https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca PROTEST AND DEMOCRACY Edited by Moisés Arce and Roberta Rice ISBN 978-1-77385-046-7 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org 6 The Ebbing and Flowing of Political Opportunity Structures: Revolution, Counterrevolution, and the Arab Uprisings Paul Kingston The concept of political opportunity structures has come under signifi- cant fire in recent years by social movement theorists. Defined most gen- erally as “the opening and closing of political space” (Wiktorowicz 2004, 14), the political opportunity structure has been described as being too broad—soaking up almost every contextual aspect of the social movement environment like a “sponge” (Robinson 2004). It has also been criticized for being too focused on objective conditions rather than perceptions, emotions, and cultural norms—ignoring in particular the possibility that political and normative threats (as opposed to political opportunities) could be of equal importance in motivating contestation and collective action. Finally, it has been critiqued for being too static—focusing for the most part on a snapshot analysis of political structures rather than on the dynamic and contingent ways that openings come and go as a result of the iterative interaction of structures and social movement agents. These critiques can be usefully analyzed in the context of the Arab world prior to the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011. The Arab Spring was an unprecedented wave of popular mobilization across the Arab world, particularly within the region’s republican regimes, that toppled dictators in four countries, led to political reform in several more, and precipitated 119 the outbreak of civil conflict in others, especially in Syria, whose brutal civil conflict is still ongoing. These developments caught observers and experts of the contemporary Arab world off guard—mainly because the overwhelming focus of most scholars had been on the remarkable re- silience of authoritarian systems of governance in the region (see Gause 2011). Even a recent volume on social movements in the Middle East—an excellent collection of articles published just before the Arab Spring broke out—worked from the premise that the resilient authoritarian conditions that characterized the region provided little in the way of objective conditions, let alone movement resources, for popular mobilizations and revolt (Beinin and Vairel 2011).1 In short, scholars of social movements, political scientists, and/or the whole array of policy experts assumed that the resili- ently limited political opportunity structures in the Arab world were the decisive factors militating against the possibility of widespread social and political mobilization in the region. Given the apparent strength of authoritarianism in the region, why did political opportunities suddenly open up in January of 2011? Why were those openings so transitory? In short, how can one explain the sudden ebbing and flowing of political opportunity structures during the Arab Spring and its aftermath? To that end, this chapter examines various components of the social movement framework—namely grievances, re- source mobilization, and political opportunity structures—in the context of the pre– and post–Arab Spring Middle East. A wealth of scholarship has documented the widespread and intensifying grievances in the region fueled by deteriorating socioeconomic conditions, growing poverty rates, unaccountable repression, corruption, and the narrowing of networks of power and privilege. Scholars have also identified important facilitating conditions in the decade prior to the outbreak of the Arab Spring—ones driven by such factors as the spread of regional satellite television networks, the increased use of new social media, and the rise of a new gen- eration of activists eager to experiment with new, informal forms of net- working. Lynch (2012, 67) described these as contributing to a structural transformation in the Arab public sphere(s), increasing the possibilities of translating the simmering grievances in the region into collective action. Yet, scholars of social movements tell us that grievances and facilitating conditions do not necessarily translate into popular mobilization, 120 Paul Kingston especially in the face of what seemed to be a highly unfavorable set of political opportunity structures in the region. Hence, the third component of this chapter will investigate the dynamics that led to sudden openings in the political opportunity structures in many states of the region. In part, these can be explained by the cumulative effects of years of state repression—eventually surpassing “threshold levels” as a result of particularly arbitrary and lethal acts of state violence against ordinary citizens. The waves of popular mobilization that ensued, in turn, rebounded into the political arena, activating a parallel politics of contestation within many of the regimes that transformed minor cracks in their internal institutional alliances into genuine political opportunities for sustained social mobilization and, in some cases, regime change. In short, through a dynamic, if contingent, process, political opportunity structures that had at best been hidden and latent in the pre–Arab Spring era, were transformed and opened up overnight by the recursive dynamics unleashed by the process of social mobilization itself. In the concluding remarks, we will investigate briefly why it has been so difficult to sustain these dynamics, leading in most cases to the counterrevolutionary reconsolidation of previous authoritarian regime structures. On the Eve of the Arab Spring(s): Widespread Socioeconomic and Political Grievances On the eve of the Arab Spring, objective socioeconomic and political conditions in the region were ripe for oppositional mobilization. Initially, in the early postcolonial Arab world, many of the regimes had formulated “nationalist-populist social pacts” with their populations—a series of im- plicit, informal, but collective agreements specifying the norms and institutions that would underpin relations between these regimes and their societies. Heydemann (2007) has outlined several features of these postcolonial pacts that include: a preference for redistribution over growth; a preference for states over markets; a preference for protecting local markets from global trade; and an emphasis on the organic unity of the polity. The key to these informal agreements was both their reciprocal na- ture—bringing state and society together into a series of mutually binding obligations—and

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