Systems Thinking Index of Works of Scholarship

Polarization – defined as the difference in policy preferences along the salient axis of political competition – among non-regime elite actors has important consequences for successful democratic consolidation during authoritarian transitions. However, existing theories fail to explain why elites emerge more or less polarized from authoritarian contexts. In this paper, I present and test an original theory of how the repression that defines authoritarian regimes affects processes of polarization in these systems. The theory builds on social psychology findings about the causes and consequences of group identification to posit that the nature of repression – whether it targets a specific group, or is more widespread – alters group members’ level of in-group identification, in turn affecting the distance between groups’ political preferences, and ultimately shaping the distribution of preferences among these groups. I first test the proposed causal relationship through lab experiments conducted with 434 adult citizens in Tunis, Tunisia in May 2016. I then present evidence supporting the theory through condensed case studies of Egypt and Tunisia. Egypt serves as a case of targeted repression against a single opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, under authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011), while Tunisia serves as a case of widespread repression against multiple opposition groups under Zine el-‘Abidine Ben ‘Ali (1987-2011). I conclude with implications for transitology theories and outline the analytic importance of considering the political psychological legacies of authoritarian repression on subsequent developments.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 created a consensus among Western, and in particular US, policy makers that authoritarianism in the Middle East undermined Western interests by contributing to the emergence of Islamist terrorism. This study demonstrates, however, that there is no evidence that a necessary causal relationship exists between the democratic deficit in the Middle East and Islamist terrorism. The analysis explores the three main types of Islamist terrorism: the transnational terrorism of al Qaeda; the Islamist terrorism associated with national liberation movements, such as Hamas and Hizbullah; and Islamist terrorism in the context of domestic insurgencies, such as the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya and the Algerian Armed Islamic Group. The case studies show that the political exclusion and repression of the Islamist movements in question contributed to the adoption of terrorist methods in some cases, but not in others. The account also explores the obverse question, whether political participation leads to the emergence of a moderate Islamism that eschews terrorist tactics. The Turkish Justice and Development Party, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Tunisian Nahda and the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood/Islamic Action Front are studied in this context. The evidence, again, is mixed: the non-violent nature of some movements is clearly a product of their being included in the political process – but in other cases repression had the same outcome.

Since the end of the cold war internal conflicts have received unprecedented attention. Of special interest has been the effort of neorealists to employ an approach traditionally used to explain interstate conflict to make internal war understandable. While neorealism has been useful in explaining the behavior of groups in anarchic conditions, it is inadequate in explaining internal wars occurring in states that retain a strong government and that stem from motives other than power and security. Neorealism also does little to explain how anarchy is created in the first place and what can be done to restore central control. Another approach offers “bad leaders” as a proximate cause of internal war. There is much to this explanation, but more work needs to be done in understanding just what makes leaders “bad” and whether leaders have the latitude to be “good.” Finally, the diverse nature of internal wars has frustrated efforts to develop an overall means of settling them. At a point in which armed conflict has become almost exclusively an internal affair, useful generalizations for causes and cures remain elusive.

This paper helps explain the variation in political turmoil observed in the MENA during the Arab Spring. The region’s monarchies have been largely spared of violence while the “republics” have not. A theory about how a monarchy’s political culture solves a ruler’s credible commitment problem explains why this has been the case. Using a panel dataset of the MENA countries (1950-2006), I show that monarchs are less likely than non-monarchs to experience political instability, a result that holds across several measures. They are also more likely to respect the rule of law and property rights, and grow their economies. Through the use of an instrumental variable that proxies for a legacy of tribalism, the time that has elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution weighted by Land Quality, I show that this result runs from monarchy to political stability. The results are also robust to alternative political explanations and country fixed effects.

Conventional wisdom suggests that lapses in media connectivity – for example, disruption of Internet and cell phone access – have a negative effect on political mobilization. I argue that on the contrary, sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention. Using a dynamic threshold model for participation in network collective action I demonstrate that full connectivity in a social network can hinder revolutionary action. I exploit a decision by Mubarak’s regime to disrupt the Internet and mobile communication during the 2011 Egyptian uprising to provide an empirical proof for the hypothesis. A difference-in difference inference strategy reveals the impact of media disruption on the dispersion of the protests. The evidence is corroborated using historical, anecdotal, and statistical accounts.

Various individual and group participants in the Arab Spring have noticeably embraced and reaffirmed predominant patterns of human expectation and claims occurring worldwide regarding individual dignity and worth, self-determination of peoples, related human rights with respect to relatively free and genuine participation in governmental processes and the standard of legitimacy of governments, democracy as a universal core value, and the right of rebellion or revolution and the concomitant right of a given people to seek self-determination assistance. As documented, each of these forms of human expectation and claim has a present legal and policy mooring in basic international legal instruments, including the United Nations Charter and a number of authoritative human rights instruments. This article also contains a section near the end on the propriety of U.S. and NATO use of force in Libya to protect civilians and to support regime change or self-determination assistance.