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The Arab region experienced minor to serious revolts from 18 December 2010. This study sought to establish whether the causes of revolutions identified by Karl Marx are consistent with what prevails in contemporary politics. This entails revisiting Karl Marx’s ideas and weighing them against what is obtaining in contemporary politics. The researchers first established points identified by Karl Marx as providing fertile grounds for revolutions through analysing his social class theory. From the population of the Arab region, Syria was purposively chosen as a case study. This was due to the fact that its unique geographical location, history, ethnic, religious complexities and recent events provided a wide spectrum for the purposes of this study. The findings show that, indeed, class struggles, class consciousness, alienation, among other things identified by Karl Marx existed in Syria. These are the conditions that Marx identified as prone to trigger revolutionary spirit. In Syria these conditions also created fertile ground for revolts. However, the study in addition established aspects of geopolitics and religious factors that Karl Marx did not foresee in the genealogy of revolutions. The researchers recommend that countries must be wary of these emerging aspects alongside those identified by Karl Marx as causing revolutions.
This paper examines informality during the political and economic turmoil that accompanied the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt. The paper focuses on unprotected employment and the extent to which it changed by educational level right after the January Uprising of 2011. We find that over time and particularly after the revolution, informal employment has increased for both high- and low-educated workers however, through different paths: high educated were more likely to be stuck in informality, whilst low-educated formal workers were more likely to lose their contracts. The results suggest a high level of rigidity in the Egyptian labor market even in the wake of the Arab Spring.
In this paper, we examine the effect of the political instability witnessed subsequent to the Arab spring revolutions on the stock markets’ performance. We analyse the reaction of the Egyptian stock exchange to eight major political events in the post-revolution period.
The paper differentiates between political instability arising from factors within the ordinary course of political transition and under the government’s control (endogenous) and that arising from factors which are not within the ordinary course of political transition and outside the government’s control (exogenous).
The paper concludes that political instability imposes a significant effect on the performance of the Egyptian Stock Exchange and that the impact of events not within the course of political transition is more significant than that of events within the ordinary course of political transition.
It is unequivocally conspicuous the increase in violence and insecurity in most of the Arab countries after 2011. Suicide bombings, terrorist abductions and daily killings became the order of the day for many Arabs and Muslims. Jihadi terrorism and violence became the poster child of life in Arab and Muslim countries. While the Arab Spring of 2011 has been a watershed towards the democratization of the Arab regimes in the MENA region, however it turned into a mirage for most of the people of these countries. When the Arabrevolutions aimed at sacking authoritarian regimes in the region, the result was the creation of a power vacuum by the destruction of the pillars of the state power which led to the emergence of violent contending ethno-sectarian entities and the rise of unprecedented wholesale wave of violence threatening the every-day life of peoples and their properties. Throughout the Arab world and parts of Islamic Africa, revolutions have encouraged Al Qaeda ‘lookalikes’ to set up recruitment strongholds for support. On the other hand, the U.S. incoherent behavior in the ‘war on terrorism’ has ended up serving to breed terrorism. The U.S. State Department officials seem to watch helplessly as sympathizers to Al Qaeda in Mali, Libya, Syria and Iraq gain strength and support, while the U.S. Defense department scrambles to react to inept foreign policies. The U.S. policy towards the Arab world has been one cause of terrorism. The hypocritical policy has created havoc for some of the area’s nations. The emergence of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq has also brought U.S. cold war nemesis, Russia, into the battle and pushed President Obma into forming a policy to defeat IS.
This aim of this paper is to look into the legacy of the Arab revolutions with regard to the seemingly endless security concerns in the region. The main point is to find out whether the Arab spring has contributed in one way or another to the rise of this violence in the MENA region and by extension the fate of democracy and if so how and why. It also traces the implications of US foreign policy and the effects of such violence on US future interests in the region.
This paper analyses the main determinants of the diffusion and growth of the Islamic finance services industry (IFSI) globally. The boom in oil prices, producing surpluses in resource-rich countries with Muslim majorities and a preference towards investing in Shari’ah-compliant assets, boosted demand for Islamic financial services. The recent global financial crises and the Euro crises diverted attention to the need for more risk-averse vehicles for investment with asset backing both a prevalent feature of Islamic finance. Finally, the Arab Spring magnified the demand for Islamic financial services. However, the industry’s development, global diffusion and growth are challenged by many factors. Most importantly in the Shariah-compliant domain there is a lack of globally accepted standards for regulation and risk management, particularly for capital adequacy. The paper concludes that multilateral development banks (MDBs) can take a leading role in fostering the necessary global knowledge base and sharing global best practices to facilitate Islamic finance in achieving more efficient solutions to fighting poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
Though Egyptian voters clearly evince a desire for Islamic law (however defined), public opinion research shows that they also want robust welfare states and significant redistribution. Though the application of Islamic law is the special province of Islamist parties, it is left-leaning, labor-based parties who are the primary champions of the economic policies that Egyptians seem to desire. Why, then, do Egyptian voters select the former over the latter? This article argues that the answer lies not in the political unsophistication of voters, the subordination of economic interests to spiritual ones, or the bureaucratic and organizational shortcomings of leftist parties, but in the ways in which the social landscape shapes the opportunities of parties in newly democratized systems to reach potential voters. Dense networks of religious solidary organizations, in which Islamist activists are often embedded, and which encompass large numbers of voters, provide Islamist parties with opportunities for linkage that are unavailable to leftists, who are embedded in much more limited networks of labor activism. As a result, despite the fact that Islamist attitudes toward redistribution and the state’s role in providing welfare are more ambiguous than those of leftists, Islamist candidates have far greater opportunities to convince voters that they in fact share their economic views. The theory is tested with a combination of aggregate and individual evidence from Egypt after the Arab Spring.
We present new and rigorous mechanisms – a major weakness of the extant literature till date – to study spatiotemporal dynamic spillover effects of democratic shocks on cross-country economic growth in general and in Arab Spring, in particular. As a centrality of our research, we investigate how democratic shocks occurring in the ‘proximity’ of another country, is likely to trigger similar institutional reforms and growth upsurge in a system of interdependent economies. We define proximity in economic and socio-cultural sense and construct a distance metric based on these measures to estimate dynamic effects of (democratic) shocks. A spatial vector autoregressive framework is developed to study the first stage of dynamic complementarity with respect to democratic distance. Detailed response of democratic shocks and the transmission mechanism is modelled by Global Vector Autoregression method. Our work reveals discrete changes in regimes that run counter to the dominant aggregate trends of democratic waves or sequences, demonstrating how the ebb and flow of democracy varies among the world’s regions. The main finding suggests that the current revolution waves in the Arab World can be understood in light of the economic situation in a given country. More specifically, we find that high and upper middle income countries are immune to the recent democratic shock transference, whereas the lower middle and low income countries seem to be perfect candidates of another revolutionary wave.