There were large differences in the responses of Arab dictators to the Arab Spring protests. To understand these differences, I present a stylized model of how a dictator responds to mass protests for democratization in a polarized country with two ethnic or religious groups. In this model, the dictator’s response crucially depends on oil revenues and his affiliation to either the majority or the minority group. I document that the model’s predictions are consistent with the observed differences in the Arab dictators’ responses. Hence, ethnic politics and religious divides may play an important role in political transitions and regime changes.

The Arab Spring has suddenly overturned dictatorships in a number of countries, which now have a chance to reverse decades of stagnation which has left the countries behind in development and the populations impoverished. We propose a framework which can be useful in guiding policy as these countries rebuild. It consists of six key management elements, ‘M’s, applied to three key domains, ‘E’s, which are all intimately interconnected. We briefly introduce how the framework can be applied to Egypt, probably the most important Arab Spring countries because of its traditional leading role in the Arab world.

This study quantifies four alternative macroeconomic scenarios for the southern and eastern Mediterranean countries (SEMCs), with the use of GEM-E3, a general equilibrium model. The four scenarios are: i) the continuation of current policies, ii) southern Mediterranean–EU cooperation, iii) a global opening of the southern Mediterranean countries and cooperation with the rest of the Middle East and other developing countries like China, and iv) a deterioration in the regional political climate and a failure of cooperation. Explicit assumptions on trade integration, infrastructure upgrade, population growth and governance developments are adopted in each scenario. The simulation results indicate that an infrastructure upgrade and governance improvements in the context of SEMC–EU cooperation could benefit most of the countries under consideration. The analysis remains important in light of ongoing regional developments and the need to design the best policies to pursue in the aftermath of the Arab spring.

The article contends that the “Arab Spring” needs to be analyzed through three analytical frameworks – democratization, authoritarian adaptation/succession, and state-failure – and that all three are unfolding simultaneously in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The Arab Spring is a clear indicator of the urgency of achieving inclusive growth and ensuring job creation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where private sector development is still hindered by limited access to credit. Following Kiyotaki and Moore’s (1997) seminal model, we apply a novel methodological approach to a unique data set of MENA firms to estimate credit limits and their impacts on capital accumulation. Notably, we find higher credit limits in countries where the Arab Spring erupted than in other MENA countries and that their marginal effect on capital accumulation has been statistically and economically significant.

Ultimately, Militant Islam: A Sociology of Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences identifies and underscores how far two areas of academic inquiry still remain from one another and the pressing need for their synthesis: our ability to understand the making of geopolitically-informed (and not just Western) discourses of political violence, change, and resistance, on the one hand, and the actual, often local sociological processes, structures, and contexts that help explain extremist organizations and the nature of their responses, on the other. Insofar as Militant Islam attempts to bring these research areas together, it has set the research agenda in this area for academics into the current decade – one that will, at its best, help us to understand new formations of political resistance showcased in the ‘Arab Spring’ and emerging paradigms for political stability.

The goal of this article is to place the role of the social media in collective action within a more general theoretical structure using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. Three theoretical principles are put forth all of which center around the idea that one cannot understand the role of any media in a political conflict without first considering the political context in which they are operating. The first principle states that: “Political variables are likely to be more important in explaining the extensiveness of a popular uprising than the overall penetration of the social media in a particular country”. The second principle is referred to as the “principle of cumulative inequality”. It states that: “Citizens who most need the media are the ones who find it the most difficult to exploit them.” The third and final theoretical principle states that: “A significant increase in the use of the new media is much more likely to follow a significant amount of protest activity than to precede it.” The three principles are examined using political, media, and protest data from 22 ArabCountries. The findings provide strong support for the validity of the claims.