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.

How do states attempt to use their position as destinations for labor migration to influence sending states, and under what conditions do they succeed? I argue that economically driven cross-border mobility generates reciprocal political economy effects on sending and host states. That is, it produces migration interdependence. Host states may leverage their position against a sending state by either deploying strategies of restriction — curbing remittances, strengthening immigration controls, or both — or displacement — forcefully expelling citizens of the sending state. These strategies’ success depends on whether the sending state is vulnerable to the political economy costs incurred by host states’ strategy, namely if it is unable to absorb them domestically and cannot procure the support of alternative host states. I also contend that displacement strategies involve higher costs than restriction efforts and are therefore more likely to succeed. I demonstrate my claims through a least-likely, two-case 25 study design of Libyan and Jordanian coercive migration diplomacy against Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I examine how two weaker Arab states leveraged their position against Egypt, a stronger state but one vulnerable to migration interdependence, through the restriction and displacement of Egyptian migrants.

The present paper complements recent research at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission (UNESCWA) on the Arab Middle Class and discusses the political role of the Middle Class. The objective of the paper is to lay the groundwork for a contextual model of analysis on political participation of the Middle Class in the Arab region by focusing on a sub-group and to develop a policy and research agenda on meaningful political participation based on democratic principles.

The Arab Uprisings and their transformational impact across the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] have generated immense debate about the future of the region’s countries during a period of re-organizational crisis in the international political economy. At this stage of the unfolding region-wide transition in the MENA, this paper performs a two-step theoretico-practical examination of the processes between and after the Uprisings. The first step is to crystallize the ambiguous manifestations between the theory of Islamic political economy and the praxis of these Muslim-majority countries: the high-income Arab Gulf States, upper-middle-income Tunisia, and lower-middle-income Egypt. The second is to contextualize the evolving continuities and discontinuities in these case countries between economy, polity, and society using the eight patterns of path-dependent changes that the author develops. And a discussion will ensue on the prospective changes these nations will face in terms of the potential trajectories of systemic change between the embedded path-dependencies of the established regimes and the patterns of change demanded by the subversive Islamic factions drawn from the pure theory of Islamic political economy.