We argue that the tilt toward donor interests over recipient needs in aid allocation and practices may be particularly strong in new partnerships. Using the natural experiment of Eastern transition we find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and entry in the first half of the 1990s, but much less so later on. We also find that fractionalization increased and that early aid to the region was particularly volatile, unpredictable and tied. Our results may explain why aid to Iraq and Afghanistan has had little development impact and serves as warning for Burma and Arab Spring regimes.

Since 2011, Myanmar’s leaders have concentrated on ensuring the success of their overall political transition, given the expectations created after the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011-2012. Not surprisingly, designing a new national security policy was less a priority than achieving ‘peace’; national security was viewed as a matter of continuity rather than transition. Moreover, many of the reformist objectives of the political transition were not applied to the evolution of a new national security strategy or to the challenge of adjusting national security policies. Indeed, many historically unacceptable military practices — human rights abuses, targeting of civilian populations in insurgency areas and acting outside the law in confiscating land, labour and resources — continued. While this different approach to national security reflected ingrained sensitivity on the part of Myanmar’s leadership, reluctance to expose national security policy to scrutiny and determination to retain political control, they are not necessarily unreceptive to overseas experiences.

We develop a continuous time dynamic game to provide with a benchmark theory of Arab Spring-type events. We consider a resource-dependent economy with two interacting groups, the elite vs. the citizens, and two political regimes, dictatorship vs. a freer regime. Transition to the freer regime can only be achieved if citizens decide to revolt given the concession/repression policy of the elite. Departing from the related literature, the revolution optimal timing is an explicit control variable in the hands of citizens. The elite is the strategic leader: she ultimately chooses her policy knowing the reaction function of citizens. In this framework, we provide with a full equilibrium analysis of the political regime switching game and notably emphasize the role of the direct switching cost of the citizens and of the elite’s self-preservation options. In particular, we show how the incorporation of explicit revolution timing may change the conventional wisdom in the related institutional change literature. Finally, we emphasize how the theory may help explaining some key features of the Arab Spring.

Europe’s foreign policy-makers are confronted with an increasingly complex situation in the Southern Mediterranean and beyond. The EU can play a central role in this laboratory of Arab democracy. It is also crucial to tackle seriously the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other regional powers, such as Turkey and the Arab League, will want (and need) to have a role in the transition process. Most importantly, the Union and other donors must engage in a dialogue with all local stakeholders.

The Arab Spring has led to very different outcomes across the Arab world. I present a highly stylized model of the Arab Spring to better understand these differences. In this model, dictators from the ethnic or religious majority group concede power if their country is oil-poor, but can stay in power by bribing the people if their country is oil-rich. Dictators from the minority group often rely on other members of their group to repress protests and to fight the majority group if necessary. These predictions are consistent with observed outcomes in Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and elsewhere.