How do revolutions shape markets? Prior social movement research has focused on those movements that seek to work with the existing state to change markets. Yet, revolutions are a unique outcome of social movement activity that seeks to create change through removing, rather than working with, the existing state. Using a novel sampling methodology to construct a unique dataset of both Tunisian and Egyptian entrepreneurs during the Arab Spring, we find that because revolutions seek to disrupt the state, they delegitimize formal firms (i.e. those registered with the state) and legitimize informal firms (i.e. those unregistered with the state). In so doing, revolutions improve the ability of informal firms to access formal resources from state banks. Moreover, any firms that have a structure similar to that of informal firms (i.e. sole proprietorships) also have an easier time accessing these formal state resources after the revolution, irrespective of their registration status. This study contributes to the social movements literature, particularly as it relates to markets and the state.

This paper seeks to place the events of the Tunisian ‘Arab Spring’ in a productive tension with the political theory of Giorgio Agamben. Before the revolution Ben Ali’s regime entwined biopolitical and sovereign logics of power, utilizing complex apparatuses which generated a fundamental inclusion and exclusion within the populace. Thus, when the revolt began, the gestures and strategies of resistance often sought to displace or negate these logics of power. In other words, the Tunisian revolution was not simply a classic liberal-democratic exercise of constituent power, where ‘the people’ rewrote their political being-together. Drawing on Agamben’s ideas on the coming community and the state of exception, this chapter seeks to undercut the traditional constitutionalist narrative by highlighting the disordered disruption of biopolitical regulation and the refusal of a clear representational strategy. As such, it seeks to instantiate a critical legal theory based around dissensus.

One important recent trend in constitution-making around the world has been revolutionary constitutionalism: using the constitution-making process to attempt to institutionalize and bring to a successful conclusion a political revolution. Although a good deal of attention has been paid to the specific revolutions involved, there has been far less on the general phenomenon of revolutionary constitutionalism as such. This article attempts to begin redressing this gap by offering some reflections on the general phenomenon and then employing them to inform an analysis of constitution-making in the revolutionary context.

The article makes three main claims. The first is that revolutionary constitutionalism is a useful and illuminating category for the discipline of comparative constitutional law. Empirically, it encompasses a range of situations that implicate constitutionalism in a particular way and raise special challenges. Analytically, it is a distinct concept from the neighboring term “constitutional revolution.” Recognizing this permits us to distinguish, for example, the American Revolution from the New Deal constitutional revolution in qualitative terms, as different in kind and not merely degree. The second is that revolutionary constitutionalism contains within itself certain paradoxes and practical problems that have their source in the combination of initial radical transition and subsequent resistance to further radical change that constitutionalization brings. The final claim concerns the role and importance of constitution-making in the revolutionary context. Although relative to a broad array of socio-political variables, this role is generally less central to the ultimate outcomes of revolutionary constitutionalism than constitutional lawyers often think, it can respond to one distinctive challenge: the need to re-establish political authority lost by the old regime. As the comparison between recent experiences in Egypt and Tunisia suggests, constitution-making can make a key contribution here as one source of the legitimacy that the new regime must acquire.

A revolt or protest succeeds only if sufficiently many people participate. We study how potential revolutionaries’ ability to coordinate is affected by what they learn from those around themselves. We begin by exploring the tradeoffs from such learning: some supporters of a revolt will meet other supporters and become more convinced that there is strong support for a revolution, while others will meet partisans of the status quo and become discouraged. Even those who are more convinced may know that sufficiently many others may be discouraged, and so the revolt has no chance of success. Which effect wins is determined by the prior beliefs of the agents and the strength of the correlation of preferences across the population. We then show that homophily (situations in which people are more likely to meet others who have similar preferences) affects the possibility of a revolution, by undercutting learning and making it more asymmetric. We also use the model to study the role of protests and counter-protests before a revolution in signaling relative support, and to discuss why holding mass demonstrations before a revolt may provide better signals of people’s willingness to actively participate than other less costly forms of communication (e.g., via social media).

A paramount task of a democratic nation’s constitution is to prescribe effectively the supreme law of the land derived from the consent of the governed. A constitution seeks to fulfill important legal functions, including organizing political power within a state, establishing government institutions, and providing administrable laws. Constitutions and their surrounding constitutional cultures are often also statements of a nation’s commitment to the ideals it values most highly and aspires to attain. A constitution contains two types of elements: functional and aspirational. The functional elements of a constitution establish the institutions that comprise the state and the pragmatic rules of governance — the “constitution in practice.” Aspirational elements, by contrast, articulate the nation’s commitment to higher principles, such as social justice or democracy. In a well-ordered state, the aspirational aims of a constitution provide the true north for the nation’s compass and determine policies the functional provisions should implement to achieve the legitimacy of the laws and promote a perpetually progressing society. If the functional components of a constitution cannot adequately pursue its aspirational goals, the constitution and government will lose support and lack legitimacy. This disconnect can result in social strife and political unrest. The recent upheaval in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring, provided three nations thus far with the opportunity to erect new constitutional cultures: Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Adequately concretizing revolutionary aspirations in their new national constitutions, while also providing functional elements and institutions to reinforce these aspirations, is vital to the establishment of a secure and legitimate constitutional order. This note explores these ideas of constitutional theory in the universal and applies them to the particular situations in these Arab Spring nations.