The Middle East and North Africa region has not been immune to forms of contentious politics, having experienced independence struggles, revolutions, labor protests, and demonstrations for women’s rights. Yet it was not part of democracy’s third wave, which enveloped Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa between the mid-1970s and 1990, or the “color revolutions” that occurred later. The chapter surveys the literatures on revolutions and social movements, and on democracy, democracy waves, and democratic transitions, to determine the conditions that set off the Arab Spring protests and why democratization was limited to Tunisia only. The chapter shows that context and history matter, with no set formula for successful democratic transitions. The complex interaction of internal and external factors and forces shape the nature of prodemocracy protests and their outcomes. As such, the Arab Spring and its divergent outcomes should help refine theories of revolution, social movements, and democratic transitions.

This final chapter reiterates the book’s explanatory framework and overarching thesis. We have argued for an integrated and holistic explanatory framework that accounts for structural and societal factors and external and internal forces: the state and political institutions, civil society, gender relations and women’s mobilizations, and international influences. Whether or not a region or cluster of countries is prepared to embark on a democratic transition depends on socioeconomic, institutional, and cultural preconditions along with the nature of international connections and interventions. These structures, institutions, and social forces shaped both the possibility for a democratic transition and its trajectory across our seven cases. In particular, we reiterate the significance of the presence or absence of strong women’s rights movements and of international intervention in our seven cases, and we posit that our framework has relevance beyond the Arab Spring cases.

The chapter focuses on the role of civil society as a determining factor in the Arab Spring uprisings and their outcomes in the seven country case studies. It begins by revisiting the literature on, and debates over, civil society and its relationship to the state and political change, distilling two approaches. In one, civil society is a separate and autonomous sphere essential to democracy; it protects individuals and groups and gives them voice vis-à-vis the power of the state and, in some interpretations, the market. The other more skeptical approach posits that civil society is either an extension of the state apparatus or a sphere that provides legitimacy to the status quo and thus helps to reproduce it; civil society may be able to compel the ruling elite to enact some reforms, but it has neither the capacity nor the will to produce large-scale systemic change. We argue that both have merit and that each is context-specific, and we distinguish civil society in advanced capitalist democracies from that in authoritarian settings. We examine the strength and capacity of civil society prior to, during, and after the uprisings in each of our cases, showing that the strongest were present in Tunisia and Morocco.

The book argues that the success or failure of prodemocracy social movements is inextricably linked to the regional and international external environment of states undergoing transitions from authoritarian rule. The seven country cases all have experienced both coercive and noncoercive forms of external influence by regional and international actors and states. To account for cross-national variation and to capture patterns of convergence and divergence, the chapter scrutinizes the conditions and processes that motivate intervention calculations by foreign actors. It examines two forms of external influence – foreign aid allocations and disbursements, and coercive military interventions. In the absence of direct interventions, the protest movements in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt (prior to 2013) were able to develop organically. Conversely, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen experienced directly military interventions that produced more violent transitions resulting in autocratic survival or protracted civil wars and failed states.

The chapter elucidates the book’s gender variable. It provides details for each country to show not only how women were affected by the Arab Spring protests, but more significantly, how gender relations and women’s mobilizations shaped the nature of the protests and the aftermath. It begins with a synopsis of feminist studies on women’s movement organizing and the impact on public policies, gender equality and violence, and the relationship between women’s autonomous movements, civil society formation, and democratization. It then applies these insights to the seven country cases, revealing that only in Tunisia, and to a lesser extent Morocco, had there been societal change in the direction of women’s autonomous organizing, influence, and political empowerment.

The chapter examines macro- and meso-level variation in the institutional and structural conditions that galvanized popular mobilization, it and maps their trajectory a decade following the uprisings. Although the protests were a culmination of an enduring struggle for political liberalization and democratization, years of stalled growth and high unemployment structured citizens’ grievances against their states. The chapter offers a mapping of regime type, institutions, and governance trends across the seven country cases. Although all seven countries were autocratic prior to the uprisings, variations in institutional development and capacity help explain why violence and repression prevailed in some cases and not others, why Morocco adopted the path of constitutional amendments, and why Tunisia embarked on a democratic transition. The chapter also shows that a decade after the uprisings, the Arab Spring’s socioeconomic grievances and demands remain unmet, leading to renewed protests in 2018–20.

This introductory chapter poses the book’s main questions, surveys the literature on the Arab Spring, places the Arab Spring in historical and comparative perspectives, introduces the book’s explanatory framework and methodology, and provides an overview of the book. Of the countries involved in and affected by the Arab Spring protests, why was Tunisia the only country to embark on a procedural and consensual democratic transition? Why not Egypt? Why did the Bahraini monarchy call on outside military assistance to repress the protests, while the Moroccan monarchy quickly agreed to constitutional amendments? Why did Libya, Syria, and Yemen descend into internationalized civil conflicts? More broadly, what prevented a region-wide democratic transition? We present our thesis regarding the salience of type of state, civil society, gender relations and women’s mobilizations, and international influences in shaping transition possibilities and trajectories. Tables and figures illustrate the argument and situate the 2011 uprisings along a historical continuum of protest and mobilization in the MENA region.

This chapter analyzes the political debates in the United States about arms sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When the United States “lost Iran” in 1979, the presidential administrations of Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan identified regional instability as a threat to the security of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and “global economic health.” Both administrations turned to arms sales as a means to secure alliances in the face of American vulnerability. In this context, the burgeoning military sales relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia arrived through an Iranian workshop. Congressional debates about the sale of fighter jets and AWACS to both nations, as well as the corporate lobbying of the Bechtel Corporation, reveal important logical columns in this shift to a more aggressive foreign policy based on military relationships: the link between economic growth and US Cold War legitimacy, the importance of military sales to the US domestic economy, and the crucial place of weapons transfers in good relations with the ruling monarchies in Iran and then Saudi Arabia. When it came to the regional security of the Middle East and secure flows of its oil, this was the time when military force began to become the premier instrument of US diplomacy for a new global age.

This chapter discusses how the volume charts the 1979 Iranian Revolution by examining the complex interplay of space and time that made the revolution possible and conceptions of the global contested. What unites the multidisciplinary collection of authors is that they all treat the global, national, regional, or local as neither natural, preexisting, nor opposed to one another; instead, they assume that these scales are coproduced in specific historical contexts. Globalizing the Iranian Revolution in this manner is an enterprise in recovering the histories of the revolution non-teleologically and to think of global history as multidirectional and not emanating from a single epicenter or from “the global” to “the local.” Specifically, Global 1979 presents five discrete propositions: (1) geographic and archival margins are powerful means to decenter political struggles; (2) global guerrilla tactics politicized space before and after the revolution; (3) tracing genealogies allows us to think simultaneously, rather than linearly about causation; (4) the circulation of expertise left divisive imprints on society; (5) part of what gave the revolution meaning was imagining the world. Collectively and individually, the chapters disrupt familiar stories and interrupt hackneyed historical sequences by making us attuned to configurations of space and time obfuscated by a penchant to explain outcomes, assign responsibility, and second-guess decisions.