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.

This chapter examines the gender and sexual politics of the Iranian Students Association (ISA), the US affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union) (CISNU), which was the largest anti-shah opposition formation during the 1960s and 1970s. While the participation of CISNU in the creation of pan-Third Worldist solidarities has been established, Iranian foreign student activists have been left out of narratives of the emergence of Third World feminism as an outgrowth of women’s commitments to the anti-imperialist movements of the era. The author argues that the efforts of some ISA members to challenge gender hierarchies, and to place the struggle for women’s equality on the immediate organizing agenda – rather than postpone this goal until after the arrival of socialism – represent gestures toward an anti-imperialist feminism that was severely constrained by historical and ideological circumstances. Nonetheless, these gestures are important for subsequent generations of Iranian diasporic feminists to parse, as they contain ideas crucial for reimagining transnational feminist solidarities today. Through close readings of interviews with former ISA members and movement literature, the author traces a genealogy of Iranian revolutionary gender consciousness rooted in an analysis of the intersections between patriarchy, empire, and dictatorship.

Drawing on a close reading of the French feminist Des Femmes's documentary Mouvement de libération des femmes Iraniennes année zero made by a group of filmmakers and journalists associated with Antoinette Fouque and the Psych et Po, this chapter articulates the ways that the Iranian Revolution’s anti-disciplinary concept of “the planetary” ( jahani in Persian) situates the object of Iranian studies and the radical mission of the field.