The Arab uprisings constituted the largest contemporaneous regionwide mass movement to have erupted in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region). Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain all experienced sustained protest movements that varied in demands: some called for democratic institutional and structural reforms toward inclusive governance, whereas others called for the downfall of long-standing autocratic regimes. More than a decade after the initial wave of protest movements in late 2010 and early 2011, numerous interdisciplinary works have been devoted to explaining various outcomes of the uprisings— ranging from those focusing on structural and institutional factors to those emphasizing dynamics between social forces and state–society relations at domestic, regional, and international levels. Invariably, these works have centered on explaining why the diffusion of regionwide protest movements within a given temporal setting failed to induce progressive social change across the region.
Jamie Allinson’s timely contribution, The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East, adds to the few cross-national comparisons of uprisings and protest outcomes on the subject, including our own book, After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa, and the seminal work by Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds, The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (2014). Allinson’s book diverges in scope and framing from the extant literature on the Arab Spring in shifting the analytical lens from the discourse on “democratization versus authoritarian resilience” (p. 9) to a focus on factors and forces that produce “Arab un-democracy” (p. 8) through what he terms a Marxist analysis (p. 18) of revolution and counterrevolution. Allinson advances an argument of the Arab uprising that emphasizes counterrevolution as a response to revolutionary mass mobilization. Through a cross-national comparison of revolutions and counterrevolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the book undertakes pair-structured comparisons between Tunisia and Egypt in chapter 4, militarized counterrevolutions in Syria and Bahrain in chapter 5, and revolutions and state collapse in Libya and Yemen in chapter 6. Chapter 7 offers an outlier comparison of ISIS and Rojava, the Kurdish enclave in Northeast Syria, as cases of revolutionary situations.
Rather than focusing exclusively on explaining the factors that contributed to revolutionary failure, Allinson is interested in answering why Arab counterrevolutions were successful (p. 19). He defines a counterrevolution as a project supported by various social movements and international alliances that attempt to reverse a revolution (p. 21); interestingly, this definition treats class as secondary in his Marxian analysis.
Central to this study, and a question invariably addressed by the vast and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Arab Spring, is whether the uprisings that engulfed the region from late 2010 into 2011 even qualify as revolutions. Eschewing works that posit that the Arab uprisings fail to constitute revolutions in the conventional sense (e.g., Asef Bayat on “refolutions” and our own book), Allinson’s book treats mass uprisings across six case studies as “revolutionary situations” because they produced profound political changes and alternative political institutions (p. 21); he does concede, however, that they did not lead to class-based social transformations. An established body of literature over the past decade has examined the factors and forces behind authoritarian reversal, resilience, and durability. Allinson, however, prefers to present them as counterrevolutionary. This begs the questions of who the revolutionary forces were in each country case study and to what extent the “revolutionary situations” were viable. We return to this issue shortly.
As a work of historical sociology, the book relies methodologically on an “incorporated comparison” (p. 25) to elucidate the enduring effects of historical developments on the modern phenomenon of counterrevolution. However, the weight of history and of a seemingly path- dependent argument the author alludes to is undertheorized when juxtaposed with a vast literature in both comparative historical sociology and historical institutionalism as analytical toolkits for mapping the weight and effects of a long durée of historically contingent events on contemporary outcomes. One is left wanting more clarity on what, exactly, is an incorporated comparison, why it is distinctively instructive for a cross-national comparison rather than other methods such as a structured or focused cross-national comparison, and how it facilitates a distinct operationalization of the variables underpinning the cross-national comparison.
Readers will find much that is instructive in the book. The descriptions of the uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen make for compelling reading. We share Allinson’s admiration of Tunisia’s political revolution and the role of the UGTT then and during the 2013 crisis. (Our own book’s analysis anticipates the authoritarian reversal that occurred after July 2021, as Tunisia’s revolution faced an unfavorable global economic environment.) We agree that although each uprising had national frames and distinctions, all were influenced by global and regional dynamics. Like us, Allinson highlights differences in the dynamics of twentieth-century revolutions compared with the Arab uprisings. Early on, he notes the counterrevolutionary role of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (p. 43), but he claims that the United States played “next to no role” (p. 171) in the Arab uprisings and denies any US involvement in Syria. (There is ample evidence, however, of CIA destabilization activities in Syria as early as 2008, reported in the New York Times, as well as USA Today, and former President Obama is on record informing US senators in early 2013 that the CIA had trained and dispatched to Syria an insurgent element). Indeed, works by May Darwich, Ariel Ahram, Shamiran Mako, and Fred H. Lawson, among others, have illustrated the effects of foreign interventions—both regional and international—on democratization outcomes in the Arab uprisings. Allinson emphasizes the role of regional powers and rivalries in the disruption of the revolutionary situations, notably those pitting Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Qatar, but falls short of problematizing Turkey’s role in enabling jihadist entry into Syria.
A work of historical sociology might also have addressed issues of gender. There are some references to women’s roles in the various uprisings, but the book makes no attempt to consider how the confluence of decades of male-dominated polities, militarism, and international interventions shaped the violent nature of the uprisings and their unhappy outcomes—for women and men alike—in all six countries but Tunisia. Years ago, Val Moghadam asked, “Is the future of revolution feminist?” and argued that without women’s mass presence and leadership, any potential revolution would fail.
Ultimately, we find perplexing Allinson’s characterization of revolutions, revolutionaries, and counterrevolutionaries. Regarding Yemen, the Houthis are designated part of the revolutionary protest encampments (p. 100) but in chapter 6 they are counterrevolutionaries, in the same camp as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh is classified as counterrevolutionary (as though there was some debate about their utterly reactionary and regressive nature). Allinson spends some time criticizing the literature on classic or social revolutions (notably Perry Anderson and Theda Skocpol) that, he claims, would have included Da’esh as a revolutionary force and their so-called Caliphate a revolutionary state. To the contrary, both Anderson (a Marxist) and Skocpol (a liberal inspired by the works of Barrington Moore but also cognizant of Marxist writings on revolution) emphasize “class-based” social transformations. What was the dominant class in any purported Da’esh “revolution”? Oddly, Allinson designates Da’esh counterrevolutionary not because it sought transformation but because it intended to “preserve existing social relations” (p. 219). This begs the question: How was the Da’esh genocidal campaign of antagonizing, targeting, and brutalizing local populations in the territories it dominated a preservation of existing social relations? Da’esh emerged and functioned to create and propagate an exclusionary and repressive radical Sunni Islamist ideology rooted not in class liberation but in violence couched in jihad. It was hardly in the business of preserving existing ethnic, gender, or social relations and was closer to the atrocious Khmer Rouge of Cambodia (another result of US military intervention) than any twentieth-century social or political revolution.
Our own analysis of the Arab uprisings does not assume that what occurred in the Arab countries could resemble the past “great” social revolutions, in part because of the absence of a class-based “vanguard” party or political force with the capacity to build coalitions and present a unifying strategy for transformation—whether at the national, regional, or international level. The era of pervasive neoliberal capitalism has affected all manner of institutions, social forces, and values, limiting and constraining the capacity of progressive revolutionaries. In this respect, the Arab uprisings differed also from the array of 1960s and 1970s Third World revolutions that occurred in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa—although many of those were undermined by counterrevolutionary forces internally and externally. Instead, in our book we ask why more limited political revolutions leading to democratic transitions—even pacted transitions—could not occur in the Arab region, and we do so within a framework grounded in four explanatory variables.
Returning to Allinson’s study, we are left wondering who the revolutionaries were in each case and why the counterrevolutions succeeded. In addition to the varied forms of external intervention, could this counterrevolutionary success have occurred because of the absence of organized class forces? The absence of coalition building between opponents of the authoritarian regimes? The lack of progressive ideology, leadership, and strategy? A fragmented opposition, unable or unwilling to negotiate with representatives of the state? Which social class or coalition of social groups were or could have been the carrier of the ideals of the Arab Spring, able to bring them to fruition? Who could have consolidated democracy and effected a major redistribution of property and income, with recognition and rights for women, youth, and religious and ethnic minorities?
Nevertheless, The Age of Counter-Revolution makes an important cross-national comparison to an established body of literature by challenging existing explanations of divergent outcomes of the Arab uprisings through a revolution–counterrevolution framework currently understudied in the expansive literature. Allinson’s detailed account of change from above and below throughout the six country case studies examined in the book advances our understanding of how processes of change unfolded across time and space.
