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The Arab Thermidor

 Anand Gopal, Catalyst Vol 4, 2020

The Arab revolutions of 2011 promised to usher in the greatest democratic transformation since 1848, but in the end, almost all the uprisings failed spectacularly. To understand this defeat, this essay seeks to reintroduce a class analysis of the Arab Spring and examines how the regional turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s shaped the patterns of revolutionary mobilization and, ultimately, sealed the revolutions’ fates.

In 2011, the Arab world was gripped by a great awakening, a popular uprising for democracy unlike anything seen since 1848. No fewer than a dozen Arab-speaking countries witnessed upheaval, and in six — Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria — revolutionary movements threatened state power. In the end, all but one of these movements failed spectacularly. Only Tunisia was blessed with a successful democratic transition; Libya, Yemen, and Syria collapsed into civil war, and Egypt slid into a new era of despotism. Bahrain’s uprising was crushed by Saudi tanks.

The debacle has spawned several explanations. Liberal commentators argue that the uprisings did not receive adequate support from the “international community,” while many on the Left, pointing to the lack of “moderates” and secular leftists in the revolutionary ranks, question whether the uprisings held any emancipatory potential to begin with. Both claims, though, fall short of evidence. For example, the Tunisian revolution, the Arab Spring’s sole success story, garnered little foreign support. On the other hand, foreign powers were heavily invested in managing Yemen’s democratic transition, an intervention that proved so disastrous it set off a civil war. And the claim that the uprisings were Islamist in character from the beginning belies copious evidence from the ground, to the point where sections of the Left have resorted to Islamophobia or conspiracy theories to maintain this position.

Even if these claims were true, they’d only raise further, more vexing questions. If the uprisings failed because of insufficient support from Western powers, then why were these movements dependent on foreign support in the first place, especially when their historical analogs had been self-sufficient? And if the uprisings were doomed because of the dominance of fundamentalism, then why, in a region once in thrall to Arab nationalism and communism, is political Islam the argot of resistance today?

The standard critiques are correct, however, in recognizing that the uprisings don’t quite fit the classic model of democratic revolutions, in which parties and classes are the protagonists. Though the six revolutionary movements underwent quite different trajectories, they shared common organizational principles and ideology. In the initial stages, the revolutionaries expressed an aversion to political parties and centralization.

The movements extolled leaderlessness, verging on horizontalism. “Revolutions of the past have usually had charismatic leaders who were politically savvy and sometimes even military genius,” wrote the liberal Egyptian revolutionary Wael Ghonim. But the new revolt, which he dubbed “revolution 2.0,” was a “truly spontaneous movement led by nothing other than the wisdom of the crowd.”1 At first, the uprisings were not comprised of political parties or institutions; instead, they were organized territorially — most famously in the occupation of public spaces like Tahrir Square in Cairo. Over time, though, the uprisings developed organizational and hierarchical structures, including neighborhood committees, local councils, and armed factions. Those participating in these bodies were united by kinship or geography, not through membership in a political party or by sharing a political vision. Focused on local service delivery, these new bodies resembled NGOs rather than traditional political parties. Classic left and liberal parties were unable to penetrate these structures. Eventually, these bodies were either taken over by Islamists or dissolved by the counterrevolutionary regimes.

The ideological character of the uprisings went through a similar evolution. In the early stages, the revolutionaries fashioned themselves as belonging to a post-ideological movement. In reality, though, they were as ideological as any political movement — but their worldview simply mirrored international liberal norms, a doctrine so thoroughly internalized that it seemed like common sense. The movements for democracy were articulated through an individualistic, rights-based discourse, with a special emphasis on human rights. Among the revolutionary leadership, there was almost no talk of substantive equality, wealth redistribution, or property relations. The liberal revolutionaries appealed to the “international community,” which usually meant the Western powers. They believed that by documenting human rights violations and the transgression of (putative) global norms, concerned citizens and world powers would be moved to act, or that international pressure would constrain the counterrevolutionary regimes’ ability to wage bloody repression. But this liberal phase did not last long. Within two years, as the regimes imprisoned and killed thousands, the uprisings witnessed an increased condensation of social forces into opposing camps: liberal and illiberal. The latter included either various stripes of Islamic fundamentalists or new strongmen. The uprisings increasingly took on an identitarian character, bifurcating along sectarian or religious–secular lines. In the end, the liberal rhetoric of the early revolutionaries was discredited, and many looked to illiberal alternatives.

To understand what happened, we must grapple with the changing social structure in the Arab world over the previous four decades. Both liberal and left explanations fall short because they ignore the role of class in explaining the outcome of the uprisings. They miss the profound shifts in class structure that have taken place in recent years, a transformation that shaped the patterns of mobilization and, ultimately, sealed the revolutions’ fate. Only by bringing class analysis back in can we begin to see that the challenges the revolutionaries faced ran much deeper than lacking foreign support or the correct strategy.

The revolutions that failed did so because the movements lacked the structural power to overthrow the regimes. This power resides in the ability of subaltern actors to engage in collective action that threatens the underlying basis of elite power. Until the 1990s, the Arab world was organized around a social contract wherein the masses were incorporated into state-run bodies, through which they received basic protections from the market as well as a means of representing their interests. In exchange, they surrendered all democratic freedoms, along with the right to independent organization and collective bargaining. The region-wide neoliberal turn, beginning in the early 1990s, unraveled this social contract. Not only did the reforms gut the social safety net and expose millions to the market, they transformed the nature of work. Without membership in corporate bodies, people no longer had the connections to secure scarce public- sector jobs. Meanwhile, crony capitalism limited the growth of the formal private sector. The majority of the working class was therefore thrust into the informal sector, where they survived on temporary contracts and precarious employment. By 2010, between 50 and 70 percent of the workforce in Arab Spring countries consisted of informal labor. These “disincorporated” masses lacked structural power; collective action was oriented around kinship and neighborhood, not class-based organizations or national bodies. The resulting fragmentation meant that, when uprisings swept the region, the revolutionaries could not directly threaten elite power without taking up arms. Though the movement lacked formal leaders, an informal leadership emerged, comprised of middle- and upper- middle-class individuals who had been excluded by crony capitalist liberalization. Early on, these individuals were pivotal in giving the movements a liberal orientation. Later, as their liberal ideas became discredited, Islamists and strongmen won mass support. Ultimately, the manner in which the Arab regimes had forged the social contract, and the manner in which neoliberalism had unraveled it, doomed the uprisings.

This article will provide a broad historical overview of the rise of the social contract across the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It will then detail how the neoliberal turn undid this contract and restructured the Arab working class, which both propelled and doomed the uprisings. Finally, it will examine these dynamics in depth through an analysis of the Syrian and Tunisian revolutions.

THE ARAB SOCIAL CONTRACT

In the 1950s, after decades of colonialism, a series of liberal oligarchies took power across the Arab world. In Syria, elite agricultural and merchant families formed the People’s Party, which led the post-Mandate government and won the 1954 elections, the first truly free polls in the Arab world. The People’s Party advocated closer ties with the West and robust personal freedoms, but opposed calls for serious land reform, in keeping with their class interests. In Egypt, leadership of the nationalist Wafd Party represented an alliance between the urban middle class and the landed aristocracy. The Wafd called for full political rights but were wary of land reform. In Tunisia, the most powerful constituency within the ruling Neo-Destour Party was the large landowners of the Sahel region.

In the end, the liberals’ unwillingness to address class demands proved their undoing, creating an opening to their left. Many countries witnessed mass political mobilization, the rise of peasant and worker movements, and explosive strike waves. By the 1950s, for example, a third of all workers in Egypt and Tunisia were unionized. For the first time, the masses were directly contesting national politics, usually through left-wing parties. In southern Yemen, the Aden Trade Union Congress became a leading force in the independence movement against the British, and subsequently in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In Egypt and Syria, Arab nationalists aligned with Gemal ‘Abd al-Nasser seized power.

The new left-wing regimes sought to limit the power of capital. In Egypt, Nasser took a hammer to the landlord class; nearly 7.5 million people benefited from land reform, with 1.3 million peasants finally owning the land they tilled. His regime nationalized foreign firms and, most famously, seized the Suez Canal from the British. In Syria, more than a hundred firms were nationalized, and the state monopolized 70 percent of foreign trade. In Libya, Mu‘ammar al-Gaddafi unveiled the principle shuraka’ la ujara’ — partners, not wage earners — and attempted to abolish the commodification of labor altogether through large-scale expropriation of the private sector. In Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba expropriated French companies and agricultural holdings. These regimes, which scholars usually describe as “populist authoritarian,” pursued a broad program of wealth redistribution, commanded from above through dictatorial fiat. By subordinating capital to the needs of the nation, the populist authoritarian regimes prioritized redistribution over economic growth. In Egypt, for example, Nasser made university education virtually free and guaranteed government employment for all graduates. Millions of Egyptians ascended into the middle class. By 1969, the state was employing 60 percent of all university graduates, including two-thirds of all lawyers and 87 percent of all physicians.

These reforms placed an enormous financial burden on the state. The explosive growth of the public sector in Egypt, for example, diverted “scarce resources away from productive investment,” writes Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “ultimately eroding the state’s resource base for further distribution.” Added to this was the global slump of the early 1970s, exacerbated by the oil shock. By 1973, growth rates in Egypt had cooled, and inflation was soaring. The populist authoritarian regimes faced a dilemma: deepen extraction of capitalist profits to fund redistribution, or retreat from class conflict. The former would spark civil war, unless the regimes relied on mass mobilization from below in the form of strikes and protests — which Arab rulers wanted to avoid because, in their nationalist vision, they sought to minimize class struggle in the name of national unity.2 So they opted for the latter and pursued a rapprochement with the private sector. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad overthrew the left wing of the Ba‘ath Party in Syria and launched the “Corrective Movement,” seeking to reconcile with the Sunni merchant class (especially in Damascus). Land reform was halted, and trade restrictions eased. That same year, Bourguiba moved against the left-wing leadership of the UGTT, the powerful trade union confederation in Tunisia, and appointed the pro-market liberal Hédi Nouira as prime minister. In 1974, Anwar Sadat announced the Infitahin Egypt, a policy of economic “openness” to attract private investment and reverse Nasserist policies.

By the mid-1970s, the era of left-wing Arab nationalism was finished.3 This is usually chalked up to the Arab nationalists’ defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, but in fact, it was internal contradictions and structural reasons that forced these rulers to halt radical extractive measures and reengage the bourgeoisie. Yet it would be a mistake to call the resulting regimes capitalist; the state developed into a body with its own bureaucratic interests, as against all other sectors and classes in society, which some scholars call “bureaucratic authoritarianism.”4 (See Figure 1.) They managed a balancing act between the classes by alleviating the extractive pressure on the private sector while using exogenous revenue to maintain redistribution. Syria relied on Soviet aid and oil rents, which afforded the regime a measure of independence. Egypt and Tunisia, on the other hand, resorted to taking on large amounts of Western debt. This exposed them to the designs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which pressed them to slash redistribution. But attempts at radical liberalization failed — Sadat, for example, was forced to scrap a proposed subsidy after riots broke out in 1977. Instead, the regimes pursued reforms with great caution.5 As a result, while sectors of the Egyptian and Tunisian economies were opened to private capital through the 1970s and 1980s, the social safety net remained in place.6




Millions of working people continued to benefit from subsidies, free education and health care, guaranteed state employment, cheap credit, and price controls on inputs and outputs in the agricultural sector. Such programs, together with oil remittances, achieved remarkable results. By the end of the 1980s, the MENA region had the lowest poverty rate in the developing world, with only 2 percent of the population living below $1 per day. Inequality, similarly, was far lower in MENA than in comparable regions.7 MENA led the developing world in access to health and education.8

Despite these benefits, the masses enjoyed almost no political rights; this provision of a safety net in exchange for surrendering political freedom is the great social contract that underpinned Arab regimes: torture chambers and butter. There were no elections, no free press, no opposition parties, no independent judiciary, no independent unions, and no right to strike. By shielding the poorest citizens from the violence of the market, the dictatorships exposed their populations to the naked violence of the political order.

Yet the social contract was not simply a trade-off between desirable ends. In fact, the contract was a means through which people could improve their lot and, in a limited manner, represent their interests at the state level — just not in the way interests are represented in democracies. Understanding the structure of the social contract is crucial to explaining how neoliberalism unraveled it and shaped the ensuing revolutions.

CORPORATISM

In order to mobilize society around nationalist and anti-imperialist causes, the Arab regimes viewed the contradictory “internal” interests of society, such as those of labor and capital, as secondary to, and possibly distracting from, the development of the Arab nation. The Arab nationalists agreed with the communists that workers and employers constituted distinct interest groups, but they believed this contradiction should be resolved through direct negotiation, mediated by the state. In other words, the Arab nationalists viewed the various interest groups in society as necessary components of the body politic, a veritable corpus, that were ultimately united in the goal of national development. Whether consciously or not, these regimes were drawing from the tradition of corporatism.

Corporatism developed in the late nineteenth century among the Catholic intelligentsia in Italy as an alternative to socialism, a means of improving the lot of the working class without threatening private property. In its original formulation, the corporatists viewed society as consisting of discrete interest groups — such as workers, employers, lawyers, the clergy, and parties — that settled differences through bargaining and negotiation. As it developed in practice, the state became the arena through which such disputes were settled, ultimately leading all interest groups to be incorporated into the state itself. In his classic exposition, Philippe C. Schmitter writes that 9

“Corporatism can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports.”

By incorporating unions and political parties into the state, corporatism effectively destroys any independent organization in society, including those of the working class. So it’s not surprising that corporatism is closely associated with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler — we might view it as the sociopolitical organization of classical fascism. It was also the primary means through which the populist and bureaucratic authoritarian Arab regimes ruled. The Arab state, represented by a single party, mediated between various “functional” groups in society, each supposedly with its own distinct interests — peasants, teachers, lawyers, industrial workers, women, and so on. Class stratification within these groups did not determine their function, at least on paper: the agricultural cooperative represented the interests of rich and poor peasants; the women’s organization represented everyone from female industrial workers to housewives. Under this system, solidarities on any basis except those of the functional groups were, by definition, against those groups, and therefore against the national interest. Any attempt at political or economic activity not conducted through these channels was, ipso facto, illegitimate. Hence strikes were severely curtailed or outlawed, and union membership was carefully controlled. In Syria, for example, all unions were merged into the General Federation of Trade Unions, which itself was adjoined to the General Union of Peasants, the Revolutionary Youth Union, and an assortment of leftist parties to form the state- controlled National Progressive Front.

The limits on the right to strike or pursue independent collective bargaining benefited employers, but at the same time, state ministries fixed wages and controlled private industry’s ability to discipline workers. In this sense, the working class lost collective power in exchange for a broad redistributive program that partially decommodified labor and offered protections from the market. In addition to this economic trade-off, the social contract consisted of an important political trade-off. When Arab nationalist corporatism eliminated all democratic rights, it wasn’t merely a mechanism of fragmentation and control; by replacing horizontal ties of solidarity and collective action with vertical ties to the state, the corporatist regimes actually created a new form of interest representation. On the one hand, corporatist structures were means for the state to control popular activity, stifle dissent, and channel interest group rivalries in a manner concordant with the bureaucratic interests of the state. But on the other hand, membership in a corporate body allowed individuals and communities to tap into patronage networks and even, under some circumstances, influence policy. For example, as peasants joined state- managed agricultural cooperatives, the village became linked to the center as never before. The state would set prices but would face direct and indirect pressure from various quarters: the peasants’ union, agricultural ministry employees, party bosses. A ministry employee might push for a crop rotation schedule more favorable to his home village; a party official might cajole the agricultural bank to offer cheaper credit to her family’s area. “When individuals [moved] up in the national power structure,” writes Raymond Hinnebusch about Syria, they “used their position to help out kin in the village.”10 The same applied in the urban sphere: workers from a given community

 might succeed in pushing one of their own onto an industrial labor-relations body. A shop steward at a plant might manage to sit on a corporate board and might push for a greater share of profits to his local. A teacher would join the national party to get a choice posting. This manner of using personal connections for goods and services is best described by the Arabic term wasta. While it is usually viewed as a form of corruption, wasta was a feature, not a bug, of the corporatist regime, and it served to cement the social contract by offering social mobility and a means of influencing policy. In other words, despite the lack of formal political freedoms, popular sectors could contend for their interests — albeit in a very attenuated form — through representation in corporate structures. In this way, as Hinnebusch points out, “patronage was ‘democratized’ at the local level as public goods were diverted and laws bent to favor locals.”11

In this sense, the social contract was not merely the exchange of political rights for economic protections, as most authors argue. Instead, it was a complex trade-off between various social and political resources: by surrendering independent collective organization and formal political rights, the masses were given some protection from the market and a means of interest representation through patronage networks. The latter proved especially valuable as a vehicle of upward mobility.12 Millions of poor people ascended into the middle class as they took jobs as government employees, for which wasta was crucial. It was this upwardly mobile layer that generally formed the social base of the bureaucratic authoritarian regimes.

THE NEOLIBERAL TURN

The core element of the social contract was redistribution, which ultimately depended on revenue. So long as the bureaucratic authoritarian regimes could fund redistribution exogenously — without extracting from the domestic private sector — they could maintain the delicate balance between the bourgeoisie and the popular sphere. In Syria, for example, foreign aid in 1979 accounted for 40.9 percent of state revenue.13 In 1985, only 1.3 percent of state revenue derived from income taxes, and 10 percent from customs duties, with the rest coming from oil and foreign aid. Across MENA, non-rentier revenue accounted for just 16 percent of state coffers, compared to nearly 26 percent in sub-Saharan African states.14 This is an inherently unstable approach: rents are fickle, and debt mounts rapidly. Sooner or later, something would have to give.

In the Middle East, the spark that collapsed this house of cards was hydrocarbons. In the 1980s, oil prices came crashing down from the heady heights of the previous decade; between 1981 and 1986, the price of a barrel of crude fell by nearly two-thirds. This immediately impacted rentier states like Libya, which became one of the first MENA countries to attempt neoliberal reforms. It also indirectly affected non-oil-exporting countries because the tapering flow of migrant labor squeezed remittances. The expanded domestic labor pool put pressure on state employment programs, leading to increased unemployment and underemployment; countries with guaranteed state employment faced a public-sector wage bill that was rising at an alarming rate. The anemic private sector was an insufficient tax base for redistribution; technological advances on the international market were exerting downward pressure on domestic labor productivity. Investment plummeted: by the late 1980s, growth in physical capital per worker across the region had fallen by three-quarters from the previous decade.15

Confronted with this crisis, some regimes simply attempted to borrow more — but this spawned a spiraling debt crisis, exacerbated by the credit crunch following Mexico’s default in 1982. As Adam Hanieh explains,16 “By the mid-1980s, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia were paying 30–65 percent of their entire export earnings just to service their debt. At the same time, new loans had to be taken on in order to keep afloat, and so overall debt stock actually rose despite the continual outflows of debt service. In other words, indebtedness increased each year in tandem with growing debt and interest repayments. Debt thus represented an ever-escalating drain of wealth from the Arab region to the richest financial institutions in the world.”

Other regimes clung to the hope of foreign aid until that, too, disappeared. For example, Syria had avoided the debt cycle by relying on Soviet aid and oil rents, but the 1980s oil glut and 1991 Soviet collapse made continuing this course impossible.

The bureaucratic authoritarian regimes were facing a similar choice to that of their populist predecessors two decades earlier: remove the fetters to private capital accumulation or pursue radical extraction — only this time, the balancing act was no longer possible. Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating thereafter, nearly every non-OPEC country in MENA turned decisively away from the redistributive programs that underwrote the social contract, and embraced various forms of neoliberalism.

Countries firmly under the boot of the international financial institutions followed the typical recipe of structural adjustment. Egypt, for example, pledged to increase sales tax, remove tariffs, and slash subsidies. Various public-sector firms were privatized, and hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off. Nasser’s guaranteed employment scheme for university graduates was finally abolished. Meanwhile, countries that had avoided the World Bank and IMF, like Syria, embarked upon such adjustments on their own. The first tentative steps came in 1991, with Investment Law No. 10, which granted tax holidays to corporations, waived import duties, opened access to hard currency, and flattened income tax rates. Upon inheriting power in 2000, Bashar al-Assad turned up the dial through widespread privatization. Even services that were not privatized, like education, suffered declining quality as teachers were wildly underpaid and absenteeism soared.17

ELITE REALIGNMENT

The balancing act was finished, but this did not mean the state could simply untie the private sector’s hands and step aside; uncontrolled liberalization could embolden the capitalist class and threaten the regimes’ rule. The neoliberal turn was therefore not merely an opening to the market, it was a fundamental restructuring of class relations in Arab societies. Neoliberalism produced a new bourgeoisie, forged from elements of the state and sections of the preexisting private sector. From the perspective of the state, the only way to ensure that liberalization did not threaten elite rule was to become capitalists themselves. From the perspective of the private sector, on the other hand, neoliberalism produced winners and losers: those who possessed strong links with the ruling clique struck riches, whereas those who did not found themselves on the outside, looking in. In other words, neoliberalism produced a split within the private sector, a realignment that, like the unraveling of the social contract, helped determine the course of the Arab Spring.

In practice, the private-sector split resulted from a segmentation in profitability. Those firms tied by family or friendship to the ruling elites received preferential access to markets, a phenomenon usually described as “crony capitalism.” One study found that politically connected Egyptian firms had greater access to credit and greater market share than unconnected firms, controlling for sector size and other variables.18 Regime- linked firms had a debt-to-equity ratio about 108.3 points higher than independent ones, far surpassing firms in other countries notorious for corruption. Between 2004 and 2010, debt-to-equity ratios of connected firms increased by 43 percent, while those of non- connected companies declined by 55 percent — as a result, 74 percent of all corporate debt in this period accrued to firms connected to the regime. Since the banking sector is liberalized, banks were lending to regime-linked firms simply because it was more profitable, and the regime connections effectively acted as collateral against the loans. Similarly, regime-linked firms commanded an extra market share of about 8 percent over non-linked firms, again a relatively high figure compared to other countries where crony capitalism is a feature.

In Tunisia, Zine El ‘Abidine Ben Ali’s family owned nearly 400 firms, 367 bank accounts, 550 properties, and 48 stock portfolios.19 These assets were valued at $13 billion, a full quarter of the country’s GDP in 2011. Ben Ali firms represented 1 percent of employment and 3 percent of national output, but they earned 21.3 percent of all net private-sector profits.20 Some of these holdings came from fire-sale privatizations in the public sector, but much of them belonged to heavily regulated segments of the private sector. This brand of neoliberalism meant keeping a facade of regulations, thereby restricting market access to non-regime-linked bourgeoisie, while exposing the poor and working class to the market by slashing welfare provisions. The family monopolized air and sea transport, telecommunications, banking, real estate, and the service sector, so that without ties to the rulers, it was impossible to circumvent state regulations. As a result, sections of the bourgeoisie found it very difficult to compete.21 For example, in the Bir Kassaa wholesale market, traders required regime connections to circumvent the 36 percent import duty on bananas. Tunisia does not produce bananas, meaning the tariff existed solely to protect the market for regime-linked firms.22

In Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power in 1977 on the basis of a power-sharing arrangement with key figures in the Hashid tribal confederation in the north; Saleh would occupy the presidency in Sana’a while Hashid tribal sheikhs and military commanders would be free to run fiefdoms in their areas. In time, Saleh used oil revenues to incorporate regional elites from around the country into a pyramid of patronage. In this system, control over the state sector became a means of distributing patronage and amassing private-sector wealth; for example, Hashid elites developed networks inside the Yemen Economic Corporation (YECO), a parastatal military procurement body that was active in real estate, oil and gas, construction, tourism, and other industries. But during the mid-2000s liberalization, technocrats linked to Saleh’s son established a holding company, with World Bank support, and seized vast tracts of YECO’s land. This move, and many like it, cut into the profits of Hashid elites and drove a wedge between them and the Saleh family. Saleh’s sons and nephews also took control of the presidential guard and the intelligence agency — through which they accrued millions of dollars in “political rents” from Washington’s War on Terror. In other words, Saleh’s immediately family benefited disproportionately from liberalization and the War on Terror, threatening the interests of rival Hashid elites. When the revolution erupted in 2011, Yemen’s elite coalition split: the Hashid chieftain Hamid al-Ahmar funded Change Square, the main protest camp in the capital, and another leading Hashid figure, general Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, defected with a chunk of the armed forces, laying the seeds for civil war.23

RESTRUCTURING

The neoliberal turn stemmed from the same pressures that produced the rapprochement between the state and private capital in the early 1970s. This time, however, the regimes could not rely on aid and debt to keep redistributive programs afloat, leading them to dismantle the social contract and restructure the working class. While MENA countries generally did not deindustrialize, globalization kept the manufacturing sector stagnant, and most new jobs appeared in the service industry (Figure 2). The most striking structural transformations, though, occurred in agriculture and the public sector. Agricultural cooperatives were disbanded and state farms privatized. In Syria, for example, the total surface area of state-owned farms plunged by 50 percent between 1970 and 2000.24 And in 2000, public ownership of land was abolished altogether; through politicking and subterfuge, regime-connected elites scooped up the bulk of the distributed land. Effectively, the Ba‘athist land reforms of the 1960s were reversed, creating a new landed elite presiding over vast latifundia. In Egypt, a similar process took place, with agribusinesses scooping up much of the land. These privatizations, together with various urbanization policies, drove millions off the land to settle in shantytowns or become migrant laborers.

FIGURE 2 % OF WORKFORCE EMPLOYED IN SERVICE SECTOR


Figure 3 shows the decline in the agricultural workforce; the formal private sector was unable to absorb these jobs — one reason that pre-2011 MENA had the highest rate of unemployment in the Global South. Because major industries were monopolized by the new state-linked bourgeoisie, small businesses were unable to grow or compete on the market. In Egypt and Tunisia, for example, start-ups were unable to expand into midsize firms, and within ten years, 95 percent had shut down.25 One study found that in Egypt, the rate of job creation fell by 1.4 percent when a regime-linked firm entered a sector.26 With a rapidly dwindling public sector, the privatization of agriculture, and a private sector unable to absorb new entrants to the labor market, the majority of the working class found little alternative to precarious work in the informal sector. Figure 4 shows this phenomenon in Egypt: in 1971, nearly 90 percent of new workers entered the public sector, but by 1997, only 19 percent did. Instead, nearly 70 percent of new workers that year joined the informal economy. The proportion of the workforce engaged in informal labor in other Arab Spring countries is similar: 71 percent in Syria, 91 percent in Yemen, and 50 percent in Tunisia.27 Most of these workers have not moved into the formal sector, meaning that precariousness is the permanent state of being for the majority of the working class in these countries.28

Source: Adapted from Jackline Wahba and May Moktar, “Informalization of Labor in Egypt,” in Ragui Assaad, ed., The Labor Market in a Reforming Economy: Egypt in the 1990s. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002).

The consequences for working-class living standards were devastating. Those hailing from middle-income families — white-collar state employees — experienced dwindling income. Many in this downwardly mobile layer were university-educated but could not land a job commensurate with their degree. Life in the informal sector meant recurring periods without work, and much time spent queuing, knocking on doors, and waiting in muster zones. Under such conditions, women began to drop out of the workforce — one reason why today, fewer women participate in the labor market in MENA than anywhere in the world.29

For the poorest sections of the working class, on the other hand, the situation was more complex. These workers had previously belonged to the agricultural sector, but upon getting thrown off the land, they moved abroad as migrant laborers. They often earned more in places like the Gulf than they had back home in the fields, so that the mean income for this group actually increased. The net result was a flattening of the working class as a whole, where everyone — poor and middle-income alike — now experienced similar working conditions and living standards, regardless of education.

By privatizing agriculture and slashing public employment, the liberalizing regimes overturned the corporatist arrangement that had been the bedrock of the social contract for forty years. The newly precarious working class was, therefore, “disincorporated.” This had four important consequences for the shape of things to come. First, recall that corporate bodies like agricultural cooperatives and teacher syndicates were a means of interest representation. On a communal level, it was a way for villages, tribes, and workplaces to influence policy. On an individual level, these bodies were the primary way, through wasta, that middle-income workers found jobs or evaded the capricious behavior of ruling institutions like the courts. The disarticulation of corporate bodies, therefore, also represented the privatization of wasta. New entrants to the job market no longer had a means of using regime connections to secure employment or protect against a rapacious police force.

The second consequence was that the disincorporated working class lacked the structural power to overturn the system in which they were trapped. René Rojas writes that structural power

“[C]omes from the leverage that ordinary people might enjoy owing to their positions in institutions valued by elites. Unlike mobilizational capacities that must be built up, structural leverageis built in to subaltern sectors’ position in the economy. The key to it is the fact that ruling classes rely on working people’s labor as the source of their own wealth and income. When workers or peasants withhold this labor, it imposes intolerable costs on economic elites, and this becomes a lever for extracting concessions from power centers. The mere refusal to participate in routine tasks and activities threatens to undermine ruling-class power. The more workers and the poor are integrated into institutions that produce value for ruling classes, the higher their potential structural leverage.”30

In the Global North, the ability of workers in key sectors like manufacturing and mining to threaten elite interests was pivotal to winning democratic reforms.31 In MENA, given the historical dominance of state employment as compared to manufacturing, the Arab working class’s structural power was never great to begin with. But under neoliberalism, it was less than ever.

Third, disincorporation increases the hurdles to collective action on the basis of class. The precarious nature of employment, and the shifting nature of work, mean that it is more difficult to coordinate work stoppages. The challenge is temporospatial: workers may not be on the job long enough to organize successful campaigns, nor are they concentrated in a given industry for sufficient time. (Compare them to workers in industries with high structural leverage, such as mining, who have historically played an important role in democratization.32) Therefore, disincorporation makes basic elements of collective action, such as coordination, difficult. In other words, disincorporation acts as a powerful constraint on class formation. Without the means to organize collectively around the conditions of their destitution, people are less likely to conceive of themselves as a class.

Instead, opposition to the regimes took on a territorial logic. This is the fourth consequence of disincorporation and, paradoxically, it stems from the nature of the corporatist order itself. Corporatist regimes failed in inculcating a nationwide esprit de corps; instead, by organizing society into corporate bodies that were vehicles for patronage and local interest articulation, they encouraged a logic of territoriality. A peasant who joined an agricultural cooperative might secure cheaper credit if her cousin was a member of the ruling party or her neighbor had a position in the agricultural bank.

These regimes severed horizontal ties among the population and promoted vertical ties among individuals, their kin, and the state. When the vertical ties, too, were severed in the process of disincorporation, all that remained were hyperlocal ties.

THE ARAB REVOLUTIONS

With these structural transformations in mind, we can begin to understand the 2011 Arab revolutions. Broadly speaking, two segments of society — the marginalized bourgeoisie and the disincorporated working class — formed the social base of the revolutions. The former, which includes the petit bourgeoisie, dominated the uprisings ideologically, especially in the early stages, simply because their resources allowed them to do so. The latter, meanwhile, made up the bulk of the protesters. The bourgeois and upper- middle-income revolutionaries articulated a liberal program based on political democracy, while carefully avoiding anything that smacked of social equality.

The revolutions consisted of fragmented, atomized mass movements without organic political parties or even the basis to create them. Party formation requires dense social ties between unrelated people, as well as a variety of cultural and institutional resources that take years to build. But during the Arab uprisings, the revolutionary leaders viewed politics through the lens of international human rights discourse — a doctrine closely linked to neoliberalism that emphasizes political rights and ignores economic ones.33 Human rights discourse sees politics as making appeals to an imagined global community; it is a moral language that favors benevolent action by the global elite over self-emancipation. The revolutionary masses did not take up these ideas simply because it was in the interests of the liberal leadership, but because any other politics was unthinkable under the conditions of neoliberal fragmentation, privatization, and disincorporation.

The revolutionary forces organized against the regimes using a territorial logic — again, as an outcome of the structural transformations that disincorporation wrought. In Egypt, this logic manifested in the occupation of Tahrir Square, a tactic we should understand as a weakness, not a strength, of the uprising. It was not the occupation of Tahrir, which the regime was prepared to wait out, that toppled Hosni Mubarak, but workers’ strikes in the textile mills of the city of El Mahalla and elsewhere — among the few pockets of the working class with structural power — that turned the army against him. In Syria, the territorial logic manifested in a fragmented, alphabet-soup opposition, featuring more than one thousand armed factions and hundreds of protest groups, called Local Coordinating Committees. The factions and committees were territorially limited, and few managed to stitch themselves into anything resembling a national opposition. The Syrian opposition was divided not because its leadership lacked the right strategy or the political will to unify, but because the structural preconditions for rapid unification were simply not present.

As transitions to democracy, the revolutions failed. One reason is because the bourgeoisie was divided; these were not the revolutions of old, pitting one class against another. The leading elements of the bourgeoisie had a stake in the survival of the dictatorships, leaving those without leverage, such as marginalized businesspeople and the middle class, to push for democratization. A second, more important reason is that while the revolutionary forces were able to topple heads of state, they lacked the structural power to overturn entire systems of rule. Egypt’s labor action was limited to the overthrow of Mubarak. Broader mobilization to topple the military was not possible because the most revolutionary forces — that is, those who were calling for an overthrow of the state itself — were also those with the least structural power. The same was the case in Yemen, where the Gulf Cooperation Council orchestrated a transfer of power to ‘Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, an old regime official, without addressing the elite divisions. Though ordinary Yemenis had the greatest interest in an elite bargain, they were also the most informalized working class in MENA, so they held the least structural leverage over the transition process. Attempts at transition failed, too, in Libya, where the majority of the working class had been state employees; after neoliberalization and disincorporation, territorialism and kinship became the main modes of collective action.

THE SYRIAN CASE: REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION

The Syrian revolution went much further than all Arab Spring countries except Tunisia in overturning the old order, until it spiraled into a devastating proxy war. A closer look at Syria will illustrate the broader transformations the region has undergone in the past forty years.

Syria emerged from Ottoman rule a deeply unequal country, saddled with corruption and reeling from the injustices of World War I. Urban merchants and tribal sheikhs had amassed riches while most peasants toiled in near slavery — indeed, actual slavery was not abolished until the 1950s. In the vast steppes of eastern Syria abutting the Euphrates River, just forty chieftains and town notables owned 90 percent of all land.34 When the world powers imposed the Mandate in 1920, the French attempted to co-opt this elite, but with only partial success at first. The Mandate administration was forced to quell numerous nationalist uprisings, culminating in the Great Revolt of 1925–27, which the French savagely repressed with little regard for rebel or civilian life.

Yet at the same time, nationalist leaders adapted elements of French-style liberalism. The flag-bearers of this movement included the National Bloc, a nationalist alliance of merchants and landed families who had commanded extraordinary wealth during the Ottoman years. The Bloc and similar groupings championed democratic elections, secularism, and personal freedoms, but they eschewed questions of economic justice, carefully projecting anti-colonial politics in a way that did not threaten their class interests. They led Syria from its independence in 1946, shepherding the country’s “liberal oligarchic” phase, just as similar formations were in power around MENA. The watershed moment came with the parliamentary elections of 1954, hailed as the “first free elections of the Arab world.”35 The polls marked the emergence of political parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party on the Right, and the Ba‘ath and the Communist parties on the Left. But it was the centrist liberals who carried the day, winning forty-nine seats — more than double their nearest competitor, the Ba‘athists.36

Syria was poised to become the Arab world’s first successful democracy. Under Article 15 of the 1950 constitution, which guaranteed freedom of press, the Syrian landscape bloomed with new periodicals. Kevin W. Martin writes,

“Along with a plethora of specialty journals published by Syrian government agencies, foreign embassies, private corporations, educational and religious institutions, and professional associations, literate Syrians could choose from a remarkable range of conventional news and entertainment periodicals. In Damascus alone, at least twenty- nine different titles appeared as daily newspapers between 1954 and 1958.”37

Student associations and professional syndicates began to appear, and workers were now forming unions. In the countryside, for the first time, peasants began organizing against their wretched conditions.

Yet this democratic experiment soon unraveled. The centrists, comprised of wealthy merchants and landed elites, harbored little desire to tackle the extreme inequities marring Syrian life: during this period, 0.03 percent of the population owned nearly a third of all land.38 By refusing to address the class demands of the working class and the peasantry, they rapidly lost ground to the Left. The Arab Socialist Ba‘ath Party, an Arab nationalist party comprised primarily of teachers and other middle-income professionals, placed the agrarian question at the center of their platform, leading peasant campaigns against rapacious landlords. At the same time, they organized within the armed forces, giving them a foothold within a sector of society that had enormous structural leverage. This middle-class-soldier-peasant alliance proved to be a recipe for spectacular success: in the 1949 constituent assembly election, the Ba‘athists had captured just four seats to the liberals’ seventy-six, but by 1954, they increased their vote fivefold.39 That year, they had six thousand supporters countrywide — and thirty thousand by 1957.40 In 1958, Arab nationalists politicked their way into engineering a union between Syria and Nasser’s Egypt; Nasser promptly dissolved all political parties, outlawed strikes, and Syria’s democratic moment was finished.

THE BA‘ATHIST SOCIAL CONTRACT

Arab nationalists in Syria quickly realized that the union with Egypt was not on equal terms, and that Cairo was ultimately calling the shots. Splits emerged among the Left, with some elites seeking to repudiate the union. A carousel of coups ensued, until the Ba‘athists finally seized control in 1963. Between 1958 and 1963, the various regimes had carried out four waves of land reform. Pre-reform, 50 percent of the population worked on massive latifundia, but post expropriation, 82.3 percent tilled small and medium plots.41 In the northeast, Syria’s breadbasket, 63 percent of all rain-fed and irrigated land was redistributed.42 Woefully inefficient and corrupt, land reform was nonetheless the centerpiece of Ba‘athist policy, pulling millions out of poverty. Thus, through agrarian redistribution, the regime acquired a mass base.

The state organized this base through corporatist measures. Those who moved to the cities and took up government employment joined syndicates or the Ba‘ath Party. In the countryside, meanwhile, any peasant receiving expropriated land was required to join a cooperative.43 In each cooperative, the state determined the crops to be planted and agreed to buy the harvest at a fixed price. All other factors of production remained privatized, but the state agricultural bank offered credit below market rates. As a result, the peasantry was shielded from the market. By 1983, 85 percent of all families in the agricultural sector were incorporated.

The system successfully severed national, horizontal ties among the population based on ideology or profession, but it promoted localism. For example, due to limits on the size of single-family plots, a group of brothers or close friends might attempt, through exchanges, to obtain adjacent plots. They would then farm these plots as a de facto unit, combining resources and increasing efficiency. By pooling income, they might then purchase a tractor or acquire a truck to bring surplus crops to market. They might also rent the truck out as a taxi, or have their children pick up day work on other farms. Françoise Métral describes this approach in his case study of a cooperative in the Ghab Plain, north of Hama:44

Such family strategies are organized around a double objective, diversifying sources of income and extending the family’s network of relations so that they may in some way penetrate the system of state-run economic activities. If money is invested in the private sector to provide new sources of income, the family also tries here and there to place a son or a nephew in the Ghab Development Office of the Ministry of Agriculture. A second may be placed in teaching, a third in the army, etc. In fact, one must have prior authorization and some guarantees to invest in the private sector, to obtain raw materials, or to carry on any number of semi-clandestine activities. Administrative procedures are long, complicated and costly. To achieve the desired ends, they require “good relations” and some degree of protection.

Individuals became clientelistically linked to the state, while their networks of solidarity developed solely through kinship and neighborhood. Territoriality became, ironically, the logic of incorporation in the social contract.

OPPOSITION TO THE REGIME

It was, of course, the old moneyed classes who stood to lose the most from land reform and mass incorporation. Opposition arose among two sectors: the agrarian elite who’d slipped through land reform because their plots fell just under the expropriation ceiling, and the merchants based in the souq. The former were unconnected to the corporatist structures of the regime; as credit-worthy borrowers, they could obtain loans more cheaply on the market than through the agricultural banks, and the regime’s redistributive program was an affront to their values and interests. The profits of the souq merchants, meanwhile, suffered due to competition from the state’s monopoly on foreign trade and its subsidies of consumer goods. As early as the 1960s, these marginalized elites made common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood itself had been marginal in the 1950s — gaining just 3 percent of the seats in the 1954 election — but benefited from an influx of support from bourgeois families, enough so that they were able to stoke riots in the city of Hama in 1964.45 This proved a warning sign: the populist authoritarian regime lacked the social forces necessary to fully dislodge the capitalist class. Hafez al-Assad grabbed power in 1970 and launched the “Corrective Movement,” which sought a rapprochement with these elites. He partially succeeded: he struck an alliance with the Damascus bourgeoisie, but he could not come to terms with the old guard as a whole without sacrificing his base in the peasantry.

The result was a tenuous balancing act, and the marginalized capitalists seized the moment. In the late 1970s, the elite classes of Aleppo and Hama backed a Brotherhood- led insurgency.46 But outside these two cities, the majority of the country was incorporated and had a stake in Ba‘athist rule, as did the Damascene bourgeoisie. Assad was able to isolate and crush the uprising, resulting in the brutal denouement of 1982 in Hama, when the regime massacred tens of thousands of people. Assad won the war because the Brotherhood had failed to win the peasantry or unite the bourgeoisie. It would be precisely this relationship — between the regime and the incorporated

masses — that neoliberalism would sever, so that when unrest erupted again, Assad the younger would not find things so easy.

THE NEOLIBERAL TURN

Because Hafez al-Assad’s brand of bureaucratic authoritarianism had kept the private sector weaker in Syria than in most other MENA countries, the country’s neoliberal turn sparked one of the deepest structural transformations in the Arab world. The oil crisis and fall of the Soviet Union prompted landmark Law 10 in 1991, which marked the regime’s first serious liberalization measures (Figure 5). After fits and starts, which included an infusion of Gulf capital, foreign direct investment skyrocketed following the ascension of Bashar al-Assad to power in 2000 (Figure 6). He gutted the cooperative system, privatized state farms, and introduced private banking. In June 2005, the regime announced the so-called Social Market Economy, accelerating the pace of reforms to include liberalizing the currency, lifting import restrictions, and joining the Greater Arab Free Trade Area.47 A free trade agreement with Turkey and China flooded the Syrian market with cheap foreign goods, undermining local manufacturing. All public-sector employment growth was halted. The regime slashed subsidies in fuel, seeds, and fertilizer. Inequality ballooned. By 2007, one-third of Syrians were living below the poverty line — more than double that of the previous decade.48




FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN SYRIA AS % OF GDP

Through neoliberal restructuring, Syria transitioned from a Bonapartist-like balancing of classes to a full-fledged capitalist state. In the process, a new bourgeoisie was born from the state itself. Close links with this “state bourgeoisie” were crucial for capitalizing on the new world of profits opening up.49 While the Sunni business class in Damascus had enjoyed such links since the 1970s, the Aleppine bourgeoisie finally reconciled with the new business-friendly order. Even as the state privatized and deregulated, the new bourgeoisie used state regulations and connections to control markets and block competitors. The losers in this shuffling of alliances were medium-size capitalists, especially traders, in outlying towns. This “provincial bourgeoisie,” who hailed from marginalized parts of the country like Idlib and rural Aleppo, saw little of liberalization’s benefits. Many of these merchant families had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s; that organization was now liquidated inside Syria, but it left behind a tight-knit network of traders who were anti-regime in outlook and well-off in their communities, even if they were poor relative to the big-city capitalists.

The working class, meanwhile, was restructured just as in the rest of the Arab world. Figure 3 shows the decline in the agricultural labor force. The first wave of deruralization between 1970 and 1980 came as a result of a massive expansion in state employment in sectors like education, with millions of Syrians rising into the middle class. The second wave, however, resulted from privatization, which occurred just as public-sector employment was frozen. Millions of agricultural workers were thrust into the informal labor market; more than 32 percent of the population lived in shantytowns on the outskirts of big cities, crowded together in crumbling apartment buildings in areas like eastern Ghouta and east of Aleppo. University graduates fared little better: without corporate membership, they no longer had access to wasta to land scarce public-sector jobs. By 2004, inequality had risen by 11 percent compared to seven years earlier.50 In 2008, the global economy crashed, and not long after, food prices skyrocketed. Then, just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse, the skies dried up. Syria suffered its worst drought in forty years; yields of wheat and barley plummeted, and livestock was decimated. Nearly 1.5 million people fled the countryside, leaving fields fallow and villages abandoned.

Amid this tumult, the old ways were dying, and new mores sprung up in their place. The state began to outsource social services to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Between 1963 and 2000, the regime only authorized about fifty NGOs, but by 2009, it had licensed 1,485.51 These charities attempted to fill the void left by the collapsing social contract; the Damascus Charities Union, for example, covered the costs of medical care for 29,823 patients, including 60,000 surgical treatments, over the course of a decade.52 Syrians learned to look to the market and private charity for survival, a harsh discipline that encouraged a new ethic. Neoliberal terms of art like “capacity building,” “empowerment,” “raising awareness,” and “human resources” became the socioeconomic argot of middle-class Syria. The NGO distribution model reinforced the prevailing territorial logic. Laura Ruiz de Elvira and Tina Zintl write, “Previously, some citizens had reported their problems to the party or to mass organizations, hoping for help in the form of subsidies, reduced taxes, etc. In the late 2000s, they turned instead to their family networks, to private organizations, including charities, or to religious leaders.”53

By 2008, 584 state-sanctioned Islamic NGOs and nearly one thousand Islamic schools and institutes were in operation.54 The use of religious charities was a central plank in the regime’s strategy to shed the burden of public services. Once avowedly secular, the regime began to infuse public life with religious discourse. Upon inheriting power, Bashar al-Assad repealed his father’s ban on schoolgirls wearing headscarves. In 2004, the regime organized the first religious conference in four decades, entitled the Renewal of the Religious Message. Two years later, the regime even orchestrated protests against the Danish cartoons insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that Syria’s turn to Islam was simply engineered from above. Instead, the regime sought to control a burgeoning religious revival from below that was sweeping the country. This bottom-up revival had roots in the way Syrian society was being restructured by neoliberalism. As corporate bodies dissolved, the only form of associational life the regime allowed outside of NGOs was religious activity. One decree allowed the public to enter mosques outside of prayer times, overturning a ban in place since the 1980s, while another sanctioned the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. Religious study circles and mosque reading groups began to pop up. Where religion had once been a private matter, it increasingly took on a public role. 55 The members of an atomized working class found one another through faith, and new forms of intersubjective piety, such as wearing the headscarf, became widespread. Meanwhile, millions of workers went abroad to the Gulf; they returned home wealthier but also armed with new, more austere interpretations of Islam.

By reinventing faith as a public, social, and collective endeavor, the fragmented popular classes had developed a new imagined community at odds with Ba‘athist Arab nationalism. This imagined community coexisted with, and reinforced, a second imagined community of global liberalism, as embodied in human rights discourse. When a decade of austerity reached its tipping point, leaving the social contract in tatters, Syrians exploded onto the street, chanting the language of faith and human rights.

THE REVOLUTION

The Syrian revolution began in the provincial town of Dara’a in March 2011. Before long, protests reached Damascus and Aleppo — but only the shantytowns ringing these metropolises. One observer writes,56

When the uprising first reached the capital in 2011, I noticed something odd as I followed the news. The first areas in Damascus that rose up against the regime sounded strangely familiar, although I had never visited them: Jobar, Douma, Barzeh, Ghouta, Qaboun, Harasta. It took a moment before it hit me. They were the names that I had seen every day on the roofs of passing microbuses. They were the destinations of the routes; places on the outer limits of the city’s sprawling suburbs. Some of them were lines that I had ridden regularly within the city. But I didn’t have any friends or students in these places. There were no famous restaurants or beauty spots there. I’d never had a reason to ride the servees [sic] to the end of the line.

This was indeed a revolution of those at the end of the line. The pattern of protests corresponded precisely to the regions that had suffered most from the social contract’s unraveling: small provincial towns and densely populated informal settlements on the edge of cities. Protesters gathered in force in outlying areas like Idlib and Deir ez-Zor, which had suffered from drought and privatization. Depressed subaltern suburbs like Ghouta, outside of Damascus, had swelled in population in recent years from those fleeing the countryside. In Aleppo, the revolution was centered in the working-class warrens of the eastern part of the city, as well as small countryside towns surrounding the city. Yasser Munif writes that “the overlap between the [protest] areas and informal housing is striking. The insurgents controlled the vast majority of informal settlements. The same thing can be said about the split between affluent and poor neighborhoods. None of the wealthy districts were under the control of the opposition.”57 In west Aleppo or in central Damascus, on the other hand, where the Sunni business class was integrated into the state bourgeoisie, and where a small, highly skilled professional class benefited from neoliberal reforms, the revolutionaries were unable to make inroads.

In the early stages, the revolutionary leadership consisted of two blocs: a provincial bourgeoisie fully committed to the free market but opposed to the regime, and middle- income professionals like lawyers, engineers, and architects who embraced human rights discourse. The former tended to be pious, the latter secular, but both essentially espoused a liberal alternative to the Assad dictatorship, calling for personal freedoms and democracy. The quintessential example of this layer could be found in the town of Mare‘a, in the northern Aleppo countryside. A few months into the uprising, businessmen and lawyers from the town’s richest families formed a Local Coordinating Committee (LCC), a body that organized protests and liaised with similar organizations popping up around the countryside.

Unlike the 1980s uprising, the revolution was truly a mass movement, and its leadership initially enjoyed a massive social base. In towns like Mare‘a, nearly the entire population actively or passively supported the uprising. And yet, surprisingly, the movement failed to topple the regime. Its weakness lay in its lack of structural leverage; the movement’s rank and file consisted of precarious, semi-employed workers who simply did not possess the structural power to threaten the Syrian elite. It was also fragmented, built around the family and neighborhood networks that survived the collapse of the corporatist order. The Mare‘a LCC, for example, was drawn from a cluster of tight-knit families and was unable to undertake concerted collective action with LCCs from other provinces. The movement’s mode of resistance was limited to temporarily occupying town squares or the landings outside mosques. The regime responded with unimaginable brutality, killing without discrimination, but the protests continued — an extraordinary triumph under the circumstances. But for the revolutionaries, the cycle of protest and repression was unsustainable, as the regime was prepared to employ genocidal measures.

It was under these circumstances that the revolutionaries began to arm themselves, usually by sourcing weapons on the black market or by raiding government depots. This was, in effect, a desperate attempt to substitute for structural leverage. Unable to dislodge the regime peacefully by threatening its vital interests, the revolutionaries were forced to adopt military means. By the spring of 2012, the revolutionaries began to receive foreign support: Saudi Arabia provided small amounts, mostly to secular and tribal groups, while Qatar flooded ex–Muslim Brotherhood networks with much larger quantities. In other words, the revolutionaries resorted to arms and foreign aid because they lacked structural leverage, which ultimately stemmed from the disincorporation of Syrian society over the previous decade.

By mid-2012, revolutionaries succeeded in expelling the regime from nearly half of Syrian soil. In these stretches of liberated countryside, a new challenge arose: how to keep the lights on and the schools open without the presence of the government. The LCCs morphed into a new body, called Local Councils (or, in some cases, Revolutionary Councils). In some areas, the councils effectively functioned as NGOs, but in others, they were mini parliaments, with the ability to tax, draft legislation, and even raise a police force. In Mare‘a, the local council refurbished the city’s water system, which had gone into disrepair under the regime. Workers in Saraqib, in Idlib province, took over the local granaries and managed bread distribution jointly with the town’s local council. In the town of Darayya, near Damascus, which was under regime siege, the local council established its own hospital and commandeered pharmaceutical supplies for distribution.

The most developed council was in Manbij, a city of 100,000 about an hour’s drive from Aleppo. A closer look at the dynamics there provides a window into the political currents emerging in the liberated areas.


Manbij was under the authority of the Revolutionary Council (RC), a body of fifteen members, which acted as the executive organ answerable to a two-hundred-member senate. Figure 7 shows the class background of the RC: the vast majority was drawn from the elite, especially the city’s wealthiest merchants. The popular classes joined the city’s revolution through new political parties, newspapers, cooperatives, and even through the rebirth of corporatist formations like teachers’ and farmers’ syndicates. By mid-2013, upward of seventy such tajamma‘at — assemblies or gatherings — had appeared throughout the city. Where there had been one state-run newspaper before the revolution, no fewer than a dozen periodicals were now in circulation, including the Free Path and the Sun of Freedom. Three different women’s organizations were active, including one that organized against patriarchal norms. The incipient political parties ranged from leftist to Islamist. The most important of these was the Revolutionary Youth Movement, an activist collective that, unlike the RC, was drawn entirely from the poor and working class. Liberated spaces, therefore, became a site of partial reincorporation, the rebirth of independent political structures, and the rediscovery of political imagination.

But this moment was fleeting. Remarkably, the liberated regions were able to survive the brutal counterrevolutionary onslaught waged by the Syrian regime and its Iranian and Russian backers, but they could not withstand the weight of their own contradictions. By 2016, few liberated regions remained, and the uprising was effectively finished. Ultimately, three factors doomed the Syrian Revolution. First, by resorting to arms, the revolutionaries had made a Faustian pact: they gained military leverage at the expense of autonomy. They were now subject to the whims of outside patrons, some of whom, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, worked at cross-purposes. None of the foreign powers nominally allied with the revolution, including the Western countries, had an interest in the revolutionary overthrow of the old order. Second, revolutionary reincorporation did not go far enough. A decade of atomization, born from the logic of forty years of corporatist rule that violently severed horizontal political ties among the population, made it challenging to develop centralized structures in the midst of a counterrevolution. Though remarkable progress was made in just two years, more time was needed. But time was a luxury the revolutionaries did not have, because of the third reason: the uprising was devouring itself from within.

By mid-2013, for example, the revolution in Manbij began to tear at the seams. The Revolutionary Council’s rule inaugurated a period of unprecedented civil liberties, including the freedom of press and assembly — but also the freedom of the market. This was no accident: the RC was drawn from the “provincial bourgeoisie,” who had been marginalized by the neoliberal opening. The RC was unable, or unwilling, to fuse their liberal program of political rights with a redistributive program that protected ordinary people from the market. On the other hand, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), drawn from the popular sectors, supported civil liberties but demanded price controls and basic redistributive policies. The city was soon split into two opposing camps. Into this milieu appeared various Islamists, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the summer of 2013, ISIS had just six members in Manbij, but they deftly waged a populist campaign against the RC and built a following. They articulated these grievances in the language of Islam, which, over the previous two decades, had become a commonsense part of public life. ISIS argued that an Islamic state would level social inequalities as well as bring stability and communal solidarity, which the RC’s liberal regime had failed to deliver. In August 2013, the price of bread shot up, and ISIS organized riots outside the RC headquarters. A number of RYM members joined ISIS outright, and by the end of the year, the Islamic State had effectively won the city politically, without firing a single shot. In January 2014, they formally took over Manbij, abolished the RC, shut down all newspapers, and dissolved all political parties — and the revolution was finished.

THE TUNISIAN EXCEPTION

The deeper tragedy of the Arab Spring was not simply that the revolutionaries failed, but that the seeds of their defeat were sown long before the first protest banner was unfurled, the first square occupied. Decades of corporatist rule followed by neoliberal restructuring produced angry, downwardly mobile populations without sufficient collective power to topple the old order. In Syria, where the revolution went further than anywhere else, new divides appeared, but here, too, it’s difficult to imagine a different outcome when the forty-year dictatorship left no cohesive force that could challenge the populism of ISIS.

Yet it is possible to imagine a victorious uprising, because there was one: Tunisia. This revolution produced the only democratic transition among the 2011 Arab Spring countries; Tunisia successfully transformed from a neoliberal autocracy to a neoliberal democracy. This is despite the fact that Tunisia underwent a similar restructuring to the rest of the region, resulting in a comparable decline in public-sector employment and increase in informal labor. The size and distribution of its working class is on par with those of other Arab Spring countries. However, workers in critical industries such as oil and gas, and in the state bureaucracy, were organized independently of the regime’s corporatist structures. As a result, they were not fully disincorporated by neoliberalism. Even workers in the informal sector managed to maintain a semblance of organized power through their relationship to the formal sector. The reason for this turn of events lies with the unique history of the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), the national trade union confederation. Due to contingent factors, the UGTT was the only significant workers’ organization in the Arab Spring countries that was not absorbed into a corporatist pact with a ruling regime. Instead, the UGTT functioned with a degree of autonomy unimaginable in Egypt or Syria, which allowed it to respond to the revolutions differently than its counterparts. In other words, the Tunisian working class was far less disarticulated and atomized than those in other Arab Spring countries. Tunisia, therefore, is the exception that proves the rule.

The UGTT emerged as a powerful nationalist force during the colonial period, but in the 1950s and ’60s, it had become absorbed into Bourguiba’s corporatist pact. Between 1962 and 1969, for example, real wages rose by only 1 percent, while the cost of living jumped by 30 percent, and one in five workers was unemployed — yet there were hardly any strikes.58 This corporatist pact was similar to those in other Arab Spring countries (the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, the General Federation of Trade Unions in Syria, and the Union of Producers in Libya): abandon the right to strike and elect leadership, in exchange for worker protections. (As Nasser once stated, “The workers don’t demand; we give.”59)

During the 1970s, Bourguiba fell ill, sparking a liberal faction to plot a takeover of the ruling party. The UGTT leadership sided with Bourguiba at this pivotal moment, which led him to see the confederation as an ally against rival elite groupings. As Keenan Wilder has demonstrated, it was this factional crisis that created the conditions for the UGTT’s autonomy. Bourguiba looked the other way as the UGTT underwent a rapid growth in membership, with leftists entering the ranks in large numbers.60 The potential for rank-and-file militancy was now greater than ever. Yet at that moment, elite rule was too fractious for Bourguiba to purge the ranks and discipline the confederation. Wilder writes that, instead, Bourguiba was forced to ensure that

“[N]o single individual or faction, very much including the prime minister, could ever consolidate enough power in the party to remove him from the presidency. This in turn sharply limited the possibilities for rebuilding the old labour regime. With more than half of the party’s membership willing to openly challenge even Bourguiba, these same members could hardly be relied on to administer a full takeover of the UGTT or to staff new industrial cells.”61

It was as a result of this elite crisis that the UGTT freed itself from the corporatist pact. Strikes were still banned, but that was left to UGTT leaders to enforce. Moreover, the leadership was given the right to collectively bargain against sectoral interests. This granted the UGTT enormous leverage — at times, nearly 80 percent of Tunisia’s workforce were covered by their agreements.

Over the years, the regime continued to allow this because it viewed the confederation’s ability to demobilize its base and limit militancy to be worth the price of autonomy. Outside of a UGTT-led general strike in 1978 — which the rank and file essentially forced the leadership to support — the confederation mostly acted as a means to limit class struggle. In the 1970s, the economy lost an average of 241 working days per strike, but since the early 1980s, it has lost only 151.62

When Ben Ali came to power in 1987 and launched liberalizing reforms, he hoped the UGTT would be a means of controlling the workforce. The alternative, to crush the confederation outright, would require the use of the military, which Ben Ali wanted to avoid given his persistent fears of a coup.63 The result was that the country’s largest workers’ organization was neither “totally submissive [n]or totally aligned” with the regime, a balancing act that allowed the union to play a unique role in the liberalization process.64 Beginning in the 1990s, Tunisian labor informalized as acutely as those in other Arab Spring countries. But whereas such disincorporation severed any relationship between bodies like the Egyptian Trade Union Federation and precarious workers, in Tunisia, the UGTT functioned like a temp agency or labor market broker, assigning workers to companies and helping businesses manage flexible labor contracts.65 The result, paradoxically, was that a rich network of relationships developed between the precarious sector and organized labor, especially mid-level militants. The extent of these ties became clear in 2008, in the impoverished heartland city of Gafsa, home to one of the largest phosphate mines in the world. Early that year, the Compagnie des

Phosphates de Gafsa (CPG), a state-owned mining company, posted results for a recruitment examination. When it became clear that the CPG and UGTT officials had rigged the results in favor of their relatives, protests erupted. The leading force was the Union Diplômés Chômeurs, an organization of unemployed university graduates who were joined by mid-level UGTT cadre against the wishes of their leadership.

The Gafsa rebellion was a trial run for the Tunisian revolution. In 2011, links between the informal sector and rank-and-file UGTT activists were crucial in the early stages of the protests. In Sidi Bouzid, where the fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze, the local teachers’ union established a Committee of the Marginalized, which included precarious workers, to organize solidarity demonstrations. As protests spread, the UGTT leadership supported the regime, but rank-and-file activists turned local shops into organizing centers. The groundswell of revolutionary activism was such that the UGTT was forced to support strikes in key union strongholds. On January 13, Ben Ali dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency. The next day, UGTT leadership succumbed to intense rank-and-file pressure and called a two-hour general strike in Tunis. That same day, Ben Ali boarded a plane with his family and fled.

In Egypt, by contrast, a wave of wildcat strikes was the tipping point — the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) stuck with Mubarak until the end, and even after. (In response, activists created an independent confederation, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), but as Joel Beinin remarks, “Unlike the UGTT, EFITU did not have the historical legitimacy, militant activists, or logistical capacity to organize strikes from a national trade union center.”66)

Post-revolution, the UGTT deepened its ties to the informal sector, and even managed to ink agreements with the state and the private sector to convert precarious jobs into permanent union contracts. As a result, union membership expanded by as much as 200,000.67 For the first time, the UGTT began to side with the UDC (Union of Unemployed Graduates) and other groups of unemployed workers in the face of police repression — for example, by supporting strikes by temporary sanitation workers seeking permanent status.

In Egypt, meanwhile, events took a dark turn. In the summer of 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood government was facing widespread protest; opposition forces had withdrawn from the constituent assembly, and there were growing calls for the dissolution of the Mohamed Morsi–led government. This ultimately paved the path for ‘Abd el-Fattah al-Sisi’s coup. The workers’ movement could do little; it was divorced from the mass of informal labor and hopelessly divided, with the official ETUF staunchly pro- military, while the independent unions lacked the numbers or leverage to stop Sisi once his designs became clear.

Remarkably, that summer of 2013, as the Egyptian revolution hung in the balance, a nearly identical situation was playing out in Tunisia. There, mass protests had erupted against Ennahda, a Muslim Brotherhood–like party dominating the post-revolutionary government. Opposition forces withdrew from the Constituent Assembly, threatening the democratic transition itself. In this critical moment, the UGTT convened three other groups (an employers’ association, the Tunisian Order of Lawyers, and the Tunisian Human Rights League) and convinced Ennahda to step down and transfer power to a technocratic government. A new constitution was drawn up — the most progressive in the Arab world — and, in late 2014, Tunisia held its first ever free elections. For saving Tunisian democracy, the National Dialogue Quartet — of which the UGTT was the leading player — won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.

CONCLUSION

In 2019, the Arab world once again erupted in upheaval — and this time, it was joined by protesters around the globe, from Argentina to Iraq. Unlike the Arab Spring, which was initially organized around demands for human rights and democracy, the proximate cause in this round was economic: a tax on WhatsApp usage in Lebanon, a tripling of the price of bread in Sudan, a four-cent price hike on a liter of gas in Iran, an increase in metro fares in Chile. Despite the difference in demands, the 2019 revolts share much with those of 2011. First, they are symptoms of the neoliberal assault on living standards and social mobility that runs much deeper than simple price and tax fluctuations. In Sudan, for example, the secession of the oil-rich South in 2011 prompted a severe shortage of hard currency reserves, which ultimately pushed the government, encouraged by the IMF and the World Trade Organization, to impose radical austerity measures, such as cutting off the long-standing bread subsidy.68

Second, many of the movements adopted the same leaderless horizontalism as their 2011 counterparts. For instance, protesters from Catalonia to Hong Kong to Chile have embraced as a slogan Bruce Lee’s maxim “Be formless, shapeless — like water.”69 The reasons for this attitude are plenty, but working-class disincorporation remains key. And with disincorporation comes powerlessness. We are still firmly in the clutches of the “Age of Anger,” where popular fury against the status quo falls short of popular capacity for change.70 In Iraq, for example, the state sector actually underwent a dramatic expansion under the American occupation, because the United States and the ruling parties sought to use state patronage as a tool to attract support in the face of insurgency and civil war.

But these were not the high-quality public-sector jobs of the old social contract; woefully underpaid, most employees were forced to take additional work in the informal sector, while the Iranian- and US-backed politicians grifted hundreds of millions from state coffers. The mass protests that erupted in October 2019 consisted of those excluded from the patronage of these ruling parties. The protesters were fearless and heroic, carrying on their shoulders the aspirations of millions of Iraqis desperate for deliverance from decades of war, but they lacked organization or links to key sectors like the oil workers. Without a means to strike at the heart of elite interests, their anger could not match their power, and the government waged bloody repression.

But as in round one of the Arab revolutions, round two offers signs of hope. In Sudan, the revolution kicked off in December 2019, when informal workers took to the streets in the dusty mining town of Atbara, the cradle of the union movement. The unrest soon spread to the middle- class quarters of Khartoum, the capital, where doctors’ and journalists’ syndicates assumed leadership of the uprising. By April, dictator Omar al- Bashir had lost the support of the United Arab Emirates, his key benefactor, and he was toppled. The post-revolutionary milieu looked familiar: a split between ancien régime elements and a middle class–informal sector alliance. But like in Tunisia, for historically contingent reasons, unions and political parties had survived, and activists had established ties between the organized and unorganized sectors of society. In June, when an arm of the military called the Rapid Support Forces (which emerged from the infamous Janjaweed militias in Darfur) carried out a massacre in Khartoum, the revolutionaries called a successful three-day general strike. The mass civil disobedience and work stoppage led to a power-sharing deal between protesters and the military and a plan for elections.

The road to power is strewn with the detritus of forty years’ history, but Sudan and Tunisia teach us that these obstacles are not insurmountable. No matter the structural challenges, the road runs a straight course: there’s no getting around the painstaking work of becoming rooted in communities, building local institutions, and forging links with the organized sections of the working class. When the third revolutionary wave comes — and come it will — it is the thousands of thankless acts like these that will turn anger into power.


References


1. Asef Bayat. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 16.

2. 
“Nasser refused to use the iron fist [to overturn capitalism], not because of signals from the countries of the core (they abounded) nor because of his class predilections, if he had any. Rather, his course was set by his very real unwillingness to sacrifice, as he put it, the present generation for those of the future and unleash potentially uncontrollable elements of class conflict.” John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: the Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

3. 
The exception was Libya; due to oil rents, they were able to maintain redistribution and subordinate the capitalist class — which was very small to begin with.

4. 
Some authors treat the post-1970s Arab regimes as bureaucratic authoritarian; see, for example, Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 14, 16, 268; Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat,Ch. 1. Others refer to the pre- and post-1970s regimes as populist authoritarian; e.g., Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria: Revolution From Above (London: Routledge, 2001). The concept of bureaucratic authoritarianism was developed in the Latin American context to refer to a form of state development that seeks to deepen industrialization through an alliance with domestic and foreign capital; here, I am adapting the term for the Middle Eastern context to emphasize the state’s autonomy and its modus vivendi with capital.

5. For example, Sadat was unable to end Nasser’s guaranteed employment scheme, which was placing strain on the state budget, so the state increased the waiting period for new graduates to obtain a public-sector job.


6. Of course, this dynamic was not unique to the Middle East but featured across the Global South. In the Middle East, however, state autonomy was perhaps greater, and the efforts to constrain the private sector through a balancing act more ambitious, than elsewhere.


7. Richard H. Adams Jr and John Page, “Poverty, Inequality and Growth in Selected Middle East and North Africa Countries, 1980–2000,” World Development 31, no. 12 (2003): 2027– 48.


8. Farrukh Iqbal and Youssouf Kiendrebeogo, “The Determinants of Child Mortality Reduction in the Middle East and North Africa,” Middle East Development Journal 8, no. 2 (2016): 230– 47.


9. Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” The Review of Politics 36, no. 1 (1974): 85–131.


10. Hinnebusch, Revolution, 121.


11. Hinnebusch, Revolution, 121.


12. Corporatist rule was the model deployed in one-party states across the Global South; for a comparison of Juan Perón to Nasser, for example, see Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 27– 8.


13. Giacomo Luciani, “Allocation vs. Production States: A Theoretical Framework,” in Giacomo Luciani, ed., The Arab State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 65–84.


14. Leonard Robinson, “Rentierism and Foreign Policy in Syria,” The Arab Studies Journal 4, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 34–54.


15. Tarik M. Yousef, “Employment, Development and the Social Contract in the Middle East and North Africa,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2004).


16. Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013).


17. One survey found that “the percentage of people dissatisfied with the availability of affordable housing rose most dramatically prior to the Arab Spring uprisings, but there was also increase in the incidence of people dissatisfied with public transportation, quality healthcare, and availability of quality jobs.” See Shantayanan Devarajan and Elena Ianchovichina, “A Broken Social Contract, Not High Inequality, Led to the Arab Spring.” Review of Income and Wealth 64 (2018): S5–S25.

18. Hamouda Chekir and Ishac Diwan, “Crony Capitalism in Egypt,” Journal of Globalization and Development 5, no. 2 (2014): 177–211.


19. Antonio Nucifora, Bob Rijkers, and Bernard Funck, “The Unfinished Revolution: Bringing Opportunity, Good Jobs and Greater Wealth to all Tunisians,” Developmental Policy Review, World Bank (Washington, DC, 2014).


20. Bob Rijkers, Caroline Freund, and Antonio Nucifora, “All in the Family: State Capture in Tunisia,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2014).


21. Devarajan and Ianchovichina, “Broken Social Contract.”


22. Nucifora et al., “Unfinished Revolution,” 119.


23. For more on these elite splits, see, for example: Peter Salisbury, “Yemen’s Economy: Oil, Imports and Elites” (London: Chatham House, 2011).


24. Myriam Ababsa, “The End of a World: Drought and Agrarian Transformation in Northeast Syria (2007–2010),” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Tina Zintl, eds., Syria from Reform to Revolt: Political Economy and International Relations (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 213.


25. Devarajan and Ianchovichina, “Broken Social Contract,” S21.


26. Hania Sahnoun, Philip Keefer, Marc Schiffbauer, Abdoulaye Sy, and Sahar Hussain, “Jobs or Privileges: Unleashing the Employment Potential of the Middle East and North Africa,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2014).


27. Roberta Gatti, Diego F. Angel-Urdinola, Joana Silva, and Andras Bodor, “Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa Region,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2011); Jackline Wahba, “The Impact of Labor Market Reforms on Informality in Egypt: Gender and Work in the MENA Region,” Population Council Working Papers (2009); Yousef et al., “Employment”; Jackline Wahba and May Moktar, “Informalization of Labor in Egypt,” in Ragui Assaad, ed., The Labor Market in a Reforming Economy: Egypt in the 1990s (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002).


28. Diego F. Angel-Urdinola and Kimie Tanabe, “Micro-Determinants of Informal Employment in the Middle East and North Africa Region,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2012).


29. Gatti et al., “Striving”; Devarajan and Ianchovichina, “Broken.”


30. René Rojas, “The Latin American Left’s Shifting Tides,” Catalyst 2, no. 2 (Summer 2018).


31. Adaner Usmani, “Democracy and the Class Struggle,” American Journal of Sociology 124, no. 3 (2018): 664–704.


32. Usmani, “Democracy.”


33. See Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London: Verso Books, 2019); and Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). These authors disagree on the precise relationship between neoliberalism and human rights.


34. Myriam Ababsa, “Agriculture and Reform in Syria,” Syria Studies 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–79; Bichara Khader, La Question Agraire dans les Pays Arabes: Le Cas de la Syrie (Louvain: Ciaco Editeur, 1984).


35. Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945–1958 (London: IB Tauris & Company, 1965).


36. Eyal Zisser, Asad’s Legacy: Syria in Transition (New York: NYU Press, 2001).


37. Kevin W. Martin, Syria’s Democratic Years: Citizens, Experts, and Media in the 1950s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).


38. Khader, La Question.


39. Zisser, Asad’s Legacy.


40. Hinnebusch, Revolution.


41. Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Peasant and Bureaucracy in Ba‘thist Syria: The Political Economy of Rural Development (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989).


42. Günter Meyer, “Rural Development and Migration in Northeast Syria,” in Muneera Salem- Murdock and Michael M. Horowitz, eds., Anthropology and Development in North Africa and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990): 245–78.


43. Hinnebusch, Peasant and Bureaucracy.


44. Françoise Métral, “State and Peasants in Syria: A Local View of a Government Irrigation Project,” Peasant Studies 11.2 (1984): 69–89.


45. Dara Conduit, The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).


46. Hanna Batatu, “Syria’s Muslim Brethren,” Middle East Report 110 (1982): 12–36.; Raphaël Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).


47. Samer Abboud, “Locating the ‘Social’ in the Social Market Economy,” in Hinnebusch and Zintl, Syria from Reform to Revolt, 46–66.


48. Khalid Abu-Ismail, Ali Abdel-Gadir, and Heba El-Laithy, “Poverty and Inequality in Syria (1997–2007),” UNDP Arab Development Challenges Report 15 (2011).


49. See, for example, Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).


50. Heba El-Laithy and Khalid Abu-Ismail, “Poverty in Syria: 1996–2004,” Diagnosis and Pro- Poor Policy Considerations, UNDP, Damascus, Syria (2005); Line Khatib, Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba ‘thist Secularism (London: Routledge, 2011).

51. Laura Ruiz de Elvira and Tina Zintl, “The End of the Baʿthist Social Contract in Bashar Al- Asad’s Syria: Reading Sociopolitical Transformations Through Charities and Broader Benevolent Activism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 2 (2014): 329–49.


52. De Elvira and Zintl, “Baʿthist Social Contract.”


53. De Elvira and Zintl, “Baʿthist Social Contract,” 335.


54. Khatib, Islamic Revivalism.


55. This religious sentiment was at least partly facilitated by ulema networks that enabled the rise of a religious civil society, which the regime was forced to contend with. See Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).


56. Matthew McNaught, “The End of the Line: A Microbus Map of Damascus,” Syria Comment, July 2, 2013, joshualandis.com/blog/the-end-of-the-line-a-microbus-map-of-damascus/ (accessed July 12, 2020).


57. Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 60.


58. Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).


59. Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and Economic Restructuring, 1952–1996 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 74.


60. Keenan Wilder, “The Origins of Labour Autonomy in Authoritarian Tunisia,” Contemporary Social Science 10, no. 4 (2015): 349–63.


61. Wilder, “Origins,” 353.

62. Calculated from International Labor Organization statistics.

63. Wilder, “Origins.”


64. Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 127.


65. Ian M. Hartshorn writes, “While the question for workers in Egypt might have been ‘Where is the union?’ in Tunisia it was ‘Why is the union doing this?’ as the UGTT had a direct role in deciding who got a job.” Hartshorn, Labor Politics in North Africa: After the Uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 105.


66. Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves, 108.


67. Hartshorn, Labor Politics in North Africa, 138.


68. Edward Thomas and Magdi el-Gizouli, “Sudan’s Grain Divide: A Revolution of Bread and Sorghum,” The Rift Valley Institute (February 2020).

69. Robin Wright, “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe,” New Yorker, December 30, 2019, newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-story-of-2019-protests-in- every-corner-of-the-globe.

70. Pankaj Mishra uses this phrase to describe the rise of the Right, but it could well describe the politics of popular protest across the spectrum. See Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Macmillan, 2017).

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