POLITICS GOVERNANCE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS

POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, AND STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS
groups, often with horrific agendas. And, as
institutions of basic governance and community
order failed, those with guns to impose their will
gained power. More than anything else, the terrible
choices of leaders like Muammar al-Qaddafi
and Bashar al-Assad created the openings that
al-Qaeda, ISIS, and sectarian killers across the
region now exploit for their own purposes, including
to threaten regional and international security.
Of the states that experienced mass uprisings in
2011—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Morocco,
and Jordan—only Tunisia has achieved a transition
to democratic governance. In Egypt, polarization
and exclusion both before and after the democratic
election of a president ultimately produced a new
round of mass demonstrations, a military coup,
and a renewed authoritarian regime that has jailed
its political opponents along
with peaceful civic activists
and journalists, imposed
severe restrictions on basic
rights, and established rules
for parliamentary elections so
disadvantageous to opposition
groups that many political
parties declined to participate
and voter turnout appears to
have been around 10 percent.
In Bahrain, the Gulf Cooperation
Council supported the Bahraini
government in putting down
demonstrations with force; the
country still faces regular unrest,
and its government continues
to escalate the persecution of
its political opposition as well as
human rights activists and others who challenge its
behavior. Leaders in Morocco and Jordan, where
political reform had gone somewhat further before
2011, saw smaller demonstrations and responded
with less force. These leaders also sought to get
ahead of protestors with swift constitutional
changes and new rounds of parliamentary elections.
Whether these new packages of limited reform will
suffice remains to be seen. And, of course, Syria
and Libya are mired in brutal civil conflict, with
various fighting factions receiving support from
governments elsewhere in the region and beyond.
The limited positive outcomes from the 2011
uprisings, and especially the violence in Syria and
Libya and the rise of ISIS terrorism, have endangered
the prospects for sustainable governance in the
region by producing crises in authority and order.
[T]he terrible
choices of leaders
like Muammar al-
Qaddafi and Bashar
al-Assad created
the openings that
al-Qaeda, ISIS, and
sectarian killers
across the region
now exploit. . .
First, the cycle of inadequate reform, repression,
revolution, and failed post-revolutionary change
means that many Arab citizens have simply lost
faith in the state as an institution that can solve
their problems or help them achieve their goals. In
different quarters and contexts, the state may be
variously viewed as bumbling, partisan, coercive,
absent, or simply irrelevant—but in any of these
scenarios, the citizen is left without effective
recourse to the state and seeks other platforms
and mechanisms to achieve even the basics of what
states are meant to do. In this sense, Lebanon’s
2015 “garbage protests” sprang from the same
source as support for militias among Iraq’s various
communities—and both show the same underlying
challenge to reestablishing sustainable governance
in the region.
ruling power.
Relatedly, cycles in which
Middle Eastern governments
alternately co-opted and
coerced societal institutions,
and alternately reformed
and retrenched government
institutions, left many citizens
cynical about other sources of
societal authority, both state
and non-state. People do not
trust government-sponsored
news channels, but neither
do they trust channels owned
by business tycoons, religious
authorities appointed and
paid by the state, or political
parties who alternately boycott
elections and seek to join
institutions dominated by the
By the time of the uprisings, then, not only had
the social contract broken down, but social trust
had been deeply eroded. Autocratic governments
had eviscerated independent civic associations
that might have helped manage social relations
or facilitate peaceful dialogue and political
compromise. In some ways, the biggest challenge
to rebuilding regional stability is the breakdown of
social trust within these societies—a consequence
both of the way they were governed and of the way
those governments fell.
In addition, the horrific violence of the region’s
civil wars and the expansion of terrorism have
created new public constituencies for “order,” who
support state coercion as a means of combating
very real threats, and of holding back the chaos
18 ATLANTIC COUNCIL