POLITICS GOVERNANCE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS

POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, AND STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS
seems obvious to suggest that gradual political
transformation is preferable to discontinuous
change. But authoritarian retrenchment à la
Sisi’s Egypt closes off precisely this option. By
suppressing and persecuting those pursuing
reforms to the existing order, renewed
authoritarianism increases exclusionary
governance and destroys gradual reform
as a pathway, leaving revolution as the only
possibility for those who seek to alter the
status quo. The authoritarian response to the
crisis of governance in today’s Middle East is
exacerbating the risk of chaotic, violent change.
3. To the extent that authoritarian regimes rely
on the classic authoritarian bargain, providing
security and/or economic performance to
sustain public consent for their rule, failure
at either or both could easily undermine the
regime’s base of support and spur challenges
to its authority that could produce destabilizing
effects. A coercive state’s inability to deliver
security is particularly dangerous, since state
coercion creates demand among targeted parts
of the public for protection from state forces,
pushing those populations to support nonstate
violent actors, and thus toward civil war.
On the economic side, the challenge of failure
is also severe: the underlying socioeconomic
and global pressures that produced the Arab
uprisings are still there, and the deficits that
produced the 2011 crisis are still unfilled. The
exclusionary basis of renewed authoritarian
governance in Egypt—which rests on an even
narrower base than the corporatist regime it
replaced—actually contains the seeds of its
own destruction, since it replicates or even
exacerbates the systemic problems that
contributed to the uprisings of 2011.
4. Finally, one irreversible outcome of the 2011
uprisings is that Arab citizens demonstrated
that they can overthrow their rulers. As a result,
even resurgent authoritarian governments in the
Middle East today are sensitive, and vulnerable,
to public sentiment. Without accountability for
state performance, regimes might seek to mollify
public sentiment in other ways—through selfdefeating
economic populism, ugly Jacobinism,
and/or foreign threats or adventures. The
populist nationalism and xenophobia cultivated
in a number of Arab states since 2011 has not
advanced regional stability, and in many cases it
has exacerbated existing instability and conflict.
Accountability is thus a key requisite for stable
governance—and accountability requires that
public sentiment leads to changes in the way
government does business.
Given the level of violence suffusing the region, the
fear and mistrust that suffuse local populations,
and the ugly “race to the bottom” underway
where extremism and authoritarianism compete
as alternative models for Arab governance, it is no
surprise that many—publics, elites, and external
powers—express a degree of “buyer’s remorse”
about the Arab uprisings of 2011. Although the
extra-systemic mobilization finally broke open
stagnated Arab political systems and injected new
possibilities, many look on the results with deep
despair. The breakdown of social trust, particularly
in societies now enmeshed in conflict, makes it
hard to imagine how a new social contract could be
negotiated, established, and implemented. But, as
the above analysis shows, imposing a new contract
from the top down is unlikely to produce a stable,
positive outcome.
ATLANTIC COUNCIL
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