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The Nature of Civil Society in Hybrid Regimes in the MENA Region

Since the end of the Cold War, authoritarian leaders in the Arab world have responded to mounting pressures from both internal and external actors to democratize by adopting a variety of liberalization measures, including implementing elections, opening up the space for civil society and granting new civil liberties to previously disenfranchised groups, such as women and minorities. During the past five years alone, regimes across the region instituted remarkable acts that appeared to set the Middle East on a course toward electoral democracy. Several states held historic elections - Saudi Arabia held its first municipal elections in 50 years, Bahrain its first parliamentary elections in 30 years, Egypt its first ever competitive presidential elections, and opposition parties made great gains in elections in Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon and Egypt– while Qatar adopted its first written constitution. However, while these acts largely succeeded in appeasing Washington (and London and Paris), these liberalization measures were not benevolent acts by Arab regimes interested in increasing the political rights and civil liberties of their citizens, but rather a conscious strategy to satisfy international donors and the masses, while simultaneously maintaining a hold on power. As Robert Bianchi, writing in the 1980s, described the situation in one Arab state, “Fearful of the social unrest and political opposition that such choices would inevitably provoke, Egypt’s rulers have tried to promote a live-and-let-live attitude among antagonistic interests and ideologies without relinquishing power to any of them.”In response to this wave of liberalization without democratization, scholars have stopped asking, “Why is the Arab world not democratic?” and instead asked over and over again, “why is the Arab world still autocratic?” This has led to a much better understanding of how Arab autocrats manipulate institutions and actors in order to stay in power while maintaining domestic and international legitimacy. But, despite the breadth of scholarship on the persistence of authoritarianism in the Arab world, today we understand very little about how this form of entrenched authoritarianism impacts the people who live in Arab regimes.As I will argue in more detail below, over the past few decades, Arab regimes have initiated multiple strategies to simultaneously give off the appearance of political liberalization while limiting the capacity of non-regime actors to successfully function. This has led to a unique configuration of “liberalization under coercion.”