The positional puzzle of uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East: Regional inequalities in world-historical perspective

While orthodox political scientists present the Arab Spring as a belated "catching up" of the region with global norms and institutions of liberal democracy after decades of "authoritarian persistance," this view cannot explain why such events took place circa 2011 instead of, say, circa 1989.  Notably, while the Arab Spring and its Persian cousin in Iran are portrayed as stemming from economic discontent related to poverty and inequality, the MENA region has historically exhibited low inequality combined with low poverty in comparison to regional averages in the most of the developing world, especially vis-a-vis Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.  In this paper, I frame recent political contention in the Middle East in world-historical perspective in order to rethink these "Why Here? Why Now?" questions.  First, I show within-country inequality of MENA states in comparison with other regions from the post-colonial era to the present, illustrating the region's unique trajectory of low inequality vis-a-vis the Third World.  Second, I argue that this is an outcome of post-colonial state formation, which embedded broad social welfare compacts within relatively robust authoritarian states that survived the end of the developmental era and well into the neoliberal turn.  Third, the cross-class coalitions that initiated the Arab Spring and its Persian cousin, I contend, were produced by these MENA welfare regimes during earlier bouts of state-led development.  Yet, these coalitions became a disloyal opposition as MENA elites dismantled and restructured existing social compacts.  Grievances in the Arab Spring stemmed from this widening "fear of falling" among new middle and working classes, whose positional status vis-a-vis both their own elites as well as other developing countries were perceived as in rapid decline.  While the sparks were contingent and diverse, the "chained" mobilizations across the region relied on these common self-understandings rather than timeless democratic desires or regionally exceptional misfortunes.