Mass-based Uprisings and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Some Preliminary Notes

Authoritarian regimes break down in many and different ways. Sometimes they are defeated by military coups, by conspiracies that emerge within the autocrat’s inner circle, or by foreign invasions. In other occasions, a less traumatic and smoother transformation takes place. The fall of the authoritarian regime is, indeed, anticipated by the emergence of rifts in the ruling coalition and by the attempt lunched by ‘soft-liners’ to introduce some changes, involuntarily triggering a process that can bring to the dismantling of the former regime. Although the role played by mobilizations from below can be of some relevance in each of these instances, favouring unusual and unexpected elites’ behaviour, it has been constantly portrayed as merely instrumental. The breakdown of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 has shown that this is not always the case. Autocracies are not only overthrown by coups d’état or by political liberalization initiated by the ruling coalition at a time when collective protests have already delegitimized the dominant coalition. As happened in the two North African countries, authoritarian regimes can fall apart without pacts, negotiations, and compromises. Although this is a much less frequent path, autocracies are also defeated by mass-based uprisings in which the emergence of a cross-class and cross-ideological coalition throughout (almost) the whole country imposes a regime change. Is the way in which authoritarian regimes broke down in Tunisia and Egypt unprecedented and unique? Is there any similarity with previous episodes of termination of authoritarian rule? The main goal of this paper is exactly to preliminary assess whether the Tunisian and Egyptian trajectories share some common traits with three other cases – Sudan in 1985, Haiti in 1986, and Romania in 1989 – in which mass-based uprisings determined the breakdown of the authoritarian regime without pacts and negotiations. Due to the sharp different geographical contexts taken into consideration and the innovative character of the project, the paper has to be regarded as tentative and subjected to be enlarged to more and different cases at a later stage. Having said that, the five cases considered here share some important contextual features. They all were a) peripheral countries that b) showed some degree of sultanism and c) relied heavily on the police forces to maintain order. Even more importantly, all five authoritarian regimes broke down in a tremendously rapid way – 11 days in Romania, 12 in Sudan, 18 in Egypt, 28 in Tunisia, and just a few months in Haiti – under the pressure of a non-armed mass-based uprising in which nearly all social classes and political tendencies participated. In the last stages of such processes neither pacts nor negotiations took place. It was, on the contrary, the armed forces’ refusal to fire on protesters that determined the end of the authoritarian dominations. Yet, due to the fact that the military responded directly to an extraordinary wave of nonviolent street activism, they were not coups d’état. Highlighting similarities and differences between these supposedly comparable five cases is the task of this paper