Ten Years after the Arab Spring: Authoritarian Resilience of the MENA Countries in the Third Wave of Autocratization

Ten years have passed since the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring. Despite great expectations for democracy and wider freedoms, a democratic tsunami did not occur in the MENA region. The Arab Spring triggered rather a “wave of political change” that involved different phenomena according to each country: democratization (Tunisia), autocratization (Turkey), political liberalizations (Morocco, Algeria, Jordan and Oman), authoritarian progressions (Egypt, Bahrain and Kuwait) and state fragmentation (Libya, Syria and Yemen) (Szmolka, 2017). Before the outbreak of the Arab Spring, scholars coined the label “Arab exceptionalism” (Diamond 2003: 21; Diamond 2010: 93) or “Middle Eastern and North African exceptionalism” (Bellin 2004, 143) to refer to the resistance of these countries to democratization. On the other hand, the theory of “persistence of authoritarianism” (Ghalioun, 2004; Hinnebush, 2006), or later also referred to as “resilience of authoritarianism” (Heydemann y Leenders, 2011), emerged as a sub-discipline of transitology and became the prevailing approach in studies on the MENA region (De Smet, 2020). This theoretical approach aimed at explaining the characteristics of authoritarianism and the factors of its tenacity. Democracy indices suggest that authoritarianism continues to be deeply rooted in the MENA region ten years after the Arab Spring. Nevertheless, to what extent is still “MENA exceptionalism” a valid label? Is actually the resilience of authoritarianism in the MENA countries only a regional trend or it is framed in a global trend of autocratization? The answer to these questions should be framed in the current academic debate about the “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann and Lindberg, 2020) in the 21st century, to see to what extent the resilience of authoritarianism in MENA countries influences or is a consequence of this process. The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the MENA’s political regimes after the Arab Spring in order to explain the dynamics of continuity or change in the last ten years. In order to achieve this objective, firstly, the scholarly literature on authoritarianism resilience is reviewed and engaged in the current debate on the ongoing trend of autocratization. Also, the own author’s perspective is exposed regarding the different forms that political change can take as well as the continuity of political regimes. Secondly, the classification of MENA countries in the most important democracy indices is analyzed. And thirdly, the explanatory factors of the authoritarian resilience in the MENA countries are discussed, as well as the prospects for democracy in the region. The methodology used in research is based on the comparative method.