{"id":22876,"date":"2018-03-05T07:21:40","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T07:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/?p=22876"},"modified":"2019-11-06T11:05:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T11:05:51","slug":"on-springs-and-their-offspring-the-international-consequences-of-domestic-uprisings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2018\/03\/05\/on-springs-and-their-offspring-the-international-consequences-of-domestic-uprisings\/","title":{"rendered":"On \u201cSprings and Their Offspring: The International Consequences of Domestic Uprisings\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This post by John Owen first appeared on the ejis.eu blog in February 2016.<\/p>\n

It is based on his article from the inaugural issue of European Journal of International Security<\/em><\/a><\/span>. Full article available here<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 is a conceptual blob \u2013 or, at best, a tangle of events across thousands of kilometers and scores of days, events whose connections are not clear.\u00a0 We do not have a good account of how the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in a small Tunisian city, produced the NATO intervention in Libya, the election of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, and the Syrian Civil War.<\/p>\n

We cannot understand or explain the causal story unless we define precisely what it is we want to explain, and that is where the trouble begins.\u00a0 Was the Arab Spring the set of demonstrations and uprisings across much of the Arab world in early 2011?\u00a0 Did it include state attempts to buy off and suppress unrest?\u00a0 How about the foreign interventions in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria?\u00a0 In my article I try to impose some discipline on our thinking by defining a political spring as \u2018an abrupt, broad, sustained increase in public dissent in a state that has prohibited it\u2019.\u00a0 I then isolate the first event in the complex cluster of events of 2011:\u00a0 the Tunisian Spring of December 2010 and January 2011.\u00a0 Related puzzles then emerge:\u00a0 why and how did the Tunisian Spring produce the offspring that it did, namely, the transnational spread of open dissent, unrest, state bribery of citizens and promise of reform, state repression, increasing international tensions, and foreign interventions?<\/p>\n

A full causal account should address correlation (under what conditions do springs produce offspring?), and mechanisms (by what processes do they do so?).\u00a0 My article addresses only the second question.\u00a0 The mechanism that connects causes to effects, I argue, is\u00a0transnational group polarization.<\/em>\u00a0 By group polarization I mean the progressive separation of preferences across a population into two mutually exclusive groups.\u00a0 The axis of polarization (pro- versus anti-government) is pre-existing but, in normal times, latent.\u00a0 Following literature in social psychology, I argue that polarization is triggered by a sharp rise in either prestige or threat to one latent group; members of that group begin to talk and act more like members of that group, which causes members of the opposite latent group to follow suit.<\/p>\n

What is new here is that group polarization\u00a0happens across states<\/em>.\u00a0 Among many social scientists is a longstanding skepticism about contagion of ideas and practices; surely, these scholars say, people act based on local conditions rather than events in neighboring countries.\u00a0 I argue that that view is mistaken.\u00a0 Inasmuch as people in cities such as Cairo, Amman, and Manama identify to some extent with people in Tunisia \u2013 as Arabs \u2013 and in proportion to how cheaply they can communicate, a triggering event in a Tunisian city can polarize people in these other Arab cities.\u00a0 Note that it is not simply unrest that is spreading, but polarization:\u00a0 pro-government actors also draw inspiration from their counterparts in other states and are galvanized to protect the regimes they support.\u00a0 The Arab world in 2011 was more like Europe in 1848 than in 1989.<\/p>\n

Only transnational group polarization is not really new.\u00a0 I narrate briefly a similar chain reaction of unrest, rebellion, suppression, and foreign intervention in northwestern Europe following an English Spring in 1559 (in which open Protestant worship was again allowed in England, polarizing Catholics and Protestants in neighboring countries).\u00a0 The Internet and satellite media facilitated the Tunisian Spring\u2019s offspring, but were not necessary to it.<\/p>\n

In any case, when group polarization spread across states, the governments of those states have incentives to take strategic action to exploit and manage it.\u00a0 They use various tools to augment pro-government actors and suppress anti-government actors.\u00a0 Sometimes their policies work, but sometimes they simply exacerbate polarization.\u00a0 Foreign interventions in a given state A on behalf of the pro- or anti-government side may take place because other states B and C see that, with acute polarization, the probability of regime change in A is higher, and with regime change may come a new set of alignments and policies.<\/p>\n

What evidence do we have that Arabs across states polarized as the argument claims?\u00a0 First, acts and tropes across Arab states were remarkably similar.\u00a0 Self-immolations took place in several Arab cities in early 2011.\u00a0 \u2018Days of Revolt\u2019 were announced.\u00a0 \u2018We Are All All Khaled Said\u2019, a Facebook page devoted to a victim of an Egyptian crackdown, was followed by \u2018We Are All Hamza Alkhateeb\u2019, a Facebook page devoted to a victim of a Syrian crackdown.\u00a0 On the governmental side, packages of reforms, such as greater political representation, were promised in several countries.\u00a0 Second, participants have shared many anecdotes with journalists and scholars about contagion.\u00a0 As one Egyptian activist said, \u2018The Tunisian tsunami gave everyone hope\u2019.\u00a0 A Saudi protestor said, \u2018The protesters in Egypt and Tunisia did something that was almost impossible.\u00a0 If they could bring down two tough presidents, why can\u2019t we demand our rights?\u2019\u00a0 Finally, social media provide some evidence:\u00a0 after certain prominent events in one Arab country, such as the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, \u2018tweets\u2019 about politics increased in other Arab countries.<\/p>\n

Had this transnational group polarization \u2013 this serial segregation of multiple populations into pro- and anti-government groups \u2013 not taken place, the Tunisian Spring would have been an isolated incident, sadly forgotten outside of Tunisia.\u00a0 Of course, some springs, such as that in Iran in May 2009, proved barren, producing little or no transnational offspring.\u00a0 It remains for researchers to figure out the conditions that produce transnational group polarization and midwife the region-wide offspring we saw in 2011.<\/p>\n

Professor John Owen
\nSenior Guest Scholar, Otto-Suhr-Institut, Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin (Fall 2015)
\nTaylor Professor of Politics, University of Virginia<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post by John Owen first appeared on the ejis.eu blog in February 2016. It is based on his article from the inaugural issue of European Journal of International Security. Full article available here. The \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 is a conceptual blob \u2013 or, at best, a tangle of events across thousands of kilometers and scores […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":760,"featured_media":31902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,17],"tags":[4077,4081,2570,2571,2573,1564,4078,4080,4079,3310,657,4082,4048],"coauthors":[4049],"class_list":["post-22876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law","category-politics","tag-arabspring","tag-bahrain","tag-ejis","tag-european-journal-of-international-security","tag-international-security","tag-iraq","tag-libya","tag-mohamed-bouazizimohamed-bouazizi","tag-muslim-brotherhood","tag-nato","tag-syria","tag-tunisian-spring","tag-un"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/760"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22876"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}