Abstract
How and why do militaries intervene in politics? Why do national armies side with the regime in some cases but in others they refuse to interfere? What is the institutional legacy of a military’s involvement in episodes of mass mobilization? These are the questions driving Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring, an insightful volume edited by Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, and Fred H. Lawson that examines how the relationship between regimes and national armies shaped the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.
The first section of the book focuses on military politics and regime dynamics. Of particular importance here is Chapter 3. Fred Lawson argues that the armed forces of authoritarian regimes are themselves often rife with internal cleavages and rivalries. Obtaining a nuanced view of how elites and national armies respond to domestic turmoil thus rests on exploring the complicated relationship between the regular armed forces and internal security services. In Yemen, Lawson demonstrates how an intense rivalry between security services resulted in “a pronounced tendency toward the deployment of force against peaceful protestors, as each agency did its best to assert itself when responding to potentially threatening situations” (p. 67). In Algeria, he paints a more complex picture. The military was highly autonomous, staffed through conscription, and retained a share of the local economy. Moreover, all of Algeria’s presidents between 1970 and 1998 had come from the senior officer corps. The country’s primary internal security service, the Department of Intelligence (DRS), was more powerful than the regular armed forces. The DRS, however, did not have any internal rivals. Nor did it have a stake in electoral politics. In fact, it was this unique military-security dynamic that proved crucial in shaping a moderate reaction to the Algerian uprising.
The book’s second section covers military engagement in the Arab Spring uprisings. Dorthy Ohl’s “Bahrain’s ‘Cohesive’ Military and Regime Stability amid Unrest” is this section’s standout work. The author applies ethnographic data from Bahrain to existing arguments on the origin of military cohesiveness—as a product of norms, institutional design, or nonmaterial bonds. Ohl argues that Bahrain’s military could have been coded cohesive or noncohesive, which demonstrates that cohesion as a concept is too theoretically weak to “shed light on military reactions to unrest and therefore regime durability and the trajectory of mass mobilizations” (p. 147). Scholars should instead turn toward a more micro-level analysis of military cohesion and its causal value in state breakdown and recalibration.
Another insightful work in this section is Philippe Droz-Vincent’s chapter on the Syrian military’s response to the 2011 uprising (Chapter 8). Droz-Vincent focuses on Syria because, unlike other Arab regimes, the country “singled itself out with fierce military repression during the initial months of the 2011 uprising” (p. 168). But equally as important, the Syrian army, unlike its counterparts in Libya and Yemen, did not completely fracture. Despite the initial “stress test,” it has sustained a brutal civil war. For Droz-Vincent, the central factor explaining these phenomena is the Assad regime’s social engineering of the officer corps; specifically, awarding Alawites key positions. This enabled the regime to withstand the effects of its decision to brutally repress unarmed civilians. The army then closed ranks. With the help of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, the Syrian army was transformed into a brutal killing machine that targeted defectors within its own ranks and opposition figures. The regime and army that so many predicted would collapse now seems poised to win the war.
The third section of the book examines trajectories of political-military relations in the post–Arab Spring period. Most notable here is Chapter 9, where Chérine Chams El-Dine examines why the Egyptian military has resisted attempts by the civilian government to reign in its autonomy. In post-Mubarak Egypt, civilian political actors increasingly sought to accommodate the military and utilize it to marginalize rivals. But this has enabled the military to “bypass civilian oversight but also to acquire privileges they had never enjoyed previously” (p. 199). The Egyptian army’s economy, its legacy of human rights abuses, and its status as custodian of national security all remain off limits to civilian oversight. And in areas where civilian officials have challenged the military, such as the trial of civilians in military courts and management of the defense portfolio, the military has emerged supreme. The election of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as Egypt’s president in 2014 has only made prospects for achieving civilian oversight of the armed forces less remote.
Eight years after uprisings began, the hope that gripped many Arab states has largely turned into despair. Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring helps shed light on the factors that produced the Arab Spring’s divergent outcomes. It stands as required reading for any student, scholar, pundit, or policy maker seeking to understand why the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the post–Arab Spring Middle East has proved so difficult.