Inside the Arab State by Kamrava Mehran;

Author:Kamrava, Mehran;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

As all uprisings go, the Arab Spring gave Arabs hope and a sense of the possible. Revolutions are by definition hopeful endeavors. People mobilize, shout, and sacrifice because they believe a better future is possible. They feel empowered. They sense the possible. But only in Tunisia has the future turned better, if not economically at least politically. Elsewhere, autocracy has been reestablished and reinvigorated, or worse yet, neighbors and clans have turned against each other and plunged their societies and countries into seemingly endless civil wars.

As if the mixture were not already lethal enough, external actors continue to pursue their own agendas regardless of the costs to those whose lives are ruined in the process. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 started a chain reaction that led to the declaration of the Caliphate by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi on 29 June 2014. Today, the world in general and the Middle East in particular is still grappling with the consequences of George W. Bush’s war in the Middle East. Not to be outdone, the Qataris, Saudis, Iranians, Emiratis, and even the Russians joined the fray. The Arab world’s post-2011 quagmire is no longer strictly Arab.

Once again, Arab politics has come to be defined less by the legitimacy of the state than by the nature of the state’s power relationships over and with society. Arab societies have always shown remarkable creativity, vibrancy, and resilience in finding avenues for contemplation, expression, discussion, and debate even under the most repressive of political circumstances. The 2011 uprisings brought those forms of expression to the surface, out on the streets, and in public squares. But before long old power relations reemerged, coercive apparatuses reasserted their political dominance, and creativity and free expression were pushed into the shadows. Censorship in all forms reigns supreme.

Within Arab societies themselves, few signs of hope for a better political future are present. Violence, sectarianism, jihadism, the rule of the military, and technocracy have all combined to end the public debate over demands for citizenship and legitimacy. States instead seek a forcible imposition of unity and conformity. Legitimacy has been redefined and reduced to forcible acquiescence. Citizenship is now seldom seen in terms of the common good, but is assumed to revolve around parochial, specific demands for the rights of the sect, the tribe, the clan, and the family.132 And dialogue, when it is allowed to take place, tends to emerge out of strategic alliances and accommodations against mutual enemies, rather than agreements over rules of the game and respecting opponents.133

Despite Daesh’s brutal excesses, therefore, there are few indications that extremist impulses are likely to recede any time soon. Should Daesh be defeated, as it appears to be as of this writing, there is always another like-minded militant group that is likely to emerge to fill the power vacuum in the region. Regardless of what happens to the Islamic Caliphate, the ideology of Salafi-jihadism is here to stay and is likely to gain new converts.134 Given the brutality of military regimes in

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