More on Tunisia: a guest post by “Professor Scott Radnitz”:http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Wealthy-Predatory-Elite-Led-Protests/dp/0801449537 of the University of Washington.
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Those who study politics in non-democratic states would be a little disingenuous if they did not admit to being a little bit surprised by what happened yesterday. If you were told that rioting was occurring in the streets of an Arab autocracy that has been “ruled by the same man since 1987,”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/world/africa/15tunis.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all this is probably not the outcome you would have predicted. Instead, you might expect something like that which took place in Belarus last month (or a more efficient version of the crackdown of Iran’s Green movement two years ago): the deployment of security forces to beat up protesters, the targeted detention of demonstration leaders and their families, the dispersion of the crowds with tear gas, and eventually, the retreat of the opposition. After all, this is a Middle Eastern autocracy–and an American ally in the “War on Terror” to boot–and not a waffling, effete hybrid regime. Restive citizens should be a minor annoyance at best.
Do political science theories help explain what happened? The problem of seeking overarching explanations for a class of events such as “protest-induced regime change” is that contingency and agency play such a major role in the outcome. The decision to shoot into crowds can be a fatal one for a dictator (see Romania); but so can the decision not to use force (Georgia).
Yet, as Josh mentioned, we do have a template from the “color revolutions,” which spawned a decent amount of scholarship. Although those events happened in post-Soviet states, which have a number of unique characteristics, they also have potentially wider applicability. How much leverage do those theories give us on what occurred in Tunisia?
To elaborate on Josh’s post, scholars have argued that protest-induced regime change is more likely to occur in hybrid regimes than authoritarian ones, in the presence of a somewhat free media, after elections, with a well-organized opposition united around a single leader, with an ambivalent business community, in the presence of innovative tactics carried out by non-governmental organizations generously funded by the West, and where the security forces are poorly paid or disunited. Most of these points converge on single critical insight: rapid, non-violent, bottom-up political change is more likely to happen where there are pockets of pluralism, and not in consolidated authoritarian regimes.
Tunisia is a police state with a state-controlled media, which has never held a competitive election, has no civil society to speak of, and possessed a (seemingly) loyal and cohesive coercive apparatus. In short, a typical Arab regime. So our theories seem to fall a bit short.
Explanations will soon follow, making the “Jasmine Revolution” seem perhaps more likely than it was. Already, it has been noted that Tunisia was socially progressive, not a rentier state, and suffering from higher-than-average food prices and unemployment. Yet one can find indicators in any autocracy that would, in hindsight, make a revolution seem quite probable.
We will learn a lot as information comes in, but at the very least we are reminded of how unpredictable politics can be. We study intensely the few cases of unexpected regime change that occur to identify general lessons, but interactions between regimes and oppositions involve a high amount of contingency. Corruption is ubiquitous and presidents reward their families with the spoils of office in many places, but rarely do large numbers of people openly demand that their president step down. Likewise, militaries and police in authoritarian states always appear to be solidly behind the regime. And indeed they are, until they are not, as appears to be the case in the last two days in Tunisia. This gets at a larger point about political stability: a country is completely stable until it is not. Then it turns out it was actually unstable all along. Some argue that “revolutions are inherently unpredictable”:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018433. That may be going too far, but we should be reminded that spontaneous events can generate numerous possible outcomes, and conversely, there are many roads to the same destination.
Now for prediction: While this event is truly unprecedented, it is probably wise to temper our euphoria. For one, the period following the rapid collapse of a government is highly uncertain-especially if there has been no major change in 23 years–and there are reports of looting and street violence, as people take the opportunity to settle scores. The duration of this interregnum and the magnitude of the damage that occurs will probably shape the nature of the political arrangements that follow.
Second, although Ben Ali fled, his ruling clique remains intact (for now), and will work hard to maintain its foothold and control over resources. Perhaps the ruling elites and the (leaderless?) opposition can reach a compromise about the transition, which could result in a new form of modified authoritarianism. An attempt to thoroughly dislodge the elite would entail substantial violence. Many forces are pushing against democracy.
Third, some, including the activists themselves, have spoken optimistically of contagion to other states in the region. But we should remember that autocrats are also watching. Now that they have seen what could happen, they are probably taking measures to ensure that no more “democratic dominoes” fall.
A few final bits of non-wisdom:
* Is this the first “Twitter revolution,” rather than “Moldova”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002817.html or “Iran”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/09/iran-twitter-revolution-protests? The Western media like to push that narrative, but perhaps not. The vast majority of Tunisians are not on Twitter, but would have no trouble learning of political events and plans for protests by talking to their friends and neighbors.
* Ironically, after all the talk about democratizing the Middle East in the Bush era, America had nothing to do with this (or so it seems, pending a wikileak release of secret CIA memos in the coming decades)
* Did “wikileaks”:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/tunisia-09TUNIS492 cause the revolution? If yes, then perhaps the US government is smarter than we give it credit for, what with its clever use of a spy posing as an anarchist to sow the seeds of regime change with complete US deniability.