Rethinking the Origins of Civic Culture and Why it Matters for the Study of the Arab World (The Government and Opposition /Leonard Schapiro Lecture 2018)

The protests of the Arab Spring sparked hope for a democratic breakthrough in a region long known for its durable systems of authoritarian rule, but optimism soon turned to disappointment. This article argues that the main problem with the post-Arab Spring narrative of failure and regression is that it equates democratization with regime change and places too great a causal burden on protests as the route to its achievement. It proposes that democratization can be understood as a multivalent process encompassing changes occurring at different registers, spurred by different causal mechanisms, and according to different time lines, rather than as a fixed package of changes that proceed in unilinear fashion from different variants of authoritarianism towards a common democratic finish line. Thinking about democratization differently alerts us to vectors of change we might otherwise fail to notice and enables us to move beyond the over-generalizations and over-simplifications that arise when we focus solely on (changes in) macro structures and relations of power.