Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life . By Roger Owen . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2012. 272p. $24.95.
Book Reviews: Comparative Politics
Since 2011, the antiregime insurrections across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring have elicited a large scholarship. Like the scholarship attending other rare moments of regional transformation, such as the collapse of communism in 1989-91, this new cottage industry has varying quality. More than a hundred English-language academic books have already been published on the Arab Spring, but most have been little more than well-detailed narratives. Needed now are more rigorous investigations about not just how but why the Arab Spring happened--the origins of social rebellion, the dynamics of economic crisis, and the durability of authoritarian regimes.
Roger Owen's book helps fill this gap, providing fresh ideas with promise but ultimately stumbling in its causal logic. Owen aims to explain why autocratic republics proved far more susceptible to downfall than their monarchical peers during the Arab Spring. Although eight kingdoms are located in the region, cases of regime breakdown engulfed presidential dictatorships run by civilian strongmen who appointed themselves for life while surrounded by large coercive apparatuses. These cases include unarmed uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, violent insurgencies in Libya and then Syria, and internal factionalism in Yemen. While contingent variables like financial crises and systemic forces like international pressures made breakdown more likely, the real explanation for regime collapse, according to the author, stems from a single institutional factor--the struggle to ensure smooth succession within the president's family or clique, which divorced the leadership from institutional bases of potential support.
A doyen of modern Middle East history, Owen brings historical depth and comparative perspective to his institutionalist thesis. Early chapters are descriptive, laying...