No abstract

Burton and Reitz suggested that Islam should tend to decrease the levels of female labor force participation rate, because "societies that seclude their women by means of purdah or similar customs will have lower rates of female participation in activities outside of the immediate household." Our cross-cultural tests have supported this hypothesis. However, a closer analysis shows that a high correlation is predicted mostly by the "Arab factor," rather than by the precisely Islamic one, as a country's belonging to the Arab world turns out to be a much stronger predictor of very low female labor participation rates than the percentage of Muslims in its population. These relationships hold even after controlling for other factors known to be related to female labor participation. This suggests that the anomalously low level of female labor participation observed in the Near and Middle East might be connected with certain elements of Arab culture that are not directly connected with Islam.

Jack Goldstone proposes three predictors for acute social and political destabilization during the revolutionary wave of 2013-2014: (a) an intermediate level of per capita GDP, (b) a high level of corruption, and (c) a transitional type of political regime. After testing this theory on a broader sample, this study suggests and finds support for another predictor—“center-periphery dissonance” for the destabilization of the 2013-2014 wave. The emergence of this factor is common in the process of modernization, and is due to the heterogeneity of modernization processes, when a system’s central elements (“capitals”) are almost always modernized faster than its periphery. Identification of this factor is of considerable interest because accounting for this factor could significantly improve our capability to predict risks of sociopolitical destabilization of modernizing social systems.

Internet censorship remains one of the most common methods of state control over the media. Reasons for filtering cyberspace include ensuring the security of the current regime, attempts to limit all kinds of opposition movements, and the protection of the religious and moral norms of society. In Arab countries, where religion plays a major role in the sociopolitical sphere, the latter is particularly important. Since, in Islamic law, there is no direct reference to censorship in practice, governments cause many resources to be filtered under various pretexts. At the same time, as the example of Egypt during the Arab spring shows, moral and religious reasons for filtering the Internet have more grounds than, say, the persecution of opposition leaders.

The quantitative analysis of the Arab Spring events is a rather difficult task. Respective difficulties are related to the variety of factors affecting social instability, and to individual peculiarities of historical, cultural, socio-economic, and political processes in the region. As a result of the research, we found out that the processes of social and political destabilization in the countries of Arab Spring were caused by a complex set of factors. The most significant factors that tended to reduce the scale of sociopolitical destabilization during the Arab Spring have turned out to be the following: the ability of the government to reduce social tensions and the presence of “immunity” to internal conflicts. However, such indicators as structural and demographical characteristics and external influences turned out to be less significant in the context of the Arab Spring. It should be mentioned that the significance of the external influences indicator notably increases when the model is used to account for the death toll resultant from anti-government protests. We also discuss the possibility of applying the developed model of sociopolitical destabilization to forecast sociopolitical upheavals in future.