Tracking the “Arab Spring”: Egypt’s Failed Transition

Abstract

Egypt’s mass uprising of 2011 gave birth to tremendous hopes that a new era of democratic politics could be built in the Arab world. But the process of transition to a democracy was badly designed, providing strong incentives for the country’s diverse political actors to behave in ways that undermined democratic development. Compounding these political mistakes was a heavy authoritarian legacy of division, mistrust, and unaccountability. While elections were not the cause of Egypt’s political woes, voting only clarified and sometimes aggravated the growing fissures in the Egyptian body politic. And those divisions have not only sabotaged Egypt’s post-2011 democratic hopes but also have undermined the prospects for future democratic development.

The New Digital Natives

“…In the famous George Orwell book [215], the animals take control from the farmer and overthrow his dictatorship, only to realise that their fellow animal friends who take control can be worse than the authoritarian farmer. In essence, this is what we saw in Egypt [37] where the new government has been overthrown by a military coup. Use the Internet to Keep Power the Right Way.…”

Trust and Tolerance across the Middle East and North Africa: A Comparative Perspective on the Impact of the Arab Uprisings

“…Brown (2013) and Robbins (2015) link the failed transition in Egypt to a growing distrust of political authorities, but they neglect to explain why a drop in trust should be expected. Given Egypt's longstanding authoritarian history and malfunctioning government it is likely that political trust was already low or gradually declining, unless the regime change and free elections actually boosted trust at first.…”

“…In three of the nine, the full set of institutional rules was replaced, leading to a fundamentally different type of political system, but, as Table 1 indicates, the outcomes are quite different. In both Egypt and Tunisia a democratic transition took place, but in Egypt this did not last, with the Qandil governments and president Morsi rolling back the democratic transition and the military aborting it completely (Brown, 2013); whereas in Tunisia the Islamist Ennahda and the other major parties more or less accepted the new rules (Netterstrøm, 2015). In Yemen, the regime collapsed and a still ongoing civil war broke out.…”

Tunisian Exceptionalism Or Constitutional Timing: A Comparison Of Democratic Transitions In The Middle East

“…48 This conflict was predetermined by the failure of the revolutionary movement to establish a consensus for a new constitutional system before the election of a president. Utilizing the existing constitutional framework left authoritarian levels of power in the hands of the executive and in such a setting, it is unimaginable how a constitution based on consultation and dialogue could have been written, given extreme imbalance in power between the Islamists and the liberals.…”