Why Arab Spring 2.0 Succeeded Where the First Wave Failed
Researchers have identified why mass protests reignited across the Middle East nearly a decade after the 2011 Arab Spring fizzled out. The answer lies in how post-conflict governments rebuilt state control—and how activists learned to navigate those constraints. Understanding this pattern matters for policymakers predicting instability and businesses assessing political risk in fragile regions.
Originaltitel: ‘On the Edge’: Theorizing the Role of Post-Conflict in Dynamics of Mobilization
Abstract The 2019 uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, and Iraq, often framed as a ‘Second Wave’ of the Arab uprisings, present a critical puzzle: why did mass mobilization re-emerge nearly a decade after the 2011 revolutions, despite their mixed outcomes? This article argues that the post-conflict trajectories of these countries are central to understanding these movements. By integrating post-conflict studies and social movement theory, we conceptualize post-conflict as an analytical category that shapes mobilization dynamics through the reconstruction of citizenship regimes, collective memory, and governance mechanisms. These regimes, designed to consolidate state power and enforce security, delimit acceptable forms of political participation and identity. The 2019 uprisings revealed both the fragility of these post-conflict arrangements and the transformative potential of mobilization, highlighting the dual dynamic of boundary-pushing and self-imposed limits as activists navigated internalized ‘red lines’ shaped by conflict memory and state repression. This framework offers new insights into the relationship between post-conflict governance, citizenship reconstruction, and social movement mobilization, emphasizing the need for further comparative research on the conditions under which marginalized groups successfully contest exclusionary political orders.