Economic development, governance, and human security after the Arab uprisings

What happens when societies withdraw legitimacy from their governments? How have regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region responded to citizens who defect, openly rejecting the economic rules of the game—the “authoritarian bargain”—that Arab regimes used for decades to manage state-society relations? What forms of governance have emerged to contend with disaffected and mobilized publics? The years since the uprisings of 2011 and a second wave of mass protests in 2019 offer insight into how Arab regimes have coped with the most significant challenges to their legitimacy and authority in modern history. From the perspectives of governance and human security, their responses call into question their commitment to addressing the underlying causes of economic grievances. Regime responses also raise important questions about the prospects for MENA citizens to play a meaningful role in setting economic priorities, broadening opportunities for economic inclusion, or holding governments accountable for their performance.

While regime responses to the challenges of mass mobilization have differed, reflecting wide variation among the region’s political economies, two broad patterns are discernable. The first pattern is evident in a set of cases that transformed pre-2011 authoritarian bargains into repressive-exclusionary social pacts. This category includes the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council¹ (GCC) as well as Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia (post-2020). In these cases, regimes refined and expanded legal, regulatory, and technological mechanisms of repression and social control to prevent mobilization from below, suppress social demands for greater participation, and narrow the scope of economic and social rights. The second pattern is evident among a set of regimes that pursued their own survival without regard for the economic and social costs caused by their resistance to popular demands for change. This category includes the conflict-affected cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, as well as the nominally post-conflict cases of Lebanon and Iraq where governance is heavily inflected by legacies of prior conflicts.

In all cases, however, regime responses have disempowered societies, reshaping state-society relations to further insulate Arab autocrats from citizen demands for economic inclusion, accountability, and responsive governance.

Mass discontent and the mobilization of disaffected publics

In early 2011, publics across the Middle East exploded in protest. Fueled in no small part by economic grievances, simmering discontent boiled over, tipping the region into turmoil from which it has yet to recover. As in the protests that swept across Eastern Europe in 1989, the MENA uprisings seemed almost spontaneous, less a series of discrete events than a single wave. Writing about the 1989 protests, political scientist Adam Przeworski wryly observed that while scholars would write “thousands of books and articles correlating background conditions with outcomes in each country … they will be wasting their time, for the entire event was one single snowball. I mean it in a technical sense: As developments took place in one country, people elsewhere were updating their probabilities of success and as the next country went over the brink, the calculation was becoming increasingly reassuring.” Similar dynamics were at work in MENA in 2011. Once protests broke out in Tunisia in December 2010, the snowball of mass protests rapidly spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. Syria was the last to tip, in March 2011. As in Eastern Europe, however, the conditions that sparked the uprisings had been developing for years, if not decades.

From the 1980s onward, struggling to cope with slowing economic growth and burgeoning debt, rulers in MENA’s republican regimes gradually retreated from statist frameworks of economic governance. They introduced economic reforms intended to expand the role of markets, promote private sectors as engines of growth, remove rigidities in labor markets to address the region’s massive unemployment crisis, and rein in the ballooning costs of subsidies and social provision. The effects of MENA’s neoliberal turn, however, introduced new sources of economic and social dislocation. In practice, reform programs bore little resemblance to the so-called Washington Consensus—an idealized template for navigating transitions from state-led to market-oriented economies. Instead, Arab regimes appropriated and exploited reform to reinforce their grip on power, managing access to new economic opportunities as a political resource to reward loyalists, empower “networks of privilege,” and shore up the social coalitions that helped to stabilize regimes politically, at least for a time. What transpired across MENA in the 1990s and 2000s was not a transition from state to market, but from statism to crony capitalism.

Selective neoliberal reforms fueled the rise of a new economic elite and seemed to usher in an era of renewed growth. Positive macroeconomic indicators were widely seen as signs that the region’s economies had turned a corner. Yet for most people in the Middle East, the transition to crony capitalism was experienced in largely negative terms. Over the course of the 2000s, inequality and corruption increased. Social mobility declined, especially for urban middle classes that were historically a bulwark of regime support. Youth unemployment levels in MENA were the highest in the world, pushing large cohorts of college graduates into low-wage informal labor markets. Economic exclusion and rising commodity prices deepened economic precarity and food insecurity, hitting the least well-off with particular force. In a 2015 study, the World Bank acknowledged the disconnect between robust macro-economic and human development indicators and rising levels of social dislocation and popular discontent:

“Judging by economic data alone, the revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring should have never happened. The numbers from the decades before had told a glowing story: the region had been making steady progress toward eliminating extreme poverty, boosting shared prosperity, increasing school enrollment, and reducing hunger, child and maternal mortality.” Yet these positive indicators obscured “growing and broadly shared dissatisfaction with the quality of life—evident in perception data from value surveys but not in objective data … Ordinary people, and especially those from the middle class, were frustrated by their deteriorating standards of living due to a lack of job opportunities in the formal sector, poor quality public services, and the lack of government accountability. The old social contract of redistribution without voice had stopped working. In the Arab world, the middle class wanted a say and more opportunities.” 

Repression, exclusion, and violence: Economic governance after mass uprisings

In the wake of mass protests, Arab regimes faced a critical juncture. They could take steps to reform what the World Bank called “the old social contract,” expand opportunities for voice, broaden economic and social inclusion, and strengthen accountability. This was the path universally recommended by international financial institutions as well as the United States and its democratic partners around the world. It soon became clear, however, that Arab regimes had other ideas. In the 13 years since the onset of mass protests and violent conflict, Arab regimes have followed two distinct pathways of economic governance. The first, evident in the high-income GCC states and middle-income Arab states such as Jordan, Tunisia (post-2020), and Egypt, is a transition from social pacts anchored in regime commitments to redistribution and the legitimacy of the economic rights of citizens toward exclusionary-repressive social pacts that restrict economic rights and diminish opportunities for participation and accountability. The second, evident in conflict-affected and post-conflict states including Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, is the deepening of predatory ruling coalitions—perhaps more accurately described as predatory power-sharing arrangements in the cases of Lebanon, Iraq, and Libya—in which corrupt, personalistic, illicit, and informal aspects of pre-conflict political economies have been generalized and further entrenched. Recognizing that there is important variation among states within each of these categories, and that some features I attribute to one category, such as high levels of informality and corruption, are present in countries I have grouped in the other, both modes of economic governance bode poorly for citizens who aspire to greater participation and economic inclusion.

Consolidating repressive-exclusionary social pacts

In one set of cases—those spared the worst ravages of insurgency and civil war, including the high-income states of the GCC as well as Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and, since 2021, Tunisia—regimes are overseeing transitions from decaying and ineffective authoritarian bargains to more exclusionary and repressive models of authoritarian governance. As their citizens have become increasingly disaffected, these regimes have responded by clamping down on public access to state economic benefits and making it more explicit that such benefits are contingent on compliance.

In the past, these governments were largely tolerant in their response to economic demands from citizens—an important element of redistributive social contracts in which regimes were guarantors of economic security and social mobility. Today, however, regime intolerance of economic claims-making has taken hold. In this set of cases, where developmental outcomes have been generally stable or positive—despite brief but sharp declines during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—regimes have introduced repressive legislation criminalizing citizens’ economic claims and mobilization. To extricate themselves from the authoritarian bargains of the past without ceding ground on political rights, they have securitized the link between citizenship and economic rights.

Egypt is perhaps the clearest example of where laws and regulations have been used to quash social and economic rights, including the threat of taking away citizenship. The Egyptian government may bring the full force of its enormous repressive bureaucracy down on anyone it deems as disloyal. Since 2013, the regime of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has used a wide array of rules, amendments, and regulations to ensure compliance and economic stability. Economic dissent is now a criminal offense, and acts that the regime considers as endangering the economy are designated as terrorism. This trend was especially visible in November 2013 when a law was passed to make protests and demonstrations essentially illegal. The security services received ‘‘absolute power to cancel or postpone [a] demonstration, change the location, and modify the activity path based on ‘serious information or evidence’ regarding the existence of threats against security and peace which the security services themselves provide.” Responding to criticism of the law, Sissi “has defended restrictions on citizens’ right to demonstrate, saying that protests could cause more harm to the country’s already battered economy.” After the protest law passed, in September 2014, the government turned its attention to independent unions, restricting their operations with new regulations despite constitutional protection of freedom of expression and association. Next came punishment for workers who participate in labor actions, the suppression of economic protests, and the targeting of independent unions by the security services. By the end of 2017, labor protests had declined by two-thirds (see Fig. 1, below) from their post-2011 peak.² According to Human Rights Watch, “Since May 2016, police have arrested scores of striking workers from various industries. Most were later released, but prosecutors have referred dozens for trial, including some before a military court.”

Conflict and the deepening of predatory ruling coalitions

When mass protests erupted in 2011, followed by a second wave in 2019, regimes in conflict-affected states were defiant, defensive, and resistant to popular demands for political and economic change. In some cases, including Libya, Yemen, and Syria, mass mobilization was a precursor to mass violence, sparking large-scale conflicts that remain unresolved. In Iraq and Lebanon, regimes were similarly defiant in response to “second wave” mass protests that erupted in 2019. They deployed violence more selectively than the other cases in this category—and were aided by the 2020 COVID pandemic in their efforts to clear public space. Yet, they were no less fierce than their conflict-affected counterparts in their determination to resist popular pressure for economic and political reforms. With regime change in Syria and the election of a president and prime minister in Lebanon, these cases may shed their status as members of this category. It is still too soon to view either country as set decisively on a trajectory toward more inclusive governance.

In all three of the conflict-affected cases, as well as Iraq, the post-2011 period witnessed the deepening of corrupt, predatory ruling coalitions that were present prior to the onset of conflict but became further entrenched in its wake. Actors such as communal-sectarian power brokers, wartime profiteers, regime cronies, and militia commanders—principal beneficiaries of wartime political economies—have become central to these predatory coalitions. In these cases, economic governance takes the form of negotiation among ruling elites about access to public revenues, with little to no opportunity for citizens to play a role in setting economic priorities. Access to and the distribution of public revenue are heavily patrimonial and often sectarian: ruling elites essentially look after their own constituencies. Citizens’ attempts to mobilize to make economic claims on the state are typically met with repression.

In conflict-affected countries, economic trajectories since the 2011 uprisings reflect the negative developmental, social, and economic effects of large-scale, protracted violence. Conflicts have varied in their intensity and scale, yet they have contributed to broad-based economic declines that exhibit similar features. These include stalled or declining GDP growth; deteriorating productivity across economic sectors; destruction of critical infrastructure; lower levels of domestic and foreign investment; spiraling inflation and currency devaluations; increased unemployment; worsening poverty; rising levels of food insecurity and economic precarity; and declining human development indicators.

The human toll of mass violence is a paramount consideration, yet conflict also profoundly reshapes political economies. Conflict-affected countries vary in the extent to which security landscapes have fragmented, the scale and capacity of nonstate armed groups, the extent to which populations have been displaced, and the roles of external actors. Despite important variation, however, MENA wartime political economies share attributes that are consistent with the broader dynamics that have come to define intrastate conflict in recent decades. These features, constituting what I refer to as wartime economic orders, include the weakening of state institutions and their capture by warring parties, the splintering of national markets, and altered patterns of trade and production. Mass violence also amplifies the informal features of patrimonial, personalistic political economies that were present prior to the onset of conflict but acquire growing prominence and reach as violence takes hold and formal market mechanisms erode.

During and following active conflict, central banks, ministries of economy, trade, and finance, along with state regulatory agencies, continue to function. Yet their authority and reach are constrained if not directly undermined by the spread and consolidation of wartime economic orders across territories controlled both by insurgent forces and recognized regimes. In these new orders, the boundaries between formal and informal, licit and illicit, public and private—boundaries that were highly porous even in prewar periods—become increasingly blurred. They remain so, moreover, even as violence recedes, underscoring wartime economic orders’ persistence and resilience, including in post-civil war cases like Lebanon, where cross-border conflict with Israel has reignited, and Iraq, which has transitioned from conflict to post-conflict conditions even as the wounds of mass violence have yet to heal. Despite territorial fragmentation that fractures national markets, disrupting the domestic movement of goods and people, wartime economic orders foster forms of cooperation, collusion, and exchange across conflict lines and between warring parties. These informal ties can become important lifelines for civilian populations, yet they contribute to conditions in which corruption, predation, and criminality thrive and where the crucial legal distinction between civilians and combatants is all too easily erased.

Conflict thus destabilizes and reshapes prewar political settlements, reshuffling coalitions of winners and losers among established and newly empowered wartime economic actors. Across MENA conflicts, both state and nonstate armed actors use coercive and predatory means to accumulate wealth through extortion, kidnapping, theft, smuggling, and “checkpoint economies” in which fragile supply chains are exploited to extract resources from the movement of goods and people. State and nonstate armed groups alike cultivate direct transnational economic ties with foreign governments and patrons, building extensive cross-border economic networks that elude scrutiny, oversight, or regulation.

Armed actors who control the means of violence are thus among the principal beneficiaries of conflicts that expand opportunities for predation. Syria and Libya are notable examples of these trends. In the Libyan case, the family of former general Khalifa Haftar, the dominant military figure in eastern Libya, has become the axis around which a network of affiliated business cronies grew to become a powerful economic force in the east, while also extracting resources from central state institutions in the west. In Syria, where neopatrimonialism and personalism were rampant prior to 2011, the onset of conflict led to the marginalization or exit from the country of segments of the business elites and the empowerment of wartime crony networks closely allied with the inner circles of the Assad regime. In both cases, pre-conflict political economies that were patrimonial and clientelistic have not only persisted but have become increasingly pervasive, more broadly and deeply entrenched, and are now systemic features of wartime economic orders in all conflict-affected states and post-conflict states in MENA.

In recent years, violence has subsided in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. In December 2024, armed Islamist rebels overthrew the regime of Bashar al-Assad and initiated a process of political transition that holds the promise of a meaningful change in economic governance. Nonetheless, as of this writing in January 2025, Syria’s conflict, like those in Yemen and Libya, cannot be said to have been fully resolved. Lebanon is also exiting from a brief but deeply destructive period of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and it too may be on the cusp of long-overdue economic and political reforms. Iraq has entered a fragile post-conflict phase marked by ongoing insecurity and violence. In each case, conflicts have led to political if not territorial fragmentation and the weakening of regime authority and legitimacy. In each, wartime economic orders have become consolidated under conditions of political, economic, territorial, and social polarization and fragmentation. These trends are especially visible in the three cases that have been most severely affected by post-2011 violence: Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

In Syria, prior to its collapse in December 2024, the Assad regime nominally governed some two-thirds of the country, including the western economic heartland and major urban centers—a part of the country the French dubbed “useful Syria”—with the active presence of Iranian-backed militias. The nominally nonstate Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) dominated the northwestern city of Idlib and its surrounding areas, while the Syrian National Army, a loose coalition of Turkish-backed armed groups, controlled parts of northern Aleppo province and areas adjacent to the territory in Syria’s northeast where the Kurdish Democratic Union Party holds sway.

Iraq’s political landscape is no longer as sharply fragmented as it was during periods of peak conflict from 2007-2011 and from 2014-2019. Yet the central government’s legitimacy is low, Kurdish-majority provinces in the north are governed semi-autonomously by regional Kurdish political parties, and Iranian-backed militant Shia militias have become powerful political and economic actors, establishing political parties that field candidates in national elections.

In the Libyan case, the Government of National Stability, allied with Haftar, who commands the Libyan National Army, has centralized its authority over militias active in eastern Libya. In western Libya, a loose and fractious constellation of militias dominates a fragmented territory under the fragile control of the internationally recognized Government of National Accord. Yemen exhibits similar features. Since 2014, insurgent forces of the Ansar Allah (Helpers of God) movement, commonly known as the Houthis (after the Zaydi Shia family from Saada governorate that formed and leads Ansar Allah), have dominated most of western Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa. Two major and several minor political and armed groups confront the Houthis and simultaneously contend for control in central, eastern, and southern Yemen. Leading actors include the Internationally Recognized Government and a southern Yemeni irredentist movement, the Southern Separatist Movement or the Hirak, with large areas of south-central Yemen contested by Islamist Jihadist armed group,s including al-Qaida.