Why We Were Surprised (Again) by the Arab Spring

Popular uprisings toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in 2011 and (as of this writing) are seriously threatening dictators in Yemen and Syria. There have also been massive political protests in Bahrain, which have been met with considerable violence from authorities, as well as large protests in Morocco. Yet no social scientist or political analyst in either the West or the Arab world itself claims to have predicted these uprisings, so far as I am aware. Nor did any Western or Arab intelligence agency predict them. In fact, the very people who participated in these uprisings, including long-time activists, do not seem to have foreseen them. We were all taken by surprise. The question is, why? Might we have predicted these uprisings if we had been paying closer attention and utilizing the best social-scientific ideas? Were area specialists simply devoting too much time to explaining the persistence of authoritarianism in the Arab world (Gause 2011)? Before addressing these questions, let me point out one particularly egregious yet illuminating failure to predict the Arab Spring—’’egregious’’ because the individuals involved believe their job consists precisely in providing early warnings of political unrest. For some years now, a U.S. think-tank called the Fund for Peace has published, in collaboration with the journal Foreign Policy, an annual ‘‘Failed States Index.’’ This index, the most recent of which covers 177 countries, is a composite of a dozen demographic, economic, political, and military indicators that are supposed to reveal which states around the globe are weak and failing. By so doing, the index is supposed to give an ‘‘early warning of conflict . . . to policymakers and the public at large’’ (2011: 8). The assumption is that political conflict is more likely to occur where one finds weak and failing states. Does the Failed States Index that is based on data for 2010 suggest that conflict was about to erupt in the Arab world? Not exactly. If anything, the index predicts an African Spring. Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Cameroon are found among the ‘‘top’’ 25 (i.e., the most weak and failing) states in the index. By contrast, only one Arab country (Yemen, ranked thirteenth) falls into this group. Egypt and Syria barely fall into the top 50, and their scores are similar to rather more stable, semi-democratic countries like Colombia and the Philippines. Finally, three Arab countries that experienced a great deal of conflict and violence in 2011—Tunisia, Libya, and Bahrain—actually fall into the ‘‘bottom’’ half of the index, that is, among the allegedly stronger and more successful states. In short, the Failed State Index might have led us to expect political unrest in Yemen in 2011, but not the serial uprisings that will forever be remembered as the Arab Spring or Arab Awakening. Swiss Political Science Review 17(4): 452–456 doi:10.1111/j.1662-6370.2011.02045.x