The Arab Revolutions: A retrospective on the aftermath

With the 15th anniversary of the January Revolution behind us, the debate over how to assess the Arab uprisings remains hurried and often unfair, sharpened by deep political polarization—especially in light of the upheavals they unleashed. In some countries, they led to civil wars and chaos; in others, to the return of old ruling systems.

In this context, the January Revolution has come under sustained attack. Critics blame the revolutionaries for removing a corrupt authoritarian regime, accuse them of weakening the state, and hold them responsible for worsening economic and social conditions. Some go further still, alleging that the revolutionaries acted as agents—or were swept up in foreign conspiracies.

Between toppling the regime and the state

Such arguments deliberately overlook three basic facts: First, the revolution did not rule; counterrevolutionary forces did. They seized control of money, lawmaking, media, and policymaking. Second, it was the authoritarian regimes themselves that weakened the state through prolonged despotism and entrenched corruption.

Third, the chaos that followed the uprisings was not caused by the millions who demanded freedom, social justice, dignity, and independent national decision-making, but by ruling authorities clinging to power and waging open conflict against their own societies, using every available tool of coercion.

Amid this debate, some have treated revolution as a fixed model to be replicated everywhere, measuring success or failure against historic cases, such as the French, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Mexican revolutions.

This approach ignores fundamental differences in social psychology, historical experience, civilizational inheritance, and national character. It also overlooks changes in time, technology, and modes of communication.

What once took years can now unfold in weeks. Social media accelerated the Egyptian revolution far more than cassette tapes did in Iran. Mobilization through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube proved faster and more precise than the rooftop chants of “Allahu Akbar” exchanged nightly to defy the Shah and embolden one another in the 1979 Iranian revolution. 

The fruits of authoritarianism

What is clear today is that Arab regimes were not as fragile as many believed. It was the states that weakened and slackened, while the regimes themselves grew strikingly stronger—a paradox captured two decades ago by political scientist Samer Soliman in “The Strong Regime and the Weak State.”

This paradox stems primarily from three factors:

1. Fusion of state into the regime

Institutions meant to serve enduring states—along the Nile, in the Levant, Yemen, Tunisia, and Libya—were appropriated by ruling systems and repurposed for their own survival. In doing so, they revived a logic Europe had long abandoned: reducing the state to the ruler—captured in the historic phrase many monarchs proclaimed, explicitly or implicitly: I am the state.

When revolutions erupted under the slogan “The people want the fall of the regime,” many revolutionaries failed to grasp that toppling the regime risked toppling the state itself. The task required a surgeon’s scalpel, not a farmer’s hoe—precision, caution, and professionalism in dismantling power while preparing to build a new one. This, after all, is the ultimate aim of revolutions seeking radical change.

In Libya, revolutionaries faced an army led by the sons of the very ruler they sought to overthrow, They soon discovered that all state institutions and resources were bound to his interests. In Syria, they confronted a military dominated by the Alawite sect, unleashed against the population. In Tunisia and Egypt, it soon became clear that the reach of Ben Ali and Mubarak extended far beyond the surface of power.

Security agencies and bureaucracies were designed to serve a single equation: stability and continuity—meaning the ruler’s permanence until death, followed by succession to a son, as planned in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, or even a spouse, as rumored after Ben Ali’s flight.

The succession carried out in Syria—and prepared elsewhere—deepened the fusion of state and regime, allowing total control over political outcomes in pursuit of this pathological objective.

2. The nature of Arab systems of rule

Unlike democratic states that rotate power, prolonged rule enabled presidents, kings, and sultans to build dense networks of patronage tied to power by a thick umbilical cord.

These networks formed what might be called political clientelism: an assemblage of army generals, senior security officials, high-ranking bureaucrats, favored business figures, major landowners and rural notables—along with certain intellectuals and media figures who benefit from authority and serve as its mouthpieces. These were not small, isolated circles. Around them gathered vast numbers of lesser beneficiaries, convinced their privileges depended on the corruption that sustained them.

When revolutions removed the head of the system, these clientelist networks briefly retreated. But as revolutionary momentum waned, they resurfaced, seeking to reverse change and restore the old order, with only cosmetic reforms if needed—drawing on their numbers and the fortunes amassed under the fallen regimes.

3. Arab states are partially modernized

In Egypt and Tunisia, peaceful uprisings toppled rulers relatively quickly, despite the formidable security apparatuses of Mubarak and Ben Ali.

This was possible because partial modernization limited the regimes’ ability to mobilize traditional resources, unlike Ali Abdullah Saleh’s use of tribal structures, Gaddafi’s reliance on mercenaries, Assad’s mobilization of the Alawite sect alongside the Baath Party, or Bahrain’s sectarian counter-mobilization.

Open questions

Beyond repression, the five countries that experienced revolutions left their revolutionaries with a heavy legacy bequeathed by corrupt authoritarian regimes. This excess burden weighed down the revolutionary momentum and slowed it for two main reasons.

First, counterrevolutionary forces exploited this legacy to hold the revolution responsible for security disruptions, emergent economic problems, and political uncertainty.

Second, the swift collapse of the “revolution of expectations”—the hope of moving from poverty to prosperity and from humiliation to dignity—gave way to a “revolution of disappointments,” gradually driving people away from the revolutionary project and weakening its mass base.

This has prompted renewed calls for a sober diagnosis. Were these uprisings pushes for limited reform? Delayed but genuine revolutions? Disguised coups? Or the reproduction of old regimes with new faces?

These questions remain open, and the answers offered so far remain insufficient.