Economic Development and Political Action in the Arab World

Analysis of North African revolt against authoritarianism, known as the ‘Arab Spring’, embraced reductionist explanations such as the social media, youth unemployment and citizens’ agitations to regain dignity in societies humiliated by oppressive regimes. While recognizing the role these factors played in the revolt, this book offers an alternative comparative analysis of the political economy of development and transition in North Africa. The Arab Revolt or Spring is explained against the backdrop of a faulty developmental paradigm which privileged growth-centered export-led development at the expense of the domestic economy on which the majority of the population subsists. Equally significant, in this analysis, is the EU-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) policy which tolerated authoritarianism in exchange for North Africa’s dictators support for the war against terrorism, the containment of Islamist Jihadists and intercepting illegal immigrants’ before entering Europe.

This book illustrates that reductionist approaches can only elucidate some symptoms of a social problem while leaving unexplained the economic and political structures which contributed to it. One outcome of North Africans’ faulty development paradigm is that it deepened inequality and created a wedge between winners and losers or affluence, wealth and power vis-a-vis poverty and hunger among humiliated jobless and hope-less masses. The book blends theories of development and transition to explain the complex factors which contributed to North Africans’ revolt against authoritarianism and its long-term consequences for political development.

This timely book is of great interest to researchers and students in Development Studies, Economics and Middle Eastern Studies as well as policy makers and democracy, human rights and social justice activists in the Arab world.