Abstract
The chapter introduces the subject of the book and defines the research questions.
Throughout the book, US spelling is used, except for names of organizations or in direct quotes where original British spelling was kept.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The expression “Arab Spring” coined by mass media is unfortunate because it is misleading in a number of ways. First, the nature of political movements towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and at the beginning of the next decade was not solely and simply “Arab.” On the one hand, Moghadam and Decker (2014: 73–74) convincingly argue that the “Green protests” in 2009 in Iran were forerunners of the later protests in Arab countries and had a demonstration effect for protesters there. On the other hand, protests in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Morocco were embedded in their own national contexts. Some common problems and underlying causes do exist across many Arab nations, and the importance of a shared Arab public sphere and “regional demonstration effects” (Lynch 2014: 390) should not be underestimated. Neither should the relevance of specific national political and economic contexts be neglected. To emphasize the heterogeneity of revolutionary phenomena in different Arab nations, it would be far more appropriate to use the term “Arab revolutions.” The second major reason why the term “spring” is misleading is because it implies a cyclicity which does apparently not exist. Given the vastly different outcomes of revolutions (e.g., when comparing Tunisia and Egypt) and tragic courses in some countries (notably in Syria, Yemen, and Libya), the uniform idea of a “spring” which is necessarily followed by summer is a misnomer. On the other hand, the term “spring” is reminiscent of the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Apart from the fact that this reminiscence is Eurocentric, the term denies the different contexts of both sets of events and thus suggests a similarity that did not exist. As is argued in the following sections, the Arab revolutions were based on a complex mixture of social, economic, institutional, and political reasons (e.g., Moghadam and Decker 2014: 74). The narrative implicit to the adaptation of the word “spring” from the “Prague Spring” focuses primarily on a struggle for democracy against autocracy and thus masks the complexity of underlying reasons for the Arab revolutions. Despite being a most inappropriate term, “Arab Spring” has unfortunately become a household name. Therefore it is close to inevitable to use it even in scientific discourse. Consequently, whenever used in this book, the term is put in quotation marks to emphasize its highly problematic nature.
- 2.
References
Acemoğlu D, Robinson JA (2012) Why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity and poverty. Profile Books, London
Amin M, Assaad R, Al-Baharna N, Derviş K, Desai RM, Dhillon NS, Galal A, Ghanem H, Graham C, Kaufmann D, Kharas H, Page J, Salehi-Isfahani D, Sierra K, Yousef TM (2012) After the spring: economic transformations in the Arab world. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Ben Shitrit L (2014) Israel. In: Lust E (ed) The Middle East, 13th edn. CQ Press, Thousand Oaks, pp 537–563
Benner M (2017) From clusters to smart specialization: tourism in institution-sensitive regional development policies. Economies 5(3):26. http://www.mdpi.com/2227-7099/5/3/26/pdf. (29.07.2017)
Bouroujerdi M (2014) Iran. In: Lust E (ed) The Middle East, 13th edn. CQ Press, Thousand Oaks, pp 478–506
Cammett M (2014) The political economy of development in the Middle East. In: Lust E (ed) The Middle East, 13th edn. CQ Press, Thousand Oaks, pp 161–208
Dhillon N, Yousef T (2009) Introduction. In: Dhillon N, Yousef T (eds) Generation in waiting: the unfulfilled promise of young people in the Middle East. Brookings, Washington, DC, pp 1–10
Eder M (2014) Turkey. In: Lust E (ed) The Middle East, 13th edn. CQ Press, Thousand Oaks, pp 830–865
Glückler J, Bathelt H (2017) Institutional context and innovation. In: Bathelt H, Cohendet P, Henn S, Simon L (eds) The Elgar companion to innovation and knowledge creation. Elgar, Cheltenham, Northampton, pp 121–137
Glückler J, Lenz R (2016) How institutions moderate the effectiveness of regional policy: a framework and research agenda. Invest Reg – J Reg Res 36(2016):255–277
Gobat J, Kostial K (2016) Syria’s conflict economy. IMF Working Paper No. 16/123. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp16123.pdf. (30.06.2016)
Hertog S (2016) Is there an Arab variety of capitalism? Economic Research Forum Working Paper No. 1068. https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1068.pdf. (02.03.2017)
Lynch M (2014) Regional international relations. In: Lust E (ed) The Middle East, 13th edn. CQ Press, Thousand Oaks, pp 367–395
Moghadam VN, Decker T (2014) Social change in the Middle East. In: Lust E (ed) The Middle East, 13th edn. CQ Press, Thousand Oaks, pp 73–106
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Benner, M. (2020). Middle Eastern and North African Economies After the “Arab Spring”. In: A New Arab Social Contract?. Economic Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19270-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19270-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19269-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19270-9
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)