Rage against the Regime: Terrorist Groups and the Arab Spring

• In Event: Graduate Student Research Lightning Round: Authoritarian Regimes, Contested Spaces

Abstract

The Arab Spring was an extraordinary display of political mobilization on a group and individual level. Dictators across the region were seeing their ability to wield coercive and extractive state capacity considerably weakened, even when they managed to cling to power for more time. The obvious political opportunity structure that appeared in the midst of the revolutions saw youth movements, political parties and civil society bringing their issues to the table and, to varying degrees, succeeding in mobilizing their members. Terrorist groups of the Salafi-Jihadi type were not so clearly mobilizing across the region. Puzzlingly, there was no concerted effort to work towards establishing an Islamic caliphate, for instance, in and around 2011 as we would have anticipated. And so I ask, why didn’t more Salafi-Jihadist groups capitalize on the Arab Spring to achieve some measure of success? In this paper, I develop a new theoretical framework to understanding the variation in Salafi-Jihadi terrorist group success predicated on three elements - the group’s economic networks, competition with Islamist parties and internal ideological cohesion. I then employ a statistical text analysis model to measure ideological cohesion within Salafi-Jihadist group documents as well as qualitative case study analysis to explore economic network and Islamist party competition.

Author

• Mostafa El Sharkawy, University of Michigan