Eva Bellin

This chapter explains how strategies and forms of authoritarian rule in the MENA have evolved greatly since the Arab uprisings. Sidestepping normative expectations for democracy and democratization, the chapter shows the primary pathways of change and persistence for many dictatorships. Many autocracies have become personalistic, bucking assumptions that rational leaders should protect themselves with hegemonic parties rather than cronies and sycophants. Most have become far more repressive since the uprisings, despite the costs of ramping up coercion. Others have catalyzed new modes of cultural domination that induce compliance through ideology. This chapter examines the shift in these different domestic practices, showing also at the external level how many regimes have also become imbricated in new networks of international support. These developments enrich prevailing theories about authoritarianism but also show how quickly regional events outpace them.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring. By Fraihat Ibrahim . New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2016. 304p. $40.00. Deeply ensconced in the theory and practice of conflict resolution and drawing on two years of field work in the Middle East and North Africa, Fraihat explores the patterns and possibilities of national reconciliation in three countries: Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia. His work is both prescriptive and descriptive.