[MUSIC] The uprisings that transformed the Arab state system from 2010 onwards, have been primarily economically motivated. The slogan used by resident populations was bread, dignity, social justice, and freedom. While clearly no hunger riots, the uprisings and the demand for economic redistribution came as a surprise to many at that particular point. Macroeconomic indicators for most of the Arab world had actually been moving into the right direction for some time. As Aminit Al stated in the introduction to the highly illuminating analysis, After the Spring: Economic Transitions In the Arab World, they write, it is tempting to ascribe the Arab Spring to high levels of unemployment, especially among youth, and the suppression of political options, but that seems to be too narrow and explanation because in country such as Egypt, the available evidence showed gradual improvement in these indicators. By the end of 2010, unemployment in the region had modestly declined, though from high levels. Democratic reforms were taking place, albeit in a slow and incremental fashion, and you people a had a more optimistic outlook on their economic prospects that the elderly. Along with sound economic growth and increasing foreign direct investment, these trends created a false sense of complacency among policy makers over the pace and impact of progress. The so called Arab Spring has been compared to the one other truly transformational social event in the modern Muslim world. The Islamic Revolution in Iran but such comparisons must be taken with some causation. Iranians and Arabs have different cultures, speak different languages, adhere to different sects of Islam, experience their different social uprising are dramatically different global environments, and achieve strikingly different results. There is some truth to the analogy. One similarity that is particularly pertinent is the inability to derive from the economic record a straightforward explanation for what happened. Offering an original explanation of the Iranian Revolution, to which I will return shortly, the American sociologist Charles Kurtzman makes an interesting observation in his book The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, he notes, if we were observing Iran in early 1978 economic data would probably not have led us to predict that a revolution would soon occur. Iran was faring no worse than many other Islamic countries, than other populous oil exporters, or than its own previous recession of 1975. The social groups suffering the most economically were politically quiescent. Indeed, the economy looked ready for a rebound in early 1978. Kurtzman correctly observes a phenomenon that we see replayed 30 years later in the Arab context. While in hindsight, economic indicators did portend trouble. It is psychological, not material impact that changed dramatically and unpredictably within a short period of time. It continues, but this drastic loss of confidence was not accompanied by statistics or other information that would suggest a shift in economic conditions since the previous, promising forecast. What had changed was the emergence of an unexpected protest movement, which cast a new light on economic issues that observers had previously downplayed, leading economic causes to be identified retroactively. This concerns ultimately the fundamental problem of prediction in the social sciences, generally a hypothesis might in hindsight explain the causal chain leading to a certain event. Still it might not be able to predict, ahead of time, whether the causal factors it identifies will in fact bring about that event. The American historian, John Lewis Gaddis, discusses this problem of the predictive power of theoretical models in his 1992 essay, International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War. He grappled with the failure of virtually all scientific models to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse and do so without major war. He acknowledges that all scientific models are incomplete and unreliable guides to the future. Still he exhorts us not to I quote jettison, the scientific approach to the study of international relations, end of quote. We should remind mindful of the inherent limitations of science, and therefore accept also all the other tools at our disposal. Namely, I quote, not just theory, observation, and rigorous calculation, but also narrative, analogy, paradox, irony Intuition, imagination, and not least in importance, style. End of quote. In a remarkable book published five years later and written with the benefit of access to Soviet archives he returns to the early exhalations to mythological flexibility to assert confidently we know know rethinking cold war history. Revising decades of mainstream thinking including most of his own earlier realist writing. He concludes that material factors in hindsight over determined the outcome of the Cold War. At the time, however, they were not perceived by either scholars nor by the people concerned to be determinative. The Cold War ended not because of any discernible change in people's livelihoods or strategic environment, but in what they saw and felt. Like in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, people suddenly realized that the emperor was naked. And once that realization spread, the social reality changed. Even if there was no change at all in the co-material reality. In the same vein, Kurzman offers an analysis of the Iranian Revolution that does not rely on economic or military factors but on their perception by a hitherto docile, fearful population who suddenly became aware that the Shah was metaphorically speaking naked, he writes. People evaluate the 'legitimacy' of a regime on a relative scale, not an absolute scale. To take the example of economic performance; it's not that a regime delivers of fails to deliver a particular level of growth, but that a different regime would have done 'better'- a counterfactual whose attractiveness rises and falls independent of the current regimes, actual economic performance. 'Better' could mean any number of things, including more growth, or a different distribution of economic gains, or non-economic factors that people come to consider more important than growth. What determines the actual realization of rebellion is the perception of a viable alternative to the existing regime. A viable alternative is a movement that seems to have a realistic chance of success. The Iranian Revolutionaries found that viable alternative in Khomeini Islamist Movement. For the would be Arab Revolutionaries in 2010 a coherent alternative to the ancient regimes did not materialize and was never formulated, even in theory. But what certainly did emerge, was the realistic possibility of displacing the old order even if it remained, and remains, unclear what would come to take it's place. The viability of resistance is ultimately hard to measure and impossible to predict. Group psychological phenomenon, namely the belief that the old order is not invulnerable and that its apparent permanence could be challenged through social action. Kurzman ends his book by stressing this psychological element. He writes, this appearance of stability was self-fulfilling: if people expected protest to fail, only the courageous or the foolhardy would participate. WIth such small numbers, protests could not fail to fail. So only as revolution remained unthinkable, it remained undoable. It could come to pass only when large numbers of people began to 'think the unthinkable'. As we will see in the following videos, the realization that the old order was indeed vulnerable and could be displaced through social action suddenly became thinkable. While it remained underdeveloped, highly contested, and apart from the Islamist project, quite literally unthinkable is, which vision of the state should come to replace the authoritarian bargain? [MUSIC]
