Suchergebnisse

In 2006/2007 Turkey became a regional power in the Middle East, a status it has continued to maintain in the context of the Arab Spring. To understand why Turkey only became a regional power under the Muslim AKP government and why this happened at the specific point in time that it did, the paper highlights the self-reinforcing dynamics between Turkey's domestic political-economic transformation in the first decade of this century and the advantageous regional developments in the Middle East at the same time. It concludes that this specific linkage - the "Ankara Moment" - and its regional resonance in the neighboring Middle East carries more transformative potential than the "Washington Consensus" or the "Beijing Consensus" so prominently discussed in current Global South politics

Is violent opposition less likely to occur in subnational regions that have been treated preferentially by the respective country's ruling elite? Many authoritarian regimes try to secure political support by providing critical segments of the population with privileged access to economic or political rents. This study is interested in the effects of this strategy. Our empirical analysis is based on crowdsourcing data on the number and geospatial distribution of fatalities in the Syrian civil war. We also use satellite images of the earth at night to measure spatial variations in access to electricity across Syrian subdistricts; these data are complemented with information from the last Syrian population census. Estimations of fixed-effects logit models confirm the hypothesis that the risk of violence has been lower in subdistricts that had been favored by the ruling regime in terms of preferential access to electricity in times of power shortages. -- regime cooptation ; geographical distribution of violence ; Syria ; civil war ; crowdsourcing data ; nightlights

The survival of eight monarchies during the "Arab Uprisings" of 2011 has put center stage the fundamental question about the durability of this subtype of authoritarian regime. Seen from a broader historical perspective, however, the idea that monarchies have an inherent advantage in retaining power is less evident: a number of authoritarian monarchies broke down and subsequently became republics, while others survived. To account for these divergent long-term pathways the authors compare the 13 current and former Middle Eastern monarchies, as well as their different trajectories. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis they concentrate on five central explanatory factors - namely, US military support, rent revenues, family participation, the monarch's claim to legitimate rule and anti-government protest. The findings support the existence of two broad pathways to monarchical survival - linchpin monarchies, like Jordan and Morocco, versus the dynastic Gulf monarchies - and also reveal a possible third pathway, one which shares linchpin characteristics, but relates to cases on the Arabian Peninsula (Oman, the historical Imamate in North Yemen, and Saudi Arabia)