Crisis of Democratisation in the Maghreb and North Africa

Abstract

Democratisation in revolutionary times matters to academia and to our social world. Reflecting on the urgent scholarly need among students of Arab and Middle Eastern politics to address the crisis of democratisation is imperative. A line-up of social scientists comes together to do just that: a focused and in-depth engagement with the problematic of the crisis of democratisation. To this end, the contributors in this Special Issue offer a ‘soft’ theorisation of the crisis of democratisation in the context of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its aftermath. Such an undertaking seeks at once context-focused analysis and sensitivity to the ‘specific’. That is, a set of articles that embraces multivocality of specialism, interpretation, methodology and positionality. We address the problematic by focusing on what qualifies as ‘democratic backsliding,’ alternatively called ‘setbacks,’ ‘regressions,’ etc. This is one means for outlining the anatomy of the Arab region’s own ‘democratisation crisis’ over twelve years after the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings that heralded cascading socio-political changes in the region, Maghreb included. What possible comparative representations can be gleaned from our attempt to deconstruct the Arab democratisation crisis? How are they manifested and experienced empirically and discursively? The articles in this Special Issue attempt to contextualise and analyse this phenomenon through diverse case studies, accounting for the social and political matrices in which democratic backsliding is incubated. In so doing, the contributors collectively bring to the fore both commonalities and particularities of Arab polities that can no longer escape the conundrum of ‘reform or perish’. Against the backdrop of haunting ghosts from authoritarian pasts (presents?), the Special Issue is an attempt to study the crisis of democratisation, a confirmation that despite backsliding the imaginaries and horizons of democratic futures have not dimmed.