Variants of Authoritarian Robustness in the Arab Uprisings: An Institutionalist Rentierism Approach

ABSTRACT The Arab Uprisings 2010/11 caused the removal of political leaderships in some countries, whereas no deep political change occurred in other cases. A critical discussion of two main competing approaches to explaining the (lack of) robustness of Arab regimes in the Uprisings—the oil rent stabilization thesis and the thesis of monarchical resilience—reveals that the oil rent stabilization thesis is theoretically sound but faces empirical challenges. To address them, we outline different rent concepts, which then serve as the basis for innovatively developing an approach of institutionalist rentierism. This approach pools an expanded, nuanced version of the rent stabilization thesis with insightful aspects of the thesis of monarchical resilience. After identifying Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, the UAE, and Yemen as critical cases for the present comparative study, we discuss them in more detail, highlighting the relevance of different institutional settings. A major empirical finding is that different experiences with European imperialism often had a significant impact on authoritarian robustness.