Consociational Power‐Sharing in the Arab World as Counter‐Revolution

This paper argues that consociational power‐sharing in the Arab world is intrinsically counter‐revolutionary. The academic debate on consociational power‐sharing has largely overlooked this because 1) it pre‐supposes class inequalities and over‐emphasizes state stability; and 2) it is limited by a broader misunderstanding of counter‐revolution, in which the concept is reduced to momentary reactions to revolution. By critiquing class and state assumptions in the consociational power‐sharing literature and presenting a nuanced conceptualization of counter‐revolution, this paper seeks to bring the debate closer to the concurrent revolutionary episodes against the consociational arrangements of Lebanon and Iraq, and to inspire more inclusionary state‐(re)building arrangements in the Arab world.