This article examines how the international environment influences the decision-making of opposition actors in the Arab world, with a focus on the communist parties. Theoretically, the article challenges the idea that the process of learning and adaptation that opposition parties have gone through across the Arab world and that allowed them to survive as organizations is the sole product of their interactions with the regime and with other opposition movements. To fully understand when and how they learn/adapt it is crucial to examine the international environment. The article thus employs the concept of external referent to argue that the strength of such referent and what it provides ideologically and materially to opposition movements determines the way in which the latter adapt. Empirically, the article focuses on a set of salient episodes of the history of the Iraqi and Moroccan Communist parties to demonstrate that it is only when the external referent had met its ‘demise’ that such parties adapted fully to their domestic environment. In our case, the external referent is world communism. The analysis provides a novel contribution to the literature on opposition movements in authoritarian setting and highlights the relevance of the external dimension in explaining domestic institutional outcomes.
Cavatorta et al. (Fri,) studied this question.