From ascendance to marginalization: Role contestation and the rise and decline of the Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab uprisings

This article examines how the Muslim Brotherhood moved from political ascendance after the 2011 Arab uprisings to rapid regional marginalization. Existing explanations have highlighted organizational weaknesses, governing failures, political opportunities, and counter-revolutionary repression. While these accounts explain important aspects of the Brotherhood’s rise and decline, they pay less attention to how the legitimacy of Islamist political participation was reconstructed and contested at the regional level. Drawing on role theory, the article conceptualizes this trajectory as the outcome of processes of role recognition, contestation, and rejection. Brotherhood-affiliated actors initially articulated a role conception, presenting themselves as legitimate democratic participants committed to electoral politics and constitutional governance. In the immediate post-uprising environment, this claim received partial external validation, most notably from Qatar. However, influential regional actors, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and post-2013 Egypt, advanced an alternative role expectation portraying the Brotherhood as a destabilizing transnational movement incompatible with regime stability. Using theory-guided process tracing and discourse analysis of elite speeches and policy actions between 2011 and 2017, the article shows that the Brotherhood’s decline resulted not only from domestic repression but from the regional rejection of a previously available political role.