Introduction
At the end of 2010, a series revolutions against authoritarian governments started in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain in the following year (Lynch, 2014). Angry over years of economic stagnation and authoritarian abuse of power, citizens occupied symbolic squares in cities throughout the Middle East demanding democratic reforms and stronger welfare states. While these revolutions started in a similar fashion, they had very different outcomes. In Egypt, the military chose more peaceful measures to deal with protestors by coopting the opposition with the promise of reforms. Violence against civilians was limited. After two years of political and economic stability, the military returned to power. In contrast, the Syrian military met protestors with lethal force and refused to make concessions. The result was a long and brutal civil war that has since been framed as an ethnic conflict between the country’s Alawi minority and the Sunni majority. Why did the Egyptian and Syrian governments respond so differently to these protest movements? Furthermore, why are some countries more prone to civil war and ethnic conflict than others?
To shed some light on these questions, I will conduct a small-n comparison of Egypt and Syria by using John Stuart Mill’s method of difference. Despite the similarities between these states, Syria has experienced far more civil war and ethnic violence since obtaining independence from colonial rule (UCDP, 2017). In contrast, Egypt has been relatively tranquil. Syria’s ethnic diversity cannot explain the differences between these case studies since Egypt also has a demographically significant minority group—the Coptic Christian population (Minorities at Risk, 2018). It is my contention that it is not ethnic fractionalization on its own but the level of political, economic, and social inequality between ethnic groups that makes some countries more prone to violent conflict than others (Cederman, et. al, 2011.) If in the process of state formation one ethnic group—particularly a minority—comes to dominate the political system and the economy at the expense of other demographically relevant groups, this will have a long lasting impact on how the state deals with domestic conflict in the future.
Literature Review
While the impact of ethnicity on civil war is now a prominent topic of research among comparativists, it is only relatively recently that the issue has gained traction in the field. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, scholars paid far more attention to interstate wars and ideological conflicts than they did to intrastate wars and ethnic violence (Newman and DeRouen, 2014). Most of the civil wars in this era tended to be proxy conflicts of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a violent contest to spread their economic ideology throughout the globe, so civil wars were usually framed as a divide between capitalists and communists. In fact, many modernization theorists believed that civil wars, particular those over ethnicity and religion, would gradually disappear as economic and political development spread throughout the globe (Almond and Coleman, 1960).
Numerous scholars continue to share this modernist view of conflict. According to James Fearon and David Laitin, countries suffering from poverty are more likely to experience civil war. In poor countries, the state lacks the tax revenue to build a good infrastructure, enforce laws, and coopt citizens through investment in a welfare state (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). In contrast, high levels of economic development leads to improvements in literacy, health, and other measurements of well-being, which should decrease grievances against the state among the population. Scholars of rentierism such as Michael Ross have also argued that dependence on the export of rents such as oil and mineral resources entrenches authoritarian leaders into power, discourages economic development, and often gives rebels easy access to lootable resources (Ross, 2004). Industrialized countries, which have greater economic diversification, should suffer from less conflict. Furthermore, some scholars have argued that democracies are less likely to have civil war as they have institutional mechanisms to alleviate conflict and a political culture that emphasizes consensus over coercion (Regan and Norton, 2005). Democracies are also far less likely to go to war with each other for these reasons (Maoz and Russert, 1993). From this perspective, global economic development, the spread of democracy, and the end of the cold war should have decreased the amount of civil wars.
Nevertheless, the number of civil wars have actually increased since the 1970’s, and far more civil wars have been framed as being ethnic rather than ideological in nature (Newman and DeRouen, 2014). This was particularly true in the Middle East where transnational Islamist movements and ethnic civil wars in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Syria, and Yemen have captured the attention of both media outlets and academic institutions. What explains this contradiction?
Beginning with Donald Horowitz’s inductive 1985 study Ethnic Groups in Conflict, academics began to have a more rigorous debate on ethnicity and its impact on conflict (Horowitz, 1985). From this debate on ethnicity emerged two different schools of thought: primordialism and constructivism. Primordialists argue that ethnicity is a form of identity that is intransient, highly salient, and has its roots in the premodern past (Van Evera). Therefore, if a country has a greater degree of ethnic diversity, this will increase the chances of conflict. There is a debate over the mechanisms that drive ethnic conflict among proponents of this school of thought. Some rational-choice scholars have argued that ethnic groups may have different political, economic, and social preferences, which can potentially lead to a conflict over control of the state. Furthermore, social identity theorists have argued that there is a less rational and more psychological mechanism that drives conflict as individuals have an emotional attachment to their identity and may lash out violently against perceived threats to the survival of their group. Instrumentalists have argued that political entrepreneurs play a big role in fostering ethnic conflict. In an ethnically diverse environment, politicians will be motivated to obtain power by exacerbating social cleavages in a process known as ethnic outbidding (Posner, 2004). From the primordialist perspective, conflicts may be more common in the developing world due to the manner in which European colonizers divided up many countries in Asia and Africa among themselves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century without regard to the ethnic groups that lived in this part of the world. This may have caused civil wars in the aftermath of independence from colonial rule.
Another group of scholars called constructivists have been critical of the primordialist conception of ethnicity. Constructivists argue that ethnic identity is far more transient and flexible than primordialists claim. For example, when there are cross-cutting cleavages, individuals can have multiple identities from which to choose, and some of those identities may be more politically salient than others (Hale, 2004). Furthermore, components of ethnicity such as language, religion, and nationality can change over the course of a generation. Institutionalist scholars such as Arrend Lijphart and Donald Horowitz have argued that institutions can also play a great role in either instigating or mitigating conflict (Horowitz, 1985; Lijphart, 2004). If institutions promote power sharing between ethnic groups through quotas in the legislative and executive branches, federalism, and economic redistribution to poorer groups, this can potentially mitigate conflict. Other factors such as the population size of the group (Posner, 2004), where they are spatially concentrated, the existence of coethnics across the border (Siroky and Hale), and the level of inequality between groups (Cederman, et al., 2011) also can influence the saliency of ethnic cleavages. Constructivists also argue that ethnic identity as we conceive of it today is a modern phenomenon since our identities are heavily shaped by educational institutions, mass media, and state propaganda. These linkage institutions can either mitigate or exacerbate conflict between groups depending on how they frame issues. The empirical evidence seems to show greater support for the constructivist conception of ethnicity. When Albert Alessina’s Ethnic Fractional Index has been regressed on civil war while controlling for other pertinent variables, ethnic diversity often has had either a substantially weak effect or no statistically significant effect at all on civil war occurrence and duration (Cederman, et al., 2011). Despite the claims of primordialists, simply having more diversity will not necessarily make a country more likely to have conflict.
A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Ethnic Conflict and Civil War
Why then have certain countries experienced more ethnic conflict than others? Furthermore, why have the number of ethnic conflicts increased in recent years? It is my contention that civil war will be more likely when political, economic, and social inequalities between ethnic groups are higher. These inequalities will be shaped by the manner in which state institutions distribute resources to groups. To understand how horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups impact civil war, it is necessary to first conceptualize and operationalize these variables.
The dependent variable is civil war onset, duration, and intensity. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen define civil war as “a violent conflict between a government and an organized rebel group. (Newman and DeRouen, 2014)” The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has collected data on conflict from 1946 to the present, labels a country as having a minor armed conflict if there is between 25 and 999 deaths in a calendar year, and it is labeled as a civil war if there are over 1,000 battle related deaths (UCDP, 2017). The observations in the data set are dyadic conflicts between a rebel group and the state. These intrastate conflicts include coups d’état, revolutions to overthrow the state, and wars of secession in peripheral regions. In terms of comparing Syria and Egypt, I am interested in not only the onset of new conflicts but the length of time they lasted and the intensity of the conflict in terms of the total amount of estimated deaths.
The independent variable is horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups. Donald Horowitz defines ethnicity as consisting of “groups differentiated by color, language, and religion; it covers tribes, races, nationalities, and castes. (Horowitz, 1985)” According to Horowitz, ethnicity is ascriptive in that it is a form of identity passed down to children either through genetics or socially by one’s parents at a very young age. Traits such as skin color and national origin are given to us from birth, and other components of ethnicity such as language are very difficult to change throughout the course of one’s lifetime. While some scholars have argued that religion should not be included in this definition since conversion is something that is technically very easy, other scholars have argued that religion is usually passed down to children at a very young age (Brubaker, 2013). There is often an incredible amount of social and political pressure to maintain one’s religious identity. Religion is not just a set of beliefs in the supernatural and a set of superstitious rituals but a form of identity that binds a community together.
While ethnicity has a sticky component in that it is difficult to change, ethnic identities can differ in terms of their salience or importance to an individual. The political saliency of ethnic identity is affected by horizontal inequalities, which are political, economic, and social divides between groups (Cedermen, et al., 2011). Political inequalities refers to which ethnic groups have control over the institutions of government including the legislature, the bureaucracies, the military, and the courts. Economic inequality refer to the distribution of wealth across groups as well as other issues like the level of housing segregation and discrimination in the work force. Finally, social inequality refers to the level of respect the state has for the traditions and cultures of different ethnicities. Modern states might discriminate against an ethnic group by trying to impose another language on the group or not recognizing a religious holiday.
Horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups can lead to civil war due to what Ted Gurr called relative deprivation (Gurr, 1970). When certain groups do better than others economically and they receive better treatment from the state in terms of the enforcement of laws and jobs in the bureaucracy and the military, this can lead to the development of animosity between groups. Not only will the oppressed ethnic group have grievances against the state but the more powerful group may react with hostility to protect those privileges if they feel threatened. Fearing retribution if they lose power, the ethnic group in control may be more violent to the opposition. This helps explain why modernity may have led to more conflict in some countries. If countries that are developing economically disproportionally distribute the benefits of modernity to some groups over others, this can foster animosity and violent conflict. Furthermore, the spread of democracy throughout the globe has led to the spread of liberal norms such as civil liberties, political rights, and ethnic equality. States that continue to oppress the rights of minorities are operating in an international environment where there is less tolerance of such oppression. Political entrepreneurs may have more legitimacy to use ethnic grievances to mobilize fellow co-ethnics in defense of the rights of their group.
Methodology
To analyze the mechanisms that connect the independent variable with the dependent variable, I will use John Stuart Mill’s comparative method of difference (Hoffman, 2011). This method requires choosing case studies that are relatively similar to control for factors that may affect civil war. Ideally, the two case studies should only differ on the dependent and independent variables so that the existence of causality can be demonstrated. Of course, there are no examples of perfect case selections since even the most similar countries have many differences between them, but the researcher should choose case studies that come closest to fitting this ideal standard. This method has several advantages over large-n quantitative analyses. While comparing large number of countries is good for external validity and allows us to test whether there is a general correlation between an independent and dependent variable, it is also very difficult to analyze the causal mechanisms that connect those variables while using nothing but large data sets. By analyzing only a few countries, we can using historical process tracing and thick description to demonstrate causality.
The two countries I will be comparing are Egypt and Syria. It is a good comparison because they are similar on a large number of variables that are correlated with civil war but differ in a few key respects that allow us to test this theory (Schwedler and Gerner, 2008). Both countries are relatively similar geographically in that they are located in the Middle East, are adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea, and have relatively dry climates. In terms of ethnicity, both states are overwhelming Sunni Muslim (85 percent in Egypt and 77 percent in Syria), have a large religious minority that is approximately 10 to 15 percent of the population (Coptic Christians in Egypt and the Alawi in Syria), and have several smaller religious and linguistic minorities (Minorities at Risk, 2018). Over 90 percent of the population in both countries speaks Arabic. Historically, both states were part of the Ottoman Empire prior to colonization, were colonized by European powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gained independence after World War II, and experienced revolutions in 2011. Following independence, both states have been dominated by authoritarian regimes—specifically, military dictatorships founded on Arab Nationalist ideology. These regimes fought several wars against the Israeli state in 1948, 1956 (Only Egypt), 1967, and 1973. Economically, both countries following independence were mainly dependent on agriculture and had a GDP per capita of around $500 per person. Over the course of the next half century, each nation struggled with economic development due to inefficient state bureaucracies, clientelism, and an overdependence on rents such as oil (approximately ten percent of each country’s economy), transport rents such as oil pipelines (Syria) or the Suez Canal (Egypt), remittances from relatives working in the Gulf and the West, and foreign aid (Schlumberger, 2008). Prior to the revolution in 2010, both countries had a GDP per capita of approximately $3,000 per year (World Bank, 2018). These similarities control for many of the economic, political, and social variables that potentially impact the onset, duration, and intensity of civil war.
These countries also have several key differences that will demonstrate the existence of causality between the dependent and independent variables. First, civil war onset, duration, and intensity has been far worse in Syria since the country gained independence from France in 1946 (UCDP, 2017). According to the Uppsala Armed Conflict Data set, Syria had 21 dyadic conflicts between the state and an organized rebel group in a calendar year. These conflicts can be grouped into three different episodes: (1) violence involving over a dozen successful coups and failed coup attempts from 1949 to 1970 (the violence only reached the threshold to be labeled as a conflict in 1967), (2) a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency against the government from 1979 to 1983, and (3) a civil war from 2011 to 2017 between the government and the secular Free Syrian Army, Islamist militias such as the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State, and Kurdish militias such as the People’s Protection Units. In contrast, Egypt only had one coup following independence in 1952 and there were only 11 dyadic conflicts that had 25 or more deaths. There were two major sets of conflicts: the government’s struggle against an Islamic insurgent group called Jama’a Islamiyya in central Egypt from 1993 to 1998, and a conflict in the Sinai against Islamist insurgents such as Ansar Bayt al Muqdis and the Islamic State starting in 2013. In both Syria and Egypt, conflicts against Islamist groups had an ethnic framing as Islamists often targeted religious minorities, secular figures, and members of the government with acts of violence and terrorism. For their part, both states have used these acts of terrorism to convince minority ethnic groups that they are the best defense against Islamists. They also have used Islamist violence to convince their populations that authoritarian restrictions on freedom are necessary to insure security. However, there is a massive difference in terms of the intensity of violence: Egypt’s conflicts only witnessed a little over two thousand battle related deaths since 1946 whereas Syria witnessed over 270,395 deaths according to the UCDP’s Battle-Related Deaths dataset. This is in spite of the fact that Egypt’s population is approximately four times larger (World Bank, 2018). Insurgencies in Egypt lacked a widespread base of support whereas Syria’s insurgencies involved mass mobilization of individuals against the state. Furthermore, Syria’s wars have witnessed the destruction of entire cities, hundreds of thousands of indirect deaths caused by the wars, and millions of internally and externally displaced migrants (Lynch, 2014).
One of the key differences between these countries to explain the variation in the dependent variable are the horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups. Since the colonial era, Syria’s minorities have dominated the government, and after 1969, the Alawite minority has had the most power (Owen, 2004). The Alawi have used their control of the state to disproportionally distribute resources to their group (Eibl, 2017). In Egypt, it is the Sunni Muslim majority who has dominated the government. While there is discrimination against religious minorities in Egypt, the country’s Coptic Christian community has relative economic parity with the Muslim majority, and the Coptic Church has been coopted by the state (Minorities at Risk, 2018). A historical comparison of Egypt and Syria will demonstrate the mechanisms that connect the independent and dependent variables. The differences in the power dynamics between ethnic groups in Syria and Egypt were established during colonial rule, and this would affect how each authoritarian regime dealt with political opposition following independence. I will briefly analyze the following sequence of historical epochs to demonstrate the connection between the independent and dependent variables: European colonization, the transition to independence, the decline and end of the Cold War, and the 2011 Arab Spring.
Historical Process Tracing: Egypt versus Syria
Egypt and Syria both had some similarities in terms of their experiences under colonial rule (Schwedler and Gerner, 2008). In 1882, Egypt was invaded by the British, and what is now Syria was invaded by allied forces at the end of WWI. Syria was carved out of the Arab lands of the former Ottoman Empire and given as a mandate to the French. In both colonies, the British and French had little interest in promoting industrial development or education. Instead, they were more concerned with extracting agricultural commodities. While they built rail ways, electrical lines, and a system of modern canals to promote agricultural efficiency, they failed to invest in industrial development.
Despite these similarities, there were also important differences that would structure the nature of ethnic relations over the following century. The British form of rule in Egypt was indirect from the beginning (Owen, 2004). Prior to the British invasion, Egypt was ruled by a dynasty founded by an Ottoman governor named Mohamed Ali in the early nineteenth century. Instead of overthrowing the dynasty, the British relied on their descendants to rule by proxy. While the British directly controlled foreign affairs and the Suez Canal, they relied on this dynasty to control domestic affairs. After a revolt against British rule in 1919, the British gave further autonomy by allowing the Egyptians to establish a parliament with legislative powers. While they only used British officers to staff the highest ranks of the military, they trained Sunni Arab officers to fill the middle and lower ranks of the officer corp. The Coptic Christian minority benefited from increased trade and tourism with Europe, but they were not given special favor in the armed forces. The situation in Syria was very different. From 1920 to 1936, Syria was ruled directly by the French, and they were not given autonomy until 1936. Furthermore, the French relied on the Alawite, Druze, Kurdish, and Christian minorities to fill the ranks of the officer corps. (Horowitz, 1985) In other words, the French played the game of divide and conqueror with the country’s ethnic groups.
Why the differences in the style of colonial rule? First of all, World War I witnessed the complete collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which led to the French filling the power vacuum that was left in Syria (Schwedler and Gerner, 2008). On the other hand, the British were able to rely on a dynasty that was still intact after they invaded. French direct rule was far more violent as a result. The second difference was the spatial concentration of minorities. In France, the Alawite minority is concentrated in their own region of the country—the coastal region around the port city of Latakia. Sunni Muslims are concentrated in the large cities of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, which are all located west of the anti-Lebanon mountain range—a series of mountains that run from north to south along the coast of the Greater Syrian region. Other small minorities such as the Druze and the Kurds are also spatially concentrated in their own regions. To divide and conquer the population, the French relied on the support of minority groups. It was very common for European colonial powers to rely on minorities in peripheral regions to fill the ranks of the military. The reason why is that it was easier to police the majority of the population using troops that were not on familiar terms with the local population (Horowitz, 1985). The British had no such option in Egypt. Over 99 percent of the population was concentrated along the Nile River, which provides the country with the vast majority of its water. Christians in Egypt live side-by-side with their Muslim counterparts. Even at the local level, neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria—the country’s two largest cities—are often intermixed. The British had no peripheral region in Egypt from which to draw troops.
The differences in the style of colonial rule had consequences for the transition to independence. From the early to mid-twentieth century, both Egypt and Syria saw the rise of political movements calling for the end of British and French rule (Owen, 2004). Some of these movements supported liberal democracy. Others supported Arab Nationalism, socialism, and communism. In reaction to the influence of Western norms and customs, Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood formed to resist the spread of Western hegemony. While the British and French were initially successful in using a mixed of cooptation and coercion to suppress these movements, European powers no longer had the resources to maintain control of their empires by the end of World War II. In the years after 1945, the French and British militaries would gradually withdraw from the region. Parliaments in Egypt and Syria, lacking a tradition of consensus and dealing with severe political and economic instability, failed to form stable governments in the aftermath of colonial rule. For many military officers, a breaking point was reached when their governments lost an embarrassing war against the newly formed state of Israel in 1948.
While both Egypt and Syria experienced military coups d’état in the aftermath of independence, the differences could not be more striking. Egypt had a single coup led by a group known as the Free Officers Movement in 1952 (Owen, 2004). Over the next two years, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Sunni Muslim who was one of the Free Officers, was able to centralize control of the country by developing a cult of personality around himself. In contrast, Syria had over a dozen coups from 1949 to 1970. Factions in the military were based on ethnicity, and coups were led by different officers from the Alawite, Kurdish, and Druze minorities. Following each coup, the officers had difficult establishing trust with the population and with other military officers. Gradually, different ethnic minorities were purged from the officer corp until the Alawite minority emerged victorious by 1970 under the leadership of Hafez al Assad.
The differences in the transition to independence had consequences for how the authoritarian military regimes consolidated their power. Both regimes did gravitate towards the Soviet Union due to mistrust of the West following the end of colonialism (Eibl, 2016). Abdel Nasser and most of the military governments in Syria gravitated towards Arab Nationalism and Socialist policies to foster economic development in the late 1950’s and the 1960’s. Both governments increased the capacity of the state, built state-owned industries, and used development aid from the Soviet Union to invest in projects such as the Aswan Dam in Egypt. However, authoritarian leaders in both states had very different strategies for dealing with opposition to state authorities. While Egypt’s military regime did use coercion, it also relied heavily on cooptation through the expansion of the welfare state. According to Ferdinand Eibl, Egypt’s welfare state was larger than Syria’s in part due to the differences in the saliency of ethnic cleavages. In Egypt, welfare was distributed in a more homogeneous manner across the entire population. In contrast, Syria distributed a disproportionate amount of goods to the Alawite minority, and relied far more on police surveillance and state violence to control opposition groups. The coalition that rules Syria is far smaller than in Egypt. As a result, the Syrian state has had a greater problem with legitimacy while Egypt’s authoritarian regime has been relatively soft in comparison.
The differences between these authoritarian regimes led to different responses to the changing circumstances of the Cold War (Bogaert, 2013). Starting in the 1970’s, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States began to ease, and as the Soviet Union fell behind economically, American political hegemony spread throughout the globe. Many states in the developing world that were once allies of the Soviet Union had to foster better relations with the United States to receive economic aid to bolster their struggling economies. Receiving American aid meant governments had to open their countries to foreign direct investment and their political systems to democratic forms of electoral contestation. While Egypt officially switched allegiances in 1979 with the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel and accepting two billion a year in aid from America, Syria continued its relationship with the Soviet Union (and after 1991, Russia). While Egypt opened its authoritarian system to the West, Syrian maintained its alliance with Russia when the Cold War ended.
In many ways, Egypt and Syria had similar economic crises in the 1970’s (Schwedler and Gerner, 2008). Both countries had experimented with socialist polices after World War II and had disappointing outcomes economically. State owned industries were inefficient, they overemployed workers, and they failed to export a significant amount of goods. Authoritarianism led to the spread of clientelism and corruption within the state bureaucracies. Populations in both states were also growing, placing a strain on their welfare states—particularly, the growing cost of bread and energy subsidies were draining the treasuries of these regimes. Both countries had also overspent on their militaries as a result of several wars with Israel. As a result of these problems, internal opposition to these governments was growing as political Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood were attracting greater support. Many young Muslim men had traveled to the Arab Gulf in the midst of the post-1973 oil boom and were returning with more conservative religious ideals. Pressure on the state to implement reforms was growing. With these problems mounting, why then did only Egypt switch sides in the Cold War to take advantage of American foreign aid?
Egypt’s authoritarian regime had more flexibility to open up its economic and political system than did Syria (Schlumberger, 2007). Accustomed to using cooptation to control the opposition, Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat (1970-1981) dealt with the economic crisis of the 1970’s by making substantial political and economic reforms. He created a new constitution in 1974 that allowed for multiple political parties to exist. Furthermore, he opened up the economy to allow domestic and foreign businessmen greater autonomy from the state. Political prisoners arrested under the Nasser regime—particularly, members of the Muslim Brotherhood—were released from jail. It was a controlled opening in that opposition political parties were never allowed to win elections and domestic businessmen required connections with the state to operate their businesses. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood could only run for parliament as independents. Nevertheless, the partial reforms weakened opposition against the state and allowed for greater amounts of foreign direct investment and American aid to flow into the country. Islamist charity networks and NGO’s were given more leeway to operate, and Western businesses were allowed to move into the country. The reforms didn’t completely quell the opposition as the state had to occasionally use coercison to suppress radical Islamist groups such as what happened with a conflict against Jama’a al Islamiyya in the mid-1990’s, but violence against the state was limited. After Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a radical Islamist in 1981, his successor Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011) continued his policies.
In contrast, the Syrian state, fearing what would happen if opposition groups were given the ability to organize, continued to rely heavily on coercion and Russian military aid to suppress opposition groups (Owen, 2004). The Assad regime was bolstered with military aid from Iran after the 1979 revolution as well. Iran’s revolution led to the deposing of a pro-American government and was replaced by a Shi’a theocracy led by Ayatollah Khomeini. The theocracy sought to spread its influence in the region by supporting Shi’a minorities in the region such as the Alawi in Syria and the Twelver Shi’a in Lebanon. Consequently, the Assad regime kept its society and economy closed from the outside world with the help of Russian and Iranian military aid. When members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the town of Hama attempted to rebel against the state beginning in the late 1970’s, the Syrian government eventually responded by bombing the city in 1982. While Egypt’s government coopted the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria’s government rarely tolerated any form of opposition. After Hafez al Assad’s death in 2000, his son Bashar al Assad (2000-present) continued to use his father’s strategies for dealing with political opposition.
We now have a better understanding as to why the Egyptian and Syrian militaries responded very differently to 2011 revolutions (Lynch, 2014). In many ways, these protest movements had similar dynamics. Each country had suffered from years of authoritarian oppression and economic mismanagement. The economic situation was made worse in both country by the 2008 financial crisis in the West, which eventually led to the decline of oil prices. With less access to rents, states in the Arab world experienced economic downturns and cuts to the welfare state. There were less jobs available in the Arab Gulf. Furthermore, the spread of the internet and social media over the 2000’s allowed opposition activists a freer space to mobilize against their regimes and made it easier to spread information. Each country saw the rise of protest movements led by both liberal and Islamist political movements demanding political and economic reform as a result. Following the outbreak of a successful revolution in Tunisia at the end of 2010, activists in Egypt and Syria were inspired to start their own protest movements.
Nevertheless, both governments responded very differently due to the different relationship between ethnic groups. In Egypt, the government encountered an ethnically diverse group of protestors occupying cities throughout the country. Muslims and Coptic Christians came out to protest the regime, so the government could not frame the protestors as consisting of Islamist terrorists. Additionally, Egypt’s American ally placed pressure on the Egyptian state to respond with peaceful reforms instead of using violence against protestors. The Egypt state, long accustomed to dealing with opposition through political and economic reforms, partially opened up the system to get protestors off the street. The heads of the Security Council of the Armed Forces forced the country’s long-serving military dictator Hosni Mubarak to step down from power and elections were promised for the future. While the democratic transition failed to materialize as the military returned to power two years later, violence against civilians was relatively limited.
In contrast, protests in Syria were quickly framed as a Sunni-Alawite conflict. The government has claimed that protestors are terrorists attempting to overthrow the state. The vast majority of Alawite soldiers and civil servants remained loyal to the regime while the majority of defections came from the Sunnis serving in the administration. With strong support from Russia and Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, the Syrian state met protestors with machine gun fire. While there was initially a strong secular faction among the rebels that formed the Free Syrian Army, the opposition quickly became radicalized and Islamist groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State attracted a large number of supporters. Since the conservative Arab Gulf states have supported Sunni Islamist groups in the conflict, they had the resources to attract supporters to their cause. This has fed into Assad’s narrative that the opposition groups are not supporters of democracy but radical Islamists who will massacre religious minorities. The end result has been a devastating civil war that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Conclusion
This comparison between Egypt and Syria reveals some of the mechanisms that connect ethnic diversity with civil war. Simply having ethnic diversity does not explain why states have problems with violence. Instead, the level of horizontal inequalities between groups can potentially create animosity and spark conflict. This is why Alberto Alesina’s Fractionalization Index has been a weak predictor of civil war in past studies (Cederman, et al., 2011). While this study shows how ethnic diversity can foster conflict in one country but not another depending on the level of inequality between groups, it suffers from problems with external validity. Does this theory apply elsewhere? To test this theory elsewhere, I recommend conducting large-n studies that measure horizontal inequalities as an independent variable. When operationalizing ethnicity as a variable in large-n studies, it is better to measure the level of inequality between demographically relevant groups rather that the total amount of diversity. I strongly recommend using relatively new data sets that measure horizontal inequalities such as Ethnic Power Relations Index to test the relationship between ethnicity and conflict.
Work Cited
Albrecht, Holger and Dina Bishara, 2011. “Back on Horseback: The Military and Political Transformation in Egypt,” Middle East Law and Governance, 3: 13-23.
Albrecht, Holger. 2012. “Authoritarian Transformation or Transition from Authoritarianism? Insights on Regime Change in Egypt,” in Arab Spring in Egypt, edited by Bahgat Korany and Rabab El-Mahdi. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
Allal, Amin and Florian Kohstall. 2010. “Opposition within the State: Governments in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia,” In Contentious Politics in the Middle East, edited by Holger Albrecht. Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 181-204.
Barany, Zoltan. 2012. “Comparing the Arab Revolts: The Role of the Military,” Journal of Democracy, 22(4): 28-39.
Bogaert, Koenraad. 2013. “Contextualizing the Arab Revolts: the Politics behind Three Decades of Neoliberalism in the Arab World,” Middle East Critique, 22(3): 213-234.
Brubaker, Rogers and David Laitin. “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 423-52.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2013. “Language, Religion, and the Politics of Difference,” Nations and Nationalism, 19(1).
Brumberg, Daniel. 2002 “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy, 13(4): 56-68.
Brush, Stephen. 1996. “Dynamics of Theory Change in the Social Sciences: Relative Deprivation and Collective Violence.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 4: 523-545.
Cederman, Lars-Erik and L. Girardin. 2007. “Beyond Fractionalization: Mapping Ethnicity onto Nationalist Insurgencies.” American Political Science Review, 101(1): 187-193.
Cederman, et al. 2011. “Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison.” American Political Science Review, 105(3): 478-495.
Chandra, Kanchan. 2006. “What is Ethnic Identity and Does it Matter?” American Political Science Review, 9: 397-424.
Collier, Paul and Anke Hoeffler. 2004. "Greed and Greivance in Civil War," Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4): 563-595.
“Correlates of War Project,” http://www.correlatesofwar.org/, 2018.
Eibl, Ferdinand. 2016. "Social Dictatorships: The Political Economy of the Welfare State in the Middle East and North Africa," St. Antony's College, dissertation.
Fearon, J.D, and David Laitin. 2003. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, 97: 75-90.
Fearon, James. 2005. “Primary Commodities Exports and Civil War,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49(4): 483-507.
Haddad, Bassam. 2012. “Syria’s State Bourgeoisie: An Organic Backbone for the Regime,” Middle East Critique, 21(3): 231-257.
Hale, Henry E. 2004. “Explaining Ethnicity,” Comparative Political Studies, 37(4): 458-485.
Hale, Henry. 2013. “Regime Change Cascades: What We Have Learned from the 1848 Revolutions to the Arab Uprisings,” Annual Review of Political Science, 16: 331-353.
Hinnebush, Raymond. 2010. “Toward a Historical Sociology of State Formation in the Middle East,” Middle East Critique, 19(3): 201-16.
Heydemann, Steven. 2014. “America’s Response to the Arab Uprisings: US Foreign Assistance in an Era of Ambivalence,” Mediterranean Politics, 19(3): 299-317.
Hofmann, Urs and Michael Baumgartner. 2011. “Determinism and the Method of Difference,” Theoria, 26, 2(71): 155-176.
Horowitz, Donald. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. University of California Press: California.
Langohr, Vickie. 2004. "Too Much Civil Society, Too Little Politics: Egypt and Liberalizing Arab Regimes," Comparative Politics, 36(2):181-204.
Lynch, Marc, ed. The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East. Columbia University Press: New York, 2014.
Kadhim, Abbas, ed. Governance in the Middle East and North Africa. Routledge: New York, 2013
Korany, Bahgat, ed. Arab Human Development in the Twenty-First Century: The Primacy of Empowerment. The American University in Cairo Press: Egypt, 2014.
“Minorities at Risk,” http://www.mar.umd.edu/, 2018.
Munif, Yasser. 2013. "The Arab Revolts: the Old is Dying and the New cannot be Born," Rethinking Marxism, 25(2): 202-217.
Newman, Edward and Karl DeRouen, eds. 2014. Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars. Routledge: London.
Owen, Roger. 2004. State, Power, and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East. Routledge: London.
Posner, Daniel N. 2004. “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi.” American Political Science Review, 98(4).
Posusney, Marsha Pripstein. 2002. “Multiparty Elections in the Arab World: Institutional Engineering and Oppositional Strategies,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 36(4): 34-59.
Ross, M. 2004. “What do we know about Natural Resources and Civil War?” JPR, 41: 337-356.
Sambanis, Nicholas. 2001. “Do Ethnic and Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45(3): 259-282.
Schwedler, Jillian, and Deborah Gerner. 2008. Understanding the Contemporary Middle East. Lynne Rienner Publishers: Boulder.
Schlumberger, Oliver. Debating Arab Authoritarianism: Dynamics and Durability in Nondemcoratic Regimes. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2007.
Siroky, David S. and Christopher W. Hale. 2017. “Inside Irredentism: A Global Empirical Analysis,” American Journal of Political Science, 61(1): 117-128.
Tessler, Mark, Amaney Jamal, and Michael Robbins. 2012. "New Findings on Arabs and Democracy," Journal of Democracy, 23(4).
“Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP),” http://www.ucdp.uu.se/, 2018.
Van Evera, Stephen. 2001. “Primordialism Lives!” American Political Science Association, 12(1): 20-22.
No comments:
Post a Comment