The Arab Spring has aroused great expectations, with the slogans for “freedom now” and some factions’ liberal dreams of Western-style democracy. But beneath this enthusiasm is an uneasy sense that getting from here to there is not so straightforward. The new limited access order (LAO) framework can help us understand better the implications of the Arab Spring and the realistic options going forward.
The LAO framework focuses on how societies arrive at elite bargains—formal or informal agreements—to divide the available opportunities for rents and profits in the economy. Key groups with the capacity to violently disrupt the bargain do not necessarily disarm, but the rents give them an incentive to restrain actual violence, because violence disrupts the economic activities that generate the rents.
Before the 2011 spring, the Arab countries, like many others in the developing world, were LAOs. They incorporated only a very limited range of organizations in the dominant coalition—ruling families, the army, perhaps one or two loyal political parties, as well as religious organizations and business firms that allied with the political elite or at least stayed out of politics. All other groups usually were marginalized or actively suppressed.
The spring uprisings have brought down or seriously disrupted the existing dominant coalitions in many countries; many new organizations have arisen or come out of the shadows to represent segments of the populace that had no voice or participation before. In the months and years ahead, these countries will be reconstituted as limited access orders, with some changes in the cast of organizations in the dominant coalition. The LAO framework predicts that, even if they hold fair elections, they will not soon become Western European-style democracies.
Almost all groups in these countries, having witnessed the high economic cost of violence, presumably see the value of restoring order. But which organizations will participate in that order, which ones will lead, and which ones will be excluded? What share of the economy’s rents will each group get?
Individuals have been important to answering those questions in the past—Mubarak, Qadaffi, Assad—seeming all the more important because of the media attention paid to them. But the LAO framework reminds us that they exercised power mainly through the organizations tied to them—military, security forces, Baath Parties, etc. Because these organizations have retained their violence potential, their interests and political importance will usually persist, so they are likely to play a role in the evolving political arrangements, even if a leader departs.
While the Arab countries will probably remain limited access orders for the next generation or more, not all LAOs are alike—there is a wide spectrum of possible outcomes (e.g. China vs. Myanmar, Brazil vs. Venezuela, Zambia vs. Democratic Republic of Congo). The experience of other LAOs offers a few guidelines for how to get better outcomes.
First, even as elections in the new Arab LAOs become an arena for competition among organizations, achieving stability will require creating institutions that avoid winner-take-all outcomes. In some countries elections may revert to their old role as rituals to assert the legitimacy of a ruler, but elsewhere, they may become occasions to test the relative ability of competing organizations to mobilize supporters. If elections become winner-take-all contests they risk post-election violence, as occurred, for example, in Kenya, the Kyrgyz Republic, Thailand, and Zimbabwe, where the losing sides rejected an electoral outcome that would have excluded them totally from the rent distribution.
Second, a critical challenge will be to incorporate into the new order some organizations that have violence capacity (broadly conceived) but that may be outside the state structure—such as the Moslem Brotherhood and the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai in Egypt. The LAO framework suggests what might seem at first a radical approach: allow these groups to retain the capacity to defend themselves. From an LAO perspective, the immediate agenda does not require disarmament and assertion of central control over all violence capacity. Rather, tolerating their armed status is a way for the central authority to make credible a commitment not to suppress those groups. (Students of United States history will recognize in this suggestion the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which in the aftermath of the war of independence allowed the state governments to keep control of their own militias.)
Third, international experience shows that sustained improvements in LAOs and moves toward open access have happened in incremental steps rather than via giant leaps. Historically these steps have included greater predictability in the elite bargain. Building institutions that can underpin predictable resolution of conflict between elites—i.e. Rule of law for elites—emerges as the key challenge. As these elite-oriented rule–of-law institutions become stronger over time, they can provide a platform for progressively transforming elite privileges into universal rights. Trying to move forward without investing in these institutional buttresses is a recipe for endless cycles of fragility and disruption.
To try to go straight from revolution to an open access order has never worked and has often led to disruption and more fragility. Even the task of creating a workable limited access order will not be easy—as we see in the examples of Afghanistan, Iraq and Democratic Republic of Congo—but it is feasible, as many successful LAOs show.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Rowan El Shimi
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