André Bank, Eva Bellin, Michael Herb, Lisa Wedeen, Sean Yom, and Saloua Zerhouni, Authoritarianism Reconfigured In: The Political Science of the Middle East. Edited by: Marc Lynch, Jillian Schwedler, and Sean Yom, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197640043.003.0002 2 Authoritarianism Reconfgured Evolving Forms of Political Control André Bank, Eva Bellin, Michael Herb, Lisa Wedeen, Sean Yom, and Saloua Zerhouni For decades, the Middle East’s preponderance of ruling monarchies and au- tocratic republics made the region a primary site of research about the social origins, institutional resilience, and political strategies of authoritarianism within comparative politics. Ten the Arab uprisings came and went. For hopeful observers, the revolutionary unrest of 2011–12 promised to inaugu- rate a new era of democratization, echoing the optimism that accompanied the Tird Wave of Democracy in Latin America in the 1980s, as well as the post-Communist transitions that rippled across the Soviet bloc in the 1990s. Yet that great transformation did not happen, and a decade later the regional panorama of governance remains dominated by dictatorships. Tunisia re- mains the lone success story in the Arab world produced by those tumul- tuous events a decade ago, and even its electoral democracy has sufered severe backsliding in recent years Tose in desperate search of democracy are tempted to look elsewhere. But for scholars of political regimes, whose subfeld has produced one of the largest literatures in comparative politics, the still autocratic terrain of the MENA provides an extraordinary wellspring of new theoretical inspiration, one that cuts to the heart of how political order operates in the modern world. While most dictatorships in the MENA appear to have stability, to be stable does not also mean to be static. Amid shifing domestic pressures and in- ternational tides, many authoritarian regimes have reconfgured their polit- ical control in new and unexpected ways. Tese reconfgurations mean that while the prospects for democratization remain low in many countries, the strategies and mechanisms used to suppress opposition, monopolize power, and preserve popular support have evolved. Continuity, in other words, has Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/43030/chapter/361430705 by Temple University Law School Library user on 01 August 2022