Tough Lessons: Opposition Learning in Response to Authoritarian Resilience in the Middle East and North Africa.
by Francesco Colin and Alfonso Casani.
📜ABSTRACT:
Despite the resilience of authoritarian states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), social and political contestation continues to threaten their hegemony. Opposition actors have shown their capacity to adapt to authoritarian resilience and change their strategies and practices to express disagreement. Drawing on a broad array of case studies, this Special Issue aims to answer the following question: how do opposition actors learn to navigate the reorganization of authoritarian regimes in the MENA? This introduction situates the Special Issue within theoretical debates on the study of opposition in non-democratic regimes. It defines opposition learning as the processes through which opposition actors change the claims, loci, structures and networks of their expression of disagreement based on the context, their experiences and their capacity to navigate authoritarian policies and practices. It also introduces the mechanisms of opposition learning that will be discussed in the case studies included in this Special Issue, distinguishing between the effects of endogenous and exogenous factors on opposition actors, and the active or passive roles these actors assume in this process of change. The interplay of these two variables allows us to identify and test four mechanisms of opposition learning: upgrading, isomorphism, internal and external diffusion.
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