Book Review: Armies and insurgencies in the Arab Spring

• Author: Sharan Grewal
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18757472
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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(2016). Warriors and citizens: American views of our military. Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press; Shafer, A. (2017, 2 August). The warrior caste. Slate.
4. Pew Research Center. (2011, November 23). The military-civilian gap: Fewer family
connections. Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/23/the-military-
civilian-gap-fewer-family-connections/
Albrecht, H., Croissant, A., & Lawson, F. H. (2016). Armies and insurgencies in the Arab Spring.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 320 pp. $65 (hardcover), ISBN 978-
0812248548.
Reviewed by: Sharan Grewal, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18757472
Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, and Fred H. Lawson have compiled a fascinating
account of military politics in the Arab world. The edited volume tackles three
important questions: First, how did patterns of civil–military relations influence
each military’s response to the Arab Spring? Second, what originally shaped those
patterns of civil–military relations? Finally, how have Arab militaries evolved since
the 2011 revolutions? Organized in this fashion, the book offers a comprehensive
account of civil–military relations before, during, and after the Arab Spring.
The book seeks to explain military behavior during “endgame” scenarios: When
mass protests have overwhelmed security forces, as in the Arab Spring, will the
military choose to defend the autocrat or defect to the opposition? According to
David Pion-Berlin (Chapter 1), this calculation is based not only on the military’s
assessment of the autocrat’s legitimacy and chances of survival but also on its own
institutional interests and whether they will be enhanced or curtailed by defecting. In
some cases, the military’s very survival is at stake: Militaries stacked with minority
sects in Bahrain (Dorothy Ohl, Chapter 7) and Syria (Philippe Droz-Vincent,
Chapter 8) largely defended their autocrats out of fear of major restructuring if
the majority came to power....