"More than two years after the start of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, there is still doubt about whether Ennahda can oversee the completion of a transition to democracy. Indeed, since winning Tunisia’s first free election in 2011, Ennahda has been unable to choose definitively whether to support a pluralistic or an Islamist state. This ambivalence has led to a high level of polarization between liberals and Islamists--and to political violence."

"While short-term pain is not unusual following the end of despotic regimes, long and protracted transitions can be terribly costly, requiring decades for societies to recover. Political impasse is not only depressing economies by discouraging trade and investment; it is also preventing the formation of governments that could implement much-needed economic and institutional reforms – and thus threatening to take these countries into a long downward spiral."

This paper presents the outlines of a coherent, structural, long term account of the socioeconomic and political evolution of the Arab republics that can explain both the persistence of autocracy until 2011, and the its eventual collapse, in a way that is empirically verifable. The changing interests of the middle class would have to be a central aspect of a coherent story, on accounts of both distributional and modernization considerations, and that the ongoing transformation can be best understood in terms of their defection from the autocratic order to a new democratic order, which is still in formation.