The Role of social capital  in the context of Arab Spring Movements

For decades, much of the literature on the Middle East politics was built on persistent authoritarianism. Given the long history of autocratic rule in the Middle East, a region which the third wave of democracy bypassed, several Middle Eastern scholars tended to view this region as exceptional. Then, much to our surprise, a wave of uprisings broke out in the shaking the Middle East at its core. With ongoing political unrests in the Middle East, debates on the relationship between social capital and civil society and its implication for the political outcome of the uprisings came to the fore. In transition literature, there is a basic assumption that any democracy needs a minimum level of civic engagement in order to function. Civic engagement in the Middle Eastern context, to a great extent, takes place through social network, which is the basic component of social capital and democratic transition. On the other hand, the case of civic engagement has the potential to produce undemocratic outcomes increasing intolerance among ethnic and religious groups. To a great extent, thanks to political mobilization through civic engagement in social networks, a wave of uprisings took place in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria, leading to the ouster of authoritarian regimes in the former three countries. However, this civic engagement in certain social networks also brought about intolerance and violence against certain religious, sectarian and ethnic groups. In the light of these arguments, this paper attempts to analyze the relationship between certain types of social networks as the main component of social capital and democratic transition in the Middle East. It also analyzes how the level of civic engagement in social networks influence the political outcome of uprisings in the Middle East by comparing the case of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. Last but not the least, this paper investigates the patterns through which civic engagement in social networks fosters and impedes democratic transition.