Demographics Explain Regional Variation in the Arab Spring Uprisings

Despite scholarly and popular hopes and predictions that the 2011 Arab Spring would mean the end of authoritarianism and the onset of democracy across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, anti-regime uprisings only occurred in a small subset of MENA nations. This thesis aims to address the puzzle of the Arab Spring’s partial contagion; the main interest of this work is to explore why the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in particular escaped the Arab Spring virtually unscathed. The hypothesis offered here argues that the regional variation in the Arab Spring uprisings can be explained by labor force demographics in the GCC. Dominated by non-Arab, Asian migrant laborers, GCC workforces depend on the exploitative kafala sponsorship system that ties migrant workers to Gulf employers in a mode of quasi-indentured servitude. The kafala system and the labor force demographics it has created in the GCC are significant to the Arab Spring uprisings in two ways: first, migrant workers strike and protest their living and working conditions often, and suffer harsh consequences as a result. Gulf migrant workers ’ collective action and the punishments that they endure operated as a mode of demonstration effect that deterred Gulf citizens from engaging in similar behavior against their respective governments. Second, Asian migrant workers recruited through the kafala system have supplanted intraregional labor imports from poorer MENA nation