Download or read book Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa written by Frédéric Volpi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a much-needed corrective to dominant approaches to understanding political causality during episodes of intense social mobilisation in North Africa. Drawing on analyses of routine governance and of 'revolutionary' mobilisation in four countries of the Maghreb - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya - before, during and after the 2011 uprisings, Volpi explains the different trajectories of these uprisings by showing how specific acts of protest created new arenas of contention that provided actors with new rationales, practices and, ultimately, identities. The book illustrates how the dynamics of revolutionary episodes are characterised by the social and political de-institutionalisation of routine mechanisms of (authoritarian) governance. It also details how post-uprising re-institutionalisation and/or conflict are shaped by reconstructed understandings of the uprisings by actors, who are themselves partially the products of these episodes of phenomena.