Report No.275: The Arab Spring Rollback and Varieties of Arab ‘Autocratization’

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Toda Peace Institute presents a report series, “An Eye on Arab De-democratization,” that seeks to capture the nature of democratic erosion in a MENA Arab cluster of nine countries plus one case study covering the gender question in relation to ‘democratization’. The Arab region (interchangeably Middle East and North Africa – MENA) has had a chequered history with democratization. Evidently, today, the trend is not one of democratic transition but rather one of ‘autocratization’, i.e. of democratic de-consolidation. The report series will be published over the next three weeks, beginning with this Introduction, the case study on Arab women, and reports on Palestine and Morocco.