Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, March 2014: Divisive Rule - Sectarianism and Power Maintenance in the Arab Spring: Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria
….A historical perspective shows that in all four cases, these dispositions and dynamics are grounded in authoritarian, non-democratic, and violent practices of rule, leadership, and power maintenance applied by or on behalf of political rulers and leaders. Whether the narrative features Druze landlords in nineteenth-century Lebanon mobilizing tribal solidarity to com-bat an agrarian uprising, Syrian intelligence officers recruiting Alawi youths into popular militias, Sunni Iraqi politicians generating bargaining power by initi-ating “spontaneous” protest camps, or Bahraini royals encouraging Sunni citizens to take to the streets to prevent a Shiite takeover: the story remains one of en-forced top-down solidarity sustained by and ultimately leading to violence, which compromises all social actors and destroys all options for horizontal solidarity that could generate bottom-up pressure. As the events of 2011 and beyond show, divided societies remain divided and indeed become more so as the result of strategies and practices devised by rulers and leaders defending positions of political power, and for this same end, they will continue to generate exactly the divisions and the violence they pretend to contain…