Within a fairly short amount of time, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has managed to put large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq under their control. To many observers, the sheer speed at which this “state” was established was dumbfounding. To better understand the roots of this organization and its supporters we present a study using data from Twitter. We start by collecting large am...

T he Arab uprisings of 2011 left an indelible mark on the region. As Long-standing presidents fell in four countries, many wondered if a wave of democratization might be sweeping the region. This early optimism soon faded as countries as protests were violently suppressed in Bahrain and subsequently Libya, Syrian and Yemen fell into civil war. This narrative of the failure of the uprisings to y...

as one of the influential groups in the incidents of the early centuries ah, khawārij appeared for the first time during the caliphate of imam ‘alī (a.s.) and in the process of the battle of ṣaffain as an independent cult that stood up in opposition to arbitration (ḥakamiyyat). upon the transfer of caliphate to the umayyad, the khawārij stood up against them from the very beginning and develope...

This paper explores the role of threats from below in the emergence of electoral authoritarianism. Mass uprisings for democratic regime change undermine closed authoritarian regimes by making it difficult for autocrats to maintain their regimes through repression and co-optation. Anti-regime uprisings also promote the establishment of electoral authoritarianism by toppling existing closed regim...

This introductory article to the Special Issue MENA Political Science Research a Decade after Arab Uprisings: Facing Facts on Tremulous Grounds takes stock of political science research decade uprisings. Engaging with key contributions from social movement and protest studies, comparative politics, International Relations, we discuss three overarching questions that consider as particularly imp...