A recent news item on the BBC's English website neatly captured the sharp contrast in how, five years later, various Arab rulers, citizens and non-Arab observers view the popular uprisings that swept leaders from power in several Arab states and challenged others. The headline read "Arab Spring 'cost region $600bn' in lost growth, UN says", but what the latter actually said differed substantially.


Whether intentionally or not, the BBC's headline echoes those who portray the chaos and bloodshed suffered by several Arab states since 2011 as the direct result - indeed the essence - of the Arab Spring. But, there was nothing inevitable about this.


Authoritarian byproducts



Significant material rewards were provided, as even authoritarian regimes generally find it cheaper to co-opt society rather than to rely wholly on coercion, but these shrank as economic cronyism deepened and productivity and investment in all sectors of the economy - other than oil and real estate - declined from the 1990s onwards.

The reallocation of state resources and economic opportunities towards privileged elites and social sectors in an era of prolonged financial contraction further "hollowed out" state institutions.

In short, Arab states had left themselves with few reserves - political, economic, social, or institutional - to cope with the impacts of wider events affecting their finances and economies in the decade leading up to 2011, even when macro-level indicators, such as gross domestic product and foreign investment, appeared positive.

Violence was not inevitable


A significant part of the answer lies in how incumbent regimes chose to respond to popular uprisings and the democratic challenge they posed. Contrary to those who claimed there was "no other choice", the resort to force was neither necessary nor unavoidable.

The Tunisian army's insistence that civilians design and manage their country's entire transitional process, from start to finish, is proof positive of this. So was the "soft security" approach adopted by the Jordanian authorities in response to their own protest movement in 2010 and 2011-2012.


But it is the elimination of safeguarded arenas for the conduct of legal - that is, peaceful - political contestation and social negotiation that poses the biggest threat.



Regimes that have insisted on returning to political and economic "business as usual" have prevented the kind of reforms that might resolve the problems that led their countries into social upheaval and systemic crisis in the first place.




This article was originally published on Al Jazeera English.