How revolution spreads

Marc Herman is back home from Libya and has written up his experiences as a Kindle Single called The Shores of Tripoli. (Be sure to read his recent blog post about the market forces in the magazine industry that led him to choose this outlet.)

It's a fascinating read. One of the points that particularly compelled me was the discussion of the rebellion finally hitting the small mountain town of Nalut. The residents knew of the uprisings in the big coastal cities, and the local loyalist soldiers knew of them, too. And they had all seen videos of the regime slaughtering protesters. But nothing had yet happened in Nalut. As one of the residents says,

"Some guys from school, and some people who are just my neighbors. We decide to do this thing," as he described it. The thing they would do was to walk to the local Nalut office of Internal Security the next afternoon and tender a request that Moammar Qaddafi, Libya's leader of forty-two years, abdicate. They they would stand there and dare the guards to shoot them, hit them, gas them, or, if they preferred, agree with them. They did not reallly think about what would happen after that.

The book offers a case study as to how a movement spreads. Part of it is simply organic - it was just time, and the thing went viral. Part of it is manufactured - a NATO operative plays a role in the local resistance, and the rebels find help from across the Tunisian border. But it nicely connects the local individual stories to much larger social forces. If you're trying to figure out why something like Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party takes off and other movements don't, here's a nice piece of research for you.

Party before government

It looks like some enterprising individuals are trying to construct parties in Libya:

As Libya's new leaders work on setting the country right and eliminating the last holdouts of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists, budding politicians are looking forward to the planned elections.

"Our party is being formed," said Abdel Dayem al-Gharabli, a lawyer from Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, after lengthy talks in a cafe with a group of friends. 

To be called the National Democratic Encounter, it aims to be broad-based, supporting the rule of law and respect for liberties, he said.

The really interesting thing here, of course, is that there's not yet a government for the parties to influence, a legislature to which to recruit members, or elections in which to participate. There's a provisional government, and there will likely be a constitutional convention next year, followed a year later by some sort of legislative and presidential elections. Parties are forming now with an eye to influencing the process of creating a government.

This is reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the argument advanced in The Party Decides that America's constitutional Founders were essentially a party. They built a government that would protect and advance their interests, and deliberately made that government very hard to change (the amendment procedure is a very high wall, and the separation of powers structure is filled with veto points making it difficult to pass sweeping laws). Importantly, they organized and planned to control a government prior to that government's existence.

In Libya, it is not entirely clear on what basis these parties are being formed. They certainly have their roots in geography and ethnicity, but some sorts of ideological claims may be built on top of those.

(h/t Marc Herman)

To make a democracy, not so fast on the democratic stuff

Reporting from Libya, Marc Herman notes some interesting research by political scientists Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig on how dictatorships successfully transition to democracies:

In 2009, working with data collected since 2007, the two claimed to have found a connection that could predict a successful transition between dictatorship and democracy. It was, simply put, to have a post-Revolution legislative body in place before holding national elections to put a single leader in power. The Vaclav Havels and Nelson Mandelas of the world, it turns out, are in the minority.

This strikes me as a rich area for political scientists to make a real contribution. Kudos to Marc for talking to some of us about it.

No-fly zone

Marc Herman sent me this video of a remarkably sane and intelligent John McCain being interviewed by David Frost on Al Jazeera(!) and making the case for a no-fly zone over Libya:

McCain's logic is that Libya could very well be the next Rwanda or Srebrenica -- and if it is, we really want to be non-neutral and on the right side of it. And yes, that's true, although unfortunately we don't have the luxury of knowing what the next Rwanda or Srebrenica is before it happens. Still, while creating a no-fly zone over Libya is a far cry from deploying 100,000 soldiers onto Libya's beaches, it's nonetheless an engagement. Robert Farley says it nicely:

Any decision to intervene means, effectively, that we have decided on regime change in Libya. This is to say that we’ve decided the rebels should win, and we’re willing to undertake steps that will make it easier for them to do so.

In other words, it would be very easy (and accurate) for Khaddafi to portray the struggle as one between him and the United States. I can't help thinking that that would make it easier, rather than harder, for him to retain his position of power. I get that not a lot of people like him, but a lot of people who don't like him hate us even more.

The usual caveats apply here: I'm no expert on foreign policy or on Libyan politics. Weight my views accordingly.