Rory McCarthy | Durham University (original) (raw)

Books by Rory McCarthy

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Tunisian Islamist movement al-Nahda voted to transform its... more In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Tunisian Islamist movement al-Nahda voted to transform itself into a political party that would for the first time withdraw from a preaching project built around religious, social, and cultural activism. This turn to the political was not a Tunisian exception but reflects an urgent debate within Islamist movements as they struggle to adjust to a rapidly changing political environment.

This book re-orientates how we think about Islamist movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with grassroots activists of Tunisia's al-Nahda, Rory McCarthy focuses on the lived experience of activism to offer a challenging new perspective on one of the Middle East's most successful Islamist projects. Original evidence explains how al-Nahda survived two decades of brutal repression in prison and in social exclusion, and reveals what price the movement paid for a new strategy of pragmatism and reform during the Tunisian transition away from authoritarianism.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Rory McCarthy

Politics and Religion, 2024

Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahda has announced a separation of political and religious work, a... more Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahda has announced a separation of political and religious work, apparently reinforcing a "post-Islamist" argument that Islamic parties have left behind religious mobilization. However, the boundary between religious and political fields is highly porous. We ask why the distinction between religious and political activism remains a point of ambiguity within Islamism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 48 men and women who participated in the movement in the 1970s and 1980s in Tunis and Sousse, we develop a microlevel explanation of Islamist mobilization. We argue that religious and social Islamist activism is replete with political intent, which worked through three mechanisms: a counter-hegemonic ideology, an activist engagement in social transformation, and a formal organization. These findings add empirical insights to the case of Ennahda, provide leverage in explaining the politicization of Salafist movements, and underscore the legacy of asymmetric party capacities in shaping outcomes in a democratic transition.

Party Politics, 2023

What happens to an Islamist party after moderating its behaviour and ideology? Existing work on I... more What happens to an Islamist party after moderating its behaviour and ideology? Existing work on Islamist parties has elaborated the varied causes of moderation. Yet, the mixed findings do not capture the full range of Islamist dynamics. This article draws on a multiyear, interview-based study of the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahda to interrogate the process of intraparty change after moderation. Islamist parties face a two-level problem with external and internal trade-offs. I argue that the intraparty characteristics that enable moderation may also contribute to undermining a party's institutional structure and identity as it responds to an uncertain political context. These findings bring processual evidence from Islamist parties into broader explanations of party change and highlight the ongoing effects of moderation, not just its causes.

Democratization, 2023

How do citizens in the Arab world hold their governments to account between elections? Diagonal a... more How do citizens in the Arab world hold their governments to account between elections? Diagonal accountability mechanisms in the literature show how citizens can constrain executive power by imposing reputational costs, by using legal action, or through watchdog oversight. However, citizen mobilizations in the Arab world are often autonomous, reflecting low political trust and ineffective political parties and therefore weakening potential accountability mechanisms. This article uses a structured, focused comparison of protest episodes during the Tunisian transition to theorize three alternative mechanisms used in autonomous mobilizations. Autonomous movements develop legitimacy for their claims by reinterpreting initial grievances as legitimate claims for greater popular participation in decision-making. Although these movements all insist on their independence from parties and unions, they develop temporary and expedient alliances with political actors for greater leverage. When movements have sufficient local resources, they try to establish lasting collective capacities to demonstrate alternative models of development. These findings contribute to a richer understanding of the varied mechanisms behind accountability processes in new democracies by showing how autonomous movements deploy alternative strategies to shape the quality of their emerging democratic system.

Social Movement Studies, 2021

A democratic transition is likely to bring significant changes to the character of contentious po... more A democratic transition is likely to bring significant changes to the character of contentious politics. Scholars argue protest is likely to become normalized and more frequent because of new opportunities, but less radical because it is channelled by political actors into a more responsive political system. However, less attention has been paid to explaining those protest episodes, which remain transgressive. This article uses an original event catalogue and informant interviews to examine the microlevel interactions within one such episode, the Kamour protest in Tunisia in 2017, in which hundreds of young unemployed protesters staged a four-month long sit-in and shut off an oil pipeline to demand jobs and increased state spending in their region. Findings show that in conditions of low political trust, protesters relied on three mechanisms: they escalated but self-limited their actions; organized autonomously but used fraternization to seek the protection of the military; and resisted institutionalization as a political party even as they transformed their claims to appeal to the 'absent state' to demand deeper democratic reforms. Evidence from Tunisia contributes to explaining how political mistrust shapes transgressive protests after a democratic transition.

Middle Eastern Studies, 2019

Tunisia's transition away from authoritarianism has been shaped by a politics of consensus, which... more Tunisia's transition away from authoritarianism has been shaped by a politics of consensus, which has brought together representatives of the former regime with their historic adversary, the Islamist movement al-Nahda. This article argues that consensus politics was a legacy of the authoritarian regime that was re-produced during a democratizing transition. The politics of consensus was encouraged and enabled by al-Nahda, which prioritized its inclusion within this elite settlement to provide political security for itself and the broader transition. However, this came at a cost, engineering a conservative transition, which did not pursue significant social or economic reform. The Tunisian case shows that historical legacies, such as consensus politics, can shape a transition as much as contingent, pragmatic decisions by political leaders.

The Middle East Journal, Aug 29, 2018

This article is a case study of how Tunisia's Islamist party, the Ennahda Movement, responded to ... more This article is a case study of how Tunisia's Islamist party, the Ennahda Movement, responded to new political opportunities that opened up after the 2011 Arab uprisings. It argues that Ennahda chose to make a hard-to-reverse commitment to politicization in the pursuit of electoral legitimacy, as protection from repression, and for fear of marginalization. The article demonstrates how the context of a democratic transition exposed internal debates within the movement over ideology, strategy, and organizational structure, ultimately dislocating the relationship between political ambitions and the religious social movement.

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Feb 17, 2015

Since the 2011 uprising, Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahdha has proposed a political project ba... more Since the 2011 uprising, Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahdha has proposed a political project based on reclaiming the nation's Arab-Islamic identity. At the heart of this is the issue of ‘protection of the sacred’, which seeks to define limits to freedom of expression to protect religious symbols from criticism. This is part of Ennahdha's post-Islamist evolution. The movement has drawn away from its earlier ambitions to Islamise the state and now seeks to reconstruct the role of Islam by asserting a cultural Islamic identity, which recasts religious norms as conservative values and which has yet to determine the precise limits of new individual freedoms. The result was to propose a new set of rules for the community under which Tunisians would freely express their religious belief in a way denied them under the former regime, but would also live under a state that defended and guaranteed their religious values.

Journal of North African Studies, May 12, 2014

The victory of a Tunisian Islamist party in the elections of October 2011 seems a paradox for a c... more The victory of a Tunisian Islamist party in the elections of October 2011 seems a paradox for a country long considered the most secular in the Arab world and raises questions about the nature and limited reach of secularist policies imposed by the state since independence. Drawing on a definition of secularism as a process of defining, managing, and intervening in religious life by the state, this paper identifies how under Habib Bourguiba and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali the state sought to subordinate religion and to claim the sole right to interpret Islam for the public in an effort to win the monopoly over religious symbolism and, with it, political control. Both Bourguiba and Ben Ali relied on Islamic references for legitimacy, though this recourse to religion evolved to face changing contexts, and both sought to define Islam on their own terms. Bourguiba sought to place himself personally at the summit of power, while under Ben Ali the regime forged an authoritarian consensus of security, unity, and ‘tolerance’. In both cases the state politicised Islam but failed to maintain a monopoly over religious symbolism, facing repeated religious challenges to its political authority.

Edited Volumes by Rory McCarthy

Civil resistance, especially in the form of massive peaceful demonstrations, was at the heart of ... more Civil resistance, especially in the form of massive peaceful demonstrations, was at the heart of the Arab Spring-the chain of events in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in December 2010. It won some notable victories: popular movements helped to bring about the fall of authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Yet these apparent triumphs of non-violent action were followed by disasters—wars in Syria, anarchy in Libya and Yemen, reversion to authoritarian rule in Egypt, and counter-revolution backed by external intervention in Bahrain. Looming over these events was the enduring divide between the Sunni and Shi'a branches of Islam.

Why did so much go wrong? Was the problem the methods, leadership and aims of the popular movements, or the conditions of their societies? In this book, experts on these countries, and on the techniques of civil resistance, set the events in their historical, social and political contexts. They describe how governments and outside powers—including the US and EU—responded, how Arab monarchies in Jordan and Morocco undertook to introduce reforms to avert revolution, and why the Arab Spring failed to spark a Palestinian one. They indicate how and why Tunisia remained, precariously, the country that experienced the most political change for the lowest cost in bloodshed.

This book provides a vivid illustrated account and rigorous scholarly analysis of the course and fate, the strengths and the weaknesses, of the Arab Spring. The authors draw clear and challenging conclusions from these tumultuous events. Above all, they show how civil resistance aiming at regime change is not enough: building the institutions and the trust necessary for reforms to be implemented and democracy to develop is a more difficult but equally crucial task.

Book Chapters by Rory McCarthy

Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, 2023

Hizb al-Tahrir Tunisia (The Liberation Party Tunisia) is an Islamist group that emerged in the la... more Hizb al-Tahrir Tunisia (The Liberation Party Tunisia) is an Islamist group that emerged in the late 1970s as a branch of the international Hizb al-Tahrir movement, which was established in Jerusalem in 1952 by the Palestinian Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani (1909–77).

Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle East, Apr 2016

In Holliday, S. and Leech, P. (eds.), Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle Ea... more In Holliday, S. and Leech, P. (eds.), Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle East (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016)

Essays by Rory McCarthy

Global Policy Journal Online, 2023

MENA Politics Newsletter, 2021

(APSA) was established in 2018 to support, develop and publish research on the politics of the ME... more (APSA) was established in 2018 to support, develop and publish research on the politics of the MENA region. It seeks to fully integrate the rigorous study of the politics of the Middle East with the broader discipline of Political Science. It serves as an institutional home for the community of political scientists dedicated to the Middle East. This Newsletter is a forum for discussion of research and issues of interest to the community, and is produced with the support of POMEPS.