Chapter 6 covers the post-uprisings period. Whatever the poor harvest in terms of democratic advances nine years later, many Arab states have witnessed an unprecedented wave of changes and reactions (counterrevolutionary moves) similar in importance to the revolutions of the 1950s–1960s. The term revolution (thawra) was first widely used, with the Tocquevillian caveat about the relevance of the state and the power structures of old regimes both for the breakdown and then regime re-formation – and the effect of huge social mobilization should not be assessed only with the notion of a unified outcome (success or failure) at the macro-level in the short term. This chapter shows the tentative deployment of the military's institutional power with different outcomes. Notwithstanding the enduring Tunisian exception and the case of full civil war in Syria, the picture is mixed with reinforced militarism in Egypt, attempts elsewhere in a context of acute threats and boiling regional context, yet with inherent weaknesses and risks of fragmentation.

Chapter 1 starts with a critical juncture that installed a new pattern with the political surge of armies in many Arab states. Newly independent states engaged in the complex task of building their armed forces, also as a symbol of their newly gained sovereignty. During this foundational period, the complex processes of nation- and state-building went hand in hand with the politicization of the officer corps so that the army was propelled as the founder of new, postcolonial political orders and as a specific incubator, in control of real power and endowed with huge power resources. Within this general trend, some militaries were much more submitted to social trends and penetration by societies in the form of ethno-confessional or tribal dimensions, when compared with the relative closure of the Egyptian armed forces to society and its dynamics. Rather than their exhaustion in the framework of national armies, subsequent political developments witnessed their enhancement, as exemplified by Syria and Yemen. And, in this overall picture of heightened militarization in the Arab World, Tunisia appeared as the negative and exceptional case with its armed forces remaining a subservient part of the (civilian) Tunisian state and regime alike.