Diagnosing Collapse: Lessons from Sovietology for Arab studies

Barbara Lehmbruch

Diagnosing Collapse: Lessons from Sovietology for Arab studies

After the unexpected and domino-like collapse of one Arab regime after another, some Observers have diagnosed a “crisis of political science”, and many have compared researchers’ alleged failure to predict events with the similar failure of Soviet studies two decades ago.

Seen in retrospect, did Sovietology truly do all that badly, and are there some lessons we can draw for the analysis of current events? The presentation argues that the litmus test of success or failure does not lie in a step-by-step prediction of events, but rather in whether or not social scientists correctly perceived the underlying factors behind both waves of revolutions. Subject to that test, Sovietology “got” many crucial developments if viewed in a broad fashion, putting together the work of political scientists, revisionist social historians and the theorists of the “bargaining economy”. Since then, social science has made considerable progress uniting the various strands of scholarship, in particular in the study of informality. This may prove a competitive advantage to today’s Arabists in comparison with their Sovietologist brethren.