Publication

This report examines the role that citizenship has played in Middle Eastern history and argues that the concept and practice of citizenship provides the key to understanding the Arab uprisings. The author first introduces the core concepts of citizenship and traces the development of civil, political, social and cultural rights in the Middle East since the Ottoman Empire. He then makes the argument that what lies at the basis of the emergence of rights movements in the Middle East and ultimately, the Arab Spring, is the collapse, since the 1970s, of the social contract in which civil and political rights were exchanged for social rights.