Sociopolitical Destabilization Dimensions in Comparative Global and Regional Perspective

This paper examines empirically political instability using a principal component analysis. Conducted tests allow us to identify its three types: (1) ‘armed destabilization' with the main contributions on the part of number of killed in terror attacks, number of terror attacks, and guerilla warfare; (2) ‘mass protest destabilization' with the main contributions on the part of anti-government demonstrations, riots, and general strikes; and (3) ‘elite destabilization' with the main contributions on the part of governmental crises, coups and coup attempts, assassinations, and purges. Our analysis further demonstrates that some MENA countries are the most violently destabilized in the whole world for the period of 1970-2018 among all other countries. These results are supported by the mean factor score values of socio-political destabilization principal components for four world-system regions for three observation periods which show that, both for 1970-2018 and after 2011 periods, the Afrasian instability macrozone in general, and the MENA region in particular, turn out as the areas of the highest mean values of armed destabilization factor scores. Moreover, the conducted tests show that MENA is the only region where mass protest destabilization component is associated with repressions both for the general observation period (1970-2018) and for the period after the Arab Spring (since 2011) while for other regions the correlation with purges/repressions indicator is insignificant, though positive (South America and Sub-Saharan Africa) or even insignificant and negative (Western Europe). This appears to imply that in the MENA region protests are accompanied by mass repressions much more systematically than in the other parts of the world. However, we find the presence of number of terror attacks among the significant contributors to mass protest destabilization for Sub-Saharan Africa, which suggests that the mass protest destabilization in that part of the world is also of a rather special type involving a very substantial violent component. In the meantime, the principal component analysis of the destabilization in the MENA region (considered as a semi-peripheral world-system area) in comparison with South America (another world-system area), Western Europe (regarded as a part of the world-system core), and Sub-Saharan Africa (as a part of the world-system core) has yielded the following results. In general, we find that the highest percent of the destabilization variance is explained by the mass protest principal component for the world-system core (represented by Western Europe); and the lowest percent of the destabilization variance is explained by the armed destabilization principal component precisely for this part of the world. We also found that the highest percent of the destabilization variance is explained by the armed principal component for the world-system periphery (represented by Sub-Saharan Africa); and the lowest percent of the destabilization variance is explained by the mass protest destabilization principal component precisely for Sub-Saharan Africa. The world-system semi-periphery appears here in between those poles. The MENA region (which is the core of the Afrasian instability macrozone) ranks the second for both mass protests and armed destabilization, thus displaying very high levels of both (whereas South America occupies an intermediate place between MENA and Western Europe).