Structural Stress and Political Instability in the MENA Region: A Computational Macrohistory Analysis of the Arab Spring

This paper extends the Computational Macrohistory (CMH) framework to eleven countries of the Middle East and North Africa over 2000 to 2012, addressing the structural preconditions of the Arab Spring. Building on the three-country proof of concept that preceded it, we construct a five-component Systemic Stress Index (SSI) over demographic pressure, inequality, youth unemployment, regime type, and connectivity. The SSI is a reduced proxy for testing whether the framework’s structural signals are detectable in historical data; it does not implement the full dynamic system. At the 2010 benchmark the index ranks the instability countries above the stability countries in twenty of twenty-eight pairs, an area under the curve of 0.714 with an exact permutation probability of 0.158, and separates the two groups by 0.290 index units. Threshold classification assigns eight of eleven correctly; with the threshold fixed in advance that accuracy carries an exact probability of 0.197, but against its own threshold-optimised null it sits at the median and carries no evidential weight. The ranking is stable across weighting schemes except under heavy connectivity weighting. Leave-one-component-out analysis locates the discrimination in youth unemployment and the anocracy transformation of the Polity score, which carry half the index weight; the other three contribute nothing or degrade it, and the inequality series is model-imputed across the panel. Three misclassified cases, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, are examined, each a specifiable limit of the specification. The paper states the conditions under which the expanded programme, at thirty or more validated country-cases, would constitute statistical validation.