When the Best Leave: Emigration as Regime Stabilizer in the Arab World
It is a striking political paradox: the very mass exodus that signals a country’s governance failure is often what keeps its leaders in power. For decades, Middle Eastern regimes have quietly mastered the art of treating the exit door not as a crisis, but as a survival tactic. By allowing millions of frustrated, educated young citizens to leave, ruling elites manage to systematically export their most potent critics and outsource their economic failures before domestic anger can boil over into organized revolt.