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In May 2010, despite American blandishments, Mubarak renewed the state of emergency that he’d ruled under ever since the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. His ruling party rigged elections for the upper house of parliament while shutting down attempts by domestic civic groups to monitor the vote. In June, Egyptian security services dragged a young man, Khaled Said, out of an internet cafe in Alexandria and beat him to death on the street. His murder became a cause célèbre for young Egyptians, sparking a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said” that turned into a locus for organizing what became the 2011 Egyptian uprising.

The ruling party took 473 of 508 elected seats, while the opposition presence went from over 100 seats to 31. At a meeting the following month, when an Egyptian visitor described the humiliating spectacle of the sham elections and the rising anger among Egyptians in response, Secretary Clinton listened and then noted that Mubarak was creating exactly the situation he was most concerned about. The protests began about six weeks later, and 18 days after that, Mubarak had resigned.

Looking back from today’s brutally repressive Egyptian regime led by President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, the ousted Mubarak’s 30-year reign seems gentler and sepia-tinged with unrealized possibility.

Since the Arab Spring uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in 2010/2011, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members have sought to be drivers of political developments in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia—and, to lesser extents, Algeria and Morocco—not only through petrodollar diplomacy, but also through direct military intervention

The three-year-old GCC crisis—pitting Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt against Qatar since mid-2017—has significantly regionalized

By far, the Gulf crisis has played out more destructively in Libya than anywhere else in the Maghreb. Yet Tunisia is a salient example of how another North African country became an arena for the Gulf rivalry albeit one where far less violence has erupted

officers from a military intelligence unit called Telem design much of the Arabic language curriculum

“The military are part and parcel of the education system. The goal of Arabic teaching is to educate the children to be useful components in the military system, to train them to become intelligence officers.”

Mendel said Arabic was taught “without sentiment”, an aim established in the state’s earliest years.“The fear was that, if students had a good relationship with the language and saw Arabs as potential friends, they might cross over to the other side and they would be of no use to the Israeli security system. That was the reason the field of Arabic studies was made free of Arabs.”

Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

To study the Middle East is to study authoritarianism. Its presence is unavoidable and pervasive. It is evident not only in the organization of political institutions and the formal rules of the game that shape political behavior, but in virtually all aspects of the everyday lives of citizens across the region. Indeed, the extent to which authoritarianism defines and dominates the political, economic, social, and cultural landscapes of the region, and its resilience even in the face of severe challenges such as the mass uprisings of 2011, are widely acknowledged as distinctive features of the Middle East, a form of exceptionalism that is itself a longstanding source of debate and disagreement among scholars.

as contemporary Arabic fiction becomes more widely available in translation, the works of authors such as Basma Abdel Aziz, Sinan Antoon, Hassan Blassim, Khaled Khalifa, Mustafa Khalifa, Mohammad Rabie, Mahmoud Saeed, and Nihad Sirees, bring new depth and dimensionality to non-Arabic speaking readers about the corrosive effects of authoritarianism.

volume that Linz co-edited together with H. E. Chehabi, Sultanistic Regimes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), focuses on a form of authoritarianism that is prevalent in the Middle East: regimes exhibiting high levels of patrimonialism, where institutions, in the words of Max Weber, are “instruments of the master,” and the exercise of authority is marked by arbitrariness and discretion.

many of the non-oil exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa are undergoing a process of redefinition of how they are linked with the global economy. It is not going well.

Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan are becoming more dependent on external borrowing than on foreign direct investments compared to the pre-2008 period. This is visible with declining ratios of FDIs to GDP, in contrast with increasing ratios of foreign debt to GDP and total exports

The relative political stabilization in all four countries as of 2014/2015 did not allow them much room for full-fledged recovery due to the global economic slowdown. This made it harder for all of them to achieve export-led growth and attract FDI, leaving them with foreign borrowing as the only viable option. Foreign debt accounts for much of the apparent recovery, as expressed in growth rates.

Erica Chenweth begins “Trends in Nonviolent Resistance and State Response: Is Violence Towards Civilian-based Movements on the Rise?” (Global Responsibility to Protect[1], July 2017) with the following rather discouraging statement, at least if you’re a protester: Through 2010, nonviolent mass movements tended to be surprisingly effective in removing incumbent leaders from power or achieving territorial independence, even when they experienced some repression from the government. However, since 2010, the success rates of nonviolent campaigns have declined by a staggering rate (about 20% below the average)

She speculates that the cause of the this decline is due to Authoritarian Adaptation: the ability of authoritarian governments to adopt more politically savvy repressive tools may be part of the reason for the decline in success rates in the past six years.21. Authoritarian leaders have begun to develop and systematize sophisticated techniques to undermine and thwart nonviolent activists.

Dana R. Fisher, Kenneth T. Andrews, Neal Caren, Erica Chenoweth, Michael T. Heaney, Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jeremy Pressman in “The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States” (Science Advances, October 23, 2019). This is a fascinating article, which I encourage all big data fans to read in full. From the abstract: This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large scale: building comprehensive event databases and conducting field surveys of participants at demonstrations.

In February, OPEC called for an oil production “freeze” to raise crude prices in conjunction with Russia. But this effort collapsed at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, in April when Iran refused to join any freeze in order to regain the pre-2012 production levels of close to 4 mbpd it enjoyed before U.S. and European Union nuclear sanctions were imposed, following the removal of certain sanctions after the 2015 nuclear deal. A similar proposal failed at the OPEC meeting in June, again following Iran’s refusal, despite outreach by the Qataris.

OPEC again called for a form of output cut on Sept. 28 at an extraordinary meeting in Algiers. Markets bit on the news, with Brent prices rising sharply by about 15 percent in the following week, from $46 to $52 per barrel.

Can action by the cartel sustain higher crude prices over the long term? Probably not. Like a desert mirage, the image of an OPEC resurrection vanishes when approached.

situate the movements in Egypt and Tunisia in the framework of the imposition of neoliberal economic reform and structural adjustment programs (ERSAPs) on Tunisia, from the mid-1980s, and Egypt, from 1991. The labor movements were the most salient expression of the deteriorating conditions of life under the regime of neoliberal globalization, or “flexible accumulation,” as the regulation school of political economy terms it

The recent murder and torture of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, who was researching the independent trade union movement in Egypt, suggests that it will be quite a while before anyone takes up this subject again.

class and political economy were far more salient elements of the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (and I might have added Bahrain and Morocco) than most Western (and even local) accounts were willing to acknowledge

Secularism in schools has been undergoing a transformation that signals a reticence on the part of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., to separate religion from politics.

there has been a 73 percent increase in the number of religious vocational schools, known as imam-hatip, in the country since 2010. While the schools offer a general academic curriculum, they also provide compulsory Islamic teaching, principally Sunni, which represents the majority of the country’s 77 million population.

nearly 40,000 of them, including some non-Muslims, found themselves automatically assigned to religious vocational schools, often against their will. Many parents have demanded transfers, a difficult bureaucratic task on several counts, but mainly because of a lack of vacancies. Some critics argue that this reflects a deliberate assimilation project aimed at nationwide Sunni indoctrination.

Erdogan has for now succeeded in his aim of taming the "Pashas", officers, who disdain his Islamist roots. But as coup trials stutter over technical appeals, his position ranging over a demoralized military has its perils.

An annual European Union survey showed Turks trust in the military slid from 90 percent in 2004 to 70 percent in 2010.

resignations allowed Erdogan to install a chief of staff of his choice, General Necdet Ozel

for many guardsmen, they have become the establishment they grew up to despise

Ahmadinejad has moved to retire guardsmen, many with years of experience, and replace them with cadres of young, ideologically committed and loyal recruits. Empowered and imbued with an almost immature enthusiasm for confrontation, these new recruits are simply accentuating the existing tensions, as the old guard, bloodied by war and professionalised by experience, look on with disdain at the naivety of their successors.

Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,”

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,”

Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact. Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.