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Public taxation is also increasing. A sin tax was implemented in June 2019 on products like sugary carbonated drinks and tobacco, and a serially delayed 5% value-added tax is expected in 2021. According to Salmi, electricity and water subsidies could soon be slashed and, in the long term, Omanis could see an income tax.

Above all, reforming the labor market — an unpopular move — would be the cornerstone of a post-Qaboos welfare state. About 43% of Omanis work for public entities. Abousleiman recommended economic diversification to foster private sector job creation and to further "relieve the expectations on the government to provide employment."

Following a field visit to Oman in 2019, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggested that the wages and benefits of the private sector need to align more closely with the public sector to make employment in the former more appealing.

Omanis who talked to Al-Monitor, as well as Mukhaini, believe any upcoming austerity measures "should not make the poor poorer and the rich richer," Mukhaini said.

According to rating firm S&P, the new ruler will face “a difficult trade-off” in the coming months to address high unemployment among youths, weak growth, and fiscal and funding pressures

Defense and security expenses account for over a quarter of Oman's annual budge

Oman — rated junk by the three major rating agencies — has several other options to fund its short-term ballooning deficit: Go further into debt; deplete its sovereign wealth fund; sell state assets; devalue its currency; and seek assistance from neighboring countries or international organizations.

Analysts believe Oman should build a model of governance tailored to the post-oil era. Along with a more stringent budget environment, the new leadership pledged to implement structural reforms to diversify the rentier economy and foster private sector-led growth.

To ensure political and social stability, Sultan Qaboos avoided controversial measures that could have triggered short-term political unrest

In 2011, at the height of the Arab uprisings, Sultan Qaboos promised to create 50,000 jobs and institute unemployment benefits in an attempt to defuse unprecedented nationwide protests.

the lack of economic reforms did not stop Omanis from loving the monarch, who built a modern state out of a medieval-like society he inherited in the early 1970s

Sultan Haitham bin Tariq "is already planting the seeds by cutting the royal expenditures tremendously,"

The relationship between state and society that Omanis have known for decades will likely never be the same

economic model is neoliberal

Morsi has accepted the outlook of the IMF, not because he has been forced to do so, but because it is an approach he shares. This will bring further privatisation and competition. And because the price paid by swaths of the population will be severe, the government will need a functioning apparatus of repression and to break the trade unions. It will also have to gain the acquiescence of the army, in exchange for immunity and the right to regulate its own affairs, particularly in the economic sphere

Time is against Morsi, because the economic measures that he wants to introduce will make the government increasingly unpopular. And, on the other hand, continued popular protest will require him to call on the army, which will support him, but at a price – the political and economic autonomy that the military is asking for runs counter to the Brotherhood’s programme of economic liberalisation

the other battleground for the Muslim Brotherhood is control of the religious sphere. Like al- Nahda in Tunisia, it has discovered that this is considerably more diverse than it had thought. Moreover, figures who had previously been relatively docile where the state was concerned, such as Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, have reasserted the autonomy that they were granted by the Arab spring. This means that the only way for the government to wrest back control of the religious sphere is to place it under the authority of the state (specifically, to submit the mosques to the diktat of the ministry of religious affairs)

if there were a credible and unified opposition, it could beat al-Nahda in the elections. Consequently, Tunisia’s chances of staying democratic are better than Egypt’s

State control of religion would in fact go beyond institutions and extend to religious orthodoxy, leading to limitations being placed on Sufi practices and theological discussions. Even if the Muslim Brothers succeed in the first part of the operation – nationalising faith institutions – the price they will have to pay for it will be high, because the imams won’t appreciate being turned into civil servants. They also run the risk of destroying the religious dynamic of their movement: if the state controls religion, what use is a religious “brotherhood”? And if religion is identified with the state, there is a grave risk that the unpopularity of the government will affect faith institutions in turn, as has happened in Iran

Religion is becoming just one instrument of control among others – rather than a social, economic and ideological alternative. This is, in short, the failure of political Islam

Al- Nahda is neither as strong nor as deeply rooted as the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement is more diverse, with a branch that is, if not more liberal, then at least more realistic. And because of their commitment to violence, the Tunisian Salafists are not credible allies

Al-Nahda is coming into conflict with the unions, either for the same reasons as in Egypt (a fascination with the free market) or for reasons more specific to Tunisia (it wants allies on its left but cannot bear to compete with a truly popular movement of grass-roots activists)

As in Egypt, al-Nahda proposes to use its own ministry of religious affairs to control the religious sphere, although this statism could rebound against the movement

a politics more redolent of Pinochet in Chile than of Khomeini in Iran

The Islamists are succeeding neither in delivering the goods in economic and social terms nor in giving the impression that they are architects of an authentic social project that goes beyond the stamping of “Islamic markers” on a society over which they have increasingly little control

To get through the period of austerity and the economic difficulties that go with it, they should have done more to secure a “historic compromise” with the liberals. The alternative to such an alliance is not “Islamic revolution”, however. What is taking shape instead is a coalition that is con - servative in politics and morals but neoliberal in economics, and thus open to the west

The temptation to draw the comparison has some substance. In 2011, demonstrators explicitly demanded the end of regimes ruling over their respective countries, and the same is happening today.Moreover, both in 2011 and 2018-19, the protesters seem to be emboldened by the ongoing movements in other countries. Stephen McInerney, the executive director for the Project of Middle East Democracy (POMED), explained that “certainly what happens in one Arab country is seen elsewhere, and there are common frustrations shared across the region.”

It’s natural that boiling tensions inside countries and ongoing protests are giving way to the overarching claim that a new Arab Spring is underway. But that simplistic framing misunderstands the nature of political grievances and upheavals in the region. After all, they are similar to the protests in 2011, just as the 2011 protests are similar to those that happened in the decades before, and will be similar to those that happen in the future.

A ‘Spring’ implies in its history and usage, the new flowering of a spontaneous, overwhelming grassroots revolution that permanently changes the sociopolitical landscape of the countries and even the region. It paints a picture of a people awakened to the oppression they face and marching through the streets to demand justice.

But Arabs have been ‘awake’ to the corruption, misuse and abuse regimes have enacted upon them for decades, and have organized against it accordingly.

the same protests and chants that can be heard in Jordan and Sudan were yelled in the beginning of 2018. At both times and in both countries, the government cut bread and fuel subsidies in order to comply with loan conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).Egypt in 2017 also saw thousands take to Twitter and the streets to protest against similarly price hikes in bread following a government removal of subsidies, though the IMF continually insists it did not recommend these governments cut subsidies servicing poor and working class families.

To look at these continual mobilizations and isolate the movements happening now as an “Arab Spring 2.0” ignores the continual, inter-generational struggle for economic and political rights that has pushed continuously at the doors of old regimes. In their place, an alternate history is given whereby Arabs were resting, and were woken up.

“In Algeria, Jordan, and Sudan the regimes managed to dodge the original 2011 wave. The confrontation was avoided but popular discontent was not crushed, and the reasons for it not addressed. So this will continue to come back, until either a showdown happens or things change.”

It is less an ‘Arab Spring 2.0’ than a continuation of 2011’s protests, which were in themselves continuations of protests that occurred in the years before.

Ending practices of corruption and cronyism requires movements that aren’t framed as spontaneous ‘Springs’ of youth but as constituent parts of a broad-based, durable intergenerational call for justice from below. 

New policies and programs are announced constantly, while the delivery capacity of the sluggish Saudi bureaucracy continues to lag. Below the upper echelons, the Saudi state remains the deeply fragmented, bloated, and slow-moving machine that I described in my 2010 book. The government seems to have no clear strategy for reforming this bureaucracy

While space for political opposition arguably has narrowed, women will soon be allowed to drive and the religious police force that once harassed them has been almost entirely neutered. By relaxing religious controls over the public sphere, the crown prince is seeking to attract more foreign investment and facilitate diversification into tourism and entertainment

Saudi Arabia has tackled fiscal reforms more vigorously than most local and international observers expected, introducing unprecedented tax and energy price measures, including the introduction of a 5 percent value added tax, new levies on foreign workers, and increases in electricity and transport fuel prices. The government is now experimenting with new non-oil sectors with an increased sense of urgency, including information technology and defense manufacturing.

As limits on government employment kick in, young Saudis will increasingly have no choice but to seek private jobs. But they will face tough competition on the private labor market where employers have become accustomed to recruiting low-wage workers from poorer Arab and Asian countries

public sector employment remains the key means of providing income to Saudi nationals. Cheap foreign labor dominates private sector employment, thereby keeping consumer inflation at bay and business owners happy. Citizens, however, are parked in the overstaffed public sector. Out of every three jobs held by Saudis, roughly two are in government. The average ratio around the world is one in five. Public sector wages account for almost half of total government spending, among the highest shares in the world

Local economic advisors fear that the majority of private petrochemicals firms — the most developed part of Saudi industry — would lose money if prices of natural gas, their main input, increase to American levels.

Saudi wage demands will have to drop further if private job creation is to substitute for the erstwhile government employment guarantee. For the time being, private job creation has stalled as the government has pursued moderate austerity since 2015 in response to deficits and falling oil prices

The government has also underestimated how dependent private businesses are on state spending. The share of state spending in the non-oil economy is extremely high compared to other economies. Historically, almost all private sector growth has resulted from increases in public spending

As long as oil prices remain below $70 per barrel, the goal of a balanced budget will cause pain for businesses and limit private job creation. This will pose a major political challenge at a time when an estimated 200,000 Saudis are entering the labor market every year. More than 60 percent of the population is under 30, which means that the citizen labor force will grow rapidly for at least the next two decades.

It would be far more prudent to gently prepare citizens and businesses for a difficult and protracted adjustment period and to focus on a smaller number of priorities

The key structural challenge to non-oil growth is the way the Saudi government currently shares its wealth, most notably through mass public employment — an extremely expensive policy that bloats the bureaucracy, distorts labor markets, and is increasingly inequitable in an era when government jobs can no longer be guaranteed to all citizens. A stagnating economic pie that might even shrink in the coming years must be shared more equitably.

A basic income would not only guarantee a basic livelihood for all citizens, but also serve as a grand political gesture that could justify difficult public sector reforms. A universal wealth-sharing scheme would make it easier to freeze government hiring and send a clear signal that, from now on, Saudis need to seek and acquire the skills for private employment and entrepreneurship. The government could supplement this scheme by charging fees to firms that employ foreigners while subsidizing wages for citizens to fully close the wage gap between the two.

Focusing on such fundamentals might be less exciting than building new cities in the desert or launching the world’s largest-ever IPO — but they are more important for the kingdom’s economic future. No country as dependent on petroleum as Saudi Arabia has ever effectively diversified away from oil

These reforms are not targeting the root causes of restrictions on women, but are selected to portray certain types of reforms that can be promoted in international media

He doesn’t want any competition, any counter-opinions, any criticism. So he’s almost shut down everybody, and he’s moving ahead with his reform. When he arrested intellectuals last September, it was meant to silence everybody. The purge on corruption was planned to make everyone dependent on his mercy. If he succeeds, he will succeed alone. If not, maybe he will include the Saudi people in his reforms. I wish he could do that today, but right now he has all the power and the international community is not pressuring him on human rights.

selected reforms aimed at certain purposes, but not necessarily towards developing human capital or investing in people, or women, at large

He’s raising expectations to riskily high levels. If in two, three, five years nothing significant has really changed for the prospects of individual people looking to get ahead, they may begin to question whether Mohammad bin Salman is really the revolutionary he claims to be. We’ve seen a lot of his supporters here in Washington buying into that revolutionary, Arab Spring-like figure-of-change image, embracing his top-down approach without pausing to think about the extent to which there is a bottom-up counterpart

meeting with President Donald Trump on Tuesday was punctuated by a particularly uncomfortable exchange in which Trump went into detail about the $12.5 billion in new U.S. weapons the prince agreed to buy and then said to the prince, “that’s peanuts for you.” Ulrichsen suggested that the scene would not play well in Saudi Arabia: I think if I were watching yesterday’s press conference with Donald Trump, I would have been quite dismayed to have seen a U.S. president treat his Saudi counterpart as if he were just a source of opportunities for the U.S. Some of the president’s tenor and demeanor was quite remarkable. Khashoggi agreed that Trump’s performance was not helpful for the crown prince: President Trump is wrong when he says that money is “peanuts” to us. Saudi Arabia has a serious poverty problem—money is not “peanuts” to us. To spend billions of dollars on military equipment is a serious thing. Today the Saudi Shura Council is talking about 35 or 40 percent unemployment—the official figure is 12 percent. So as much as Donald Trump is concerned about providing jobs for Americans, Mohammad bin Salman should be concerned about providing jobs for Saudis.

human rights begin with the conditions under which we live. The revolution made life harder for us—us being the poor—so of course when they arrest these activists, I say it’s for the better, we can’t afford another revolution. We can hardly afford to eat each day

December, four months after the opening of the new canal, and, aside from those who had bought bonds and received the first payout, most people I heard began describing it as el-tira’a (a sewer). When I asked one woman, Sabah, a cook who juggles jobs in six homes each week, why her opinion of the canal had changed, she said: “They promised revenues and immediate returns, and now everyone says revenues are down. Where are the immediate returns? The project has failed.”

Sisi was no Nasser, but his nationalist credentials as a former army general lent him credibility. He also spoke the language of the street—his public speeches were matter-of-fact and colloquial

I kept tabs on the shrinking number of people who showed up to protest, and then on the decreasing number of protests. Only a handful of people still voiced their dissent, including Laila Soueif, the matriarch of a family of longtime activists, whose son Alaa Abdel Fattah is serving a five-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges; or the team behind the online paper Mada Masr, led by the journalist and editor Lina Attalah, who continued to publish despite scrutiny and censorship (the paper’s website was eventually blocked, along with 127 others). The risks of human rights work had become almost prohibitive, with arrests, disappearances, and travel bans all commonplace. I counted the number of activists, academics, and artists who had left the country, and friends who were emigrating. Regeni’s name often came up in conversations—his murder lingered in our minds

in April, the president declared that two Red Sea islands, Tiran and Sanafir, long perceived as Egypt’s, fell within the territorial waters of Saudi Arabia and would be transferred to the kingdom. Public attention shifted to this new declaration, which brought revolutionary and pro-government Egyptians together in opposition to it

muffled grumbles, but the answers to the others were invariably: “The government’s job is to keep us fed, and at least the country is safe again.”

More and more, on the streets of Cairo, in government offices, and in informal settlements on the outskirts of the city, I heard references to Syria: “We could have ended up like them.”

Passivity has been their particular mode of survival

Discontent surged in February over the shifting official accounts of what had happened to Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student who disappeared and was then found dead on a highway in Cairo, his body bearing marks of severe torture

A friend’s activist neighbor was dragged from his home in the night and disappeared for four days on allegations of being an “Islamist sympathizer” (he was not); a writer was imprisoned, on grounds of “offending public morals,” for sexually explicit scenes in a novel; gay men were being hunted by undercover police on the hookup app Grindr; a poet was jailed on charges of “blasphemy” and “contempt of religion” for calling the slaughter of sheep during a Muslim feast “the most horrible massacre committed by humans”; two women were threatened with jail for allegedly “kissing” in a car (they were not)

I, too, had slipped into some variation of the so-called inertia. A friend one evening described our often-dulled responses to news and events that once enraged us as a type of PTSD

As a result of severely dwindling currency reserves, the government was forced to implement a series of long-overdue austerity measures to secure a $12 billion loan from the IMF. The risks of implementing the loan program were described by the agency’s staff as “significant.” Morsi had considered these same measures but backed out after a public outcry. Sisi had little choice but to take the risk. First gas and fuel subsidies were suddenly lifted (causing price hikes of 50 percent), then the Egyptian pound was floated, plunging the currency from seven to twenty pounds against the dollar. Overnight, the price of milk, tomatoes, pasta, cigarettes, soap, water, sugar, oil, chicken, chocolate, bread, juice, toilet paper, matches, bananas, plumbing services, and household goods leapt

They want to make it impossible for us to be political

By August, I heard people everywhere talking about the price of school supplies. School bags seemed to be the measure of the state of things. What cost 90 pounds a year before cost 350 pounds now. Inflation was at its highest (33 percent) since 1986 (when it was 35.1 percent), and second-highest since 1958. When, over the months that followed, I asked my grocer or the man who delivered the bread or the garbage collectors how they were managing to keep afloat, the invariable answer was “baraka”—blessings from God.

“They say he is building a $10 million palace in the desert for himself when the rest of us can hardly eat, but what is the alternative? To be fair, he inherited a mess. At least he is a nationalist, one of us.”

“We would have descended into chaos had the Brotherhood stayed in power. The country would not have survived the remainder of Morsi’s term.”

There was a handful of people who knew what military rule would bring, who anticipated the crackdowns, the closing-in of the state. Some had forecast the outbursts of violence to come. But perhaps nobody quite anticipated that the deep state would be resurrected with such ferocity, and so unabashedly

When I asked a range of political figures about the surveillance, the answer I got was “paranoia”—to this day, no one fully understands the political and emotional causes that led to the revolution on January 25, 2011.

radicalism seems at once to undermine and to strengthen Sisi’s hold on power. The country feels more and more mired in such contradictions

“I admit,” a brass worker in Cairo’s old city told me one evening in November, “I’m not happy with how things have unfolded. This was never a revolution to begin with. It was all scripted from the start, by military intelligence, so what is one to do now except put your head down and try to make a living?”

It is an anomaly of the Tunisian political scene that the UGTT’s anti-austerity position has little representation among elected politicians: the largest political groups (the Islamist Ennahda party and various offshoots of the secular-modernist Nidaa Tounes party) have backed the IMF agreement

unemployment and the proliferation of grey-sector jobs are linked to structural biases in the economy that systematically favour a small group of politically connected businesses. Measures that might address this problem include increasing access to credit for would-be entrepreneurs, changing regulations and practices within the public and banking sectors that are tilted to a narrow elite, and reducing corruption. According to Tunisians, corruption has not been reduced but only “democratised” since the revolution. Investment in infrastructure serving disadvantaged parts of the country could also help spur more inclusive growth

Since the revolution, the overarching priority of political life in Tunisia has been to seek enough stability to preserve and complete the political transition. Much has been achieved, though a few important steps (notably the establishment of a Constitutional Court) remain unfulfilled. But Tunisia has now reached a point where the greatest threat to stability is no longer political rivalries around religious identity but unmet social and economic aspirations. Until now, the country’s political parties have not organised themselves to offer distinctive and coherent visions of how Tunisia’s socio-economic development can be improved, and they are paying the price in public alienation from the entire political system

As a structured political party with large parliamentary representation but little influence inside state institutions, Ennahda in particular has aimed to change the status quo, as its new elite within the Tunisian interior remains largely excluded from the established economic circles in the coastal cities.

seek the political backing of the IMF and G7 countries, who are demanding that Tunisia speed up ongoing structural reforms to the economy. However, these measures are very unpopular, reawakening old grievances and notably sparking widespread anti-austerity protests in January 2018

The discourse of the union’s leadership—which calls for nationalization of major sectors and includes elements of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialist nationalism—is finding appeal among a population disenchanted with the leading parties’ ability to improve their economic situation. The union has also found natural partners in the Popular Front, a political coalition of leftists and pan-Arabists, and in remnants of the old regime, whose hybrid ideology incorporates nationalism, socialism, and pan-Arabism

as UGTT leaders accuse Chahed and Ennahda of being manipulated by the IMF and foreign countries, the camp in power is going on the defensive. They have alternately called for negotiations, stalemate, and compromise with the UGTT, ultimately capitulating to the UGTT’s primary demand on February 7 to increase wages in order to avert the planned February 20 strike

The more Tunisia’s foreign partners demand substantial structural reforms, the more the current coalition will confront popular anger that puts these reforms on hold, lest the coalition provoke a larger upheaval that could topple it. This will in turn make it harder for the government to abide by Tunisia’s commitments to its international donors, at a time when it needs their support to keep a grip on power

when he talks he talks the language of the street and the street listens to him. That's Sisi's problem.  

Most Egyptians have seen their real incomes fall, while Egypt under its IMF-backed austerity programme is racking up huge foreign debts. It was $43bn during Morsi’s presidency. It is $106bn now. Seventy per cent of taxes now goes into paying these debts off. Internal debt is over 5 trillion Egyptian pounds ($306bn).

Ali listed them: a luxury house in Hilmiya ($6m), a presidential residence in Alexandria ($15m), a palace in the new administrative capital, and another one in the new Alamein city west of Alexandria.

A report published by the World Bank in April calculated that "some 60 percent of Egypt’s population is either poor or vulnerable". 

Sisi  was a "failed man", a "disgrace", a "midget" who uses make up and hitches his trousers up too high, Ali told Egypt. Sisi was a con man who lectured you on the need to tighten your belt while building palaces for his wife Intissar.

"Now you say we are very poor, we must be hungry. Do you get hungry? You spend billions that are spilt on the ground. Your men squander millions. I am not telling a secret. You are a bunch of thieves."

Every Egyptian remembers the lectures Sisi gave them on the need to tighten their belts. When the IMF forced the state to reduce subsidies, Sisi’s response was: "I know that the Egyptian people can endure more... We must do it. And you’ll have to pay; you’ll have to pay," Sisi said in one unscripted rant a year into his presidency.

Ali’s YouTube channel has done more in three weeks to destroy Sisi’s image than the Brotherhood, liberals and leftists, now all crushed as active political forces in Egypt, have done in six years of political protest. 

To their credit the opposition did not crumble, paying for their stand with their lives and their freedom. To their shame the Egyptian people did not listen.

Sisi thinks he can ride this out, as he has done challenges in the past. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested since last Friday.

The initial demonstration in Tahrir Square in January 2011 was smaller than the ones that broke out in Cairo, Suez and Alexandria last Friday. They called for reform, not the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Last Friday, Sisi’s portrait was torn down. “Say it, don’t be afraid, Sisi has to leave!” they shouted on day one of this fresh revolt. 

the "opposition" is everybody - ordinary Egyptians, disaffected junior ranks in the army, Mubarak era businessmen. This is a wide coalition of forces. Once again Egypt has been reunited by a tyrant

unlike 2013, Sisi’s bankers  - Saudi Arabia and the UAE - have run out of cash for Egypt. Today each has its own problems and foreign interventions which are all turning sour - Yemen and Libya.

The steam is running out of the counter-revolution.

popular protest is re-emerging as a driver for change across the region. We have seen it topple dictators in Sudan and Algeria. Both have learned the lessons of failed coups in the past and have so far managed the transition without surrendering the fruits of revolution to the army. This, too, has an effect on events in Egypt.

Prince Mohammed is betting that the Premier League at a time of economic crisis and with Britain needing to forge new trade relationships in the wake of its departure from the European Union may not want to slam the door on a wealthy investor and/or jeopardize British relations with the kingdom.

a decision by the Premier League to reject the acquisition of Newcastle would be perceived as yet another of Prince Mohammed’s self-inflicted public relations fiascos that include multiple failed attempts to position the kingdom as a powerhouse in international soccer governance

The acquisition would mimic the 2017 purchase of celebrated soccer star Neymar by Qatar-owned Paris St. Germain for US$277 million intended to demonstrate that the Gulf state was unaffected by the then several months-old Saudi-UAE-led economic and diplomatic boycott.

Saudi Arabia responded in 2018 to Canadian criticism of the kingdom’s human rights record by withdrawing its ambassador and freezing all new trade and investment transactions. German criticism of a failed Saudi attempt to force the resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister led that same year to a de facto downgrading of diplomatic relations and reduced trade.

The League has tightened its criteria to test potential club owners on their integrity and reputation. The criteria include ensuring that a potential owner has not committed an act in a foreign jurisdiction that would be a criminal offence in Britain, even if not illegal in their own country.

Supporters of the acquisition argue that it bolsters Prince Mohammed’s reforms in a soccer-crazy country and reaffirms his push to break with the kingdom’s austere, inward-looking past. They reason further that it will bolster investment in Newcastle and surroundings at a time of impending economic hardship.

Supporters only need to look at Manchester where the United Arab Emirates’ acquisition of Manchester City more than a decade ago has benefitted not only the club but the city too.

supporters of Newcastle are likely to welcome the financial injection and departure of the club’s unpopular current owner, Mike Ashley, and ignore condemnation of the deal by human rights activists, including Amnesty International, as “sportswashing, plain and simple.”

Rather than trying to occupy squares and politically symbolic urban spaces, protestors acted locally to where they lived, inflicting an immediate cost on the authorities by impeding the flow of traffic and disrupting the functioning of local government.

Since the 2013 coup that ousted Islamist president Muhammad Mursi, the military-backed government has used a draconian anti-protest law to detain thousands of protestors. It is striking then that of the 24 food protests that we were able to identify, only four were met with any kind of repression

fearful that the protests may scale up again following Friday prayer, the Ministry of Endowments issued a sermon that called on Egyptians to reflect upon the country’s tightened economic circumstances and to be prepared to make sacrifices for the homeland. [22] This was followed by President Sisi himself making a public statement, pledging that the bread quota would not be cut again.

the trajectory of the mobilization suggests that economic grievances alone do not predict the scale of protest. Between March 6 and 7, millions of Egyptians faced an immediate threat to their food security—but only a small minority of those affected took to the streets in what were highly localized protests

as the March protests clearly show, the poor, both rural and urban, are also willing and able to mobilize against subsidy cuts. The class dynamics of bread subsidies seem not to have been lost on Egypt’s poor, either. In Alexandria, women protestors chanted, “They eat fino [higher quality] bread, and we can’t find our bread.” Several protestors interviewed by the media complained about the quality of subsidized baladi bread, with one woman commenting that it should be used as chicken feed. “Would the Minister of Supply eat this?” she asked the camera, as a group of children jostling around her yelled out “No!” in unison. The regime’s behavior in the face of these disruptive protests shows that not only were the authorities unprepared for this backlash, but that the regime fears provoking this constituency further, manifest in the Minister of Supply’s immediate volte-face and the police’s reluctance to crack down on residents. Even small localized protests, this suggests, can be an effective tool for extracting concessions from Sisi’s regime.

The decision to implement the new system was quickly reversed, however, over fears that the simmering bread crisis could provoke wider tumult. Seeking to allay citizens’ concerns that the move was a prelude to a reduction in their quotas of subsidized bread, Moselhy held a televised press conference on the day of the protests, apologizing to “all citizens who had not received bread” and asserting that their quotas would remain untouched. Promising to resolve the crisis within 48 hours, he blamed bakery owners for the crisis, hinting they were making profits off the subsidized flour they received from the government.

In the last six years, government spending on food and fuel subsidies has represented more than a quarter of annual government expenditure (more than the country spends on education and health services combined)

a thriving black market for the subsidized wheat, which is often resold by the bakeries at a profit rather than turned into bread

The real test will be the government’s ability to stave off unrest that could undermine the progress made so far. Nafaa said it is possible to quell the rising anger over soaring prices “through more equitable distribution of wealth, better communication of government policies, transparency and accountability.”

Tensions have been simmering since the pound’s depreciation — a key requirement by the International Monetary Fund for Egypt to secure a $12 billion loan needed to finance the country’s budget deficit and shore up dwindling foreign currency reserves. Economists and analysts have lauded the flotation as “a much-needed reform that would restore investors’ confidence in the economy, helping foster growth and job creation.”

shrinking middle class was already struggling with flat wages, high inflation and mounting unemployment

Sisi’s approval ratings, which according to a poll conducted in mid-December 2016 by Baseera (Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research) fell by 50% during his second year in office

the weak currency is helping the economy by boosting exports and luring back tourists. A 25% increase in non-petroleum exports in January (compared with the same month last year), along with new loans from the IMF and other sources, is beefing up foreign currency reserves, according to The Economist. The weaker currency is also proving to be a blessing in disguise for local manufacturers as more consumers are opting to purchase local products, which are more affordable than their imported alternatives

“The patience of Egyptians is wearing thin,” Cairo University political scientist Hassan Nafaa told Al-Monitor. “Despite the economic pressures they are facing, citizens have so far restrained themselves from protesting because they are weary after two revolutions. They also fear further turmoil as they see the civil wars in some of the neighboring Arab countries. But if people are hungry and if their basic needs are not met, there is likely to be another rebellion,” he warned, adding that if that happens, “It would be messy and bloody.”

“The government must also ease the crackdown on dissent, release detainees who have not committed terror crimes and bring more youths on board,”

Kuwait’s new parliament includes representatives from less-powerful tribes, including the Anazzah and Dosari. Yet the broader representation of tribes in parliament may make it more difficult for the opposition to unify. While these tribes are large in number, they receive less state patronage and thus have a less developed relationship with the government than the Mutair and Ajman—meaning they also have less incentive to support the government’s agenda. The less-powerful tribes may use their increased influence to take stances with which the more powerful tribes disagree. Thus while the government now faces a larger opposition, it is also a more diverse one. By exploiting these divisions, Kuwait’s government may be able to mitigate opposition gains

because of the rising influence of orthodox interpretations of the faith, stambeli artists are careful to stress the monotheistic, Islamic essence of their practice

The origins of stambeli music resemble those of American jazz (even though the two genres don’t sound alike). In both cases, the musical traditions of former slaves combined with the diverse cultural influences of their new environments to create something radically new. Whereas slaves arriving in Louisiana mixed their music and practices with European, Caribbean, and American ingredients, slaves arriving in Tunis during the same period fused their animist practices with North African versions of mystical Sufism and orthodox Islam. Mounir Argui, a theater director and music producer who works with Bidali, says that the metal castanets that play such a prominent role in stambeli performances evoke “the sounds of chains and shackles” that the slaves once wore, while the chanting recalls the “moaning.”

the Tunisian state never prioritized the preservation of stambeli, focusing instead on the art and culture it considered highbrow

Many Tunisians see stambeli as an alien phenomenon associated with blacks, who are already widely viewed as not quite Tunisian. In post-revolutionary Tunisia, where asserting the Islamic character of the country has become an important political symbol for some, the pagan origins of stambeli also cause suspicion

As long as some Tunisians continue to see freedom of religion and freedom of art as mutually exclusive, the rare traditions like stambeli that manage to straddle both will find little space

In neighborhoods like this one, with winding roads and haphazard rows of buildings, the elevated highway provides a watchtower for the state.

Rather than connecting informal districts to utilities and providing funds to upgrade housing, the government prefers to relocate residents to satellite cities on the outskirts. As residents of these areas grow poorer and more desperate under crushing austerity measures, the government would rather see them housed in isolated contingents in the desert, thus eliminating the prospect that they could participate in a mass mobilization, as happened a decade ago.

Building or repairing roads offers a relatively quick and easy way for a government to demonstrate progress, something the young regime would have been eager to do to establish some semblance of legitimacy.

the megaprojects. Work began on a $4.2 billion expansion of the Suez Canal in August 2014. The crews responsible for the canal expansion had not yet set down their shovels when construction began on the world’s widest cable-stayed bridge, which now stretches across the Nile in central Cairo. Its six lanes in each direction are inaccessible to most commuters who cannot afford to pay the 20 Egyptian pound ($1.27) toll. But those who tuned in to public television on New Year’s Eve were treated to a spectacle of fireworks choreographed to nationalist music above its towering pylons and a floating portrait of the president.

Located some 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo, the New Administrative Capital is Al Sisi’s crown jewel. Contractors began work on the project in 2015. When finished, the luxe megacity will be almost as large as Singapore and boast a series of artificial lakes, an amusement park four times the size of Disneyland, and the tallest skyscraper on the continent. But the first phase alone, slated for completion in 2022 (although engineers working on the project say that construction is far behind schedule), will cost $45 billion — an unfathomable sum to anyone, perhaps, but more dissonant still for the more than 60 million Egyptians who depend on shrinking subsidies for their daily bread.

Television commercials starring Egyptian celebrities and billboards stationed along every road in the nation depict imagined lives in lush, gated communities backdropped by gleaming glass towers and bluer skies than dust-choked Cairo has ever seen. They are part of what architect Adham Selim describes as a practice of “ruling through drawing,” in which the government produces images of the future as a means of exerting greater control over the present and the past. “The continuous act of drawing the world-to-be is the way in which authority sustains a stable worldview, in which it places itself as an external to the world it intends to change, and rule,”

Al Sisi longs to be remembered as the ruler who snatched Egypt from the mouth of the Muslim Brotherhood and built a new Cairo in its wake. To this end, he is curating an archive that will be taught in the future.

Ismail borrowed so excessively from foreign lenders to realize his vision that when a collapse in the price of cotton left Egypt unable to repay its debts, European powers had him deposed. Then Britain invaded Egypt to protect its interests, starting a decadeslong occupation.

Successive Egyptian administrations have tried to decentralize Cairo, building generation after generation of satellite cities meant to entice upper- and middle-class Cairenes out of the urban core. The cities 10th of Ramadan and 6th of October, located east and west of Cairo, respectively, built under Sadat, and Madinaty and New Cairo (not to be confused with the New Administrative Capital), scattered to the east and started under Mubarak, sit half-empty, having never reached their target populations — or anything close.

Yahia Shawkat, author of “Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space,” estimates that 33,000 families were victims of forced eviction under Mubarak between 1997 and 2012. Under Al Sisi, the Ministry of Housing now boasts that it has relocated 60,000 families between 2018 and 2020 alone

When the government wanted to demolish informal housing on Warraq Island, located in the center of the Nile river in Cairo and home to 90,000 people, it sent security forces with bulldozers in the predawn hours of July 16, 2017, while most residents were still asleep. Heba Nagaa Otmorsi, a resident of the island, told The Guardian that her house had been demolished while she was at work. “It was our neighbors who rescued the children,” she said. Clashes on the island left one resident dead and dozens injured.

“People living in these semi-autonomous neighborhoods are always blamed for some sort of social urban ill,”

In January 2021, several high-level government officials laid the cornerstone of the Cairo Eye in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s wealthiest neighborhoods. One-third of Al Masallah Garden, a 15,000-square-meter (16,500-square-yard) historic park, will be destroyed to make way for the 120-meter-tall (132-yards) observation wheel, surrounded by shops, entertainment, restaurants, and a two-story parking garage.

Recent projects have disrupted Khedival Cairo and Mamluk-era tombs in the City of the Dead. A recent announcement that graves around Imam Al Shafi’i Mosque will be moved to make way for a bridge project has left Hussein Omar heartbroken at the prospect of losing his family mausoleum, where generations have been laid to rest since his great-great-grandfather bought the plot in 1924. It feels like a “concerted assault on the fundamental relationship that Egyptians have with their past,” he says. A plot that has belonged to his maternal grandmother’s family since the 19th century is even nearer to the site of the scheduled bridge project. There is no way of knowing if either plot will survive the new construction.

Politicians give whatever work there is to their henchmen, not to us

Many of the politicians in Lebanon and Iraq are the direct material beneficiaries of sectarian systems instituted after conflicts in both countries.

Wealth and national resources were carved up along sectarian lines, with no party having an interest in upsetting the status quo.

After the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq borrowed from Lebanon to build its own muhasasa taifa, or balanced sectarianism. Power is likewise shared between the ruling elite of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. As a result, while elections can shift the balance of power, they do little to change the faces of those who wield it, from whichever sect or faction

such division of power has reduced sectarian conflict but failed at making government efficient or transparent

one side of the protests is that they are against any political parties that are religious or ideologically charged

At least two generations of Iraqis have been scarred by sectarianism, beginning with Saddam Hussein’s killings of Shiites in Iraq, the subsequent revenge by the Shiite militias on Sunnis, and then the formation of the Islamic State. They are not just exhausted from the chaos unleashed by sectarian rivalries, but also disdainful of them. The most recent Iraqi protests were held mainly in Shiite cities and against a Shiite-dominated government.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, the protests comprise different sects, ages, sexes, and ideologies. However, perhaps most notable were the protests by Shiites in the south of the country against the Amal Movement, historically the dominant Shiite political party. The streets of Tyre resonated with curses aimed at Nabih Berri—Amal’s leader, the Shiite speaker of the parliament, and a Hezbollah ally.

In both countries, Shiite militias backed by Iran have come to play a dominant role in government in recent years: Hezbollah in Lebanon, and groups that belong to the Popular Mobilization Forces, the irregular army raised to fight the Islamic State, in Iraq

many Lebanese feel that Hezbollah can no longer claim the moral ground it once claimed for itself as a political outsider, now that it’s clearly a part of the faulty system

In last year’s elections, a new movement of independent, nonsectarian “civil society” candidates stepped up, and though only one succeeded in winning a seat, amid claims they are too disparate and divided to succeed, they are still determined to try again

For now, however, the very act of protest offers a sense of possibility. “It’s very beautiful,” said Azab, “when you feel that you managed to defeat all your fears and say what you want out loud.”

More specific patterns of regional histories need to be taken into account before we turn to more global trends.  

Within what historians call the longue duree frame of reference, the success of counter-revolutionary forces in derailing these uprisings is but a temporary bump. The fundamental, structural causes of the Arab (and other world) revolutions remain the same and will outlast the temporary reactionary stratagems designed to disrupt them.

postcolonial states across the Arab and Muslim world, all the way to Asia, Africa and Latin America have lost their raisons d'etre and therefore their legitimacy.

Defiance of abusive state powers and their foreign backers - think of the junta in Egypt and their US and Israeli supporters, or Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian enablers - cannot be suppressed by yet another abusive total state. The statism at the heart of old-fashioned total revolutions - that one good state will follow one bad state - has long since lost its relevance and legitimacy. What we are witnessing today is the sustained synergy of delayed defiance, open-ended revolutions, and public happiness that in its revolutionary potential is far more enduring than the false promises a total state can deliver.

The naked brutality of state powers in suppressing the transnational uprisings were clear indications of their absolute and final loss of legitimacy.

In its global configuration, that "democratic" spectacle has resulted in the murderous Hindu fanaticism in India ("the largest democracy in the world") and the corrupt and ludicrous reality show of Donald Trump in the US ("the oldest democracy in the world") or else in the boring banality of Brexit in the United Kingdom. The world has nothing to learn from these failed historical experiments with democracy. The world must - and in the unfolding Arab revolutions - will witness a whole different take on nations exercising their democratic will. Delayed defiance will systematically and consistently strengthen this national will to sovereignty and in equal measures weaken the murderous apparatus of total states which have now degenerated into nothing more than killing machines.

Among the 1930s cultural and intellectual figures given place of pride are Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and John Steinbeck. Guernica is reproduced in an inset about Picasso, illustrating the artist’s hatred of war. (47) A lengthy excerpt from the Grapes of Wrath concludes with Steinbeck’s denunciation of depression-era America: “And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”

The book places added emphasis on the harsh terms imposed on Germany at Versailles. Prefiguring the later treatment of Al Qaeda terrorism, the intention appears not so much to justify Nazism, but rather to present injustice as the causal force behind violence and cruelty in world politics.

Early Cold War era decolonization also provides an opportunity to celebrate Atatürk’s role as an anti-imperialist hero for Muslims and the entire Third World. (122-123) “Turkey’s national struggle against imperialism in Anatolia struck the first great blow against imperialism in the 20th century,” the authors write. “Mustafa Kemal, with his role in the War of Independence and his political, economic, social and cultural revolutions after it, served as an example for underdeveloped and colonized nations.” Atatürk himself is quoted as saying, in 1922, that “what we are defending is the cause of all Eastern nations, of all oppressed nations.” Thus, the book explains that “the success of the national struggle brought joy to the entire colonized Islamic world, and served as a source of inspiration to members of other faiths.” The section ends with quotes from leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Habib Bourguiba about how Atatürk inspired them in their own anti-imperial struggles or was simply, in Nehru’s words, “my hero.” An accompanying graphic shows Atatürk’s image superimposed over a map with arrows pointing to all the countries, from Algeria to Indonesia, whose revolutions were supposedly influenced by Turkey’s War of Independence.

The foundation of the UN is immediately followed by a discussion of Israel under the heading “Imperial Powers in the Remaking of the Middle East.” (80-81) The Palestine problem, students learn, is the principal cause of conflict in the region. It began when the Ottoman Empire, “the biggest obstacle to the foundation of a Jewish state,” grew weak, leading to the creation of Israel.

Next comes a discussion of the post-war financial order and the International Monetary Fund. Students learn that “the IMF’s standard formula, which recommends austerity policies for countries in economic crises, generally results in failure, chaos and social unrest.” (81-83) An excerpt, which students are then asked to discuss, explains how the IMF prescribes different policies for developed and developing countries.

only in the context of the Cold War origins of the EU does the book engage in any explicitly religious clash-of-civilizations style rhetoric. The idea of European unity is traced back to the Crusades, while a quote about the centrality of Christianity to European identity appears under a dramatic picture of Pope Francis standing with European leaders. (112) The next page states that the EU’s treatment of Turkey’s candidacy, coupled with the fact that “all the countries within it were Christian” had “raised questions” about the EU’s identity.

the Holocaust instead appears here as one among several examples of Western barbarity

The authors also offer a balanced treatment of the fraught domestic politics during the period from 1945 to 1960 when Turkey held its first democratic election and experienced its first coup. (138-142, 144-146) They focus their criticism on the negative impact of U.S. aid, arguing that Washington intentionally sought to make Turkey economically and politically dependent, then sponsored a coup when these efforts were threatened.

Selçuk Bayraktar, the architect of Turkey’s drone program, said that as a student “I was obsessed with Noam Chomsky.” [16] During the 1980s and 90s, America sold Ankara F-16 jets and Sikorsky helicopters that were used to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in southeast Anatolia. No one was more critical of this than left-wing scholars like Chomsky.[17] Now, Ankara is selling Bayraktar drones to Ethiopia, where they are being used to kill civilians and destroy schools in another violent civil war.

The narrative of national independence also helps smooth over Turkey’s Cold War domestic divides. Students are introduced to the ‘68 Generation and left-wing leaders likes Deniz Gezmiş as anti-imperialists protesting against the U.S. Sixth Fleet in support of a fully independent Turkey. (185-186)[9] In this context, Baskin Oran’s work is again cited, this time quoting Uğur Mumcu on the role of “dark forces,” presumably the CIA, in laying the groundwork for Turkey’s 1971 coup.

The book also offers a relatively neutral treatment of political activism during the ensuing decade, suggesting that rival ideological movements were all good faith responses to the country’s challenges. On this, the authors quote Kemal Karpat: “Both right and left wing ideologies sought to develop an explanation for social phenomena and a perspective on the future. A person’s choice of one of these ideologies was generally the result of chance or circumstance.” (202) Thus the authors imply that while foreign powers provoked or exploited these movements, the individual citizens who participated in them can be given the benefit of the doubt. Interestingly, the book takes a similar approach in discussing the 2013 Gezi protests: “If various financial interests and foreign intelligence agencies had a role in the Gezi Park events, a majority of the activists were unaware of it and joined these protests of their own will.”

Turkey’s real struggle in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is against dependence on foreign technology

a book which begins with a portrait of Atatürk ends with a photo of the Bayraktar TB2.

the book’s biases are less in the realm of wild distortion and more reminiscent of those that plague ideologically infused nationalistic history education in all too many countries

its exaggerated critique of European imperialism may be no more misleading than the whitewashing still found in some European textbooks

At moments, Contemporary Turkish and World History is better aligned with recent left-leaning scholarship than the patriotic accounts many Americans grew up reading as well

Throughout the 20th century, America defined itself as the world’s premier anti-imperialist power, all while gradually reproducing many of the elements that had defined previous empires.[11] Today, it often seems that Turkey’s aspirations for great power status reflect the facets of 20th century American power it has condemned most vigorously

Turkey’s marriage of power projection and anti-colonial critique have been particularly visible – and effective – in Africa. Ankara has presented itself as an “emancipatory actor,” while providing humanitarian aid, establishing military bases, selling weapons across the continent.[13] In doing so, Turkish leaders have faced some of the same contradictions as previous emancipatory actors. In August 2020, for example, members of Mali’s military overthrew a president with whom Erdoğan enjoyed good relations. Ankara expressed its “sorrow” and “deep concern.”[14] Then, a month later, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu became the first foreign official to meet with the country’s new military leaders. “Like a brother,” he “sincerely shared” his hopes for a smooth “transition process” back to democracy

Amidst the polarization of the Erdoğan era, what is striking in this book is the authors’ efforts to weave together the conflicting strands of Turkish political history into a coherent narrative. Illustrating Ernst Renan’s argument about the role of forgetting in nation-building, this account glosses over the depth of the divisions and hostility between rival historical actors, presenting them as all working side by side toward a common national goal

certain themes dominate Contemporary Turkish and World History. At the center of its narrative is the struggle for global hegemony, in military, economic, technological and artistic terms