Group items tagged

On Feb. 24, Russia invaded Ukraine, and sanctions imposed on Russia by Western states led to surging food, fuel, and fertilizer prices. Burkina Faso saw two successful coups and a third foiled putsch. There were failed power grabs in São Tomé and Príncipe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and against Mali’s military junta, sparked by armed groups’ escalating attacks and creeping inflation on food and services. It was a continuation of a trajectory set in 2021, a year that saw four successful coups in Africa (in Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan).

Tunisia is just one of many countries experiencing a rollback of democratic gains. Amid an economic crisis worsened by the pandemic and made even more acute by the war in Ukraine, democratic backsliding is increasing. As reported in Africa Brief this year, Sudan’s democratic future still hangs in the balance, and Mali’s putsch leaders agreed to a two-year democratic transition that would allow coup leader Col. Assimi Goïta and other military members to run in general elections in 2024. Ibrahim Traoré, an army captain in Burkina Faso, proclaimed himself the new president of the country’s military junta in the country’s second coup in eight months while Guinea’s military rulers issued a three-year ban on public demonstrations to combat growing calls for democracy. And around 50 people were killed by security forces as Chadians took to the streets to demand a quicker transition to democratic rule.

Recent elections in Kenya and Angola showed democratic gains as Kenyans defied their outgoing president’s chosen successor and young Angolans increasingly challenged their one-party state. Africans want more democracy even if their leaders want less of it.

The challenge Egyptians faced throughout the transition was to build an inclusive polity in the face of their deep divisions. They could resolve these divisions either by suppressing disagreements through a forceful exercise of state power or by competing at the ballot box. The former strategy requires massive state violence in the short term and almost always leads to suspension of formal democracy, without any guarantee of a return to democracy in the medium or long term. The latter strategy involves less force, establishes at least the formal elements of democratic rule, and preserves the possibility of additional democratic gains in the future, even if it requires concessions to undemocratic or illiberal political groups in the present and is marked occasionally by episodes of political violence.

The 14th century Arab Muslim political thinker Ibn Khaldūn’s tripartite typology of regimes—natural, rational, and Islamic—is consistent, in broad terms, with Rawls’s analysis. Natural states are based on relations of domination between the ruler and the ruled, restrained only by the limitations of the ruler’s actual power. Rational and Islamic states, by contrast, impose moral restraints on the exercise of political power. According to Ibn Khaldūn, rational and Islamic regimes transcend the relations of domination characteristic of natural regimes and establish overlapping conceptions of the common secular good. Ibn Khaldūn’s rational and Islamic regimes both can foster the convergence in political morality that—like Rawls’s overlapping consensus—characterizes a just constitution. Critically, this convergence or consensus must occur organically. Ibn Khaldūn argued that coerced adherence to Islamic law fails to produce virtuous subjects. Likewise, coerced imposition of even a just constitution cannot produce an effective system of justice if large numbers of citizens are incapable of freely adhering to its terms.

The real issue, however, was the make-up of the Constituent Assembly and the substance of the constitution it would draft. The parties arrived at a deal, including the semi-presidential structure of the state—with executive power shared by a prime minister and popularly elected president—but the role of religion was a sticking point. Because Parliament had selected the members of the Constituent Assembly, and because Islamists had won Parliament, Islamists dominated the Constituent Assembly. Liberals argued, not unreasonably, that those parliamentary elections exaggerated Islamists’ long-term political strength. Liberals also thought that the draft sacrificed or limited too many personal rights and freedoms in the name of religion, morality, and family values. They argued that the constitution would not be legitimate unless it was a consensual document capable of gaining acceptance by all significant social groups in Egypt.

authoritarian regimes use pseudo-democratic institutions to enhance the durability of their regimes. The figure below shows the increasing durability of authoritarian regimes, particularly in the post-Cold War period. From 1946 to 1989, the average authoritarian regime lasted 12 years. Since the end of the Cold War, this number has increased to 20 years. Today, the typical autocracy has been in power for 25 years. From China (where the current regime has been in power for 66 years) to Jordan (69 years), and Belarus (21 years) to Zimbabwe (35 years), today’s authoritarian regimes are remarkably durable.

rising authoritarian durability has tracked closely with the spread of democratic institutions (elections, legislatures, and parties), suggesting authoritarian leaders have learned to leverage these institutions to enhance their staying power

Dictatorships with multiple political parties and a legislature now last 14 years longer than those without

Kais Saied’s brand of populism can be identified based on two observations: on the one hand, this populism subscribes to a Tunisian dynamic of relentless fighting for equality that began with the revolution, and on the other hand, it is an extension of the populist waves rippling through different democratic regimes around the world.

people called for equality among regions against a backdrop of strong disparity between the coast and the hinterland as well as in their relations with the State (clientelism, nepotism, institutional violence, etc.) or among citizens themselves (abolishing discrimination, particularly based on gender, skin colour, or geographical origin, right to dignity in the name of equal belonging to the nation)

a population that has been systematically classified, compartmentalized, and segregated into two categories: the "forward thinkers" and the "backward thinkers", the "educated" and the "ignorant", the "modern" and the "traditional".

In recent months, as a slew of anti-democratic and racist legislative initiatives were advanced by Labor's government allies and as even the façade of a functioning peace process was removed (and Labor's justification for being in the coalition was to ‘save the peace process'), many Labor ministers felt uncomfortable in the government and attacked its policies. The end was near.  Several MKs were pushing to bring forward party leadership elections to unseat Barak and to pull Labor out of the government.

The name of the new faction, "Independence," is being treated with deep irony, it is anything but that. It is as much a creation of Netanyahu's as it is Barak's, and is dependent on the former's good will. The only part of today's drama that surprised no one was that Ehud Barak himself would betray the Labor Party in order to save his own political skin.

Many consider Barak to have single-handedly snuffed out the remains of Israel's peace camp when Barak himself declared there was no Palestinian partner after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000. The "No Partner" meme has become a defining motif of the Israeli discourse ever since.  Barak presided over the total loss of support for Labor amongst the Palestinian Arab population in Israel, and once Kadima was formed, mostly as a Likud breakaway, and later when serving in the Kadima-led Olmert government, Barak chose to relocate Labor from its natural place - to the left of Kadima - to a more hawkish centrist position to Kadima's right.

thisarticle highlights three distinct mythologies (economic miracle, democraticgradualism and secularism) about Tunisia that prevented a clearer understandingof the political and socio-economic situation

studies of Arab politics haveswung between the democratization paradigm and the authoritarian resilience one.Both certainly captured important aspects of the political developments taking placein the Arab world over the last two decades and to an extent still do, but, at the sametime, missed equally significant changes that, if identified earlier, might havecontributed to lessen the surprise of the Arab Spring. Specifically, the contentionhere is that both paradigms tended to focus too strongly on what was visible andreadily identifiable at the level of the state and state – society relations, but did notaccount for important unintended consequences that were occurring and diffusing inwider society as well as for less visible socio-political phenomena because they werepartially trapped in the mythology served up by the Ben Ali regime. What this meansis that both paradigms operated from similar mythologies about Tunisia, while, atthe same time, drawing very different conclusions about them

unintended consequences have animpact on the regime because the reforms it initiates have surprising effects that itneeds to deal with, but, interestingly, they also have an impact on scholars whosetheoretical tools might need sharpening in light of the occurrence of events thatcontradict what seemed to be valid theoretical assumptions

Policymakers who face unfamiliar challenges often turn to the past. The problem is they don’t see the messy questions that historians do but, instead, a warehouse of analogies providing easy answers. That seductive simplicity can lead them badly astray.

The actual events of the Chernobyl disaster that took place 35 years ago have been transmuted into a fable about how the revelation of a calamity can undermine an authoritarian regime. That story has led to a ceaseless search for how any disaster in an authoritarian system opposed to the United States presages the imminent defeat of U.S. adversaries from within. It’s an analogy that instructs U.S. policymakers of the fragility of other systems and the inherent superiority of their own. In doing so, it absolves them of any need to shore up the foundations of their own system or prepare for long-term coexistence with a resilient authoritarian rival.

relying on analogical reasoning clutters rather than clarifies thinking about international relations and foreign policy.

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.

Arab populations have heard a variation on Washington’s long-standing theme: “The Obama administration seeks to encourage political reforms without destabilizing the region.” That sentence, taken from the National Security Network’s January 27 press release, says it all: Democracy is great in theory, but if it will cause any disruption to business as usual, Washington prefers dictatorship.

The reasons for this stance have changed little over the decades since the US became the superpower in the Middle East. Strategic interest number one is the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the world economy, unimpeded by a rival hegemon or a regional upstart that might raise prices dramatically or deploy the oil weapon to extract political concessions from the West. Number two is the security of Israel. But third -- not to be confused with tertiary -- is the stability of satrapies that Washington can trust to safeguard its other interests and initiatives, whether the US-sponsored “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians (and the blockade upon Hamas that Egypt helps to enforce) or the campaign to curtail Islamist movements for which Tunisia’s Ben Ali so eagerly signed up. The US rewards its clients with cash and copious armaments, with scant regard for their records on democratization or human rights. After the Yemeni regime canceled elections in 2009, its aid package was quintupled. There have always been numerous dissenters within the US foreign policy apparatus who know the damage that is being done, but they are resolutely kept out of positions of real authority.

Amidst the hand wringing in the mainstream media over Obama’s “limited options” in Egypt, through whose Suez Canal cruise oil tankers and the warships of the US Fifth Fleet, the truth is that the entire debate over democracy promotion in the Arab world and greater Middle East has been one long, bitterly unfunny joke. The issue has never been whether the US should promote democracy; it has been when the US will stop trying to suppress it. The bargains with tyrants lay a “commitment trap” for Washington, which must solemnly swear allegiance to each strongman lest others in the club have second thoughts about holding up their end. The despots, in turn, assume that the Marines or their equivalents will swoop in to the rescue if need be. Most, like Ben Ali, are mistaken, if nothing else because an ambitious underling is often waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, just as Iranians have not forgotten the Carter administration’s eleventh-hour loyalty to the Shah some 32 years later, neither will Pakistanis soon forgive the US for standing by Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

For decades, democracy promotion efforts have tended to focus on strengthening civil society and stimulating civic engagement as methods of encouraging the emergence of a democratic political culture. This is nowhere more present than in the Arab world. Between 1991 and 2001, some $150 million -- more than half of all U.S. funding for democracy-promotion in the Middle East -- went toward this goal. Yet the QWVS revealed that, in fact, civic participation in Qatar is actually associated not only with reduced support for democracy itself, but also with a disproportionate lack of the values and behaviors thought to be essential to it, including confidence in government institutions and social tolerance. In Qatar, the QWVS showed that civic participation cannot lead individuals toward a greater appreciation for democracy, for it is precisely those who least value democracy that tend to be most actively engaged.

Qataris who channel their social, economic, and political ambitions through participation in civic associations are disproportionately likely to be less tolerant of others, less oriented toward democracy and less confident in formal governmental institutions. These findings are the result of a careful multivariate analysis, which offers a strong foundation for inferring, albeit not proving, causality

In places where democracy does not exist to begin with, private associations can just as easily operate in support of the prevailing regime as in support of the behaviors and attitudes thought to beget democratic citizens. Indeed, the survivability of such organizations is linked precisely to the extent they do so. In the rent-based Arab Gulf, where the state's principal role is the top-down distribution of revenue generated from the sale of natural resources, private civic associations are a natural locus of the clientelist networks that link all citizens directly or indirectly to the state. Furthermore, with every eight out of 10 residents of Qatar being foreign expatriates or migrant laborers, Qatar's citizen population of no more than 300,000 tends to be inward-looking and to seek opportunities to be connected to one another and to the regime.

While Tunisians are often told that theirs is the only revolution that remains from the "Arab Spring," they know full well that its goals have not been achieved.

Béji Caïd Essebsi has always rejected a democratic process within the party he founded in 2012--the party that carried him to the highest office. At the end of the party's congress held in Sousse on 9 and 10 January, the party appointed Caïd Essebsi's son to succeed him as party leader

Béji Caïd Essebsi has always rejected a democratic process within the party he founded in 2012--the party that carried him to the highest office. At the end of the party's congress held in Sousse on 9 and 10 January, the party appointed Caïd Essebsi's son to succeed him as party leader,

almost half of respondents (49.9 percent) said the government is moving toward an authoritarian and repressive style of governance, while 36 percent said the government is progressing on further democratization; 14.2 percent did not respond or said they do not have any opinion on that issue

49.7 percent of respondents said they have no concerns about revealing their political views, while 46.7 percent said they are worried about expressing their views

The majority of those surveyed also said they believe the press is not free in Turkey, with 53.3 percent versus 41.1 percent.

various obstacles have prevented convergence in policy discourses and processes across both shores of the Mediterranean

Since 9/11, the EU has engaged in the MENA region with social and political actors whom it considered as moderate and liberal. Its uneasy relationship with Islamist parties has prevented it from tackling the interface between democratization and the requirement for inclusiveness

the promotion of democracy and human rights represented one of the major normative objectives of the 1995 Barcelona Declaration. Still, due to a mix of pragmatic and security-driven considerations, the EU has co-operated with authoritarian regimes that upheld stability in the Arab region and in the Euro-Mediterranean order. The EU has moreover promoted a gradualist path of liberalization in the Arab world which consisted in galvanizing economic reforms and providing support to civil society groups. Ironically enough, this gradualist strategy contributed to maintaining the façade of liberalization that autocratic regimes were eager to advertise

The “yes”’ to banning minarets has brought these limits to mind, causing a real shock and deep disappointment for many people. I cannot remember any referendum that has divided our country both politically and ethically in a similar manner.

Democratically reached decisions reflect the will of the people in a given moment, though, not necessarily a superior wisdom or power. Democratic decisions can be wrong, unjust and impractical, violate the country’s constitution and even violate basic human rights. They can even relate to issues for which the democratic system is quite simply inadequate.

The debate about the limits of popular sovereignty will surely go on in Switzerland for some time to come. We need to make sure that the discussion is characterized by clarity of analysis, precision in drawing these borders and public education. An absolutized concept of democracy can threaten freedom and is susceptible to misuse. An enlightened people recognizes and acknowledges the limits of its sovereignty and knows that these limitations are what strengthen democracy and freedom.

The real answer to Egypt and Tunisia’s divergent trajectories may therefore lie in the responses of each country’s state institutions to the calls to thwart the democratic transition. In Egypt, the military and judiciary heeded and even welcomed these calls. The opposition in Egypt was able to appeal to the judiciary to dissolve the democratically elected parliament and to the military to oust the democratically elected president. In Tunisia, by contrast, the judiciary was unable and the military unwilling to perform these functions. Without state institutions to partner with, the Tunisian opposition ultimately had no choice but to come to the negotiating table with Ennahda, facilitating consensus.

The Brotherhood’s biggest mistake, however, may have been to encroach on the military’s historic monopoly over national security decisions. The National Defense Council, composed overwhelmingly of military figures under the SCAF, became majority-civilian under Morsi (and tellingly reverted back to majority-military in the 2014 Constitution). In December 2012, the Brotherhood raised more red flags by allegedly backing a Qatari-Palestinian scheme to buy land in the Sinai. The military balked, claiming that “Sinai is a red line” and Sisi took the unprecedented step of issuing a decree (typically the president’s prerogative) limiting the sale of this land.Wael Haddara, an advisor to Morsi, told me about another incident in December 2012 when he and two other Morsi administration officials were sent to Washington to meet with the Department of Defense. Intentionally or not, the Egyptian embassy in D.C. failed to inform the defense attache of their meeting, contributing to fears that Morsi was sidelining the military.

The Tunisian “success story,” then, is not that all sides wanted democracy, but rather that all sides had no choice but to settle for democracy.

Erdogan and his party have irrevocably altered Turkey; there is no going back.

Turkey’s political trajectory is an exemplary case of a country permanently rolling back democratizing reforms, but it’s not the only one. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party in Poland are undermining the rule of law, democratic values, and human rights in the service of what they define as authenticity and security. These are developments that predate the migrant crisis that is buffeting Europe, though the large number of people from Africa and the Middle East seeking refuge in the European Union has made Orban’s and Kaczynski’s message more politically potent, and thus the undoing of democratic institutions and liberal values politically acceptable, for large numbers of Hungarians and Poles.

what’s important is how, in response to opposition, leaders in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland have established new institutions, manipulated existing ones, and hollowed out others to confront political challenges or to close off their possibility

the United Kingdom’s messy divorce from Europe, sold as an effort to reclaim parliamentary sovereignty, has instead delivered its opposite. Last Monday, the House of Commons voted in the early stages of the European Union Withdrawal Bill to give the government sweeping powers to make laws without parliamentary scrutin

If the withdrawal bill is passed as it stands, May will be able to make laws by decree and reverse and adapt primary legislation without consulting Parliament. It is the greatest attack on the British constitution in at least a century. Parliamentary sovereignty—the very thing that Brexiteers said they were voting for in leaving the E.U.—may be about to be vastly reduced by a cabal of right-wing Conservatives who say they are obeying the people’s will. Such power grabs, of course, are always done in the name of the people.

even more alarming is that there is so little concern expressed by the majority of the press and the generally acquiescent BBC. The point is that after the referendum last year, and despite the poor result in the General Election, the right-wing of the Conservative Party has continued traveling in an increasingly undemocratic direction and has, so far, swept all before it. The normally rather sober Hansard Society, an organization dedicated to promoting and strengthening democracy, has called the “broad scope of the powers in the Bill, the inadequate constraints placed on them, and the shortcoming in the proposed parliamentary control of them” a “toxic mix” that will undermine Parliament’s ability to hold May to account or to meliorate the most damaging policies arising from Brexit.

Some have attempted to make the Arab spring ‘unknowable’ as a socio-political phenomenon, all the better to obscure the intentions of its subjects and justify counterrevolution. But the reality is that its aims of establishing freedom and democracy in a region run by decades-old systems of tyranny exists beyond its popularly accepted timeline

In almost every national situation where counterrevolution has triumphed, it has been allowed to do so without any hindrance by the democratic West – in fact, in many cases it’s with direct or indirect support from it

There was never any true support for democracy from those who pretended to be its bastions and patrons, all while powerful foreign anti-democratic forces, such as Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, mobilised viciously on the side of counterrevolution to crush nascent democracy

Until recently, there was little practical knowledge about what it meant for an academic to analyze the military activities of the Gulf states because there wasn’t much to study, other than some symbolic joint training exercises, sociological inquiry about the composition of the region’s armed forces, and limited Emirati participation in non-combat operations in places like Kosovo. The bulk of scholarship examined the Gulf in the context of petrodollar recycling (the exchange of the Gulf’s surplus oil capital for expensive Western military equipment) or the Gulf as the object of military intervention, but never as its agent.

it is no coincidence that two decades of research and funding for domestic weapons development in the UAE is now manifested in armed interventions in Yemen, Libya and the horn of Africa

The history of the United States and European states undermining regional governments—including its only democratically-elected ones—using covert agents posing as scholars, bureaucrats and businessmen is well-documented. Its legacy is clear in the region’s contemporary politics, where authoritarians and reactionary nationalists frequently paint democratic opposition forces as foreign agents and provocateurs. It’s also visible in the political staying power of religious conservatives, who were actively supported by the US and its allies in order to undermine leftist forces that threatened to nationalize oil fields and expropriate Western corporate property.