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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

The shares of public in total employment across core Arab countries in Maghreb and Mashreq mostly lie between 20 and 40 percent, far above those in richer Latin America, where they range from 4 to 15 percent (OECD 2014, 61), sub-Saharan Africa, where they range from 2 to 9 percent (Monga and Lin 2015, 138), or East Asia and Pacific, where they mostly lie below 5 percent (Packard and Van Nguyen 2014, 16).

A majority of citizens, however, remains excluded from state employment, which is often seen to be allocated in intransparent ways. As formal employment in the private sector remains miniscule, the default option for most remains the badly paid, precarious informal sector.

A large informal sector also exists in other developing countries. But different from most other developing economies, the “insider” group on the labor market mostly consists of public employees (figure 5). This setup makes for a relatively large and protected insider group, but also crowds out state resources for more inclusive and growth-oriented policies.

Insider-outsider dynamics are also at play in Arab business, the top tiers of which are typically state-dependent cronies, protected through layers of heavy regulation as well as discretionary subsidies and credit allocation – themselves often distorted legacies of earlier periods of statist development

On labor markets, informality typically lasts longer, labor turnover is lower, and exits from public employment are almost unheard of

deep formal and informal state intervention and protection result in low mobility between segments

The only universal benefit on which most Arab states spend large amounts are energy subsidies, which are regressive as they disproportionately benefit richer households.

While Arab states have gone to great lengths to provide, popular expectations of provision in the region have also been particularly high (figure 6) – arguably a legacy of populist policies that have promised universal public services and employment to the masses since the age of Nasser.

Given these high expectations, material exclusion and inequality and the highly visible “winner takes all” business cronyism in the 2000s has been grating for many ordinary citizens – even if average levels of inequality in the region remain on a middling level in global comparison

While the elites leading the revolutions cared deeply about questions of political freedom, it is clear that material issues played an important role in the mass mobilization that tipped the balance in cases like Egypt or Tunisia.

Since 2011, some energy subsidies have been cut in a piecemeal fashion, but only under enormous fiscal pressure and without building a comprehensive social safety system to compensate. In the absence of such systems, public resistance to subsidy reforms has been strong. No ruler has yet dared to substantially change public employment policies.

This anti-development equilibrium of low capacity and vested interests has led Arab states even further down the route of unequal and exclusive distribution after 2011. In Tunisia, the most powerful interest group is the national union UGTT, which represents mostly middle aged, middle class government employees – not the informal sector whose rage fuelled the revolution. The UGGT has contributed to elite-level political pacts that have prevented Tunisia from backsliding into autocracy. In the economic field, however, it has mostly focused on defending insider privileges, investing much of its energy in fighting successfully for fiscally unsustainable civil service salary raises. In the meantime, little has been done for improving the lot of informal workers. They themselves remain fixated on the public sector: protesters from marginalized communities have been asking for the provision of one government job per family, and unrest has been triggered by the removal of individuals from an official list promising government employment.

Even “fierce” states embroiled in civil wars have deepened their old-style distributional commitments: Post-Saddam patronage policies under rival prime ministers have resulted in a state that now reportedly employs 7 million individuals, about half the total adult population (More than 55 percent of the population of about 36 million is under 20). Including in ISIS-occupied areas, 8 million individuals rely on a government salary or pension. Iraq competes with much richer GCC countries for the highest share of government employees anywhere in the world

Tunisian and Egyptian attempts to prosecute old regime cronies have been half-hearted at best and many cronies remain well connected to the new ruling elites. In the absence of an independent business class, both governments have made attempts to lure temporarily marginalized old-school business tycoons back into their countries to invest.

The group helped free Filipina domestic worker Halima Ubpah. According to This is Lebanon, Ubpah was confined without pay in the home of a family with close connections to Lebanon’s political elite for 10 years.

Local traffickers in Ethiopia work in tandem with recruitment agencies in Beirut. Ethiopian traffickers are known to have charged up to $500 to facilitate the travel of recruits to Lebanon, where domestic workers make on average $150 a month.

Some Lebanese employers force their domestic workers to put in extremely long hours, deny them days off, withhold pay, confiscate their passports to prevent them from leaving, and severely restrict their movement and communication

Following reports of abuse, Ethiopia, in 2008, banned its citizens from travelling to Lebanon for work. But the ban has never been properly enforced and the numbers of women migrating to Lebanon for work swelled in subsequent years.

“I kept asking ‘when are you going to pay my sister?’ She would say that after six months, Meskerem would receive the accumulated pay,” Tsedale told Al Jazeera by phone from Beirut. In March of 2015, with Meskerem yet to see a penny for more than two years of work, an exasperated Tsedale reached an agreement with her sister’s employer: Meskerem would be paid by the end of the month or she’d be permitted to leave. But when Tsedale went to visit her sister towards the end of March, she found an empty apartment.

Meseret started working for a Lebanese family as a domestic worker shortly after arriving in the city of Jounieh in February 2011. Things started off well, Emebet said. Her daughter received her salary and sent money home. But a little over a year after departing Ethiopia, she was suddenly unable to reach Meseret by phone and the monthly remittances stopped coming in. “I don’t know why she suddenly stopped calling,” Emebet said. “She just vanished.” Meseret’s parents made the trip to Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, a two-hour bus ride away in Addis Ababa on at least two occasions to plead for help in locating their daughter. “They took our names and opened a file for her. We hoped they might provide answers.” But none came

“This is Lebanon”, a Canada-based domestic worker rights organisation that works to locate and free women who have been abused under the kafala system

“Since 2017, we’ve looked into over 6,000 complaints of various types of abuse,” Uprety told Al Jazeera. “Many are resolved through negotiations, in particular when it’s cases related to unpaid salaries. We escalate things only when abusers refuse to cooperate.”

This is Lebanon caseworkers studied the files of both Meskerem and Meseret for most of 2019. A few weeks after Al Jazeera visited the Emebet’s home, the group called Meseret’s Lebanese employer, Dr May Saadeh, a single mother of three daughters. This is Lebanon activists told Saadeh they would post Meseret’s story to the group’s Facebook page if she did not release the Ethiopian woman. Saadeh gave Meseret some cash and booked her a flight back to Ethiopia. Within days, Meseret was free. By September 2019, Meseret arrived back home.

Oula Keyrouz admits Aster is still owed six years of wages, but denies her family mistreated Aster, saying she has pictures she took of Aster enjoying herself in the family home. “I saw her like a daughter to me, like another one of my children.”

“Out of nowhere, she suddenly told me that I would be going home. I wasn’t allowed to use a phone for seven years. That day, she handed me the phone and said, ‘call your mother, tell her you will see her soon’.”

Meseret boarded a late-night flight back to her homeland, with nothing but the clothes on her back and the cash she was handed. She had no luggage and was still owed seven years worth of pay, more than $12,000.

When she was taken by her employer to renew her residency papers, Meseret pleaded with officers at the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut for help. But they turned her away, she said. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, as well as an official Meseret said she spoke to at the consulate did not respond to requests for comment. Saadeh also did not respond to Al Jazeera’s repeated requests for comment.

Meskerem boarded a plane and returned to Ethiopia as part of a group of formerly imprisoned domestic workers whose one-way tickets were covered by donations from members of the large Ethiopian community in Lebanon. Meskerem was a free woman again, but returned to Ethiopia last June, terribly scarred by her ordeal. Emaciated, drained, Meskerem had also lost most of her teeth.

After months of recuperating, Meskerem gradually opened up about her time in Lebanon, and spoke of the physical and mental abuse endured, the lack of food and how she was locked in at all times and forbidden contact with the outside world

“Aster is happy in our home, she is like one of my daughters,” Oula Keyrouz told Al Jazeera by phone. “I don’t understand what the family in Ethiopia wants because we don’t speak their language. But we treat her well.” But Aster told Al Jazeera that she has endured years of abuse, in particular at the hands of Oula’s husband Michel, allegations Oula denied. Aster explained that years ago Michel nearly strangled her with a belt, as punishment for an ill-fated escape attempt.

Oula Keyrouz admitted that Aster was owed six years worth of pay, totalling thousands of dollars. “We keep her money for her in a safe. She will take all of it when she returns to her country one day.” When asked when that might be, Oula Keyrouz said that “because of the dollar crisis in Lebanon,” the family couldn’t afford to send Aster home.

On June 17, 2020, a taxi pulled up to the Keyrouz family home. Aster, who had made coffee for Oula Keyrouz, walked outside, pretending to be taking out the trash. Instead, she stepped into the waiting vehicle, never to be seen again by the family that had stripped her of her dignity for six years. She was dropped outside the Ethiopian consulate, where members of a community group who had called the taxi, paid the fare and took her in. “It was like being freed from prison,” Aster later said.

Aster was part of a group of 90 Ethiopian domestic workers who were repatriated in September, with the help of Egna Legna Besidet, a Beirut-based nonprofit organisation.

Aster successfully escaped the Keyrouz home, but like Meseret and Meskerem, she returned from Lebanon empty-handed after years of toiling without pay.

In Lebanon, where as many as 400,000 Ethiopians live, migrant workers are also excluded from the protections of the country’s labour laws – putting their lives and livelihood at risk of abuse and exploitation.

When asked about the three women’s cases, Lebanese Labour Ministry official Marlene Atallah said her office was aware of such cases and was working on preventive measures. “We have set up a committee at the ministry tasked with dealing with complaints from domestic workers,” Atallah explained. “There is now an emergency hotline number workers can call in case of violations. We have also begun giving orientation sessions for domestic workers to learn how to bring their cases to Lebanese courts.” But Lebanese courts have rarely sentenced abusive employers to jail time, and any kind of justice is often out of reach for migrant workers.

authorities estimate that at least two domestic workers die weekly on average. These are mainly deaths by suicide or from botched escape attempts.

the deaths of most migrant workers in Lebanon are rarely looked into.

Protesting workers, mostly from Bangladesh, told Al Jazeera that in addition to poor living conditions, they had not been paid for four months, the companies had failed to renew their work permits - making their status in Qatar illegal - and were not given the required letters that would allow them to switch employers.

Last year, Qatar announced it was abolishing the need for exit permits for non-domestic migrant workers. It also did away with the need for an NOC if the migrant worker completed the contract duration or finished five years in the event of an undefined time period in a contract.

Owing to its small population of roughly 300,000 citizens, Qatar relies heavily on migrant workers. When it won the World Cup bid, it employed a labor system called kafala. Under kafala, migrant workers, mostly seeking to leave impoverished conditions elsewhere, have to pay exorbitant recruitment fees and cannot change jobs without the consent of their employer. The system led to rampant abuses that included wage theft and unsafe working conditions, ultimately resulting in the deaths of thousands of workers. Qatar also bans homosexuality, which it defends on religious grounds.

In 2016, Qatar said it would abide by the United Nations’ human rights code. In 2019, Qatar announced it would abolish kafala. In 2021, Qatar instituted a minimum wage. The Supreme Committee, Qatar’s World Cup host organization, created a workers’ welfare program for those who built World Cup infrastructure. By the sound of the first whistle last November, the country’s labor market was “radically transformed,” a FIFA spokesman said.“Would any of that have happened if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup?” said Mary Harvey, chief executive at the Centre for Sport and Human Rights. “Would kafala still be in place in Qatar if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup? That may not be the question people want to ask, but it’s important. … You don’t just flip the switch with a law change and expect an implementation is going to take hold. It’s going to take a generation probably to get this put in. But it’s still big change, and it’s change that is needed.”

Max Tuñón, head of the International Labor Organization’s Qatar office, said he has seen major improvements in working conditions for foreign laborers over the past five years.

We work all over the world, and we rarely see change happening at this pace

Rothna Begum, a Human Rights Watch researcher, has worked extensively in Qatar and visited with workers. (Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s government allows human rights groups to work in the country.) Begum said it is “not the case” that Qatar dismantled kafala in practice.“They didn’t do it properly, anyway,” Begum said. “They didn’t take away all the elements. They reformed aspects of the kafala system, but they didn’t dismantle the kafala system. The bits that they did reform, they are implementing in such a way that kafala still exists in practice.”

While workers can apply to change jobs, Begum said, she has found they must first give notice to their employer. If the employer does not sign a resignation notice, the worker cannot get permission from the government — “employer permission through the back door,”

“Qatari authorities — not just Qatari authorities but FIFA — sought to weaponize a narrative of Qatar being an underdog, that they were under attack in this double-standard way that no one else has been under attack before, and it’s because they are a Middle Eastern country,” Begum said. “Rather than dealing with the fact that they just did not come through with reforms and did not protect migrant workers who really contribute to the success of the World Cup and made sure they got their wages and compensated them for it, they instead used this narrative and weaponized it. We’re seeing the Saudis and UAE are moving in that direction.”

Qatar’s reforms also did not address the biggest cost of the World Cup: the migrant workers who died — in the thousands according to human rights groups, a number disputed by the Qatari government — while building stadiums and other infrastructure FIFA required after working in extreme heat on strict schedules. Human Rights Watch challenged whether Qatar could move forward with meaningful reform without compensating the families of the workers who died.

FIFA instituted its human rights policy in 2017 in response to criticism about Qatar. That policy may receive a more stringent test in coming years. Saudi Arabia, whose government has jailed and executed dissidents, submitted a bid to host the 2034 World Cup and is the favorite to host the tournament. Unlike Qatar, Saudi Arabia has not met with human rights groups.

in western economies, low-cost migrant workers are largely unavailable. When the economy booms, wages rise, forcing managers to think judiciously about hiring. During a recession, employment protections for citizens mean that redundancies are complicated and sometimes impossible. Consequently, managers focus a lot more on maximizing worker productivity through investments and employee training; and on developing new technologies that are commercially valuable.

the Gulf countries rank below every region in the world in terms of R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, and the limited spending is almost exclusively funded by the government, and occurs in governmental organizations, such as oil giants Aramco and ADNOC.

the fundamental error made by proponents of restrictions on migrant workers. Rather than making the case I made above, they make the erroneous claim that if Saudi Arabia bans migrant workers, Saudi businesses will hire nationals in their stead. We know that this is false empirically because all of the Gulf countries have tried this and it has failed. The failure was also expected because national and migrant workers are imperfect substitutes. It is tempting to attribute the attractiveness of migrant workers merely to their willingness to work for a lower wage, or to domestic businesses “lacking patriotism”; but this belies the genuine superiority of migrant workers in many relevant domains, including work ethic, willingness to perform jobs that locals are averse to (waiting tables, collecting refuse, etc.), and their possession of skills that nationals often lack.

Saudis are too often educated in the areas that help one get a cushy public sector job, and not in those that serve the private sector needs. This is most starkly seen in the limited success of vocational training, especially when compared to advanced economies such as Germany or Switzerland.

for crude restrictions on the employment of migrant workers to create jobs for Saudi citizens, they must be accompanied by upgrades to the human capital of Saudis that attend to the needs of the private sector

while the new system makes hiring foreign workers “instant”, the results of these comprehensive reforms will be anything but “instant”, requiring many years to bear fruit

the economic and social discontent expressed by the desperate demise of Bouazizi and Yahyaoui has only intensified

The character and political role of the Tunisian and Egyptian armies is also a factor

the successful installation of a (highly problematic, to be sure) procedural democracy in Tunisia, in contrast to the establishment of an authoritarian praetorian regime far more vicious than that of Mubarak in Egypt, made it necessary to argue that class and political economy alone do not determine outcomes

In 2010 the national unemployment rate was under thirteen percent. By 2015 the figure rose to 15.3 percent. Unemployment rates in the center-west and southern regions of the country (including Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid) are typically nearly double the national average. In 2015 the OECD estimated national youth unemployment (ages fifteen to twenty-four) at nearly forty percent.

The government understands the problem, but has no solution. On 20 January the cabinet announced that 5,000 unemployed in Kasserine would be hired for new public sector jobs. Another 1,400 were to be hired through an existing employment program. However, on 22 January, Finance Minister Slim Chaker revoked the promise of 5,000 new jobs in Kasserine, claiming that the previous announcement was due to a “communication error.”

“There will be another revolution if the social and economic circumstances do not change,” said President Béji Caïd Essebsi on the fifth anniversary of Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Nidaa Tounes, a big-tent coalition of secularists ranging from former communists to former Ben Ali supporters has split. Over two dozen of its deputies have left, and it is no longer the largest party in the parliament. The terrorist attacks have reduced tourism to a catastrophically low level. The economy is not expected to grow at all in 2016. None of its traditional elite political forces—secular or Islamist—imagine an economic program substantially different than the one Tunisia has pursued since the mid-1980s.

On 19 January, faced with a UGTT threat to call a general strike, the employers’ association (UTICA) agreed to increase wages for about 1.5 million private sector workers. But for the unemployed, the streets are their only recourse.

the challenge facing Oman's economy was "the regularisation of the labour market, which the government is working hard to achieve so that the market can handle the needs of each stage of development."

just 237,900 Omanis working in the sector compared to 1.87 million expats, according to government figures

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

"If the government chooses to allow private parties to manage migration, it should at the very least hold private parties to high standards, monitor them closely, and penalise those who violate rights."

On Monday, Qatar announced the gradual lifting of coronavirus restrictions from June 15. But even when those are eased, "saving jobs and restarting businesses will require significant adjustments with cost implications", ILO's Homayounpour said, adding "smaller businesses especially will need ongoing support to ensure that the reopening of workplaces occurs with safeguards for the safety of workers and consumers alike". 

changing climate is forcing families to sell off their livestock and pack up for urban centers such as the region’s largest city, Basra, in search of jobs and better services

As hotter, more-crowded cities become the future of a warming world, a lack of preparedness will only exacerbate the discontent already fraying the social fabric

decades of U.S.-backed sanctions and war, combined with the weight of corruption and neglect, have left Basra’s infrastructure unable to adequately support the 2 million people the city already houses — let alone the rising tide of newcomers.

According to official figures, Basra province has a population of over 3 million — an increase of at least 20 percent in 10 years. And most of that growth has been in its urban areas

nearly 40 percent of farmers across the country reported an almost total loss of their wheat crop.

Social media has been awash with photos showing water buffaloes lying dead on the cracked mudflats of southern Iraq’s dried-out marshlands

12 percent of residents were newcomers who had settled in Basra over the past decade, mostly because of water scarcity and a lack of economic opportunities. The number is even higher in other southern Iraqi cities, such as Shatrah and Amarah.

water degradation in the province cost Iraq $400 million in lost animals, palm trees and crops in 2018 alone

As he saw it, migration was only making the situation worse, and he felt that the slow tide of arrivals was changing his city. “Their mind-set is different; we don’t know how to deal with them,” he said. “They don’t respect the laws here.”

Decades of government neglect in rural areas, particularly in the education sector, have left many of the migrants illiterate.

often struggle to access the city’s formal labor market and instead rely on temporary employment as construction workers or truck drivers, or hawking goods from carts in the street. And their habits and attitudes clash with those of their urban cousins.

political leaders in southern Iraq have started blaming the city’s crime rate — as well as other problems — on its migrants.

A few years ago, huge demonstrations decrying corruption and unemployment were crushed with deadly force. Since then, every summer has brought scattered daily protests over authorities’ failure to provide basic services.

“This is how you drive these people into criminality, by discriminating,” she said. “They move to irregular neighborhoods where there’s no proper public services and no employment. And then social issues will emerge.”

When a heat wave forced the shutdown of Basra’s power grid in August, the homes of newcomers and longtime residents alike were plunged into darkness as millions spent sleepless nights drenched in sweat

“My dreams in this country are being lived by a dog in Europe,”

Despite radically different attitudes and levels of experience, deputies from all factions took their task overwhelmingly seriously and debated in an open and fruitful atmosphere. The time factor was decisive here. Though criticised by some as “lengthy” and “not efficient”, the fact that the NCA took two and a half years (instead of one as planned) contributed to the creation of cross-party trust – which became one of the “secrets” behind NCA’s success. 

the constitution, as Moncef Cheikh Rouhou, member of the Democratic Alliance in the NCA, has explained, could have been finalised as originally scheduled in December 2012. But then, “we would have received only 70% support, but we wanted to have almost all people agreeing to it.” The “we” includes the Ennahda representatives, who agreed to renounce Sharia as the principle source of legislation and to preserve women’s full equality – not complementarity – to men.

The blatant failure of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt brought all the opponents in Tunis back to the table.

The enduring contribution of external players constituted a third factor that contributed to the NCA’s success. Particularly the influential UGTT trade union, not least with the inclusion of the Employers’ Association UTICA, the League of Human Rights LTDH, and the Bar Association of Lawyers in the “National Dialogue” roundtable meetings, who pushed for keeping talks about the 149 constitutional articles ongoing.

Ennahda remained the only party that continued to favour parliamentarism, while almost all other parties supported semi-presidentialism. A directly elected president, with the major say in foreign, security and defence policy, should counterbalance the prime minister and his cabinet who gain legitimacy from their parliamentary majority. The first is to be expected a secularist, while the latter most likely will be a political Islamist.

high risk of permanent conflict between the head of state and the head of government

Today the speed of progress between the Troika and the opposition relies largely on how far Ennahdha goes in acknowledging Nidaa Tounes as a legitimate political entity. In other words, how much legitimacy Ennahdha is willing to cede to Nidaa Tounes before the next elections and before trying to pass the transitional justice law which would launch comprehensive investigations into past crimes.

The recurrent incidents of insecurity, economic instability and social unrest constantly challenge the people’s patience, plungeing them into speculation over the country’s elite capacity to realize the revolution’s core demands: employment, freedom and dignity.

The failure of Egypt – as perverse as it might sound – was another factor that strongly contributed to the Tunisian success. The events around Mohamed Morsi in June/July 2013 were a strong warning sign for Tunisia’s Islamists not to overplay their attempted influence on society. Clearly the Tunisian army does not hold similar political ambitions as the Egyptian military, but the scenario as in Egypt was also not fully plucked out of the air. It also brought secularists who opposed the strong majority of Islamists back to their senses. The implications of the message from Egypt of, “Who needs a constitution, and who needs dialogue, if one big demonstration and a referendum of 48 hours is enough to topple a full political system” (Radwan Masmoudi), also became very clear in Tunisia. The blatant failure of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt brought all the opponents in Tunis back to the table.

The enduring contribution of external players constituted a third factor that contributed to the NCA’s success. Particularly the influential UGTT trade union, not least with the inclusion of the Employers’ Association UTICA, the League of Human Rights LTDH, and the Bar Association of Lawyers in the “National Dialogue” roundtable meetings, who pushed for keeping talks about the 149 constitutional articles ongoing.

the Oman 2020 plan, launched in 1995. With the goal of diversifing the economy away from hydrocarbons and increasing the ratio of nationals in public and private employment to 95 per cent, from 68 per cent in 1996. However, these two goals have proven somewhat contradictory. The high rate of foreign labour in both the public and private sectors has increased since 2009 when a Free Trade Agreement with the US came into force– more than doubling the 2005 figure. High rates of unemployment, low wages and the concentration of wealth among elites aligned to the government were contributing factors to the popular unrest of 2011-12.

Under a 1996 constitutional provision a council comprising members of the ruling family and senior officials is granted three days from the Sultan's death to choose a successor. If this process fails to provide a clear transition, then a contingency plan would be activated. This, as Qaboos himself told Foreign Affairs in a 1997 interview, would mean that: "As for a successor, the process, always known to us, has now been publicised in the Basic Law. When I die, my family will meet. If they cannot agree on a candidate, the Defence Council will decide, based on a name or names submitted by the previous sultan. I have already written down two names, in descending order, and put them in sealed envelopes in two different regions."

if we follow the categorisation of the region's regimes discussed by Henry and Springborg in Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East, we can see that Qaboos' Oman represents an almost completely different approach to government from most other regimes in the region. Indeed, it reflects neither the kind of practices of a bunker state – associated with rule "through military/security/party structures that are in turn controlled by alliances of these leaders' families and tribes", such as was the case in Salah's Yemen, Assad's Syria or Gaddafi's Libya – nor the kind of "bully praetorianism" which characterised the kleptocratic regimes of Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt or the PLO/PA under Arafat. Moreover, it also differs from the strife riddled monarchies in Riyadh and Manama particularly in as much as the ruling family has not gone out of its way to ostracise, exclude and oppress particular sections of the population. Instead, according to Henry and Springborg, "being the sole GCC ruler without a solid family and tribal base ... [Qaboos' Oman has] been the most assiduous in seeking to build an identity that simultaneously glorifies the Sultan himself".

Oman faces a number of pressing, and distinctly Omani-challenges in the immediate and mid-term

49 per cent of residents under the age of 20

some dissatisfaction arose during the height of the uprisings across the region in 2011-12. Though initially it appeared that Qaboos had handled popular protests deftly – through increased public sector spending, and some political reorganisation and an anti-corruption campaign – frustration at the slow pace of reform contributed to strikes by workers at Petroleum Development Oman and protests elsewhere. Authorities countered with arrests and a draconian crackdown on freedom of speech including hacking the social media accounts of intellectuals involved in the protest

included seven members of the Labor opposition, who astonishingly defied their party, which has just begun to soften its line on Brexit so as to accommodate increasing worries about the economy, employment and workers’ rights. These seven Labor members—Ronnie Campbell (age 74), Frank Field (75), Kate Hoey (71), Kelvin Hopkins (76), John Mann (57), Dennis Skinner (85) and Graham Stringer (67) have an average age of 72, which underlines a truth about the Brexit vote and the lurch to the right in Britain. They are the product of something profound going on among an older generation, even among some left-wingers. These people yearn for a past that does not exist and they do not give one solitary damn for the future of young people who will be forced to inherit the economic mess.

Naturally, there are older politicians on both sides of the House who warn about the dangers to democracy contained in the bill, one being the veteran Conservative Kenneth Clark, but at base the great divide in Britain is between generations.

question is how much damage the older generation does before being replaced by younger people who are generally more accepting of immigration, do not revere Britain’s “heroic” past, and are part of a connected world that views national borders as less and less important

MPs mutter about waiting for the right moment to oppose the government, but the truth is that the energy is all with the anti-democratic side, the one that keeps citing the People’s will but wants to remove power from the People’s representatives. The whole of the Executive is now focused on diminishing the role of MPs and taking the country out of the European Union, come what may, in 18 months’ time. There is literally nothing else of note being debated in Parliament. Brexit sits like a massive weather system over the United Kingdom, draining energy from its national life and politics.

Britain already has control of its borders, while the myths about Britain being overrun by foreigners are slowly being exposed by leaks. Two weeks ago, a leaked report showed that the vast majority of students (97 percent) and those who visit Britain on work and visitor visas return home when their time is up. It is shameful that this was not published before the referendum and probably gives as good a reading of May’s true political instincts as anything else. Her government is sitting on 50 separate Brexit impact studies, which it refuses to allow the public to see before Britain leaves the E.U.