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Due to her gender identity, Malak is at increased risk of torture by the police, including rape and sexual violence, as well as assault by other detainees

Malak al-Kashef is a transgender woman who is undergoing gender affirming surgery. However, she has not yet managed to have her gender identity officially recognized and is therefore registered as male in official documents

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?”

Erdogan last month called snap elections for June 24, when a victory would consolidate his one-man rule of a country he’s governed since 2003. Since defeating a coup attempt in 2016, Erdogan has used emergency rule to increase his control over the region’s largest economy

A referendum last year weakened the role of parliament and gave the president sweeping authority in the most radical constitutional overhaul since the republic was founded 95 years ago.

Turkey’s relations with its NATO allies fray and its diplomatic focus shifts toward Russia and Iran. The country faces the unprecedented risk of sanctions from the U.S., a risk that Erdogan downplayed

“If we’re allies with the U.S., we need solidarity, not sanctions.”

The rapidity of the changes to Turkey’s economic and foreign policies has shaken investor confidence, which is critical because Turkey’s current-account deficit demands steady inflows from abroad

Erdogan has routinely criticized the central bank for setting interest rates that he says have helped stoke rising prices, an argument that contradicts conventional economic theory

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

80 percent of Yemenis are in now in debt, and more than half of all households have had to buy food on credit.

Up to 1.5 million households engaged in agriculture now lack access to critical agricultural inputs (including seeds, fertiliser, fuel for irrigation) and are in urgent need of emergency agricultural support. Of these, 860 000 households engaged in livestock production lack access to animal feed (fodder, concentrate, mineral blocks) and many livestock-dependent households have been forced to sell their herds to cater for other household needs

The military's relentless "war on terror" against the Muslim Brotherhood and the campaign of arrests against journalists and activists makes Egypt's future look even bleaker. The fight against the Muslim Brotherhood has been so far-reaching that virtually anyone who dissents from the current regime is at risk.

the pathologies of uncertainty, unaccountability and unpredictability will continue to afflict Egyptian politics

I'm not even sure that I would risk going to Egypt these days, given how easily anyone can be imprisoned if accused of Brotherhood sympathies (which happens to me, like many other Western and Egyptian analysts, roughly 50 million times a day in the ongoing performance art of the Egyptian Twittersphere).

maybe now there is space to contemplate releasing political prisoners and stopping the campaign of arrests and persecution of political opponents. Egyptian officials could demonstrate their willing subordination to the new constitution by turning away from the "war on terror," and Gen. Sisi could commit to not seeking political office and instead insist upon the political neutrality of the military and the state.

All signs currently point in the other direction, unfortunately. And that's why so few observers of Egypt see this week's referendum as anything other than the next step in the country's slow drift back into authoritarianism.

Tunisia could be the most "laique" eligible country , more than many other arab and some european countries. Women emancipation and civil family laws are an example. Education rate is very high, and the gdp per capita is good.What's missing : transparency, freedom and real democraty.Please don't think that the regime of Ben Ali is the bastion againt extremists .. the unique bastion against all extremists are education , freedom , respect and well being. Fighting extremists by guns , fire and jail is a complete failure. Please note that the modern governments in maghreb countries have destroyed the islamic in-country traditional institutions known by their moderation and their knowledge of the religion whick maked the influence of "eastern islamic schools" like wahabism from saudi be predominant on the new era of staellite channels .. which is not very good news for all of us ..

Regularly holding elections further extends their tenures to 22 years.

democratic institutions are not just features of regimes that sit closest to democracy on the democracy-autocracy spectrum. Democratic institutions are now almost universal, and the ways in which authoritarian incumbents use them are contributing to the increased durability of contemporary dictatorships

leaders understand that institutional manipulation offers greater advantages and fewer liabilities than reliance on traditional tactics like overt repression, which forces compliance with the regime through brute force, but risks creating popular discontent that can lead to destabilizing civil unrest. Incorporating seemingly democratic institutions mitigates some of these risks by providing a leader with alternative methods of control that promote citizen participation, but on the authoritarian regime’s terms

Politics might affect the relationship between food prices and protest through two channels. The first is the extent to which governments shield urban consumers from high global prices. Governments in developing countries often subsidize food purchases, especially those of urban dwellers, shifting welfare from rural producers to urban consumers. But this observation raises the second-order question of the conditions under which governments will subsidize urban consumers. We hypothesized that autocratic governments were more likely to shield urban consumers. While urban dwellers can riot in the absence of elections, rural dwellers have fewer channels through which they can voice grievances.

democracies and anocracies did enact more pro-rural food policy. In particular, democracies in Africa and Asia enact policies that favor urban areas less and rural areas more. These take the form of enhancing farmer incomes and raising consumer prices, which often causes protests and rioting. Lessening urban bias in food policy may be good pro-poor policy, given the continued concentration of poverty in rural areas, but it carries political risks.

the Arab Spring reflects some of the risks autocratic leaders face when attempting to insulate urban consumers from global market prices. Consumer subsidies have long been part of the “authoritarian bargain” between the state and citizens in the Middle East and North Africa, and attempts to withdraw them have been met with protest before: Egypt’s bread intifada, which erupted over an attempt to reform food subsidies, killed 800 in 1977. These subsidies explicitly encouraged citizens across the region to evaluate their governments’ effectiveness in terms of their ability to maintain low consumer prices — prices that, given these countries’ dependence on food imports, those governments ultimately could not control

Our findings point to the difficult tradeoffs facing governments in developing countries as they attempt to pursue two different definitions of food security simultaneously: food security as an element of human security, and food security as a means of ensuring government survival and quelling urban unrest. These tradeoffs appear to be particularly acute for developing democracies.

One of the stipulations of the act provide for 10 acting army officers being elected to parliament by an army council, after being nominated first by Museveni himself. Apart from the obvious problems with the army having a say in legislative affairs, its presence has also invited direct meddling in deliberations, including on occasion the storming of the parliament by security forces

role the military plays in Ugandan politics

Over the past three decades, the Ugandan president has managed to militarise the state by giving government and legislative positions to top military officers. In 2005 he introduced the Uganda Peoples' Defence Forces Act of 2005 giving vast powers to the army

The act has also enabled the army to try civilians in military courts. Bobi Wine himself appeared before a military court in  August after being charged with illegal possession of weapons

his son is a top-ranking general who was initially put in charge of the elite Presidential Guard Unit and then appointed Senior Presidential Advisor on Special Operations. There have been some speculations that by promoting him within the army ranks, Museveni is grooming his son to succeed him.

even if he succeeds, the generals will remain and they will likely do anything to keep the political and economic power they currently enjoy. They are likely to sabotage any effort to introduce major economic and political reforms that could take away their privileges

Museveni himself has been threatened by various powerful officers within the army. It is for this reason that he has conducted purges within its ranks, despite the risk of mutiny. So far, he has managed to silence his challengers

The events of 2011-2013 in Egypt are a good illustration of what happens when a civilian political force tries to challenge the power of a politicised military. In 2011, the Egyptian army stepped back and let the popular revolt topple President Hosni Mubarak, whose sons were perceived as a threat by the military's top brass. Then the army also let Mohamed Morsi take the presidency and form a government; it even let him rule for about a year. But Egypt's military leadership blocked all efforts of his political group, the Muslim Brotherhood, to dismantle its power and eventually brought him down with a coup.

While the parallel between the Egyptian and the Ugandan armies is not a full one - the former being much more powerful than the latter - it is not a stretch to say that discontent military officers could serve as spoilers to whoever comes to power after Museveni, be it Bobi Wine or someone else

expectations for any post-Museveni leadership will be astronomically high (the way they were in Egypt) and his successor will risk losing whatever political capital he or she has by trying to fix decades of purposeful weakening of civilian institutions

Mubarak experimented with limited political openings in media and civil society and limited competition from other political parties (although his regime also used dirty tricks, court cases, and other tools to constrain the outcomes)

grand gestures were never Mubarak’s bag. As he grew older and dithered regarding his own intentions for leadership succession, his sons grew ambitious, his ruling party cronies grew rapacious, his security services grew arrogant, his generals grew anxious, and his citizens lost patience. Egyptians will be living with the consequences of Mubarak’s choices for many years after his death.

Unlike Qaboos, who was childless and without a male sibling, Haitham has close male relatives. These include two half-brothers, Assad and Shihab bin Tariq, both once viewed as potential successors to Qaboos. Assad’s eldest son, Taimur, has been touted as a leading figure in the next generation of royals. And Haitham himself has two sons: The eldest, Theyazin – who studied at Oxford, joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2013, and has served at the Omani Embassy in London since 2018 – has returned to Muscat and has been attending key diplomatic functions since his father’s assumption.

In other Gulf ruling families, competition among family members has fueled the expansion of royal control over government, as family demands are accommodated through government sinecures. Even if this competitive dynamic does not take hold in Oman, the royal presence may be felt in other ways. In recent years members of the Al Said family, including the new sultan and his siblings, have been increasing their involvement in business. How this is managed – or not – will affect the critical issue of Oman’s economic growth.

Qaboos incorporated many minorities into the ruling structures, within a strong narrative of interfaith and interethnic tolerance. Yet one clearly favored group emerged from within the leadership: Oman’s merchant families.

political reliance on merchants offered both advantages and risks. Bringing in this class offered a powerful constituency in support of the government and its extensive national development ambitions. But in times of economic downturn, it also left the government susceptible to accusations of conflicts of interests and self-dealing. This is indeed what played out in 2011 as protesters based in the industrial port of Sohar demanded reform of the government with complaints centered on corruption

He nearly doubled the private sector minimum wage and created 50,000 new government jobs, mostly in the security services. He also further developed Oman’s participatory institutions through the establishment of elected municipal councils and granting more powers to the elected Shura Council. A number of the most publicly criticized ministers were removed from office amid a broader campaign of corruption prosecutions that resulted in convictions of some government officials and businessmen over the next few years.

In 2019, the Omani deficit rose to $50 billion contributing to a steep rise in public debt from below 5% of gross domestic product to nearly 50% in just four years. This limits the new sultan’s ability to curry more favor through a repetition of government spending and populist solutions. There is a desperate need to create more jobs for young Omanis. But there is also the need to create conditions favorable to business to attract Omani capital back into the country

Oman has created a means of formal public input through elections for municipal councils and the lower house of Parliament, the Shura Council. While the role of the municipal councils is advisory, the Shura Council can propose and amend legislation drafted by the Council of Ministers and interpolate service ministers regarding violations of the law; this privilege does not extend to the ministers of defense and foreign affairs

these institutions have not demonstrated the ability to impose meaningful accountability

voting participation has been uneven and declining since the very high turnout of 76% in 2011

the status quo – especially regarding the economy – is not sustainable and will press the new leadership to make immediate changes

America’s sanctions had hurt people, of course. Average monthly salaries were worth less than a pair of imported shoes. I saw people sleeping rough or hawking junk on the streets. One former university lecturer I met had been reduced to busking. But few people went hungry and there seemed to be a joie de vivre among many of those I talked to. Cafés, theatres and music halls were packed. An earlier bout of sanctions had forced Tehran’s Symphony Orchestra to disband but I wangled a ticket for the opening night of the reconstituted Philharmonic.

It was liberating to have the run of Tehran, without minders, deadlines or chores. But of course, I wasn’t truly free. I policed myself on behalf of the regime, becoming my own jailer and censor, aware that any lapse could have consequences. Sometimes I tried to speak over colleagues or relatives who were saying things that I feared might enrage my captors. I felt the presence of hundreds of electronic eyes. The friendliest faces who greeted me might be informers. And I could not leave Iran. It is an odd experience to know that you can be caught out at any time. But this was the way of Tehran. Some avenues open up, others close. Everyone feels like a captive. There are those who say that it is all a grand plan of the ayatollahs to keep people on edge.

Self-censorship ranks as one of an authoritarian regime’s strongest tools, and I was complicit.

Despite Iran’s pious reputation, Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible. There has been a rampant campaign to build new mosques, yet more people flock to art galleries on Fridays than religious services. With the exception, perhaps, of Tel Aviv, I had visited nowhere in the Middle East where people read as voraciously as Tehran. “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable of women enslaved to a theocratic caste, is a particular favourite, the owner of one bookstore told me.

Life in Iran has always swung both ways. Nothing goes and everything goes. Alcohol is banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza.

The space for veil-free living had grown since I last visited. In the safety of their homes, women often removed their head coverings when chatting over the internet. Darkened cinema halls offered respite from the morality police who enforce discipline. In cafés women let their scarves fall languorously. The more brazen simply walked uncovered in the streets, risking imprisonment. And, in an unusual inversion of rebellion, ties have made a reappearance some 40 years after Ayatollah Khomeini denounced them as a symbol of British imperialism.

The listing of plays in Tehran was almost as long as London’s West End and I devoured them. Directors are adept at finding ways to evade the censors. A striking number of plays and films I saw were set in prisons – a commentary on the Iranian condition – but under bygone regimes. Opera was taboo, but a performance one evening in the red-cushioned opera house of the former shah, which was billed as Kurdish folk music, included Verdi. Beneath a vast glittering chandelier the audience threw bouquets of flowers at the Iranian singer, who is acclaimed in both Rome and Berlin; for an encore, she finally dared to sing a solo.

Of course not everyone got away with pushing at the strictures. In my first week in Tehran the authorities pulled a production of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” – the play is about suicide, which is forbidden in Islam – and another about poor women reduced to hawking to feed their families. Cafés that hosted live bands risked closure until they had paid off fines. Women without head-coverings who were spotted on one of Tehran’s many surveillance cameras received police summons by text. But the morality police, who drove around town in new green-and-white vans, seemed too stretched to suppress every challenge.

as well as being an intelligence officer, he was an academic and wrote a newspaper column

There was a Jewish café, two kosher restaurants and a maternity hospital funded by the Jewish community in the south of Tehran, where less than 5% of those born were Jewish. A Jewish sports centre was also under construction

Over the course of four days the men spent most of their time glued to phone-screens, watching Bollywood films, or American or Chinese schlock full of street fights, which they accessed through virtual private networks to evade the censorship they were supposed to enforce.

I feared either that the Revolutionary Guards thought they could use my presence to negotiate some kind of deal, or that I was becoming a pawn in the internal rivalry within the Iranian government. I was beginning to see at first hand the glaring tensions between the two arms of the state. My hotel seemed increasingly nervous about hosting an over-stayer without a passport. In an attempt to evict me one evening, they cut the lights and blamed an unfixable electrical fault. The following morning the Guards arrived to transfer me to another location. En route we were chased by two motorbikes and careened up and down the alleyways of northern Tehran. Only when we pulled into a cul-de-sac did the Guards succeed in shaking them off.

A new interrogator – toad-like and clad in leather – told me that the Guards had found incriminating material on my laptop that touched on matters of national security: he had found a note from a conversation I’d had with a government flunkie about smuggling rings connected to the offspring of senior Iranian officials. This proved, he said, that I had crossed the line from journalism to espionage. They were reopening the case.

Notes he had discovered on Iran’s spiralling brain drain confirmed, to his mind, that I was seeking to undermine national morale.

I wasn’t even sure how genuinely religious many of those I had met were. When we drove about town, Ali talked of his student days, his young family and his passion for British football. Ideology rarely came up. Within the parameters set by the vice squads, Tehran’s dominant culture was defiantly secular. Iran called itself a theocracy, yet religion felt frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a minority.

For ten nights in Muharram these passion plays were performed with growing fervour. Even an irreverent man who taught me Farsi, who devoted much of his spare time to picking up waitresses in cafés, said Muharram was the one religious occasion he observed. The streets were lined with mokebs, stalls offering tea and dates and decorated with tragic representations of the battlefield using decapitated toy soldiers. At one mokeb, I came across a camel being readied for sacrifice. Many of these rites drew on ancient folklore rather than Muslim practice, akin to the celebration of Easter in the West. Since its inception the clerical regime had sought – and failed – to purify Iran of its non-Islamic elements.

“You feel a direct connection between people and God here,” a 40-year-old programme manager told me. He had stopped going to government mosques altogether, he said. Like some other pious Iranians I met, he feared that politics had sullied their religion rather than elevating it.

Panahian preached from a cushioned, teak throne beneath a vast chandelier while his acolytes crowded around him on the floor. He projected so much power, I got the feeling that if he’d read from a phone directory his disciples would still have sobbed. “Are you a servant of God or of man?” he said, scanning the crowd for suspects. “Choose between the tyranny of westernisation and God.” After he’d left a woman in a black chador took me aside. I steeled myself for an ideological harangue. Instead, she held up a plastic bag of bread and a plastic container of beans that the Husseiniya distributed after the sermon. “That’s why we came,” she said. “If you ask about the contents of the sermon, no one can tell you. If you ask about the contents of breakfast, they’ll all remember.”

the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in the Muslim world. Since the ayatollahs toppled the shah, Iran’s Jewish population has shrunk from 80,000 to around a tenth of that number. The ayatollahs have largely kept the remaining Jews safe, but they have also confiscated some of their property, particularly that of those who have left the country. Tensions between Iran’s Jews and the regime ebb and rise depending on the country’s relationship with Israel. But over time the Islamic Republic seems to have grown more at ease with the community

Iran has 22 mikva’ot – pools for ritual immersion. Many of Tehran’s dozen active synagogues are vast and packed with worshippers

I was caught in a political game involving high-seas tankers and international diplomacy that far exceeded my ability to influence it.

By rare coincidence the first service of selichot, the penitential prayers recited for a month in the run up to the High Holidays, began on the first day of the solemn month of Muharram. The synagogues were packed. At 1am Iran’s largest synagogue still teemed with families. At 2am the congregation swayed in prayer for Israel and its people. The communal chest-beating was gentler than in the Husseiniya, but more ardent than in Western congregations. Women walked up to the ark and kissed the smooth Isfahani tiles painted with menorahs and stars of David, acting like Shia pilgrims at their shrines. People milled around on the street outside chatting. I must have recited my prayers for forgiveness with conviction.

two men in black entered and introduced themselves as officers from another branch of intelligence. They apologised profusely for the difficulties I had faced and blamed the Guards for the inconvenience. They hoped that I had been well treated and expressed outrage that the Guards had made me pay my own hotel bill. They assured me that they’d been working strenuously for weeks to fix matters. My ordeal was over, they said. But could they just ask a few questions first?After 40 minutes of interrogation, they disappeared. Ten minutes later they were back with embarrassed smiles. One awkward matter needed resolving. Because I had overstayed my visa, I needed to pay a fine of 4m toman, about  $200.“Of course, the Guards should be paying since the delay was of their making,” they said.I called Ali and asked him to clear the fine.“No way,” he replied. “Can’t they waive it?”The intelligence officers apologised again but remained insistent. There were regulations. They couldn’t foot the bill for a mistake of the Guards.

Only when the flight map on my seat-back screen showed the plane nosing out of Iranian airspace did I begin to breathe normally.

As Robert Fletcher concludes in his study of interwar borders, “Freedom of grazing and nomadic migration was written into all major boundary agreements in the 1920s.” Moreover, he argues, “These terms were assiduously observed by local frontier officials, even to the point of risking conflict with demands from the center.”

The Turkish-Syrian border experienced a similar transformation. The story is perhaps most familiar to Turkish audiences from the 1999 film Propaganda, which shows the disruptive impact of the new border that came into being with the Turkish annexation of Hatay in 1939. The film offers a dramatic parable of neighbors and lovers separated as their village is torn apart by an arbitrary and unnatural line. But in fact, after 1923, the Turkish-Syrian border was relatively open until the ongoing conflict over Hatay itself caused both sides to gradually close it.

In World War II, wartime security concerns led to new restrictions, with religious minorities in particular carefully monitored amidst accusations of espionage. Finally, in the 1980s, after Turkey’s Sept. 12 coup, the Turkish government for the first time laid mines along the border in order to prevent potential Syrian support for illegal left-wing groups in Turkey. Mining the border half a century after it was first drawn showed the deadly and disruptive result of Cold War politics, as well as Turkish-Syrian tensions arising from the Hatay dispute.

To blame Europeans for creating many of the Middle East’s problems yet simultaneously recognize that they presided over a period when you could simply board a bus from Haifa to Beirut is not necessarily paradoxical. Rather, it helps articulate the difficulty, and possibility, of resolving these problems today. We must constantly struggle to overcome the injustices around us while remaining constantly alert to the risk of creating new ones. Nationalism promised former Ottoman citizens self-rule, but instead brought them continued oppression in smaller states. Likewise, the resistance movements that proved necessary to overthrow European colonial rule carried with them the seeds of the conflicts that compounded some of colonialism’s worst features.

We don’t need to change the lines on the map to mitigate their human toll, whether by making them easier to cross or helping people fight for their rights within them.

civil society groups and Saied's political opponents have been warning of a return to authoritarianism under his power grab

Since the beginning of the 2020s, several articles5Jean-Loup Samaan, “The Rise of the Emirati Defense Industry,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 14 May 2019 https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/79121;  Elenora Ardemagni, “The UAE’s Military Training-Focused Foreign Policy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 22 October 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/83033; Melissa Dalton and Hijab Shah, “Evolving UAE Military and Foreign Security Cooperation: Path Toward Military Professionalism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 12 January 2021,  https://carnegie-mec.org/2021/01/12/evolving-uae-military-and-foreign-security-cooperation-path-toward-military-professionalism-pub-83549; Elenora Ardemagni, “ Building New Gulf States Through Conscription,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 25 April 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/76178; Elenora Ardemagni, “Gulf Monarchies’ Militarized Nationalism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 28 February 2019,https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/78472; Zoltan Barany, “Big News! Conscription in the Gulf,” Middle East Institute, 25 January 2017, https://www.mei.edu/publications/big-news-conscription-gulf; Dr. Eman Ahmed Abdel Halim, “Implementation of Military Conscription in the Gulf,” Future for Advanced Research Studies, 12 December 2016, https://futureuae.com/m/Mainpage/Item/2250/pressing-threats-implementation-of-military-conscription-in-the-gulf were written on the economic, social, and geopolitical reasons behind Gulf countries’ shift in military recruitment strategy. The security problems originating from Iran and Yemen, the willingness to exercise soft power in the region along with the volatile energy sector, and the ruptures within the rentier state model are put forward as the main justifications behind the Gulf countries’ developing defense industries and growing their armies. In this context, compulsory military service does play an important role, be it to increase the size of the army, cause deterrence in the region or create new job opportunities and a qualified workforce out of young citizens.

can also create intangible moral advantages, and thus have significant effects on these countries’ civil-military relations. The biggest reason for this is the symbiotic relationship that has formed over time between compulsory military service and national sentiment.  In this sense, introducing conscription shows an effort to turn these societies into nations where individuals would be bound to one another by national sentiment and not the rentier state model they have so far known.

To raise obedient and productive citizens who wore the same uniform, spoke the same language, and sang the same anthems, education became an important tool in the nation-building process.11Ayşe Gül Altınay and Tanıl Bora, “Ordu, Militarizm ve Milliyetçilik,” Iletişim Yayınları, (2002): 140. In Prussia, this “new form of nationalist socialization” was provided through military establishments with the hope that, after their discharge from military service, men would remain loyal to the state and transfer their sentiment and what they “learned” to the rest of the population.12

mandatory military service in these countries should not be seen as a way to efficiently raise strong and competent armies. First, like their Gulf neighbors, neither Qatar, Kuwait, nor the UAE is populated enough to sustain a competent standing army. Most of their populations are made of ex-pats who are not subject to conscription laws. Second, their current system of outsourcing military needs has proven to be efficient in the long run, with all three countries continuing to invest in contracting foreign soldiers to efficiently populate their armies. Therefore, the new conscription laws should be seen as a symbolic move to strengthen nationalistic bonds and ambitions.

paradoxically, the exact nationalistic sentiment and loyalty that the Gulf countries try to channel among their citizens can backfire if the people (including the conscripts) were to ever resent the rulers and their policies. This is rather contrary to the long-established coup-proofing strategies25After gaining their independence, most countries in the region (or rather individual leaders) have engaged in various coup-proofing measures to keep their militaries in check. There were different types of coup-measuring strategies. For example, until 2011, Hosni Mubarak, a military man himself, tried to keep the Egyptian military at bay by giving officers and the military institution economic benefits and providing an unfair competition. In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took a different approach and choose to ouster the military as an institution completely and empowered the police force. In Sudan and Libya, former presidents Bashar and Gaddafi took a more social approach and tried to counterbalance different groups of society, especially the tribal establishments, as a buffer against the military. In the Gulf, the ruling monarchs resorted to using foreign soldiers to keep the military away from social and political affairs as much as possible. that Arab countries followed over the years. However, given the low numbers of citizens that will be drafted each year, the risk of such revolts taking place remains low.

In Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar, there are legal sanctions in place against anyone who fails to enlist when they become eligible and conscientious objection is not recognized. This could cause or further the feeling of oppression and resentment and trigger protests and turmoil in these countries. However, at this stage, this risk is low but still a possibility as seen in Thailand, Israel, and Armenia