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As the double whammy of the pandemic and the collapse in oil prices slams Middle Eastern economies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are already providing several Arab governments with billions of dollars in emergency financing and anticipate requests from others. Many Arab states are especially vulnerable to such external shocks because of long-standing economic mismanagement, often exacerbated by exorbitant military spending.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) laments that many Arab governments lack any semblance of transparency in their military budgets, making it impossible to know or even estimate the region’s defense expenditures. Among other problems, this opacity makes it difficult for international financial institutions (IFIs) to factor Arab defense budgets into the requirements for adjusting public spending that normally accompany their support.

only four Arab countries—Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Tunisia—have made all of their military spending data public over the past five years. While it is expected that war-ravaged countries such as Yemen or Libya would have trouble producing a full accounting, other states have the capacity but simply choose not to release the information.

Tunisia has secured greater press freedom than many of the Arab Spring countries, but local journalists told CPJ that with elections slated for this year, challenges including funding, transparency, and government pressure remain

Despite a ban on foreign funding, many of the independent journalists who spoke with CPJ said they believe Gulf money is secretly pouring in to campaigns, although they often lack the means to expose it. Businessmen and politicians are also using privately owned media companies and the government is harnessing public broadcasters to further their political agendas.

Journalists speak privately of money from the United Arab Emirates flowing to establishment politicians and funds from Qatar to Islamists but there is little published evidence of this.

resource curse

Oil concentrates a nation’s economy around the state. Instead of putting resources into making things and selling them, ambitious people spend their time currying favor or simply bribing the politicians and government officials who control oil money. That concentration of wealth, along with the opacity with which oil can be managed, creates corruption

Taxes create accountability — citizens want to know how the government is spending their money. Substituting oil revenues decouples government from the people

Any democracy worthy of the label requires (among other things) a relatively efficient and impartial judiciary. Yet today, more than five years after the regime of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled, attempts to reform the judiciary (which encompasses some 16,000 employees) are proceeding slowly at best.

“If you go to a working-class cafe, you might run into someone you passed judgment on,” he tells me. “You have an image to maintain in society. You have to give a positive example.” (In Tunisia, it would seem, the upper classes don’t often find themselves in court.)

The old autocrats — Ben Ali and his predecessor Habib Bourguiba — habitually regarded the courts as an extension of their own executive power, and used them to crack down on their political opponents and bolster their allies. Judges who resisted would get reassigned to backwater postings.

The Avant TV video, released on social media five days after protests erupted in Iran, which have thus far spread to dozens of cities and almost every province, carefully stitches together an emotional array of interviews of people unhappy with the economic situation and President Hassan Rouhani’s policies. With scarce public information available about Avant TV, and with the great pains its producers have taken to present it as an independent station, the video is intended to appear to be transparent, a true representation of the will of the Iranian people. Glaringly absent from the video are any criticism of the political establishment as a whole, which has been one of the main themes of the current demonstrations. Avant TV is in fact not independent at all. Al-Monitor has not been able to contact it, but two pro-regime media producers confirmed that it is only the latest example of a new media outlet backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seeking to reinforce the narrative of the supreme leader above the politics of Iran.

Avant TV stems from the media wars at the heart of political factionalism both inside and outside Iran

The tactic that producers developed was to move away from content solely made for state television — which potential audiences almost automatically consider regime propaganda — to creating small production studios that develop content not easily identifiable as pro-regime. These ad hoc production studios receive funding from the IRGC and the government's cultural budget, but they remain small and unidentifiable on purpose.

For the last 10 years, Western (and even Arab) pundits have repeatedly questioned the place of Palestine in the pan-Arab psyche. They surmised that the Arab Spring had refocused Arab minds on their problems at home. They assumed that battling tyrannical regimes and their security apparatuses, reforming corrupt polities and decrepit health care and education systems, combating terrorism and religious extremism, whittling back the power of the military, and overcoming economic challenges like corruption and unemployment would take precedence over an unsolved and apparently unsolvable cause.

reforming the Arab world’s political systems and the security and patronage networks that keep them in power and allow them to dominate their populations appears to be just as arduous a task as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The difference now is not that Arab populaces have abandoned Palestine. Western and regional observers say the muted outrage over affronts like American support for the annexation of the Golan Heights or recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or even the Abraham Accords and the subsequent sycophantic embrace of Israel in the Gulf is an indicator of Arab public opinion, that it signals a loss of interest in the cause.It is not. Arabs are of course not of a single mind on any particular issue, nor is it possible to gauge public opinion under tyrannical regimes. But it is indicative of the fact that these authoritarians no longer see the pan-Arab Palestinian cause and supporting it as vital to their survival. They have discovered that inward-looking, nationalistic pride is the key to enduring in perpetuity. It is the final step in the dismantling of pan-Arabism as a political force, one that will shape the region’s fortunes and its states’ alliances in the years and decades to come.

the continuing costs of inflation since the revolution of January 2011

the current government is only a transitional body and that according to constitutional bylaws, it is not allowed to make any crucial decisions that have direct effects on consumers and the country’s economy. Zarouk went on to explain that the decision will harm consumers; The cost of household consumption has already increased by 5.9% between January 2012 and January 2013. Fuel is also vital to various segments of the economy, averaging 13% of general production costs in areas such as clothes and food. It also accounts for 50% to 60% of total expenses in the production of cement and bricks, which represent an important element of the country’s economy. “So it [the rise in fuels prices] harms such sectors,” he said. “And they are crucial in our economy.”

savings rates are insignificant in Tunisia – 17% – and decreasing, according to Zarouk. “People can no longer afford to save,”

sentenced to life in prison on charges of "inciting to overthrow the ruling system" and "insulting the emir"

One of our fundamental demands is to provide us with transparency on the national budget

It has been widely assumed that most Qataris are delighted at the prospect of hosting the World Cup and other major sports tournaments. But even here, Mr Kuwari raises an eyebrow. "I can't say for sure if the people welcome it, because nobody asks the Qataris their opinion about this matter. Decision are are taken out of the blue and we have to accept them,"

draft laws currently being prepared by various ministries about the right to information and free circulation of information. As a society, we have come a long way on this subject since the 1960s; Military Intelligence (which today we refer to as “sovereign entities”) has loosened its grip on the media, and we have made huge progress in media freedom after the emergence of independent newspapers and satellite channels, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Nonetheless, the security mentality still controls much of freedom of publication, and I believe we need to launch a serious dialogue about the relationship between national security on the one hand and freedom of opinion and free circulation of information on the other.

Information is vital for the democratic process; if the people don’t know what’s happening and if the actions of government officials and public figures are concealed and secret, then the citizenry would not be able to participate in events in their society.

Availability of information also allows the citizenry to oversee state agencies, and thus effectively contribute to curbing corruption and abuse of power. This makes free information flow vital to raising the efficiency of the government apparatus and improving its performance

one top Saudi official admitted to me, “We misled you.” He explained that Saudi support for Islamic extremism started in the early 1960s as a counter to Nasserism—the socialist political ideology that came out of the thinking of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser—which threatened Saudi Arabia and led to war between the two countries along the Yemen border. This tactic allowed them to successfully contain Nasserism, and the Saudis concluded that Islamism could be a powerful tool with broader utility.

their support for extremism was a way of resisting the Soviet Union, often in cooperation with the United States, in places like Afghanistan in the 1980s

Later it was deployed against Iranian-supported Shiite movements in the geopolitical competition between the two countries.

The roots of the military’s commercial empire go back to the 1980s, when a combination of a peace dividend after Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel and a fiscal crisis led the country to pare back its defence budget. Defence spending as a proportion of GDP fell from 6.5 percent in 1988 to 1.8 percent in 2012, according to World Bank indicators. The armed forces had to find new sources of revenue.

forced labour, in the form of conscripts, is almost certainly used in army-run factories. Quite apart from the ethical ramifications of this, it allows the military to undercut its competitors, since conscripts don’t have to be paid full wages

Businesses controlled by the military are widely dispersed. Some may come under a number of umbrella organisations, including the Arab Organisation for Industrialisation, the National Services Projects Organisation (NSPO) and the Ministry of Military Production. In addition, the EAF holds majority or minority stakes in many other semi-public or private companies, especially in the fields of infrastructure and subcontracting. EAF influence also extends to “sensitive” but nominally civilian infrastructure. Senior positions at a number of airports have for some years been reserved for retired army officers, as a sort of unofficial “pension programme.”

ominous signs that the prime minister intends to overplay his hand

Everyone knows what his push for a stronger president means: Erdogan would jump ship before his term as prime minister ends in 2015 and stand as president himself when the job becomes vacant in 2014.  He would continue leading the country, with more power than ever.

Most Turks agree that the country needs a new charter — one that would finally enshrine individual rights and provide for greater accountability and government transparency. In the view of many, the current Constitution concentrates too much power in the hands of an unelected state apparatus

"The United States not only has a terrible domestic human rights record, it is also the main source of many human rights disasters worldwide," the Chinese report said, according to the official Xinhua news agency. "Especially a time when the world is suffering serious human rights disasters caused by the global financial crisis sparked by the U.S. sub-prime crisis, the U.S. government has ignored its own grave human rights problems and reveled in accusing other countries."

Opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva, the former foreign minister, said parliament was dissolved and she would head the interim government. She said the new government controlled four of the seven provinces and called on President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to resign. "His business in Kyrgyzstan is finished," she said Thursday. By Thursday afternoon, there was no sign of Bakiyev. Otunbayeva said he had fled to the central region of Jalal-Abad, the heart of his political stronghold, to seek support. This raised some concerns that Bakiyev could try to exploit the country's traditional north-south split to secure his own survival.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. deplored the violence

Reporting of these events has been sparse, to say the least. The Tunisian press, of course, is strictly controlled and international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, perhaps. But in the context of Tunisia they are momentous events. It's a police state, after all, where riots and demonstrations don't normally happen – and certainly not simultaneously in towns and cities up and down the country.So, what we are seeing, firstly, is the failure of a system constructed by the regime over many years to prevent people from organising, communicating and agitating.Secondly, we are seeing relatively large numbers of people casting off their fear of the regime. Despite the very real risk of arrest and torture, they are refusing to be intimidated.

Ben Ali may try to cling on, but his regime now has a fin de siècle air about it. He came to power in 1987 by declaring President Bourguiba unfit for office. It's probably just a matter of time before someone else delivers that same message to Ben Ali.

international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, No, that's not the reason. The reason is that this SOB is one of our SOBs. We must be absolutely sure that we don't risk letting let any nasty Islamists or not-compliant folk near the levers of power before we start to fan the flames of democracy.