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Ed Webb

An Uncertain Future for Jordanian Youth - POMED - 0 views

  • Jordan’s strategic relationships and regional importance continue to win it unmatched financial support from the international community. And as a result, the government has felt little urgency or pressure to undertake real reform or respond to the legitimate demands of its youth. With trust between the youth and the regime low and the perception of corruption high, however, remaining complacent carries grave risks for the country’s stability.
  • “Economic optimism is scant, particularly among the youth,” the Arab Barometer found, adding that the economic crisis was “leading many to consider migration despite global travel restrictions.”
  • the rate of suicide in Jordan has also increased over the past few years amid the dire economic conditions. In 2020, the rate was the highest in 10 years and 45 percent higher than the year before, with one suicide on average every other day. After university graduates threatened earlier this year to commit mass suicide over widespread unemployment, Jordan’s parliament passed legislation criminalizing suicide and attempts to commit suicide in a public place, doubling the fine if it is a mass suicide attempt.
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  • There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis
  • Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.
  • Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist. 
  • Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.
  • we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank
  • organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.
  • the attitudes of ruling elites and public officials toward youth are dismissive
  • the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation
Ed Webb

Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa - By Alcinda Honwana - African Arguments - 0 views

  • young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil liberties
  • Political instability, bad governance, and failed neo-liberal social and economic policies have exacerbated longstanding societal problems and diminished young people’s ability to support themselves and their families
  • Many are unable to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place as fully-fledged members of society. The recent wave of youth protests can best be understood in the context of this generation’s struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation
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  • young Africans are living in waithood
  • a growing number of young men and women must improvise livelihoods and conduct their personal relations outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks
  • there is scepticism among youth that growth alone, without equity, will bring the solution to their problems
  • recent protest movements, led mainly by young people, stem directly from the economic and social pressures they suffer, and from their pervasive political marginalisation
  • Young activists appear to be struggling to translate the political grievances of the protest movement into a broader political agenda. Clearly, they seem to be more united in defining what they don’t want and fighting it, and much less so in articulating what they collectively want
  • interviews I conducted with young people in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia, between 2008 and 2012, which resulted in my two most recent books: The Time of Youth: Work Social Change and Politics in Africa (published in August 2012 by Kumarian Press in the USA), and Youth and Revolution in Tunisia (published in June 2013 by Zed Books in the UK)
  • their sense of being “˜trapped’ in a prolonged state of youth
  • In Dakar in June 2011, rallying around the movement Y’en a Marre! (Enough is enough!), Senegalese youth came out to the streets, clashed with police, and managed to stop the approval of constitutional amendments that would benefit former president Wade. Galvanized by this victory, and using the slogan “Ma Carte d’Electeur, Mon Arme“ (my voting card, my weapon), the young Senegalese helped to remove Abdoulaye Wade from office in February 2012.
  • Young Africans constitute a disenfranchised majority
  • Liggey, which means work in Wolof, the national language of Senegal, is celebrated as an important marker of adulthood. The ability to work and provide for themselves and others defines a person’s self-worth and position in the family and in the community. Yet, the majority of young people in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa are unable to attain the sense of dignity embedded in the notion of liggey.
  • African societies do not offer reliable pathways to adulthood; traditional ways of making this transition have broken down, and new ways of attaining adult status are yet to be developed
  • a liminal space in which they are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults
  • Waithood also evidences the multifaceted realities of young Africans’ difficult transition to adulthood, which goes beyond securing a job and extends to aspects of their social and political life
  • Ibrahim Abdullah (1998) and Abubakar Momoh (2000) have pointed to the use of the vernacular term youthman, in many West African countries, to describe those who are stuck in this liminal position
  • youth as a socially constructed category defined by societal expectations and responsibilities (Honwana and De Boeck 2005)
  • in the realm of improvisation, or “making it up as you go along,” and entails a conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to the achievement of specific goals (Vigh 2009)
  • Although women are becoming better educated and have always engaged in productive labour alongside household chores, marriage and motherhood are still the most important markers of adulthood. While giving birth may provide girls an entry into adulthood, their ability to attain full adult status often depends on men moving beyond waithood (Calví¨s et al. 2007)
  • Although growing numbers of young people are completing secondary school and even attending university, the mismatch between educational systems and the labour markets leaves many unemployed or underemployed; they are pushed into the oversaturated informal economy or become informal workers in the formal sector (Chen 2006
  • Young Senegalese and Tunisians employ the French term débrouillage, making do
  • While Singerman’s usage of waithood suggests a sense of passivity, my research indicates that young people are not merely waiting, and hoping that their situation will change of its own accord. On the contrary, they are proactively engaged in serious efforts to create new forms of being and interacting with society. Waithood involves a long process of negotiating personal identity and financial independence; it represents the contradictions of a modernity, in which young people’s expectations are simultaneously raised by the new technologies of information and communication that connect them to global cultures, and constrained by the limited prospects and opportunities in their daily lives
  • young women and men in waithood develop their own spaces where they subvert authority, bypass the encumbrances created by the state, and fashion new ways of functioning on their own. These youth spaces foster possibilities for creativity; and as Henrietta Moore puts it, for self-stylization, “an obstinate search for a style of existence, [and] a way of being” (Moore 2011: 2). The process of self-styling is made easier by cyber social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
  • these new “˜youthscapes’ (Maira and Soep 2005) resemble Michel Maffesoli’s notion of “urban tribes,” understood as groupings that share common interests but whose association is largely informal and marked by greater “fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (1996: 98)
  • Waithood constitutes a twilight zone, or an interstitial space, where the boundaries between legal and illegal, proper and improper, and right and wrong are often blurred. It is precisely at this juncture that young people are forced to make choices. Their decisions help to define their relationships towards work, family, and intimacy, as well as the type of citizens they will become. Rather than being a short interruption in their transition to adulthood, waithood is gradually replacing conventional adulthood itself (Honwana 2012).
  • growth alone, without equity, will not guarantee social inclusion and better lives for the majority of the population. Indeed, young people rebel against the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the rampant corruption that they observe as elites enrich themselves at others’ expense
  • Young Africans today are generally better educated and more closely connected with the rest of the world than their parents. The young people I interviewed did not seem like a “˜lost generation’ nor did they appear apathetic about what is happening in the societies surrounding them. They are acutely conscious of their marginal structural position, and no longer trust the state’s willingness and ability to find solutions to their problems. In their shared marginalisation, young people develop a sense of common identity and a critical consciousness that leads them to challenge the established order (Honwana 2012, 2013).
  • Asef Bayat calls these dispersed actions “˜non-movements,’ which he describes as “quiet and unassuming daily struggles” outside formal institutional channels in which everyday social activities blend with political activism (2010: 5)
  • Young activists find themselves more divided; the broad unity forged during street protests dissipates as they struggle to articulate a new common purpose and to define a new political role for themselves
  • In the aftermath of street protests, young people appear to be retreating back to the periphery of formal politics, into their “˜non-movements.’
  • Today, the divorce of power from politics is deepening because power is being seized by supranational finance and trade corporations and by transnational organised crime syndicates. Devoid of power, politics remains localised in the nation state and responds to the interests of supranational powers rather than to the will of the people. In this sense, “˜sovereignty is outsourced’ and democracy becomes a charade, as politics has no power but instead serves power.
  • Aditya Nigam points to the current crisis of the “˜political’ and suggests that in the wake of the North African revolutions, these societies are “living in an interregnum when the old forms of politics have become moribund and obsolete but new ones have not yet emerged … Something, clearly, is waiting to be articulated in this relentless refusal of the political” by the younger generation (2012: 175).
  • In Tunisia, young activists are enjoying the freedom of independent civic and political engagement following the revolution, as these were banned under the old regime. But at the same time, their disappointment with party politics makes some young people turn to politicized forms of Islam. For example, the famous rapper of the revolution, “˜El General,’ is today an advocate for the instauration of Sharia law, and the lyrics of his latest song, titled “I Wish,” call for Tunisia to become an Islamic state. Indeed, young Islamists who joined radical Salafist groups believe that Sharia will be the solution to their problems because, as some of them put it: “Sharia is not politics, but a whole way of life, with its laws and its science.”
  • In Senegal, the Y’en a Marre activists pride themselves on being non-partisan and vow to work towards making politicians accountable to those who elected them
  • a “˜New Type of Senegalese’ described as: one that is more socially and politically conscious, assumes her/his responsibilities as a citizen, and fights for the well-being of the Senegalese people
  • my young interlocutors seem to believe that it is possible to achieve fundamental change outside of dominant political structures, even if they have not yet fully articulated how to do so
Ed Webb

2011 Youth unemployment rates adjusted to account for reduced labour force participation - 3 views

  • Extremely adverse labour market conditions lead many youth to give up the job search altogether or to decide to postpone it and continue their stay in the education system. According to the ILO's 'Global Employment Trends for Youth 2012', the crisis induced withdrawal from the labour force amounts to 6.4 million young people worldwide.
  • Adjusting the youth unemployment rate to account for reduced labour force participation can be obtained by comparing pre-crisis trends in youth labour force participation and the ILO’s estimates of the economically active population. In the figure below, such a comparison is made for each region in 2011, and separately for young men and women.
Ed Webb

Jadaliyya - 0 views

  • MAM was a concrete effort to prepare and groom regime-sponsored municipal election candidates. Mandhour and other MAM leaders did not hide it and were openly proclaiming the mission of building a “politically aware” and “responsible” community of young leaders qualified to serve on municipal councils.
  • the regime padded MAM with the special recipe MWP lacked: the experience and political networks of the former NDP. In other words, for the first time in his reign, Sisi was seriously reckoning with the traditional political classes he once dismissed. The president realized that for the NYP to survive outside of its traditional domains of scripted conventions and invitation-only conferences and to assert influence in formal political life, it would need to work and compromise with the very political notables and insiders he had long shunned
  • The slogan, Min Agl Masr, riffed off the phrase “‘ashan Masr,”عشان مصر colloquial for MAM, which Sisi frequently invoked whenever pleading with the public to show sacrifice or patience (or both) for the country’s greater good. It was catchy and it caught on until it became the regime’s de facto brand. And as the election season neared, MAM launched a campaign in support of Sisi’s presidential bid under the banner “Kolena Ma‘ak Min Agl Masr” كلنا معاك من اجل مصر (“We Are All with You for the Sake of Egypt) or All-MAM for short. Two years later, as it prepared for parliamentary elections, the regime ended up naming its own sponsored list “The National List-MAM.” The slogan was everywhere, so much so that it even became the title of multiple songs, including ones by Shaaban Abdel Rahim, Mohamed ‘Adawiyya, and Mohamed Fouad.
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  • MAM’s deference to expertise and social capital was also evident in its reliance on individuals with prior NDP credentials; that is, people who had the knowledge and connections to run a political machine. While some of the cofounders of MAM fit that bill, All-MAM was in some ways an NDP reunion.
  • Nothing symbolized Sisi’s embrace of Mubarak’s political machine more than All-MAM’s pick for secretary general, Mohamed Heiba, the former NDP Secretary of Youth. Under the leadership of Gamal Mubarak, Heiba was once at the forefront of the NDP’s youth mobilization efforts
  • Besides leaning on the seasoned political organizers of the NDP, All-MAM was also relying on the former ruling party’s big business politicians who brought to the table not only experience, but also money. The most emblematic example was mogul and former NDP lawmaker Mohamed Aboul Enein, an icon of the business clique that dominated politics during Mubarak’s final decade. Up until that point, the Sisi regime kept a largely cordial orientation toward the likes of Aboul Enein. Certainly, Sisi may have worked to politically disempower such oligarchs, but he steered clear of expropriating their assets, as Amr Adly notes. Thus, high-profile business NDPers such as Aboul Enein survived, and may have even thrived to some degree, but they were not encouraged to play politics.[4] For Aboul Enein specifically, the tide began to turn in 2018 in the lead-up to the presidential election, as he became a visible figure in the marketing of the Sisi campaign. The regime was not simply tolerating the former NDPer, as was previously the case. It was awarding him a political role, while proudly showcasing his support for the president. On a deeper level, Sisi was essentially indulging the NDP’s deep pockets, hoping they could bankroll the big campaigns the regime was about to embark upon. Sisi may hold a grudge or two against the Mubarakists, but he will always hold a place for those who pay.
  • the regime’s aggression had surpassed those rejecting the post-2013 political order and that the security apparatus was just as predatory in targeting opposition actors who have accepted the political system and agreed to work from within it
  • by early 2021, MWP looked much less like the youth-led party of 2014 and much more like MAM, with many of the association’s founders, including Mandhour, holding senior posts inside the party. Likewise, the NDPers made themselves quite comfortable inside MWP, as exemplified by Mohamed Aboul Enein, who became vice president of the party, not to mention deputy speaker of the House of Representatives following his return to parliament after the 2020 election.
  • their entry into MWP captures Sisi’s post-2018 rapprochement with the interests and clientelistic networks that once occupied the Mubarak regime, as distinct from the cadre of younger politicians Sisi had been trying to cultivate through the NYP
  • the NYP (or, at least, the “wisdom” behind it) was essential in facilitating Sisi’s accommodation with NDP-tied families. Many such families capitalized on the president’s NYP discourse, prodding their own younger members to enter the political stage under the guise of youth empowerment. It may be hard to believe, but longtime political families managed to gaslight Sisi right back: “You want youth? We’ll give you youth.” This strategy was evident in MWP to the extent that it featured young affiliates of NDP families. But it was more than just MWP. By the time the 2020 elections were over, the phenomenon of relatives of former lawmakers entering parliament became more visible across parties and regions, as Amr Hashem Rabee noted. Outside legislative chambers and Mustaqbal Watan, other parties jumped on the same bandwagon, recruiting and showing off young figures from politically prominent families. In other words, every establishment party is now cutting two carrots with one knife: get on Sisi’s good graces by checking off the youth empowerment box, and, at the same time, solidify alliances with politically distinguished families
  • Whereas between 2014 and 2018, the regime’s principal aim was keeping civilian politics weak, fragmented, and inconducive to collective action, its approach became more interventionist beginning 2018. This is because the president now had a clearer vision for political outcomes he needed to generate, majorities he wanted to manufacture, and allies he needed to coopt and reward.
  • MAM proved to be a useful instrument for coopting NDPers and deploying their resources and expertise on behalf of Sisi. Also, it kept these Mubarakists loyal to the president and away from the likes of Shafik and other presidential hopefuls eyeing the Mubarakist networks.
  • as Sisi began reorganizing his own political apparatus and putting his own ducks in a row, he embarked on an effort to sabotage his competitors and wreak havoc on their organizations and networks at an unusually broad scale
  • In contrast to 2015 when it sought to engineer a fragmented parliament, this time around, the regime wanted a majority for its own political arm and was adamant to stack the cards in favor of that outcome. Not only that, but the regime was also keen on dictating the candidate rosters of other independent parties participating on its own list, “The National List for the Sake of Egypt.” Indeed, Sisi was that determined not to leave anything to chance.
  • the 2020 election marked the reintroduction of parliament’s upper chamber. As a body devoid of any meaningful legislative powers, the Senate provided Sisi with a low-cost method of rewarding political allies with “certificates of prestige.” Certainly, this was not unique to Sisi’s reign. This same tradition was prevalent under previous rulers. But that Sisi is now conforming to this same template shows that he has finally succumbed into resurrecting his predecessors’ cooptation and clientelistic practices after years of eschewing them in his dealing with civilian politics. The details might differ, but the overall story is a familiar one: the initially timid officers instinctively avoid getting their hands dirty by civilian politics, until the imperative for survival draws them into the same “swamp” they once swore to drain
  • Today, MWP controls parliament and serves as a vehicle for advancing Sisi’s political agenda. Yet, the president holds no affiliation with it and neither do most senior members of the government and the state apparatus. There has been no clear effort to encourage officials to affiliate with the party either. In other words, the president has kept MWP in this ambiguous space akin to a political “friendzone.”
  • Sisi’s refusal to grant MWP (or any party for that matter) the status (and privileges) of a ruling party arguably speaks to the persistence of his populist instincts and his own belief that he is in fact capable of ruling without the mediation of any political class.
  • for Sisi, turning MWP into an actual ruling party would be ceding power and access to the very political forces he has been trying to contain. If the NDP (along with all its missteps) was the reason for Mubarak’s demise, why give its descendants the chance to grow and gain more influence through MWP? Therein lies the source of the paradox: Sisi needs the NDPers’ expertise and resources, but he is aware their support cannot take for granted. Thus, despite Sisi’s accommodation with the Mubarak regime’s networks and their presence in MWP, the president’s propaganda machine remains discursively hostile to NDP remnants, especially more recently with growing chatter about a Gamal Mubarak presidential bid.
  • The president may believe that his investment in this project will someday bear fruit, contributing to a new reality actualizing his vision for the ideal civilian politician—that is, the politician who will blindly defer to the men in the uniform, accept their supremacy, and respect their economic privileges (with all the corrupt practices they entail).
  • The regime’s continued inability to assert its hegemony over the formal political sphere, its dependency on political intermediaries it does not trust, and the shutting out of credible competitors from politics, have all limited Sisi’s political options for managing the ongoing economic crisis
  • the realm of formal politics has become so discredited that the regime itself is aware that it will not provide its international audiences a sufficiently persuasive façade of democratic politics
  • Sisi’s long struggle to invent the politics he dreams of through his political grooming projects, while evading the politics he actually faces by gaslighting his allies and critics, alike
Ed Webb

Tunisian Youth Call for Greater Political Participation - Tunisia Live : Tunisia Live - 0 views

  • a growing disconnect in the country between youth and older generations
  • “Last elections’ youth participation was almost 17 percent of the total voters. So how are we expecting to have a better chance in the coming elections without the youth’s enthusiasm and participation?”
Ed Webb

The Built-In Obsolescence of the Facebook Leader - 0 views

  • With great rapidity new groups and figures have been projected into the political limelight thanks to the springboard of popular social media channels, only often to disappear with the same speed, with which they had first appeared. Social media have proven to be a stage in which creativity and spirit of initiative of different radicalized sectors of the Egyptian urban middle class have found a powerful outlet of expression. One might say that they have to a large extent delivered on the techno-libertarian promise of being a meritocratic space, in which dedication and charisma could find the outlet that was not available in formal parties and NGOs and in the traditional intellectual public sphere. At the same time, activist' enthusiastic adoption of social media as a ready-made means of short-term mobilization has produced serious problems of organizational sustainability. Short-termist over-reliance on the power of social media has contributed to a neglect for the question of long-term organization, ultimately leading to the incapacity in constructing  a credible leadership for the revolutionary youth.
  • the image of the Egyptian political web as a sort of magmatic space: a space in which campaigns, groups, and personalities come and go, without managing to solidify into more durable organizational structures
  • political evanescence is the inconvenient accompaniment of the open and meritocratic character of social media
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  • low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place
  • he political evanescence of social media activism raises issues of accountability and democratic control on the new emerging leaders of social movements, because of a certain opacity that accompanies the fluidity and partial anonymity of online interactions
  • The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists
  • it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events
  • While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.
  • The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.
Ed Webb

Oman's youth unemployment problem is a harbinger for wider Gulf | Business and Economy ... - 0 views

  • Oman was rocked by demonstrations as young people took to streets in cities across the country to protest a lack of jobs and economic opportunity. The unrest fell just weeks after the government, led by Oman’s new ruler, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, introduced a 5 percent value-added tax (VAT) as part of a long-delayed fiscal reform package that included other cuts to state spending and plans to introduce an income tax.
  • Demonstrations over economic grievances in the Gulf’s most indebted state have occurred sporadically since the 2011 “Arab Spring”. The country’s previous ruler, the late Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, managed to quell protesters by offering them generous state handouts. The new sultan responded to events in May in a similar fashion, promising nearly 15,000 public-sector jobs and another 15,000 jobs in the private sector to be funded by a $500 government stipend. But that strategy will likely delay reform designed to trim bloated state budgets and jump-start the country’s private sector to generate more jobs.
  • While Oman has less breathing room than its wealthier neighbours to successfully reform its economy, the delicate balancing act playing out there between reining in state spending and creating economic opportunities for young people lays bare a dilemma facing other Gulf nations.
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  • “A youth bulge is coming into the labour force at a time when the ability of Gulf societies to continue in the traditional pattern of offering public-sector jobs is diminished,”
  • In 2019, the World Bank estimated Oman’s youth unemployment rate at 49 percent. The pandemic has almost surely worsened it
  • Muscat is seeking to improve education and diversify the country’s economy by promoting job growth in sectors like tourism, manufacturing and technology
  • Like Oman, Saudi Arabia faces an acute problem of creating jobs for young people. Half the population is under the age of 25 and nearly 60 percent of unemployed people are under the age of 30
  • Oman is a country of just five million, with expats accounting for more than 38 percent of the population. Filling the roughly 80 percent of jobs held by foreigners in the private sector is critical to the government’s economic transformation plans
  • Muscat has recently passed laws making it more costly to hire foreign workers while also implementing nationwide training programmes to address skills gaps with Omani nationals
  • A demographic that has been more willing to take jobs in the private sector, particularly in Saudi Arabia, is young women
Ed Webb

Tunisian leader: Young are paid to migrate, harm Europe ties - 0 views

  • Tunisia’s leader claimed Sunday that some desperate youths are being paid to try to leave Tunisia illegally for Europe, saying the goal is to damage the country from within and hurt its ties with Europe.President Kais Saied made the remarks during a stroll down the iconic Avenue Bourguiba, the main axis in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, a week after firing the prime minister and other top officials and freezing parliament. He listened to passersby calling out his name and shouting “Tunisia!” but said nothing about his much-awaited next steps.
  • He claimed that some of his countrymen with political motives are paying desperate youth to make the trip, saying their intention is to repeat the mass illegal migration that began after the Tunisian revolution a decade ago.
  • Saied made the same assertion earlier Sunday when he formally accepted 1.5 million doses of anti-COVID-19 vaccines from Italy, warning against any “political exploitation” of the country’s youths.
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  • The Tunisian Coast Guard picked up 31 Tunisian youths on Sunday, a day after stopping three attempted crossings and seizing five small boats and a large sum of money. A total of 188 migrants, 56 of whom were Tunisian, were saved, while 11 other attempts to embark on the journey to Europe were stopped, according to the Interior Ministry.
  • dozens of migrants, most of them from Tunisia, reached the Italian island of Sardinia over the weekend
Ed Webb

Jadaliyya - 0 views

  • At the heart of the regime’s responses to these pressures is the “National Dialogue.” The Dialogue, which kicked off last May, is a vaguely conceived multi-track forum in which a host of carefully selected political figures and experts convene periodically to discuss public policy reforms. The political leadership has marketed this initiative to its international and domestic detractors as a testament to its readiness to engage opponents and alternative viewpoints. In reality, the Dialogue is the regime’s attempt at gaslighting critics
  • the spectacle (as opposed to the outcome) of deliberation is the clear driver of this initiative
  • The very existence of the Dialogue underscores the extent to which Sisi has managed to lock himself in a corner after spending much of the past decade destroying all forms of managed dissent and limited pluralism, once a staple of the previous authoritarian order.
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  • by early 2023, the regime had decimated the resources it now needed to erect a convincing façade of participatory politics to mitigate the concerns of its international partners and to absorb popular discontent
  • the July 2013 coup proceeded on the ruins of the “civilian punching bag” model of 2012-13. The latter describes a tacit arrangement in which the military was poised to pursue its interests from behind a civilian interlocutor (or, a “punching bag”), the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party—an arrangement that ended in utter failure. By 2013, therefore, the military’s appetite for working in collaboration with civilian parties had run its course.
  • the reinvention of Mubarak-style dominant party rule was not an appealing option for Sisi in 2014.
  • “the New Youth Project” or NYP for short. The NYP describes a host of formal and informal initiatives and programs that, collectively, seek to cultivate a new cadre of youth politicians and public servants socialized around military-centric nationalism
  • a broader effort the political leadership is undertaking to inject into public institutions a broad-based ideological commitment to the military-dominated political order
  • a pervading discourse senior officials and pro-regime figures have propagated in the past few years under the banner of “the battle of consciousness” (معركة الوعي). Behind this rather eerie term is a narrative claiming that Egypt’s most pressing national security concern is the spread of misinformation and ideational attacks against society’s so-called core values. The implication of course is that any expression of dissent, criticism of government performance, or questioning of state-provided information is a suspected attempt to foment instability and undermine Egypt’s social peace. The solution, the story goes, is countering such “false consciousness” by promoting public awareness of these threats and by enlisting more patriots in the “battle of consciousness.”
  • the Sisi regime has been pursuing a broad-scoped project to ideologically militarize civilian spheres and to inculcate all sectors of Egyptian society with ideas rationalizing blind support for the military-sponsored regime
  • the politicians who have been coached to impress the crowd by their confident demeanor, their captivating TED Talk public speaking style, and their superficial use of catchy phrases that borrow (albeit superficially) from the language of scientific research. Most importantly, they have been socialized to accept the supremacy of the military such that they would never question the men in uniform, as was the case with the contentious youth activists who often denigrated officers in public forums and protests between 2011 and 2013
  • a consistent strategy Sisi has adopted whenever frustrated with the ineffectiveness or the bureaucratic resistance of state institutions: the creation of parallel structures to bypass these institutions altogether. Thus, today one finds a host of bodies and offices Sisi formed over the years and that seemingly replicate the roles of existing government ministries. Examples include the Supreme Council for Investment, the Supreme Council for Combatting Terrorism, the Supreme Council for the Automotive Industry, and, currently under study, the Supreme Council for Education. Whereas the office of the minister of health still exists officially, a presidential advisor for health affairs (a former minister of health himself), appointed by Sisi in 2020, has taken a visible role in explaining and defending state health policies, just like a minister of health would.
  • Mustaqbal Watan Party (MWP). MWP was once the embodiment of Sisi’s dream of a new generation of pro-military youth politicians who could lead Egypt’s post-2013 political scene. After several wake-up calls, the regime was forced to restructure the party so that “Sisi’s youth” could step aside to accommodate a larger role for the older and more seasoned networks and affiliates of the Mubarak regime—the same actors the president once sought to sideline. These transformations underscore the inherent limitations of the NYP and the idea that Sisi, despite all the power and resources he possessed, had to forge compromises with the once-dreaded traditional political classes, even if at the expense of his own coveted project.
  • observers were aware that MWP was among the political parties the intelligence establishment created and funded to promote the Sisi presidency. Nevertheless, Sisi kept an official distance from the party, avoiding any insinuation that Mustaqbal Watan represents the wielders of power in any formal sense. This policy was partly shaped by Sisi’s aforementioned skepticism of political parties and his interest in engineering the political field from a distance
  • there was more to Sisi’s apprehension toward the Mubarakists than appeasing the January 25thers or deflecting criticism. On a more fundamental level, Sisi was keeping a watchful eye on presidential hopeful Ahmed Shafik, former Air Force general and Mubarak’s last prime minister, who ran for president in 2012 and lost to Morsi in a tight runoff. Even though Shafik opted (rather grudgingly) not to run for president in 2014 after it became clear Sisi was the state’s chosen candidate and trying to challenge him was pointless, his supporters did not relent.
  • The idea of former Mubarakists banding together outside the state’s purview[3] was (and remains) an alarming prospect for Sisi for multiple reasons. They are proficient in mobilizing supporters in elections and have a long experience in the business of setting up vote-buying machines. More than any other civilian player, they can work collaboratively with security agencies. Most significantly, if organized sufficiently, they have what it takes to offer Sisi’s international allies and domestic constituents the same deal he offers them: a stable authoritarian project accommodating the various geostrategic, political, and economic imperatives the Sisi regime claims to protect
  • In early 2021, over half of MWP’s Central Secretariat members had ties to the NDP (compared to a quarter in 2016), and so did two thirds of its provincial leaders. This reality stood in stark contrast to the state of affairs inside Mustaqbal Watan during its founding years, when a younger group of political outsiders were running the show. Interestingly, by 2021, only two of Mustaqbal Watan’s 2014 founding signatories enjoyed posts in the party’s Central Secretariat, which now featured a completely different cadre of politicians.
  • lawmakers voted down by a wide margin the president’s highly coveted civil service bill, among the reforms reportedly “encouraged” by the International Monetary Fund at the time
  • in the fall of 2019, the president decided to put an end to this disarray, ordering a freeze on parliament’s operations, nearly a year before the next legislative elections were due.
  • The lead-up to the 2018 vote confirmed in many ways Sisi’s intolerance of any political competition, even to the most limited degree. He went to great lengths to eliminate all presidential contenders by any means possible: imprisonment, intimidation, violence, and dubious legal measures. Left to his own devices, Sisi would have run unchallenged. Pressured by Washington, however, he ultimately agreed to let one of his own political cheerleaders, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, run against him in what proved to be an unconvincing (even if lighthearted) episode of political theater, with Sisi winning 97 percent of the votes.
Ed Webb

Is tourism the antidote to youth unemployment in Oman? - 0 views

  • A stubbornly high youth unemployment rate is one of Oman's most pressing internal issues. Roughly half of Oman's youths are unemployed, the World Bank estimates.
  • many Omanis await structural economic reforms, as the hydrocarbon industry accounts for 74% of government revenues but employs only 16,000 citizens of the Gulf state
  • the country’s road map for social and economic reform identifies five high-priority sectors, including the employment-intensive tourism industry. Ranked as one of the fastest growing industries in the world, the tourism sector could employ a total of 535,000 people, directly and indirectly, in Oman by 2040 to cater to 11 million visitors.
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  • The government is expected to play a "crucial" role in tourism development by injecting $6 billion over 25 years to trigger $43 billion worth of investments from the private sector.
  • the promises to allocate 223,000 direct tourism jobs to Omani nationals by 2040 does not align with Oman's undersized tourism education sector, which graduates only a few hundred students per year, mainly from the Oman Tourism College
  • although the number of tourists visiting Oman has doubled since 2008, the industry employs less than 17,000 Omanis.
  • “Corruption was also an issue since local authorities requested me to pay imaginary taxes," he said. "I am an ordinary man so I had to shut up and comply.”
  • “The concept of SMEs [small and medium enterprises] does not exist in the field of tourism anyway, the whole system is designed for large corporations,” said Christopher Chellapermal, a French entrepreneur. Chellapermal ran a scuba diving business in Oman for 15 years before being forced out of business in 2017.
  • The country’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product is rated junk by all three major agencies, as it has multiplied by 12 since 2014. Moreover, the Omani economy is ranked the worst performing among Gulf countries
  • For Chellapermal, Oman "makes the crazy wager" of luxury tourism by prioritizing premium visitors when the backpacker segment would be a better fit.
  • “Chinese and Indian tourists are very much interested in culture and heritage destinations," Hollister said. "Oman could focus on this segment to make it their niche, a differentiator.”
  • wealth of cultural and natural assets. The Ministry of Tourism promotes Oman as a hidden jewel at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. 
  • regional tensions had very little impact on tourism
  • As Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said takes power, analysts worry that Oman’s foreign policy of neutrality could be at stake. Will “any of Oman’s more assertive neighbors seek to sway Haitham to align more closely with their own approach,” Kristian Coates Ulrichsen wrote for Al-Monitor.
  • The prospect of tensions between Muscat and neighboring states does not please tourism actors, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are Oman’s key source regional markets for tourism. In 2018, Gulf citizens accounted for about half of international arrivals.
  • Saudi Arabia’s aggressive push to develop its leisure tourism industry and attract 100 million visits by 2030 collides with Oman’s ambitions
Ed Webb

The dwindling promise of popular uprisings in the Middle East - 0 views

  • The scenes emerging from Iran today elicit a mix of reactions across a region still reeling from the dark legacy of the “Arab Spring,” which itself came on the heels of the “Green Movement” protests in the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Many Arabs cannot help but recall the sense of hope that reverberated from Tunisia to Yemen, only to be shattered by unyielding repression, war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Subsequent protest waves, including those that began in 2019 in Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, were similarly met with brutality, co-optation, and dissolution.
  • Over a decade on from the Arab uprisings, the path toward democracy and freedom for youth across the Middle East has become more treacherous than ever, as liberation movements find themselves fighting against stronger, smarter, and more entrenched regimes that have adapted to modern challenges to their domination.
  • Technologies that many hoped would help to evade state censorship and facilitate mobilization have been co-opted as repressive surveillance tools.
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  • many of the region’s youth have become immobilized by revolutionary fatigue left by the tragic, violent trauma of the Arab Spring’s aftermath
  • Breakthroughs in surveillance methods are allowing intelligence outfits across the Middle East to infiltrate just about every crevice of civil society, making it almost impossible to communicate or organize without the government’s knowledge. Some of the most sinister of these weapons have been manufactured in Israel, which has emerged as a leading global exporter of surveillance technologies that are now being deployed against oppressed populations worldwide.
  • The prospect of acquiring dystopian surveillance tech like Pegasus has become a driving motive for authoritarian Arab leaders in their rush to normalize relations with Israel, against the will of their people
  • While arming themselves with the latest repressive tools, autocratic regimes across the Middle East continue to be encouraged by their external benefactors to prioritize security and foreign interests at the expense of democracy and human rights at home
  • with the United States declining as a global hegemon, authoritarians are selling their allegiances to the highest bidder, with human rights, democracy, and accountability falling further by the wayside.
  • Since 2011, Russia has doubled down on its support for some of the most brutal regimes in the region.
  • About 60 percent of the region’s population are under 25 years old, and the dire socio-political and economic conditions that much of the Middle East’s youth face have changed little since the thwarted revolutions of 2011. Youth unemployment has, in fact, worsened over the past decade, increasing from 23.8 percent in 2010 to 27.2 percent in 2020. The lack of opportunities continues to fuel brain drains and mass migration across the region.
  • dictators driven by paranoia have continued to hollow out civil society, ensuring that no viable political alternative to their rule exists. Press freedom across the region has declined drastically; Egypt, for example, has become one of the world’s top jailers of journalists since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in a military coup in 2013. In Tunisia, President Kais Saied has undone many of the country’s democratic advances by dissolving the government and enhancing his powers through a new constitution.
  • This aggressive trend has intensified in Palestine, too. Following the 2021 Unity Intifada, Israeli forces arrested hundreds of political activists and are now stepping up efforts to target civil society and human rights groups that expose Israeli war crimes and rights violations. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has entrenched its role as a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation, stepping up arrests of political activists and resistance fighters alike across the West Bank at Israel’s behest.
  • A recent study by The Guardian and YouGov found that although a majority of respondents in Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, and Egypt do not regret the uprisings, more than half of those polled in Syria, Yemen, and Libya say their lives are now worse
  • By shutting down spaces for Iranians to realize their imagined future, Iran’s leaders have ensured that any substantial transfer of power will be violent
Ed Webb

New Texts Out Now: Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisi... - 0 views

  • situate the movements in Egypt and Tunisia in the framework of the imposition of neoliberal economic reform and structural adjustment programs (ERSAPs) on Tunisia, from the mid-1980s, and Egypt, from 1991. The labor movements were the most salient expression of the deteriorating conditions of life under the regime of neoliberal globalization, or “flexible accumulation,” as the regulation school of political economy terms it
  • The recent murder and torture of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, who was researching the independent trade union movement in Egypt, suggests that it will be quite a while before anyone takes up this subject again.
  • class and political economy were far more salient elements of the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (and I might have added Bahrain and Morocco) than most Western (and even local) accounts were willing to acknowledge
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  • 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.
Ed Webb

Exporting Jihad - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • A friend of Mohamed’s, an unemployed telecommunications engineer named Nabil Selliti, left Douar Hicher to fight in Syria. Oussama Romdhani, who edits the Arab Weekly in Tunis, told me that in the Arab world the most likely radicals are people in technical or scientific fields who lack the kind of humanities education that fosters critical thought. Before Selliti left, Mohamed asked him why he was going off to fight. Selliti replied, “I can’t build anything in this country. But the Islamic State gives us the chance to create, to build bombs, to use technology.” In July, 2013, Selliti blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq.
  • Tourism, one of Tunisia’s major industries, dropped by nearly fifty per cent after June 26th last year, when, on a beach near the resort town of Sousse, a twenty-three-year-old student and break-dancing enthusiast pulled an automatic weapon out of his umbrella and began shooting foreigners; he spared Tunisian workers, who tried to stop him. The terrorist, who had trained at an Islamic State camp in Libya, killed thirty-eight people, thirty of them British tourists, before being shot dead by police.
  • “The youth are lost,” Kamal told me. “There’s no justice.” Douar Hicher, he said, “is the key to Tunisia.” He continued, “If you want to stop terrorism, then bring good schools, bring transportation—because the roads are terrible—and bring jobs for young people, so that Douar Hicher becomes like the parts of Tunisia where you Westerners come to have fun.”
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  • he condemned the Sousse massacre and a terrorist attack in March, 2015, at Tunisia’s national museum, the Bardo, where three gunmen killed two dozen people. The victims were innocents, he said. Kamal still entertained a fantasy of joining a reformed police force. His knowledge of Islam was crude, and his allegiance to isis seemed confused and provisional—an expression of rage, not of ideology. But in Douar Hicher anger was often enough to send young people off to fight
  • “Maybe it’s the Tunisian nature—we like risk,” a former jihadi told me. A million Tunisians live and work in Europe. “A lot of drug dealers are Tunisian; many smugglers of goods between Turkey and Greece are Tunisian; a lot of human traffickers in Belgrade are Tunisian. Online hackers—be careful of the Tunisians, there’s a whole network of them.”
  • “The radical narrative tells you that whatever you’ve learned about Islam is wrong, you have to discard it—we have the new stuff. The old, traditional, moderate Islam doesn’t offer you the adventure of the isis narrative. It doesn’t offer you the temptation to enjoy, maybe, your inner savagery. isis offers a false heaven for sick minds.”
  • Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad.
  • the factors that drive young men and women to adopt Salafi jihadism are diverse and hard to parse: militants reach an overwhelmingly reductive idea by complex and twisted paths. A son of Riyadh grows up hearing Salafi preaching in a state-sanctioned mosque and goes to Syria with the financial aid of a Saudi businessman. A young Sunni in Falluja joins his neighbors in fighting American occupation and “Persian”—Shiite—domination. A Muslim teen-ager in a Paris banlieue finds an antidote to her sense of exclusion and spiritual emptiness in a jihadi online community. Part of the success of isis consists in its ability to attract a wide array of people and make them all look, sound, and think alike.
  • Souli wasn’t sure what should be done with returned jihadis, but, like nearly everyone I met, he spoke of the need for a program of rehabilitation for those who come back. No such program exists
  • In its eagerness to modernize, the Ben Ali regime encouraged widespread access to satellite television and the Internet. The sermons of Islamist firebrands from the Gulf, such as the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, entered the homes of Tunisians who felt smothered by official secularism. Oussama Romdhani, who was a senior official under Ben Ali—he was referred to as the “propaganda minister”—told me, “Radicals were able to use these tools of communication to recruit and disseminate the narrative, and they did it quite efficiently.”
  • “I never thought I would repeat the same demands as five years ago. The old regime has robbed our dreams.”
  • Why can’t the police do their job and stop the terrorists but let the smugglers go with a bribe?
  • Around 2000, the Tunisian Combat Group, an Al Qaeda affiliate, emerged in Afghanistan, dedicating itself to the overthrow of the Tunisian government. One of its founders, Tarek Maaroufi, provided false passports to two Tunisians who, allegedly on instructions from Osama bin Laden, travelled to northern Afghanistan posing as television journalists and assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan mujahideen commander, on September 9, 2001. The Combat Group’s other leader, known as Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, was an Al Qaeda commander; when the Americans overthrew the Taliban, in late 2001, he escaped from Tora Bora with bin Laden, only to be arrested in Turkey, in 2003, and extradited to Tunisia. (Sentenced to forty-three years in prison, he seized the chance to radicalize his fellow-prisoners.)
  • Walid was vague about his reasons for returning to Tunisia. He mentioned a traumatic incident in which he had seen scores of comrades mowed down by regime soldiers outside Aleppo. He also pointed to the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in April, 2013, which soon engaged in bitter infighting with the Nusra Front. Walid spoke of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, with the personal hatred that Trotskyists once expressed for Stalin. He accused isis of destroying the Syrian resistance and helping the Assad regime. He believed that isis was created by Western powers to undermine Al Qaeda and other true jihadi groups.
  • these aged men from the two Tunisias—Essebsi a haughty remnant of the Francophile élite, Ghannouchi the son of a devout farmer from the provinces—began a series of largely secret conversations, and set Tunisia on a new path. In January, 2014, Ennahdha voluntarily handed over the government to a regime of technocrats. Ghannouchi had put his party’s long-term interests ahead of immediate power. A peaceful compromise like this had never happened in the region. Both old men had to talk their followers back from the brink of confrontation, and some Ennahdha activists regarded Ghannouchi’s strategy as a betrayal.
  • To many Tunisians, Nidaa Tounes feels like the return of the old regime: some of the same politicians, the same business cronies, the same police practices. The Interior Ministry is a hideous seven-story concrete structure that squats in the middle of downtown Tunis, its roof bristling with antennas and satellite dishes, coils of barbed wire barring access from the street. The ministry employs eighty thousand people. There is much talk of reforming Tunisia’s security sector, with the help of Western money and training. (The U.S., seeing a glimmer of hope in a dark region, recently doubled its aid to Tunisia.) But the old habits of a police state persist—during my time in Tunis, I was watched at my hotel, and my interpreter was interrogated on the street.
  • The inhabitants of Kasserine, however neglected by the state, were passionate advocates for their own rights. They had played a central role in the overthrow of the dictatorship, staging some of the earliest protests after Bouazizi’s self-immolation. In every coffee shop, I was told, half the conversations were about politics. Although Kasserine is a recruiting area for jihadis, Tunisia’s wealthy areas are so remote that the town felt less alienated than Douar Hicher and Ben Gardane.
  • “You feel no interest from the post-revolutionary governments in us here. People feel that the coastal areas, with twenty per cent of the people, are still getting eighty per cent of the wealth. That brings a lot of psychological pressure, to feel that you’re left alone, that there’s no horizon, no hope.”
  • The old methods of surveillance are returning. In the center of Kasserine, I met an imam named Mahfoud Ben Deraa behind the counter of the hardware store he owns. He had just come back from afternoon prayers, but he was dressed like a man who sold paint. “I might get kicked out of the mosque, because last Friday’s sermon was something the government might not like,” the imam told me. He had preached that, since the government had closed mosques after terror attacks, “why, after an alcoholic killed two people, didn’t they close all the bars?” To some, this sounded like a call for Sharia, and after informers reported him to the police the governor’s office sent him a warning: “In the course of monitoring the religious activities and the religious institutions of the region, I hereby inform you that several violations have been reported.” The imam was ordered to open the mosque only during hours of prayer and to change the locks on the main doors to prevent unsupervised use. The warning seemed like overreach on the part of the state—the twitching of an old impulse from the Ben Ali years.
  • revolution opened up a space that Salafis rushed to fill. There were a lot more of them than anyone had realized—eventually, tens of thousands. In February, 2011, Tunisia’s interim government declared an amnesty and freed thousands of prisoners, including many jihadis. Among them was Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, the co-founder of the Tunisian Combat Group. Within two months, he had started Ansar al-Sharia.
  • According to the Tunisian Interior Ministry, a hundred thousand Tunisians—one per cent of the population—were arrested in the first half of 2015. Jihadi groups intend their atrocities to provoke an overreaction, and very few governments can resist falling into the trap.
  • New democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe and Asia have had to struggle with fragile institutions, corruption, and social inequity. Tunisia has all this, plus terrorism and a failed state next door.
  • Ahmed told himself, “If I pray and ask for divine intervention, maybe things will get better.” Praying did not lead him to the moderate democratic Islam of Ennahdha. His thoughts turned more and more extreme, and he became a Salafi. He quit smoking marijuana and grew his beard long and adopted the ankle-length robe called a qamis. He un-friended all his female friends on Facebook, stopped listening to music, and thought about jihad. On Internet forums, he met jihadis who had been in Iraq and gave him suggestions for reading. Ahmed downloaded a book with instructions for making bombs. In the period of lax security under Ennahdha, he fell in with a radical mosque in Tunis. He was corresponding with so many friends who’d gone to Syria that Facebook deactivated his account. Some of them became leaders in the Islamic State, and they wrote of making thirty-five thousand dollars a year and having a gorgeous European wife or two. Ahmed couldn’t get a girlfriend or buy a pack of cigarettes.
  • “Dude, don’t go!” Walid said when they met on the street. “It’s just a trap for young people to die.” To Walid, Ahmed was exactly the type of young person isis exploited—naïve, lost, looking for the shortest path to Heaven. Al Qaeda had comparatively higher standards: some of its recruits had to fill out lengthy application forms in which they were asked to name their favorite Islamic scholars. Walid could answer such questions, but they would stump Ahmed and most other Tunisian jihadis.
  • “We need to reform our country and learn how to make it civilized,” he said. “In Tunisia, when you finish your pack of cigarettes, you’ll throw it on the ground. What we need is an intellectual revolution, a revolution of minds, and that will take not one, not two, but three generations.”
Ed Webb

The Fight Against Terror Needs Better Data - Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Using a leaked database from 2016 on Islamic State recruits, we were able to geographically locate where almost 600 recruits originated from in Tunisia—one of the highest exporters of foreign fighters to Syria. We then used socio-economic data from Tunisian delegations (the equivalent of a district or a county—the smallest geographic unit that could be measured) to try to find what was driving foreign fighters to go to Syria. Surprisingly, our research suggests that absolute indicators of well-being, which are intuitively linked to terrorism by many policymakers, are not related to a higher probability of joining a violent extremist group.
  • higher rates of radicalization seem to be linked to relative deprivation—the perception of being disadvantaged or not achieving the expectations one feels entitled to. This builds on previous research including Ted Robert Gurr’s seminal book, Why Men Rebel, and supports the conclusions of recent work such as Kartika Bhatia and Hafez Ghanem’s study on the linkage between economic development and violent extremism across the Middle East
  • districts with high levels of unemployment among university-educated men produced higher numbers of men joining violent extremist groups
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  • districts with high inflows of domestic migrants in search of better living conditions exported more foreign fighters
  • the problem is not one of poverty or unemployment per se but rather the unmet expectations of highly educated youth who feel the country’s social contract has failed them
  • even policies that advance the right agenda items—such as increasing employment for well-educated youths—may not make any impact in addressing radicalization if they are too broadly based or target districts with low numbers of foreign fighters
Ed Webb

Where Has Tunisian Politics Gone? - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

  • In the final days of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, Kram was among the neighborhoods where groups of disenfranchised youth took to the street calling for jobs, freedom and national dignity. A decade later, its streets filled once again with youth protesting police violence in January 2021.
  • the nation’s civic consciousness hasn’t dissipated, as many people have bemoaned, “but until it’s translated into a political movement capable of entering the Tunisian political scene, it won’t lead to any substantial change.”
  • Kram has three candidates running to represent it. By contrast, in Sherifa’s home district of La Goulette — the wealthiest municipality in the country, containing sea ports, airports and the capital’s main business district — there is only one: the former Member of Parliament Hichem Hosni.The same is true in 10 other districts in the country, six of which are in the capital. The seat is already allocated because only one candidate is running. The phenomenon is partly a result of political apathy and partly by design. In September, Saied rewrote the country’s electoral law in what he said was a bid to level the playing field by moving away from a party list-of-candidates system and instead focusing on individual candidates. In order to stand in the election, a candidate had to collect 400 signatures notarized by the municipality — a method that should in theory have shortened the distance between voters and candidates, but in practice only increased it.
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  • The new electoral law — enacted after Saied ran on a staunch anti-corruption platform, rewrote the country’s constitution and put it to a referendum in July — also eliminates public funding for campaigns. Candidates are left to use their own money to run, or to raise donations from individuals, because funding by parties is also barred.
  • the new setup serves to weaken the legislative branch in a system with Saied and the presidency at its center. “The electoral law cannot be read separately from the new constitution. Everything has been done to prevent parliament from playing a real political role and from acting as a balancing power.”
  • “I took part in the revolution. I am a citizen, but this country does not treat me as such. I have decided not to vote,” she said. She knows the exact figures for how much inflation rises monthly, and the increases in the prices of taxis, bread and gasoline. Yet “for the first time,” she says, she doesn’t “even know the names of the candidates” running for parliament in her district.
  • The political life of the capital and state institutions feels too far removed from the everyday life of the young people of Kram. “We only know the police,” complain the young Cinevog regulars. They consider themselves to be “anti-politics,” though they are far from apolitical.
  • A new law forbids candidates from speaking with foreign journalists
  • “Where is the state?”
  • The disinterest in the ballot box and rejection of politics in its institutional forms, then, do not necessarily correspond to a depoliticization of Tunisian society. Many of the activities carried out by young activists and civil society constitute an alternative way of doing political education at the local level. With increasingly stringent controls on NGO funding, however, many small associations find themselves in a tight corner and fear for their future, including Mobdiun, which benefits from a certain amount of European funding.
  • “Many would try to leave for Europe, but here we create an alternative.”
  • “I stopped on the way to school to look at this empty wall, without the candidates’ posters, and I thought it said so much.”
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