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251. Russian Foreign Policy in the Middle East: New Challenge for Western Interests?

Author:
Nikolay Kozhanov
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Transatlantic Relations
Abstract:
This paper is part of CTR's Working Paper Series: "Russia and the West: Reality Check." The current level of Russian presence in the Middle East is unprecedented for the region since the fall of the Soviet Union. Records of diplomatic and political contacts show increased exchange of multilevel delegations between Russia and the main regional countries. After 2012, Moscow has attempted to cultivate deeper involvement in regional issues and to establish contacts with forces in the Middle East which it considers as legitimate. Moreover, on September 30, 2015, Russia launched air strikes against Syrian groupings fighting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Before that time, Russia had tried to avoid any fully-fledged involvement in the military conflicts in the region. It was also the first time when it adopted an American military strategy by putting the main accent on the use of air power instead of ground forces. Under these circumstances, the turmoil in the Middle East, which poses a political and security challenge to the EU and United States, makes it crucial to know whether Russia could be a reliable partner in helping the West to stabilize the region or whether, on the contrary, Moscow will play the role of a troublemaker.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Military Strategy, Military Intervention, and Syrian War
Political Geography:
Russia, Iran, Middle East, Israel, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, United States of America, European Union, and Gulf Cooperation Council

252. Unsolved Dilemmas: Issues of Internal Governance in Egypt’s Human Rights NGOs

Author:
Yara Shahin
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
This paper explores the state of internal governance in Egyptian human rights NGOs. It looks at their internal structures including; decision-making processes, the existence and role of governing boards, relationships with donors, levels of accountability and representation of constituencies along with the relationship with the government within a restrictive legal and political environment. It argues that while the restrictive environment for civil society in Egypt has hindered the development of stronger internal governance mechanisms in many organizations, the internal dynamics of these organizations have also contributed to the weak internal governance structures in most of them. The dilemmas that persisted through different generations and phases of Egyptian human rights organizations include balancing activism on public issues with bureaucratization and professionalization of vehicle organizations, the difficulty for and resistance from founders/directors to leave their influential posts, developing better participatory mechanisms of accountability towards the NGOs constituencies and addressing the “stigma” of foreign funding
Topic:
Human Rights and Governance
Political Geography:
Egypt

253. Institutional Reform of State Agencies in the Arab Region: Educated but Unemployed: The Challenge Facing Egypt’s Youth

Author:
Adel Abdel Ghafar
Publication Date:
10-2017
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
The state was the subject of political and political economic analysis in general in the post-independence period. This was also the case in the Arab region, where new states emerged with cumbersome civil bureaucracies and large military and security apparatus, and with huge powers to control the management and direction of (natural and human) economic resources. It was as if the burden of economic and social modernization had been placed on those newly independent States in the face of traditional societies lacking the social classes capable of advancing modernization, be they bourgeois or national proletariat. Despite the decline of the development models of the state by the seventies, the Arab state has continued to be the focus of analysis of development and modernization with the flow of oil money and the emergence of rentierism in most, if not all, the Arab countries, whether direct producers of oil or receivers of oil through secondary flows. This has placed emphasis on the importance of the state as a holder of wealth and as a source of distribution for different social strata.
Topic:
Education and Reform
Political Geography:
Egypt

254. Revolutionary Youth Movements, Religiosity and Identity Politics in Egypt

Author:
Fouad Halbouni
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
This paper explores how the emergence of revolutionary youth movements have destabilized the different forms of political and religious identification inherited from the world of the Mubarak regime. I am interested basically in showing how revolutionary politics introduced new forms of identification that broke with the exclusionary binaries upon which Mubarak's world was based. In order to track those transformations, one needs to take a second look at revolutionary politics, its disruptive force of all existent grounds upon which these political and religious identities had root themselves
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
Egypt

255. Historical Legacies in Egyptian Security Institutions

Author:
Yosra El Gendi
Publication Date:
10-2017
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
On October 13, 2014 in Corniche Street, Alexandria a police superintendent at a checkpoint and a navy officer engaged in a fist fight. The army officer contacted the military police which took the police officer and superintendent at the checkpoint to an army base where they were requested to stand hours in the sun as a form of punishment (Madgy et al., 2015). While many insist that these are individual incidents (Abdel- Aal, 2015). This is only one incident of at least 6 of clashes between members of both institutions since the 2011 uprising (Madgy, 2015). These incidents that point to the different security institutions’ extensive powers and the divisive structure in which they are based, a structure that was once called a “mamluk state” (al- Sherif, 2012). This points to the failed processes of state-building at the core of the institutional weaknesses in Egypt.
Topic:
Security and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Egypt

256. The Formal Birth of the Human Rights Movement in Egypt

Author:
Yasmine Shash
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
This paper analyzes a chronology of Egypt’s human rights movement since its birth in 1985 going through its different phases and generations until 2016. It starts with a brief history of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, the challenges it faced and the conceptual differences that led to its fragmentation in early 1994.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
Egypt

257. Setting the Terms for U.S.-Egypt Relations

Author:
Daniel Benaim, Mokhtar Awad, and Brian Katulis
Publication Date:
02-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for American Progress - CAP
Abstract:
Donald Trump’s first meeting as president of the United States with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi offers a significant opportunity but also some risks for U.S. security interests and values. U.S.-Egypt ties have witnessed historic strains in the past few years at a time when the broader Middle East slipped into a state of violent fragmentation that threatens both U.S. interests and the global order. The region faces the confluence of global terrorist networks based within its territories; civil wars, state collapse, and mass migration; proxy battles between regional and global powers; and tensions between authoritarian states and young populations facing high unemployment. Egypt currently appears tenuously positioned to avoid the worst fates of its neighbors. However, Cairo’s new political and economic order remains inchoate and brittle, lacking a concrete plan for defeating terror networks, advancing large-scale job creation, or offering more effective or representative governance. Instead, the country’s civic space has been smothered to deny openings for the open exchange of ideas needed to defeat extremism, while Egypt’s economy goes from crisis to crisis.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Military Strategy, Bilateral Relations, Counter-terrorism, and Peace
Political Geography:
Africa, North America, Egypt, and United States of America

258. ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL VOL. XXV, NO. 2

Author:
Ifdal Elsaket, Suhad Daher-Nashif, Nisa Ari, Tamer ElGindi, Manfred Sing, Nader Atassi, Sophia Azeb, Deen Sharp, Nicholas Simcik Arese, Charles Anderson, Kristi N. Barnwell, and Charles Wilkins
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Arab Studies Journal
Institution:
Arab Studies Institute
Abstract:
In this issue, we are proud to feature a series of groundbreaking interventions. Ifdal Elsaket explores anti-Blackness in Egypt through the genre of “jungle flms.” She lays bare the racial and imperial fantasies that informed these flms’ popularity. Elsaket exposes a process of racialization through which Egyptians positioned themselves as superior and modern, at a time when Egypt’s claims to Sudan took on a greater urgency and Blackness marked otherness. Tis deeply engrained vision of Africa as a place of inferiority would continue to infect flm and visual culture long afer decolonization. Suhad Daher-Nashif interrogates the national-civic service which has successfully targeted young Palestinian women who are citizens in Israel. Her ethnographic study carefully details the complex web of considerations, interests, and strategies that shape the national-civic service as a “trapped escape.” Women’s participation in the service reveals the mutually constitutive nature of Israeli colonial and Palestinian social structures. By showing how women use a colonial apparatus to escape patriarchal norms DaherNashif rethinks Palestinian experience in Israel as well as the imposition of and resistance to gender norms more broadly. Nisa Ari explores the interaction between local and foreign artistic communities in early twentieth century Palestine. She focuses on the work of Palestinian artist Nicoal Saig (1863-1942) who copied photographs that the American Colony Photo Department (ACPD) produced. Te relationship between Saig and the ACPD, Ari shows, reveals a multidirectional artistic exchange between local and foreign. She uncovers a world in which a diverse group of artistic agents employed diferent practices, produced and sold religious representations and object, and formed a vibrant economic market in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Palestine. Tamer ElGindi tackles the World Bank’s assessment of the massive uprisings that rocked Egypt and Tunisia as “puzzles,” given both countries’ achievements in poverty rates, access to education, child and maternal mortality, and infrastructure services. Trough a close reading of various inequality measures from the developmentalist era of Gamal Abdel Nasser to the subsequent neoliberal eras of Anwar al-Sadat and Husni Mubarak, ElGindi shows that macroeconomic improvements never “trickled down.” Energy and food subsidy systems in particular benefted the wealthiest instead of targeting the needy. He urges for a comprehensive understanding and measurement (of the monetary and the non-monetary) as a prerequisite to understanding and ameliorating inequality. Manfred Sing revisits the wave of Arab social criticism that marked intellectual life afer the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Trough a careful rereading of fve intellectuals Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, Yasin al-Hafz, Mustafa Hijazi, Nawal El Saadawi, and Hisham Sharabi, Sing traces the normative shif in Marxist thought away from a critique of capitalist society and towards theorizing the absence or failure of revolutionary mass movements. Following neither the admirers of Arab criticism nor their countercritics, Sing maps a social criticism that was timely, provocative, polemic, disenchanted, and marred by heuristic fallacies. Tis issue also features the usual robust array of book reviews.
Topic:
Race, History, Arts, Socialism/Marxism, Women, Inequality, Film, and Intellectual History
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, North Africa, and Egypt

259. Openness and Closedness of the Political Systems That Caused the Arab Spring

Author:
Hamid Bouyahi
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Liberty and International Affairs
Institution:
Institute for Research and European Studies (IRES)
Abstract:
Most of the analysis of the Arab spring revolved around the immediate causes of the events and the role of social media in spreading the protests, in countries that succeeded in toppling their regimes. For this reason, this study adopts a different approach to tackle the long-term development of the Political opportunity structures that set the grounds for the emergence of these movements. To avoid the bias of focusing only on movements that succeeded, the paper compares the conditions of the emergence of the Egyptian movement that toppled the Mubarak regime in eighteen days, to the Moroccan movement that faded after a year of weekly protests. Instead of discussing the immediate context in which the movements appeared, or the course of events that the movements followed, the paper adopts a historical approach to review the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial historical, economic and political developments that created different structures of opportunity and threat in each of the two countries.
Topic:
Civil Society, Arab Spring, Colonialism, and Political Parties
Political Geography:
North Africa, Egypt, and Morocco

260. ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL VOL. XXIV, NO. 1

Author:
Sherene Seikaly
Publication Date:
05-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Arab Studies Journal
Institution:
Arab Studies Institute
Abstract:
The Arab world and the broader Middle East offer profound lessons on the inextricability of knowledge and power. In the midst of civil war, foreign intervention, and ongoing occupation, those of us who study the Middle East or call it home confront two realities at once. On the one hand are the conditions of everyday life that range from the constrained to the unbearable. On the other are the increasingly confined possibilities of producing knowledge on these conditions. To grasp these two realities, we have only to glance at the kind of fire, sometimes live, scholars and students have come under in the last few months alone. In January, the Turkish Higher Education Council condemned a petition that scholars in solidarity with the Kurdish region signed as “terrorist propaganda.” University rectors immediately began taking punitive measures: launching investigations against and suspending scholars who were signatories. This is in addition to the prosecutions and criminal investigations scholars are facing for expressing their opinion on social media.
Topic:
Communism, Human Rights, Socialism/Marxism, Intellectual History, Transitional Justice, Feminism, Justice, Reconciliation, Leftist Politics, and The Press
Political Geography:
Middle East, North Africa, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia