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4691. The Dynamics of Business Interest Group Advocacy on Economic Policymaking

Author:
Heba Abou Shnief
Publication Date:
08-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
While the Arab awakening has impacted the political economies of Arab states differently, the message that state-business relations can no longer afford to rely on pre-existing models of business advocacy has reverberated across the region. Rent-seeking, cronyism, patronage, and state capture have long been―to varying degrees—all features of state-business relations in the Arab world. In post-uprising countries, the rise and fall of regimes, the adoption of new constitutions, the holding of theoretically more open legislative elections, the emergence new interest groups and a more scrutinizing public are all dynamics that are likely to influence the mechanics of policymaking, and with it, legacy systems of private sector advocacy. While it is still too early to ascertain with certainty precisely how older business advocacy models might evolve to adapt to new realities, or how soon such adaptations might occur, the dynamics have already changed—particularly with regards to ‘state capture’—where challenges to pre-existing networks have paralleled challenges to incumbent regimes. Combining a desk study with extensive field interviews with key persons from the business sector, government and civil society in both Egypt and Tunisia, the research makes a preliminary examination of the initial attempts at policy advocacy by business interest groups during the transitions. In doing so, a deeper understanding of how those dynamics seem to have changed thus far, as well as an initial assessment of whether or not state capture has, perhaps, come to an end in any of the countries studied is made. Finally, a brief set of policy recommendations are presented on ways and means of improving advocacy processes so that national business interests might be better reflected in the economic policymaking calculus.
Topic:
International Political Economy
Political Geography:
Middle East

4692. The Heybeliada Talks: Sharing Ideas from and for Cyprus

Author:
Costa Constanti, Takis Hadjidemetriou, Mete Hatay, Praxoula Antoniadou Kyriacou, Sami Özuslu, and Chrysostomos Pericleous
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Global Political Trends Center (GPoT)
Abstract:
The publication you are holding in your hands represents a selection of contributions ranging from personal experiences with the Cyprus problem to the suggestions for the international community, which were discussed during the recent rounds. The six important contributions will help you to grasp the intricate nature and complexity of the Cyprus problem.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Territorial Disputes, and Dialogue
Political Geography:
Turkey, Middle East, and Cyprus

4693. Rethinking Islamist Politics

Author:
Khalil al-Anani, Mokhtar Awad, Steven Brooke, Michaelle Browers, and Nathan J. Brown
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
The Arab uprisings of 2011 radically reshaped the environment within which Islamist movements had evolved over the preceding decades, causing rapid, disorienting changes in their strategies, ideologies, and organizations. The last three years have produced an enormous amount of new information about these movements: detailed election results; factional and generational and intra-Islamist rivalries spilling out into public; varying degrees of political polarization between Islamists and their rivals; the erratic performance of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after coming to power through elections and the fallout from its removal through popular protest and military coup; the emergence of a sharp public backlash against the Brotherhood in Egypt, at least, and a crackdown on its social services; a new regionwide campaign designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization; the surprising evolution of al Qaeda and jihadist movements from Syria and Iraq through North Africa. In January 2014, the Project on Middle East Political Science therefore convened a workshop with fifteen leading academic specialists on Islamist movements in the Arab Middle East and charged them with rethinking key assumptions, arguments, evidence and research programs in light of these three tumultuous years. The workshop brought together European and American academics with specialties ranging from mainstream movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood to jihadists and non-violent Salafists, and with expertise on countries ranging from the Gulf through Egypt and the Levant to North Africa. This special POMEPS Briefing collects the memos prepared for the workshop. The short essays collected here touch on many of these issues, pointing towards a rich set of compelling new theoretical and empirical questions with which the field must now grapple.
Topic:
Politics, Salafism, Arab Spring, Political Science, Islamism, and Muslim Brotherhood
Political Geography:
Middle East and North Africa

4694. Visions of Gulf Security

Author:
Mehran Kamrava, F. Gregory Gause III, Gary Sick, Rouzbeh Parsi, and Stéphane Lacroix
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
The turbulence in Gulf security politics today is difficult to miss: unusually sharp public splits in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), rising sectarian tensions, tough moves against the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements, and markedly harsh crackdowns on even minor forms of public dissent. Gulf elites are openly airing profound doubts about the future of the U.S. regional role, worries about blowback from Syria, and fears about the implications of a Western rapprochement with Iran. Regime efforts to insulate themselves from popular dissent have included potentially unsustainable economic commitments and self-defeating internal repression. Meanwhile, deep political divisions are disrupting the long-standing security partnership between Washington and the GCC states. How has the turbulence of the last three years affected security in the Gulf? Do new domestic, regional, or international trends fundamentally alter how the regimes, political movements, and people of the region grapple with challenges to their security? How new are these challenges, and how extraordinary the responses? What is gained, and what potentially distorted, by viewing these events through a security lens? Which assumptions in the academic literature about Gulf security have proven resilient, and which require rethinking? On March 9, 2014, POMEPS and Matteo Legrenzi at Ca’ Foscari University brought together more than a dozen scholars based in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States to Venice, Italy to look closely at the new – or not so new – questions about Gulf security. This should be the finest hour for the “regime security” perspective, which has been the dominant theoretical framework for understanding the region’s security politics in recent years. The regime security framework emerged to challenge the conventional Realist view of states primarily responding to external power and threat in their alliance and foreign policy choices. As Gregory Gause and many other scholars have effectively demonstrated, regimes faced threats to their own power and survival from within as well, and often prioritized those in their policy choices. Iran’s “threat” to Riyadh, for instance, had as much to do with its potential appeal to Saudi Shiites as it did with its pursuit of a nuclear arsenal. This perspective seems to offer considerable traction on the domestic and regional maneuverings of Gulf regimes in the last few years. While no GCC regimes fell in the face of popular protest, the Arab uprisings clearly intensified and sharpened those internal regime security concerns. And, as several of the memos in this collection observe, the responses by Gulf states to these concerns included both domestic security crackdowns and regional foreign policy initiatives. The coordinated campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as Stéphane Lacroix, David Roberts, and Guido Steinberg suggest, reflected this logic of shoring up domestic power through foreign policy activism. So did the financial and political support by wealthy Gulf monarchies for less well-endowed fellow monarchs across the region.
Topic:
Security, Politics, and Sectarianism
Political Geography:
Middle East and Gulf Nations

4695. The Ethics of Research in the Middle East

Author:
Wendy Pearlman, Laurie Brand, Scott Weiner, Nathan J. Brown, and Richard A. Nielsen
Publication Date:
07-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
What are the ethical obligations of an academic studying today’s Middle East? Have the Arab uprisings changed how scholars must weigh ethical and moral concerns in their research? How should academics incorporate their ethical commitments into their social scientific research agendas or policy advice? How should they respond when faced with severe moral atrocities such as the human costs of the war in Syria? Is there an obligation to take sides? These are not the usual questions that are supposed to occupy the professional life of political scientists, who spend more time contemplating research design, replicability and statistical significance. But, of course, they do. Ethical decisions underlie virtually everything we do. The challenge of incorporating ethics into academic political science was a major theme of this May’s annual conference of the Project on Middle East Political Science. The thoughts of ten first-rate scholars on the subject have now been published as a symposium in the POMEPS Studies series.
Topic:
Ethics, Research, Arab Spring, and Political Science
Political Geography:
Middle East

4696. Islamist Social Services

Author:
Abdullah Al-Arian, Mona Atia, Steven Brooke, Melani Cammett, and Kevan Harris
Publication Date:
10-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
What do we really know about the provision of social services by Islamist movements? It’s hard to find a popular article about a group like the Muslim Brotherhood or Hezbollah that doesn’t reference their ability to win popular support by providing social services through their extensive network of charities, clinics and community centers. Most observers have long believed that these charitable activities played a key role in Islamist outreach and organization, built their reputations for honesty and efficacy, conferred a significant political advantage, and helped to promote the Islamization of society. A recent wave of scholarship has challenged many of the prevailing assumptions about the nature and significance of these social services, however. Evidence for the scope, superiority or political utility of these charitable activities has proven elusive. Volunteers in the Islamic charitable sector profess a far wider set of motivations for their participation than just political rewards. The rise of non-governmental charities – and not only Islamic ones – seems to be driven at least in part by neoliberal reforms and the broader structural changes in the region’s political economy. What’s more, whatever explains the patterns and effects of social service provision in the past might no longer apply. Major changes on the ground such as the crushing of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the dramatic move into service provision by jihadist groups raise serious questions about how these dynamics might play out in the future.
Topic:
Political Science, Islamism, and Social Services
Political Geography:
Middle East

4697. Reflections on the Arab Uprisings

Author:
Nathan Brown, Daniel Brumberg, Clement M. Henry, Vickie Langohr, and Ellen Lust
Publication Date:
11-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
'Tis the season to reflect upon the course of the Arab uprisings. Over the last few weeks I have participated in three major workshops including nearly 50 scholars – and had to miss yet another in favor of a quick trip to Tunisia. It is not difficult to understand this intense urge to take stock, given the sorry state of the region and catastrophic results of virtually every one of the 2011 uprisings. The overblown criticisms of the field of Middle East political science over its failure to predict the uprisings have been thoroughly aired by this point. But what about the field’s performance during the Arab uprisings? Academics have written an unprecedented amount of real-time analysis and commentary over the last few years. What did we miss, misinterpret, exaggerate or rush to premature judgments about along the way? The first of the workshops focused explicitly on this question. I asked a group of the authors from my edited volume The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East to write short memos assessing their contributions critically after having another year to reflect. Those memos have been published as POMEPS Studies 10 Reflections on the Arab Uprisings. Their auto-critique is full of worthy observations: We paid too much attention to the activists and not enough to the authoritarians; we understated the importance of identity politics; we assumed too quickly that successful popular uprisings would lead to a democratic transition; we under-estimated the key role of international and regional factors in domestic outcomes; we took for granted a second wave of uprisings, which thus far has yet to materialize; we under-stated the risk of state failure and over-stated the possibility of democratic consensus.
Topic:
Authoritarianism, Democracy, Arab Spring, and Identity
Political Geography:
Middle East and North Africa

4698. Extremism as Mainstream: Implications for Women, Development & Security in the MENA/Asia Region

Author:
International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN)
Publication Date:
03-2014
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN)
Abstract:
In 2013, ICAN, in partnership with the MIT Center for International Studies and the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), hosted a two-day roundtable to better understand rising religious extremism from a gendered and grounds-up perspective, highlighting the essential yet often overlooked implications for women and the efforts of civil society on the ground. The meeting included civil society practitioners, scholars and journalists with expertise from Canada, Pakistan, Malaysia, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, the United States, and Iran. The roundtable addressed a range of questions. The statements and perspectives included here reflect views shared during the roundtable, and related research and analysis by ICAN. While this brief cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of the discussions, it is intended as a catalyst to widen the space for discussion, research, policy and practice among international and national level scholars and practitioners.
Topic:
Security, Development, Violent Extremism, and Women
Political Geography:
Middle East, Asia, and North Africa

4699. Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium Afghanistan Research Programme

Author:
Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU)
Abstract:
Decades worth of attempts to engineer a social transformation in Afghanistan from its existing social order to one more reflective of Western norms have largely failed to take root and have often helped consolidate a rule of patronage and personalized relationships.
Topic:
Civil Society, Corruption, Leadership, and Social Order
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and Middle East

4700. The Contribution of BRAC’s Life Skills Education and Livelihoods Trainings to Social Inclusion in Afghanistan

Author:
Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit
Publication Date:
04-2014
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU)
Abstract:
This study adopts a social exclusion lens to analyse the effects of BRAC’s life skills education and livelihoods trainings for young women in Afghanistan and tests assumptions about the role labour programmes can play in contributing to social inclusion. It used mixed methods and employed a quasi-experimental impact evaluation.
Topic:
Education, Labor Issues, Quality of Life, and Social Order
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and Middle East