It's the 250th episode of the Middle East Political Science Podcast!
What makes new democracies durable, or not; and Tunisia's horrifying racist turn
“Why don’t you ever blog about your podcast? Most people blog about their podcasts.”
Good question, anonymous and totally real person. Seeing as how I had absolutely no good answer, I figure I should start blogging about my podcasts. I didn’t just start a podcast to go with my blog, after all: it’s already been twelve seasons full of conversations with something like 500 scholars about their books, articles, and current events. And today’s podcast marks a big milestone: it’s the 250th episode of the Middle East Political Science Podcast! The podcast is one of my favorite POMEPS activities, and I’m so grateful every time someone tells me that they listen. So I’m going to start posting about them each week after they go live (usually on Thursday mornings) and adding some context and color.
This week, the first two segments address a common theme: why do some new democracies survive while others collapse into renewed authoritarianism? In the first segment, Mohammad Ali Kadivar of Boston College talks to me about his new Princeton University Press book, Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy. The book uses both quantitative analysis and comparative case studies (Poland, South Africa, Pakistan, Egypt and Tunisia) to argue that democratic transitions are much more likely to succeed if they are preceded by lengthy periods of popular mobilization which build formal organizations capable of channeling popular grievances and negotiating with autocratic elites and other challengers. During our conversation, Kadivar mentioned that the book had its origins in his conversations with his father (the Iranian dissident Mohsen Kadivar) about the failures of democratic change in Iran, and added some post-book reflections on the book’s implications for Iran’s current protests which I won’t spoil here but are well worth reflecting upon.
Next, I talk to Georgetown University’s Killian Clarke about his newly published Journal of Peace Research article on the unhelpful role played in Egypt’s transition by US ambivalence about the outcome. Clarke draws some intriguing theoretical insights from the now painfully-familiar story of Egypt’s transitional failure, focusing on the impact of mixed American messaging on the expectations and behavior of both President Mohammed el-Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (which thought they had American backing) and the military (which calculated that America wouldn’t really go to the mat for Islamists who they didn’t really trust).
Finally, I talk to Shreya Parikh, a PhD candidate at Sciences Po CERI and UNC Chapel Hill who I met in Beirut a couple of weeks ago, to talk about the wave of racism and anti-African attacks unleashed by President Kais Saied’s embrace of a “Great Replacement” narrative. Parikh, who has been researching her dissertation on blackness and racial identity in Tunisia, is able to situate the current crisis within longer trajectories of identity politics and changing discourses on race in Tunisia. Our conversation was based on this really interesting short essay she published on the topic a few days ago.
That’s this week. Last week, in Season 12, Episode 18 I talked to Andrew Simon about his book Media of the Masses, and hosted a roundtable on the politics of the earthquake which devastated Turkey and Syria featuring Hasret Dikici Bilgin of Istanbul Bilgi University, Lisel Hintz of Johns Hopkins University, Rana Khoury of the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champagne, and Reva Dhingra of Harvard University and Brookings Institution.