The Coming Arab Backlash
My latest Foreign Affairs piece on the "Arab Street" Redux, plus our weekly roundup of academic research on the Middle East
My very first Foreign Affairs article, published just over two decades ago, begged American policy makers to “take Arabs seriously” as they confronted the ruination of the Middle East following their ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Building on a longer, scholarly article in Politics and Society (still one of my favorite of my own articles) - and previewing my book Voices of the New Arab Public, “Taking Arabs Seriously” argued that we needed to move beyond viewing Arab public opinion as just a reactive, mindless, emotional and extremist force which might sometimes threaten the stability of allied Arab regimes but otherwise could be safely ignored. US foreign policy preferred to focus on the kings and presidents, counting on their autocratic partners to take care of any local dissent. Instead, I argued, we needed to pay much closer attention to what Arabs across all dimensions of society were actually saying, what media they were consuming, what arguments they were having, and what political incentives their attitudes created.
For a while, the US government did sort of move in that direction. The “war of ideas” which accompanied Bush’s global war on terror required attention to what ideas were prevalent and whether they were changing; granted, the ideas that policy agenda cared about were mostly those of extremists and jihadists, but it was a start. That era saw significant growth in public diplomacy and strategic communications across the agencies, which looked far more broadly at the Arab media and at an ever more frequently surveyed public opinion. And then the Arab uprisings of 2011 seemed to vindicate the idea that public attitudes mattered and that we had no choice to to pay attention to the ideas and arguments of publics which had managed to overthrow multiple governments and were trying to navigate democratic transitions.
Sadly, all of that new attention has faded of late. The Trump administration manifestly could not have cared less about public attitudes as they returned to a Palace-centric approach to regional politics. That team also brought in the core idea that Arabs no longer cared about Palestine and that policies towards normalization with Israel or enabling extreme right wing settlers inside of Israel could safely ignore them. The Biden campaign talked about human rights and democracy, and criticized Saudi Arabia, but as soon as he took office Biden more or less adopted Trump’s Middle East policies wholesale. In particular, Biden and his team focused with bewildering intensity on expanding the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, while copying the Trump team in largely ignoring Arab public opinion and assuming that Palestine no longer mattered.
Which brings us to my new article in Foreign Affairs, out today, which goes back full circle and revisits the argument for shifting our gaze from the palaces back to the people. It argues that the neo-traditional approach of dismissing Arabs as just a “street” to be controlled underpins a lot of US policy failure in the region over the course of decades, and that it’s an especially bad approach to a region where the fears and hopes generated by the Arab uprisings a decade ago remain intensely real for regimes and publics alike. It argues that this dismissal of Arab opinion and refusal to take seriously how bad things were getting on the West Bank helps to explain how the US could have been blindsided by the Hamas attack on October 7, and that continuing to do will help doom whatever post-Gaza plans it is cooking up (amazingly, those plans are still apparently to promote Saudi normalization with Israel as if literally nothing has happened to possibly change anything).
I look forward to your thoughts on the piece. You can read it here:
The Coming Arab Backlash: Middle Eastern Regimes — and America — Ignore Public Anger at Their Peril.
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the Middle East has been rocked by mass protests. Egyptians have demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians at great personal risk, and Iraqis, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Yemenis have taken to the streets in vast numbers. Meanwhile, Jordanians have broken long-standing redlines by marching on the Israeli embassy, and Saudi Arabia has refused to resume normalization talks with Israel, in part because of its people’s deep fury over Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip.
For Washington, the view is that none of this mobilization really matters. Arab leaders, after all, are among the world’s most experienced practitioners of realpolitik, and they have a record of ignoring their people’s preferences. The protests, although large, have been manageable. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other leaders have long encouraged protests about the treatment of Palestinians, which allow their people to blow off steam and direct their anger toward a foreign enemy instead of against domestic corruption and incompetence. In time, or so the argument goes, the fighting in Gaza will end, the angry protesters will go home, and their leaders will carry on pursuing self-interests, an activity at which they excel.
U.S. foreign policymakers also have a long history of disregarding public opinion in the Middle East—the so-called Arab street. After all, if autocratic Arab leaders are calling the shots, then it is not necessary to put stock in what angry activists shout or in what ordinary citizens tell pollsters or the media. Since there are no democracies in the Middle East, care need not be given to what anyone outside the palaces thinks. And for all its talk of democracy and human rights, Washington has always been more comfortable dealing with pragmatic autocrats than with publics it regards as irrational, extremist mobs. It rarely pauses to consider how this might contribute to its dismal record of policy failures.
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And Now for the MENA Academy Weekly Roundup!
This week’s Middle East Political Science podcast features the great Middle East historian Zachary Lockman of NYU. We talk about the history of Middle East Studies in the United States through a conversation weaving between his books Contending Visions of the Middle East (2003) and Field Notes (2016). In the latter book, Lockman did tremendous research into the institutional backers of Middle East Studies, not only the U.S. government but also key foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the Social Science Research Council. He uncovers a really fascinating secret history of the field, as funding decisions and methodological fads at the foundations shape the kinds of research being done and the type of training which scholars receive. His account in both books also provides critical context for the current round of contention about Middle East Studies (which he takes on every day in his role on MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom).
Listen here:
Next, just in case you missed it, my angry article from late last week on the impact of the Gaza war on Middle East Studies has only become more relevant since it came out. The news out of Columbia University, where beleaguered president Shafik tried to appease House Republicans and local critics by unleashing the NYPD on campus pro-Palestinian protestors — and going farther by suspending them and kicking them out of their dorms, while locking down the campus to keep journalists out — has brought the campus crisis to a fevered pitch. Our administrations are failing faculty and students by abandoning norms of free speech in the name of repressing expressions of support for Palestinians, and it has to stop. Read my piece here if you missed it last week.
And finally, here’s a slew of interesting new articles which have been published over the last couple of weeks, including a number by friends of POMEPS, on topics ranging from online calls for protest in Iran, Turkey’s 2023 election, Jordanian citizenship policies, the impact of algorithms in shaping online discourse of the 2021 Sheikh Jarrah crisis, local public opinion in Aleppo, democracy from below in Yemen and Libya, and a new approach to peace and conflict studies in Middle Eastern International Relations.
Mohammad Ali Kadivar, Neil Ketchley, Abolfazl Sotoudeh-Sherbaf, and Christopher Barrie. “Online calls for protest and offline mobilization in autocracies: evidence from the 2017 Dey Protests in Iran,” European Sociological Review (April 2024). ABSTRACT: A body of research suggests that social media has afforded new opportunities for orchestrating mobilization in autocracies. However, the mechanisms linking online coordination with offline mobilization are rarely demonstrated. We address this lacuna by exploring the impact of Farsi-language social media posts that called for protest on precise days and locations in Iran during the 2017 ‘Dey Protests’. To conduct our analysis, we match a dataset of posts with an original protest event catalogue. Our results show that if a district was the subject of a protest call, it was much more likely to witness higher levels of mobilization on the target date. This relationship was especially pronounced for calls that received more online engagement. The findings suggest that the digital commons can play a role akin to an analogue protest flyer: social media posts can inform broad audiences of the where and when of upcoming mobilization.
Berk Esen, Sebnem Gumuscu and Hakan Yafuzilmas, “Competitive yet unfair: May 2023 elections and authoritarian resilience in Turkey,” South European Society and Politics (April 2024). ABSTRACT: On May 14, Turkish voters headed to the polls to vote for presidential and parliamentary elections. This was the most challenging race yet for authoritarian populist Erdoğan, as the ongoing economic crisis and deadly earthquakes severely diminished his performance legitimacy. Moreover, the opposition parties united against his regime by rallying behind a joint presidential candidate. However, Erdoğan turned the tables on the opposition and won the presidential race for a third consecutive term while his electoral bloc secured a majority in the parliament. This paper analyses the context and results of Turkey’s 2023 twin elections. We highlight the features of the competitive authoritarian regime, Erdoğan’s religio-nationalist electoral strategy, and the opposition’s fragile state and weak strategy to explain Erdoğan’s electoral resilience.
Lillian Frost, “Ambiguous citizenship policies: Examining implementation gaps across levels of legislation in Jordan,” Comparative Migration Studies (April 2024). ABSTRACT: Despite the prevalence of ambiguous citizenship policies that say one thing in law and another in implementing regulations, few studies have focused on systematically studying this type of implementation gap, particularly in contexts beyond North America and Europe. This largely has remained the case despite research on discursive policy gaps, which occur between a policy’s stated objectives and its laws, efficacy gaps, which describe when a policy’s outcomes fail to meet its goals, and compliance gaps, which reflect disparities between a state’s commitments to international law and its corresponding domestic policies. How can we advance conceptualizations of law-regulation implementation gaps? This paper proposes one approach by focusing on the content of domestic laws, on the one hand, and the content of related implementing regulations, on the other. When law-regulation discrepancies occur, they illustrate the agency of senior officials in writing this intentional ambiguity into different levels of legislation, challenging assumptions about institutional weakness and lower-level bureaucratic discretion as chief drivers of implementation gaps. The paper illustrates this concept by analyzing discrepancies between Jordan’s nationality and passports laws and their related implementing regulations, particularly regarding Gaza refugees’ access to passports, investors’ access to nationality, and Palestinian-Jordanians’ subjection to nationality withdrawals. These diverse cases of intentional ambiguity demonstrate that such gaps can serve to partially exclude or include a group and can occur with noncitizen and citizen as well as more or less vulnerable groups.
Norah Abokhodair, Yarden Skop, Sarah Rüller, Konstantin Aal, and Houda Elmimouni, “Opaque algorithms, transparent biases: Automated content moderation during the Sheikh Jarrah Crisis,” First Monday (April 2024). ABSTRACT: Social media platforms, while influential tools for human rights activism, free speech, and mobilization, also bear the influence of corporate ownership and commercial interests. This dual character can lead to clashing interests in the operations of these platforms. This study centers on the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah events in East Jerusalem, a focal point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that garnered global attention. During this period, Palestinian activists and their allies observed and encountered a notable increase in automated content moderation actions, like shadow banning and content removal. We surveyed 201 users who faced content moderation and conducted 12 interviews with political influencers to assess the impact of these practices on activism. Our analysis centers on automated content moderation and transparency, investigating how users and activists perceive the content moderation systems employed by social media platforms, and their opacity. Findings reveal perceived censorship by pro-Palestinian activists due to opaque and obfuscated technological mechanisms of content demotion, complicating harm substantiation and lack of redress mechanisms. We view this difficulty as part of algorithmic harms, in the realm of automated content moderation. This dynamic has far-reaching implications for activism’s future and it raises questions about power centralization in digital spaces.
Benjamin Isakhan and Lynn Meskell, “Local perspectives on heritage reconstruction after conflict: a public opinion survey of Aleppo,” International Journal of Heritage Studies (April 2024). ABSTRACT: The destruction of heritage in conflict has emerged as a key challenge to global security and the prospects of peace. In response, the international community has undertaken several large-scale heritage reconstruction projects on the assumption that they would foster development and promote cohesion. However, to date very little is understood about how local populations value their heritage, how they perceive its destruction, whether they view reconstruction as a priority, and the extent to which they support foreign efforts to rebuild. This article addresses this lacuna by focusing on the case study of Aleppo and documenting the results of an original public opinion survey of 1600 residents. The results hold several implications for heritage projects in Aleppo, namely that locals prefer that heritage reconstruction: not be privileged over security, development and peace; includes the rebuilding of their local religious sites as much as significant non-religious sites; transforms sites into more useful structures for the community; and they want domestic control and agency over the future of their heritage. The article concludes by noting that such findings hold important implications for heritage projects in other (post-)conflict contexts where mass heritage destruction has taken place.
Dana Moss and Clare Bath, “Civic Opportunities and Democratic Practices in Yemen and Libya after the Arab Spring,” Qualitative Sociology (April 2024). ABSTRACT: The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings are often portrayed as a wave of failed revolutions that devolved rapidly into anarchic violence. Yemen and Libya appear to illustrate this dynamic par excellence, as interim governments collapsed in the face of violence, war, and humanitarian disasters by 2014. Although studies of these revolutions have proliferated in recent years, the fuller range of outcomes emerging from the Arab Spring at the local level and in everyday life have comprised a theoretical and empirical black box. Based on the grounded analysis of ethnographic data from Yemen and Libya during the post-Arab Spring interim periods (2012–2013), this study argues that although the 2011 revolutions failed to achieve their major goals, they succeeded in breaking down normative forms of incumbent authoritarian power across major urban centers. As a result, activists and ordinary citizens gained what we call newfound “civic opportunities” to make political claims in Yemen and Libya’s emergent civic spheres. Participants did so by repurposing their built environment for artistic expression, engaging in peaceful collective action, and publicly commemorating the victims and heroes of anti-regime resistance. While civic opportunities were later eclipsed by violence, we argue that revolutions failing to instigate democratic change from “above” can nevertheless create meaningful civic opportunities for democratic practices from “below.” The study concludes by suggesting how this mobilization matters for future waves of protest and democratization, and for the scholarly investigation of revolution outcomes more generally.
Ariel Ahram, “In Search of a Middle East and North Africa Peace System,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East (April 2024). ABSTRACT: This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of the peace system in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It views peace not merely as the absence of direct violence but as the result of institutions and systems that mitigate, defuse, and diminish conflict. The peace system of MENA operates at multiple scales and deals with multiple kinds of violent conflict. Different system components produce different forms of positive and negative peace through both formal and informal institutional channels. Consequently, peace in MENA is often uneven and unstable, with progress in one dimension coming at the expense of another. Understanding the gaps and inconsistencies within the MENA peace system can help devise a more realistic and feasible approach to conflict resolution rather than abstract and ultimately impractical ideals. The article identifies shortcomings in the current explanations for the frequency of war, explores the idea of a regional peace system that operates in regional and domestic arenas both formally and informally, and examines policy measures that might bolster or undercut the MENA peace system.