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Middle East Brief 158 (Summary) — How is the Israel-Hamas War reshaping Israel's democratic foundations and attitudes toward national identity? In this Middle East Brief, Daniel Amir offers a novel approach to this question by examining the way the conflict has affected Israel's Arab minorities, who make up one-fifth of the country's population. Amir traces the legal status of minorities within Israel and compares the recent treatment and political mobilization of Druze, Bedouin, and other Arab Israeli groups. Such a minority perspective, Amir argues, complicates our image of the war and demonstrates how the internal debates around Israeli civic identity and belonging, temporarily paused after October 7, continue apace as the country battles its external enemies.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 158 (PDF)
Daniel Amir, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 20 (Summary) — Since last year’s release of ChatGPT brought Artificial Intelligence (AI) to public attention, its disruptive and transformative powers have been widely analyzed by experts and the media. These debates, however, have rarely been concerned with the implications of AI for the Middle East, a region of rapidly expanding AI use and development. In this Crown Conversation, we ask Nagla Rizk and Omer Shah to shed light on how AI technologies are being used in Egypt and Saudi Arabia—in areas as varied as agriculture and pilgrimage—and reflect on the possibilities and challenges of AI in the region.
READ FULL TEXT OF CONVERSATION 20
Nagla Rizk is professor of economics and founding director of the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the American University in Cairo’s School of Business. Her research area is the economics of knowledge, technologies, and development, with a focus on the governance of data and Artificial Intelligence, gender, and inclusive growth in Egypt and MENA.
Omer Shah is the Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Pomona College in the Department of Anthropology. His current book project, Made in Mecca: Expertise, Technology, and Hospitality in the Post-Oil Holy City, examines recent efforts by the Saudi state to intensify and optimize Mecca’s pilgrimage through new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics, and hospitality.
Ramyar D. Rossoukh is the assistant director for research at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 157 (Summary) — Eliminating dissent among clerics and extending state control over Shiʿi seminaries has been pursued vigorously over the past three decades by the Islamic Republic. Yet, clerical factionalism remains a significant feature of Iranian politics. Why has the Islamic Republic been unable to reign in the clergy and its seminaries? In this Middle East Brief, Mohammad Ataie argues that the Islamic Republic has been hindered by the multiple sources of authority within the Shiʿi seminaries, as well as opposition from the clerical establishment. Rather than subduing the clergy and bringing seminaries under its control, the state’s efforts have had the opposite effect: exacerbating divisions within the clerical establishment and bolstering the resolve — on the part of not only reformist clerics but conservative ones as well — to voice their opposition to the state’s interference. Ataie concludes by analyzing the implications of these developments on clerical reactions to the "Woman, Life Freedom" movement.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 157 (PDF)
Mohammad Ataie, lecturer in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a junior research fellow at the Crown Center from 2020–2023.
Crown Conversation 19 (Summary) — On January 11, after months of Houthi attacks on commercial ships transiting the Red Sea in response to the Israel-Hamas War, the US and UK launched air strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. As the cycle of attacks and retaliatory strikes stretches into its third week, we spoke with Stacey Philbrick Yadav and Yazeed Al-Jeddawy about what lies behind the conflict, the reaction inside Yemen, and its impact on the ongoing civil war and peace process. Their Crown Conversation offers fresh insights into how the Houthi campaign and the response to it will shape the role the Houthis play in Yemen's political future.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav, non-resident fellow at the Crown Center and professor and chair of the International Relations department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Yazeed Al-Jeddawy, research coordinator at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies in Yemen.
Ramyar D. Rossoukh, assistant director for research at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 18 (Summary) — In this two-part Crown Conversation, we asked two Israeli and two Palestinian experts about likely scenarios and outcomes in light of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. These conversations were conducted on October 23 and October 30, 2023 and as such may not reflect the latest developments. But read together, they present a nuanced and complex picture of the long-, medium-, and short-term factors that will shape the current war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and possibilities and limitations for peace.
AFTER THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR: PALESTINIAN PERSPECTIVES
Yezid Sayigh, senior fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where he leads the program on Civil-Military Relations in Arab States (CMRAS), and a former senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah and a founding senior fellow at the Crown Center.
AFTER THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR: ISRAELI PERSPECTIVES
Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Legal Studies at Suffolk University and a former senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Shai Feldman, Raymond Frankel Professor in Israeli Politics and Society and the founding director of the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 156 (Summary) — In recent years, Saudi Arabia has seen rapid social transformations driven by the country’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (commonly known as MBS). These initiatives have included the promotion of what MBS calls “moderate Islam” and the arrest of Saudi preachers in ever increasing numbers for allegedly promoting extremism and destabilizing the Saudi state. In this Middle East Brief, Raihan Ismail assesses how the relationship between the ruling family and religious establishment has changed under MBS and what recent trends within Saudi religious circles can tell us about the status of the Saudi Salafi/Wahhabi religious tradition in the kingdom. Ismail argues that while state-clerical conflict is not new, and religious institutions remain intact, MBS has effectively subdued the religious establishment and reduced its capacity to challenge his social reforms.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 156 (PDF)
Raihan Ismail, His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford and was the Goldman Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center in 2022–2023.
Crown Conversation 17 (Summary) — On September 15, 2020, Israel and two Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, signed the Abraham Accords, officially establishing diplomatic relations. Later expanding to include Sudan and Morocco, the Accords represent the first instance of Arab-Israeli normalization since Israel's peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. To mark the third anniversary of the Abraham Accords, we asked Shai Feldman and Sanam Vakil to assess the impact of the Accords on the region, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the prospects of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Shai Feldman, Raymond Frankel Professor in Israeli Politics and Society and founding director of the Crown Center.
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House.
Ramyar D. Rossoukh, assistant director for research at the Crown Center.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History.
Middle East Brief 155 (Summary) — Even as the Biden administration resumes informal talks with Iran over its nuclear program, American and Israeli military leaders recently warned that Iran is well on its way to becoming a “nuclear threshold state.” These developments pose challenges for Israel’s national security and also for other important regional and global players. In this Middle East Brief, Shai Feldman attempts to ascertain the possible regional and international consequences of Iran’s newly acquired status, explores Israel’s options for dealing with these consequences, and considers the risks and opportunities that may be associated with these policy options for Israel and the broader region. He concludes that most likely Israel will consider responding with measures to enhance its deterrence, either by obtaining a U.S. security guarantee or by upgrading Israel’s own nuclear posture to one of overt deterrence, thereby abandoning whatever ambiguity still surrounds Israel’s capabilities in this realm.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 155 (PDF)
Shai Feldman, Raymond Frankel Professor of Israeli Politics and Society and founding director of the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 154 (Summary) — Why do relatively few women work in the Middle East and North Africa? A common answer is that they are bound by cultural norms against their taking on paid work. In this Middle East Brief, Carolyn Barnett argues that the explanation lies in the combination of structural, historical, and cultural factors that have enabled citizens in the region to develop a strong preference for women to work in certain kinds of jobs, namely in the professional public sector. As public sector employment in the region continues to decline, Barnett’s analysis reveals how the attitudes and social norms that have shaped this preference hold back women’s employment in other sectors—and, potentially, their broader empowerment.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 154 (PDF)
Carolyn Barnett, non-resident fellow at the Crown Center and an assistant professor in the School of Government and Public Policy and School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.
Middle East Brief 153 (Summary) — The recent beatings and arrests of Palestinians by Israeli police inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan has renewed concerns about the viability of the status quo arrangement of Jerusalem's holy sites. The Israeli police are overseen by national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who has called for changes that would allow increased Jewish access to these sites, including the right to pray. In this Middle East Brief, Peter Krause argues the status quo has been continuously challenged and even altered in recent decades, most effectively by religious nationalist activists pursuing small changes that have evaded public and government scrutiny. With Ben Gvir and other religious nationalist activists now part of Israel's governing coalition, Krause considers the future of the status quo and its significance for the stability of Israel’s government and its relations with Palestinians, Arab states, and the U.S.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 153 (PDF)
Peter Krause, faculty leave fellow at the Crown Center and associate professor of political science at Boston College.
Middle East Brief 152 (Summary) — After a decade of interventionist policies that alienated many of Turkey's regional economic partners, President Erdoğan launched a rapprochement initiative in early 2020 to repair Turkey's relations with Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. In this Middle East Brief, Nader Habibi examines the political and economic factors behind this major foreign policy shift and Erdoğan's prospects for improving Turkey's economic conditions and regional isolation ahead of the May 2023 presidential elections. Erdogan's erratic foreign policy and pursuit of economic policies that have intensified Turkey's financial crisis, Habibi argues, make it unlikely that his diplomatic efforts will be enough to dramatically improve Turkey's economic situation in the short term.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 152 (PDF)
Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 151 (Summary) — Nine years after the ISIS campaign of genocide against the Yazidi community in the northern Iraqi region of Sinjar, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis continue to live in displacement camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Efforts to implement the 2020 UN-brokered Sinjar Agreement between Iraqi and Kurdish governments to restore stability in the region have not only failed but also resulted in new waves of Yazidi displacement and further militarization of the region. In this Middle East Brief, Houman Oliaei outlines the shortcomings of the agreement in addressing past discrimination against Yazidis, the formation of new political identities and alliances, and ongoing conflicts over control of the Sinjar region as a disputed territory that hinders Yazidis' ability to relocate outside of Sinjar. Oliaei concludes that though the agreement was embraced by national and international stakeholders as a solution for Yazidi displacement, it does not tackle the root causes of Yazidi vulnerability to displacement and violence and, thus, is unlikely to be successful.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 151 (PDF)
Houman Oliaei, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Brandeis and was previously a doctoral fellow at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 16 (Summary) — Over its 40-year history, the Lebanese party Hezbollah developed sophisticated military and organizational capabilities that have elevated it to be the most influential non-state actor in the Middle East. These capabilities make it the lynchpin of the so-called Axis of Resistance, the network of states and militias in the region that are closely allied with Iran. In this Crown Conversation, Mohammad Ataie discusses shifts in Hezbollah’s popularity and cross-sectarian appeal, and how Hezbollah's conflicts in its formative years with many of its current allies shaped the party that exists today.
Mohammad Ataie, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 150 (Summary) — Is Israeli democracy at risk? This was a question raised by analysts and opinion makers after the results of the November 2022 Knesset elections in Israel, and the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu and far right parties aligned with him. In this Middle East Brief, Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch argues that while the election results raise the short-term risk of populist authoritarianism in Israel, the more significant and longer-term risks are the erosion of democratic institutions and decline in democratic values, particularly among Israeli youth. She concludes that these risks further shape and are being shaped by Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 150 (PDF)
Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Legal Studies at Suffolk University and a former senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
Crown Conversation 15 (Summary) — In April, the two main warring parties in Yemen — the Houthi movement and the Government of Yemen — agreed to a two-month truce brokered by the United Nations that has since been extended twice. After the initial truce, Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi handed power to an eight-member Presidential Leadership Council, a development that many Yemenis and observers hope will lead to an end of almost eight years of war in the country. In this Crown Conversation, we spoke with Yasmeen al-Eryani and Stacey Philbrick Yadav about efforts to end the war, the importance of inclusion in peacebuilding, and the myriad ways in which conflict and international humanitarian efforts have changed the nature of research in Yemen.
Yasmeen al-Eryani, director of research at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies in Yemen. She is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at Tampere University, Finland.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav, non-resident fellow at the Crown Center and an associate professor of international relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 149 (Summary) — The question of Iran's nuclear capabilities has been a major issue in US foreign policy for several decades. While many analysts have probed the politics of decision-making inside the Iranian regime, the technical dimensions of Iran's nuclear program are less understood. In this Brief, Gary Samore discusses what Tehran would need to do to build a nuclear bomb—and how quickly it could do it. Samore presents three possible scenarios in which Iran might obtain nuclear capabilities: breakout, sneak out, and creep out. US foreign policy towards Iran will only be effective, Samore suggests, if we accurately understand the technical foundations of Tehran’s nuclear aspirations.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 149 (PDF)
Gary Samore, Crown Family Director of the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 14 (Summary) — After the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, the Islamist movement Ennahda reemerged in Tunisia and frequently has been the largest party in the parliament and kingmaker in coalition governments. Consequently, it has borne the brunt of many Tunisians' growing disenchantment with their post-revolutionary political system. Since President Kais Saied's power grab in July 2021 and subsequent dissolution of parliament, Ennahda and its leader, Rached Ghannouchi, have tried to oppose the coup without triggering a violent crackdown by the state or alienating allies and party members. Nonetheless, in the lead-up to a national referendum scheduled for July 25 to approve a new draft constitution, Tunisian courts imposed a travel ban on Ghannouchi and froze various Ennahda leaders' bank accounts. In this Crown Conversation, the third in a series on Tunisia, we spoke with Andrew F. March — who has interviewed Ghannouchi extensively and is co-writing a book with him — about the history of Ennahda, how it has responded to Saied's actions, and where the movement goes from here.
Andrew F. March, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was previously the Goldman Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center from 2020-2021.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 148 (Summary) — The Kurdish movement in Turkey has long been associated with the country's rural south-east. But in recent years, it is the cities of the region that have been the crucible of a new Kurdish politics. In this Middle East Brief, Muna Güvenç explains how municipal elections have propelled pro-Kurdish parties into power in Diyarbakır and other cities, even as they have been prevented from winning representation at the national level. Once in office, pro-Kurdish parties have channelled the resources of city hall to support cultural centers, associations, and NGOs with explicitly Kurdish agendas, directly building their support base across class lines and indirectly infusing everyday life with visible signs of Kurdishness. Despite its electoral gains in the municipalities of south-east Turkey, the Kurdish movement's success is now threatened by a central government campaign to remove its mayors, purge its members from the bureaucracy, and ban its leaders from political activity altogether.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 148 (PDF)
Muna Güvenç, assistant professor of fine arts at Brandeis University and a faculty affiliate of the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 13 (Summary) — Running as a populist, Kais Saied, a retired law professor and political independent, was elected president of Tunisia in October 2019. After suspending parliament and dismissing the prime minister on July 25, 2021, Saied has further tightened his hold on power by announcing he would rule by decree, reconfiguring the Supreme Judicial Court, and laying out a roadmap to revise the constitution. These moves — called a "coup" by some and a "correction" by others — threaten Tunisia's decade-old democratic transition. In the second of a series of Crown Conversations on Tunisia, we spoke with Hind Ahmed Zaki about how Tunisians' disenchantment with their post-revolutionary political system led to the election of Saied as president, public support for his power-grab, and how the country's women's rights movement has reacted to his appointment of the Arab world's first female prime minister.
Hind Ahmed Zaki, assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. She was previously the Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center from 2018-2019.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 147 (Summary) — Why is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan so enthusiastic about planting trees? The answer is more complicated than authoritarian greenwashing. In this Middle East Brief, Ekin Kurtiç argues that the AKP government’s keen interest in greening Turkey is an attempt to monopolize the environmental agenda and turn legitimate environmental protest into a criminal activity. From anti-mining movements in the 1990s to the Gezi Park occupation in the 2010s and the wildfires of the 2020s, Kurtiç charts how community organizers, legal activists, and forestry experts have formed new fronts of opposition against environmental degradation. While state-led initiatives to plant trees throughout Turkey might appear benevolent, Kurtiç argues, in reality AKP environmentalism is rooted in coercion.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 147 (PDF)
Ekin Kurtiç, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 146 (Summary) — Analysts have been closely watching China’s growing economic relations with oil-producing states in the Middle East over recent years. Yet despite the paucity of energy resources in the Eastern Mediterranean countries, China has also been quietly extending its Belt and Road Initiative into this strategic corner of the region. In this Middle East Brief, Nader Habibi analyzes the changing pattern of Chinese trade and investment in Turkey, Israel, and Egypt. What does the Egypt-Turkey competition for Chinese investment tell us about regional geopolitics? Will Israel’s courting of Chinese tech investors ring alarm bells in Washington, D.C.? Could the Belt and Road Initiative provide the opportunity for regional economic integration in the Middle East that the Arab-Israeli peace process failed to deliver? Habibi argues that Chinese-funded infrastructure projects in the Eastern Mediterranean are laying the foundations for new economic connections between the Levant and other regions—and that the Levant could in the future become an unexpected front in the geopolitical rivalry between China and the U.S.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 146 (PDF)
Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 12 (Summary) — Israel’s position in the Middle East is changing. The UAE’s announcement in August 2020 that it would normalize relations with Israel — formalized the following month in the Abraham Accords Declaration — sparked a series of similar agreements between Israel and several Arab states. The perception of U.S. disengagement with the region has led countries to reconsider alliances and rivalries. And the election of new leaders in the U.S. and Israel heralds a possible reset in relations between those states. In this Crown Conversation, we spoke with Chuck Freilich about what these changes mean for Israel’s security and role in the Middle East.
Chuck Freilich, Goldman Visiting Senior Fellow at the Crown Center and a former deputy national security adviser in Israel.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 145 (Summary) — In its bid to revive an Iranian nuclear deal, the Biden Administration has promised to reverse the heavy sanctions burden placed on Tehran by President Trump. Yet, as Hadi Kahalzadeh argues in this Middle East Brief, turning back the clock to the pre-Trump era will not be so straightforward. Not only will it prove difficult to dismantle the sheer quantity of new sanctions imposed on Iran by the previous administration, but the economic impact of those sanctions has undermined the support for negotiations among the Iranian political elite and public. Analyzing recent household survey data, Kahalzadeh reveals the declining fortunes of the Iranian middle class under sanctions and explains how Iranian hardliners have used the implosion of the country’s private sector businesses to tighten their own grip on Iran’s economy. Although President Biden might be willing to negotiate a new nuclear deal, Kahalzadeh argues that his administration will find itself weighed down by the legacy of President Trump.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 145 (PDF)
Hadi Kahalzadeh, doctoral fellow at the Crown Center and PhD candidate in social policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis.
Crown Conversation 11 (Summary) — Ebrahim Raisi assumed office as the eighth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran on Aug. 3, after winning the June presidential election. Replacing the centrist Hassan Rouhani, Raisi is often described as a conservative hardliner and ally of Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. Raisi's administration faces a myriad of challenges, including a floundering economy that remains under U.S. sanctions, the potential for renewed urban unrest, and one of the deadliest outbreaks of COVID-19 in the world. In this Crown Conversation, we spoke with Nader Habibi and Amir Mahdavi about the administration's domestic and foreign policies and what they reveal about the direction in which the Islamic Republic is headed.
Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Amir Mahdavi (GSAS MA '19), is an Iranian journalist, former member of the central council of a reformist party in Iran, and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. He was a researcher at the Crown Center from 2015 to 2016.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 10 (Summary) — In May 2021, Israel and Hamas exchanged heavy fire, leading to the deaths of 10 Israelis, three foreign workers and approximately 260 Palestinians, with many more injured. Events in Jerusalem were the immediate trigger for this round of violence, which provided Hamas an opportunity to assert itself as the guardian of Palestinian and Arab rights far beyond Gaza. In this Crown Conversation, we spoke with Shai Feldman about how the May conflict impacted Hamas and Israel domestically and internationally, as well as the prospects for change in their relationship.
Shai Feldman, president of Sapir Academic College in Sha'ar Hanegev (near Sderot), Israel; founding director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies; and professor of politics at Brandeis University.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 144 (Summary) — The creation of the suburban Baghdad district of Madinat al-Thawra (Revolution City, later known as Saddam City and today as Sadr City) in 1959 is widely remembered as a heroic act by Iraq’s new republican government to house the thousands of rural migrants living at the time in reed mat and mudbrick huts. In this Middle East Brief, Huma Gupta revisits the birth of this famous housing project and argues that it was not due to the benevolent action of a populist leader and should not be seen as a model for top-down development projects in Iraq. She traces how migrants who came to Baghdad in the early- to mid-twentieth century formed an enduring urban underclass that collectively organized to demand housing, services, and higher wages. Thawra was conceived in response to years of worker protests, but its creation led to violent land dispossession on Baghdad’s outskirts and the enclave’s lack of basic services exacerbated economic inequality and hardened patterns of class-based spatial segregation. This history of dispossession and deprivation help explain why Thawra/Saddam City/Sadr City became and remains to this day a center for mass-based social mobilization in Iraq.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 144 (PDF)
Huma Gupta, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center from 2020-2021.
Crown Conversation 9 (Summary) — On July 25 — Tunisia's Republic Day — President Kais Saied dismissed the country's prime minister and government, froze parliament for 30y days, suspended lawmakers' parliamentary immunity, and announced that he (alongside a yet-to-be-named prime minister) will temporarily exert executive authority "until social peace returns to Tunisia and until we save the state." A 30-day curfew was announced the following day. In the first of a series of Crown Conversations on Tunisia, we spoke with Eva Bellin about the challenges of governance in Tunisia and what President Saied’s actions mean for its fledgling democracy.
Eva Bellin, Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics at the Crown Center and chair of the Department of Politics at Brandeis University.
David Siddhartha Patel, senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 143 (Summary) — Several Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states recently announced independent plans to abolish what is often called the "kafala system," regulations that require noncitizen residents to be sponsored by a citizen or citizen-owned business. Sponsorship is widely blamed for the exploitation of and poor conditions faced by noncitizen workers, and the reform announcements followed increased international attention on the issue. In this Middle East Brief, Alex Boodrookas unpacks three widely-held misunderstandings about labor and migration in the Persian Gulf. He argues that sponsorship legislation does not reflect long-standing regional tradition. Instead, it dates from the imperial period and reflects the shared economic interests of elites and multinational companies. And "kafala" is not a single system; it is a diffuse set of coercive mechanisms and practices controlled by different actors. Dismantling sponsorship alone, therefore, will not bring an end to the systemic exploitation of noncitizen workers. Finally, Boodrookas details a long history in the Gulf of citizen workers allying with noncitizen workers to improve labor conditions and rights for all. The divide over sponsorship, he argues, is better understood as one of class interests and racial hierarchy than one that pits citizens versus noncitizens, which has implications for the prospects of further and deeper reform in the future.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 143 (PDF)
Alex Boodrookas, Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 142 (Summary) — During Tunisia's post-revolutionary transition, the traditionally Islamist party Ennahda explicitly rebranded itself as a "Muslim Democratic" party, committed to consensual democracy and a pluralist political order. Some analysts view this as a strategic move driven by political necessity and claim it masks a long-term aim to Islamize the state and society. Others see the change as a genuine reconciliation of the party's ideological commitments with a political system based on a democratic and civil state. In this Brief, Andrew March argues that two connected but distinct conceptions of politics have been evident for decades in the political thought and speech of Ennahda's co-founder and intellectual leader, Rached Ghannouchi. He examines how Ghannouchi and Ennahda have long proclaimed both a pragmatic willingness to engage in "politics" any time that political freedoms could be secured but also a more comprehensive vision of why Islam actually calls for a deeper form of democracy. Ennahda's commitment to "Muslim Democracy," therefore, predates the 2010-11 Tunisian Revolution and has coexisted ambiguously with a commitment to a more comprehensive "Islamic Democracy."
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 142 (PDF)
Andrew F. March, Goldman Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 141 (Summary) — The Islamic Republic of Iran is allied with a number of non-state actors throughout the Middle East, such as Hizbollah in Lebanon and several militias in Iraq. Iranian leaders describe their support for such groups in religious and revolutionary terms, and this aspect of Iran's foreign policy is widely understood to be a product of the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution and motivated, in large part, by ideology. In contrast, Mohammad Ataie argues in this Brief that Iran's pattern of support for non-state actors after 1979 is in fact a continuation of a regional policy that dates back to the late 1950s. Both Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the leaders of the Islamic Republic pursued a similar strategy of backing extraterritorial groups and utilizing historical and religious ties to Shiʿi communities in the region to counter perceived threats and contain regional adversaries. The shah enmeshed Pahlavi Iran in Iraqi and Lebanese domestic politics by supporting anti-Nasser and anti-left non-state actors, and the Islamic Republic continued this involvement after the revolution as part of their anti-imperial "Axis of Resistance." Ataie asserts that the revolution, therefore, did not usher in Iran's support for non-state actors and that support cannot be understood primarily in ideological terms.
READ MIDDLE EAST BRIEF 141 (PDF)
Mohammad Ataie, Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 8 (Summary) — In late March, Iran and China signed a 25-year strategic accord that calls for China to invest a reported US$400 billion in various sectors in Iran in exchange for a regular, and presumably discounted, supply of Iranian oil. The partnership also envisions increased bilateral trade and deepening military cooperation between the two countries. In this Crown Conversation, we spoke with two experts on Iran at the Crown Center — Nader Habibi and Hadi Kahalzadeh — about factors that led to the agreement, opposition to it inside Iran, and what it means for the region.
Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Hadi Kahalzadeh, doctoral fellow at the Crown Center and a PhD candidate in social policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 7 (Summary) — Ten years of civil war in Syria has killed an estimated 600,000 people and displaced half of the country’s population. Yet the Syrian regime has proven to be surprisingly durable, and President Bashar al-Asad remains in power in Damascus. In this Crown Conversation, we asked Syria expert Daniel Neep what the conflict teaches us about how the Syrian regime works and Bashar’s role in it, ethnic and religious dynamics, and whether the war is finally coming to an end.
Daniel Neep, non-resident fellow at the Crown Center and the American Druze Foundation Research Fellow in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 6 (Summary) —President Joe Biden says that the U.S. will rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal if Iran returns to "strict compliance" with its terms. His administration then intends to seek to extend and strengthen the nuclear deal as well as reach agreements on limits to Iran’s missile program and regional interventions. In this Crown Conversation, we speak with Gary Samore, a former U.S. official responsible for nuclear nonproliferation, about the continued relevance of the original deal, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, and the prospects for successful follow-up negotiations.
Gary Samore, Crown Family Director of the Crown Center.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 140 (Summary) — In the decade since the Arab uprisings began in 2010-2011, the Arab world has seen bouts of popular protest, leaders deposed, civil wars, and interventions by regional and global powers. This churn is often described as a regionwide revolutionary hangover that will eventually subside. In this Brief, David Siddhartha Patel argues that the unrest of the "post Arab Spring period" only seems like an aberration because, in several ways, domestic politics in Arab states were frozen from the 1970s to the early 2000s. He argues that it is that period—when Arab leaders almost never fell—that was anomalous. Before a huge increase in oil rents from 1973 to 1986 dramatically strengthened states and regimes, the domestic politics of the Arab Middle East were just as tumultuous and dynamic as they have been since 2011. Today, oil prices are lower and states are weaker than they were during the oil-enabled "ice age." The current moment, therefore, is not an interregnum between eras of authoritarian stability in the Arab world; in a sense, disorder is the (not so) new order.
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David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 5 (Summary) — Ten years ago this week, Egyptians began a series of mass protests that quickly brought down President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for almost 30 years. The subsequent years were contentious, and an uneven transition to democracy ended when the military assumed power in 2013. Today, Egyptians remain deeply divided over the legacy of the Jan. 25 Revolution. In this Crown Conversation, we asked three scholars of Egypt — Youssef El Chazli, Hannah Elsisi and Neil Ketchley — to reflect on how and why the revolution occurred, the ways it changed politics and society, and its lasting imprint on the everyday lives of Egyptians.
Youssef El Chazli, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Hannah Elsisi, research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Neil Ketchley, associate professor of political science at the University of Oslo.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 139 (Summary) — China’s economic and diplomatic ties with each of the eight states that border the Persian Gulf rapidly expanded over the past two decades. This occurred despite conflicts and diplomatic tensions among those states and the heavy dependence most of them have on the United States for their external security. And China, so far, has largely avoided being drawn deeply into the complex politics of the region. In this Brief, Nader Habibi explores the reasons for this growth in China’s trade and investment with Iran, Iraq, and the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. He analyzes the motivations and strategic calculations of the Gulf states while emphasizing China’s ability to contribute to economic diversification programs and link infrastructure projects to its global Belt and Road Initiative. Habibi concludes by discussing factors that might limit further expansion of Gulf-China economic ties, including increasing U.S. concern about China’s growing influence in the region.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 138 (Summary) — The Israeli government’s declaration in April of its intent to vote on a unilateral annexation of the Jordan Valley and all Israeli settlements in the West Bank—as outlined in the Trump peace plan—prompted Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas the following month to "absolve" the PA of all agreements and understandings with Israel and the U.S., thereby ending coordination in security, economic, and civil affairs. Although plans for annexation have now been "suspended" as a result of the Israeli-Emirati normalization deal announced in August, those links remain severed, and the threat of annexation remains unresolved. In this Brief, Khalil Shikaki analyzes the strategic game of chicken between Abbas and Israeli leaders and argues that each side is waiting for the other to concede as the PA weakens and moves toward gradual collapse. This standoff continues, despite the Israeli-Emirati agreement, because Palestinians believe that annexation is not "off the table." The Brief reveals how the suspension of relations has affected Palestinians and what the threat of annexation means for stability and the diplomatic process.
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Khalil Shikaki, founding senior fellow at the Crown Center and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah.
Middle East Brief 137 (Summary) — In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and began its "maximum pressure campaign" to compel Iran to renegotiate the nuclear deal. Almost two years later, sanctions on Iran continue, talks have not recommenced, and U.S.-Iranian relations remain at a stalemate. This has led to speculation that the campaign is regime change in disguise. In this Brief, Arash Davari unpacks the maximum pressure campaign's internal logic to identify the conditions under which it would induce the true power brokers in Iran to engage in negotiations. He concludes that the current U.S. policy appears to be a regime change one because the narrow set of preconditions under which negotiations would happen have not occurred. But this analysis also suggests that, under different circumstances, the maximum pressure campaign may yet lead to renewed talks between the U.S. and Iran.
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Arash Davari, assistant professor of politics at Whitman College. He was a sabbatical fellow at the Crown Center in Fall 2019.
Crown Conversation 4 (Summary) — The largest and most sustained demonstrations in Iraq’s post-Ba‘th era began in early October 2019, which led to the resignation of then Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. After five months without a government and several failed attempts by other nominees to form one, journalist and intelligence chief Mustafa al-Kadhimi became Iraq’s new prime minister in May. In this Crown Conversation, as the premier approaches 100 days in office, we asked Kanan Makiya to reflect on the forces that brought Kadhimi to power, his mandate, and the challenges he faces. In 2003, Makiya founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, an NGO dedicated to issues of remembrance, violence, and identity formation in Iraq; Kadhimi directed that foundation from 2003-10.
Kanan Makiya, senior fellow at the Crown Center and professor emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University. His most recent book, On Cruelty (in Arabic, Dar Al Jamal, Beirut, 2020), explores the phenomenon of cruelty in politics and grew out of a course he taught each spring at Brandeis.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 3 (Summary) — The killing of an African-American man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis on May 25 triggered a wave of protests and acts of civil disobedience throughout the United States. These protests were accompanied by demonstrations of solidarity across the globe. In this Crown Conversation, we asked three members of the Crown Center research team — Hayal Akarsu, Yazan Doughan and Youssef El Chazli — to reflect on how their research on related topics in Turkey, Jordan and Egypt sheds light on aspects of this global moment of mobilization, demand for police reform and reexamination of racial and social inequalities.
Hayal Akarsu, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Yazan Doughan, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Youssef El Chazli, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 136 (Summary) — From the Arab Spring uprisings to the anti-racist demonstrations spreading across the U.S. and the globe today, waves of mass protest are often seen as ephemeral moments of anger. They typically are judged to be a success or failure based on the extent to which they produce direct political change. In this Middle East Brief, Youssef El Chazli uses Egypt’s 2011 revolution to highlight the often-overlooked effects that participation in mass protests has on individuals' lives after they leave the streets. He argues that participating in mass public protests forced many Egyptians to examine their private lives and beliefs and question what was normal and what was possible in other spheres of life, including friendship circles, family, and the workplace. Although mass protests may subside, they shape participants on issues related to gender, parenting, and professional careers. These effects are easy to overlook yet can increase the propensity for long-term social, political, and cultural change.
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Youssef El Chazli, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 135 (Summary) — Long criticized for human rights abuses, the Turkish National Police underwent significant reforms in the early 2000s as part of Turkey’s effort to join the European Union. International donors and experts encouraged Turkey to import best practices of community policing and proactive crime prevention from the West. These reforms, it was thought, would protect human rights, improve governance, and further the democratization of the country. In this Middle East Brief, Hayal Akarsu argues that this remodeling of the Turkish police had the paradoxical effect of strengthening state surveillance in Turkey. Importing proactive policing practices enabled the Turkish police to infiltrate into the everyday lives of ordinary people to an extent that it had never before done. Granting the police discretion to punish "potential criminality" in public spheres facilitated arbitrary policing, and police-led social projects focused on "social risks" brought the police into the private homes of citizens. Instead of democratizing policing in Turkey, these reforms actually provided the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) with a new toolkit to strengthen its hold on power.
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Hayal Akarsu, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Crown Conversation 2 (Summary) — Iran has been one of the worst hit countries by the current global outbreak of a coronavirus disease (officially known as COVID-19), with the World Health Organization acknowledging over 4,200 deaths and 68,000 confirmed cases in the country as of April 11, 2020. In this Crown Conversation, we discuss the political and historical context of the crisis, including the Iranian government’s response to it, with Orkideh Behrouzan, a medical anthropologist and physician and the author of "Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran" (Stanford University Press, 2016).
Orkideh Behrouzan, faculty leave fellow at the Crown Center and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS University of London.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 134 (Summary) — Jordanian society is often described in terms of a native Transjordanian tribal population supporting the Hashemite monarchy against a larger population of Palestinians. In this Brief, Yazan Doughan argues that this constellation of identities was the product of a particular historical moment in the kingdom’s history—1967-1989—and that a new form of Jordanian patriotism has come to replace it in recent years. This new patriotism, expressed in the language of economic and human rights and commitment to the homeland, rather than allegiance to the person of the King, was a product both of the state’s liberalization of the economy and of the nationalization of politics since the 1980s. During Jordan’s “Arab Spring” of 2011-12, Doughan found that activists utilized this language as they sought to claim popular sovereignty against a king whom they accused of corruption, leading previously disparate groups—including so-called regime loyalists—to join the popular movement for reform, known as the Hirak. The Brief concludes by addressing what this change in civic patriotism says about the willingness of the current generation of Jordanian activists to call for revolution.
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Yazan Doughan, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 133 (Summary) — The peace treaty signed between Israel and Jordan twenty-five years ago, often referred to as the Wadi Araba Treaty, was meant to usher in an era of friendly relations and cooperation between the two countries, open the way for reconciliation between Israel and the wider Arab world, and place Jordan in a position to mediate a fair settlement between the Jewish state and the Palestinians. Today, little remains of those lofty promises and Israeli-Jordanian relations remain a "cold peace." In this Brief, Dror Zeevi explores the domestic, bilateral, and regional issues that contributed to this impasse. Zeevi highlights the unwillingness of the parties to follow through on cooperative projects meant to link Israel and Jordan economically, the role of violence in shaping public opinion toward cooperative endeavors, and how the rise of Iran has led the Israeli government to increasingly look toward Gulf Arab states instead of Jordan for regional partnerships. The Brief concludes by exploring how the treaty’s failure to deliver real peace dividends could impact future efforts by Israel to sign peace treaties with other Arab states.
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Dror Zeevi, professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and was a visiting scholar at the Crown Center in 2006–2007.
Crown Conversation 1 (Summary) — Our first Crown Conversation, "Iran, Iraq and Lebanon after Soleimani," was organized and edited by Naghmeh Sohrabi and David Siddhartha Patel and features Maryam Alemzadeh, David Siddhartha Patel and Kelly Stedem. It focuses on the targeted killing of Iranian Gen. Qasim Soleimani and others by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2020 and its short- and medium-term effects on domestic politics in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.
Maryam Alemzadeh, Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
David Siddhartha Patel, associate director for research at the Crown Center.
Kelly Stedem, doctoral fellow at the Crown Center and a PhD candidate in politics at Brandeis.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis.
Middle East Brief 132 (Summary) — Over the past 15 years and under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey dramatically expanded its diplomatic and economic relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Despite this, Turkey supported Qatar in June 2017 when Saudi Arabia and the UAE led an economic blockade on their neighbor. Soon after, in October 2018, Turkish diplomatic relations with Saudi soured further after the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Many analysts expected that these diplomatic crises would have severe economic reverberations and harm the Turkish economy. In this Brief, Nader Habibi assesses the economic implications for Turkey by examining changes in four important areas with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar: bilateral trade, foreign investment, purchases of Turkish real estate, and tourism. He finds that, despite considerable diplomatic tensions, Turkish-Saudi economic links have proven to be resilient. In contrast, trade and investment relations between Turkey and the UAE have suffered, although increased Turkish exports to and investment from Qatar have partly offset those losses. The Brief discusses what these developments tell us about how policymakers in the region use their economic relations to reward or punish trade partners for diplomatic reasons.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 131 (Summary) — Tunisian women have gained many new legal rights since the overthrow of President Ben Ali in January 2011, including the right to marry non-Muslims, mandated parity with men in elected bodies, and a comprehensive law against all forms of gender-based violence. This expansion of women's rights surprised many Tunisians who thought that the country's existing "pro-women" policies, often described as the most progressive in the Arab world, would be rolled back after the revolution, particularly as the Islamic party, Ennahda, was gaining political and electoral power. In this Brief, Hind Ahmed Zaki examines this unexpected development and argues that women's rights activists in Tunisia played a critical role after the revolution in both the protection of existing rights and in their further expansion. These activists creatively reframed and rehabilitated the previous regime's nationalist project of state feminism, using legacies from the authoritarian past to mobilize citizens and shape policy outcomes during the transition to democracy.
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Hind Ahmed Zaki, 2018-2019 Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center and assistant professor of political science and Middle East studies at the University of Connecticut.
Middle East Brief 130 (Summary) — The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) plays a prominent role in carrying out the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy agenda. Noting this, the Trump administration has targeted the IRGC as part of its maximum pressure policy on Iran, recently announcing that the U.S. will designate it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. In this Brief, Maryam Alemzadeh describes the inherently informal nature of the IRGC and the notable degree of freedom that it possesses to embark on actions that go against centrally devised policies. She argues that this unconventional and flexible political structure was established in the very first days of the Islamic Republic, after the 1979 revolution, and reflects struggles between Islamists and technocrats over the nature of their new government. The IRGC’s organizational informality, flexible modus operandi, and ethos were consolidated during the armed conflicts of the following years. The Brief’s analysis has implications for the extent to which the Trump administration’s policies will be successful in restraining the IRGC’s regional activities.
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Maryam Alemzadeh, Harold Grinspoon Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 129 (Summary) — Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement in February 2019 that he would run for a fifth term triggered the rise of a mass protest movement known as the Hirak. The Hirak brought together diverse and fractious political currents in peaceful demonstrations that, less than seven weeks later, led to Bouteflika’s ouster after 20 years in office. Yet protests continued, demanding deeper changes to the political system and hindering the military’s attempt to engineer a rapid transition. In this Brief, Thomas Serres links the durability of Algeria’s revolutionary movement to its ability to connect the current situation to the war of independence against the French over half a century ago. The Hirak relied heavily on shared nationalist discourses that referenced that earlier struggle, portraying the regime as a form of internal colonialism that had confiscated the country’s independence and public wealth. To understand the resiliency, strength, and future limits of Algeria’s current revolutionary movement, Serres argues that we need to understand how Algerians collectively have revived the populist legacy of the first Algerian revolution.
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Thomas Serres, lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and associate researcher in the Development & Societies Research Unit, Paris-Sorbonne.
Middle East Brief 128 (Summary) — After the Syrian uprising began in 2011, many U.S. government officials and foreign policy analysts predicted that the regime of Bashar al-Asad would eventually collapse. They saw Syria’s minority-led government as inherently fragile and pointed to the country’s long history of political instability. Eight years later, however, the Asad regime survives, albeit transformed, and has regained territorial control of much of the country. In this Brief, Daniel Neep argues that these analyses misunderstood the nature of the regime that Bashar and his father, Hafiz, had built since 1970. The Asads learned valuable lessons from earlier Syrian dictators who were overthrown and, by seeking to avoid their mistakes, they constructed a regime that was more networked, more dispersed, and more sprawling than experts and policymakers realized. To understand the continued resiliency of the Syrian regime, Neep argues we need to look, as the Asads did, at the country’s overlooked history of tyrannies.
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Daniel Neep, sabbatical fellow at the Crown Center and an assistant professor in Arab Politics in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Middle East Brief 127 (Summary) — Launched in April 2016 and closely associated with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Vision 2030 is an ambitious set of economic and social initiatives aimed primarily at transforming the economy of Saudi Arabia. The conventional wisdom among journalists and analysts is that a series of crises and policies — including massive Saudi intervention in the war in Yemen and the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi — have hurt Vision 2030 by damaging the Kingdom’s reputation as a stable and hospitable environment for long-term investment. In this Brief, Nader Habibi evaluates progress in the implementation of Saudi Vision 2030 programs. He finds that while there have been successes in public sector reforms and enacting social and cultural changes, many of the economic diversification efforts have stalled because of a lack of foreign investment and partnerships. Habibi argues that paradoxically some of these delays — particularly to the “giga projects” — might be a blessing in disguise for the long-term trajectory of Vision 2030.
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Nadir Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 126 (Summary) — The Trump administration plans to unveil its detailed proposal for peace between Israel and the Palestinians sometime after the April 9th Israeli elections. Will the so-called “ultimate deal” be dead on arrival or could it lead the two sides to re-engage in serious negotiations based upon the plan's details and conditions for implementation? In this Brief, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki identify factors critical to the success of Trump’s initiative. They examine the Israelis' and Palestinians’ minimal requirements in such a deal; whether key Arab leaders would be willing to support the U.S. effort; the leverage the Trump administration could bring to bear on each side; and the degree to which Israeli and Palestinian domestic political environments would be receptive to renewed peace efforts. Finally, the authors discuss measures that the Trump administration could take to decrease the odds of either or both parties rejecting what Trump has called “the deal of the century.”
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Shai Feldman, Crown Family Director of the Crown Center and professor of politics at Brandeis University.
Khalil Shikaki, Goldman Senior Fellow at the Crown Center and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah.
Middle East Brief 125 (Summary) — Islamic movements in Saudi Arabia — including the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi groups, and armed militants — have faced fierce repression since the rise to power of King Salman in 2015. As with earlier crackdowns, however, they are likely to survive. In this Brief, Pascal Menoret argues that the strength and resiliency of Saudi Islamic activism is rooted in how it takes advantage of resources and spaces created during the rapid expansion of suburbs of Saudi Arabia’s main cities since the 1960s. Islamic activism in the Kingdom is a suburban phenomenon, and it is in the sprawling landscapes of suburbia where Islamic activists recruit and mobilize for a range of activities, including street protests, marches, electioneering, and direct action. Menoret’s analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that piety and religious doctrine explain the strength of Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia.
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Pascal Menoret, Renée and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at the Crown Center and an assistant professor of anthropology at Brandeis University.
Middle East Brief 124 (Summary) - In the Middle East, the nation-state is back. After a period of relative decline caused by the “Arab Spring,” states in the region have strengthened relative to non-state actors. Consequently, geo-politics — and, specifically, geo-economics — have returned as the basis for inter-state interactions. In this Brief, Abdel Monem Said Aly examines two nascent zones of economic cooperation and possible mutual prosperity. On the islands and coasts of the Red Sea, Egyptian development plans and Saudi Arabia’s ambitious “Vision 2030” complement and reinforce one another. In the Eastern Mediterranean, ongoing gas discoveries and progress in maritime border demarcation agreements between Egypt and Cyprus could usher in a period of stability and prosperity that extends to Israel and other Mediterranean countries. Said Aly analyzes the opportunities presented by these two zones, as well as important challenges to the realization of their potential.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the board of Al Masry Al Youm Publishing House in Cairo and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 123 (Summary) — The ongoing war in Yemen is usually understood in both policy circles and public discourse as either a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia or a civil war between Houthi rebels and the Government of Yemen led by President Hadi. In this Brief, Stacey Philbrick Yadav challenges these binary understandings of the war by disaggregating Yemen’s war into four arenas of conflict, each with distinct antagonists, methods, and aims. The Brief demonstrates that none of the four arenas, alone or in combination, can be understood by the current conventional framings. These zones of conflict have fragmented and localized the experience of war for Yemenis, complicating the process of humanitarian relief and eroding a shared experience of Yemeni national belonging. Philbrick Yadav concludes that the diplomatic process to bring peace to and rebuild Yemen is unlikely to be successful unless it recognizes the implications of this fragmentation and localization of the war.
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Stacey Philbrick Yadav, associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Middle East Brief 122 (Summary) — Four months after Iraq held parliamentary elections in May 2018 and two months since protests against inadequate public services, high unemployment, and corruption erupted in Basra and spread to other locales, Iraqi political factions continue to negotiate power-sharing and the formation of a new government. In this Brief, David Siddhartha Patel explores structural factors shaping the message of the elections and protests. He argues that both Iraq’s post-Ba‘th political system and a majority of its people came of age during a decade of extraordinarily high oil prices, from 2005 to 2014, and this period of plenty left a legacy that shapes attitudes as well as possibilities for reform. This period was critical with respect to the nature of patronage networks as well as in shaping the expectations of the country’s burgeoning youth population, 39% of whom were born after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. A majority of Iraq’s population do not remember life under Saddam Hussein — only the period under elected Iraqi governments flush with oil wealth. These factors likely will hinder the next Iraqi government’s efforts to implement financial and administrative reforms.
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David Siddhartha Patel, research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 121 (Summary) — The Jazira — the lands at the foot of the Anatolian Plateau between the Tigris and the Euphrates — was at the center of the territory held by ISIS. Discussion on the future of this region now focuses on efforts to promote economic development, facilitate the return of refugees, and include ethnic and religious minorities in rebuilding efforts. In this Brief, Samuel Dolbee offers a historical perspective on similar endeavors in the Jazira, arguing that two kinds of engineering — agricultural and ethnic — have a long history of being commingled there in ways that made the region ripe for unrest. Ethnicity and agriculture have intersected as various states mobilized minorities as well as majorities to populate and develop this land, transforming it from a realm of limited state control and limited cultivation to some of the most productive — albeit still marginal — regions of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. These state projects entangled ethnic identity with agrarian development schemes and border-making, suggesting that the solution to instability in the Jazira is not simply a matter of getting borders “right.” Thinking about what may happen in this land after ISIS requires accounting for the various borders that have emerged in concert with one another, including those of states, environments, and ethnicities.
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Samuel Dolbee, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 120 (Summary) — In late June 2018, demonstrations and strikes spread throughout Iran. This unrest followed a widespread wave of protests that began in the final days of 2017 and continued into January. Both sets of protests started over economic issues, but soon turned to political and social concerns. Despite their dramatic spread, however, these recent protests have been suppressed quickly by the Iranian government’s police forces, known as NAJA, and largely without the help of Iran’s paramilitary militia (the Basij) or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). In this Brief, Saeid Golkar argues that NAJA and its special forces have evolved over the past decade specifically to prepare for such contingencies, and its recent success in controlling and suppressing protests is the result of a continuous process of restructuring, expansion, and professionalization of police forces in post-revolutionary Iran. While most academics and policy makers focus on the Basij and the IRGC when discussing the Islamic Republic’s coercive apparatus, this Brief describes how NAJA and its special forces have become ever more important in maintaining domestic public order, blocking reform, and ensuring the survival of the Iranian regime.
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Saeid Golkar, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science & Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Middle East Brief 119 (Summary) — After the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, Iran, which lies on drug trafficking routes from Afghanistan to Europe, experienced a dramatic increase in the number of drug users. Over the years, the Islamic Republic's response to the crisis has moved away from draconian measures, including capital punishment. Most recently, the country amended strict drug trafficking laws, paving the way for several thousand prisoners to have their pending death sentences reviewed and possibly commuted. In this Brief, Golnar Nikpour examines this change in sentencing laws as part of a broader societal and governmental rethinking of Iran’s approach to the growing epidemic of drug use in the country. Influenced by domestic public health NGOs and grassroots organizations, Iran’s official anti-drug policies and strategies have shifted from a zero tolerance ethos on drug use to incorporate harm reduction and addiction treatment models favored by medical professionals. More broadly, this demonstrates the extent to which the Islamic Republic’s legal and penal codes remain flexible and responsive to both international and domestic pressures, rather than static and simply driven by ideology.
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Golnar Nikpour, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 118 (Summary) — After terrorist attacks in 2003, Morocco launched an ambitious and wide-ranging strategy to counter violent extremism. Intended to both target existing terror groups and address the roots of radicalization, this comprehensive strategy sought to combine security measures with efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions and promote the state’s moderate interpretation of Islam. In this Brief, Mohammed Masbah assesses this strategy and finds that, while it has been largely successful at hindering jihadi groups from operating inside Morocco over the past 15 years, it failed to prevent hundreds of Moroccans from radicalizing and joining groups fighting abroad. Masbah argues that the domination of security agencies in implementing the strategy sidelined its non-security aspects, which also suffered from being too broad, unfocused, and lacking in complementarity. As a result, Morocco seems to have failed to make sufficient progress in achieving its broader objective of fighting poverty and social exclusion. The Brief concludes by discussing the implications of the assessment for the expected return of hundreds of Moroccans who fought in Syria and Iraq with ISIS.
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Mohammed Masbah, Marilyn and Terry Diamond Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 117 (Summary) — Lebanon’s political system is often described as weak and perennially at risk of collapse. The sudden resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri in late 2017 was just one example of how regional crises threaten to destabilize Lebanon’s government. In this Brief, Jeffrey G. Karam challenges this conventional wisdom and argues that the activism and organizational capacity of the Lebanese public make the country's political system more stable and resilient than is commonly assumed. This occurs in two ways. First, civil society and non-governmental organizations support, pressure, and challenge the Lebanese government in its normal functioning in a wide-variety of arenas, such as electoral reform and environmental planning. Second, during crises, NGOs can help by supplementing or substituting for the Lebanese state, such as responding to the breakdown of garbage collection and coping with the influx of Syrian refugees. This bottom-up activism contributes to the stability and durability of the Lebanese political system but also, inadvertently, allows the government to remain weak.
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Jeffrey G. Karam, former visiting research scholar at the Crown Center and an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at the Lebanese American University.
Middle East Brief 116 (Summary) — No formal refugee camps exist in Lebanon to house the approximately 1-2 million Syrian refugees in the country. Laws there make it difficult for them to maintain legal status, limiting access to formal employment, the justice system, and public services. In this Brief, Nils Hägerdal argues that the plight of Syrian refugees in Lebanon is a result of a series of policy changes implemented by the Lebanese government since 2014 that are designed to reduce the number of Syrians in the country. Many Lebanese view the refugees’ ongoing presence as a threat to their country’s economy, political balance, and security. Consequently, the Lebanese government, unlike those in Jordan and Turkey, has implemented policies on refugees primarily designed to ensure that Syrians do not settle permanently in the country but instead return to Syria as soon as possible.
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Nils Hägerdal, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 115 (Summary) — January 16, 2018 marked two years since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 — lifted international nuclear-related sanctions. Although the agreement was expected to bring significant economic benefits to Iran, the weeks leading up to this anniversary witnessed Iranians protesting in the streets of many cities against continued economic hardship. In this Brief, Nader Habibi assesses the economic dividends of the nuclear deal for the Iranian economy by focusing on oil production, growth, trade, and investment over the past two years. He then looks at factors such as household consumption, unemployment, corruption, and the financial burdens of Iran's foreign interventions to explain why so many Iranians have not felt the economic benefits of sanctions relief in their daily lives.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 114 (Summary) — The recent storm created by President Donald Trump’s declaration that the U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital drew attention away from an important interview that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, gave at the Saban Forum a few days earlier. There, for the first time, Kushner explained the premises and the underlying logic of the Trump administration’s preparations to launch negotiations leading to an “ultimate deal” for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In this Brief, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki address the following questions: How favorable are the current regional, as well as Palestinian and Israeli domestic political conditions for launching such an initiative, and to what extent did the Jerusalem statement affect these conditions? And if the president intends to eventually unveil his “ultimate deal,” why did he risk derailing the efforts of his own team by making the Jerusalem statement in advance of, and separate from, the peace initiative to which Kushner alluded? The Brief concludes by providing a net assessment of the viability of the Trump administration’s initiative to resolve the decades-long conflict.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, Goldman Senior Fellow at the Crown Center and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah.
Middle East Brief 112 (Summary) — Following the 2010 Jasmine Revolution, Tunisians voted the Islamist party, Ennahda, into power in 2011. At the time, many were concerned that Ennahda would use its newfound electoral victory to reverse significant gains for Tunisian women's rights over the past decades. These gains included the right to work, hold political office, initiate divorce, and pass citizenship onto their children. In this Brief, Carla Abdo-Katsipis argues that the Tunisian case demonstrates that the coming to power of an Islamist party does not necessarily come at a cost to gender equality and women’s rights. The Brief describes the status of women in Tunisia before and after the Jasmine Revolution and then presents three aspects of Ennahda's governance and policies that affect women's rights.
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Carla B. Abdo-Katsipis, non-resident scholar at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 111 (Summary) — In 2013, the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) entered into historic peace talks that signaled the possibility of an end to the Kurdish question in the Turkish republic. However, by July 2015, the Turkish government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), launched an unprecedented military offensive against the PKK. These military operations have claimed the lives of two thousand people and displaced half a million others. In this Brief, Serra Hakyemez argues that the failed peace process between the Kurds and the Turkish government is due to the discrepancy between the popular support for peace and the absence of legal support, which allowed the strained negotiations between the AKP and PKK to fall apart when the political circumstances changed. The Brief concludes with some reflections on the possibilities of restarting negotiations between the AKP and PKK in the aftermath of Turkey’s 2017 constitutional referendum.
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Serra Hakyemez, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 110 (Summary) — Six years after a popular uprising against a ruthless dictator, Libyans struggle to understand why stability and prosperity did not come to their resource-rich country. Libya's sovereign power is currently contested among two parliaments, three governments, and nine members of a presidential council. This abundance of political bodies is far from affording peace, stability, and prosperity. In this Brief, Jean-Louis Romanet Perroux identifies the key actors who play roles in the international, national, and individual dimensions of Libyan politics and explains the factors that prevent the creation of a single and strong Libyan national government. Finally, the Brief also explores whether there is a realistic scenario for either military rule or a national unity government in the near future for Libya, given the distribution of power among an extensive and diverse number of actors and the seeming impossibility that some of them will coalesce into a dominant coalition.
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Jean-Louis Romanet Perroux, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 109 (Summary) — On May 19, 2017, Iranians go to the polls to elect their next president from six candidates, including the incumbent Hasan Rouhani. The election has become surprisingly competitive for a variety of reasons, including the unclear economic benefits of the nuclear deal signed between Iran and the P5+1 in July 2015. In this Brief, Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi and Naghmeh Sohrabi analyze three other issues that have come to the fore in the space for public debate opened by this election: the effects of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s death in January 2017 on the reformist-centrist alliance; the question of, and the planning around, the eventual successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; and finally, the unemployment crisis in Iran and the associated mobilization of the populist vote. The Brief concludes with an examination of the expected evolution of these issues in the aftermath of the election, regardless of who is elected president.
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Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi, researcher at the Crown Center and graduate student at Harvard University.
Naghmeh Sohrabi, associate director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History.
Middle East Brief 108 (Summary) — In the wake of the political protests that erupted in Morocco in 2011, King Mohammed VI issued royal pardons in March 2011 and February 2012 to a group of prominent Salafi ex-Jihadis, that is — Salafi Jihadis who had renounced violence. He offered to release them from prison on the condition that they either remain apolitical or participate in the legal political process. The offer was part of the monarchy’s broader effort to battle and defeat extremism. This significant policy shift — allowing Salafis to take part in mainstream politics — has been attributed by seasoned observers to the regime’s inclusiveness, and it allowed Salafi ex-Jihadis to enjoy the benefits associated with becoming legal political actors. In this Brief, Mohammed Masbah argues that the political participation of prominent Salafi ex-Jihadi sheikhs within the regime’s predefined framework seems to have been counterproductive. Rather than leading to the moderation of Salafi former detainees, it has instead alienated their ideological base, thereby shrinking the scope of these sheikhs’ influence on their followers and preventing the government from controlling the actions of radicals and stemming the flow of Moroccan youth to conflicts abroad.
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Mohammed Masbah, Marilyn and Terry Diamond Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 107 (Summary) — In October 2016, after two and a half years of failed attempts to fill the post of the President of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, the Sunni former Premier, nominated Michel Aoun, the Christian Maronite former commander in chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces and ally of Shii Hezbollah. Hariri’s initiative both ended the Lebanese presidential crisis and began to mend the political rift between Aoun’s mostly Christian Free Patriotic Movement and Hariri’s predominantly Sunni Future Movement. This development is not consistent, however, with the common perception of Lebanon as dominated by sectarianism, which is seen as the root cause of the country’s wars, underdevelopment, and chronic instability. In this Brief, Jeffrey Karam offers an alternative to that conventional understanding of Lebanese politics. He argues that cross-sectarian compromises between political elites, such as this one that solved the presidential crisis, have recurred throughout the history of modern Lebanon, providing a surprising degree of stability to the Lebanese political system. Nonetheless, such deals primarily serve the interests of elites and hinder reforms that could fix the country’s myriad problems. The Brief concludes with an assessment of grassroots organizations that are attempting to break across these cross-sectarian alliances in order to bring about fundamental change in Lebanon.
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Jeffrey G. Karam, visiting research scholar at the Crown Center and lecturer of international relations and Middle East Studies at Boston University.
Middle East Brief 106 (Summary) — On November 3, 2016, the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi accelerated the implementation of a set of economic decisions that previous governments had feared to undertake. The reforms — an austerity program including subsidy cuts; currency reform; and increased indirect taxes — have been gradually adopted in the lead-up to an agreement for a major loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Egypt’s decision to float its currency immediately caused the value of the Egyptian pound to crash almost 50 percent against the U.S. dollar. Along with earlier subsidy cuts, these reforms have created a set of inflationary pressures. These painful measures have accordingly frustrated many Egyptians, even as many observers see them as necessary to restore economic stability. In this Brief, Ahmad Shokr explores how Sisi’s chosen economic course might affect his government’s political legitimacy in the coming years. He argues that under current economic conditions, the government will find it difficult to use economic policy as a means of building a durable social coalition that can strengthen its political authority.
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Ahmad Shokr, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College.
Middle East Brief 105 (Summary) — In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani emerged as one of the most influential voices in Iraq. His dual role as a leading Shii figure in the Muslim world and a vocal and consistent voice for democracy and stability in Iraq has, at times, placed him at odds with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, as well as with radical forces inside Iraq. In this Brief, Harith Hasan al-Qarawee analyzes Sistani’s approach to authority in Iraq, his attitudes towards the Iranian role in Iraq, and the future of Najaf’s hawza, one of the major centers of religious learning in the Shii world, in the aftermath of the aging Sistani’s death. The Brief concludes that a post-Sistani Najaf will be more divided, weaker, and vulnerable to influence exerted by Iran.
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Harith Hasan al-Qarawee, non-resident fellow at the Crown Center and is a fellow at the Center of Religious Studies, Central European University, Budapest. In 2014–16, he was a junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 104 (Summary) — The “two-state paradigm” that for decades comprised the basis of almost all discussions about resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is losing its relevance. What will replace it is a “one-state reality” — the de-facto transformation of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River into one political unit. This Brief analyzes the trajectories in the conflict’s global and regional environments as well as in the Israeli and Palestinian domestic scenes that currently drive the slide toward this new reality. It also elaborates the considerable costs that are likely to be associated with this slide for Israelis and Palestinians.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, Goldman Senior Fellow at the Crown Center and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah.
Middle East Brief 103 (Summary) — ISIS’s territorial ambitions and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria have led to speculation among various analysts as to whether we are witnessing the end of Sykes-Picot and the emergence of newer and “less artificial” borders in the Middle East. In this Brief, David Patel identifies three myths underlying these assessments and systematically dismantles them: first, the notion that the Sykes-Picot Agreement is the moment when Europeans drew artificial states and borders on a blank map of the Middle East; second, that ISIS’s expansion and control of territory in both Iraq and Syria is an unprecedented challenge to this regional state system; and third, that a collapse of colonial-era states would result in smaller and more peaceful polities defined by relatively homogenous ethnic or sectarian identity groups. The Brief ultimately challenges the current narrative in the West of ethnic partition as a solution to the crises in the Middle East.
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David Siddhartha Patel, research fellow at the Crown Center and lecturer in politics at Brandeis University.
Middle East Brief 102 (Summary) — On September 11, 2015, Egyptian university graduates set their PhD and MBA certificates on fire to protest their inability to find suitable jobs with these advanced degrees. Paradoxically, the day before Egyptian high school students and their parents gathered to demand an increase in the admissions capacity of public universities. These very different protests are emblematic of the “overeducation” crisis facing Egypt. In this Brief, Nader Habibi and Fatma El-Hamidi analyze the political and socioeconomic causes, historical roots, and current form of this crisis. They further shed light on the ongoing debate, recent policy initiatives, and place the Egyptian crisis within a larger regional context. The Brief concludes with the assessment that only by restricting admissions can Egypt re-balance the supply and demand for highly educated workers.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Fatma El-Hamidi, adjunct professor of economics in the Department of Economics and Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh.
Middle East Brief 101 (Summary) — For decades, the Saudi monarchy has propagated the notion that they are the only rampart against Islamism inside the country. This idea has become axiomatic internationally, and many analyses of Saudi Arabia have solely focused on the salience of the royal family. In this Brief, Pascal Menoret challenges conventional understandings of Saudi politics and reveals a very different picture. The Brief examines six movements that have attempted to organize and protest in Saudi Arabia: the Sunni Islamist movement, the Association for Political and Civil Rights, the Shiite Islamist movement, the anti-corruption movement, the anti-repression movement, and the labor movement. Although these movements lack institutional resources, they mobilize people to challenge state policies. Menoret explains why some mobilizations were successful while others failed, and assesses the contribution of these movements to the future of Saudi politics. The Brief concludes by stating that, in the absence of political reform and with the decline in state spending, repression will remain a staple of the Saudi political system, making the future of Saudi politics bleaker than ever.
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Pascal Menoret, Renée and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies at the Crown Center and an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University. He is the author of “The Saudi Enigma: A History” (2005) and of “Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt” (2014).
Middle East Brief 100 (Summary) — The Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi’s rise to power in 2014, in the aftermath of Nouri al-Maliki’s controversial rule, was lauded by the United States, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Moqtada al-Sadr, and most Kurdish and Sunni parties alike. Yet, recent protests in Iraq raise questions about Abadi’s ability to implement reforms and remain in power in the face of growing discontent. In this Brief, Harith Hasan Al-Qarawee reviews Abadi’s premiership thus far, examines the differences between Abadi’s and Maliki’s policies, and questions whether the transference of power from Maliki to Abadi has led to a significant change in Iraq’s political dynamics. The Brief argues that, despite improvements in the style of governance, Abadi failed to meaningfully impact major political issues, especially those pertaining to the central authorities’ relations with the Kurds and the Sunnis, and the conduct of the war against ISIS. The Brief concludes by illustrating that the nature of Iraq’s political system and Abadi’s inability to consolidate a support base have made his term ineffectual and may, ultimately, be the cause of his downfall.
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Harith Hasan Al-Qarawee, junior research fellow at the Crown Center where he is working on a book titled “Shiism and State in Iraq: Authority, Identity and Politics.”
Middle East Brief 99 (Summary) — Since 2014 when ISIS declared itself a new Islamic caliphate, the questions of what is Islamic authority and who wields it today have taken on a new urgency. In this Brief, Dr. Richard Nielsen explains the changing nature of Islamic authority in the Sunni Muslim Middle East. The Brief demonstrates that there is a distinction between those nominally in authority and those who actually have broad influence, and describes how traditional Muslim authorities have lost ground to new, more ideologically diverse clerical voices. The Brief also argues that the decline in the influence of state-employed clerics means that governments that have previously relied on religious authority now risk actually undermining it when they seek religious cover for their political projects. Taken together, the evidence presented here shows that religious authority in the Middle East is not as absolute as it often appears to outside observers. Even the most influential clerics face substantial limitations on their ability to change worldwide Islamic discourse around contested issues like the correct definition of “jihad.”
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Richard A. Nielsen, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center and an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Middle East Brief 98 (Summary) — The Egyptian parliamentary elections held in fall 2015 were meant to complete President el-Sisi’s political road map and restore stability and social order to the country. However, critics both in Egypt and the international community have questioned the elections’ legitimacy. The contention surrounding the elections was exacerbated by the low turnout and corruption that plagued the process. In this Brief, Abdel Monem Said Aly and Sobhy Essaila address this controversy but also provide a broader perspective on these elections by focusing on the novel features of their results: the absence of a presidential party, the proliferation of parties, a surge in women’s participation, greater representation of Copts, a higher number of university-educated MPs, and the absence of violence. The authors then examine how the recent parliamentary elections may enable the reestablishment of stability in Egypt.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, and senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Sobhy Essaila, senior researcher at the Alahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
Middle East Brief 97 (Summary) — A decade of no war, no peace in Palestinian-Israeli relations is now coming to an end, and is gradually being replaced by intensifying violence. In this Brief, Khalil Shikaki argues that the post-intifada status quo that prevailed in the West Bank during the 2005–15 period is currently being challenged by two escalating factors: 1) The Palestinian Authority (PA), which contributed significantly to the status quo's creation, is rebelling against it, with PA president Mahmoud Abbas threatening to dismantle the Oslo Accords, and 2) The Palestinian public, which facilitated that status quo, is now taking matters into its own hands and is on the verge of plunging the West Bank into violence. Abbas, without whom the post-intifada design would have been unthinkable, may or may not survive the turmoil, but it is almost certain that the “Abbas Decade” that he shaped will not. Shikaki analyzes the five pillars upon which the decade of no war, no peace was constructed, and explains the international, regional, and domestic causes for the breakdown of Palestinian-Israeli relations. He concludes by examining three possible outcomes of the current escalation, and their implications for the future of the two-state solution.
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Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Political and Survey Research in Ramallah and Goldman Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 96 (Summary) — Since the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the P5+1 in 2015, several contradictory messages have been coming out of Tehran. On one hand, the Rouhani government and many among the Iranian people hope that sanctions relief will alleviate the Islamic Republic’s many economic ills. On the other, Iranian hardliners and the Supreme Leader himself have warned against “Western infiltration” as a result of a potential economic opening. In this Brief, Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi steps back from the headlines to assess the validity of the various expectations regarding the impact of the Vienna Agreement on Iran by examining some of the most trenchant obstacles the Rouhani government faces today. Specifically, he identifies three inter-related economic and political crises that arose independently of the sanctions and thus cannot be resolved merely through the lifting of sanctions and the unfreezing of Iran’s assets abroad: the legacy of former president Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s economic mismanagement, the unprecedented number of job seekers entering Iran’s economy, and the expanded role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the Iranian political arena. The Brief concludes by examining three probable scenarios concerning the effects of the agreement on the future of Iran in the short and medium terms, including the agreement’s possible impact on the February 2016 parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections.
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Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi, former member of the Central Council of Mujahedin Inqilab, a reformist party in Iran, and on the editorial board of several reformist newspapers. He is currently a researcher at the Crown Center and a graduate student at Harvard University.
Middle East Brief 95 (Summary) — Engulfed in violent conflict and political turmoil, today’s Middle East is unrecognizable. The costs of the past four years of violence in Syria alone, when the dead, wounded, and displaced, as well as the destruction of Syria’s infrastructure and economy are taken into account, are among the worst in the region's history. In this Brief, Abdel Monem Said Aly and Shai Feldman ask: Can the Middle East be put back together? They address the following questions: What are the dimensions of the region’s current situation? How did the Middle East come to such a dreadful state of affairs? Can the region be restored? What are the obstacles facing any such effort, what resources are available to counter them, and what reforms would need to be implemented for any restoration of the region’s states to succeed? The authors suggest that the key to the region’s success lies in the creation of a Concert of Arabia — a Middle East corollary to the 19th century Concert of Europe — the core of which would be the Arab monarchies and Egypt. They also discuss the conditions under which Arab states might accept Israel as an affiliate of the Concert.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, and senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 94 (Summary) — On June 7, 2015 the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey (AKP) failed to secure an electoral majority in the national-level parliamentary elections for the first time since it came to power in 2002. Although the AKP’s electoral defeat was caused by many converging developments, including the rise of pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, an overlooked yet important factor was the split with the Gülen, a religious movement long-considered the main grassroots mobilizer of the AKP. The alliance with the Gülen had been crucial in securing the AKP's electoral victories in the 2002, 2007, and 2011 elections, so its absence was keenly felt during the 2015 elections. In this Brief, Sarah El-Kazaz analyzes the demise of the AKP-Gülen alliance by focusing on three key areas of contention: market-driven economics, EU accession, and Kurdish non-recognition. The Brief concludes with a discussion of the ramifications of the AKP-Gülen rift and its impact on the composition of a new ruling AKP coalition government.
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Sarah El-Kazaz, Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center .
Middle East Brief 93 (Summary) — By most accounts, the Libyan democratic transition, which began with the 2011 revolution and ended Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign, appears to have been derailed. Libya is suffering a civil war and a Libyan state capable of steering the country towards democracy is unlikely to emerge any time soon. Yet in the midst of the country’s chaos, a positive change is occurring slowly and quietly. Largely overlooked, a vibrant civil society is forming, driven by shifts in individual and small-group attitudes and behaviors. In this Brief, Jean-Louis Romanet Perroux provides an assessment of Libyan civil society and its potential role in state-building based on a survey of 1,022 civil society organizations in six major cities. He first identifies three critical elements preventing a democratic transition: the failure of politics, the lack of state institutions, and communalism. Romanet Perroux then argues that the nascent civil society is helping to address these deficiencies by fostering empowerment and civic engagement, national identity, and trust and social cohesion. The Brief concludes that while civil society alone cannot end the cycle of violence or build state institutions, it is forging a sense of Libyan citizenship that is crucial for nation-building.
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Jean-Louis Romanet Perroux, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and a doctoral candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Middle East Brief 92 (Summary) — The rise and expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has threatened to erode state order and boundaries in the Middle East. Situated at the epicenter of this potential regional breakdown, Jordan faces serious domestic and international challenges to the stability that its Hashemite monarchy has so carefully cultivated. In this Brief, Asher Susser provides a net assessment of Jordan’s response to the ISIS challenge and the regime’s capacity to weather this latest storm. In responding to this predicament, Jordan must confront the radicalization of its domestic Islamist opposition, a struggling economy overburdened by the massive influx of Syrian refugees, and discontent among the monarchy’s core of “East Banker” elite. Jordan’s ability to pull through hinges on two critical factors: international support and the evolution of Jordanian stateness, defined here as effective central government and a cohesive understanding of Jordanianness. Susser concludes that as long as these remain, the Jordanian monarchy can continue performing an increasingly precarious balancing act. Yet, he cautions that this will require delicate diplomacy and very generous support from the Hashemite Kingdom’s allies, including Israel.
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Asher Susser, Stanley and Ilene Gold Senior Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. During 2007–2008 and 2009–2010, he was a senior fellow on the Myra and Robert Kraft Chair in Arab Politics at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 91 (Summary) — IntroduIn his inaugural address as the first directly elected president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared his election a triumph of the “New Turkey.” This “New Turkey,” he proclaimed, is to be an inversion of the centralist and authoritarian legacy of the Kemalist past and the rise of pluralistic democracy. But how successful have Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) been in fulfilling this promise? In this Brief, Hikmet Kocamaner examines the parallels between the previous Kemalist regime and the current AKP rule by focusing on three shared characteristics: 1) centralization of power through one party rule; 2) the role of a charismatic leader with authoritarian tendencies and 3) the delegitimization of dissent. Kocamaner argues that while the AKP initially garnered widespread support because of its reconciliation with secular-liberal principles and promise to end the authoritarian Kemalist legacy, it has fallen short of achieving democratization and instead deepened its political entrenchment. The Brief concludes by positing that while current AKP policies will not bring the country closer to the promise of a “New Turkey,” the institutionalization of a participatory and pluralistic democracy may eventually move it in that directionction.
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Hikmet Kocamaner, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and holds a dual PhD in anthropology and Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Arizona.
Middle East Brief 90 (Summary) — The September 2014 takeover of the Yemeni capital Sana’a by Houthi tribesmen, and subsequent events, have radically destabilized the fragile republic and holds the possibility of re-igniting a full civil war. Much of the analysis of current events in Yemen have focused on the rise of extremist religious groups, the possibility of a sectarian war, and the role of foreign powers in intensifying this conflict. In this Brief, Asher Orkaby takes an alternative view by examining the rise and success of the Houthi movement as a domestic conflict rooted in the crisis of legitimacy created by the passing of the 1960s revolutionary generation known as the Famous Forty. The ensuing power vacuum, he argues, has presented an opening for the Houthi movement to gain support for a religious and tribal alternative to the republican state model of the 1960s. The Brief concludes by suggesting that, with their situation growing increasingly desperate, Yemenis may accept the political certainty offered by the Houthi leadership, in a religiously-inspired language historically familiar to them.
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Asher Orkaby, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and holds a PhD in International and Middle East History from Harvard University.
Middle East Brief 89 (Summary) — The Islamic Republic of Iran is facing an unprecedented overeducation crisis—producing far more university graduates than the employment opportunities available to them. Indeed, while a number of Middle East countries have been experiencing the same challenge, the magnitude of this problem in Iran is far greater than in any of the region’s other states. In this Brief, Nader Habibi sheds light on the causes, magnitude, and consequences of this growing and little-examined challenge to Iran. He lays out both the Iranian government’s counterproductive policies that led to this crisis and the pitfalls associated with the proposed solutions. He concludes by arguing that while the primary symptom of the crisis is economic — the effects of the growing rates of underemployment among young college-educated Iranians on the country’s economy — its more important impact may be socio-political: If unmanaged, the growing discontent among educated young Iranians can lead to social instability and political unrest.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 88 (Summary) — The events known as the Arab Spring and uprisings have provided two different models of possible integration of Islamic movements into politics: the example of al-Nahda in Tunisia, where participation in politics led to moderation, and that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, where it did not. But what about the Brotherhood’s sister Palestinian movement, Hamas? Did the latter’s participation in Palestinian politics lead to its moderation? In this Brief, Khalil Shikaki addresses this question using seven years of survey research and other data collected by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Based on this data an effort is made to ascertain whether or not Hamas has changed its views with regard to three crucial issue-areas: governance, the social agenda, and the Arab-Israeli peace process. This Brief concludes that despite important examples of opinion change, Hamas has essentially failed to moderate its views.
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Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Political and Survey Research in Ramallah and the Goldman Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 87 (Summary) — The rise and expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, poses a serious threat to regional and global security. In response, on September 10, 2014, President Obama initiated a strategy to “degrade and destroy” ISIS through systematic airstrikes and local “partner forces” fighting on the ground. This strategy is based on three key assumptions: first, that ISIS is foreign to Iraq; second, that ISIS will eventually alienate Sunni Arabs; and finally, that Iraq’s new government is more inclusive and can thus persuade Sunni Iraqis to break with ISIS and join hands with the government in Baghdad. In this Brief, David Siddhartha Patel explores the origins of each assumption and the reasons why they are not applicable in the present Iraqi political environment. Patel concludes by arguing that the inapplicability of these assumptions means that America’s military re-engagement in Iraq — this time against ISIS — will be long and difficult.
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David Siddhartha Patel, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and a former assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University.
Middle East Brief 86 (Summary) — In the wake of the 2011 revolution, Egypt has experienced two radical transformations in its leadership and, correspondingly, in its foreign policy agenda. In this Brief, Abdel Monem Said Aly examines the foreign and national security policies of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi whose presidency he regards as the first in Egypt’s “post-revolutionary era.” The Brief begins by elaborating the constraints on the foreign policy agenda of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammad Morsi. It then provides an in-depth analysis of Egypt’s current foreign policy challenges and concludes by identifying six possible foreign policy directions Egypt may take under the Sisi presidency.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. He is also the chairman of Al-Masry Al-Youm, a leading Arabic language daily newspaper in Egypt, and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 85 (Summary) — As the November 24 deadline for a comprehensive agreement between Iran and the P5+1 to resolve the nuclear conflict nears, analysts have become increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of reaching such an agreement. In this Brief, Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi challenges this “common wisdom.” He compares the conditions surrounding the current nuclear negotiations to those prevailing in 1988 when Iran decided to accept UN resolution 598 that ended the Iran-Iraq war. Looking at the three dimensions common to the two decisions — the economic, the religious and the ideological — Mahdavi argues that there are important similarities between these sets of conditions. In turn, this leads to the conclusion that just as in 1988 when Iran's Leader drank a “cup of poison” by accepting a cease-fire with Iraq, his successor may well do the same by committing a “heroic” act and accepting a nuclear deal with the P5+1.
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Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi, a former member of the Central Council of Mujahedin Inqilab, a reformist party in Iran. During his ten year career in journalism, he was the editor of several dailies in Iran and in 2013–14 was a researcher at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 84 (Summary) — The uprisings that swept the Arab world in 2011-2012 were sparked by many catalysts. Not least among them was the desire to put an end to arbitrary rule and install what political analysts call “the rule of law.” For countries in the region that face the prospect of failed (or failing) states, such as Libya, Syria, and Iraq, the goal of building accountable governance is a luxury of secondary priority. But for other countries where the integrity of the state is not in doubt, building rule of law is a reasonable ambition. In this Brief, Eva Bellin examines the question of how the Arab world can achieve this objective and the specific challenges they face by drawing on the experience of other regions that have wrestled with this ambition. By focusing on four crucial institutions — the judiciary, the police, the military, and regulatory agencies — Prof. Bellin identifies some of the best practices and evaluates key obstacles to the reforms required.
This Brief is based on the introduction to the forthcoming book “Building Rule of Law in the Arab World,” edited by Eva Bellin and Heidi Lane.
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Eva Bellin, Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 83 (Summary) — The 2014 Gaza-Israel War has created an opportunity to launch a more stable paradigm between Gaza and Israel, and between Israelis and Palestinians more broadly. In this Brief, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki present the elements required to transform a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas into a lasting de-escalation processes. First, all three principle parties will need to radically change their approach toward one another by prioritizing pragmatism. Second, the parties will need to support this pragmatic approach with specific policies aimed at facilitating the movement away from violence and destruction and toward greater accommodation. Without these changes, Israel and Hamas are bound to find themselves, sooner or later, in another round of deadly violence, to the detriment of innocent civilians on both sides.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Political and Survey Research in Ramallah and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 82 (Summary) — On June 8, 2014 Field-Marshall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was sworn in as Egypt’s fifth president amid monumental challenges to Egypt’s path towards democracy and economic prosperity. As a result, many commentators have already declared him as doomed to fail. In this Brief, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly attempts to decipher the meaning of Sisi’s ascent to Egypt’s presidency by describing the ways in which he is seen by different constituencies inside Egypt. The Brief also examines Sisi’s vision for Egypt’s future by assessing his liabilities and deficits when confronting the challenges facing his country, and by ascertaining his initial steps in office and their possible implications.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. He is also the chairman of Al-Masry Al-Youm, a leading Arabic language daily newspaper in Egypt, and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 81 (Summary) — For years, public discussions of Iran’s nuclear program and the negotiations surrounding it were considered to be off limits in the Iranian political sphere. But in recent months and as the negotiations with the P5+1 continue, not only have these discussions become a matter of public debate, they have realigned the political elite along a nuclear fault line. In this Brief, Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi examines this new dialectic between Iran's foreign and domestic politics by identifying the two new power blocs — the “worried,” who oppose, and the “valiant,” who support the nuclear stance taken by the Rouhani administration. In doing so, he traces the roots of this political division back to the student protests of 1999 and follows the critical events since then that have shaped the current split. He concludes by analyzing Ayatollah Khamenei’s delicate balancing act as he supports both the “valiant” and the “worried” in a bid to pull Iran out of its current crisis, while maintaining his own power base.
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Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi, former member of the Central Council of Mujahedin Inqilab, a reformist party in Iran, and on the editorial board of several reformist newspapers. He is currently a research assistant at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 80 (Summary) — Soon after his victory in the June 2013 election, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that reforming and revitalizing Iran’s oil and gas sector would be one of his government’s top priorities. Since then Rouhani and his oil minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh have launched a significant reform program aimed at reversing many of the policies instituted during Ahmadinejad’s presidential terms. In this Brief, Prof. Nader Habibi evaluates this reform program by analyzing the developments in Iran’s oil sector under Ahmadinejad, providing a detailed account of the reforms proposed and implemented by Rouhani, and ascertaining the possible challenges facing these reforms within the oil ministry and the broader political landscape.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 79 (Summary) — Since the ousting of President Mohammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime on June 30, 2013, U.S.-Egypt relations have been on the worst negative trajectory seen since President Anwar Sadat reconciled with the United States nearly four decades ago. In this Brief, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly and Prof. Shai Feldman explore the growing rift between Washington and Cairo, rooted as it is in the very different manner in which the two have come to define the recent events experienced in Egypt and their competing narratives about these developments. They conclude by taking stock of the two countries' long-standing significance to each other, and suggest ways in which a major effort can be launched to “reset” their relations.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, chairman of Al-Masry Al-Youm, and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 78 (Summary) — Since the battle of Qusayr and Hezbollah’s direct military involvement in the Syrian crisis, analysts have pondered whether Hezbollah’s actions resulted in a crisis of legitimacy for the party in Lebanon. In this Brief, Dr. Eric Lob argues that the roots of this crisis are multi-varied and date earlier than recent events suggest. Specifically, he explores the sources of the increasing discontent and criticism by analyzing the impact of Hezbollah’s costly foreign adventures against Israel, and its domestic governance deficiencies. In conclusion, Dr. Lob lays out the factors that will enable Hezbollah to remain a dominant actor in Lebanon and the region for the foreseeable future, despite its eroding legitimacy.
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Eric Lob, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 77 (Summary) — Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, religion has occupied an increasingly central role in the opposition. In this Brief, Dr. Thomas Pierret explores the issue of sectarianism in Syria by analyzing the history of the relationship between the minority Alawite regime and two parts of the majority Sunni Islamic community: the Islamist opposition movements and the ulama (the learned religious elite). Dr. Pierret argues that while economic liberalization initially enabled the co-option of the Sunni ulama, the brutality of the regime in reaction to the ongoing uprising forced the ulama to realign itself toward the opposition.
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Thomas Pierret, lecturer in contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh.
Middle East Brief 76 (Summary) — Has the Syrian civil war become also a Lebanese war? And if so, how long will it take before the country comes apart at the seams? In this Brief, Prof. Joseph Bahout explores how the Syrian crisis has escalated the Lebanese sectarian struggle and upset a precarious balance of power. In particular he examines Hezbollah’s decision to enter the Syrian civil war and the pivotal role this decision will have on the future of Lebanese politics.
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Joseph Bahout, professor of Middle Eastern politics at Sciences-Po Paris and senior researcher at Académie Diplomatique Internationale. He also serves as a permanent consultant with the Policy Planning Unit of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is an associate fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security policy (GCSP).
Middle East Brief 75 (Summary) — Thirty-one months since the fall of Zine Abdine Ben Ali, how far has Tunisia progressed in the transition to democracy? The noise of the daily battles and aberrant acts of violence may obscure the country’s true political trajectory and generate discouragement about Tunisia’s future. However, some distance may provide a better perspective, revealing a surprisingly positive and encouraging trend line. In this Brief, Prof. Eva Bellin presents the six most salient factors shaping Tunisia’s democratic trajectory. She then presents the result of these “drivers” by providing a “net assessment” of Tunisia’s progress thus far. Prof. Bellin concludes by pointing out the challenges still facing the country’s march toward democracy and the factors which are likely to affect this march in the years ahead.
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Eva Bellin, Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 74 (Summary) — On June 14, 2013, Iran will hold its 11th presidential election to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During his two terms in office, Ahmadinejad implemented a number of broad economic reforms and policies that have had a profound effect on socioeconomic conditions in Iran. In this Brief, Prof. Nader Habibi explores Ahmadinejad’s eight year legacy by analyzing his economic ideas, political strategies and interactions with various centers of power. Prof. Habibi concludes that Ahmadinejad’s emphasis on economic justice and reduction of inequality, in addition to his expansion of the Revolutionary Guards’ role in the economy, is likely to have a long-term impact on the distribution of economic opportunities and efficiency in Iran.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 73 (Summary) — Until recently, little attention has been paid to the upcoming June 14 presidential election in Iran. Citing the 2009 election and its violent aftermath, many Iranians came to believe that a regime that is capable of changing the result of an election according to its own will, would do the same in future elections as well, making them ceremonial at best. In this Brief, Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi argues that it may not be so simple. The power struggle inside the regime, impact of sanctions on people’s daily lives, and domestic and foreign crises have made the 2013 election meaningful, crucial, and unpredictable. To this end, this Brief lays out the five main factions that will be important players in this election and concludes that, ironically, the current situation in Iran may lead to a “healthy” election, which in turn may signal the return of the reformists to power.
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Seyedamir Hossein Mahdavi was a member of the Central Council of Mujahedin Inqilab, a reformist party in Iran, and on the editorial board of several reformist newspapers. He is currently an MA student in the Coexistence and Conflict program at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
Middle East Brief 72 (Summary) — The Jordanian monarchy is going through one of its most difficult periods ever. The Arab Spring has emboldened the opposition by eroding the deterrent effect of the notorious “fear of government” (haybat al-sulta) in the Arab world in general and in Jordan in particular. Additionally, economic stagnation and austerity measures driven by the International Monetary Fund have led to unprecedented discontent among the regime’s traditionally loyal East Banker elite and tribal base. In this Brief, Prof. Asher Susser analyzes the various factors that have led to the current crisis engulfing the Jordanian monarchy. However, he concludes by cautioning that the lack of a viable alternative to the Monarchy makes the situation in Jordan, though tenuous, manageable for the time being.
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Asher Susser, Stanley and Ilene Gold Senior Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. In the years 2007–2008 and 2009–2010, he was a senior fellow on the Myra and Robert Kraft Chair in Arab Politics at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 71 (Summary) — In Iran, the 2011 Arab Spring was hailed as an “Islamic Awakening” based on its own Islamic revolution in 1979. In this Brief, Dr. Payam Mohseni focuses on the Iranian conceptualization of this “Islamic Awakening” and the domestic ideological context in which it took shape. Dr. Mohseni further contextualizes Iran’s narrative of the Islamic Awakening from two different perspectives: the soft war and the Islamization of the social sciences. The Brief concludes with a discussion of the political ramifications that the discourse of the Islamic Awakening holds for the regime.
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Payam Mohseni, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and is a member of the Iran Study Group at the United States Institute of Peace.
Middle East Brief 70 (Summary) — To what extent has the transitional period —from the trial of Hosni Mubarak in August 2011 to the civil disobedience seen in the city of Port Said in Winter 2012 — moved Egypt closer toward a democratic system of governance? In this Brief, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly and Karim Elkady provide a net assessment of the positive, the negative and the unpleasant developments of Egypt’s political transition. They argue that while Egyptian politics has experienced a number of positive developments, the transition is also associated with some very negative or simply unpleasant manifestations, that obstruct Egypt’s path to democracy. They conclude that the interactions between these developments make it nearly impossible to predict the end-state of Egypt’s political transition.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, chairman, CEO and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies (RCSS) in Cairo, and senior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Karim Elkady, PhD candidate in the politics department at Brandeis University and doctoral fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 69 (Summary) — One of the mainstays of Turkey’s governments throughout its modern history has been a dogged secularism. However, in recent years the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), while still paying lip service to secular tenets, has churned out a stream of laws and injunctions that, taken together, amount to a radical transformation of Turkey’s public sphere. In this Brief, Prof. Dror Ze’evi assesses these changes and examines their implications for Turkey today. It begins with the trajectory that the AKP has followed from its ascent to power to the present, surveying the transformations that are already in place and those that are in the planning stages. It concludes with an evaluation of the present state of affairs—and of the direction Turkey may take in the future.
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Dror Ze’evi, professor of Turkish and Ottoman history in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University.
Middle East Brief 68 (Summary) — The first elections in post-revolutionary Egypt brought into being a parliamentary majority dominated by Islamist parties and a new constitutional assembly also dominated by Islamist leaning members. Although the constitution is still being written, a preliminary draft was released to the public on October 10, 2012. In this Brief, Dr. Aria Nakissa takes a closer look at the concept of Wasaṭism, an important component of the Muslim Brotherhood’s orientation toward implementing Sharia, and considers how this approach has found expression in the drafting of Egypt’s post-revolutionary constitution. He concludes by stating that differences of opinion which have surfaced with regard to the constitution — between the Islamists and the secular-oriented politicians — indicate the types of struggles likely to characterize Egypt’s post-revolutionary political landscape.
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Aria Nakissa, junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 67 (Summary) — While out of power, Islamic political movements in Egypt and Tunisia frequently criticized the economic policies of secular Arab regimes and put forth ideas on how they would combat poverty, inequality, and corruption. Now that they are in power, these movements will have the opportunity to implement their ideas. In this Brief, Prof. Nader Habibi analyzes the economic programs and policies that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Ennahdha Islamists in Tunisia proposed during their recent political campaigns, along with the policies and programs that they are likely to implement in practice. In doing so, he identifies three important factors that will influence their final economic policy choices: 1) the current economic challenges; 2) Islamic principles on economics and commerce that have influenced their proposals; and 3) the relative influence of socioeconomic interest groups in the formulation and implementation of these Islamic parties’ economic platforms.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 66 (Summary) — For years, Middle East specialists have debated the compatibility of Islamist politics and democracy in the Arab world. In Tunisia, the small country that sparked the Arab Spring, the victory of the Islamist Ennahdha party in last year’s parliamentary election has created an opportunity to examine the relationship between Islam and democracy in practice. In this Brief, Sarah J. Feuer analyzes Ennahdha’s governance in relation to three major political pressures acting on the party. She argues that while Ennahdha has demonstrated a commitment to democratic principles such as broad participation in elections and the separation of powers, the party has also pursued policies that would restrict individual rights.
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Sarah J. Feuer, PhD candidate in politics at Brandeis University and doctoral fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 65 (Summary) — In Iran, the presidential election of June 2013 has already become a hot topic. In this Brief, Prof. Naghmeh Sohrabi lays out three developments that will be evolving in this last year of the Ahmadinejad presidency and that will likely affect the upcoming election: the continuing power struggle over the scope of executive powers; the emergence of the Paydari Front, which supports Ahmadinejad; and the role that the reformists may play in the 2013 presidential election. The Brief concludes by evaluating the likely combined effect of these developments on the 2013 election and by assessing whether, in the context of the powerful role the Supreme Leader plays in Iranian politics, any of these developments really matter.
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Naghmeh Sohrabi, associate director for research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis.
Middle East Brief 64 (Summary) — The systematic savagery leveled by the Assad regime in Syria against its own citizens has sparked moral outrage and fueled calls for international intervention to stop the slaughter. For an increasing number of analysts this means indirect intervention by providing military and non-military assistance to opposition forces. In this Brief, Prof. Bellin and Prof. Krause argue that a distillation of the historical experience with insurgencies and civil wars, as well as a sober reckoning of conditions on the ground in Syria, make clear that this type of intervention would likely exacerbate the harm that it seeks to eliminate by prolonging the current bloody stalemate. Instead, the authors consider two alternative forms of intervention: choking the regime’s capacity for battle and restructuring the incentives to encourage regime elites to step down.
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Eva Bellin, Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics at the Crown Center.
Peter Krause, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston College.
Middle East Brief 63 (Summary) — As the ongoing humanitarian disaster unfolds in Syria, Turkey is increasingly placed in the international hot seat. With strong strategic and economic ties to Syria, the government in Ankara is in a key position to affect Syria’s future. However, so far Turkey has remained cautious, weighing its policy options carefully. In this Brief, Dr. Joshua Walker presents both a historical account of Turkish-Syrian relations and also the current Turkish policy regarding the escalating civil war in Syria. It concludes by laying out two alternative scenarios for Ankara: a limited military intervention in Syria through a buffer zone coupled with covert assistance to the Free Syrian Army; or, a full internationally sanctioned and supported military intervention.
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Joshua W. Walker, a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund based in Washington, D.C. and was a junior research fellow at the Crown Center in 2010–2011.
Middle East Brief 62 (Summary) — As the tenth anniversary of the landmark visit by then Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to Iran approaches, Prof. Nader Habibi analyses the evolution of Turkish-Iranian relations over the past decade with emphasis on how these relations have been influenced by international sanctions against Iran. This Brief argues that the growing economic ties between Turkey and Iran increase in geopolitical significance as Western and Middle Eastern countries attempt to influence the course of Iran’s nuclear efforts. Prof. Habibi concludes that economic relations with Turkey will play an important role in how Iran will respond to the latest round of sanctions against its central bank and oil sales.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 61 (Summary) — The leaders and people of Iran have been watching with keen interest the loud debate in the United States and Israel regarding the relative efficacy of different means for preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. However, inside Iran the economic and verbal onslaught has created a public conversation that is quite different. In this Brief, Prof. Farideh Farhi argues that since it is not permissible to advocate temporarily suspending Iran’s enrichment program, the public debate in Iran centers on two other areas of contention: The credibility of an attack on Iran and the possibilities of meaningful negotiations with the United States. She concludes by analyzing the implications of Iran’s internal debate for the future of diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict with Iran over the nuclear issue.
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Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar and affiliate graduate faculty at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Middle East Brief 60 (Summary) — In recent months, news of Palestinian internal politics has been dominated by the Fatah-Hamas unity deal and the possibilities for its success or failure. In this Brief, Dr. Peter Krause assesses both the unity deal and also a number of other options available to the Palestinian movement. In conclusion he argues that given that no one group is likely to dominate the movement in the short term, multiple strategies amidst division are not necessarily destined for failure.
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Peter Krause, junior research fellow at the Crown Center and assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston College.
Middle East Brief 59 (Summary) — The closing months of 2011 saw a sharpening of the debate in Israel over the implications of Iran’s nuclear efforts as well as the relative efficacy of different means for preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Given Iran’s geo-strategic position, there is much at stake in the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, as well as in a military strike to prevent it from obtaining such weapons. This Brief is a clarification of the at times unstructured and polemical Israeli debate on both these issues. It first maps out this crucial debate by identifying some of its main issues, then systematically presents the various and contending arguments made regarding these key issues.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center and co-chair of the Crown-Belfer Middle East Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Brig. Gen. (ret.) Shlomo Brom, former head of strategic planning in the IDF’s Planning Branch. He is a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv.
Amb. Shimon Stein, former Deputy Director General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former Israeli Ambassador to Berlin. He is a senior research fellow at INSS.
Middle East Brief 58 (Summary) — How has the Arab Spring affected Palestinian politics? In this Brief, Dr. Khalil Shikaki answers this question by focusing on three important issues: The regional realignment of Fatah and Hamas, their respective approaches to internal Palestinian reconciliation, and the Palestinians’ future relations with Israel. Dr. Shikaki begins by describing the political baseline that prevailed early in 2011. He then ascertains the domestic and regional changes that unfolded in the first half of 2011. He concludes that with no prospects for a return to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in the next twelve months, Hamas and Fatah will continue to muddle through.
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Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 57 (Summary) — In August 2011, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published an unusually controversial assessment of Iran’s economy that projected a relatively positive economic future. In this Brief, Prof. Nader Habibi critically evaluates the main factors that account for the report’s positive assessment and concludes that the IMF forecast underestimates the political and geopolitical threats facing Iran; it also underestimates the adverse effects of governance issues and factional politics on the successful implementation of economic reforms that are crucial for Iran’s economic growth. Nonetheless, Prof. Habibi also argues that while sanctions and domestic political mismanagement will hurt the economy, as long as Iran can avoid a comprehensive oil embargo and a military confrontation with the West, the likelihood of a severe economic collapse remains small.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 56 (Summary) — In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, a conventional wisdom developed that what is now known as the Arab Spring would only further complicate Arab-Israeli interactions. In this Brief, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly and Prof. Shai Feldman examine this conventional wisdom by reviewing the nature of Egyptian-Israeli relations prior to January 2011 to identify the constants that have informed these relations over the past three decades. The Brief then explores the challenges that the revolution has presented to these constants, the manner in which Egypt and Israel have dealt with these difficulties, and the challenges and opportunities that future Egyptian-Israeli interactions will likely face.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, president of Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center and co-chair of the Crown-Belfer Middle East Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Middle East Brief 55 (Summary) — In the wake of the dramatic deposing of President Mubarak, a critical tension has emerged in the Egyptian revolution between the forces supporting the continuity of the revolution and those supporting the continuity of the state. In this Brief, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly examines the reasons for this tension, namely the particular roots of the revolution and the competing agendas working to affect Egypt’s post-revolution future. It further argues that the interconnection between the state and the revolution will inevitably escalate these tensions in the months and years ahead.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, president of Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo and a senior fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 54 (Summary) — In September 2011, a UN vote on Palestinian independent statehood seems all but certain. In this Middle East Brief, Prof. Shai Feldman looks beyond the upcoming vote and asks what lessons can be learned from the diplomatic failures of the U.S., Israel and Palestinian Authority over the past two and a half years that have led us here. Using these lessons, Prof. Feldman then lays out the conditions required for a more successful future effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Professor of Politics at Brandeis University. He is also a Senior Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where he serves as co-chair (with former Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns) of the Crown-Belfer Middle East Seminar.
Middle East Brief 53 (Summary) — In this Brief, Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi provides a novel perspective on the current power struggle evolving in Iran between the president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and their respective factions. She highlights an important aspect of recent events that has been overlooked by most analyses of these developments: The ways in which the need to contain Ahmadinejad’s efforts to expand executive powers seem to be leading to a realignment of the Supreme Leader with centrist reformist politicians — such as Hashemi Rafsanjani — who had been pushed to the sideline in the aftermath of the dramatic events that followed the 2009 election.
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Naghmeh Sohrabi, Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center. Sohrabi was a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center from 2005-2007. She received her Ph.D. in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University in 2005. Her dissertation received an honorable mention from the Foundation for Iranian Studies. Sohrabi is currently under contract with Oxford University Press to publish her book on 19th century Persian travelers to Europe. She has taught courses at Harvard University, Skidmore College, and most recently at Brandeis.
Middle East Brief 52 (Summary) — In the Arab Spring of 2011, Jordan proves to be a case unto itself. It is neither Egypt nor Tunisia where mass protests led to the overthrow of the rulers, nor Syria, Yemen, Libya, or Bahrain where the opposition has been met with brutal repression. In this Brief, Prof. Asher Susser demonstrates that while Jordan has had its share of domestic difficulties, both the regime and the opposition have drawn on a reservoir of moderation. This, he argues, appears to have allowed for a relatively peaceful modus vivendi and for a gradualist, evolutionary approach to reform in place of revolution.
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Asher Susser, Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University. Previously, he served four terms as the Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. In the years 2007-2008 and 2009-2010, he was a Senior Fellow on the Myra and Robert Kraft Chair in Arab Politics at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 51 (Summary) — At a time of radically conflicting interpretations about the direction in which the AK Party is taking Turkey’s foreign policy, Prof. Malik Mufti provides a novel explanation for Turkey’s geopolitical reorientation. In this Brief, Prof. Mufti uses the notion of “Little America” as an expression of Turkey’s emerging bid for regional hegemony: as an actor seeking to project the kind of power—manifested in both its “hard” and May 2011 “soft” variants—wielded by the United States at the global level. In doing so, he provides a framework that goes beyond either the “anti-Western Islamism” or the “integrationist liberalism” that dominates analyses of Turkish foreign policy today.
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Malik Mufti, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University.
Middle East Brief 50 (Summary) — The quick succession of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia by the fall of Mubarak in Egypt raised the hope that a contagious wave of revolution might soon usher in democratic transition throughout the Middle East. In this Brief, through a close analysis of these two cases, Prof. Eva Bellin suggests a different scenario. She argues that these two uprisings were successful thanks to four key factors that are not easy to replicate in the Arab world as a whole: an emotional trigger, a sense of impunity, a professional military, and new social media. She concludes that while replication may not be easy, success can breed hope and optimism.
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Eva Bellin, Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics at the Crown Center and the Department of Politics.
Middle East Brief 49 (Summary) — Turkey’s new leadership role in the Middle East has been associated with a decade-long increase in economic and diplomatic relations with Arab states. This Brief analyzes the recent transformation in Turkey’s relations with the Arab world by closely studying their economic and geopolitical ties. Through an examination of political, institutional, and commercial forces in Turkey, it suggests that this shift is far more than a simple political agenda of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Rather, it is supported by a broad base of domestic interest groups which have and will demand a durable rapprochement with the Arab world in the coming decades.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at the Crown Center.
Joshua W. Walker, Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center and an Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond from August 2011.
Middle East Brief 48 (Summary) — The Obama administration’s announcement that it was dropping its efforts to persuade the Israeli government to freeze settlement construction has led to widespread opinion that without a clear plan B, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are dead. In this Brief, Prof. Shai Feldman analyzes the reasons for the almost two-year long U.S. failure to restart negotiations and the implications of this failure. He argues that in view of this setback the Obama administration needs to press the “reset button” on the negotiations. In the last section, Prof. Feldman elaborates on what such a change in approach would entail, namely the creation of a blueprint for solving the core issues dividing Israel and the Palestinians, fast tracking on borders and security issues, a new and improved Arab Peace Initiative (API), further encouragement of Palestinian state-building, direct and honest communication with U.S. policy makers explaining to key constituencies the rationale for the proposed blueprint, and the creation of a Czar who would oversee all U.S. efforts at Mideast peacemaking.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Professor of Politics at Brandeis University. He is also a Senior Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where he serves as co-chair (with former Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns) of the Crown-Belfer Middle East Seminar. Prof. Feldman is also an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.
Middle East Brief 47 (Summary) — In 2006, in a surprising move, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) joined forces with various secular and non-secular opposition groups to form the National Salvation Front (NSF) against the regime of Bashar al-Asad. When the Brotherhood withdrew from the NSF in April 2009, this was read by various commentators as a sign that the Brotherhood’s leadership was steering the movement toward a historic reconciliation with the regime. In this Brief, Dr. Liad Porat contextualizes the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to abandon the NSF and demonstrates that the Ikhwan remains committed to toppling and replacing the Asad regime. It thus argues that what occurred in April 2009 constituted a continuation of the Ikhwan’s history in Syria rather than a break with it.
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Liad Porat, Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center. Porat was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University from 2009-2010 and he completed his PhD in Middle Eastern history with honors at Haifa University.
Middle East Brief 46 (Summary) — Given the headline-grabbing actions of Turkey this summer with regard to both Israel and Iran, a powerful narrative has emerged in which the West has “lost” Turkey. In this Brief, Dr. Joshua W. Walker argues that this narrative ignores the process of democratization in Turkey and the domestic pressures facing a populist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. To this end, this Brief evaluates US-Turkish relations by placing the recent tensions in a larger historical context and assesses various points of convergence and divergence in this relationship today.
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Joshua W. Walker, Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center. He is also a Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center’s International Security Program at Harvard University.
Middle East Brief 66 (Summary) — In June 2010 the United Nations approved a fourth round of sanctions against Iran. One of the most important areas where these sanctions have been effective has been in Iran’s trade with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. In this Brief, Prof. Nader Habibi offers an overview of Iran’s economic ties with its GCC neighbors since 1980 and the ways in which these relations have been affected by the new cooperation of GCC countries with the current round of UN and US sanctions against Iran.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University and and a senior member of the Crown Center research staff.
Middle East Brief 44 (Summary) — In the Summer of 2009, the Mobilized Resistance Force or Basij was thrown into the limelight when it was used by the Iranian government to crush and eventually control opposition demonstrations. In this Brief, the first of its kind, Dr. Saeid Golkar lays out in detail the Basij’s ideological-political training and its evolution since 1979 as a means to better understand this crucial organization.
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Saeid Golkar, Postdoctoral scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.
Middle East Brief 66 (Summary) — On June 4, 2010, Seyyed Hassan Khomeini was heckled off the stage by supporters of president Ahmadinejad, in an event commemorating the anniversary of his grandfather’s death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic. Using this incident as a starting point, Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi examines the ways in which the events following the June 12, 2009 election have fundamentally affected the political landscape of Iran. In her Brief, she focuses on three areas of change: the future of electoral politics in Iran, the dual nature of its political system as a theocracy and a republic, and the efficacy of the Green movement.
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Naghmeh Sohrabi, Assistant Director for Research at the Crown Center. Sohrabi was a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center from 2005-2007. She received her PhD in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University in 2005.
Middle East Brief 42 (Summary) — The March 7, 2010 Iraqi elections compare with only one other national Iraqi election in recent times: those of December 2005. The electorate, Prof. Makiya shows, voted in 2010 to weaken sectarian politics and increase the representation of women and minorities, while the political class has proven itself unable to place national interests above narrow party and identity politics. As a result, increasing corruption and patronage politics is undermining the nascent state institutions.
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Kanan Makiya, The Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, Baghdad-born Makiya wrote “Republic of Fear,” which became a bestseller after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991.
Middle East Brief 41 (Summary) — Three years after taking control of Gaza, Hamas has established a stable and effective governing system despite a crushing siege and political challenges from Fatah and Salafist groups. In this brief Prof. Sayigh explores both the policies and the fortuitous circumstances that have enabled Hamas to consolidate its control over Gaza and to maintain its domestic legitimacy. The brief further elucidates the complex relationship between Hamas as an armed resistance movement and the government it supports, headed by Prime Minister Ismail Hanieh. Bringing to light the tension between the practical exigencies of governance and its core constituency’s Islamist and militant ideologies, Prof. Sayigh argues that Hamas has demonstrated its ability to innovate and survive. He concludes that the international sanctions policy has created a durable stand-off: Rather than spark mass discontent leading to the collapse of the Hanieh government, it enables Hamas to enhance its ruling party status.
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Yezid Sayigh, Sayigh is Professor of Middle East Studies at King’s College London and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center from 2009-2010. Previously he was Assistant Director of Studies at the Centre of International Studies, Cambridge University (1994-2003), and headed the Middle East program of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London (1998-2003). In 1990-1994 he was an advisor to and negotiator for the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks with Israel, and since 1999 has provided policy and technical consultancy on the permanent status peace talks and on Palestinian reform.
Middle East Brief 40 (Summary) — The financial meltdown in the United States and Europe in early 2008 sparked a wave of crises around the world. Of the emerging-market regions, the Middle East is among the least integrated in the global financial market. Under normal circumstances, this would have protected the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region when the global economy sank into a severe financial crisis. In this case, however, MENA states have been affected by global economic conditions through fluctuations in the oil market, strong trade and investment relations with Europe, and large portfolios of financial and equity investments in advanced economies. All these factors increased the MENA economies’ vulnerability to the global economic downturn. This Middle East Brief explores how Arab countries have been affected by the global economic crisis that began in the summer of 2008 and traces the responses of the MENA governments to this crisis.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University.
Middle East Brief 39 (Summary) — The first ten months of the Obama administration’s efforts to achieve a breakthrough in Arab-Israeli peacemaking have led to widespread disappointment among Palestinians and to growing anxiety among Israelis. This Brief first provides an account of the Obama promise to the Middle East, highlighting the innovations characterizing his approach to the region. It then offers an explanation of what went wrong — of how both the administration and Israeli and Palestinian leaders contributed to wasting this initial period. Next, the Brief sets forth options available to the administration if it seeks to overcome the present impasse and jump-start Palestinian-Israeli talks. Finally, it offers some guidelines for a more promising Middle East peace process.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 38 (Summary) — The June 12, 2009 presidential election and its aftermath in Iran have been characterized as a watershed moment in the thirty year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In “The Curious Case of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,” Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi examines the historical reasons behind the targeting of one of Iran’s most powerful political figures, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his surprising reaction to these attacks on himself and his family. Through this lens, this Brief analyzes two important developments that account for the current state of politics in Iran: the rift between Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the entry of the radical Right into mainstream politics in the context of its perceived and actual marginalization during the Rafsanjani presidency.
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Naghmeh Sohrabi, Assistant Director for Research at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 37 (Summary) — Despite the weak showing of the Hizballah-led opposition in the June 7, 2009 Lebanese parliamentary elections, the Shiite community remains one of the most powerful political forces in Lebanon. This brief examines the transformation of the Shiite community in Lebanon from their marginalization in politics to their current ascendancy.
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Yusri Hazran, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 36 (Summary) — In this brief, Dr. Vincent Romani explores the political problems posed by higher education for the Arab Middle East. After reviewing the main trends in higher education in the region, along with the principal locations and actors figuring in the current academic boom, the brief explains why higher education is a central issue in the Arab world and lays out the political background to these new academic dynamics. Finally, Romani assesses the main challenges facing higher education specifically in the Arab Gulf.
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Vincent Romani, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Crown Center and holds a PhD from Paul Cézanne University, IREMAM (CNRS), Marseille, France.
Middle East Brief 35 (Summary) — Parallel to the growing violence by jihadi groups, such as al-Qaeda, there is a growing revisionist movement which aims to minimize extremist or militant understandings of sacred texts. In this brief, Khalil Al-Anani analyzes a case of jihadi revisionism: Sayyid Imam al-Sharif’s 2007 document renouncing his own influential manifesto, and the response of jihadis to it.
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Khalil Al-Anani, Assistant to the Managing Editor of al-Siyassa al-Dawliya in Cairo and a former visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute.
Middle East Brief 34 (Summary) — The authors examine four developments that affect U.S.-Middle East economic relations and present important policy challenges to the Obama administration: China’s and India’s increasing energy interests in the Persian Gulf; U.S. interest in reducing instability through economic development and poverty reduction in the Middle East; U.S. loss of market share to European and Asian countries as the Middle East’s purchasing power grows; and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) emergence as the financial and economic center of the Middle East.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University.
Eckart Woertz, Director of the Economic Research Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai.
Middle East Brief 33 (Summary) — Dr. Beranek describes the principal actors and divisions of the fragmented Saudi politico-religious landscape, their varied goals and ability to bring about any real change. The Brief further analyzes the ruling establishment’s methods of curbing the many voices of dissatisfaction in an effort to maintain the status quo.
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Ondrej Beranek, Postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center. He holds a PhD from the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague.
Middle East Brief 32 (Summary) — What are the assets available to the incoming Obama administration for resolving or at least reducing the intensity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What liabilities and constraints will the next administration face and what opportunities might it attempt to exploit for this purpose? This document constitutes a first attempt by two experts — one Israeli, the other a Palestinian — to examine these assets and liabilities, these opportunities and constraints, and to evaluate the various options available to the next administration for solving or ameliorating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
Middle East Brief 31 (Summary) — In “The Iranian Economy in the Shadow of Economic Sanctions,” Prof. Nader Habibi evaluates the impact of the international economic sanctions leveled against Iran in the context of its nuclear efforts. He assesses this impact relative to other major forces acting on the Iranian economy, including: fluctuations in oil revenues, deeply rooted structural and institutional weaknesses, and the current Iranian government’s economic policies. Prof. Habibi concludes that in spite of the economic mismanagement and structural weakness of the Iranian economy, the significant oil wealth has protected the citizens from feeling the sanction’s full impact.
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Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University.
Middle East Brief 30 (Summary) — In “Is Iraq Viable?” Prof. Kanan Makiya ponders the question of sectarianism in Iraq through the prism of Saddam Hussein’s execution. Prof. Makiya challenges the perspective that the current sectarian division precludes a unified, viable, and functioning Iraqi state, while carefully outlining the historical fluidity of identity and internal alliances in Iraq.
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Kanan Makiya, Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University.
Middle East Brief 29 (Summary) — “Iran’s 2008 Majlis Elections: The Game of Elite Competition” is the first comprehensive analysis of the two rounds of voting for the highly competitive and complex 2008 parliamentary (majlis) elections in Iran. Dr. Farideh Farhi examines the results of these elections, the implications of intra-party divisions, and the marked decline in voter turnout. Farhi argues that as an indicator of the 2009 Presidential elections, the recent elections point to a trend of increasing competitiveness, partisanship, and unpredictability.
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Farideh Farhi, Independent Researcher and an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Middle East Brief 28 (Summary) — In “The Sword and the Book: Implications of the Intertwining of the Saudi Ruling Family and the Religious Establishment,” Dr. Ondrej Beranek explores the complex interaction between Saudi Arabia’s state and religious institutions. Through an historical survey, Beranek demonstrates that the interdependence of the Saudi Family and the religious establishment creates a double edged sword. It has enabled the stability within the state and moderated extremist forces in society while at the same time preventing the swift implementation of religious or political reforms.
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Ondrej Beranek, Postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center. He holds a PhD from the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague.
Middle East Brief 27 (Summary) — In “Jordan: Preserving Domestic Order in a Setting of Regional Turmoil,” Prof. Asher Susser discusses the ways in which Jordan has maintained its stability despite its tenuous geostrategic position by analyzing three components of Jordan's stability and resilience: the political elite’s cohesion and determination, the security forces ability and effectiveness and Jordan’s geopolitical centrality.
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Asher Susser, Fellow on the Myra and Robert Kraft Chair in Arab Politics at the Crown Center and a Professor at Tel Aviv University.
Middle East Brief 26 (Summary) — In “Clans and Militias in Palestinian Politics,” Prof. Dror Ze’evi evaluates the current influence of clans on Palestinian politics by tracing the historical shifts in clan dominance. Prof. Ze’evi identifies the second Intifada as the critical moment when the clans regained power and influence in the political system. Given the clans’ new central role, he concludes that clan support will be the key to the successful implementation of any Israeli-Palestinian political settlement for President Mahmoud Abbas.
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Dror Ze’evi is a Professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, where he founded the Department of Middle East Studies.
Middle East Brief 25 (Summary) — The Crown Center continues the exploration of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with the latest Middle East Brief “The Brotherhood’s Dilemma” by Prof. Marc Lynch. Prof. Lynch evaluates the Brotherhood’s level of genuine commitment to democratic politics and opposition to violent extremism. Drawing on over fifty interviews with Brotherhood leaders, Lynch examines four significant controversies: the reaction to official repression, the contestation in the Shura Council elections, the issuing of a draft party platform, and the refraining from mass protests or violence. He concludes that the Brotherhood can be best understood as an internally divided organization still in flux.
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Marc Lynch, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University and the Elliott School of International Affairs.
Middle East Brief 24 (Summary) — On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the discovery of oil, Prof. E. Roger Owen analyzes oil’s impact on the Middle East and the world at large. Owen traces the development of Arab oil-producing states comparing the political economy of small allocation states to large production states. Through this lens, he explores the creation of political systems, inter-regional dynamics, and the impact on world consumers. Owen concludes by projecting another 100 years of oil dominating the political-economy landscape.
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E. Roger Owen, A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard University.
Middle East Brief 23 (Summary) — Are the Muslim Brothers in Egypt moderating? Through a critical analysis of their positions on society, democracy, foreign policy, and, especially, the relations between religion and state, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly evaluates the Muslim Brothers’ current level of moderation. Drawing from their various statements and especially the draft party platform they recently published, Dr. Said Aly questions the assertion that the Muslim Brothers in Egypt are moderating. Finally, he also addresses the conditions under which moderation and democratic values might become intrinsic parts of the Brothers’ ideology and behavior.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, Director of the Al Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies, Cairo, Egypt and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Banu Eligur holds a PhD in Politics from Brandeis University and is the Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly, Director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Cairo, Egypt, and Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Dror Ze’evi, Professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, where he founded the Department of Middle East Studies.
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Naghmeh Sohrabi holds a PhD in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly is Director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Cairo, Egypt and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
Response Comment: “I recently read Crown Center Brief No. 17 by Abdel Monem Said Aly,...”
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Mohammed Samhouri is an Assistant Professor of Economics, a former Senior Economic Adviser in the Palestinian Authority and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Carol Saivetzis a Research Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studeis and for the 2006/2007 academic year is a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Center for International Studies.
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Joshua Shifrinson is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at MIT. His current research focuses on civil-military relations and regional security in the Middle East.
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Jeremy Pressmanis an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut and is a Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Mohammed Samhouri is an Assistant Professor of economics, a former Senior Economic Adviser in the Palestinian Authority and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Abdel Monem Said Aly is Director of the Al Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies, Cairo, Egypt and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Shai Feldman is the Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Banu Eligur, holds a PhD in Politics from Brandeis University and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Dror Ze’evi is a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, where he founded the Department of Middle East Studies, and a visiting scholar at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Jeremy Pressman is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and is a research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
Response Comment: “My Brandeis ’91 classmate Jeremy Pressman does a fine job presenting ...”
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Banu Eligur holds a PhD in Politics from Brandeis University and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Chen Kane is a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of Harvard University specializing in nuclear non-proliferation issues.
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Naghmeh Sohrabi holds a PhD in history and Middle East studies from Harvard University and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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Dror Ze’evi is a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, where he founded the Department of Middle East Studies, and a Visiting Scholar at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
Response Comment: “Dror Ze’evi on ‘What the Palestinians expect’ reminded me of the...”
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Abdel Monem Said Aly is Director of the Al Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies, Cairo, Egypt and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
READ Middle East Brief 1 (PDF)
Shai Feldman, Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center.
Khalil Shikaki, Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center.
The opinions and findings expressed in these publications belong to the author(s) exclusively and do not reflect those of the Crown Center or Brandeis University.