Emma C. Murphy

Problematizing Arab Youth: Generational Narratives of Systemic Failure

Arab youth have proved to be an engine for long-awaited political change in the region, but who are they and how should we understand them as a phenomenon rather than simply a social category? This paper suggests that the various paradigms which exist for identifying and explaining Arab youth are individually in themselves insufficient. By combining their contributions, however, Arab youth becomes visible as a lived and shared generational narrative of the exclusion and marginalization which have resulted from post-independence state failures in the political, economic and social realms. Their subsequent informal and alternative formats for protest and action reveal the links between the local and the global of youth narratives.

The Tunisian elections of October 2011: a democratic consensus

In October 2011, Tunisia held its first free and fair elections since independence was gained in 1956. In January the authoritarian ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had fled the country, following a month of sustained and widespread popular protest. This article charts the political process from that moment through to the conclusion of the electoral processes, demonstrating the key roles played by an historical legacy of socially embedded institutionalism and an inclusive – if not universal – consensus on the desirability of democratic transition in determining the outcomes.

The Tunisian Uprising and the Precarious Path to Democracy

The popular uprising in Tunisia, which took place at the start of the year and which one can cautiously hope will lead to the first genuine democratic state in North Africa, took everyone by surprise, not least the Tunisians themselves. Just two years ago, in November 2009, the then president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had been reelected (for a fifth term) by an overwhelming (albeit entirely fraudulent) 89.4 per cent of the turnout. His party, the Rassemblement constiutionnel démocratique (RCD), held an unchallenged position within the National Assembly, and boasted of two million members in a country with a population of just over ten million. The legal opposition was composed of a limited number of small, personalized, largely localized and to all intents and purposes co-opted political parties, and any effective opponents had been either brutally eradicated or forced into exile. The regime espoused a discourse which valorized stability above all else, and which could count on significant international, particularly European and American, support. Ben Ali appeared to be a key regional ally in the battles both to defeat Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militancy and to promote liberalizing economic reforms. With a large and terrifyingly brutal internal security force at his disposal, and with his own family and that of his wife exerting an ever-growing influence over the economic resources of the country, the president seemed untouchable. Indeed, such was his personal control over the political and economic life of the country, that any discussions of succession (bearing in mind that he was 74 years old and there had been periodic reports of his ill-health), focused on contenders from within his own family rather than other public or party officials. Tunisians ironically referred to his own and his wife’s Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans as the royal family, and wearily noted his efforts to parachute them into official posts on the RCD Central Committee in preparation for the day when he was no longer willing, or able, to stand for election himself. Ben Ali had become Tunisia’s latest Bey, under whose absolutist rule the brief window of hope, opened by his own promises of democracy when he seized power in 1987, had seemed to be not only shut but firmly locked.

The Tunisian Mise à Niveau Programme and the Political Economy of Reform

The Arab world has stumped observers in recent decades with its apparent resistance to democratisation. Despite a proliferation of electoral procedures, constitutional reforms and democratic discourses, the reality for many countries has been a retreat into authoritarian modes of rule. Nowhere has this been more true than in Tunisia. For many years hailed as the most progressive, outward-looking and moderate Arab state, since the 1990s it has become a security state par excellence. Yet Tunisia’s apparent dedication to a liberalising economic agenda might suggest, at least for transition theorists, that the dynamics for political reform should be evolving. Alternatively, one could interpret the regime’s resistance to a liberal restructuring of political arrangements as the result of its prioritisation of political stability in order to support the economic reforms, and one could even go so far as to argue that this has been why Tunisia’s structural adjustment has been a relative regional success. This article assesses the role of the state in the economic reform process and the relative impact of its authoritarian credentials through an examination of one particular area of policy. The program de mise à niveau (industrial upgrading programme, or PMN) has been the flagship of Tunisian structural reform since the early 1990s. Through it, the regime has sought to transfer the burden of export-income generation to the private sector in a manner that is sustainable and based on diverse, internationally competitive production. The article engages with two key debates for the political economy of developing countries: the linkage between economic liberalisation and political transition; and whether the political character of the state dictates performance when it assumes an interventionist role.

The Non-Arab Middle East States and the Caucasian/Central Asian Republics: Iran and Israel:

the level of their regional profiles and their bilateral relations with the CCARs. Both Iran and Israel have played major roles in the evolution of the post-1945 Middle East, even as they were obliged to come to terms with the Arab-centric character of that evolution. Over this period they have moved from being allies to enemies yet it was never predicted that their paths should cross in the southern heartland of the former Soviet Union as they do today.

The Arab state and (absent) civility in new communicative spaces.

Abstract This study examines how Arab states have constructed national regulatory regimes for satellite television and telecommunications which undermine or inhibit the emergence of the three normative requisites for a civil political culture: freedom, equality and tolerance. Drawing on case studies of Jordan, Egypt and the UAE, the study argues that, by failing to be either self-limiting or to protect civil society from its uncivil components in the new communicative spaces provided by these technologies, the Arab states are attempting to reconstruct their own dominant (new) media spaces and so prevent the conditions which might foster democratic political cultures of civility.

Institutions, Islam and Democracy Promotion: Explaining the Resilience of the Authoritarian State

It is a rather sad indictment of Arab politics today that the word democratization has virtually disappeared from research-based literature on the Middle East. Early optimism during the first half of the 1990s that the so-called third and fourth waves of democratization would sweep through the region on their way around the globe, has given way to an acknowledgement that authoritarian modes of rule are more deeply embedded than previously imagined. In the heady days when liberal economic reforms or infitahs seemed to carry with them the promise of political correlates, the field was marked by texts such as Brynen, Korany and Noble’s twovolume Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World (1995) and Harik and Sullivan’s Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East (1992). Along with the assumed imminent demise of the Arab state came a new focus on the political potential of society with classics like Richard Norton’s Civil Society in the

Legitimacy and economic reform in the Arab world

In the 1970s Michael Hudson identified a crisis of regime legitimacy among the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa. By the mid‐1980s that crisis had been compounded by economic failures and stresses across the region. Regimes have subsequently sought to address the economic problems by means of reform and structural adjustment. This article seeks to assess the impact of such measures upon regime and political system legitimacy within the region, identifying linkages between economic policy and political change. It concludes that apparent moves towards democratisation have been motivated largely by the need to contain political forces which threaten regimes in response to the negative impact of economic reform. Tactical political liberalisation by regimes is matched, however, by genuine developments within civil society which have led to the expression of popular dissatisfaction with regimes and political systems, indicating that the crisis of legitimacy is far from over for the Arab state.

The Non-Arab Middle East States and the Caucasian/Central Asian Republics: Turkey

as a region of states in its own right has brought with it new inter-state relations as well as internal dilemmas. The developing strategic, political and economic ties between the Asian republics and three of their most eager potential friends Turkey, Iran and Israel form the subject matter of this and a further article which will be published in the April 1994 issue of this journal. For these three countries, all linked by their non-Arab status in the Middle East, yet equally at odds over their respective roles in that region, Central Asia and the Caucasus represent realms of opportunity and threat, with potential repercussions for the entire Middle East, including the Arab system therein. This first article focuses on Turkey for two reasons. Firstly, Turkey is the Middle Eastern state closest ethnically, linguistically and culturally to the Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union. Secondly, Ankara sees itself as the rightful inheritor of Russian influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia,

Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb

Hibou, B. (2006) Domination and control in Tunisia: economic levers for the exercise of authoritarian power, Review of African Political Economy, 108, pp. 185–206. Perthes, V. (Ed.) (2004) Arab Elites: Negotiating the Politics of Change (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner). Valbjørn, M. (2012) Upgrading post-democratization studies: examining a re-politicized Arab world in a transition to somewhere, Middle East Critique, 21(1), pp. 25–35.