Lebanon’s interlocking challenges

Lebanon currently faces major interlocking challenges that threaten its stability. These include potential hostilities between Israel and Hizbullah (as Iran's proxy); Sunni–Shia strategic rivalry in the region; and the erosion of Lebanon's economy by the Syrian civil war.     

Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance,Leadership Change,and Support for Violent Groups in Iraq

The “hearts and minds” model of combating rebellions holds that civilians are less likely to support violent opposition groups if the government provides public services and security. Building on this model, we argue that a political event that raises popular expectations of future public service and security provision increases support for the government and decreases sympathy for violent opposition groups. To test this argument, we leverage a unique research design opportunity that stems from the unforeseen announcement of the resignation of Iraq's divisive prime minister in August 2014 while an original survey was being administered across the country. We show that the leadership transition led Iraq's displeased Sunni Arab minority to shift support from the violent opposition to the government. In line with our argument, this realignment was due to rising optimism among Sunni Arabs that the new government would provide services and public goods—specifically security, electricity, and jobs.     

Mothers and militias: Islamic state construction of the women citizens of Northern Sudan*

As the only Sunni Islamic Republic in the world, Sudan's middle‐class, modernist Islamist revolution can be seen as a model for the mobilization of public consciousness about citizenship in an Islamic state. That this citizenship is consciously and conspicuously gendered is the main theme of this paper. In the north, where mobilization has been most successful, Sudanese women have both been constructed and have constructed themselves as the woman citizen— mother, Muslim, and soldier. A brief historical background reveals complicated shifts in national, local, and gender identities, from the colonial state to the present. The crux of the paper is an exploration of state hegemonic strategies, including the manipulation of gender and other identities, especially as these are manifested in the fashioning of the ‘new Muslim woman’. Women's complicity in and resistance to these constructions are among the dynamics of contemporary northern Sudan. The paper also explores the waning of ‘Arab’ identity claims in the face of state emphasis on Islamic identity and the relevance to Islamist women. Interview statements by Islamist women attest to both their complicity in and resistance to their construction as members of the Islamic nation/community.     

Liberalism and Religion: Amplifiers of War between Democratic and Non-Democratic States?

This study tests the association between liberalism and religion on militarized disputes in the politically and religiously similar and mixed state dyads. The analysis (1980–2001) integrates the Correlates of War and World Religion Datasets. The findings suggest that while religious makeup of state dyads does not vitiate the impact of democracy, religious similarity amplifies the impact of liberalism. The results also suggest that Christian–Muslim dyads, especially Christian–Sunni and Christian–Muslim other than Shia and Sunni dyads, are more likely to engage in militarized disputes, and regime differences increase the chances of conflict in the joint Muslim dyads.     

Citizens,consumers, workers,and activists: civil society during and after water privatization struggles

Water privatization battles and their aftermath in seven Latin American, African, and Asian countries feature diverse and often complementary forms of action by unions, popular movements, neighbourhood associations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs cooperate with popular movements for water rights more than the literature would suggest, and after mobilizations against privatization, activists have had some success maintaining pressure for better service to poor neighbourhoods through advocacy and local self-provision arrangements. Public employees’ unions play important roles in water policy coalitions, often practising a distinctive form of social movement unionism. These experiences argue for a more flexible understanding of categories and organizational forms in civil society.     

Urban commons and freedom of movement The housing struggles of recently arrived migrants in Rome

ABSTRACT

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control.     

Does the procedural act of electing leaders enhance cooperation in divided societies? Experimental evidence from Lebanon

Studies suggest that the procedural act of participating in an election in homogenous communities enhances social cooperation and compliance with policies proposed by the elected leader by making the leader more legitimate. In this study, we implement a lab-in-the-field experiment among Shia and Sunni Muslims in Lebanon to test whether participating in the procedural act of electing a leader increases cross-group cooperation also in ethnically heterogeneous communities. We find that participation in leader election fails to increase inter-group cooperation in a heterogeneous setting. In contrast, an appeal to a common ingroup identity successfully increases cooperation. When appeal to a supraordinate identity is combined with leader elections, cooperation increases only when out-group leaders are elected and among voters who value democratic procedure. Our findings suggest that in ethnically divided societies elections can lead to cooperation only if the dominant social norms are consistent with democracy and supraordinate group identity is salient.     

The counter-hegemonic role of civil society: Palestinian–Arab NGOs in Israel

This paper deals with the causes and impact of the rise in the number of Palestinian–Arab Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Israel in the last two decades. It provides a multi-level model that combines economic, political and cultural factors to explain the shifts in Palestinian-Arab political mobilization in Israel and as a result to the rise of a complex network of Arab NGOs. The paper demonstrates the way in which the civil institutions and their intensive involvement in public social affairs generate social capital that has internal as well as external political impact. Arab civil society institutions, which operate mainly separately from civil institutions of the Jewish majority, assist in the empowerment and the development of Arab society. They provide services in different fields, such as education, health, and planning. They also advocate and lobby for the rights of the Arab citizens inside Israel and internationally. Arab civil society institutions also provide information necessary for political mobilization, identity formation, and cultural preservation. In this framework the paper claims that they play a counter-hegemonic role vis-à-vis the Israeli state. However, the paper also claims that the broad advocacy and lobbying activity of Arab civil institutions did not manage to fully democratize Israeli policies towards Arab society, demonstrating the centrality of state identity and power structure when it comes to democratization processes. On a different level, the paper reveals that, although the Palestinian–Arab NGOs network has managed to lead to a liberalization process within Arab society, this process is partial and selective.     

The limits of authoritarian solidarity: The Gulf monarchies and preserving authoritarian rule during the Arab Spring

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other.     

Iraq’s Political Turmoil

Motivated by the government's patronage and corruption, massive political protests in Iraq have mobilised the majority Shia population and weakened Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. He is caught between an intensely disgruntled population and an equally stubborn ruling elite. In a heavily armed population with a recent history of civil war, there is a salient risk that popular demands will be pursued through violence.     

The Fundamentalist City,Medieval Modernity,and the Arab Spring

Abstract

The Arab World has witnessed massive popular uprisings that seek to overturn years of authoritarianism and supposedly bring about democratic change and social justice. These uprisings evoke both optimism and pessimism about religion, violence, and their connection to cities. As people in various parts of the Arab world embark on their quest for self-government, there is no telling where this great experiment will lead. Based on current indications, religion will play a decisive role in shaping the futures of these nations, and particularly their cities. These directions seem to be charted by the religious parties that have come to power, and through a series of subtle and gradual policies that are setting the foundations for future theocratic states. The aim of this article is to explore the urban processes by which religious ideologies transform into fundamentalist urban movements, and how their actions are starting to reshape the cities of the Arab World.     

Civil Society after Democracy: The Evolution of Civic Activism in South Africa and Korea

The phase of democratic consolidation can significantly impact the motives, dynamics and objectives of civil society. Its internal roles, dynamics and power balances are significantly altered by the advent of democracy, due to shifting resources, political opportunities and a general reframing of goals and objectives. By adopting a definition of civil society as an ‘arena’ (which highlights the continuously evolving composition and leadership of civil society) and borrowing a number of theoretical dimensions from social movement theory (which underline the importance of resource mobilization, political opportunities and conceptual framing processes), the article shows that the advent of democracy has posed a number of challenges to civil society organizations in Korea and South Africa. Moreover, the consolidation of democracy has inevitably changed the nature of government–civil society relations. While in South Africa institutional politics reasserted itself in the first years of democracy, thereby sidelining organizations and movements concerned with public accountability and good governance (which have only recently resurfaced through the action of new social movements), in Korea corruption and lack of transparency immediately marred the dawn of democracy, providing civic movements with a fertile terrain to galvanize civic mobilizations vis-à-vis the lack of responsiveness of the political class.     

The role of MI6 in Egypt’s decision to go to war against Israel in May 1948

David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel, repeatedly accused Britain of provoking the Arab states to invade Israel the day after its establishment in May 1948. To date, historians have not found proof of his accusations in British archives. However, evidence may be found in French archives, especially in Syrian and secret British documents obtained by the French secret services, originating from agents who had infiltrated the Syrian government in Damascus and the British Legation in Beirut. This article, based on French, Syrian, Israeli and British sources, argues that under the Labour government, Arabist MI6 officers in the Middle East, in collaboration with the British High Command in Cairo, pursued an alternative policy to that of the Foreign Office. They provoked Egypt’s King Faruq to go to war against Israel without the knowledge or approval of either Prime Minister Clement Attlee or Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, frequently misinforming and misleading them. This watershed research provides details of the goals and modus operandi of those involved in that clandestine plot.     

Building Cooperation among Groups in Conflict: An Experiment on Intersectarian Cooperation in Lebanon

Societies divided along ethnic or religious lines suffer from persistent conflict and underprovision of public goods. Scholarly understanding of how to strengthen intergroup cooperation remains limited. In this study, we set out to test the effectiveness of two interventions on intergroup cooperation: cross‐group expert appeal and participation in a cross‐group discussion. The laboratory‐in‐the‐field experiment is set in Lebanon's capital, Beirut, and involves interactions between 180 Shia and 180 Sunni Muslim participants. We find that the expert appeal increases intersectarian cooperation in settings that do not entail reciprocal exchange. On average, cross‐sectarian discussions do not improve cooperation, but those discussions in which participants delve deeply into the conflict's causes and possible remedies are associated with greater cooperation. Neither intervention diminishes the effectiveness of sectarian clientelistic appeals. The policy implication of our study is that intergroup cooperation can be strengthened even in regions as bitterly divided as the Middle East.     

A Transition without Players: The Role of Political Parties in the Arab Revolutions

Academic scholarship regarding the role of political parties in the Arab world remains largely underdeveloped in comparison to analyses focusing on the role of political Islam or on authoritarian resilience. Although both of these fields of research contain useful paradigms for explaining aspects of the region’s political development, this overemphasis means that there is a lack of meaningful analysis of political participation. This article seeks to analyze the role of political parties in the light of regional transition processes since the Arab uprisings, claiming that the region’s political history and sociocultural makeup can help in explaining that much of the popular mobilization in the Arab world following the Arab revolutions took place outside of institutionalized politics. First, the article reviews and analyzes relevant theories of political parties. Second, the article presents a comparative analysis of existing theories and case studies of political parties being part of transition processes in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Taking this as starting point, the article, by looking at the Egyptian and Tunisian cases, demonstrates the limited role of political parties in connection with the regional transitory processes, with the ambition of presenting some relevant analytical tools as well as useful hints for further analyses of political transformation processes in the Middle East.     

Citizen participation through mobilization and the rise of political Islam in Indonesia

The idea that populations participate politically outside of the formal mechanisms of a political system and through mass mobilizations is a reasonably accepted part of political science orthodoxy. Since the turn of the last century, in Indonesia, as in other developing countries, populations have mobilized en masse at particular stages of their histories into nation-state building processes, as well as have been mobilized by political authorities seeking to bolster or install their regimes. In the 1960s, Sukarno increasingly sought to mobilize a range of classes and interests behind his presidency and, in 1965–66, Suharto and his military backers organized anti-communist groups behind a systematic campaign to eradicate the Communist Party and remove Sukarno. Throughout the so-called ‘New Order’ period (1966–98), Suharto periodically mobilized groups behind his presidency and against opponents who, in turn, engaged in occasional street demonstrations against the regime. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the opposition leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri became an important rallying point for popular dissent against Suharto and, in 1998, the student movement played a crucial role in street demonstrations which helped bring down the president after three decades of strongman rule. In the post-Suharto period, which has seen the installation of three presidents between 1998 and 2001, mass mobilizations have continued to be a striking feature of the political landscape. President Habibie mobilized pro-government militias against opponents and student demonstrators, who threatened to bring down his regime. The Muslim supporters of Abdurrahman Wahid entered the streets in their thousands to protest the parliamentary impeachment of the president. Radical Muslim groups demonstrated against US military strikes on Afghanistan and against President Megawati Sukarnoputri's initial soft stance on the strikes. Potentially, these kinds of demonstrations could undermine Megawati's presidency. However, parliamentary processes rather than street mobilizations brought the presidencies of Habibie and Abdurrahman to an end while Megawati is still seeing out her term. This article examines the political mobilizations of the late-Suharto and post-Suharto periods and asks whether these mobilizations pose a threat to Indonesia's fragile transition to democracy and to a more stable institutional political process.     

Bringing People Back in Politics: The Role of Civil Society,Political Parties,and Regional Organizations in a Changing Middle East

The Introduction briefly presents the ideas behind this collection of articles, namely to analyze popular mobilization and the role of civil society, political parties, and regional organizations in relation to the developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the last years, and to discuss theoretical approaches and paradigms of relevance for the analysis of these new regional dynamics. The MENA region experienced, in connection with and following the Arab uprisings, a hitherto unseen popular mobilization. Despite the recent highly problematic situation in several Middle Eastern states, the Introduction emphasizes the continued relevance of focusing on a repoliticized MENA reality. The Middle East is still on the move away from the established image of unshakeable authoritarianism attributed to the region, which made the upgrading authoritarianism paradigm seem forever relevant and without any realistic alternative for the decades to come—therefore, the relevance, offered in this collection of articles, of bringing people back in politics.     

Post factum clarity: failure to identify spontaneous threats

This study explores an information interpretation explanation of strategic surprises using a non-traditional national security threat: a popular uprising. To explain why this type of assessments fail, I emphasize the role of information relevance when evaluating intelligence about civilian unrest. I posit that the dynamic nature of relevance is crucial for signals of popular dissent becoming dominant indicators that are incorporated into security assessments. A case study and observational data analysis of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada, 1987) demonstrate how information relevance contributed to the Israeli intelligence failure and how it affects the potential for strategic surprises facing a civilian threat.     

Cleavage Formation in Norway: The Contextual Dimension

To explore the mechanism underlying the formation and persistence of cleavage structures the author applies a contextual approach in the case of Norway where regional variation in political cleavages persists over time. This study focuses on the time period between 1890 and 1930, the formative years of the Norwegian party system. The premise of the argument is that a factor contributing to persisting patterns of electoral mobilization is the location of new voters in patterns of social interaction deriving from the class composition in different regions. Initial electoral mobilizations coupled with enduring social structures can be carried on for a long time. These social conditions may pose high costs of mobilization to new parties in a political system. The article shows the persistence of a distinct class composition across regions in Norway and demonstrates the contextual effect by examining the behaviour of new voters in the 1900 election. It evaluates the contextual argument against other party incentives for mobilization by means of a statistical model that incorporates contextual incentives in addition to incentives deriving from electoral rules and political competition.     

Social Media and Revolutionary Waves: The Case of the Arab Spring

This article argues that during the Arab Spring social media served as a tactical tool of mobilization, communication, and coordination; as an instrument of domestic and international revolutionary contagion; and, critically, as a means of enhancing pan-Arab consciousness which, in turn, was fertile soil for that contagion. These three interrelated functions are best analyzed using a revolutionary wave theoretical approach. In its absence, the Arab Spring becomes a patchwork of analytically incoherent “cascade protests.” In fact, the Arab world witnessed an extremely coherent process of revolutionary contagion whose liberal and democratic ideology was disseminated transnationally by social media. The impressive speed, scale, and effectiveness of this contagion would have not been possible without the effect of the Arab public sphere—itself partially enabled by social media—on the increasingly cohesive pan-Arab consciousness. Fundamentally, the Arab Spring was the first revolutionary wave ever to reflect the change in power relations originating in the rise of new communication networks.