What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A decade of revolt.” From Tunis to New York, Madrid, Hong Kong, Tehran, or Khartoum, the past decade was marked by protests, demonstrations, and uprisings. If the notion that history is an almost continuous march towards the progress of human kind (a popular view among Western intellectuals in the 1990s such as Francis Fukuyama) still had some currency, the last decade should have put this idea to rest.

That is because, in hindsight, it is difficult to be optimistic about the results of this decade of revolt. This is a feeling shared by many and examined in the book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” The author, Vincent Bevins, is a US journalist who was highly praised for his previous book, “The Jakarta Method”, which discusses the US support for human rights abuses during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism.

The question at the core of Bevins’ second book, “If We Burn”, is a very straightforward one: “How is it possible that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for?”[1] With the temporal focus set on the 2010s, but having a global geographical scope, Bevins conducted around 200 interviews in twelve different countries with activists, politicians, and other people with key insights on this decade of mass protests.

“If We Burn” discusses many different cases of protests during the last decade, but special attention is paid to Egypt, Hong Kong, Chile, and, above all, Brazil. This is no coincidence because, from 2010 to 2016, Bevins worked as a foreign correspondent based in São Paulo for the Los Angeles Times. The chapters on Brazil are a pleasure to read, but the strong focus on the country is somewhat disproportionate when considering that the book is presented as a work of global history. An alternative approach would have been to focus on a smaller number of cases, perhaps narrowing it down to a few Global South countries.

Bevins appears a bit uncomfortable when moving away from the countries he knows best. For instance, when he refers to the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, Bevins writes that after coming to power in 2003, Turkey’s ruling party AKP embraced “more conservative Muslims and small business owners (as long as they were ethnic Turks).”[2] This is actually not the case, as the AKP has historically outperformed the main opposition party CHP – which has a much stronger Turkish nationalist discourse – in the Kurdish areas of Turkey.

Notwithstanding this inaccuracy, and the fact that the geographical scope of the book often works against the final result, there is much to be praised in “If We Burn.” A key success of the book is that Bevins strikes the perfect balance between critically examining what protests achieved in terms of tangible results and remaining deeply respectful of the protesters and their sacrifices. Tunisian President Kais Saied might have entrenched himself in power after 2021 and established a dictatorship similar to the one headed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, brought down by mass demonstrations in 2011. But this does not take anything away from the personal stories of people like Jawaher Channa, a university student who joined the protests against Ben Ali in December 2010. Jawaher explains to Bevins how she was tortured for her political activity in a Tunisian police station before the regime collapsed.

Bevins’ reporting allows us to see how relatively unknown people shaped and were shaped by this decade of protests. Take the example of Mayara Vivian, who was a teenager when in 2005 she joined the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) that demanded free transportation in Brazil. In 2013, Fernando Haddad, the mayor of São Paulo from the center-left Workers’ Party, announced a rise in the price of public urban transportation. Mayara and her colleagues at MPL mobilized the streets against Haddad’s decision, forcing the mayor to cancel the price increase. Mayara and other members of the MPL were even granted a meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, also from the Workers’ Party, who was trying to understand the growing discontentment with her government.

Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Click here.

The likes of Mayara would soon be replaced in the streets by right and far-right-wing groups. These protesters, in conjunction with sympathetic judges like Sergio Moro and media conglomerates like Grupo Globo, pushed for Rousseff’s impeachment on flimsy charges. Rousseff was ousted in 2016. Two years later,  Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate, was defeated in the presidential election by far-right and Brazilian dictatorship apologist Jair Bolsonaro. Mayara, then living in Santiago de Chile, wept while lamenting the election loss of the man she had opposed in the streets, explains Bevins.

Mayara soon joined the protests against the conservative Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who was forced to accept the election of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. After two referendums, Chile still does not have a new constitution. What is has, though, is Gabriel Boric as president, someone who became famous in the student protests of the early 2010s. Boric represents like no other the difficult relationship between activism and institutional politics, which is often manifested in the tensions between protesters who want to use their leverage to gain political concessions and those who prefer to keep pushing for maximalist objectives. A congressman since 2014, Boric was seen as a traitor by many protestors when he agreed to a constitutional referendum as a way to resolve the conflict with the Piñera government in 2019. After he was elected president of Chile in 2022, many of those who perceived Boric as too compromising in 2019 saw his decision in a more positive light, observes Bevins.

A key topic covered in “If We Burn” is the importance of traditional and social media in defining the protests of the last decade. Their relevance was accentuated by the fact that these were mostly de-centralized protest movements with no clear spokespersons. The protesters who had the opportunity to present their views to the traditional media were not necessarily those who put their bodies on the line when it mattered or were more representative of the whole movement. Instead, those who were interviewed were usually the more Western-media friendly. Writing about the protests in Egypt that led to the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Bevins graphically explains that despite how bravely street youth had fought against the police, Western journalists “were not likely to grab a teenager who lived on the street, addicted to drugs.”[3] Equally relevant was managing the narrative in social media platforms. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, open fights emerged over who controlled the movement’s social media accounts.

“If We Burn” does not provide any conclusive answer on why so many protest movements failed to achieve their objectives during the 2010s, and this only makes the book better. Anyone claiming to have a perfect explanation for such a complex puzzle should be approached with caution. Still, Bevins presents reflections that help us make sense of what he calls ‘the mass protest decade.’ One of them is that horizontally structured, leaderless mass protests are “fundamentally illegible.”[4] As Bevins sees it, “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”, with the ensuing danger that the protesters’ goals will be misrepresented. [5]

Strongly connected to this idea is the fact that successful protests will lead to a momentary political vacuum. Influenced by the experience of Brazil, where reactionary forces took the streets against Rousseff using some of the protest repertoire of the MPL movement advocating for free public transportation, Bevins notes that “unclaimed political power exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on anyone who might want it.”[6] Therefore, he argues, a protest movement that believes in creating a better society needs to be ready to enter the political vacuum that will emerge if successful.

In the absence of a plan, someone else will step in, most likely with a very different agenda but equally relying on the power of street mobilizations. The greatest merit of Bevins’ latest book is that it leaves a deep imprint on the reader and will serve as a prompt for many fruitful discussions. We cannot know which kind of retrospective articles will be published by the end of 2029. Still, it is reasonable to assume that protests in the 2020s are likely to play at least as important a role as they did in the previous decade.

[1] Vincent Bevins, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., pp. 108-109.

[3] Ibid., p. 68.

[4] Ibid., p. 276.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 263.

The decision was a recognition that the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad had won the civil war, albeit with help from Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Russian Aerospace Forces. Although al-Assad has a great deal of blood on his hands, so do many Arab League member governments, so squeamishness about a poor human rights situation was never the issue here.

The London-based Al-`Arab reports that the move was led by Saudi Arabia and garnered support from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Although this newspaper says that the decision was made possible by a softening of the US position against Syria, I don’t see any evidence of it. Rather, I would say this initiative was undertaken in defiance of Washington.

This newspaper is right to underline, however, that this development is one result of the March 10 agreement in Beijing by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations and turn down the level of tension between the two. Iran’s backing for al-Assad and Riyadh’s for the Salafi “Army of Islam” had helped polarize the region. Now, Saudi Arabia is seeking its own, new, relationship with Damascus and no longer insists that it break with Iran. It is no accident that pro-Iran Iraq was one of the brokers of this deal.

Al-Assad’s fragile victory has left the country a basket case, a situation exacerbated by Turkish military intervention both against Syria’s Kurds and in favor of its remaining fundamentalist forces (in Idlib Province).

The foreign ministers who readmitted Syria spoke specifically of wanting to forestall any threats to Syria’s national sovereignty.

They also spoke of an Arab League role in resolving the Syrian crisis, which has left the country split into three zones: The majority of the country, ruled by al-Assad; the Kurdish northeast, which is currently autonomous; and Idlib Province, where rebels of a fundamentalist cast have gathered as refugees (among hundreds of thousands of displaced noncombatants who perhaps are not so ideological despite having taken a stand against al-Assad).

The United States protested the move and rejected it. Washington has imposed strict Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, which critics maintain are interfering with rebuilding the country and harming ordinary people more than they do the government.

The decision will be formally ratified at the full Arab League summit in Riyadh at the end of May, which a Syrian delegation is expected to attend.

Algeria had stood by al-Assad all through the Civil War. Among states that broke off relations, the move to rehabilitate al-Assad was begun by the United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammad Bin Zayed, who restored diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Damascus in 2018. Tunisia, under dictator Qais Saied, recently followed suit. Saudi Arabia is said to be on the verge of restoring diplomatic ties with Syria, as well.

Sunday’s decision had been opposed by Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco. They, however, were too few to block the League’s decision. Morocco has no love for the Syrian rebels, who gradually turned to forms of Muslim fundamentalism, some close to al-Qaeda but most rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Morocco does, however, entertain deep suspicions of Syria’s ally, Iran, and as a conservative Muslim monarchy does not think well of Baathist socialism. Kuwait and Qatar both supported the 2011 youth revolt and went on supporting the rebels once the revolution turned into a Civil War. Both countries are concerned about the fate of the four million people bottled up in Idlib Province, who had supported the overthrow of the government. Qatar says it will decline to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus until some key issues are resolved. This is likely a reference to the fate of the Qatar-backed groups in Idlib.

At the time of Damascus’ suspension, the Arab Spring governments were influential. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all had interim governments after youth street protests had overthrown their dictators, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was just three months from stepping down in favor of a national referendum on his vice president becoming president. These new governments sided with Syria’s protesters. There was an odd conjunction of these Arab Spring transitional states and some of the Gulf monarchies, which deeply disliked al-Assad’s strong alliance with Iran and his government’s intolerance of Sunni fundamentalism. Thus, Saudi Arabia wanted al-Assad gone as much as Tunisia or Egypt did.

Now, the Arab Spring is a dim memory. Dictatorships have returned in the countries that saw youth revolts. Al-Assad and his corrupt, genocidal government is not going away. Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board. Now it transpires that the Arab League states, too, are Realists.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Egyptian activist and blogger Alaa Abdelfattah wrote a book with the title You have not been defeated yet. He is being held in prison by the Egyptian regime for sharing a post on Facebook documenting the death of another political detainee in Egypt.

As I write, it is four days since Abdelfattah’s decision to stop drinking water in his hunger strike that has lasted more than 200 days. The decision was made just prior to the start of the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh. He has decided to play his final card against the regime led by his near namesake Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi: his already feeble body. The hope is that he may attract the attention of someone within the regime who has respect for humanity, but it’s doubtful.

Hundreds of kilometres away from his prison cell, meanwhile, dozens of journalists representing the Western media assembled to cover a press conference in which a young Egyptian woman told them about her brother who is on hunger strike and refusing to take any food or drink. She demanded that the world leaders taking part in COP27 should put pressure on the Sisi regime to save her brother’s life. That young woman was Sanaa Abdelfattah, Alaa’s sister.

Sanaa and her sister Mona have led an international campaign for several months now in solidarity with their brother held in Egypt. The campaign included a protest lasting several days in front of the Foreign Office in London during which they talked to the British media about the dangers Abdelfattah is facing as a result of his hunger strike. His family met British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly just two days before the start of COP27, and they were given a letter from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in which he affirmed is intention to raise the issue with Sisi for the immediate release of their brother.

His case has been highlighted right from the start of the summit. It’s a nightmare come true for the regime. Sisi has barely been able to meet a Western leader without being asked to release British activist Alaa Abdelfattah immediately. It happened in the Egyptian president’s meeting with Sunak, and again with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri couldn’t evade the question when he was interviewed by CNBC correspondent Hadley Gamble. Then he was faced with the same question and the same demands from CNN presenter Becky Anderson.

In response, Sisi took the rather reckless step to try to defend himself. He deployed his media lackeys and instructed them to launch an attack on Alaa Abdelfattah to cast doubt on his hunger strike and claim, falsely, that he was a convicted criminal and that his imprisonment had nothing to do with the issue of freedom of expression. One of Sisi’s tame journalists is Ahmad Musa, who alleges that what the Western media are doing by highlighting the plight of Alaa Abdelfattah is a systematic campaign to tarnish Egypt’s reputation and attack the regime. Musa went further and described the demands by Sunak and the other leaders as “interference” in Egypt’s domestic affairs.

For those journalists covering the summit who don’t know Ahmad Musa, he is one of the closest associates of the Sisi regime and is known to be linked to the security agencies in Cairo. The man has been documented as having incited murder live on air. His daily programmes regularly include hate speech and accusations of treason and terrorism levelled at opponents of the Sisi regime.

Not content with the justifications for Abdelfattah’s predicament made by Musa and others on TV, members of the Egyptian parliament and the National Human Rights Council, as well as members of the National Women’s Council, have been ordered to attend the summit sessions on human rights and attack Alaa Abdelfattah and his family, and deny the existence of political detainees in Egypt.

The Egyptian regime wanted the climate summit to be a PR opportunity to greenwash its evil reputation and awful human rights record. It has been shocked to see it turn instead into a scandal, championed by Alaa Abdelfattah, casting its shadow on the much bigger issue of political detainees in Egypt. The country has 60,000 prisoners like Alaa Abdelfattah, many of them held since former defence minister Sisi launched his military coup in 2013.

The matter did not start with Abdelfattah and will not end with his release; he is neither the first nor the last. The regime is continuing with its repression and persecution of ordinary Egyptian citizens. The façade of a benign, open and transparent regime that respects human rights is belied by the fact that more than 200 Egyptian citizens have been arrested recently far from the eyes of the world focused on the political and media circus at Sharm El Sheikh.

The Egyptian regime may bow to external pressures and release Alaa Abdelfattah because he happens to have a British passport, but the matter cannot be allowed to end there. Releasing him must be the starting point for a campaign to pressure Sisi to release thousands of anonymous Egyptians who languish in his many brutal prisons for no other reason than that they oppose his rule.

If the world mobilises now for the sake of a British citizen called Alaa Abdelfattah, it should also exert pressure to save the lives of thousands of Egyptians who are not fortunate enough to hold the citizenship of another country. Alaa Abdelfattah and the 60,000 like him shout the same slogan: “You have not been defeated yet”. We cannot let them down.

Osama Gaweesh is Editor-in-Chief at Egypt Watch and a TV presenter at Al-Hiwar. He has previously worked for Journalism.co.uk

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

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Via Middle East Monitor )

Industrial revolutions are defined as new scientific and technological breakthroughs and innovative ways of seeing and dealing with the world around us. They lead to a profound change in the economic and social dimensions in favour of improving human life, in addition to developing philosophical concepts and generalisations.

It is well known that the scientific revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, through the discoveries of the law of conservation of matter, the law of motion, the law of conservation of energy, cellular theory, and Darwinian theory, in addition to the discoveries of other natural sciences, dealt a blow to the simplistic concepts that were prevalent at the time, which claimed that the world has not changed since its existence and that things in nature do not change or regenerate.

These blows were among the necessary introductions to the emergence of many philosophical ideas, including Marxist philosophy. History records the occurrence of four industrial revolutions that historians agreed changed the course of people’s lives and contributed to changing the facts of human civilisation. The details of these four revolutions can be found by anyone interested in sources that chronicle the development of human society, bearing in mind that the industrial revolutions are not just history, but rather, present and future.

What concerns us in this article is the digital revolution that erupted with the explosion of the Third Industrial Revolution in the 1980s, which paved the way for developments in the use of computers, the Internet and ICT applications. These then developed further with the eruption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the new millennium, which gave birth to the integration of technologies that erase the lines between the physical, digital and biological domains. With the eruption of the digital revolution, the process of communication between people, the transfer of knowledge and the exchange of information witnessed a major leap through the circulation of information between large numbers of people connected to each other through Facebook, WhatsApp or other media. These applications also act as media platforms.

Moreover, the concepts of communication between governments and peoples have changed, as information is no longer monopolised by governments and security agencies and governments are no longer the only ones capable of controlling and dominating ideas, minds and hearts. The digital revolution reduced the regimes’ ability to paralyse movement with arrest campaigns, and at the same time, it broke the elitist mentality of the opposition movements, creating virtual arenas and organisations to expand the horizons of political action, which can be translated into a strong force on the ground to bring about change.

However, the tools of the communication and information revolution will remain mere deaf and blind machines if they are not managed by effective minds that improve the reading of reality and translate its data into innovative initiatives in all political, economic, cultural and social fields. On the other hand, the digital revolution brought with it new concepts that include electronic espionage and network hacking between individuals and countries, in addition to the birth of many negative, and sometimes dangerous, phenomena at the individual level such as fraud, identity theft, privacy violation, the violation of public and private rights, crimes against users, cyberbullying, impersonation, forgery, and character assassination attempts.

On the social level, just as the digital revolution and its means of social communication played an important and essential role in the outbreak and victory of the popular movement in many countries, such as the Arab Spring revolutions and the December revolution in Sudan, counter-revolutionary circles use them to halt or infiltrate the path of change and liquidate its revolutionary content. This is especially true during the twists and turns and sharp social conflicts that always erupt after the completion of the first phase of change, i.e., the overthrow of the previous regime, and the start of implementing the slogans and programmes of the revolution.

In Sudan, and in light of the severe crisis that has taken over the country today to the point of suffocation, counter-revolutionary circles inside the country, as well as foreign intelligence services that are disturbed by change in Sudan, seek to build accounts and digital platforms with fake names through which destructive ideas, rumours and lies are spread. They also seek to assassinate the personalities of popular movement leaders and the influential national leaders politically and socially and adopt the goals of the revolution.

While the activity of counter-revolutionary circles and hostile foreign intelligence through social media is understandable, justified and expected, the biggest mistake that causes great damage is our unconscious, sometimes naive, handling of the content on these media platforms. For example, the media often brings news or information that have dangerous implications, but they do not refer to a specific source, instead using the phrase “reliable sources reported”, “news circulating in political circles” or “breaking news” and we read the news focusing on its content, not paying attention to the absence of its source. We then engage in arguments that distract us from what is important, but the news is usually either fabricated, poison covered in honey, or news serving the purposes of one party or another.

An example of this is the news that spread in the media of the names of the candidates for premiership. There is no source that the news can be attributed to, all we see is “our sources learned” or “news reports stated…”. We know that so far there has been no agreement or consensus regarding the nature and composition of the party that will choose the prime minister, yet our unconscious dealings with the media turned the news into discussions and analyses regarding the candidates. These names may have come about as a result of the desires and ideas of media pioneers, or maybe they are just test balloons launched by certain parties.

The media pioneers did not take into consideration that how the prime minister is chosen, his name, on what constitutional basis they and their government will be chosen, and what programme this government will implement is actually the main dilemma in the current crisis. Limiting the crisis to naming the prime minister without mentioning its essence – the coup of 25 October 2021 – and before any new political agreement and a new constitutional document is reached disregards the revolution and underestimates the value of the sacrifice of its martyrs. It will not achieve any stability, but rather, will escalate the crisis.

This article first appeared in Al-Quds Al-Arabi Arabic in on 21 August 2022

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The clamor for a no-fly zone among some in Congress and in US civil society, however, displays a remarkable amnesia, and it is perhaps in part because the phrase “no-fly zone” is a misnomer.

Let us recall what happened in Libya. During the Arab Spring youth revolts, demonstrations broke out in Benghazi on February 15-16, 2011, against the regime of dictator Moammar Gaddafi, several of whose sons were military commanders. On February 17, youth active on the internet coordinated a nationwide Day of Rage, with rallies throughout the country. By February 23, Gaddafi had lost Benghazi in the east and Misrata in the west to the youth revolutionaries.

On March 10, a defiant Gaddafi ordered Libyan war plans to bomb the north-central city of Brega, targeting the rebels. By March 18, regime armor had advanced to the outskirts of Benghazi with mass murder on their minds.

And here’s a couple of important developments. The Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE etc.) called for a no-fly zone for Libya. Then on March 12, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, announced that the organization was asking the UN Security Council to put a no-fly zone over Libya, to protect civilians. This organization with 22 members groups the whole Arab World, some 400 million people, and they wanted a no-fly zone over one of their member states, and they clearly wanted someone else to provide it.

On March 17, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1973, authorizing a no-fly zone for the protection of non-combatants and an arms embargo on the Gaddafi regime. China and Russia abstained from the vote but did not use their veto to protect Gaddafi.

According to the UN Charter, there are two legitimate grounds for war. One is self-defense. The other is if the UN Security Council designates a government as a destabilizing force for world order. The Security Council forwarded Moammar Gaddafi and his son Saif to the International Criminal Court for prosecution as war criminals for having targeted their own civilians from the air. The UNSC does not have its own armed forces. It can only act like a sheriff in the Old West, deputizing townspeople to go sling guns against the outlaws terrorizing the town.

On March 19, French fighter jets hit Gaddafi’s troops and armor who were attacking Benghazi.

Also beginning on March 19, President Barack Obama ordered the US Air Force to destroy all of Gaddafi’s anti-aircraft batteries and to ground his helicopter gunships and fighter jets. This involved massive air strikes all over the country.

You see, a no-fly zone needs to be imposed and policed. You have to fly your jets over the zone to make sure no one is targeting non-combatants. But it is not safe to fly your jets over territory that has anti-aircraft emplacements. So you have to destroy them. It isn’t safe to fly your jets in contested air space where the enemy might scramble his own jets and try to shoot you out of the sky. You have to try to destroy his air fields and as many of his fighter jets and attack helicopters as you can.

The prerequisite for a no-fly zone is all-out war.

When the Arab League and their citizens saw two days of mayhem, with US rockets and missiles leveling key military installations in Libya, they suddenly had buyers remorse. Secretary-General Amr Moussa came out and said, no, no, that wasn’t what they had meant by a no-fly zone. Moussa exclaimed, “What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone. And what we want is the protection of civilians and not the shelling of more civilians.”

But that is how you make a no-fly zone, by bombing the bejesus out of the zone first, so you can safely patrol it and thereafter protect the civilians. I favored the no-fly zone over Libya, and still think it saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But the Gaddafi regime did not have nukes and Russia and China had decided to stay out of it.

Now in the case of Ukraine, the enforcers of a no-fly zone such as the United States would not have anything to fear from Ukrainian anti-aircraft emplacements or from their fighter jets or helicopters.

The US would, however, have to hit any anti-aircraft systems the Russians brought in with them, including any Russian troops that might have man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) such as the 9K333 Verba, and would have to clear the air space of Russian Migs.

In other words, the prerequisite for a no-fly zone over Ukraine right now would be a massive American attack on the Russian military.

Russia is a nuclear state with 4,477 nuclear warheads, many on inter ballistic missiles that can reach the United States.

As a child of the Cold War, let me just tell any youngsters among you out there (i.e.people under 70) that you really, really don’t want to play nuclear chicken with Vladimir Putin.

Back in the 1960s, we had nightmares about a nuclear exchange. My grade school teacher sent us home in tears during the Cuban missile crisis because she said we should go home and pray that the world did not end. We were haunted by films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe (1964). You can rent the latter on YouTube, and it is worth watching. Here’s a clip:

So, no. Just, no. We don’t want a no-fly zone over Ukraine that could drag us into nuclear war.

From independence until the advent of the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern states have suffered due to their constituting principle, a notion that can be traced back to the motivations and arrangements of former colonial powers.

Independence may have satisfied the demands of the region’s inhabitants for autonomy, Arabness and sovereignty, but for citizens, elites and leaders alike, these states have served as little more than artificial entities created and divvied up haphazardly by Western diplomats.

The region’s recent history has then been marked by the consequences of wars between Arabs and Israelis, particularly by the plight of the Palestinian people. A situation that dates back to the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Balfour Declaration which, over time, have turned the Arab cultural renaissance into a nationalistic and ideologically driven enterprise.

The impact of decades of Arab nationalism

Arab nationalism has been a major obstacle to achieving political diversity and civil debate within the region. Many countries have essentially used war with Israel as an excuse to justify multiple coups d’État and a military stranglehold on public life and constitutional affairs.

The most radical and totalitarian experience was that of the Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria, particularly following the rise to power of Hafez al-Assad (1970) and Saddam Hussein (1979). The Ba’ath Party took on a mission to deconstruct the Iraqi and Syrian states for more than three decades. In their schoolbooks, and even in the Constitution, citizens and students were taught that the Arab states were illegitimate, temporary, and doomed to oblivion.

Alongside this deification of political figures and the promise of Arab unity through Ba’athist revolution came a denial of minority rights, especially the Kurds. This denial culminated in thousands of Kurdish villages being levelled in northern Iraq during the First Gulf War, as well as mass killings by chemical weapons committed under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

In Syria, the Kurdish population still has no recognized cultural rights, despite changes to the constitution in 2014, part of an attempt to re-legitimise the Assad regime during the ongoing civil war.

It appears unlikely that a territorial status quo can be installed to preserve the existing states while also helping regimes to evolve and establish pluralistic, inclusive systems. Even post-Arab Spring, with all its social and post-ideological assertions, the current situation remains one of stagnation and corresponds more to a post-state indecision.

The relationship between regime and state

The Syrian crisis began in 2011 with mass protests for political reform under the Bashar al-Assad regime. The demands were not concerned with identity or Syrian national borders. Rather, the revolutionary nature of these protests was defined by their social, post-ideological conscience, and a constitutionalist mindset for the state.

In the Middle East, there are no intra-state governments but rather regime-states. Within the various monarchies of the region, the monarch does not constitutionally stand for unity among his people, but bestows his subjects with their name and nationality. Such is the case of Arabia, whose various peoples are known as “Saudi” referring to the sovereign power of the Saud family. This flaw is less obvious in other Gulf regimes, but these countries are no less bound by the rules of absolute monarchy, an outdated political regime with no judicially secure future. Similarly, under the region’s “republican” regimes, states are not made to serve citizens but are instead driven solely by ethnic hierarchy: Jewish nationalist state, Arab nationalist state and, soon, perhaps, Kurdish nationalist state.

In other words, any normative homogeneity is totally lacking and all conflict is fated to bypass the dialectics of justice vs. injustice, freedom vs. tyranny or people vs. political regime. To date, there is no finalised state apparatus under the authority of which political views could oppose each other. This is because the issue of political legitimacy focuses on the nature of the state rather than the social and political struggles occurring within it.

The opening up of the Syrian-Iraqi domain to regional and international influences is the best proof of this, particularly when we consider the surprising emergence of various nascent statelets.

The Turkish, the Qataris and the Muslim Brotherhood did not generally aspire to constitutional, pluralistic democracies in Syria or elsewhere in the region. They sought instead to establish constitutional law upon electoral majorities, following the constitutional practices under the likes of Morsi in Egypt, Erdogan in Turkey or Putin in Russia. According to a number of Syrian opponents, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sponsors have managed to monopolise and hijack the representative bodies of the Syrian opposition, both in diplomacy and on the war field.

Meanwhile, Iran and Hezbollah enjoy a very vocal presence in Syria and Iraq, proclaiming revolutionary Shia Islam and the political system of mullahs and ayatollahs. They prey upon minorities in the region, steering conflicts into the area of irreconcilable opposition between Shias and Sunnis. Daesh first belonged to the same category as the Saudi medieval absolute monarchy; it then added to the mix the religious duty of jihad and territorial expansion. Then we have the Kurds, who have copied and continue to copy the Arab and Jewish mistake of a nationalist, monolithic state – and so the story goes on.

Normative homogeneity means judicial security. When applied to the Middle East, this can be viewed as a two-fold concept. It is both philosophical (the contract), as any political system is bound by legitimacy from the people, and legal (the Constitution), as state institutions are bound by the supremacy of law and human rights.

If regime change were to occur today in a Middle Eastern state, it could lead to the overhaul or even destruction of the said state, followed by a multitude of unpredictable territorial shifts and transformations. The legal existence of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq or the state of Israel could all very easily be called into question. And the constituent alternatives to these states are as varied as the number of minorities and ethnicities present across the region (Kurds, Palestinians, Druzes, Shias and so on).

Questions for the future

Initially, the Arab Spring offered a glimpse into the possibility of states moving away from identity-based ideologies and political regimes toward an institutional foundation and a more constitutionalised system. If this idea is still alive and if we want to ensure that it is nurtured to fruition, we must consider the following issues:

• What was the circumstantial history of the right to self-determination? Was it an illusory-but-necessary ideal in achieving emancipation from The 19th century’s European empires? In this century, should the state still be defined as an exclusive identity-based expression?

• Is there sufficient space or demographic homogeneity to territorially and constitutionally satisfy all the identities of the region? Where does the individual stand in all this, with their personal identities and social and political rights?

• Should the Kurdish and Palestinian peoples continue their fight in pursuit of self-determination and independence, or should the future of the region be thought of through the lens of pluralistic, democratic states that serve all their residents and citizens? Would this not also resolve the existential issues of certain emerging minorities, such as Alawis in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, and Shias in Lebanon and elsewhere?

• Have we thought about emerging and urgent questions for the region’s future, such as environmental challenges, sustainable management, and fair distribution of natural resources between states? Would the appearance of multiple new states not represent an even more serious threat in this regard than in matters of identity-based conflicts?

• Finally, what solutions should civil and private initiatives offer in response to the ethical challenges of technology, online spread of radical ideologies, and limited access to education and information among millions of refugees? How can a socio-digital power be formed that operates beyond borders and regimes, contributing to civil and civilian representation in political affairs?

These are just some of the many necessary questions that will require answering in the coming years.

This article is published as part of Transition from Violence: Lessons from the MENA, from the International Panel on Exiting Violence (IPEV).

Translated from the French by Enda Boorman for Fast ForWord.

Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi, Chercheur postdoctoral au Mellon Fellowship Program, Columbia Global Centers, Amman, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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What a future without oil looks like for the Gulf countries | CNBC Explains

As the popular refrain of “ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam” rang out across the Middle East in the early months of 2011, the nature of political life and relations between rulers and ruled began to fragment. The chant – which roughly translates as “the people want the fall of the regime” – became the slogan of the Arab uprisings, a wave of protests in states across the region.

The uprisings highlighted the fractious nature of political life and relations between the people and their governments, resulting in the toppling of authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

But these were limited victories – and protesters elsewhere were not as successful. Over the course of the following ten years, close to 1 million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced from their homes. The protests revealed a profound political crisis that continues to resonate across the region. And in most cases, the issues that provoked the protests – economic inertia, a lack of political accountability, rampant corruption and a growing gap between rich and poor – continue today.

It begins

Triggered by the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, the protest movements emerged from longstanding frustration at the economic conditions facing many across the region, fuelled by endemic corruption. With a burgeoning youth population facing serious obstacles to employment, the opulent wealth of those in power and unwillingness to offer even token reforms meant that latent frustrations erupted in protests from Tunis to Muscat.

The responses of regimes varied across the region, ranging from token reforms in Oman, which involved the removal of unpopular ministers, and economic incentives designed to engender support in the other Gulf states, to more draconian strategies deployed elsewhere. This included the use of emergency powers, detention, torture, the closing down of space for political engagement, citizenship revocation and death. In Syria, Libya and Yemen, the violent repression that followed protests culminated in the onset of devastating conflict that continues today.

Developments in Tunisia and Egypt initially offered hope to many following the toppling of the authoritarian regimes of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. But in Egypt, the coup d’etat that toppled Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed Morsi – the country’s first democratically elected president – reflected broader regional trends of regimes using mechanisms of control to prevent the emergence of protest movements, seemingly crushing the dreams of protesters in the process.

Divide and rule

One of the most common strategies was the manipulation of sectarian strife, which saw regimes capitalise on social divisions for their own ends – a form of “divide and conquer”. The repercussions of such processes were devastating. The increased divisions within – and between – states may have arisen from sectarian differences but were manipulated by political self-interest by elites seeking to secure their position in the face of a range of serious challenges.

In Syria, members of violent Sunni Islamist groups who were in jail were released by Bashar al-Assad in an attempt to frame the struggle against the Arab Spring protesters as a fight against Islamic extremism. Similarly, in Bahrain, the government sought to frame protesters as “fifth columnists”, doing the bidding of Iran – albeit with very little evidence to support such claims.

In pursuit of this, key regime officials spoke of nefarious Iranian involvement supporting protesters by providing arms and training. After Bahrain’s protest movement was defeated, King Hamad declared that an “external plot” had been foiled, with a clear nod to Iran.

In the years that followed, acts of protest became more isolated as regimes cracked down on oppositions. In Bahrain this involved the revocation of citizenship from 990 Bahraini nationals while elsewhere – in other Gulf states and Egypt – it resulted in increasingly draconian terrorism laws designed to prevent both violent extremism and challenges to regime power. In the years after the protests, the spectre of war in Syria loomed large – an example regularly used by those in power across the Gulf to caution against demands for democracy.

The years after the uprisings were largely shaped by this broader struggle for survival and efforts to reassert sovereign power in the face of shifting national and international pressures. At the same time, many of the structural factors that had caused the protests of 2011 remained unresolved.

This unwillingness to address underlying social, economic and political factors is hardly surprising. It reflects decades in which such grievances have remained unresolved, prompting often violent confrontations between rulers and ruled over the nature of the state and its resources.

Crisis and collapse

Moments of unrest punctured the region across the 20th century – leaving aside interstate conflict – predominantly emerging from the ability of rulers to address underlying grievances around social, economic and political issues. Processes of infitah (economic liberalisation) took place as part of a broader global move towards neoliberal agendas during the 1980s.

But across the Arab world rising birth rates, institutional weakness and bureaucratic ineptitude left a gloomy picture of unbalanced development and systematic exclusion. This was often exacerbated by regimes becoming extractors rather than distributors – leaders and their coteries taking out money from state resources for personal needs and desires – leading to widespread failures of governance. By 2004, a UN report titled Towards Freedom in the Arab World referred to the Arab “state” as a “black hole”.

The economic crisis of 2008 had a dramatic impact on the Middle East. At the height of the crisis, Saudi Arabia lost a range of contracts worth US$958 billion (£693 billion) while the UAE lost US$354 billion in contracts.

Estimates of a further US$247.5 billion in capital flight from the Middle East only exacerbated these challenges. The impact on people was devastating. By 2011, the situation was dire: 41% of people across the Middle East were living in need.

Underpinning this was the loss to economies across the region caused by the endemic corruption, which some estimates put at around US$1 trillion in the five decades leading up to the Arab uprisings.

Unhappy ending?

It was hardly surprising that having faced neglect, repression and corruption over the course of the 20th century people turned to groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Fatah, Hezbollah and Hamas. Many of these groups, as well as political and sometimes paramilitary activities, engaged in huge social welfare programmes and accrued a great deal of popular support as a result.

Over the years that followed, structural grievances that had triggered the protests in 2011 once again rose to the surface. But this time they were played out across an increasingly divided region beset by sectarian schisms and geopolitical rivalries, frustration with political elites, and – most recently – exacerbated by COVID-19.

By 2015, 53% of the region’s population required financial support from non-state actors. In Lebanon and Iraq, protesters took to the streets in 2019 articulating their frustration at the status quo. It is hardly surprising that widespread anger has resulted in further instances of protest across the past decade, driven by anger at many of the same issues. Understanding the roots of the protest movement and their evolution are essential in gaining awareness of the region’s trajectory into a new decade and under a new US administration.

The root causes of the protests remain unaddressed – and the situation may have even deteriorated as economic crises are worsened by the pandemic. While turning towards authoritarianism has given regimes additional measures to regulate life, until these deeper political issues have been addressed, latent frustrations will result in intermittent acts of protest and broader processes of repression.

Simon Mabon, Professor of International Relations, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Via Al Jazeera English: “Remembering the Arab Spring: Tunisia”