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Political participation and democratic transition in the Arab World
... This can result in dissatisfaction and unrest (Brixi, Lust, & Woolcock, 2015). Meanwhile highly centralised unaccountable governments and non-participatory political systems reduce the chances of democratic transition and increase political instability (Khatib, 2013) and extremism. In the above mentioned survey by the Carnegie Centre the vast majority of participants surveyed, 88%, attributed the lack of political pluralism in the Arab region as contributing to the extremist wave confronting the Middle East (Cammack & Muasher, 2016). ...
... The challenge of political participation As Verba and Nie (1987, p. 2) define it, "political participation refers to those activities by private citizens that are more or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of government personnel and/or the actions they take". Political participation can be formal, in the sense of voting for a political candidate or informal through use of social networks, underground political movements, and social movements to challenge the political order (Khatib, 2013). Participation can be considered as narrowly as casting a vote or as broadly as the freedom to speak out, assemble and associate (UNWomen, 2005). ...
... Prevailing political systems and their methods of governing go some way in explaining the barriers to political participation in the Arab region. Khatib (2013) raises several challenges to political participation in the Arab region including; the endurance of formal political institutions that benefit from sustaining the old political status quo. For example in Egypt, the military has played a decisive role in Egyptian politics in both the post-Mubarak and post-Morsi era, where they continue to encroach on civil society, exert political control and make it difficult for new political entities to enter the formal political sphere (Khatib, 2013) . ...
When the Arab Uprisings began in 2011, citizens called for dignity, democracy and social justice. Instead of witnessing the birth of more pluralistic societies and stronger governance systems, the past years have brought the Arab region only renewed authoritarianism, conflict, and yet weaker state systems. The regional governance deficit is creating a striking underperformance of most Arab governments in political and socioeconomic development terms. To limit the damage of this downward trend, Arab governments must adopt a 2030 Vision of governance reforms to increase political participation and political freedoms, to ratify and implement international human rights conventions and transitional justice measures, adopt population policies that reflect the region’s changing demographic realities, reduce poverty through economic reform and combat corruption. The 2030 Vision will ensure the region enjoys a new era of inclusive, accountable and effective governance and the consequent benefits for sustainable development.
... The Arab Spring "blurred the lines between formal and informal political spheres" (Khatib, 2013) In the post-revolutionary Arab region political participation depends on the existence of functioning political institutions. Khatib (2013) identified four main challenges to formal political participation: First, "endurance of formal political institutions that benefit from sustaining the old political status quo". ...
... The Arab Spring "blurred the lines between formal and informal political spheres" (Khatib, 2013) In the post-revolutionary Arab region political participation depends on the existence of functioning political institutions. Khatib (2013) identified four main challenges to formal political participation: First, "endurance of formal political institutions that benefit from sustaining the old political status quo". Second challenge is the overlap of the political environment with the social and economic spheres (see below in the case of Egypt). ...
... To participate effectively, Khatib (2013) focuses on five crucial factors of the political infrastructure, which also offer different entry points for contribution and participation: 1) Organisation: i.e. the presence of political groups that enable organisation of people into institutions; 2) leadership: political institutions require a clear leadership structure to become effective interlocutors; 3) coherent and concrete political programme and objectives 10 : necessary to effectively communicate with stakeholders and to garner support; 4) long-term oriented agenda and strategy: as the linchpin for a political programme and to sustain growth as well as evolution of a political groups; and 5) ability to build viable coalitions: as a basis for driving policy agendas based on a national identity and for a "healthy dynamic" to translate change in voters' opinion into the political landscape. ...
The present paper explores governance challenges most prevalent to the Arab region: political participation, human rights, population growth, accountability to address poverty and income/wealth inequalities, efficient public investment and the need to combat corruption. Based on a differentiation between stable, vulnerable and conflict countries, the paper identifies a set of short-, medium- and long-term policy recommendations to foster political participation and inclusion, to create a state-society compact based on observation of universal human rights and effective transitional justice, to deal with population growth and human resources capacity, to improve accountability, institutional reform, economic governance and to combat corruption.
... http://social.un.org/youthyear/docs/Regional%2 0Overview%20Youth%20in%20the%20Arab%2 0Region-Western%20Asia.pdf. October 2015). same parties in Egypt, have led to confusion and disillusion in parts of civil society, and Four years after the upheaval, it is important to examine the changes in political attitudes and civic engagement of youth following the "Arab Spring" as compared to their (non-5 or more limited) past engagement. ...
... Second, the .org/national/Morocco_2 Accessed 8 October 2015). Elatri, Abderrahim (2008) "Social Morocco in 2007: another year of managing the crisis and Report on Morocco's 2008. ...
... beyond proposing explanations for the popular uprisings and the ousting of authoritarian rulers -which at the time of writing still constitute the bulk of the academic literature concerned with the Arab Spring -the various paradigms also imply predictions for the ensuing transformations. Advocates of a post-democratization perspective draw attention to the multi-dimensional re-politicization of Arab societies (Valbjørn, 2012) and the emergence of a vibrant civil society (Khatib, 2013) as indications that a return to stable authoritarianism is unlikely. According to Lynch (2014: 16), 'the emergence of turbulent, contentious societies may ultimately be more important than who sits in the presidential office' . ...
... on the other hand, those studies that looked at civil society from this volume's angle -namely, the capacity to exert influence on the political process -mostly arrived at discouraging conclusions, dismissing the existing associational structures as 'more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism of collective empowerment' (Wiktorowicz, 2000: 43) that would further de-politicization rather than encourage resistance (bishara, 2011;Langohr, 2004). First evaluations of the post-2011 developments also mostly drew on quantitative criteria as 'positive sign[s] for the potential to widen both formal and informal participation in the region' (Khatib, 2013) without further investigating whether and how these potentials translated into actual citizen participation. ...
This article provides a conceptual framework for a special issue of Mediterranean Politics that investigates the transformation processes inaugurated in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen in 2011 in the wake of the uprisings commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring”. It proposes that these processes should not be conceptualized as linear and centrally crafted transitions from authoritarian orders towards preconceived outcomes, but rather, as contested and open-ended transformations. These are best understood through an actor-centered approach that focuses on the choices and strategies of the ‘Politically Relevant Elite’ (PRE) and its interactions with citizens intent on exerting influence, described here as ‘Mobilized Publics’. Drawing on the results of eight research papers presented in this volume, this article argues that the PRE perceived the transformation processes as mechanisms to maximize political resources and monopolize power. The ensuing, increasingly polarized contestations hastened the cooptation and instrumentalization of mobilized publics by the PRE, thus spelling the end of their capacity to offer avenues for broad, bottom-up participation and preparing the ground for renewed top-down control in Egypt and Tunisia, and to state failure and civil war in Libya and Yemen.
... As a result, two provisions in Article 8 have been changed. Khatib (2013) the amended law, PPAC is comprised of independent judges from different judicial institutions. The second issue related to the formation of a new political party. ...
... Minorities and women in the Arab world are underrepresented in political institutions (Khatib, 2013). Although women actively participated in the Egyptian revolution, their role in the post-revolutionary period remains marginalized. ...
This article contributes to our understanding of whether democratic governance can be achieved in post-revolution Egypt. It explores the status of three key pillars of democratic governance in the context of the January 2011 People’s Revolution and subsequent political developments through August 2013: (1) inclusive participation, (2) responsive institutions, and (3) adherence to international practices and principles. Available evidence suggests that none of the democratic governance pillars has been realized so far as a result of political instability in Egypt. The article argues that the current political environment is not favorable to achieving democratic governance in Egypt.
... As a result, two provisions in Article 8 have been changed. Khatib (2013) the amended law, PPAC is comprised of independent judges from different judicial institutions. The second issue related to the formation of a new political party. ...
... Minorities and women in the Arab world are underrepresented in political institutions (Khatib, 2013). Although women actively participated in the Egyptian revolution, their role in the post-revolutionary period remains marginalized. ...
This article contributes to our understanding of whether democratic governance can be achieved in post-revolution Egypt. It explores the status of three key pillars of democratic governance in the context of the January 2011 People’s Revolution and subsequent political developments through August 2013: (1) inclusive participation, (2) responsive institutions, and (3) adherence to international practices and principles. Available evidence suggests that none of the democratic governance pillars has been realized so far as a result of political instability in Egypt. The article argues that the current political environment is not favorable to achieving democratic governance in Egypt.
... Young people from these backgrounds and the associational action that they promote are generally given a certain degree of legitimacy by the public authorities and international development organisations, but this highlights our lack of knowledge about the extent to which such action reaches and attracts other, less-educated young people from the working classes. To locate this more numerous group of young people and their forms of socio-political participation, it is necessary to look to other spaces of socialisation, such as the street or the neighbourhood, and other types of collective action (Bayat 2010;Khatib 2013; Lamloum and Ali Ben Zina 2015; Antonakis-Nashif 2016; Onodera et al. 2018). For example, Bayat (2010) insists that 'non collective actors' engage in practices of everyday resistance, which are understood as an expression of opposition to the dominant modalities of social governance. ...
The overarching objective of this special issue is to gain a more in-depth understanding of the various forms of social and political participation of young people in the Maghreb – Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia – from the period after the wave of dissent of 2011 (termed ‘The Arab Spring’ in the media) dissipated up to the revolt that has been underway in Algeria since February 2019. More specifically, it aims to answer three main questions that, in turn, correspond to three levels of analysis of political activism. On a micro level, this special issue first interrogates how the participation of young people in the protest movements of 2011 was forged and what influence this experience has had on the construction of their individuality. Secondly, and focusing on collective action through the groups that lead it, the issues asks how these young people, socialised in an authoritarian environment, mobilised and formalised their activism. Finally, it asks what influence the various forms of managing pluralism, as well as social and political dissent, has had on the ways in which these young people expressed their dissatisfaction. This introduction, provides an overview of the various contributions to the dossier and situates them in the main sociological issues at hand.
... With the changes in terms of place (informal to formal) and of means of political participation (evolution of institutions) as result of the Arab uprisings 45 , the Middle Class is presented with further avenues to engage in political activity. To do so effectively, Khatib (2013, p. 336) zooms in on five crucial factors of the political infrastructure, which also offer different entry points for contribution and participation: 1) Organisation: i.e. the presence of political groups that enable organisation of people into institutions; 2) leadership: political institutions require a clear leadership structure to become effective interlocutors; 3) coherent and concrete political programme and objectives 46 : necessary to effectively communicate with stakeholders and to garner support; 4) long-term oriented agenda and strategy: as the linchpin for a political programme and to sustain growth as well as evolution of a political groups; and 5) ability to build viable coalitions: as a basis for driving 42 (Cramer, 2012) 43 (Tessler et al., 2008, p. 22) 44 According to the description of the measure "voice and accountability" (Kaufmann, Kraay, & Mastruzzi, 2013) 45 (Khatib, 2013) 46 For concrete recommendations for emerging political parties in the Arab region please refer to (Muasher, 2013)and box 4 in the annex. ...
Ever-present mass surveillance has blocked the flourishing of a traditional dissident culture in Turkey. Focusing on popular ‘just for fun’ Instagram accounts during the lira's freefall that began in the autumn of 2021, this study seeks to identify the creative strategies for digital social resistance embedded in multimodal content sharing of posts, which are composed of visuals, text, and sound. For this, we employed a multimodal-type analysis of Instagram posts regarding Turkey's economic crisis, followed by an interpretative content analysis aiming to (1) identify, categorize, and compile a typology of the main countersurveillance strategies inherent in multimodal posts, such as memes, edited videos, and animations, Photoshop-crafted still images, and (2) explore the contextual traits of the connected dissident culture. We discuss how these multimodal-type posts support connected dissident group formation while maintaining confidentiality while criticizing governmental conduct of economic policy making in Turkey.
The concept of civil society today is strongly influenced by the idea of liberalism which values individual freedom and autonomy. The main takeaway from this idea is that the role of the state, religion, and family must be minimized to ensure that the freedom and rights of individuals are achieved. Nevertheless, problems such as global warming and moral collapse indicate that without the role of nation, religion, and family, such problems would not be able to be curbed properly. The objective of this article is to highlight these three aspects from the perspectives of two traditions of thinking on the concept of civil society, namely the Western tradition and Islamic tradition. The method used is discourse analysis based on secondary data to understand the intellectualism and dynamism of these two traditional lines. This article emphasizes that the concept of Western civil society, which is deeply obsessed with anti-state approaches and intermediaries separating the role of religion, must be revisited. Accordingly, the role of the state, religion, and family in the concept of civil society needs to be reconstructed.
In the rich literature on women and conflict, many scholars have assumed that the outbreak of civil war suppresses women's political involvement. However, during Syria's civil war, there was significant subnational and temporal variation in the involvement of women in the institutions established by armed groups and civilians in rebel-held areas. Why were some Syrian women able to secure a place for themselves in insurgent governance? How were they able to influence the form of local institutions to secure a role for women? Bringing together the scholarship on social movements and rebel governance, this article argues that two factors determine whether women were able to mobilize politically during conflict: the organizational capacity of women and the strength and ideology of locally active armed groups. The article leverages data on local organizations and institutions in Syria, Syrian news sources, and correspondence with several women's organizations operating in Syria in 2017. By doing so, this article strives to bring attention to the role of gender in the expanding literature on rebel governance. It also highlights the significance of armed groups’ ideologies, an aspect often dismissed in the literature in favor of a focus on material factors.
Since the popular protests of 2011, young people in Middle Eastern and North African societies have been at the core of a plethora of research and studies. Eight years later, in early 2019, Algerian youth-led protests again surprised the world, highlighting the need to better understand the social and political commitments of young people in fast changing societies. Traditional forms of mobilisation and mediation with state authorities such as political parties, trade unions and civil society organisations seem to be losing ground with regard to channelling youth anger and frustration, and new independent forms of mobilisation have emerged, sometimes ephemerally. Young Algerians are no exception. The path they have taken to challenge the established order explores new methods and contents. The traditional commitment to civil society organisations and trade unions is not as appealing as it used to be and organisations created in the 1990s have found it difficult to make the handover to the next generation. The human and women’s rights organisations, trade unions and other civil society organisations that once led the struggle for democracy and human rights are no longer able to attract the young generation. The purpose of the paper is twofold: it provides an analysis of why young people are turning away from traditional forms of engagement related to the defence of human rights, whether political, economic and social or gender rights; and it examines the new paths and trends determining Algerian youth engagement in the context of the broader human rights agenda.
Until recently, political parties have been largely ignored in analyses of the politics of the Middle East. Parties were seen as irrelevant to an understanding of political dynamics under authoritarian conditions. The Arab uprisings of 2011 initiated a shift in perceptions, particularly, as electoral politics appeared to have assumed a newfound significance. In the case of Egypt, a formerly controlled political system witnessed a brief flourishing of political parties on a scale unimaginable a few years previously, as a diversity of parties, old and new, secular and religious in orientation, entered or re-entered the political arena. Yet, within two years, an opportunistic alliance between secular actors and the Egyptian military unseated the country’s first elected president and, ultimately, put an end to Egypt’s experiment with multiparty politics. This chapter examines the literature on party politics and democratisation before exploring the role played by parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) prior to the 2011 uprisings. This is followed by a critical analysis of the trajectory of political opposition in Egypt before and after the demise of the Mubarak regime. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the factors that explain opposition party dynamics and the broader implications of this for Egypt’s political future.
While most studies from western countries emphasize rationality in electoral behavior, the present study proposes that rationality is also a driver of candidates’ behavior in a non-Western context. The purpose of the present study is to map campaign content as well as campaign strategies of 214 candidates in the 2015 United Arab Emirates legislative elections. The qualitative analysis showed rational consideration drove the selection of both campaign strategies and public policy positions. Candidates decided to include patriotism and social and economic policy issues in their campaigns to attract votes. In addition, while candidates utilized social meda in their campaigns hoping to maximize their voter outreach, doing so was not necessarily decisive in garnering more votes. Thus, juxtaposed with social meda channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat, and GooglePlus, traditional campaigning strategies remained very potent.
The purpose of this paper to investigate the efficiency of working capital management and its impact on small firm's liquidity, profitability and operating cash flows. Small firms have considerable amount of fund tied up with current assets and faced with difficulties to access external fund from the capital markets, their current liabilities are an important source of their external financing. The relationship between the study variables examined using dynamic panel data analysis for a panel of 87030 U.S. non-financial firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, NASDAQ Stock Market, and Over the Counter Market. The analysis is applied at the level of the full sample and divisions of the sample by size. I also examined industry effect within small firms. The results suggest that managers of small firms can increase corporate liquidity, profitability, and operating cash flow of their firms by shortening the cash conversion cycle.
The purpose of the present study on political participation in United Arab Emirates is to examine the factors that motivated people to cast their vote in the legislative elections of 2011. To this end, a special questionnaire was administered to a sample of 1,800 citizens and univariate and multivariate methods were used to analyze their responses. Findings reveal that three factors motivated people to cast their vote, namely 1) their political efficacy about the legislative body, 2) their optimism about the prospects of a newly elected legislature to improve their daily lives and to aid the government's effort to enhance public services, and 3) having political networks. The study recommends further research to find out factors behind the dwindling level of electoral participation in spite of a high level of political optimism and efficacy.
Recent developments in the Middle East and North Africa have raised fundamental questions about political change, the development of collective action, as well as the making of a common struggle. The uprisings in Tahrir Square have further led to the examination and interrogation of the different ways by which collective action is thought, organized, and staged. It additionally questions the production as well as the formation of political protest in areas dominated by authoritarian rule. Egyptian football fans, in particular, have taken center stage in the clashes with security and police forces. Indeed, established social movements such as the 6th of April movement and Kefaya called upon these football supporters because of their experience in street fights against the police. Subsequently, they played a key role in some of the deadliest clashes, pushing security forces to retreat and securing decisive victories against the Mubarak regime.
The present report studies the Arab middle class; an important social group
that is relatively little understood despite the fundamental role it has played
in shaping the economic and social development outcomes in the Arab
region. This report contributes to the ongoing debate about factors that led to
the Arab uprisings and the difficult transitions to democracy that followed the
departure of long-standing dictators by marking elements influencing middle
class allegiances, specifically those that weakened their well-established
alliances with ruling regimes. The report is motivated by the conviction, on
the basis of past development experiences, that a new Arab development
model can only succeed if the middle class plays a lead role in designing and
implementing processes of economic transformation and political transition.
Studying the middle class is therefore crucial to interpreting the past,
understanding the present and reading the potential future development
prospects of the Arab region.
This report introduces three novel approaches aimed at charting a path for
sustaining, empowering and enlarging the middle class. The first is related
to the measurement of the middle class based on a definition that takes into
account both the quantity and quality of their consumption expenditure. The
second relates to the profiling of the Arab middle class using variables such
as education, employment and mobility, in addition to multidimensional
poverty. The third novel approach lies in using these results to provide a
narrative of the socioeconomic context of the decade leading up to the
uprisings, from a middle class perspective. The report concludes that the
empowerment of the Arab middle class could pave a way out of the current
development and governance debacle towards an Arab developmental State.
Data warehouse is a storage area of data which is created from large business transactions collected from various data sources. It stores current and historical transactional data which contains various frequent items that are used for mining intelligence to improve business operations. Selecting items from so many is a challenging issue to the users and for business decision making in e-commerce recommender system. In this paper, fuzzy filter based cluster approach is proposed to mine business intelligence for improving business in recommender systems. Users are filtered based their preferences and profiles by defining fuzzy or non-fuzzy rule and then clustered based on their similarity. Here fuzzy rule based system is proposed because of the fuzzy behavior of users. Matching cluster of the active user is identified and most frequent item from these cluster of items are recommended the active user. This is a hybrid method which combines existing user’s data, user’s knowledge such as preferences and profiles and frequent items for filtering items to find the intelligence. The result shown with various parameters are more efficient and functional.
Syria was, until recently, seen as a ' successful' example of authoritarian ' upgrading' or ' modernization;' yet in 2011 the Syrian regime faced revolution from below: what went wrong? Bashar al-Asad inherited a flawed regime yet managed to start the integration of his country into the world capitalist market, without forfeiting the nationalist card by, for instance, attempting to acquire legitimacy from opposition to Israel and the US invasion of Iraq. Yet, despite his expectations and that of most analysts, his regime proved susceptible to the Arab uprising. This article examines the causes and development of the Syrian uprising of 2011. It contextualizes the revolt by showing how the construction of the regime built in vulnerabilities requiring constant ' upgradings' that produced a more durable regime but had long term costs. It focuses on Bashar al-Asad's struggles to ' modernize' authoritarianism by consolidating his own ' reformist' faction, balancing between the regime's nationalist legitimacy and its need for incorporation into the world economy; his shifting of the regime's social base to a new class of crony capitalists; and his effort to manage participatory pressures through limited liberalization and ' divide and rule'. The seeds of the uprising are located in these changes, notably the abandonment of the regime's rural constituency and debilitating of its institutions.Yet, it was Asad's inadequate response to legitimate grievances and excessive repression that turned demands for reform into attempted revolution. The article then analyses the uprising, looking at the contrary social bases and strategies of regime and opposition, and the dynamics by which violence and foreign intervention have escalated, before finishing with comments on the likely prognosis.
Since the early 1990s, Egypt has experienced a substantial degree of political deliberalization which defies the notion of a blocked transition to democracy. Repressive amendments to the penal code and to legislation governing professional syndicates and trade unions as well as unprecedented electoral fraud are only some of the indicators. Though related to the conflict between the regime and armed Islamist groups, the erosion of political participation and liberties also reflects other factors, including attempts to contain opposition to economic liberalization under the current reform program.
Fareed Zakaria is correct to note that liberalism and democracy are distinct, but he fails to realize that each feeds the other.
Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most active parliamentary bloc, is an officially banned Islamist organization that long ago settled on a strategy of political participation. The work of the Brotherhood parliamentary bloc is over ideological lines to serve constituents and increase its collective knowledge of local, national and international affairs. Brotherhood MPs include doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers, scientists, academics and legal experts. The parliamentary kitchen, the group's organ which is part research arm and part think tank, is a divided specialized teams that gather information about issues the MPs deal with in the Assembly. It is also responsible for organizing the MPs' seminar series. The Brotherhood, described as Egypt's only operating political party, is an organization and an institution. This parliamentary bloc has proven its seriousness through an unmatched record of attendance, boarding together at the Ma'adi Hotel, the work of the "parliamentary kitchen" and activities inside the chamber.
Based on a survey of participants in Egypt's Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.
This article examines the trajectories of democratization in India and South Africa. Both democracies are exemplary cases of democratic consolidation but face critical challenges in deepening democracy. Focusing on the notion of `effective democracy', the article argues that subordinate groups have limited opportunities for meaningful engagement with the State. This problem is explored through an examination of social movements and local government. The article shows that the current crisis of citizenship that both countries face results from the subordination of civil society to political society.
Democratic consolidation is the process by which a newly established democratic regime becomes sufficiently durable that a return to nondemocratic rule is no longer likely. The authors examine a wide range of structural factors that may affect democratic consolidation in Third World countries, using three indicators of consolidation and multivariate statistical techniques. The authors' main finding is that development-related socioeconomic factors, the contagion effect of democratic neighbors, and high inflation each strongly affect the likelihood of consolidation, although the latter was significant only in the early part of the period studied. Several other factors have no apparent effect, including several measures dealing with political culture and the design of democratic institutions. These three factors together strongly predict which Third World democracies achieve consolidation, suggesting that the process-centric literature on democratic consolidation has paid inadequate attention to the effects of structural factors.
Political development is undoubtedly a rich and variegated field of study. We have begun to accumulate first-rate studies of widely divergent cultures and social structures, masses of quantitative data on the socioeconomic variables involved in the modernization process, analyses of political phenomena ranging from the destooling of chiefs to the functioning of complex legislative systems, well-documented surveys of particular political systems, and a smaller number of useful typologies and general hypotheses.