Democracy promotion has been a longstanding goal of US foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. President George W. Bush championed democracy promotion as a way to counter the ideology and extremism that led to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States. After Bush’s attempts ended in abject failure, President Barack Obama sought to repair relations with the Muslim world but also withdraw the US footprint in the Middle East. But Obama was forced to take a far more hands-on approach with the outbreak of the 2010-2011 uprisings known as the Arab Spring. President Donald Trump, who has displayed an almost allergic aversion to Obama’s policies, has openly embraced the region’s autocrats with little regard for their abuse of human rights or absence of attention to political or economic freedom. How the United States approaches the region matters – both for aspiring democrats and for those who wish to silence them. Despite the rise of Russia and China, the United States remains the sole superpower, with the loudest voice on the world stage. Thus, the shift from democracy promoter – albeit reluctantly at times – to authoritarian enabler has made the task of democratic political reform far more challenging for people across the Middle East. This discussion will examine the recent democracy promotion efforts of the United States, with a focus on the Obama and Trump years.
SPEAKER BIO
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Sarah Yerkes is a fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program, where her research focuses on Tunisia’s political, economic, and security developments as well as state-society relations in the Middle East and North Africa. She has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow and has taught in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. Yerkes is a former member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, where she focused on North Africa. Previously, she was a foreign affairs officer in the State’s Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian affairs. Yerkes also served as a geopolitical research analyst for the U.S. military’s Joint Staff Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate (J5) at the Pentagon, advising the Joint Staff leadership on foreign policy and national security issues.
In December 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory alerted Twitter to anoma- lous behavior in the hashtag السراج خائن ليبيا (“Sarraj the traitor of Libya”); Fayez al-Sarraj is Libya’s Prime Minister. The distribution pattern of the hashtag looked suspicious, and the images that appeared with the hashtag looked similar to those that Twitter removed in September 2019 as part of a takedown of a prior state-backed influence operation originating in the UAE and Egypt. Twitter confirmed that many accounts creating content with the “Sarraj the traitor of Libya” hashtag were related to that prior network, and took them down. Following extensive additional investigation based on the tip, Twitter shared with us a network of 36,523,977 tweets from 5,350 accounts that have been taken down. Facebook then shared with us 55 Pages linked to this Twitter network; we analyzed these Pages before Facebook removed them. We title this report “Blame it on Iran, Qatar, and Turkey”, given the prominent theme of lumping blame on these three countries for everything from terrorism throughout the Arab world to the disappearance of Malaysia Air Flight 370 to the spread of COVID-19.
Twitter reports that the network has links both to the digital marketing firm that was previously known as DotDev, which operated (or continues to, in other incarnations) out of Egypt and the UAE, and Smaat, a Saudi Arabian digital marketing firm. In December 2019 Twitter announced its largest ever state- tied takedown of a Saudi operation tied to Smaat. This new network revealed a link between the September 2019 DotDev takedown and the December 2019 Smaat takedown.
On March 11, 2020 Twitter shared with the Stanford Internet Observatory accounts and tweets associated with five distinct takedowns. These include:
Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt: 5,350 accounts and 36,523,977 tweets. The removed accounts were linked both to a September 2019 takedown of accounts linked to DotDev, a digital marketing firm operating out of Egypt and the UAE, and a December 2019 takedown attributed to Smaat, a Saudi Arabian digital marketing firm. This takedown was a result of a tip the Stanford Internet Observatory shared with Twitter in December 2019.
Facebook also shared with the Internet Observatory 55 Pages that are linked to this operation; these Pages were run out of Egypt. Facebook attributes these Pages to Maat, a social media marketing firm.
Egypt (El Fagr newspaper): 2,541 accounts and 7,935,267 tweets. A takedown of accounts tied to the El Fagr newspaper, an Egyptian weekly tabloid. The removed accounts were linked to an October 2019 takedown of El Fagr’s activities by Facebook.
Honduras: 3,104 accounts and 1,165,019 tweets. A takedown of accounts linked to a staffer of Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández.
Serbia: 8,558 accounts and 43,067,074 tweets. A takedown of accounts linked to the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the party of current President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić. These accounts engaged in inauthentic coordinated activity to promote SNS and Vučić, to attack their political opponents, and to amplify content from news outlets favorable to them.
Indonesia: 795 accounts and 2,700,296 tweets.
In this post we summarize our analysis of the first four operations. We have also written in-depth whitepapers on the Saudi Arabia/UAE/Egypt, Honduras, Serbia, and Egypt and El Fagr operations, linked at the top of the page.
In December 2019 the Stanford Internet Observatory alerted Twitter to the hashtag #السراج_خائن_ليبيا (Sarraj the traitor of Libya), a reference to the Libyan Prime Minister’s signing of a maritime agreement with Turkey that angered many regional actors. The hashtag had a suspicious distribution pattern, and was shared alongside infographics linked to an earlier Twitter takedown attributed to digital marketers DotDev. Twitter’s subsequent investigation of this hashtag revealed not just a link between this new network and DotDev, but also a link to Smaat, a Saudi Arabian digital marketing firm that Twitter suspended in December 2019 (SIO’s report on Smaat is here); Twitter believes multiple social media management firms created the accounts in this network. In April 2020 they removed 5,350 accounts, which are the subject of this assessment.
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Early appearances of the “Sarraj the Traitor of Libya” hashtag.
On March 25 Facebook shared 55 Pages linked to this network.
Key takeaways from the Saudia Arabia/UAE/Egypt datasets:
Tweets supportive of Khalifa Haftar - a Libyan strongman who heads the self-styled Libyan National Army - began in 2013. This suggests Saudi Arabia/UAE/Egypt disinformation operations on Twitter targeting Libya began earlier than previously known.
Accounts claimed to be located in a variety of Middle East and North African countries, with many claiming Sudan. They discussed domestic politics with an anti-Turkey, anti-Qatar, and anti-Iran slant. These countries are geopolitical rivals of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt.
Recent posts on the Facebook Pages leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic to push these narratives.
Many of the accounts tweeted links from a set of domains that purport to be news sites for countries like Algeria and Iran; these sites were all created on the same day and publish content with a similar anti-Qatar, -Turkey, and -Iran slant.
Prominent narratives included discrediting recent Libyan peace talks, criticizing the Syrian government, criticizing Iranian influence in Iraq, praising the Mauritanian government, and criticism of Huthi rebels in Yemen. (We discuss these in detail in our whitepaper)
There were several interesting behavioral tactics observed in this Twitter data set:
Hashtag laundering: A geopolitically aligned news website and YouTube channel ran stories about the DotDev-initiated hashtag, with the intent of making it seem like Libyans were (for example) so hostile to Turkey that an anti-Turkey hashtag was trending in Libya. This coverage was grossly exaggerated; the hashtags did not go viral, and the accounts whose tweets they embedded in their articles were subsequently taken down by Twitter.
Jingoistic personas: The accounts were exceedingly and passionately patriotic to the point of being comedic caricatures. Their profiles emphasized their pride in their purported country, saying things like (translated) “Emirati and Proud” or “Tunisia is my passion” or “I love you, Sudan.”
A March 24, 2020 post from the now-suspended facebook.com/GulfKnights1 criticizing Qatar in the context of COVID-19.
This takedown was attributed to actors linked to the El Fagr newspaper in Egypt. El Fagr has previously been associated with influence operations, possibly on behalf of the Egyptian government, on Facebook and Instagram, which took down a network related to their activity in October 2019.
As with several past influence operations attributed to networks operating out of Egypt (and Saudi Arabia), the content consisted of a mix of auto-generated tweets from religious apps, commercial content, geopolitical news content, as well as subversive political astroturfing pushed by accounts that appear to be personas. The political astroturf identities were often made and deployed for a specific topic, created within a short time period and immediately deployed towards a particular topic with very little additional content.
Key takeaways:
The topics in this Egypt-attributed data set had high overlap with topics in past Egypt-attributed takedowns: negative content about regional rivals such as Qatar and Iran, positive tone towards the Egyptian government.
News properties were at the center of this network. Several appeared to be legitimate organizations, such as El Fagr itself, and other outlets based in UAE and Yemen.
Other handles that appeared to be news outlets were fabricated properties that had Twitter accounts with “news” in the name, but did not appear to be actual news outlets - there were no signs of original content. Additionally, a few used names that tried to create the perception that they were regional affiliates of legitimate news organizations (ie, @Foxnewseurope_f).
Fabricated personalities were created in batches, some serving as content creators, and others serving as content amplifiers. The creators would tweet “original” messages nearly simultaneously (3-6 accounts would put out the same text but not engage with each other), and then outer networks of “disseminators” would amplify them all.
There was significant amplification of El Fagr’s editor, @MustafaThabetM, with over a hundred thousand retweets - not only from the paper’s own twitter handle, but from a collection of persona accounts. The retweeted content often included sensational or highly political hashtags related to Qatar.
An example of one of the many instances in which networks of accounts created in batches were used to amplify El Fagr’s editor, Mostafa Thabet.
This takedown of over 3,000 accounts was attributed to the administration of the Honduran President. and is related to a July 25, 2019 Facebook takedown of 181 accounts and 1,488 Pages. Among the accounts pulled down were those of the Honduran government-owned television station Televisión Nacional de Honduras, several content creator accounts, accounts linked to several presidential initiatives, and some “like-for-likes” accounts likely in the follower-building stage. Much of the tweet behavior seems targeted at drowning out negative news about the Honduran president by promoting presidential initiatives and heavily retweeting the president and news outlets favorable to his administration. Interestingly, a subset of accounts in the dataset are related to self-identified artists, writers, feminists and intellectuals who largely posted tweets critical of the Honduran president Juan Orland Hernandez (‘JOH’).
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Tweets by date. A coincides with the Honduran constitutional court permitting presidential re-election; B is the period immediately after the 2017 election; C occurs during the trial of Tony Hernández.
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Network graph of all retweets in the dataset. The purple cluster centers on the account of honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández; the turquoise cluster surrounds the account of the Honduran President’s communications office; in pink are news accounts, and green represents what we’re calling the “activista” cluster.
Key Takeaways:
The Honduras takedown consists of 3,104 accounts and 1,165,019 tweets. 553,211 tweets were original and 611,808 were retweets. Accounts dated as far back as 2008, but roughly two thirds were created in the last year.
The accounts created in the last year appear largely automated. Their activity overwhelmingly involved retweeting Honduran President @JuanOrlandoH. Approximately 37% of the tweets in the dataset mentioned @JuanOrlandoH.
The largest removed account was that of Televisión Nacional de Honduras (TNH). The government-controlled TV station’s facebook page was also removed in July 2019. TNH has new social media presence on bothplatforms as of March 25, 2020.
Some of the removed accounts are associated with known television and media personalities, one of whom, Chano Rivera, is also a political consultant and publicist.
The frequency of hashtags including (in translation) #TheNewHonduras, #HondurasAdvances, #BetterLife, #HondurasActivates, #ISupportYouJOH, #LongLiveJOH and #HondurasIsProgressing shows widespread promotion of the president’s initiatives within the dataset. Minimal mention is made of some major news events, such as the criminal conviction of the president’s brother, Tony Hernandez, suggesting that the tweets sought to drown out negative press.
A set of roughly a dozen accounts associated with self proclaimed writers, artists and feminists formed a distinct group in the dataset. These accounts were the only accounts heavily critical of the government. They also interacted less with the dominant media landscape and the president than other accounts in the dataset. There does appear to be evidence of coordinated activity across the cluster.
One of the takedowns announced on April 2, 2020 was a large cluster of Serbian accounts. These accounts were primarily engaged in cheerleading current Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and his allies, in attacking the Serbian opposition, and in artificially boosting the popularity of Vučić-aligned tweets and content. Among other things, the accounts appear to have focused on supporting Vučić’s run for president in 2017 and tamping down public support for the opposition-led protests known as “1 of 5 Million,” which began in late 2018.
One of the most popular accounts in the Serbia-related takedown, @belilav11, replying to a tweet from the Serbian Progressive Party, the party of current Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić: “The government belongs to the people, not to the yellow tycoons [i.e., the opposition] and their mentors from the west. The people decide in the election who will be in power.” Accounts like this one tweeted in support of Vučić and his allies and attacked the Serbian opposition.
Key takeaways
The network consisted of approximately 8,558 accounts. While many of these accounts existed earlier, most of the network’s activity came in 2018 and 2019. The accounts sent more than 43 million tweets altogether.
The accounts served as a coordinated pro-Vučić brigade on Twitter. They tweeted constantly in support of Vučić—over 2 million tweets were sent with the hashtags #Vucic and #vucic—and derided his rivals and the “1 in 5 Million” protests.
The accounts worked steadily to direct Twitter users to pro-Vučić news sources. Among their tweets were over 8.5 million links to sns.org.rs, informer.rs, alor.rs, and pink.rs, the official site of Vučić’s party and three Vučić-aligned news sites, respectively.
The accounts relied on a few core tactics to boost visibility and achieve their aims:
Dogpiling onto opposition-related content. Tweets by opposition politicians and publications were swarmed by the accounts, which replied with critical or derisive comments to give the content the appearance of unpopularity.
Taking over opposition-related hashtags. When protesters popularized the hashtags #1od5miliona and #PočeloJe, the accounts attacked the originators and attempted to co-opt the hashtags with pro-Vučić content.
Retweeting Vučić-aligned accounts to boost their popularity. The accounts retweeted @avucic 1.7 million times, @sns_srbija (the official account for Vučić’s party) over 4.5 million times, and @InformerNovine (an SNS-aligned newspaper) over 1.8 million times. Many accounts were engaged solely in retweeting @avucic.
While a precise connection between this network and SNS has not been established, there can be no doubt, given the content these accounts shared and the time period in which they were active, that this network was aligned with Vučić’s efforts to entrench himself and his party in power.
The broad spectrum of takedowns in the April 2020 collection serves as a reminder that coordinated inauthentic behavior manifests globally, comes from a range of actor types, is reliant on broadcast media as well as the social media ecosystem, and that determined manipulators regenerate networks and update tactics with regularity.
4/2/2020, 11:30AM PST: THIS POST WAS UPDATED TO INCLUDE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM FACEBOOK
With discussant: Brett McGurk Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
This event is co-sponsored with the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies
About this Event: Kim Ghattas's most recent book Black Wave tells the story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict born from the 1979 Iranian revolution. Ghattas, a native of the region, explores the distortion and deployment of religion in a competition that went beyond geopolitics, where each side proceeded to strategically feed intolerance, suppress cultural expression and encourage sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan.
About the Speaker: Kim Ghattas is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and writer who covered the Middle East for twenty years for the BBC and the Financial Times. She has also reported on the U.S State Department and American politics. She has been published in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy and is currently a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Her first book, The Secretary, was a New York Times bestseller. Born and raised in Lebanon, she now lives in Beirut and Washington, D.C.
Kim Ghattas
Non-resident Scholar
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
On December 20, 2019 Twitter announced the removal of 88,000 accounts managed by Smaat, a digital marketing company based in Saudi Arabia, and attributed thousands of these accounts to involvement in “a significant state-backed information operation”. On December 17 Twitter shared with the Stanford Internet Observatory 32,054,257 tweets from 5,929 randomly sampled accounts. In this report we provide a first analysis of the data.
The accounts were high-volume; the average account had 5,406 tweets and was created in 2016, and several accounts tweeted tens of thousands of times. Many bordered on spam.
These accounts appeared to attempt to obscure their commercial and political activity by tweeting an abundance of largely-automated religious, sports, and poetry content. Approximately 7% of tweets came from client apps that appeared designed to automatically tweet religious messages.
One amplification strategy we observed in our dataset was the use of, “قروبات دعم”, which translates to Support Groups, for boosting visibility for brands and gaining followers. Other terms for this activity - which involves everyone in the group using the same hashtag, following members in the hashtag, or retweeting the hashtag - are a “retweet ring”, follow-back ring, or follow train. Smaat’s participation in these support groups appeared to have the goal of expanding the visibility of their accounts.
The user accounts listed additional social profiles on SnapChat, WhatsApp, and some regionally-popular social sites such as Telegraph, Sarahah, and CuriousCat.
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From du3a.org. Translation: "Doaa application is an application that specializes in spreading supplications to your Twitter account and provides a service for all subscribers who have Twitter accounts where you can subscribe through your Twitter account. This application provides everyone who subscribes to the automatic Twitter service in his account, as Twitter is done automatically every hour."
Content observations:
Much of the content was commercial in nature; this is expected given Smaat’s business objectives. According to their website, their clients included Dunkin Donuts, Coca Cola, LG, Bentley, Toyota, The Ritz Carlton, and Fanta. Tweets about Dunkin Donuts, for example, defended the brand against a scandal where they had used a four-finger hand gesture to communicate how cheap their coffee was - a hand gesture which has been used by the Muslim Brotherhood. The tweets were designed to look like the expressions of real people, as opposed to ads. Social media marketing tactics are frequently misused for influence operations and this behavior looks like it was trying to mimic grassroots enthusiasm (sometimes called “astroturfing”).
A large quantity of the content was political. The political narratives the accounts pushed were consistent with the objectives of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, such as tweets critical of the governments of Qatar, Iran, and Turkey.
Another set of of political tweets of note, also aligned with KSA goals, attacked Jamal Khashoggi, the acclaimed Saudi journalist who was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. After his death there were thousands of tweets denying any involvement by the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
We observed many tweets critical of Qatar, including tweets from accounts claiming to be Qatari citizens speaking out about abuses against them by the Qatari government. There were 78 hashtags about Qatar, including #cutting_relations_with_Qatar and #Qatar_hosts_homosexuality.
Top hashtags used in the takedown about Jamal Khashoggi.
We note that there are likely other political narratives in the 32 million tweets that merit additional study.
CDDRL’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy held its annual conference at Stanford University on October 11 and 12, titled “The Struggle for Political Change in the Arab World.” The conference is an outgrowth of ARD’s efforts to support new research on the dynamics of political change in the countries of the Arab world. Scholars from across different disciplines sought to understand how social, economic, and political dynamics at the national level, as well as international and regional conflict and power rivalries, impact struggles for political and social change in the region.
Overview of Panels and Speakers
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Following opening remarks by FSI Senior Fellow Larry Diamond, the first panel titled “The Boundaries of Authoritarianism post-Arab Uprisings” featured CDDRL Senior Research Scholar Amr Hamzawy. His paper examined how the regime of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has employed discursive strategies to discredit calls for democratic change in the country. Sean Yom, Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, outlined how the protest strategies of Jordanian youth have limited their effectiveness in advancing meaningful political change. University of California, Davis Scholar Samia Errazzouki discussed the failure of state-led political and economic reform in Morocco.
Chaired by Harvard University Fellow Hicham Alaoui, the second panel was titled “Popular Uprisings and Uncertain Transitions.” University of California, Santa Cruz Political Scientist Thomas Serres provided an overview of the economic disruptions that contributed to Algeria’s uprising. Lindsay Benstead, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Portland State University, analyzed the electoral successes of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party. Khalid Medani, Professor of Political Science at McGill University, explained how Sudanese protesters leveraged new strategies of contention to force Omar Al-Bashir out of power.
Farah Al-Nakib (right) and Michael Herb (left)
The third panel, titled “Politics, Succession and Sectarianism in the GCC States,” included Oxford University Fellow Toby Matthiesen, who discussed how Saudi Arabia and the GCC states have increasingly sought to protect their regimes by actively molding the politics of their autocratic patrons in the region, and by using new technologies to upgrade the effectiveness of their surveillance states. Georgia State University Political Scientist Michael Herb explained how the aging of the Saudi line of succession contributed to the political ascendancy of Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and the decay of family rule in the country. Cal Poly Historian Farah Al-Nakib described how Kuwait’s royal family has used its sponsorship of large-scale development projects to sidestep the country’s political polarization, undermine the power of the parliament, and weaken public access to spaces of political contestation.
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The fourth panel focused on “Social Strife and Proxy Conflict in the Middle East.” Chatham House Scholar Lina Khatib described Syria’s transformation during the civil war from a highly centralized security state to a transactional state in which the regime depends heavily on local powerbrokers. Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, discussed differences in how local communities in Yemen have been affected by the country’s conflict. David Patel, who serves as Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, argued that Iraq’s democratic institutions have been impressively robust to a series of existential challenges, but he also highlighted a widespread feeling among the Iraqi public that its parliamentary system is failing to deliver.
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Finally, the fifth panel examined the topic of “International Forces in the Arab Political Arena.” Stanford University Political Scientist Lisa Blaydes suggested that China’s efforts to involve itself in the regional economy may improve its reputation among economically-frustrated Arab citizens, but that such efforts also spell trouble for democracy and human rights in the Middle East. Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University Abbas Milani argued that Iran’s ideological commitment to exporting the Islamic Revolution has been remarkably consistent for several decades. Colin Kahl, Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI, reviewed the strategies of US administrations toward the Middle East, and posited that President Trump’s approach of pursuing maximalist objectives with minimal commitments is particularly likely to heighten instability in the region. FSI Scholar Ayca Alemdaroglu emphasized that Turkey’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy has failed to achieve its objectives in the face of mounting regional upheaval.
Common Themes of Political Change and Continuity
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Several themes emerged from conference presentations. First, across the panels, scholars discussed the lessons learned by autocrats and activists alike in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and the ways in which these lessons have transformed regional politics. Hamzawy emphasized that the Sisi regime in Egypt has increasingly relied on intensive repression over cooptation to maintain stability, while at the same time refusing to grant even limited political openings as existed under Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. In part, this change appears to be rooted in the regime’s belief that relaxing the state’s authoritarian posture had contributed to the revolutionary upheaval of 2011. Likewise, Matthiesen suggested that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council States have learned to become more aggressive in strengthening their surveillance apparatus and policing popular discourse transnationally. By contrast, Serres discussed how the Algerian military and bureaucracy have responded to mass protests not by intensifying repression, but instead by attempting to coopt anti-corruption initiatives and democratic reforms to limit political and economic change. Similarly, regarding Kuwait, Al-Nakib illustrated how the restructuring of urban spaces has proved itself a subtle but successful strategy for the royal family to rehabilitate its reputation while limiting geographic focal points for popular politics.
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Activists have also learned their own lessons from the aftermath of the Arab Spring. According to Yom, Jordanian activists continue to look to the leaderless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt as a model to be emulated. As a result, they prioritize agility and horizontality in their protests, and they forgo the organization of formal political movements. This approach has succeeded in acquiring short-term concessions from the regime but has failed to generate broader structural changes. On the other hand, activists in Sudan appear to have been more successful at using lessons from the Arab Spring to push for systematic transformations of their political system. According to Medani, Sudanese protesters developed novel tactics to avoid the repression of the coercive apparatus, and they were effective at gradually forging a counterhegemonic discourse that clearly exposed the regime’s failures to the public. Following the overthrow of Omar Al-Bashir, activists in Sudan have also insisted on dismantling the political and economic might of the deep state to avoid following Egypt’s path.
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Second, the conference discussion indicated widespread dissatisfaction with formal political institutions across the region. For instance, Hamzawy suggested that Sisi’s regime has been relatively successful at discrediting civilian political institutions, including the legislature and civilian-led ministries. Errazzouki highlighted widespread dissatisfaction in Morocco with existing political institutions. Likewise, Yom’s discussion of activists in Jordan emphasized their lack of interest in entering formal politics. In Kuwait, the royal court has found an opening to pursue urban development projects outside of normal institutions in part because of the public’s frustration with gridlock in the legislature. Patel speculated that frustration with the parliament and muhasasa system in Iraq may finally prompt major changes to the country’s political process.
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Third, despite this disillusionment with formal politics, these political institutions have proved remarkably durable in countries across the region. For example, though current frustrations may finally prompt change in Iraq, Patel also highlighted the resilience of the parliamentary system in the face of a sectarian civil war, US troop withdrawal, the rise of ISIS, and a number of other major challenges. For both Algeria and Sudan, Serres and Medani stressed that militaries continue to exercise significant influence despite the popular uprisings. Meanwhile, for Egypt, Hamzawy noted the firm grip of the current military regime on power, and for Morocco, Errazzouki described the lack of systematic changes to the country’s ruling monarchy, even after years of popular pressure.
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Fourth, this durability has not precluded a number of important shifts within existing political institutions. Regarding Syria, for instance, Khatib explained how the survival of Bashar al-Asad’s presidency has depended on moving state institutions away from a centralized security state to a transactional state reliant on local actors with a degree of independence from the regime. Herb described how the consensus-based family rule of the Saudi monarchy fell victim to deaths among the aging senior princes, which opened up opportunities for the king to appoint more officials in a manner that heightened his direct influence. Herb suggested that Mohammad Bin Salman recognized this change and knew that he would likely lose relevance upon his father’s death; as a result, he was motivated to gamble on consolidating his control while his father still held the power to issue royal decrees. In Algeria, the influence of the military and bureaucracy may remain paramount for now, but Serres also pointed out that protesters have succeeded in stripping away the civilian intermediaries who used to protect these institutions. Regarding the durability of local institutions, Yadav noted how pre-conflict and even pre-unification institutions in Yemen have continued to operate effectively in a number of local communities around the country.
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Fifth, foreign interventions will continue to destabilize the region and impede prospects for democratization or post-conflict reconstructions in the coming years. Khatib noted that Russia has positioned itself as the agenda setter who can bring the Syrian state back to its feet, but also that Russia and Iran are competing to profit off the country’s reconstruction. For Yemen, Yadav argued that fragmentation at the local level has important implications for best practices in the international community’s reconstruction efforts, but that current actors are not well positioned to understand these trends. Kahl predicted that the Middle East strategy of the Trump administration would likely contribute to further destabilization of the region because of its emphasis on empowering allies to do what they want and go after Iran while the United States maintains its distance. Meanwhile, Blaydes’ presentation on China’s regional involvement, Milani’s discussion of Iran’s efforts to export the Islamic Revolution, and Matthiesen’s observations about the GCC States’ authoritarian coordination all illustrated how intervening states are reducing prospects for democratic political change.
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Sixth, even as interventionist countries have contributed to the destabilization of the region, they have also confronted major obstacles themselves – and in some cases have failed outright to achieve their primary objectives. Khatib noted that Iran has faced backlash in Syria, while Abbas Milani and David Patel pointed to backlash against Iran in Iraq. Kahl emphasized that the Trump administration’s Middle East policy was unlikely to achieve its goals. Blaydes observed that China has not acquired greater salience in the Middle East despite its more active economic involvement, and individuals in many of the region’s countries – particularly those that are more developed – do not see China’s growth as a positive force. She also stressed the reputational risks China is taking in pursuing potentially unpopular investments through the Belt and Road Initiative. The GCC States are attempting to prop up strongmen in both Libya and Sudan, but this strategy has struggled in the face of local political dynamics; furthermore, the intervention in Yemen has been a disaster for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Finally, Alemdaroglu stressed that Turkey’s ambitious “neo-Ottoman” foreign policy, which reflects a desire to revive Turkish influence in areas ruled by the Ottoman Empire, has largely failed. In particular, the architect of the policy, former foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, lost his job; the country miscalculated badly in how it handled the aftermath of the Arab Spring; and Turkey’s relations with many of its neighbors have soured.
"For years, Stanford scientists have collaborated with and received funding from the Saudi national laboratory, government-supported universities and the state-owned oil company Aramco. But despite having ties with Saudi Arabia much like MIT’s — including with several of the government institutions probed in the MIT report — Stanford has undertaken no broad review of its connections to Saudi Arabia. As a result, Stanford’s Saudi relationships have continued largely under the radar. Some at Stanford find these relationships uncontroversial or point to their scientific and cultural benefits. Others approach them with more wariness or believe the University should engage more thoughtfully with the country." Our Lisa Blades and Hesham Sallam contributed to this Stanford Daily's article. Read here.
What disturbs Stanford pediatrician Paul Wise most about the cholera epidemic in Yemen is that it’s hitting the children hardest and is completely preventable.
The four-year civil war in Yemen has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has led the poorest of the Arab nations to the brink of famine. Some 22 million of the country’s 29 million people are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.
Since 2016, two severe cholera outbreaks have impacted more than 1.2 million people. Children account for 30 percent of the infections; more than 2,500 people have died.
“Children in Yemen are not only the most vulnerable to this ongoing cholera epidemic but they are also suffering from a disastrous famine,” said Wise, a core faculty member at the Department of Pediatrics, Stanford Health Policy and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
“The cholera and starvation that is currently afflicting Yemen’s children are completely man-made and preventable,” he added. “They are the product of a brutal, protracted war and the ongoing complacency of the international community.”
The conflict pits the country’s Shiite rebels known as the Houthis, against Yemen’s internationally recognized government, which is supported by a Saudi-led coalition that includes the United States. The United Nations is currently brokering peace talks in Sweden.
Wise, who leads Stanford’s Children in Crisis project, joined colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to study the preparedness and response to the epidemic, at the request U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“The report is an attempt to bring together technical and political analysis in a way that calls attention to both the profound suffering of civilian communities caught up in war — and that real opportunities exist to better protect these communities through urgent global action,” Wise said.
If caught early, cholera can be treated with oral hydration salts, though more severe cases require intravenous fluids and antibiotics. But the bacterium found in food and water sources has overwhelmed Yemen because its health-care facilities and infrastructure have been devastated.
“What is critical to remember is that these cases and deaths are all preventable,” said Wise. “And children are always the most vulnerable to the indirect effects of war, the effects resulting from the destruction of the essentials of life, like food, water, shelter, and health care.”
There were three key findings in the report. First, there was likely an overcount of cases due to financial incentives to label patients with gastrointestinal symptoms as cholera cases.
Second, the report identified technical areas of slow provision of services, such as getting out the relatively new oral cholera vaccine, and poor coordination of essential interventions by the government and international humanitarian agencies.
Third, Wise and his colleagues documented at least 75 instances in which Saudi airstrikes appear to have purposely caused damage to water, health and sanitation facilities in rebel-held territory in the northern part of the country. Despite repeated calls by the international community to protect these public health sites — as is required by international law — the bombings continued.
The report found that in retaliation for rockets fired by the rebels at the Saudi Arabian capital city, Riyadh, the Saudi-led coalition in November 2017 closed the majority of airports, seaports and land crossings. Ports in government-controlled areas were quickly re-opened, but they remained closed in the north. This had the immediate effect of halting the flow of goods into Yemen, which relies almost exclusively on imports for food, fuel and medicine.
“The United States and other Western powers have been indirectly complicit in these airstrikes on civilian water and sanitation targets, as these global powers have provided the weaponry, intelligence, and until very recently, the refueling capacity to support Saudi air attacks,” Wise said. “The report is focused on the cholera epidemic; however, the findings clearly point to the relationship between the outbreak and violations of international norms in how the war is being fought.”
Wise noted that the security environment in Yemen has been one of the most dangerous in the world for humanitarian and health workers. Wise and some of this same group of experts who worked on the cholera report were able to travel to Iraq last year to evaluate the World Health Organization’ system to treat civilians injured in the battle for the city of Mosul.
But Yemen is just too dangerous and they were unable to conduct research on the ground. So they did the next best thing, reviewing dozens of documents and conducting 75 interviews with medical practitioners, donors and technical experts involved with the cholera response.
They found that despite the incredible odds, effective mobilization by community volunteers and health workers was paramount. During the second wave of the cholera epidemic in August 2017, for example, some 40,000 community health volunteers working with the WHO and UNICEF carried a door-to-door cholera-awareness campaign across 14 million households.
“The dedication and courage of these humanitarian and health workers have undoubtedly saved thousands of lives,” Wise said. “However, without urgent global action to end the fighting and provide the essentials of life, many more thousands of children will suffer, and most tragically, many will die from completely preventable causes.”
Under the title “Political Contestation and New Social Forces in the Middle East and North Africa,” the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy convened its 2018 annual conference on April 27 and 28 at Stanford University. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars from across several disciplines, the conference examined how dynamics of governance and modes of political participation have evolved in recent years in light of the resurgence of authoritarian trends throughout the region.
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Delivering the opening remarks of the conference, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Larry Diamond reflected on the state of struggle for political change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In a panel titled “Youth, Culture, and Expressions of Resistance,” FSI Scholar Ayca Alemdaroglu discussed strategies the Turkish state has pursued to preempt and contain dissent among youth. Adel Iskandar, Assistant Professor of Communications at Simon Fraser University, explained the various ways through which Egyptian youth employ social media to express political dissent. Yasemin Ipek, Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at George Mason University, unpacked the phenomenon of “entrepreneurial activism” among Lebanese youth and discussed its role in cross-sectarian mobilization.
The conference’s second panel, tilted “Situating Gender in the Law and the Economy,” featured Texas Christian University Historian Hanan Hammad, who assessed the achievements of the movement to fight gender-based violence in Egypt. Focusing on Gulf Cooperation Council states, Alessandra Gonzales, a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, analyzed the differences in female executive hiring practices across local and foreign firms. Stanford University Political Scientist and FSI Senior Fellow Lisa Blaydes presented findings from her research on women’s attitudes toward Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Egypt.
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Speaking on a panel titled “Social Movements and Visions for Change,” Free University of Berlin Scholar Dina El-Sharnouby discussed the 2011 revolutionary movement in Egypt and the visions for social change it espouses in the contemporary moment. Oklahoma City University Political Scientist Mohamed Daadaoui analyzed the Moroccan regime’s strategies of control following the Arab Uprisings and their impact on various opposition actors. Nora Doaiji, a PhD Student in History at Harvard University, shared findings from her research examining the challenges confronting the women’s movement in Saudi Arabia.
The fourth panel of the conference, “The Economy, the State, and New Social Actors,” featured George Washington University Associate Professor of Geography Mona Atia, who presented on territorial restructuring and the politics governing poverty in Morocco. Amr Adly, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, analyzed the relationship between the state and big business in Egypt after the 2013 military coup. Rice University Professor of Economics Mahmoud El-Gamal shared findings from his research on the economic determinants of democratization and de-democratization trends in Egypt during the past decade.
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The final panel focused on the international and regional dimensions of the struggle for political change in the Arab world, and featured Hicham Alaoui, a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Georgetown University Political Scientist Daniel Brumberg, and Nancy Okail, the Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
The conference included a special session featuring former fellows of the American Middle Eastern Network at Stanford (AMENDS), an organization dedicated to promoting understanding around the Middle East, and supporting young leaders working to ignite concrete social and economic development in the region. AMENDS affiliates from five different MENA countries shared with the Stanford community their experiences in working toward social change in their respective countries.
Farah Al-Nakib (right) and Michael Herb (left)
