Hanna Folsz, a 2025-26 Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has received the 2026 Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) European Politics and Society Section. Her paper also received Honorable Mention for the Sage Best Paper Award from APSA’s Comparative Politics Section and Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Award from APSA’s Democracy and Autocracy Section. The awards recognize her article, “Economic Retaliation and the Decline of Opposition Quality,” which examines how aspiring autocrats use economic retaliation to discourage political challengers and undermine democratic competition.

Drawing on original data from Hungary, Folsz shows that opposition candidates and their families often face consequences such as firings, blacklisting, tax audits, and the loss of business opportunities after entering politics during autocratization. Her research finds that these pressures reduce political ambition among opposition-aligned elites and shrink the pool of experienced, highly qualified candidates willing to run for office.

Folsz received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in June 2026. Her research focuses on opposition parties in authoritarian, dominant-party regimes, with particular attention to the challenges and opportunities they face in countering autocratization. More broadly, her work examines the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding, populism, media capture, and political favoritism — primarily in East-Central Europe and, secondarily, in Latin America. She uses a multi-method approach, including modern causal inference and text analysis techniques.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association, among others. She is the co-founder and co-organizer of EEPGW, a monthly online graduate student workshop on East European politics, and a co-founder and regular contributor to The Hungarian Observer, the most widely read online newsletter on Hungarian politics and culture. At CDDRL, she has been an active member of the center's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab.

Next fall, Folsz will be an incoming Fellow at the Harvard Academy and, in 2027, an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at IE University in Segovia, Spain. She will continue working on her book manuscript, which examines why establishment oppositions struggle to win elections under democratic decline and how this challenge can be surmounted.

Oren Samet, the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has received the 2026 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Collaboration Section of the American Political Science Association for his dissertation, “Challenging Autocrats Abroad: Opposition Parties on the International Stage.” The award recognizes outstanding doctoral research on international cooperation, transnational politics, and global governance.

Samet's dissertation examines how opposition parties engage foreign governments and international organizations to build pressure against authoritarian incumbents. Drawing on original cross-national data on opposition lobbying and transnational party networks, as well as interview-based fieldwork and case studies from Southeast Asia, the project explores when opposition movements seek support abroad, the benefits and risks of doing so, and why international backing sometimes helps topple autocrats but often falls short.

Before entering academia, Samet was based in Bangkok, Thailand, where he served as the Research and Advocacy Director of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, working with politicians and civil society leaders across Southeast Asia. He previously worked as a Junior Fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Samet's research focuses on the international dimensions of authoritarian politics and democratization, particularly opposition movements in Southeast Asia. His work has appeared in leading journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Communication.

Following his year at CDDRL, Samet will join Rice University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science, where he will continue his research on authoritarian politics, opposition movements, and democratization.

At a moment marked by war, regional fragmentation, and mounting uncertainty across the Middle East, the Program on Arab Reform and Development (ARD) at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a wide-ranging conversation between historian and Middle East scholar Joel Beinin and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Senior Research Scholar and ARD Associate Director.

The discussion explored how the region’s current crises fit within longer historical trajectories, and what they may signal for the future of political order, state power, and social movements in the Arab world.

Throughout the conversation, Beinin situated contemporary wars and political ruptures within broader histories of authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and the erosion of regional political cohesion. The discussion ranged from the legacies of the post-9/11 era to the fragmentation of the Arab regional order, the failures of democratization, and the global rise of the far right.

Here are five major takeaways from the discussion:

1. The current moment is not simply another regional crisis — it reflects the fragmentation of the Arab order itself.

One of the central themes of the discussion was that today’s regional turmoil differs fundamentally from earlier periods of instability. Beinin argued that while the Arab world has long experienced cycles of war, authoritarianism, and external intervention, the current period is distinctive because the very idea of a coherent “Arab world” has weakened dramatically.

As Beinin put it, “A quarter of a century ago, you could still talk about the Arab world with a certain sense of unity… and today, increasingly, it doesn’t.” He stressed that this fragmentation is not merely geopolitical but also political and ideological. Regional powers now pursue sharply divergent agendas, while many traditional centers of Arab political and cultural influence have declined.

Egypt occupied a central place in this analysis. Beinin argued that Egypt, historically viewed as a political and cultural anchor of the Arab world, can no longer plausibly play a regional leadership role. He described the Egyptian regime as deeply constrained by debt crises, Gulf dependency, and intensifying authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) increasingly shape regional politics, albeit without the broader political legitimacy or cultural influence once associated with Cairo.

The result, according to Beinin, is a region characterized less by shared political trajectories than by fragmentation, competing alignments, and increasingly localized struggles for survival and authority.

2. The legacies of the post-9/11 era continue to shape U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Early in the conversation, Sallam read aloud a passage from President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, warning that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Sallam then revealed that the quotation was not from President Donald Trump, but from Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The exchange set up one of the discussion’s recurring themes: the persistence of interventionist frameworks in American political discourse on the Middle East.

Beinin argued that much of contemporary U.S. rhetoric surrounding Iran reproduces assumptions and narratives that shaped the run-up to the Iraq War. “None of it was true when they said it about Iraq,” he remarked, “and none of it is true when they’re saying it about Iran.”

More broadly, he suggested that the post-9/11 political climate fundamentally reshaped how the United States discussed the region. Reflecting on the years after the September 11 attacks, Beinin described g a political atmosphere in which attempts to contextualize regional dynamics were frequently dismissed as apologetics for extremism.

The conversation repeatedly returned to the dangers of reducing regional politics to moral binaries or civilizational narratives. Instead, Beinin emphasized the importance of historically grounded analysis attentive to state interests, political economy, and international power relations.

3. The authoritarian restoration after the Arab uprisings has become deeper and more punitive.

Another major takeaway concerned the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 and the broader trajectory of authoritarianism in the region.

Beinin argued that states such as Egypt and Tunisia have emerged from the post-uprising period with harsher and more consolidated forms of authoritarian rule than existed prior to 2011. “Any kind of political, civil, even to some degree cultural resistance has been stamped out,” he said, citing the expansion of surveillance, imprisonment, and repression.

Yet the discussion also rejected the simplistic notion that the Arab uprisings were meaningless failures. Beinin pointed to later protest waves in Sudan and Algeria during 2019–2020 as evidence that activists and civil movements had absorbed important lessons from the earlier uprisings.

In Sudan in particular, he argued, protest movements understood that “the army is not on the side of the people,” reflecting a deeper awareness of how military institutions could derail revolutionary transitions. At the same time, Beinin stressed that regional interventions by Gulf powers played a major role in undermining these movements. He described how competing regional actors backed rival military factions, contributing to fragmentation and ultimately overwhelming civilian political forces.

The broader implication was that authoritarian resilience in the Arab world cannot be understood solely through domestic dynamics. Regional rivalries, external funding networks, and transnational counterrevolutionary alliances all play a central role in shaping political outcomes.

4. The Middle East’s crises are increasingly tied to a broader global rightward shift.

While much of the conversation focused specifically on the Arab world, Beinin consistently situated regional developments within broader international trends.

He argued that the current moment reflects not only regional disarray but also the rise of increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian political currents globally. Beinin pointed to “a hard lurch to the right” in multiple countries, including Israel, India, and parts of Europe.

This international dimension, he suggested, has profound implications for the Middle East. The rise of nationalist and authoritarian politics globally has helped normalize more extreme forms of militarism, ethnonationalism, and state violence. It has also weakened many of the international norms and institutions that once constrained state behavior, however imperfectly.

The discussion of Israel occupied a particularly important place here. Beinin linked Israel’s rightward shift to broader transformations in global politics. At several points, the conversation underscored how the wars in Gaza and Lebanon cannot be understood in isolation from these wider ideological and geopolitical currents.

Rather than treating the Middle East as uniquely unstable or exceptional, Beinin repeatedly encouraged the audience to see the region as deeply connected to broader crises of democracy, inequality, nationalism, and authoritarianism unfolding globally.

5. Historical perspective remains essential in moments of upheaval.

Perhaps the most important theme running through the conversation was methodological rather than purely political: the insistence on historical perspective in moments of crisis.

At the outset of the event, Sallam emphasized that the purpose of the discussion was “not to chase after the headlines,” but rather to “take the long view” and place contemporary developments “in conversation with scholarly research and debates.”

Throughout the conversation, Beinin repeatedly cautioned against analyses driven solely by immediate events, media cycles, or simplistic geopolitical narratives. Instead, he urged audiences to understand contemporary wars and political transformations as products of longer histories involving colonial legacies, state formation, authoritarian restructuring, social movements, and international intervention.

The discussion ultimately offered no easy optimism about the region’s future. Yet it also rejected fatalistic portrayals of the Arab world as uniquely doomed to instability. Instead, the conversation highlighted the importance of historical memory, critical scholarship, and political analysis capable of connecting contemporary crises to deeper structural processes.

A full recording of the conversation can be viewed below:

In a seminar hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Matthew Levitt, who directs the Washington Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, discussed the Middle East's changing strategic landscape through the lens of the 2026 Iran conflict. While Israel and the United States have achieved significant tactical successes against Hezbollah and the Houthis, Levitt argued, the countries have struggled in progressing the victories to long-term resolutions. He said state actors alone do not drive the region's conflict, but rather that proxy networks and aggressive public relations narratives hinder efforts towards stability.

Levitt then discussed the larger geopolitical effects of the conflict, including the shrinking chances for traditional peace agreements and increasingly negative international views of Israel after the October 7 attacks. He suggested that real changes in Israel’s global position would need political shifts and more transparency at home, while also noting the deep domestic doubts about solutions like a two-state framework. The discussion included the role of outside powers — especially China — in influencing regional dynamics through economic ties to Iran. He also touched on the likelihood that U.S.-Israel relations will increasingly shift from direct aid to joint investments in technology and defense.

CDDRL Visiting Scholar Michael Albertus’s Research Seminar presentation, “Winning Under Electoral Authoritarianism: Turning Out the ‘Right’ Votes in Venezuela,” examined how electoral infrastructure can become a subtle but powerful tool of authoritarian political control. The presentation, based on joint work with Felipe Baritto and Dany Jaimovich, focused on Venezuela and asked whether the expansion of polling centers under Chávez and Maduro was simply a response to demographic demand or whether it was politically targeted to benefit the ruling coalition.

The central puzzle of the presentation was that Venezuela substantially expanded its electoral infrastructure between 2000 and 2024, with the number of polling centers increasing by about 70 percent, even though population growth was much smaller. Albertus situated this puzzle within the broader literature on competitive authoritarianism, where regimes often maintain formally competitive elections but tilt the playing field through institutional design, state resources, media control, opposition harassment, and selective manipulation. His key contribution was to show that the organization of voting infrastructure itself may belong on this “menu of manipulation.”

The empirical strategy was built around a geocoded dataset of voting centers across Venezuelan election periods. The authors identified “new” polling centers and used stable polling centers to construct electoral Voronoi polygons, which served as local catchment areas. This allowed them to ask whether areas with higher prior support for Chavismo were more likely to receive new voting centers in later periods. Their baseline models used polygon and election-period fixed effects, with controls such as population, and clustered standard errors by municipality.

The main result was that lagged regime support predicted the creation of new polling centers. A 10-percentage-point increase in regime support was associated with roughly a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability of receiving a new polling center relative to the sample mean. Areas in the top quartile of regime support were about 30 percent more likely to receive a new center. These effects were strongest in urban areas and became larger as elections tightened and regime support weakened.

Albertus also presented evidence that new polling centers were not politically neutral spaces. Many carried regime-aligned names and ideological language, including terms associated with Bolivarianism, Chávez, communes, popular power, and revolutionary programs. This suggested that polling centers were not only administrative sites but also spaces of political embedding.

The presentation then turned to consequences. New polling centers were associated with higher turnout, especially in areas already supportive of the regime. They were also linked to smaller polling centers and more single-table centers, which may have made voter monitoring easier. In the 2024 election, the opposition's collection of actas (vote tabulations) was less likely in polygons where new polling stations had previously been established, suggesting that infrastructure expansion may have weakened the opposition's monitoring capacity.

Overall, the presentation argued that authoritarian regimes do not always need to rely on blatant fraud or overt suppression. They can instead selectively expand access, making voting easier for supporters while improving their own capacity for mobilization and monitoring. The project’s broader significance lies in showing how seemingly technical decisions about election administration can have deeply political effects.