Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 723-4270
0
amgbusse@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies
Professor of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.
In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.
Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.
Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.
Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.
Global Populisms
A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
By now, those following the news on Syria have been saturated with analysis, data, information, and misinformation on developments there since 2011. Yet we observe an increasing gravitation to mutually exclusive narratives that adorn websites and publications on the situation in Syria: (a) the narrative of pure and consistent revolution versus that of (b) external conspiracy/designs on Syria. Both narratives carry grains of truth, but are encumbered by maximalist claims and fundamental blindspots that forfeit various potentials for enduring cease-fires and/or transitions, let alone mutual understanding. This talk will address these competing narratives in the context of international escalation marked by increasing US-Russian tension and continued multi-layered conflicts on the battlefield. It closes with addressing a framework for understanding and gauging potential prospects despite conflicting declarations by all parties involved.
In a talk dated April 20, 2016, American University of Kuwait Scholar Farah Al-Nakib discussed her recently released book Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford University Press, 2016). The book traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait, from its settlement in 1716 through the bridge of oil discovery to the twenty-first century. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. However, over the past decade several social forces and youth-based movements—from political protesters to architects and small entrepreneurs—have been staking claims to the city and demanding a different kind of urban experience. Beyond simply reviving the declined urban center, Al-Nakib argues, their efforts have the potential to restore Kuwaiti society’s lost urbanity.
The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to welcome Egyptian economist Samer Atallah as a visiting scholar for the 2015-16 academic year. Atallah has taught economics at the American University in Cairo (AUC) since 2011, and his work focuses on development economics and political economy of democratization. He is a leading contributor to debates on economic public policy in Egypt, and previously served as an advisor to the 2012 presidential campaign of Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fettouh. He holds a PhD in Economics from McGill University and a Masters Degree in Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. His research on the Arab world has received the support of the Arab Council for Social Sciences and the Economic Research Fund, and spans a wide range of areas, including; education, electoral behavior, public opinion, trade policies, and political institutions in resource dependent economies.
During his residency at CDDRL, Atallah will work on a series of publications examining salient questions in the political economy of the Arab World, including the impact of trade and capital flows on governance in Egypt and Tunisia, and the relationship between education and wealth inequality in Egypt. Atallah’s fellowship is generously funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to support scholars from the Arab world. In the following interview, Atallah discusses his current research projects and their relevance to important public policy debates.
What are your research goals and priorities during your residency at CDDRL?
First of all, I would like to say that I am extremely delighted to be here and excited at this valuable opportunity to collaborate with distinguished scholars at CDDRL and Stanford University, which promises to be a nourishing environment for my research.
My research agenda during my residency here at CDDRL includes working on two projects, both of which are related to broader questions of democratization and development. This first one is a comprehensive theoretical and empirical study investigating how political and economic institutions evolve as economies become integrated in the global economy. I am interested in understanding how trade and capital flows impact institutions - in the economic sense of the term - and the implications of that impact on political change. For instance, the experiences of economic liberalization in countries like Egypt and Tunisia had unquestionable consequences on the distribution of wealth within their respective societies. Economic liberalization policies had equally important effects on the performance and evolution of their legal, economic governance and political institutions. My own research seeks to investigate how these institutional changes have evolved and the impact of these processes on political change. The second project is an empirical study examining the relationship between wealth inequality and educational inequality in Egypt.
In what ways do your projects speak to contemporary debates on the origins and trajectories of the Arab uprisings?
I would argue that the divergence in outcomes across the various uprisings in Arab region cannot be understood without seriously thinking about the different historical evolution of political and economic institutions in these countries. These institutions impact the functioning of the economy, its growth, and the social inclusiveness of that growth—factors that were very pertinent to the popular mobilization that advanced the post-2010 uprisings. Certainly these institutions are in part the product of how the economy is managed in a given country in the short-run. At the same time, they are the result of long-term external and internal factors that we need to investigate and understand.
A case in point is the bureaucratic apparatus in Egypt. That sizable bureaucracy is the outcome of a long-standing policy of guaranteed employment, which the government had adopted in the 1960s to secure political support. Whereas economic liberalization policies adopted by President Anwar al-Sadat in the 1970s shrunk the economic role of the state, the size of the bureaucracy, nevertheless, increased significantly. Thus, the question we confront as researchers is why have these institutions remained stagnant and shielded from change despite the fact the nature and priorities of the economy have shifted. This is a major concern in my own research.
What lessons, if any, does your work offer policy-makers involved in the areas of economic and human development?
My second project on inequality and education speaks to one of the central factors that have animated the post-2010 uprisings in the Arab world, namely economic inclusion. In the context of Egypt, educational inequality has contributed greatly to the huge disparities in income and wealth in the country. Exacerbating and reinforcing these disparities is an intergenerational dependency in educational attainment—that is, children of uneducated parents are highly likely to remain uneducated, and by implication, economically underprivileged. This is an area that leaves a lot of room for policy interventions.
But such interventions must be grounded in a better understanding of the causes of this dependency and why it persists. Toward that end, my research seeks to investigate how the type and range of assets in a given household affect schooling and education decisions. Other key determinants of these decisions include access to credit, spatial distribution of educational facilities, and volatility of household income. With a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the problem at hand, all of these factors present potential areas for policy interventions to alter the incentives for school enrolment and quality of education delivery. Such interventions could potentially lead to a better distribution of education and income in the long run.
What are the potentially important research questions that address Arab reform and democracy?
I believe the recent upheavals in the Arab world have pushed us to re-evaluate our understanding of the underlying reasons and implications of political and economic change. This has opened up a multitude of lines of inquiry related to the economic incentives and costs of political change. One such endeavor entails an ambitious effort to compare the evolution of social movements, economic policies, and political structures in the Arab world with other regions of the world. For instance, I think we could draw multiple parallels between the Arab experience and that of many Latin American countries, especially with respect to the role of military institutions, the impact of economic liberalization, social inequality, and civil society movements. Having said that, there is also a lot of work that needs be done in understanding and analyzing the divergent outcomes of the Arab uprisings.
In this talk Joseph Sassoon discusses his recently released book Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (Cambridge University Press, 2016). By examining the system of authoritarianism in eight Arab republics, the book portrays life under these regimes and explores the mechanisms underpinning their resilience. How did the leadership in these countries create such enduring systems? What was the economic system that prolonged the regimes’ longevity, but simultaneously led to their collapse? Why did these seemingly stable regimes begin to falter? This book seeks to answer these questions by utilizing the Iraqi archives and memoirs of those who were embedded in these republics: political leaders, ministers, generals, security agency chiefs, party members, and business people. Taking a thematic approach, the book begins in 1952 with the Egyptian Revolution and ends with the Arab uprisings of 2011. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the authoritarianism and coercive systems that prevailed in these countries and the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism that began after 2011.
Speaker Bio
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Joseph Sassoon is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the Sheikh Sabah Al Salem Al Sabah Chair at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His work focuses on the history, politics, and political economy of the Arab world, and he has published extensively on Iraq and its economy. Sassoon’s book Saddam Hussein’s Ba`h Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2013) won the British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East. His previous publications include The Iraqi Refugees: The New Crisis in the Middle East (London, I.B. Tauris, 2009). He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars during the 2014-15 academic year. Born in Baghdad, Sassoon completed his PhD at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
In this talk Farah Al-Nakib will discuss her recently released book Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford University Press, 2016), in which she traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait, from its settlement in 1716 through the bridge of oil discovery to the twenty-first century. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. However, over the past decade several social forces and youth-based movements—from political protesters to architects and small entrepreneurs—have been staking claims to the city and demanding a different kind of urban experience. Beyond simply reviving the declined urban center, Al-Nakib argues, their efforts have the potential to restore Kuwaiti society’s lost urbanity.
Speaker Bio
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Farah Al-Nakib is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait. She obtained her PhD (2011) and MA (2006) in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her research primarily focuses on the urban history of Kuwait City before and after oil, on which she has written her first book. She also writes about memory and forgetting in relation to the built environment. Her latest research analyzes the 1990-91 Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait from a social historical perspective. Al-Nakib is currently a Carnegie Centennial Fellow at American University in Washington, DC. She is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Cities Page.
To mark five years since the onset of the January 25 Revolution, five Egypt scholars examined the evolving political landscape in Egypt as part of a panel titled “The Containment of Politics in Egypt,” organized by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD). The panel featured Stanford Historian Joel Beinin, Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford Lisa Blaydes, ARD Visiting Scholar Amr Hamzawy, Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute on Middle East Policy Nancy Okail, and ARD Associate Director Hesham Sallam. The discussion revolved around a number of key issues, including the recent legislative elections, the cohesion of the ruling coalition, the regime’s responses to various economic challenges, and the impact of state repression on spaces for political contestation and resistance.
After nearly five years since the start of the uprising, Syria finds itself divided and embattled, with no end in sight. More significantly, more than half of the Syrian population is displaced and the death toll surpassed 300,000 by all counts. The Syrian tragedy persists and, more than any other case of mass uprising in the region, continues to be shrouded in political power-plays and contradictions at the local, regional, and international levels. Defined increasingly by an absence of a clear favorable outcome, considering existing parties to the conflict, the logic of the lesser evil reigns supreme. This lecture is an attempt to understand the roots and dynamics of the tragic Syrian uprising, with particular attention to its background and to the recent Russian intervention.
Speaker Bio
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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Haddad is currently editing a volume on Teaching the Middle East After the Arab Uprisings, a book manuscript on pedagogical and theoretical approaches. His most recent books include two co-edited volumes: Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012) and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Haddad serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the critically acclaimed film series, Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. More recently, he directed a film on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The "Other" Threat. Haddad is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report. He is the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East and Founding Editor of Tadween Publishing.
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CISAC Central Conference Room Encina Hall, 2nd Floor 616 Serra St Stanford, CA 94305
Bassam Haddad
Associate Professor
George Mason University
With the nearing of the fifth anniversary of the January 25 Revolution, this panel examines the nature of politics under the rule of the current military sponsored regime in Egypt. What implications will the recent legislative elections have for political stability and the cohesion of the ruling coalition? How is the regime responding to the various economic challenges it currently confronts? In what ways has the persistence of state repression affected and shaped the space for political contestation and resistance?
Panelists
Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History,
Stanford University
Lisa Blaydes Associate Professor of Political Science,
Stanford University
Amr Hamzawy ARD Visiting Scholar,
CDDRL, Stanford University
Nancy Okail Executive Director,
The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
(via Skype)
Hesham Sallam Associate Director, ARD
CDDRL, Stanford University
Moderator:
Larry Diamond Senior Fellow, FSI;
Senior Fellow Hoover Institute,
Stanford University
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, 1994, 2004-05, and 2006-08 and in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa; co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
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Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project. Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.
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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Liberation Technology, Arab Reform and Democracy, and Democracy in Taiwan. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia. He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.
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Amr Hamzawy is a visiting scholar at the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. After finishing his doctoral studies and after five years of teaching in Cairo and Berlin, Hamzawy joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington, DC) between 2005 and 2009 as a senior associate for Middle East Politics. Between 2009 and 2010, he served as the research director of the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2011, he joined the Department of Public Policy and Administration at the American University in Cairo, where he continues to serve today. Hamzawy also serves as an associate professor of political science at the Department of Political Science, Cairo University. His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. Dr. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the 25th of Jan 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a daily column and a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper Shorouk.
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Nancy Okail is the Executive Director of TIMEP. She brings more than 15 years of experience promoting democracy and development in the Middle East and North Africa region to this role. Prior to joining TIMEP, Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and has managed programs for Egyptian pro-democracy organizations that challenged the Mubarak regime. She was also one of the defendants convicted and sentenced to prison in the widely publicized case of 43 non-governmental organization workers charged with using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the U.K. where her dissertation examined the power relations of foreign aid.
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Hesham Sallam is a Research Associate at CDDRL and serves as the Associate-Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).
The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Egyptian academic and Former Member of Parliament Amr Hamzawy as a visiting scholar for the 2015-16 academic year. Hamzawy, who teaches political science at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo, brings to the program a deep knowledge of Middle East politics and specific expertise on democratization and reform processes in the region. A former Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hamzawy’s research focuses on questions of political change, human rights, and the rule of law in Egypt. He is a daily columnist for Al-Sherouk, an independent Egyptian newspaper, and writes regularly on the role of civil society actors and parties in Egypt’s often restricted political arena. Hamzawy is a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, and was elected to serve in Egypt’s first parliament after the outset of the January 25 Revolution before it was dissolved in the summer of 2012.
Hamzawy will spend his residency at CDDRL working on a research project on the liberal elite and reemergence of autocracy in Egypt. His residency is generously funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to support scholars from the Arab world. In the interview below, Hamzawy describes his current project and research plans. Hamzawy will be sharing his research findings with the CDDRL community in a seminar on October 27.
What are your research goals and priorities?
While at CDDRL, my research objective is to analyze contemporary liberal discourses on democracy and human rights in Egypt. The fact that the majority of Egyptian liberals called on the military establishment - prior to the July 3, 2013 coup which deposed the elected president Mohamed Morsi - to interfere in politics and terminate the emerging pluralist dynamics warrants an in-depth examination. Equally puzzling, is the readiness of Egyptian liberals to allow the former minister of defense and current president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s rise to power, to accept a subordinate role in an increasingly restricted public space, and to tolerate without any noticeable resistance the emergence of a new autocracy in Egypt.
What has your research uncovered?
The research journey has been going in some fascinating directions and yielding some interesting answers. For instance, one set of factors pertains to the formation of the modern Egyptian state and the long-standing dependency of liberal elites on successive autocratic rulers and governments. Another revolves around historical legacies of mistrust and fear towards religious-based social movements and political actors. These legacies have contributed to the tendency of liberals to side with autocrats against popular opposition currents. Finally, the predominance of rent-seeking tendencies inside the state bureaucracy and among economic elites has limited the integration of liberals into Egypt’s social fabric. While there are fascinating historical analogies between the current moment and previous experiences in Egypt from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my research will remains focused on the contemporary era.
How is your experience in Egyptian politics informing your current projects?
Throughout the last four years, and while putting on different institutional hats and operating in very different contexts, I have collected first-hand insights on liberal narratives on the formation of the Egyptian state and state-society relations. These experiences also deepened my understanding of liberals’ discourses on their historical encounters with religious forces, their social and political preferences, and their views on the wider public—which some key liberal figures have been willing to disenfranchise to avoid Islamist victories in the polls. These insights, as well as my own experiences as an elected member of the Egyptian People’s Assembly of 2012, the first legislature that was elected freely and without government manipulation, will inform the research.
What are the most important factors that undermined the movement that supported the January 25, 2011 Revolution in Egypt?
That is a tough question. It is easy to state that neither the military establishment nor the vastly entrenched security apparatus wanted the January 25, 2011 Revolution. They feared that it could lead to a democratic transition in which their roles, benefits, and privileges would have been limited or at least subjected to greater scrutiny. Also, there is no doubt that the rent-seeking economic elites and various forces of the Mubarak regime were heavily invested in blocking an orderly transition to democracy. These are facts that have been well documented and researched.
However, no less significant is the recurrent retreat of liberal elites from pluralist processes and procedures. It appears as if Egyptian liberals have never been ready to support a democratic opening that could bring Islamists to power. Liberals have also been reluctant to shoulder the burden of standing against the autocratic ways of the military and the security establishment, or to help civil society and human rights groups garner more popular support. To explain the root causes and impacts of Egypt’s illiberal liberals is the task of my current research project.
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Amr Hamzawy. Photo from Bündnis 90/Die Grünen flickr page
