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 CDDRL research seminar held on May 21, 2026, Alice Evans, a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford King Center for Global Development, presented her research exploring the causes of the global Islamic revival. To understand this transformation, she conducted qualitative research across nearly every world region, living with families and communities in countries including Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, Uzbekistan, India, and across West Africa. 

Evans explores several competing theories for the global Islamic revival, beginning with past religious authoritarianism and Arab prestige bias. Past religious authoritarianism is the belief that historical Islamic empires consolidated political authority by empowering clerics and religious institutions, creating systems in which rulers derived legitimacy through religion. Similarly, Arab prestige bias argues that the religious prestige of places like Mecca and Medina drew Muslims across the world to follow religious practices associated with the Arab Islamic heartland.  However, Evans argues that these explanations alone cannot fully explain the global Islamic revival, as both Arab religious prestige and religious authoritarian traditions existed long before the revival began in the 1970s. 

The second major explanation discussed by scholars is historical contingencies, including geopolitical conflict and Saudi-funded Wahhabism. Geopolitical conflicts such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the post-9/11 War on Terror intensified a sense of global Muslim solidarity and reinforced an “us versus them” worldview. Similarly, Saudi-funded Wahhabism explains the revival through Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth, which allowed the kingdom to fund mosques, madrasas, scholarships, and religious education programs across the Muslim world. However, Evans argues that these explanations still cannot fully account for the revival because geopolitical conflict does not explain why the shift manifested specifically through religiosity, veiling, and gender segregation, while reformist Islamic movements also emerged independently outside of Saudi influence in places such as Egypt, India, and West Africa. 

Consequently, Evans argues that modernization played the most important role in the global spread of the Islamic revival. As highlighted throughout the seminar, technological advances such as steamships, print media, radio, television, and the internet enabled Muslims around the world to gain greater access to religious knowledge, leading to deeper engagement with Islamic scholarship and religious networks. This process was further strengthened through expanded mass schooling and increased state spending on religious education. 

This ultimately leads to Evans’ central theory, the “Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop,” which argues that modernization amplifies whichever moral systems command prestige within a society. In Muslim-majority societies, greater access to religious education and communication technologies leads to greater trust in religious authorities and increased social importance of visible piety, including practices such as veiling and gender segregation. Evans emphasizes that these practices are reinforced through community social pressure, particularly in large religious communities where individuals are constantly evaluated based on visible signs of piety. Consequently, modernization strengthened transnational Islamic identity and reinforced religious norms across the Muslim community. 

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.

As questions about democratic governance, institutional resilience, and authoritarian power become increasingly central to public life around the world, the need for rigorous, accessible scholarship has grown more urgent. Effective May 15, 2026, a new partnership between Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Journal of Democracy will expand Stanford’s role in those conversations. Through the partnership, CDDRL will support the production of the Journal’s quarterly print issues and expanding digital content, while creating new opportunities for faculty, researchers, and students to contribute to its work. 

Since 1990, the Journal of Democracy has served as a major forum for scholars, policymakers, democratic reformers, and public intellectuals examining how democracy emerges, endures, and comes under strain. Widely regarded as the leading global publication on democratic theory and practice, the Journal has played a central role in shaping debates on democracy worldwide. Previously, the Journal was housed within the National Endowment for Democracy — a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. The Journal was co-founded by Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at CDDRL within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), who served as founding co-editor for the Journal's first 32 years. 

A natural alignment with CDDRL’s work

The partnership is a natural fit for CDDRL, which brings scholarship and practice together to examine the forces that advance or impede representative governance, human development, and the rule of law. It also builds on long-standing connections between the center and the Journal of Democracy: many CDDRL-affiliated faculty have contributed to the Journal over the years, and its focus closely aligns with the center’s research, teaching, and practitioner training programs. Moreover, CDDRL is already deeply engaged in the kinds of questions the Journal has long brought to wide audiences — whether through the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program, which brings civil society leaders from developing and transitioning countries to Stanford for intensive training in democratic practice and reform, the Democracy Action Lab’s work on democratic resilience, or the Leadership Academy for Development’s training for leaders advancing good governance and economic development.  

More broadly, the partnership reflects CDDRL’s research and teaching agenda, which focuses on the institutions, ideas, and political forces shaping democratic resilience, authoritarianism, and governance around the world. Across its faculty, fellows, students, and training programs, the center takes an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most pressing questions in global politics — from democratic backsliding and state capacity to political reform and accountability. The Journal of Democracy offers a complementary platform where that work can reach both academic and public audiences.

Connecting research to practice

For Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at FSI, the partnership highlights how CDDRL’s work connects research to the practical challenges facing democracy.

“One of CDDRL’s core strengths is the ability to take high-quality research theories and methods and apply them to on-the-ground policy challenges,” Stoner said. “The Journal of Democracy serves a similar function in the field of political development. Our new partnership to produce the Journal enhances our global reach in both the international development policy and academic communities.”