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:

At a CDDRL seminar held on November 7, 2025, Georgetown political scientist Killian Clarke presented new research on why some revolutions consolidate into lasting political change while others are reversed through counterrevolution. His central claim is that unarmed, democratic revolutions are uniquely vulnerable to reversal, not because they lack legitimacy or popular support, but because of the kinds of power resources they rely on and later abandon. Drawing on a global dataset of 114 revolutions since 1900, Clarke showed that nearly one in three democratic revolutions is later overthrown, a rate dramatically higher than that of leftist or ethno-nationalist revolutions. Still, two-thirds of democratic revolutions do survive, raising questions about how so many of them manage to resist counterrevolution despite their weaknesses.

Clarke defines counterrevolution as the restoration of a version of the old regime after a successful revolution, whether through coups, elite realignments, or mass-backed reversals. His explanation centers on the resource asymmetries that distinguish unarmed, democratic revolutions from their violent counterparts. Whereas Marxist, nationalist, or armed uprisings build coercive capacity, external alliances, and strong organizational hierarchies, democratic revolutions typically succeed through broad, decentralized, and nonviolent mass mobilization. This allows them to topple entrenched autocrats, but leaves them without reliable security forces or disciplined party structures once in power. The feature that makes them strong during the uprising — large numbers in the streets — becomes a source of fragility once governing begins.

The mechanism Clarke traces is one of post-revolutionary demobilization. After seizing power, new democratic leaders often pivot toward institutional governance, suppressing further street mobilization in the name of stability. But this demobilization fragments the revolutionary coalition and removes the only leverage it holds over old-regime actors — societal pressure. When the coalition fractures, counterrevolutionary elites can reenter the arena with support from military, foreign patrons, or disillusioned factions of the original movement.

Egypt’s 2011 revolution illustrates this pattern. The mass uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak briefly held the military at bay through continued mobilization. But once elected, President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood tried to govern by appeasing the military and old regime elites, sidelining secular allies, and discouraging protest. But popular mobilization never really declined; instead, it transformed, and eventually came to be directed not in defense of the revolution but against the Morsi government, ultimately enabling the 2013 coup. Clarke emphasized that Egypt did not fall because counterrevolutionaries grew powerful, but because revolutionaries abandoned the mobilizational strategy that had given them power in the first place.

Clarke then compared Egypt's counterrevolutionary outcome to Venezuela's 1958 revolution, another unarmed, democratic revolution against a military government. By contrast, Venezuela’s 1958 democratic transition succeeded because revolutionary leaders remobilized supporters when a military countercoup emerged, bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets and forcing the generals to retreat. In Clarke’s view, Venezuela shows that democratic revolutions can survive, but only when leaders treat post-revolutionary politics as a continuation of the struggle against the old regime.

Clarke concluded by noting a long-term decline in successful counterrevolutions during the late 20th century, followed by a possible uptick in the 2010s. The return of multipolar geopolitical backing for authoritarian restoration — and the global spread of unarmed, democratic revolutions — may be recreating the conditions under which counterrevolutions thrive.

In the wake of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election — marred by widespread fraud to ensure Nicolás Maduro’s re-election over opposition candidates Edmundo González and María Corina Machado — the regime has escalated its repression of political dissent. In the aftermath of the election, the regime arrested over 2,400 people. More than 807 political prisoners remain unjustly detained, including 95 women, 4 minors, and over 83 foreign nationals. These individuals, many held as leverage in international negotiations, are subjected to degrading conditions and denied due process.

Amongst them is Jesús Armas, a 2022 Fisher Family Summer Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and a recently admitted student to Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program (MIP). As a key campaign organizer for González and Machado, Jesús promoted civic participation and democratic unity in Caracas. He has now been held incommunicado, in conditions of physical and legal abuse, for over eight months. His arrest is emblematic of the Maduro regime’s broader strategy to silence opposition and dismantle civil society.

On August 4, 2025 Fisher Family Summer Fellows Lilian Tintori and Waleed Shawky joined Gulika Reddy, Director of the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School (SLS), for a panel on how local and global communities can support political prisoners and their families. As Beatriz Magaloni, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, stated in her opening remarks: “This event should act as a call to action for deeper reflection and justice.”