The Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted a conference on the democratic transition in Egypt on Friday as part of its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.

A series of four panels explored a number of issues surrounding the transition to democracy following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Prominent scholars from Stanford and other institutions participated in the conference.

Twelve Egypt scholars from American, Egyptian and European universities and think tanks convened in four panels throughout the day to discuss the revolution, the transition process, the changing political landscape and Egypt's future. The conference was co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Panelists included Hoover Institution senior fellow Larry Diamond, history professor Joel Beinin, political science assistant professor Lisa Blaydes, CDDRL visiting scholar Ben Rowswell and CDDRL Program Manager Lina Khatib. They were joined by academics from Kent State University, Harvard University, Georgetown University, the University of Texas, Notre Dame University, the University of Exeter, the American University in Cairo and the Brookings Doha Center.

Each panel featured an introduction by the chair, followed by two or three 30-minute talks by panelists and a 30-minute Q&A session.

Emad Shahin, an associate professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding at Notre Dame, opened the first panel with a talk that emphasized the role of the youth in charging the 18 days of protest that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

"In 18 days, this movement dismantled three pillars of Mubarak's regime-the security apparatus, NDP [National Democratic Party] and...the military," he said.

Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, discussed the response of the regime to the protests and the reasons for its failure.

The second panel looked to the future, focusing on the Egyptian presidential elections scheduled for later this year. Speeches addressed the process of negotiations between the regime and opposition groups, the agenda for constitutional and institutional reform and political repression.

Panelist Jason Brownlee, an associate professor in the Department of Government at University of Texas at Austin, drew a parallel between the current situation in Egypt and the one in Russia in 1991. He described the liberal movement as "electorally weak" and said it experienced difficulty in maintaining momentum.

The third panel addressed political parties in the post-revolution landscape, including the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party. Panelist Hesham Sallam, a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University, spoke on how the timeline for the parliamentary elections, currently set for this September, disadvantages newly formed parties and favors parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

"The speed of transition in Egypt  gives advantage to existing political parties by not allowing time for newcomers to organize," he said.

"The Brotherhood knows how to play politics where liberals have absolutely no idea," added Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Doha Center.

Diamond described parallels with the situation in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

"The liberals weren't good at organizing, had no mass constituency and got electorally crushed...but they had a constructive influence on the constitution making process," he said.

"We should look at this as an iterative process of several elections to come," he added.

The final panel focused on looking forward. Rowswell presented a new "Open Source Democracy Promotion" project, designed to provide Egyptian activists with an option for crowd sourcing constitutional negotiations.

"The best approach is for informed and engaged citizens to support the Egyptian activists...inspired by the opportunity Egyptians have given themselves but also inspired by what Egyptians have given the world regarding democratic state building and ushering in a new age of democracy based on mutual collaboration and participation," Rowswell said.

Hamid delivered the final talk of the conference, presenting his forecast for the parliamentary elections. He singled out newly formed parties backed by wealthy individuals as key players in the upcoming vote.

"The established political parties will do quite well, but also individuals with name recognition in their districts and those with resources will do well," he said.

Hamid cautioned against overly idealistic projections, given the disorganization of the liberal parties in Egypt.

"We have to be realistic," he said. "We wanted to think for a long time that once there was democracy, Egyptians would become fluffy American-style liberals, and we don't know if that is true."

"From the perspective of international actors doing democracy promotion, I think there's a distinction between encouraging Egyptians to make one choice over another," Rowswell said. "I think it should be ensuring that there is a choice to make."

Each year, CDDRL awards fellowships to four outstanding pre and post-doctoral students who are in the write-up stage or recent graduates from doctoral programs examining the fields of democracy, development, and the rule of law. Fellows spend the academic year at the Center completing their projects, participating in seminars, and interacting with the resident faculty and research staff.

The selection process was extremely competitive this year, as the Center received 95 applications to the program and awarded four fellowships to scholars whose research demonstrated significant depth and alignment with the mission and research programming at the Center. The scholarly community at CDDRL will be enriched and enhanced by the addition of two pre-doctoral and two post-doctoral scholars hailing from leading graduate programs in the United States. Fellows will be arriving in September to begin the nine month fellowship.

Please join CDDRL in welcoming:

 

Michael Albertus

Post-doctoral Fellow
Stanford University
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected June 2011
Research Interests: Political Regimes, Democratization, Autocratic Survival, Wealth Redistribution, Economic Inequality, Clientelism 
Dissertation: "Political Regimes and Redistribution"

 

Eric Kramon

Pre-doctoral Fellow
University of California Los Angeles 
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected June 2012
Research Interests: Clientelism, Distributive Politics, Democratization, Politics and Health, Political Economy of Development, Natural Resource Politics, African Politics, Experimental Methods
Dissertation: "Clientelism, Vote Buying and Democracy in Africa"

 

Reo Matsuzaki

Post-doctoral Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected June 2011
Research Interests: Civil War and Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Ethnic and Identity Politics, Comparative-Historical Analysis of Governance Institutions, East Asia
Dissertation: "Institutions by Imposition: Colonial Lessons for Contemporary State- Building"

 

Alexander Ruiz Euler

Pre-doctoral Fellow
University of California San Diego
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected September 2013
Research Interests: Inequality, Poverty, Democratization, Public Goods
Dissertation: "The Effects of Income Inequality in the Provision of Public Goods: The Case of Mexico"

 

The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at CDDRL is pleased to announce its second annual conference, From Political Activism to Democratic Change in the Arab World, to take place on May 12 and 13, 2011. The conferences addresses the key achievements of and challenges facing Arab activists in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Palestine, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. It features scholars and activists from across the Arab world, Europe, and the United States who will discuss the contexts and strategies of reform-driven political activism in the Arab world.

On April 11, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted an event to celebrate the release of Francis Fukuyama's latest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. The occasion drew an audience of over 100 faculty, students, and members of the community, who were eager to hear Fukuyama introduce the first volume of this "magnum opus," which traces the history of the development of political institutions through the eighteenth century. Fukuyama was joined by two Stanford faculty members to provide commentary on the book; Ian Morris, Professor of Classics and History, and Barry Weingast, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011
608 pages

Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and in residence at CDDRL since July 2011, coming to Stanford from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). CDDRL Director, Larry Diamond opened the event by commenting on how CDDRL is the ideal intellectual home for the Origins of Political Order, which examines democracy, development, and the rule of law from an evolutionary perspective. Diamond discussed the richness and breadth of Fukuyama's scholarship, which is not confined to one region or discipline but is truly global and interdisciplinary in nature, underpinning the philosophy and approach of CDDRL's research agenda.

Fukuyama provided the audience with an overview of how he conceived of writing such a sweeping account of political development, which began when his former teacher and mentor, the late Samuel Huntington asked him to write the forward to a new version of the 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies. It occurred to him that there was little scholarship available that focused on where institutions first originated and how they evolved throughout human history. Fukuyama stressed the practical importance of this empirical question and its application to the present day, as Arab states struggle to create viable political institutions in the wake of revolution. 

Fukuyama described modern political order as consisting of three characteristics that are the foundational analysis of his book--the state, rule of law, and accountability. In discussing the evolution of the state, Fukuyama characterized it as the "long term historical struggle against a family."

Examining history through an anthropological lens, Fukuyama described early societies as orderly, with specific rules based on biologically grounded mechanisms, favoritism towards kin, and reciprocal altruism. Cooperation among relatives and friends is something that "every human society defaults to in the absence of institutions that provide different incentives," said Fukuyama.

These early social orders evolved into modern states once patrimonialism was replaced by a more impersonal form of politics, and citizens were no longer favored based on their ties to the ruler. Fukuyama traces the first modern state to ancient China during the time of the Qin dynasty in the third century BC, which created an impersonal, rational, and centralized bureaucracy that diverged from the patrimonial systems of the past. Similarly, in the Muslim world a system of military slavery was adopted by the Ottoman empire to break young men's allegiance to their family and generate loyalty to the Sultan.  

While state institutions were constructed in the Arab, Hindu, and Chinese worlds, underneath these systems, Fukuyama stressed, are strong kinship groups that continued to influence the formation of the modern state. By contrast, he claimed, "Europe is the only world civilization that gets beyond kinship on a social but not a political level."

Examining the development of rule of law, Fukuyama described it as, "an outgrowth of religious law administered by a hierarchy residing outside the state that puts limits on the executive." In order to institutionalize law, a cadre of legal specialists were trained and law was made coherent through codification.

Something that I find striking about the rise of democracy or accountable government in Europe is how accidental and contingent it is.
- Francis Fukuyama

Fukuyama discussed how the sequence in the development of institutions can often be an accident of history that will ultimately determine its type of governance. "Something that I find striking about the rise of democracy or accountable government in Europe is how accidental and contingent it is," Fukuyama continued, "you would not have democratic institutions in the west were it not for the survival of certain feudal institutions into the modern period."

European monarchical authority was limited by feudal institutions called estates, parliaments, sovereign courts, and the like, consisting of the upper nobility, gentry, and bourgeoisie, which served as a balance of power against the central state. Fukuyama argued that this ultimately led to constitutional governance in England, but not in France, Spain, Russia, or Hungary, were parliaments were weak and divided.

Stanford historian and classicist Ian Morris, author of Why the West Rules for Now, lent an historical account of Fukuyama's book, commenting on the breadth of the scholarship and soundness of his historical judgment, which he views as a rarity in academia. On the whole Morris agreed with Fukuyama's argument, particularly the way he stressed the evolutionary basis of social and political change.

However, he disagreed with a specific detail of Fukuyama's analysis, where he classified the Qin dynasty as the first modern state. Instead, Morris views the Qin as part of a broader package of shifts occurring during the 1st millennium BCE, from China to the Mediterranean basin where patrimonial states evolved toward more "high-end type states," which separate political power from kinship networks.

On a deeper level, Morris believes there are more similarities than differences in patterns of human development. The biggest divergences did not occur until the last 500 years when according to Morris, "geographical forces have driven the rule of law, accountable government, and all that's happened since the French Revolution."

Barry Weingast, Professor of Political Science at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, provided a theoretical examination of The Origins of Political Order, discussing the important gap Fukuyama's book fills in defining political development since Huntington's seminal 1968 piece.

Weingast highlighted two areas of the book--the role of ideas and the issue of violence. According to Weingast, the role of ideas is a causal feature of Fukuyama's analysis but he does include ancient Greece and Rome, telling the story of republics and how ideas defined their political development. Weingast discusses the dilemma that lies at the heart of governance from the time of the Romans to the early American republic, which is characterized as a 2,000-year struggle of how to scale-up into larger societies, capable of defending themselves from other larger societies.

Examining the concept of violence, Weingast argues that Fukuyama does not give enough attention to the theoretical element of violence and challenges the way he conceptualizes it through Max Weber's definition of a modern state, which "has a monopoly on the legitimate uses of violence."

The debut of Fukuyama's treatise on political development left everyone in the room with a fresh perspective on where modern institutions evolved from to more fully understand their characteristics and complexities today. We look forward to the second volume of this book, which will bring the story up to the present day.