Abu Aardvark

IR of the Middle East: State of the Field

In my last post, I briefly described the headline panel on the state of the art in the International Relations of the Middle East which I chaired at the Middle East Studies Association Annual meeting on Saturday.   As promised, here is a lightly edited version of my prepared remarks for that panel -- only part of which I actually delivered, due to time constraints and deference to the other outstanding panelists, but which I reproduce here for those interested.  And see here for this old classic contretemps over IR theory's failure to deal with al-Qaeda and the follow-up response to various aggrieved parties - showing either that the problems remain or that I never learn!

International Relations of the Middle East:   State of the Field

Ten years ago in Chicago, I appeared on a special session at MESA evaluating the state of the art in the field of the International Relations of the Middle East, along with Greg Gause, Steve Walt, Mike Barnett and several others. This year seemed a good time to repeat the exercise – given how much both IR and the world have changed.   How has the field of IR ME dealt with the massive upheavals?  How has it informed the response?   I assembled the panel with an eye towards covering major subfields and approaches, including a determined effort to get the best of Europe and people who bridge the academic-policy divide. I regret that Fred Halliday and Etel Solingen were unable to attend, among others.   But despite their absence, we have assembled a sensational panel of highly accomplished scholars of the IR Middle East.
... [bios of participants here deleted]

The Middle East has been undeniably central to the great issues of world politics of the last 8 years:  from the failure of the Camp David peace summit to the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada and Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank, to 9/11 and the war on terror, to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the jockeying over the Iranian nuclear program, to anti-Americanism and the war of ideas, to the rise of sovereign wealth funds and the dramatic fluctuations in oil prices. Has the Middle East also been central to the academic discipline of International Relations?  Has the IR of the Middle East had anything to say to the wider public and foreign policy debates on these subjects?  

There are two distinct areas of concern:  engagement with policy debates and engagement with the academic discipline of International Relations.  Because the other panelists will have much to say about the policy dimension, I want to focus here instead on the academic field of IR.  How have Middle East specialists fared?   Does it matter?  What can be done?

First, the performance question.  I begin with the assumption that publication in top peer-reviewed academic journals is an important measure of performance in the field.  Books are certainly important in IR, and -- as I discuss at greater length below -- other kinds of journals (policy oriented or Middle East focused) are important outlets for high-quality academic work on the subject.  Nevertheless, publication in top IR journals matters because of their centrality to the organization of the field and to hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.   Put bluntly, how can specialists in the International Relations of the Middle East get tenure at top universities if they can't/don't/won't publish in the top journals as perceived by the discipline?  The answer is they can't, don’t, and won't. And then who will mentor the next generation of academic specialists in the field?

With the help of Rachel Whitlark, a graduate student at GWU, I did a systematic search of the IR journal literature over the last seven years: all articles published about the Middle East in the ten leading peer-reviewed academic IR journals (International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Perspectives, International Studies Review, Security Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, World Politics, and Journal of Conflict Resolution).   The findings are stark:  the IR of the ME – especially by MESA members -  is alarmingly slight -- and shows little sign of increasing.

What is the “appropriate” level?  I suggest using the contents of the leading policy journal Foreign Affairs as a proxy for what matters to the foreign policy community:  about 20% of all articles published there since 2001 have dealt with the Middle East.   By comparison, overall, 220 out of 2088 articles in the 10 academic IR journals dealt in some way with the Middle East – about 10.5%.    Of those, a very significant number were large-n studies in which Middle East cases appeared in the dataset but were not primarily about the Middle East.  In the leading journal International Organization, for instance, 42 out of 49 "Middle East" articles fell into this category.   What is more, a substantial number of the Middle East themed articles in such journals were actually comparative in focus, not IR.    Focusing only on articles in academic IR journals which primarily focus on the International Relations of the Middle East – using any methodology, and defined very broadly – left 154, less than 7.5%.   

Of those 154,  the vast majority employed quantitative or formal  methodologies which required no regional expertise, or were written by generalists relying exclusively on secondary sources.    I would wager that the number of these articles written by MESA members - a proxy for "regional expertise" which this audience at least may accept -  is in the low double digits. Adding in the generalist journals makes it worse:  in APSR, AJPS and JOP there were 5 out of 1255 articles coded – generously – as IR ME.  If I wanted to be apocalyptic, I would include these and drop the tally to less than 5%.  (Note:  while we did not code for this, Oded Haklai reports that he conducted a similar exercise for other regional area studies and found that the Middle East underperformed those, as well.)  I had hoped to see a time lag/ pipeline effect, and that more research would begin appearing after graduate students finished their dissertations and older faculty retooled.   But there is no noticable trend towards more articles on IRME topics – if anything, they have fallen off.

Does this matter?  I think it does -- and not just for the problems noted above about the effects on the field and prospective students.  The academic discipline is the incubator not only of talent but also of new ideas, presumably more insulated from the pressures of the headlines and the demands of partisanship.   It establishes the theoretical frameworks and methodologies and norms which will dominate the academic discipline and set the future of the profession.   There are also important intellectual costs of the exclusion of area specialists from the mainstream of the field.   For just one example, take the study of al-Qaeda:  the overwhelming majority of the articles published in the IR journals about this issue treat it as a problem of “terrorism” – some quite creatively and interestingly, using formal or quantitative or comparative methods, but failing to consider the wider sociological, intellectual or political context from which AQ emerged, lacking the language skills to grapple with the texts or the contexts.  

But here I offer a caveat.  Most MESA members would probably agree that it is a problem that people are writing about the Middle East without deep understanding of culture, history, language, politics.  But that position is not universally shared.  It needs to be defended by demonstrating exactly what is missed by those lacking such background or skills.  What trends, causal mechanisms, actors, or evidence are area specialists adding that others do not or can not?   I do not agree with those who believe that  local knowledge should take the place of theory or with those who prioritize general theory over local knoweldge.  Both are needed. But it is the particular burden of the area specialists in the configuration of today's academic disciplines to demonstrate their indispensibility -- not simply to assume it. 

Why is it so hard for Middle East specialists to navigate the IR field?   We’re all familiar with the ongoing, decades old arguments over parsimony vs empirical richness, policy relevance vs theory, and so on. And we’re all familiary with the vicious cycle:   training in leading departments, does not incentivize learning languages and extended field work, and well-meaning advisers likely warn students to focus on topics and methods which will get them published.  This ages old argument will not be resolved today.  But I would note that the subfield of Comparative Politics has done much better than the subfield of International Relations in recent years -- suggesting that the answer can not lie exclusively in the problems of training, in the nature of the region, or in the difficulty of doing research in the region.

One problem distinct to the field of IR is probably the nature of the leading journals.  Where those working on comparative politics can find a comfortable home in disciplinary journals such as Comparative Politics or Comparative Political Studies with work on core topics such as democratization and authoritarianism, civil society and social movements, and so forth, IR scholars working on the Middle East seem to be consistently farther from the expectations of the leading journals.   I do not think that editors are biased against the Middle East – indeed, anecdotally, many of them would love to see relevant articles but are not getting "acceptable" submissions.  But what is deemed “acceptable” is largely dictated by disciplinary norms.  In many of the leading journals there is a strong bias towards formal and quantitative methodologies which do not play to the strengths of most MESA members, and which would require asking different questions than we might prefer to ask.   The more qualitatively oriented journals fall into two main categories:  highly theoretical journals oriented towards disciplinary, non-regional concerns (EJIR, RIS) or else security oriented journals (SS, IS).  The former publish very few Middle East articles, while the latter publish quite a lot of Middle East articles which naturally cluster around the security concerns of the day -  Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq war, al-Qaeda (but defined as terrorism, not as an Islamist phenomenon) – and are often written from an ‘external’ perspective.  

One response is to cast a pox on their house – why try to publish in journals which are not receptive and which can be frustrating, especially when policy journals -- with fast turnaround times, eager editors, and real-world impact -- beckon? I’ve already outlined the reasons why this is not a productive response.  But it’s nevertheless a common one – especially for those of us with tenure who can get away with it!    Many of us now publish our “IR of the ME” work in policy journals or as think tank papers or in the many fine Middle East focused journals, and avoid the leading journals – something to which I myself plead guilty, and in which I see considerable value.   But even if such writing helps our engagement with the policy debate, it also contributes to the problem of under-representation within the discipline.  Senior scholars in the subfield need to make more effort not only to help our students publish in these journals - we also need to publish in these journals ourselves to carve out the intellectual and disciplinary space for such articles.

Part of problem is that IR itself is in a bit of a funk right now - the grand paradigm wars have passed, the top journals are dominated by methods-driven studies.    Perhaps this should be seen as an opportunity for us to try to change this.   I would point to some success stories:    the growth of the insurgencies and civil wars literature, which has opened door to qualititaive and locally informed research in important ways;  the comparative politics of the ME, which has done much better at integrating itself into core concerns of the subfield.   What can our subfield learn from this?  Broadly speaking, we should do a better job of generating theoretical controversy:  develop our own set of interlocking, progressive debates with real world relevance and above all interesting puzzles which can be unlocked through innovative sources of data, theoretical approaches, counter-intuitive hypotheses  and unexpected comparisons.   As Greg Gause more pithily put it, argue with each other -- not political polemics, but analytical arguments which can sustain a series of related articles attacking a question from multiple perspectives.

Here are some practical suggestions of where such fights of broad disciplinary concern might be found:

•  Globalization:  The Middle East is too often dismissed as "outside globalization."  That's wrong.   As I've argued in a recent chapter in a volume edited by Jon Kirschner, aside from trade the Middle East is at the heart of globalization:  information and communications technology, the movement of peoples, finance.   Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are each leading examples of transnational networks taking advantage of the changes driven by globalization – their adaptations and evolution could usefully be evaluated in the context of global civil society, transnational advocay networks, and globalization writ large.  Middle Eastern societies are unfortunately a key source of the international movement of peoples, from migrant labor to Iraqi refugees.  The region is also rotten with the kinds of black markets and illicit movements tracked by, say, Peter Andreas in the Balkans.    By attacking such questions through the lens of globalization, scholars of the IR of the Middle East could move that literature in genuinely new directions.
• Comparative regionalism:  Recent work by Etel Solingen and Peter Katzenstein demonstrates the potential of serious comparisons of the political and economic experience of different regions.  But most of those studies begin from Europe and Asia and then work outwards - what would be changed by seriously beginning from the Middle East's experience as a thoroughly penetrated sub-region (using Binder's old term) with broad social/political-cultural integration but state-level competition and anemic international organizations? 
• Wars of Ideas:   Al-Qaeda and other Islamists are also quintessentially constructivist actors:  motivated by moral ideas and engaging in persuasive argument in the international realm, waging ‘wars of ideas’ against the dominant international society.  Arab states have pushed back with their own ideological campaigns, while the U.S. has waged its well-advertised "war of ideas" with variable success.   Constructivists should be all over this, but have not generally been.   A lot of my work lies here, but there's plenty of untapped opportunities to argue here about how ideas operate and how they matter. 
•  Imperium and polarity:  The Middle East lies at the heart of the American dominated international system, and should be a crucial area to explore the dynamics of ‘imperium’ or unipolarity or hegemony from the bottom up.  The contrast between deep popular opposition to American foreign policy and America's seemingly stable alliances with virtually every state in the region cries out for analytical attention.    The American order described by, say, John Ikenberry looks very different from the vantage point of the Middle East, with its quarter million troops and deep involvement in sustaining political order in most countries in the region.  Work by Dan Nexon or Alex Cooley might be a good starting point to rethink the relationship between the region and the international order.  
• Regional power shifts:  some of the best recent work on the IR of the Middle East has been focused on alliances - Greg Gause's work on the Gulf, Curt Ryan's new book on Jordan, Ben Miller's book on regional security, and a variety of works focused on "regime security" concerns.  How do these theories stand up to the massive changes in the regional balance of power of the last few years - the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the rise of Iran, the vast amounts of money pouring into the Gulf.  
• Global power shifts:  If global power and economic weight continues to shift East, to China and India, how will this affect the Middle East?  Will the Gulf continue to be an American lake indefinitely?  Will the Middle East be a leading or a trailing indicator of global power shifts?   Where would we look to see this happening?

There's much more to be suggested here, of course - these are just some suggestions of where specialists in the IR of the Middle East might be able to tap into and reshape major arguments within the discipline at large.   My hope is that this can trigger a heightened focus on the problems of the subfield so that ten years from now we do not return for what Greg Gause calls another round of our ritual self-flagellation.  

MESA 2007

Just back from Montreal, after a quick one and a half day cameo appearance at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association.  I seem to have brought back a nasty bug with me - should I blame Canada or MESA?   Ugh.  "Friends", I blame all of you. 

The highlight of the conference for me was presenting the annual Malcolm Kerr award for best dissertation in the social sciences.   The dissertation award is named in honor of Malcolm Kerr, author of The Arab Cold War - still one of the best books written on Arab international relations after all these years - and father of NBA star Steve Kerr.  In 1984, while President of the American University of Beirut, Kerr was shot to death in his office, a murder for which the Islamic Jihad group took credit.  I served on the committee last year and chaired it this year, which has meant reading about 20 of the best Middle East themed dissertations in the social sciences over the last two years.  A lot of good stuff out there.    Last year's winner was Columbia University's Mona el-Ghobashy for her study of human rights and judicial activism in Egypt. This year's winner was Max David Weiss of Stanford University's History Department, for his study of the evolution of sectarianism in the Shia community of Lebanon during the French Mandatory Period.  Look for both to be great books soon.   

The emotional highlight of the session came during the thunderous standing ovation as Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive, walked down the aisle to accept the annual award from the Committee on Academic Freedom for his tireless efforts to salvage those essential institutions. 

In case anyone cares (and if not, stop reading!), I wasn't presenting any papers this year, but I chaired a panel and dropped in on three others.  My panel featured papers on Israeli foreign policy in the late 1950s-early 1960s, the Carter Administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Moroccan foreign  policy (the combination sort of made sense).  I sat in on a panel of mainstream political science which would have looked quite at home at the APSA, with papers on why opposition parties participate in obviously hopeless elections, Jordanian public opinion towards democracy and authoritarianism, and NGO pathologies.  In the afternoon, I sat in on part of my colleague Dina Khoury's panel on the difficulties of writing oral histories in and about Iraq.  I missed the panel focused on Steve Heydeman's "Upgrading Authoritarianism" paper, but since Pete Moore and Jason Brownlee's rather ferocious critiques got hashed out at some length ahead of the panel on both Sunday and Monday nights I feel like I was there.  But I await a field report:  any casualties?

By far the most interesting panel I saw was the last, featuring a number of young European scholars who have recently conducted fieldwork in Saudi Arabia. Stephane Lacroix offered a fascinating account of the organizational and mobilizational role of the jama'at (Islamic groups) in Saudi politics, Thomas Hegghammer spoke about the externalization of jihadist violence in Saudi Arabia, Amalie le Raynard Amélie Le Renard (thanks for the correction) spoke about the rapidly changing ways in which young Saudi women can use public space, and Stefan Hertog spoke about the role of wasta in the Saudi economy and political system (Bernard Haykal and Greg Gause commented).   Some fascinating material there, the fruits of solid fieldwork in a country which has not in the past been particularly open to such research. There were a number of other political science panels that I missed since I was only there for a day, which covered topics ranging from Islamist movements to Gulf security to Islamic political thought.  Anyone who was there feel free to chime in with their votes for most interesting panels... self-promotion discouraged!

That's about it - no particular fireworks, scarcely a sign of the variously "outrageous" stuff which MESA critics like to fulminate against, just fairly mainstream political science covering a good range of important topics by scholars who know the region well, and the usual conference conversation about Middle East politics and academic rumor-mongering on the margins.   Maybe I just hang with the wrong crowd. 

MESA blogging panel

I just got back from the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting.  I didn't actually see much of it, less than half of one panel (other than my own).  Our blogging panel was very well attended - thanks everyone for coming! - with a large room pretty much filled.   It ran from 5:00 to 7:00, which is very late by Aardvark Standard Time.  What's worse,  I was the last speaker, so I was pretty exhausted by the time I took the podium.  Plus, as I expected, the first five speakers used up most of the obvious points, so I ended up ditching most of my prepared remarks.    All of which is just a way of saying that I was kind of freestylin up there, on not a lot of sleep. 

I can only briefly summarize what my co-panelists said (Asad AbuKhalil, Helena Cobban, Juan Cole, and Josh Landis, along with organizer Layla Hudson). Asad remarked that blogs are essentially a narcissistic and personal exercise, and talking about them is twice as bad - I have to agree - and then went on to make some very interesting points about what blogs can and can't achieve (he's much more pessimistic than am Josh, Juan or I about the importance or influence of blogs).  Helena talked about the virtues of blogging as a form of networked communication, and pointed out some gender inequalities and status hierarchies in the blogosphere (I somewhat disagree about the latter point: while there are obvious hierarchies in the blogosphere, conventionally measured academic "status" only gets you so far in blogging compared to producing quality content on a regular basis).  Juan and Josh mostly talked about their own blogs (Josh had some particularly hilarious anecdotes, and a refeshing honesty about some of the reasons why people blog), and both did a good job of showing the routes by which blogs can become influential (through journalists, through policymakers, through particular academic or policy communities, through generous links from major "hub" bloggers).      

Me, I actually didn't talk much about Abu Aardvark at all.  Instead, I focused on two things:  why there aren't more MESA bloggers, and the relevance of Arab bloggers rather than just American academics writing about the Middle East.  At least I think I did - like I said, I was freestyling and talking real fast.  One point which I forgot to throw in was about the competing demands of different audiences:  what impresses other academics will not be the same as what impresses policy audiences or wider general blog-reading publics or readers from the countries you're writing about, and scholar-bloggers have to think carefully about who they are trying to reach and why. 

I pointed out out that all of us on the panel had started our blogs by fall 2002.  Why hadn't a new generation of Middle East studies bloggers emerged to replace join us?  Maybe because the critics of MESA are right, and Middle East studies scholars just don't have much to add to the public debate.  I don't think that's true, though - I know how much quality knowledge about the region was at the conference, and in the room, and how much they could add to the blogosphere if they chose to.   Maybe they've all just got better things to do, but - I argued - the internet is of growing importance in shaping public debate and even policy in areas we care about, and if experts don't engage then they just cede the field to others with less (or different) expertise.  Or, more bluntly, they can't cry about the state of public debate about the Middle East if they refuse to take part in that debate.   

But most of the answer, I suggested, was that the first five speakers had presented an overly rosy picture of academic blogging.   Now, I'm as big a fan of blogging as anyone, and blogging has been very good to me, but it's important to have a balanced perspective on the risks and costs, as well as benefits, of academic blogging.   I mentioned the various rounds of intense public criticism that Juan and Josh had received, and the ways in which blog-fed firestorms could threaten scholars, especially junior scholars without tenure, or at least consume huge amounts of their time and energy.    I mentioned the very real time commitments that blogging entails - no matter how many synergies you can create between your research and your blogging (and I create a lot of them), time spent on blogging is time spent not doing other potentially productive scholarly activities.  Bloggers' energies can be diverted into policy-relevant work which isn't conducive to long-term research projects.  Even the best blogging just doesn't rate compared to a peer-reviewed publication... and probably shouldn't.   Blogging often means writing fast, and that can mean making mistakes - horrors! -  especially if you venture outside your areas of expertise... and academics sometimes live in fear of making such mistakes.    Bottom line: I feel uncomfortable advising  junior scholars, who I think are probably best placed to become great bloggers, to take those risks.

That led to a little debate about psuedonymous blogging.  I pointed out that some of the best newer Middle East-focused bloggers have been pseudonymous, such as Baheyya and Badger.  So was I, pre-tenure.  While that's one way to get past the problems above, it's only temporary - at some point, pseudonymous bloggers will have to go public if they want to get past a certain threshold of getting the most out of their work.  Asad thought that bloggers should write under their own names, and be brave enough to state their opinions openly.  That's a fine sentiment, if you have tenure, and I don't feel comfortable imposing that standard on others who might pay the price.   But I did say that pseudonymity was only a thin shield.  Eventually, if you blog long enough on an area of your academic specialty, people will figure it out.  That can get you into trouble if you use the shield of anonymity to say silly things or launch wild attacks on people - so pseudonymous scholar-bloggers should always work on the assumption that their identities will eventually be revealed whether they like it or not.

Then I tried to convince people to contribute to qahwa sada under their real names, despite everything which I had just said.  I will just note that I did point out the obvious flaws in this rhetorical strategy.

The other major thrust of my talk was to point to Arab and Iranian and other bloggers from within the region.  I spent a lot of my time at the podium urging the audience to pay attention to Arab bloggers, many of whom offered sharp, savvy political analysis in both English and Arabic.  These folks can represent themselves and speak for themselves, and don't need North American based scholars to do it for them - what they need is for people to pay attention to them, which is why I try to link to them as much as I can and why I spent so much of my talk touting them.   I rattled off a bunch of names off the top of my head (Chanad Bahraini and Mahmood's Den from Bahrain, a bunch of Egyptians, Khalaf and Batir and Nas from Jordan, Ahmed from Saudi Jeans, a few others - please don't hate me if I didn't mention you, I was tired), and then suggested a few starting points: itoot, which selects what they consider to be the best blogs and top posts of the day;  Global Voices Online;  dwwen, a fairly new aggregator;  Jordan Planet and other national aggregators.

All in all, not exactly the talk I had planned to give, but perhaps people enjoyed it.  I was gratified to see such a large audience for a panel about blogs, which hopefully is a sign of positive things to come.  Hopefully I'll go back and add links to this post later...
 

Strategic Languages

Inside Higher Ed has an overview of recent developments in the plan to involve the Pentagon in increased funding for 'strategic languages' such as Arabic.  At the time the article went to press, the details had not yet been released as to where the Department of Defense would be involved, and where the State Department or Department of Education would take the lead.  Still, there's enough there to trigger a lot of the ongoing debates about the appropriateness of a military role in language training. 

I recognize the merit of many of the arguments against such a role for the Defense Department in language training.  It can distort the priorities of those offering and seeking language instruction in ways which might not fit an institution's curricular or educational mission.  While the Defense Department has some outstanding language instruction programs, education really isn't its core mission.   And the dangers to graduate students who have received such funding when they go out into the field shouldn't be minimized.   Those raising objections to a Defense role in funding language training in the universities should not be dismissed as a bunch of anti-American hysterics.

All that said, I have always been a (qualified) supporter of increased government funding for 'strategic languages' such as Arabic and Chinese, whatever the source.    When the Middle East Studies Association's business meeting discussed a statement by the board of directors which "URGES that its members and their institutions not seek or accept         program or research funding from NSEA unless the above-stated concerns         are fully addressed", I voted with Greg Gause and others to remove any such advisory language and instead leave decision up to individual departments or universities.  I just feel that the urgent need for better language training outweighs the concerns over the possible abuse or negative externalities of Defense-funded programs.

Look at the three big objections I mentioned above.  First, that it could distort the curriculum.   It could, but if departments and institutions make their own choice as to whether to accept the funding then this doesn't seem as serious a problem.  I would expect that other factors, such as student demand and the faculty or administration view of the curriculum will have a greater impact on choices about offering these languages - and the availability of government money (Defense or otherwise) would enter into the equation later.    My experience at Williams (a rather wealthy liberal arts college) may not be typical, but perhaps it's instructive.

At Williams, I and several of my colleagues had been urging the administration to offer Arabic language instruction almost from the day I got here in 1998.   They were sympathetic (Williams already has one of the premiere Chinese language programs in liberal arts colleges, ably overseen as part of the Asian Studies program by my next door neighbor Sam Crane) but raised a number of very legitimate objections, such as whether there would be enough demand to sustain a multi-year program, or would we end up throwing a lot of resources at two or three students a year.  After 9/11, student demand for Arabic language instruction skyrocketed, and last year almost a dozen students took Arabic through the "Critical Languages Program" - essentially, teaching yourself through tapes and meeting an instructor once a week.  Then, we lucked in to Armando Vargas, a Bolin fellow in Comparative Literature who was exceptionally well qualified to teach Arabic as well.   The administration showed responsiveness to faculty and student demands, and some creativity, in finding a way to hire him in a new tenure track line.   This year, he has more than 20 students enrolled in an introductory Arabic sequence, with a bunch of students going off in the summer or next year to study Arabic abroad.   Moral of the story (besides that Williams did well here):  faculty support for Arabic instruction and demonstrated student demand, along with a curricular commitment across the College to international studies, made the difference.   Offers of government funding, whatever their source, would have been gravy. 

The second objection is whether the Pentagon has any business getting in to education.  To me, this is overwhelmingly a question which comes down to the details. I would be opposed to any program at the college level which required military service after graduation - I don't object to ROTC, but taking language courses when there are no other alternatives available on campus should not carry the same kind of commitments.  I would also be very much opposed to any role for the Pentagon in overseeing the content of the language instruction, or in the hiring or tenuring of the instructors.   If the Pentagon wanted to administer some kind of test at the end of the classes to make sure that students were learning their Chinese or Arabic adequately, that would be fine - it's their money, after all - but that's the only legitimate role I could see for it in the actual instruction part. 

Finally, will this stigmatize and even endanger students in the field?  Well, frankly, yes it probably will - but I doubt it really makes much difference.  When I was a graduate student, I was always asked my source of funding - always.  I always answered honestly - Cornell University, the Social Science Research Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and so forth.  But I always assumed that some subset of the people I was interviewing thought I was lying and that I was really a spy.  There's no way around that.  I think that transparency is better than subterfuge, overall, and that open Defense funding for Arabic instruction - with well-defined guidelines - wouldn't be much more dangerous than already existing suspicions. 

Bottom line?  I think that American students learning languages such as Chinese and Arabic is an unqualified good.  Once they have those skills, students will take them wherever their conscience and available paychecks lead - to the military, to the State Department (maybe even to staff those all important public diplomacy television response teams I'm always calling for), to academia, to think tanks, to business, wherever.   I would want to see clear guidelines and institutional safeguards to prevent the Pentagon from exercising direct control over the programs, and I would not want students to be forced into signing a de facto ROTC agreement in order to get the language training.  But as long as such safeguards could be negotiated, I'm in favor of a Strategic Languages Program. 

Arab public opinion on terrorism

Fares Braizat, a researcher at Jordan's premiere political research center, the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan in Amman, presents some findings from surveys in five Arab countries "to assess Arabs’ perceptions of what constitutes terrorism" in today's Open Democracy.  Among the most important of his findings:

"Respondents were asked to indicate whether they considered each a “terrorist organisation” or a “legitimate resistance organisation” On average, across country and sample categories, around 90% of respondents labelled The Islamic Jihad Movement, Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Hizbullah as “legitimate resistance organisations.” The exception here is Lebanon, where a lower but still significant two thirds defined them as “legitimate resistance organisations”.

Respondents saw a distinct difference between the organisations listed above and al-Qaeda, yet still significant numbers across the survey considered it also to be a “legitimate resistance movement”, although the results vary widely from country to country: 8% in Syria, 18% in Lebanon and 41% in Egypt saw it as a “legitimate resistance movement”. In Palestine and Jordan the figure is around two thirds. In Jordan there is a tendency to define al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization as levels of exposure increase: it was higher for business sample (33%) and higher still for media samples (48%). Generally there is a clear trend among respondents to answer this question with “do not know” or “refuse to answer”. For example, within national samples, 19% in Jordan, 49% in Syria, 27% in Lebanon, 21% in Palestine and 20% in Egypt indicated one of these two responses.  For Lebanon, 54% in the national sample,(62% of university students, 53% in the business sample and 58% in the media sample) defined al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization. Looking at Lebanese national sample data by religion, 56% of Muslims and 88% of Christian respondents defined al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization. Interestingly, however, both groups defined Islamic Jihad, Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Hizbullah as legitimate resistance organizations."

Braizat's team then asked about 14 different specific acts, and asked whether or not they should be considered "terrorism".   

*The attacks on 9/11 were labeled "terrorism" by 73% in Lebanon, 71% in Syria, 62% in Egypt, but only 35% in Jordan and 22% in Palestine - those last numbers, especially in Jordan, are pretty startling.   
*Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza is considered "terrorism" by a huge margin, ranging from 88% in Lebanon to 97% in Syria.   
*American led coalition activities in Iraq are labeled terrorism by 86% of Jordanians, 94% of Syrians, and 64% of Lebanese. 
*Attacks on US military personnel in Iraq are seen as terrorism by 18% of Jordanians, 9% of Syrians, 28% of Lebanese, 9% of Palestinians, and 14% of Egyptians.
*The bombing of the UN building in Baghdad is seen as terrorism by 48% of Jordanians, 78% of Syrians, 80% of Lebanese, 36% of Palestinians, and 61% of Egyptians. 
*The hotel bombing in Morocco:  50% of Jordanians, 72% of Syrians, 75% of Lebanese, 30% of Palestinians, and 73% of Egyptians.    
*When asked generically about killing civilians, Arabs disapproved:  88% of Lebanese, 85% of Syrians, 77% of Egyptians, 76% of Jordanians, and 64% of Palestinians. 

I would want to know more about the samples and methodology and all that - especially in Syria - but I thought I would just pass on these interesting results from Braizat's surveys.  They show pretty clearly the enormous gap in perceptions between Arab and Western publics about what should be considered terrorism -  as well as some interesting variations across Arab countries, and some important points of possible agreement across the Arab-American divide.   

Public/Private Arab Politics

As you may know, the impact of growing publicity in Arab political life is an ongoing obsession of mine.  So I found this bit from the Forum on the Future absolutely priceless:

"The highly choreographed, three-and-a-half hour event was supposed to be closed to the public, with the exception of a few opening statements, most of them from Western leaders. But Moroccan officials failed to turn off the audio feed to the press room. As a result, the Arab foreign ministers inveighed against the West apparently unaware that several dozen journalists were listening."

What's interesting about this is a couple of things.

First:  usually, the argument is that Arab leaders grandstand against the West in public, but are highly cooperative with the United States in private.  This little anecdote turns this on its head.  If the Foreign Ministers thought they were in private, why all the anti-Western big talk?   If there wasn't nobody there but us chickens, as the old joke goes, what was the point? 

Second:  the "highly choreographed" part.  One of the most important things about al Jazeera and its imitators, I've always argued, is that precisely that it foregoes the choreography in favor of spontaneous, open public argument.  I remember Christopher Ross, the main US point-person for dealing with Arab public opinion, once commenting that he found such an uncontrolled environment uncomfortable, and much preferred settings where he could simply lay out the American perspective and largely control the agenda.   The Forum on the Future seems to reflect those priorities - the preferences of powerful states that want to control the agenda - while shutting out the raucous, diverse, and unpredictable voices of the public.   What a perfect metaphor for the shortcomings of current American democratic reform promotion. 

Third:  "Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an opening statement to the group on Saturday, spoke of efforts to make "participation in political and public life more inclusive," the ostensible subject of the conference.  Nonetheless, one by one, representatives of 20 Arab states talked largely about economic development and the ever-present thorn in debate here, the Arab-Israeli conflict."   Two points here:  as I noted over the weekend, the Bush administration seems to have given in to the preference of Arab dictators to talk about economic development rather than political change;  no surprise there.   As the LA Times put it, "There has been concern in the Arab world that the U.S. would attempt to use the forum to impose its political will on the region."   Turns out they didn't have to worry.  And second, the Arab-Israeli conflict really does matter in American-Arab relations, no matter how many times conservatives insist that it does not.  It does.  The fact that anti-American sentiments in the region have skyrocketed to unprecedented levels has real political implications, again no matter how many times conservatives insist that it does not. 

More later, after I've had a chance to look over the Arab press.

UPDATE: Well, I was planning to write more about how the Forum for the Future was being covered in the Arab media, but the truth is that it isn't being much covered at all - which is, in itself, perhaps the most damning fact. On most sites, the Forum is below the fold - not on the front page, if covered at all. I found nothing at all in al Sharq al Awsat, an interior (non-cover) story in al Hayat, a brief non-headlined report on al Jazeera, nothing on al Arabiya. Where it is discussed, it takes the form of "just as we expected, no real commitment to or action on real reform." So, "damp squib" seems to be the best characterization of the Forum, at least in the Arab media.

Cairo Anti-Mubarak Protest

Issandr el Amrani writes: "

"I’ve just returned from the first demonstration ever to take place against Mubarak’s rule — a significant milestone in the evolution of Egypt’s pro-democracy movement.

"There were some 500 activists, mostly from left-wing groups and human rights organizations, who gathered near the highest appellate court in the land in Downtown Cairo — the same place that overturned the verdict against Saad Eddin Ibrahim a couple of years ago.

"As usual, they were surrounded by an incredible number of black-clad troops from Central Security, the riot-control police, who must have been in the thousands around the demo and in the surrounding streets."

There's a lot more there - like with Chana'd Bahraini's great on the ground coverage of the Khawaja protests over the last few months, this is really fascinating stuff. Amrani gives a bunch more details, and promises to have videos and more information posted soon.

(link fixed, thanks. El Amrani has added more details, too.)

Forum for the Future

Colin Powell is in Morocco today for the "Forum on the Future," a regional forum convened to explore issues of reform.   I don't have much substantive to say about it right now - more next week, no doubt - but I just wanted to pass on how it is being covered in some major media outlets:

Al Jazeera:  "The Forum for the Future Agrees on Reform From Within."  The web story features a nice picture of Colin Powell, and the story is carefully neutral but largely positive.   It describes the agenda as "taking steps on the path to reform and deepening democracy and dialogue and expanding  the realm of participation in political life";  it notes that the participants all "agree that successful reform must come from within societies and not be imposed from outside";  and it pointedly notes "the sovereign rights of every country do develop its own political and social system without intervention in its internal affairs." 

Al Arabiya:  "With Powell in attendance:  the beginning of the conference for spreading democracy in the Arab world;  Arabs:  America is not in a position to be giving 'lessons' to the Arab world."

Al Hayat:  "Forum for the Future for Arab reforms begins by 'marginalizing' civil society." 

Al Quds Al Arabi:  "No American objection to continuity or hereditary rule in Egypt... and fundamental reform for Saudi;  Also on the American agenda:  total escalation with Syria... Gaza is key to peace.. and support for Shia rule in Iraq."

The Saudi owned, pro-American Al Sharq Al Awsat rather oddly keeps the Forum for the Future off of the front page completely. 

In general, then, at least in the Arab view this is pretty much the opposite of what the neo-cons have been talking about for the last couple of years, and a big step back from the heady talk of pushing democracy in the Arab world.  It has taken in the criticisms and controversies sparked by the Greater Middle East Project earlier in the year, and is now emphasizing consultation with governments, and prioritizing "modernization", economic and institutional development, rather than immediate political reforms.  It seems to be taking the perspective of Arab governments, most of which are happy to talk about economic reform and have no real interest in political reform, and not that of Arab civil society.

But let's wait and see how it develops over the next few days before coming to any conclusions...

Palestinian election poll

FYI, without comment:  Khalil Shikaki's Center for Palestine Center for Policy Research and Studies has pre-released the findings of its latest poll about the Palestinian elections.   Here are the main findings: 

"The poll shows an emerging new reality in the Palestinian territories compared to the situation prevailing three months ago when we conducted our September 2004 poll. The most important changes indicate a more realistic atmosphere with a significant drop in the level of support for Hamas and a big increase in the level of support for Fateh. It is worth remembering that similar trends were observed in December 1995, one month before the first Palestinian elections in January 1996....

"The poll shows that if presidential elections were to take place today, the results would be close with Mahmud Abbas receiving 40% of the votes and Marwan Barghouti receiving 38%. Mustafa Barghouti would receive 6% while all the other candidates would receive a total of 3% for all of them combined. 13% have not decided yet. The poll shows Abbas winning in the Gaza Strip (48% vs. 34% for Marwan Barghouti). But Marwan Barghouti wins in the West Bank (40% vs. 35% for Mahmud Abbas). These results represent the voting intentions of those planning to participate in the vote on January 9, 2005. The findings show that the level of non-participation is going to be low (10%).

"Mahmud Abbas is seen as the candidate most capable of reaching a peace agreement with Israel, improving the economic conditions, and enforcing law and order. Marwan Barghouti is viewed as the candidate most capable of protecting the right of return. The public evaluation of the ability of the two candidates to maintain national unity and preventinternal infighting is similar for both.

"The poll shows a significant increase in the popularity of Fateh from 29% last September to 40% in this poll. The increase is higher in the Gaza Strip, from 24% to 38%. The popularity of Hamas drops in the total West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 22% last September to 18% in this poll. In the Gaza Strip, Hamas' popularity drops from 30% to 22%. The total level of support for all Islamists (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and independent Islamists) drops in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 32% to 24% during the same period."

Meeting with Egypt's opposition

Al Jazeera is reporting that the outspoken American ambassador to Egypt, David Welch, met with Rifa'at al Said, spokesman for the Egyptian opposition parties, yesterday.   Here's a short English language report;  othing about it on the US Embassy in Cairo web page yet;  nor has it turned up anywhere on Google News.   

According to Said, the meeting went on for several hours and ranged widely over questions of democracy in Egypt and the status of political reform.  This was the first (publicly acknowledged) meeting of the kind in many years - and, in my opinion, an important and positive step.  If this signals a more serious commitment to direct dialogue with the Egyptian opposition as part of a real pressures towards political reform, then good for David Welch and the State Department.   Rifa'at Said and the opposition have really been pushing lately for reforms such as finally lifting the period of 'state of emergency' which has been in force since Sadat's assassination in 1981, having genuinely contested Presidential elections rather than a referendum, allowing public opposition rallies, and invigorating the rule of law.

The typical sequence of events would now be a Mubarak crackdown, complete with a public offensive led by the state-owned media denouncing American interference in internal affairs, followed by American acquiescence and backing off. So let's hope that Welch's public meeting with Said is a signal of a new approach.  If the Bush administration is serious about promoting reforms, this seems like an important test case.   We'll see!