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2. Digital Activism and Authoritarian Adaptation in the Middle East
- Author:
- Larry Diamond, Eileen Donahoe, Ahmed Shaheed, Benjamin Greenacre, James Shires, Alexei Abrahams, Joshua Tucker, Xiao Qiang, Marwa Fatafta, Andrew Leber, Alexei Abrahams, Marc Owen Jones, Afef Abroughi, Mohamed Najem, Mahsa Alimardani, Mona Elswah, Alexandra A. Siegel, H. Akin Unver, Ahmet Kurnaz, Anita Gohdes, and Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld
- Publication Date:
- 08-2021
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- The Project on Middle East Political Science partnered with Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and its Global Digital Policy Incubator for an innovative two week online seminar to explore the issues surrounding digital activism and authoritarianism. This workshop was built upon more than a decade of our collaboration on issues related to the internet and politics in the Middle East, beginning in 2011 with a series of workshops in the “Blogs and Bullets” project supported by the United States Institute for Peace and the PeaceTech Lab. This new collaboration brought together more than a dozen scholars and practitioners with deep experience in digital policy and activism, some focused on the Middle East and others offering a global and comparative perspective. POMEPS STUDIES 43 collects essays from that workshop, shaped by two weeks of public and private discussion.
- Topic:
- Security, Civil War, Government, Human Rights, Science and Technology, Infrastructure, Authoritarianism, Political Activism, Democracy, Media, Inequality, Social Media, Surveillance, Borders, Digital Culture, and Cyberspace
- Political Geography:
- Russia, China, Middle East, and North Africa
3. Urban Rights and Local Politics in Egypt: The Case of the Maspero Triangle
- Author:
- Dina Wahba
- Publication Date:
- 01-2020
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- In my visit to Egypt in late March 2018, two things were happening simultaneously: the demolition of Maspero Triangle, the neighbourhood I have been working on for my case study, and the re-election of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi for his second term. There was a big campaign banner, one of many engulfing Cairo, with El Sisi’s face and the slogan “You are the hope”. This banner on 6th of October bridge was overlooking the neighbourhood as the bulldozers were hard at work demolishing what was for years the homes of over 4000 families spanning generations. I was in a taxi trying inconspicuously to take pictures of the banner and wondering what my interlocutors would say when I ask them about how they view this promise of hope overlooking the destruction of their homes. I was also marvelling at the almost nonsensical sequence of events. In 2011 Maspero was one of the most militant neighbourhoods, among many in downtown and old Cairo (Ismail 2013), that defended the occupation of Tahrir Square. As it was adjacent to Tahrir, it played a crucial role in sustaining the square during the first 18 days of the uprising. Seven years after the revolution, the neighbourhood was faced with complete erasure. How did we get here? I argue for the productivity of looking at Egyptian politics through the lens of affect as a possible way to answer this question. As Laszczkowski and Reeves argue in their edited book Affective States (2017) “Affect is at the heart of those moments when the political catches us off guard or when it leaves us feeling catatonically suspended, wondering where we are, how we even go there, and when this became so ordinary”. In this paper, I examine one such moment: the demolition of Maspero neighbourhood that coincided with the re-election of Abd El Fattah El Sisi in early 2018. I investigate state-society relations and the shifts throughout those moments by looking at how one neighbourhood negotiated their survival that culminated in their removal. Much like the wider socio-political context in Egypt and the story of the Egyptian revolution itself, Maspero is a story of a negotiated failure. A youth-led movement that demanded basic rights, exhausted various political tactics to lobby the government and failed the bigger fight, but scored some victories, such as the ability of some 900 families to come back to Maspero after the development project is over. I argue that Maspero can uncover much about the wider political tribulations since 2011. The case offers a lens through which we can see political openings and opportunities, clampdowns and closures as well as the current regime’s agenda for ensuring that what happened on 25 January 2011 does not happen again. I claim that one of the tactics of the regime is to systematically deconstruct the politics of the urban subaltern that played a major role in the revolution (Ismail 2013) through urban reconfiguration as well as new and old methods of affective co-optation and coercion. In her analysis of state-society relations, Cilja Harders argues that “political science tends to privilege macro-level perspectives” rendering the urban subaltern as only passive subjects of political transformations (Harders 2003). I argue that this has not changed in analysing the aftermath of the revolution. Few studies discussed the role of the urban poor in the revolution; however, many scholars neglected the politicisation of the urban subaltern when analysing transformation (or lack thereof) in Egyptian politics in the last few years. After eight years, the situation seems bleak and the task futile. To argue for any kind of change, let alone transformation, one must be blind to the strong backlash against any attempt to capitalise on the temporary gains of the revolution. The only story left to be told seems to be one of failure. The utter failure of a reformist movement to impose even partially its agenda for change (Bayat 2017). However, the case of Maspero neighbourhood and its youth alliance allow me to trace the revolution back into the everyday politics of citizens in a crushing struggle with the regime to examine whether the revolution disrupted informal traditional ways of doing politics. Rather than examine radical or even reformist regime or legal changes in national politics, I am interested in informal politics and its disruption. “It is in the local scale that power relations become tangible and abstract concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘politics’ observable” (Hoffmann, Bouziane & Harders 2013, 3). Building on the work of scholars of everyday politics, street politics and politics from below, I focus, therefore, on the street and, more specifically, Maspero, a neighbourhood adjacent to Tahrir Square that lived the revolution with all its tribulations, a neighbourhood that affected and was affected by the revolution. I find Salwa Ismail’s work on the role of the urban subaltern in the revolution productive in unpacking and tracing the “everyday” in the Egyptian revolution. “The infrastructures of mobilisation and protest lay in the microprocesses of everyday life at the quarter level, in their forms of governance and in the structure of feelings that developed in relation to state government” (Ismail 2012, 450). Ismail’s argument highlights the quarters or neighbourhoods as spatial political laboratories where the urban subaltern, through rigorous negotiations and “every day” encounters with the different arms of the state, accumulates knowledge about modes of governance and how to resist them. This was obvious in the role that the urban subaltern played in the revolution and was reflected in the narratives of my interlocutors and highlighted in some of the scholar’s accounts of the revolution. In Ismail’s (2012) account of the “backstreets of Tahrir”, she narrates several important “battles” in informal neighbourhoods that she believes were vital to the success of the revolution. These “battles” manifest the moment of convergence between locally grounded grievances and national revolutionary politics. “The account of the battles serves to draw attention to the place of popular quarters in the geography of resistance, and to the spatial inscription of popular modes of activism”. (Ismail 2012, 446) The importance of Ismail’s account is in linking popular resistance to the spatial characteristics of the quarter, which brings up the question of what will happen to popular resistance when the neighbourhood is gone. I argue that the removal of entire neighbourhoods has a political purpose, that of dismantling the political laboratories and crushing street politics. In discussing the battles in Tahrir, Bulaq Abu Al-Ila features prominently in sheltering activists, defending the occupation of the square and engaging in prolonged street fights that exhausted the police and kept it from reclaiming the square. Ismail (2012, 448) links the neighbourhood’s repertoire of contention to a history of patriotism that goes back to the resistance of the French colonial conquest, again highlighting a spatially bounded accumulation of generational knowledge and affective register of popular resistance. The aim of my endeavour is not just to highlight the role of the urban subaltern in the revolution and the subsequent politicisation and depoliticization and what one may learn from it. It is also to link this to what the state has been learning about countering any possible future mobilisation in order to foresee state strategies of radically altering the “every day” modes of governance and with it modes of resistance and to connect this to the urgency of urban restructuring processes happening in Cairo on an unprecedented scale since the 1990s. Asef Bayat (2012) explores the politics of the urban subaltern in “neoliberal cities” in an authoritarian regime. Bayat offers the concept of “social non-movements” to analyse street politics (2012, 119). According to him, the streets are vital to the urban subaltern: he writes that “[t]he centrality of streets goes beyond merely the expression of contention. Rather, streets may actually serve as an indispensable asset/capital for them to subsist and reproduce economic as well as cultural life” (2012, 119). Bayat describes the ongoing conflict over the public space between the state and the urban subaltern as “street politics” (Bayat 2009). These ongoing processes consequently create the “political street”, hence, politicising ordinary citizens through their struggles over urban space. Some of the questions that arise here and reflect the limitations of Bayat’s arguments in this point of history relate to what happens to “street politics” when the urban subaltern loses the “political street”. Reflecting on the case of Maspero neighbourhood, what happens to the politicisation and cultural and economic appropriation when they are relocated to Asmarat, a far-off gated community out of central Cairo? What happens to the politics of the urban poor when they lose their “capital”? And, what kind of political and spatial affects are tied to this dispossession? One of the challenges of studying Maspero was to understand the affective attachments that people had to the neighbourhood. Drawing from the literature on street politics and Asef Bayat’s notion of encroachment (2009), I could understand materially the reasons why forcefully displacing people from their homes could be traumatic. However, as I witnessed them mourn the neighbourhood it became clear to me that there are reasons beyond what this literature can offer. Here, affect theories can be helpful. Yael Navaro Yashin calls for “a reconceptualization of the relation between human beings and space” (2012, 16). Yashin critiques what she calls “the social-constructionist imagination” in its focus on conceptualising space only through what humans project on it. Building on Teresa Brennan’s work on the transmission of affect, Yashin argues for affective relationality between humans and their environment. However, she does not take an object-centred approach but combines the human subjective approach with one that explores that “excess” in the environment that she studies through the lens of affect. Yashin’s work on the collision of the phantasmatic and the material is essential in understanding the “affect” of the neighbourhood. According to Yashin, “the make-believe is real” (2012, 10). Reflecting on the case of Maspero, the affective attachments that the inhabitants of the neighbourhood developed was built around the material, the encroachment, and the social networks but moved beyond this. To them, Maspero is their country and their home. Below one of my research interlocutors, a male resident of Maspero in his 30s explains to me the attachment of the people to Maspero Triangle. “We belong to this place; it is part of us, and we are a part of it. This place holds our memories and childhood. This is something that officials never understood. But we felt it. In this place I used to play, when I am upset, I like to sit in this place and talk to my friends. We are attached to this place not just because it is close to our work. We are linked spiritually to this place; our hearts are attached to this place. I do not want to go out. I do not want to live even in Zamalek, which is very close to us. I do not want to live there. We are attached to this place.” Nigel Thrift (2007) argues that for the political importance of studying affect in cities and affective cities to trace how affect and cities interact to produce politics. The interactions between space, bodies and affect are linked to political consequences. Thrift goes further to point to the political engineering of affect in urban everyday life and what might seem to us as aesthetic is politically instrumentalised. This engineering of affect can have various political aims. To erase emotional histories, create new affective registers or mobilise old ones in urban settings through urban restructuring (Thrift 2007, 172). Thus, it is not farfetched to argue that the urban restructuring of cities is linked to eliciting or inhibiting political responses. The massive plan of the Egyptian government to drastically change downtown Cairo, a space that witnessed a revolution has interlinked political and affective goals. It aims at erasing the affective register of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and inhibits the politics of the urban poor.
- Topic:
- Human Rights, United Nations, Revolution, Urban, and Youth Movement
- Political Geography:
- Africa, North Africa, Egypt, and Maspero
4. Israel/Palestine: Exploring A One-State Reality
- Author:
- Marc Lynch, Michael Barnett, and Nathan Brown
- Publication Date:
- 07-2020
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- In October 2019, the Project on Middle East Political Science convened a workshop with more than a dozen scholars – Israelis, Palestinians, and others – to discuss the contours of this emergent one state reality. The essays in this collection represent an initial assessment of this reality, and many more will follow over the years to come. The authors each bring their own perspective and history, their own commitments and values, their own aspirations for the future, producing areas of agreement and disagreement. But all agree on the urgent need to recognize the Israeli-Palestinian reality for what it really is and to develop the theoretical language and conceptual tools to rigorously describe and compare that reality. We hope this collection makes a small contribution to the vibrant intellectual debates developing around these issues and joins those ongoing dialogues in a productive way.
- Topic:
- Civil Society, Human Rights, Territorial Disputes, Citizenship, Ethnicity, Mobility, Settler Colonialism, and Segregation
- Political Geography:
- Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Mediterranean, and West Bank
5. Strong Organization, Weak Ideology: Muslim Brotherhood Trajectories in Egyptian Prisons Since 2013
- Author:
- Abdülrahman Ayyash
- Publication Date:
- 04-2019
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- On 28 January 2011 – as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians demonstrated on the day dubbed the “Friday of Anger” – Muslim Brotherhood member, Sameh, was demonstrating with several thousand others in Mansoura in the Nile Delta (120 km north of Cairo). As demonstrators began to throw stones at the State Security Investigations building, Sameh stood in front of them shouting “peaceful”. He was hit in the chest by a stone meant to hit the building in one of the city's most prestigious neighbourhoods. Two years later, Sameh was arrested on an array of charges, including joining the Brotherhood and committing acts of violence against the state. A few months later, he told a friend waiting on death row that he considered the Muslim Brotherhood to be apostates and that he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (Daesh) and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Sameh's case is not unique. According to several detainees – including current prisoners spoken to over the phone – there are ongoing changes among detainees who have spent most of their lives as Muslim Brotherhood members. Egyptian prisons host tens of thousands of political detainees – perhaps more than 60,000 according to Human Rights Watch.2 Arrests have mainly targeted members of the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters. However, with increased armed attacks against the army and police, arrests have also targeted alleged supporters of Daesh, al-Qa’ida, and Islamists affiliated with smaller organizations. The Egyptian National Council for Human Rights documented prison overcrowding at a rate of at least 160%,3 forcing the authorities to build 20 new prisons since the military coup in the summer of 2013.4 Importantly, this has led to an increased exchange of influences and ideologies among detainees from diverse backgrounds. Detainees – those held after referral to the judiciary or sentencing – are often relocated during their detention, including frequent transfers to temporary detention centres during court hearings, or when brought before the Public Prosecution or for medical treatment. This further facilitates communication with different prison populations and discussion and exchange of ideas between detainees. This paper does not dwell upon traditional classifications imposed on Islamic movements in terms of moderate and extremist trends. Nor does it go into detail regarding the mechanisms of individual radicalization, though it does encourage further study. Instead, we focus on the developmental dynamics of Muslim Brotherhood youth and sympathizers in Egypt, especially those who were arrested during the breakup of sit-ins supporting former President Mohamed Morsi. Developmental dynamics refer to the conditions and contexts which Brotherhood members and sympathizers experience in prison. These inform broader understandings of issues including state and society relations, and social mobility through jihad as opposed to social mobility through the Brotherhood. This paper also discusses the ways in which the Muslim Brotherhood manages its members inside prison, and its attempts to maintain the Brotherhood's administrative and intellectual organization. It is based primarily on information collected during 10 rare phone interviews with current prisoners. It is also based on additional phone and face-to-face interviews with former prisoners inside and outside Egypt. The interviewees come from five different cities and have been in at least seven prisons, including Tora, Wadi al-Natroun, Mansoura and Gamasa; for security and technical reasons, it was not possible to expand the research cohort. The paper is also based on reviews of articles written by detainees, press reports, opinion pieces, and research papers dealing with the complex social phenomenon of the Muslim Brotherhood from different angles.
- Topic:
- Human Rights, Prisons/Penal Systems, Arab Spring, Protests, and Ideology
- Political Geography:
- Africa, North Africa, Egypt, and Mediterranean
6. Human Rights and the State in Morocco: Impact of the 20 February Movement
- Author:
- Rachid Chennani
- Publication Date:
- 04-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- The Moroccan state started to seriously interact with the human rights discourse in the early 1990s due to long domestic struggles by human rights advocates and global pressures to reform. At the same time, human rights organizations have developed and set aside much of their political lineage, taking up an active role in policy advocacy and pushing for alternatives to meet growing social and societal demands. The 2011 movement has revitalized the human rights approach to politics and social problems, and culminated a decades-long struggle to peacefully and gradually move to a social rights-based contract with the state. Such a state of affairs no longer seems far off.
- Topic:
- Human Rights and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Morocco
7. The State and Human Rights Organizations in Egypt: A Problem of Political Culture or a Structural Crisis?
- Author:
- Mohamed El Agati
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- The Egyptian state seeks to control civil society through laws and puts in place security measures to restrict its action, while civil society organizations, especially rights groups, deploy various strategies to ensure a minimal space for action. In this struggle, a solution lies not only in legislation enabling the participation of independent civil society but more in the opening of the political domain itself. In a context where the real danger lies in the continuation of a status quo that prevents the construction of a modern democratic state, civil society must build wider social and political network to enable it to influence state decisions and represent rights holders.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Egypt
8. Rights and Politics: Human Rights Action and Socio-economic Struggles in Tunisia
- Author:
- Hatem Chakroun
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- The interaction between Tunisian human rights organizations and movements struggling for economic and social rights present the former with hard questions and important challenges. Human rights actors need to scrutinize their role and tactics to decide whether they would remain in the fast eroding mediation level (between the movements and the state) or they could explore other avenues that can address the complex issues of representation and brokerage between human rights defenders and the bearers of these very rights who are busy developing new ways of defending themselves.
- Topic:
- Human Rights and International Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Tunisia
9. The Human Rights Movement and Contentious Politics in Egypt (2004-2014)
- Author:
- Amr Adly
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- The economic and social rights movement has struck some success in working with contentious movements to challenge public policies and institutions in Egypt. However, no organic relationship developed between the two. The contentious movement did not strategically adopt an economic and social rights framing that would have enabled it to get beyond its local, largely apolitical and un-institutionalized characteristics in favour of a nationwide platform.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Egypt
10. Tunisia: Human Rights Organizations and the State
- Author:
- Hatem Chakroun
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This paper seeks to describe and analyse in a contextual way how the relationship between human rights organizations and the State in Tunisia has evolved since independence. The establishment and consolidation of national State institutions after independence was the main obsession of the ruling political network in Tunisia. This dictated its antagonistic position and measures against pluralism and inclusion of various political groups, all of which had been once unified in the anticolonial struggle. After independence, this common objective disappeared and differences materialized regarding which political system and policies to adopt in order to building a modern nation-state in Tunisia. The consolidated regime of President Habib Bourguiba succeeded in imposing an authoritarian single-party political system, whose “legitimacy” rested on the anticolonial struggle, that controlled the state, to which all had to show loyalty. The autocratic political system continued after 1987 with the reign of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who presented a retooled authoritarian political vision. The human rights community represented by the Tunisian League for the Defence of Human Rights came under pressure as the State attempted to coerce it into adopting a tailored vision of human rights compatible with the logic of a dictatorship. Ben Ali regime had also set up a façade of commitment to human rights as expressed in various laws, about which he boasted on all occasions and political events with total disregard for systematic violations by repressive state bodies. After the fall of Ben Ali following a popular uprising that rejected repression and authoritarianism and expressed a popular longing for freedom and dignity, a new vision began to form of the relationship between the State and the human rights community in Tunisia. The starting point was very positive with long time human rights activists playing a central role in the process of establishing a vision for the new republic based on respect for the principles of human rights. However, the political contention among various political factions and higher state echelons, fuelled by varying ideologies and interests, has affected this relationship, which oscillated between harmony and dissonance.
- Topic:
- Human Rights, Social Movement, Protests, and NGOs
- Political Geography:
- Africa, North Africa, and Tunisia
11. Tunisia: Human Rights Organizations, Political Islam and its Groups
- Author:
- Mohamed Sahbi Khalfaoui
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- How can we understand the relation of political Islam in Tunisia with the human rights system in its indivisibility and universality? Since the establishment of the Tunisian Islamic Movement in the early seventies, it has worked extensively to articulate public positions addressing issues of human rights and freedoms. This relationship sprang from a dual position which juxtaposed full hostility to personal freedoms such as sexual rights and a relatively positive interaction with public freedoms. Then came the deliberations and process of ratification of the 2014 Constitution which was special in its emphasis on equality between women and men, freedom of belief, and criminalization of accusation of blasphemy. The repression of Islamists in Tunisia in the 1980s and 1990s was the most important factor that defined their position, views, and engagement with human rights principles. After the fall of former Tunisian President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali in 2011, the return of the Islamist Ennahda (Renaissance) Movement to public activity was one of the most important features of the new political phase in the country. The Tunisian society was split between supporters and opponents of such a development. With the return of Ennahda and the emergence of other Islamist groups, especially the Salafis, the debate resumed over the position of Islamists towards human rights. While they attempted to include Islamic law (Sharia) as the main source of legislation in the constitution, Islamists continued to declare their belief in human rights principles. Some analysts were optimistic concerning a transformation in the Islamist ideology, while others insisted that Islamists were duplicitous, waiting until they are empowered enough to impose their project, which is inherently hostile to human rights. This paper is an attempt to review the Islamists’ positions on human rights and how they changed over time.
- Topic:
- Human Rights, Islam, Constitution, and Islamism
- Political Geography:
- Africa, North Africa, Tunisia, Mediterranean, and Tunis
12. Islamists and Rights Activists in Egypt: The Potential for Convergence
- Author:
- Heba Raoul Ezzat
- Publication Date:
- 10-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- Animosity has been the keyword in the relationship between Islamists and rights advocates for most of the past few years in Egypt. Islamists turned a blind eye to many crimes committed by the regime and its security agencies between 25 January 2011 and mid-2013. On the other hand, some rights advocates took part in mobilizing and supporting the opposition movement that led to the June 2013 demonstrations and the military seizing power. However, the killings, executions, and other egregious rights violations, then the direct confrontation between the regime and rights groups culminating in a more restrictive NGO law, led rights defenders to take a firmer position, by condemning the regime, and monitoring and documenting its violations. More Islamists are expected to see an opportunity in resorting to human rights advocacy. As such, this would mean accepting more cooperation, especially in terms of monitoring and documentation through various initiatives and institutions established after 2013. Led by a new generation of actors, will this cooperation be free from ideological conflicts? The paper seeks to review, in broad brushstrokes, the contours and important turning points of the relationship between the two groups of actors and outline a possible future trajectory.
- Topic:
- Human Rights, International Cooperation, Islam, NGOs, and Repression
- Political Geography:
- Africa, United Nations, North Africa, Egypt, and Mediterranean
13. Governance and the Human Rights Movement in Morocco
- Author:
- Mohammad Tariq
- Publication Date:
- 12-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This paper concludes a series on governance and human rights action in North Africa. Written by Mohammad Tariq, it presents a preliminary analysis of the issues of governance in human rights organizations in Morocco. Such a research faces methodological and practical impediments stemming from the scarcity of information on funding flows and other governance issues.
- Topic:
- Human Rights and Governance
- Political Geography:
- Morocco
14. The Problematics of Governance in the Human Rights Movement in Tunisia
- Author:
- Hafedh Chekir
- Publication Date:
- 12-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- ARI's project on the Future of Human Rights Action in North Africa continues to explore the governance challenges and moves in this paper to Tunisia where prominent feminist, academic and human rights defender Hafidha Chekir explores the legal environment of civil society organizations in Tunisia and how this affected their own internal governance.
- Topic:
- Human Rights and Governance
- Political Geography:
- Tunisia
15. Unsolved Dilemmas: Issues of Internal Governance in Egypt’s Human Rights NGOs
- Author:
- Yara Shahin
- Publication Date:
- 12-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This paper explores the state of internal governance in Egyptian human rights NGOs. It looks at their internal structures including; decision-making processes, the existence and role of governing boards, relationships with donors, levels of accountability and representation of constituencies along with the relationship with the government within a restrictive legal and political environment. It argues that while the restrictive environment for civil society in Egypt has hindered the development of stronger internal governance mechanisms in many organizations, the internal dynamics of these organizations have also contributed to the weak internal governance structures in most of them. The dilemmas that persisted through different generations and phases of Egyptian human rights organizations include balancing activism on public issues with bureaucratization and professionalization of vehicle organizations, the difficulty for and resistance from founders/directors to leave their influential posts, developing better participatory mechanisms of accountability towards the NGOs constituencies and addressing the “stigma” of foreign funding
- Topic:
- Human Rights and Governance
- Political Geography:
- Egypt
16. Revolutionary Youth Movements, Religiosity and Identity Politics in Egypt
- Author:
- Fouad Halbouni
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This paper explores how the emergence of revolutionary youth movements have destabilized the different forms of political and religious identification inherited from the world of the Mubarak regime. I am interested basically in showing how revolutionary politics introduced new forms of identification that broke with the exclusionary binaries upon which Mubarak's world was based. In order to track those transformations, one needs to take a second look at revolutionary politics, its disruptive force of all existent grounds upon which these political and religious identities had root themselves
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Egypt
17. Origins, Evolution and Challenges to the Human Rights Movement in Tunisia
- Author:
- Asma Nouira
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This is the third and last survey paper on the evolution and challenges of Human Rights Action in North Africa. It is focused on the evolution and challenges of the human rights movement in Tunisia. The first organized group was the Tunisian League for the Defence of Human Rights in 1977 (Ligue Tunisienne de la Défense des Droits de l’Homme, LTDH). The LTDH remained the only organization active in the field of human rights throughout the first decade of the history of the Tunisian human rights movement. Since its inception, the LTDH has acted as a refuge for political activists of various ideological and political backgrounds, sometimes resulting in conflating political and rights’ activism, despite attempts by the founders to separate the two fields
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Tunisia
18. The Evolution of Morocco’s Human Rights Movement
- Author:
- Mohamed Kadiri
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This study is the second paper ARI publishes as part of our ambitious "Future of Human Rights Action in North Africa". In this paper, Mohamed Kadiri, tackles the evolution of the human rights movement in Morocco through studying the context and conditions under which human rights actors appeared and the influences that shaped their development, current challenges and could dictate their future prospects.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Morocco
19. The Formal Birth of the Human Rights Movement in Egypt
- Author:
- Yasmine Shash
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- This paper analyzes a chronology of Egypt’s human rights movement since its birth in 1985 going through its different phases and generations until 2016. It starts with a brief history of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, the challenges it faced and the conceptual differences that led to its fragmentation in early 1994.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- Egypt
20. Mixed, Perilous and Other Migrations: Do African Lives Matter?
- Author:
- Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome
- Publication Date:
- 12-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Ìrìnkèrindò: a Journal of African Migration
- Abstract:
- This is a trying period for anyone that pays attention to African migration. Migrants’ gruesome deaths while in transit are given more coverage. Of these, those in the Mediterranean Sea, and to a lesser extent, the Sahara Desert make it more into the news. But there are also deaths in places in-between. Some are reported. Others are not. One only gets glimpses of such deaths when repatriated migrants mention or lament them. There has been more coverage of Libyan “Slave auctions,” at least after CNN released taped evidence from such markets (Elbagir, Razek, Platt, & Jones, 2017). The African Union (AU) and selected African states, including Nigeria, (which by dint of its sheer population size in the African continent, has more citizens caught up in the movements of migrants intent on getting out of their countries to realize dreams of social, economic and political security elsewhere), belatedly responded (Ibuot & Okopie, 2017; Daily Nation, 2017; Busari, 2017). Some have not bothered to do so. It is amazing that Nigeria and other African countries have embassies and diplomatic representative in Libya, yet, there was no previous report, awareness, response, nor were any measures whatsoever taken to document, respond to, and correct the abuses of citizens and violation of their human rights. What then is the value and utility of diplomatic representation? How do African governments understand their responsibilities to citizens? What is the function of the media in these countries? What is the duty of the AU?
- Topic:
- Diplomacy, Government, Human Rights, Migration, Media, and Violence
- Political Geography:
- Africa and African Union
21. Human Rights in Minefields: Extractive Economies, Environmental Conflicts, and Social Justice in the Global South
- Author:
- César Rodríguez
- Publication Date:
- 08-2015
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Dejusticia
- Abstract:
- This book collect stories of 16 activists researchers of the Global South about differents subjects of human rights in their respective countries. There are the results of the first workshop investigation-action realised by Dejusticia.
- Topic:
- Development, Environment, Human Rights, Social Justice, Mining, and Justice
- Political Geography:
- Global South
22. Globalization and Development : Current Trends
- Author:
- Shantanu Chakrabarti (ed) and Kingshuk Chatterjee (ed)
- Publication Date:
- 04-2012
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, University of Calcutta
- Abstract:
- This volume of essays comes out of a seminar organized by the Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, Calcutta University as a part of its UNAI program. The United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI), officially launched with a two-day conference in New York City, 18–19 November 2010, is a UN global initiative that seeks to align institutions of higher learning with the United Nations in actively supporting ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, literacy, sustainability and conflict resolution. The Academic Impact also asks each participating college or university to actively demonstrate support of at least one of those principles each year. Academic Impact is a program of the Outreach Division of the Department of Public Information. It is open to all institutions of higher education granting degrees or their equivalent, as well as bodies whose substantive responsibilities relate to the conduct of research. It's essential frame of reference is: To bring into association with the United Nations, and with each other, institutions of higher learning throughout the world; To provide a mechanism for such institutions to commit themselves to the fundamental precepts driving the United Nations mandate, in particular the realization of the universally determined Millennium Development Goals; To serve as a viable point of contact for ideas and proposals relevant to the United Nations mandate; To promote the direct engagement of institutions of higher education in programs, projects and initiatives relevant to this mandate.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution, Education, Human Rights, and United Nations
- Political Geography:
- New York and Calcutta