You can watch Robin Wright’s Stellyes Lecture on Livestream at the link below:
http://www.livestream.com/knoxcollege/
For the best viewing experience, I recommend clicking on the version located in “Latest Videos” below the main stream. The lecture stream will pop-up automatically on the page, but the “Latest Videos” version will allow you to scroll back and forth within the lecture.
Due to contractual obligations, the lecture will only be available for two weeks, until March 13.
Robin Wright’s Rock the Casbah has little to say about the current conflict in Syria. This is not surprising since most of her research was concluded before the conflict in Syria began, and well before the publication date of the book. I suspect we will hear more on Tuesday. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Syria is nearly a black hole for Western media and the scholarly community. There is a general dearth of public recognized information, sharing an important similarity with both Iraq and Iran. Once again a venerable and distinctive civilization is trivialized in our public discourse.
This last point is of great importance, since it is usually difficult to demonize a country well known to our public. It is relatively easy to demonize a country about which we know little. The campaigns against Iraq and currently Iran demonstrate that point emphatically.
I want to elucidate three factors that the public should be aware of as it attempts to understand the current events in Syria. The first is the very origin of the state, embedded in the politics of the colonial era. Syria (and Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine) were artifacts of colonial interest. The very borders of the states in question were designed to protect the geopolitical interests of Britain and France and not constructed with the intention of creating coherent national communities.
As a result, all of these states are constructed in ways that make national cohesion and identity difficult, if not impossible. Even a brief review of Syrian national politics since its independence reveals dramatic patterns of political instability. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was nearly impossible to catalogue the changes in government, with many governments lasting only a week or so. This structural defect sentenced Syria to decades of instability and conflict.
This instability was terminated with the simultaneous rise of the Syrian Ba’ath Party and the rule of Hafez Al-Assad, a military leader from the Alawite community who ruled with authoritarian technique for over forty years. Syrian national identity was imposed from the top down. A cult of leadership was firmly established. As a result, Al-Assad was periodically challenged by opposition groups (mainly the Muslim Brotherhood) and put revolts down firmly in Hama, Homs, and Aleppo. In 2000, he was succeeded by his son Bashaar , a highly Europeanized ophthalmologist, who now rules in Syria and who conducts the increasingly violent repression of the last year.
The Assad regime(s) reaction to these confrontations is rooted in the very nature of the Alawite community. This community is very much a heterodox branch of Shi’a Islam and only marginally recognized as legitimate by the main Sunni and Shi’a communities in and out of Syria. Small in number, the Alawites constitute around 6% of the Syrian population and are thus very vulnerable to the much larger Shi’a and Sunni communities. They have much at risk in the resistance to their long-standing rule. The stakes of the current conflict are much higher for the Alawite minority and this explains, at least in part, the persistant government efforts to put the opposition movements down.
International actors understand the stakes here as well, and as a consequence Syria currently receives important military and financial aid from Russia, China and Iran, all of whom prefer the current regime to the probable governments that might succeed Alawite rule. Iran, in particular, sees its relationship with Syria as invaluable and key to its geopolitical prospects in the area.
The U.S. and the West European governments are frustrated by their inability to bring relief to the besieged populations. Syria does not present the kind of platform for intervention that was available for Libya. Intervention in Syria is understood to have high potential costs and unknown outcomes. What seemed a clear path to humanitarian intervention in Libya does not present itself in the situation in Syria. As a result, Western diplomatic efforts have been mostly ceremonial and symbolic. This could all change if the U.S. submits to Israeli demands for military action against Iran, in which case all bets are off and the unknown unknowns (to borrow a term from the neoconservative community) become the reality for the region.
Once again, we are confronted with a complex political problem for which we have few immediate solutions. If the recent past is a potent predictor of future policy, we will fairly shortly be up to our resources in Iran and Syria.
We all need to learn a lot more about Syria if we are to avoid the traps and pitfalls that lurk there. Ditto for Iran.
A reminder that Robin Wright’s lecture is only days away. Join us on campus or see the lecture on Livestream.
The Livestream feed will be here:
http://www.livestream.com/knoxcollege
If you have a question you would like us to ask Ms. Wright, post it here or post it on the Livestream chat on the night of the lecture.
Even with months of harrowing reports out of Syria, it is hard to suppress the feeling that the situation in Syria is tipping into an horrendous abyss right before our eyes. We might even regard the timing of Robin Wright’s visit to Knox as fortunate, if the circumstances were not so tragic. (If you watch much television news, you can be forgiven for thinking that the most important story is the media’s attempts to get the US into a war with Iran or the latest knots our politicians are tying themselves into over the outrage-of-the-moment.) Although the international community failed to achieve some sort of collective response through the United Nations two weeks ago (some interesting analysis of the failure is here), events continue to unfold in ways that make some response inevitable.
The apparent open warfare on journalists and news reporting out of Syria, highlighted by the deaths of American-born reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik, can have the effect of galvanizing international opinion anew. Today we have a 72-page U.N. report accusing high-ranking Syrian officials of crimes against humanity that will add to the furor. You can read the report here.
It should go without saying that the crack-up in Syria will have far-reaching repercussions. However strong the argument that military intervention in Syria would mostly unworkable, it would be foolhardy for us to believe we are in for a smooth landing. Need proof? A wave of violence in Iraq today.
We have been following the story of detained American democracy activists in Egypt for a couple weeks. Not only is the diplomatic struggle itself an interesting thread in a web of foreign policy problems emerging in the region (see Syria and Iran), there is the local angle of former Congressman and Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood’s son being part of the narrative. The groups active in Egypt, officially private, non-profit organizations, are supposed to represent the best of the citizen-driven, non-governmental (NGO) activism rooted in the DNA of American democracy. However difficult it may be to be content with our political process during the sausage-grinder days of primary campaigning, political organizing is supposed to be what we do well. Why not export it?
In practice, the story is quite a bit murkier. Foreign Policy blogger Stephen Walt begs for a little perspective on our quick offense at the Egyptian government’s response to foreign activists operating within its borders:
“But before we let our outrage overwhelm our judgment, we ought to ask ourselves how these organizations and their activities might look to officials and even some average citizens of other countries. We think that encouraging democracy is an innocuous or even wholly beneficial activity, because we are convinced it is the best form of government and that all societies will be better off if they adopt democratic systems. And maybe we’re right. But if efforts to promote democracy destabilize an existing government, leading to political chaos and economic hardship, then you can understand why local authorities and some members of the population might look on this process rather differently.
“This problem really shouldn’t be all that hard for us to understand.”
He gives some provocative counter-examples. (Read the entire post here.)
While our news media may be wrapped up in the US threats to withhold foreign aid or the other storyline of war-mongering with Iran, this case deserves more attention than the usual diplomatic dust-up receives. It contains within it many of the hard questions of democracy promotion that have flummoxed Americans for decades. To the extent that democracy promotion looks like an American imposition, do we undermine democracy’s standing with the average citizens of these countries?
As we discuss the impact and future of the Arab Spring, we might want to pause and reflect about the way the western media has been covering the elections in Egypt or the struggle between the Islamists and secularists. The class angle behind the revolution and the long-brewing, accumulative factors behind last year’s events tend to be downplayed by most mainstream media. Some Arab commentators even reject the term Arab Spring, claiming that that phrase suggests an “awakening”, and is therefore somewhat pejorative. The economic demands of many protesters are shoved aside at the expense of what seems to be the more “interesting” show for western audiences, the challenges to the supposedly emerging liberal democracy by a nebulous group of Islamists, conservatives, traditionalists etc.
A perceptive analysis of this situation can be found in the following video of a panel that took place at the American University of Beirut in January. Rabab al Mahdi, a political science professor from the American University of Cairo, dissects these tendencies and highlights some of the prejudices in the media toward the actors of the uprising.
Her comments begin after 12:00.
Our blog will be tackling the tough issues swirling around Syria and Iran in the coming days, but we would remiss in failing to recognize the passing of New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid. This blog and the many news stories, not to mention politicians, pundits, and radio talkingheads, lean heavily on the dangerous work of brave and intrepid reports like Mr. Shadid. According to reports, Mr. Shadid died of an asthmatic seizure while working to bring news from inside Syria, where a few reporters and Syrian bloggers have given vivid testimony to tragic events.
To pay homage to Mr. Shadid and his work, we urge readers to listen to this riveting interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, in which he recounts his harrowing experiences in Libya but also his efforts to restore an ancestral house in southern Lebanon.
Fresh Air Remembers War Reporter Anthony Shadid
Following up on my earlier comments on rap and hip-hop, Becky Burton ’78 forwarded me this interview with rapper Mohamed El Deeb. His music is emblematic of the sort Robin Wright discusses in Chapter 5. Coincidentally, the El Deeb family was helpful to us in the early days of the research that led to our book Politics and Change in the Middle East
You can read the interview here: http://en.qantara.de/Protest-through-Songs-and-Poetry/17077c169/index.html
A sample of Mohamed El Deeb’s music is here:
Moderator: We are delighted to welcome a guest blogger today, Knox alumnus Ronald Bruce St John, ’65. Mr. St John is a Libya expert who has served on the International Advisory Board of The Journal of Libyan Studies and the Atlantic Council Working Group on Libya. Author of 20 monographs and more than 300 articles, his latest books on Libya are Libya: Continuity and Change (Routledge, 2011) and Libya: From Colony to Revolution (Oneworld, 2012). For more information, see www.ronaldbrucestjohn.com.
Libya Is An Islamic State
by Ronald Bruce St John
When Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC), announced the liberation of Libya on October 23, 2011, he said the new Libya would be governed by Islamic jurisprudence (sharia). As an example, he added that legislation restricting polygamy was contrary to Islamic law and should be annulled. His comments, coupled with the prominence of jihadist figures in post-Qaddafi Libya, raised concerns among Libyans and outsiders alike that Libya might adopt a fundamentalist or theocratic form of government.
Since that time, the results of regional elections have added to concerns about the future of Libyan democracy. In Tunisia, the moderate Islamist party, Al Nahda, outdistanced its secular rivals, winning 40% of the vote in October 2011 elections for a constituent assembly. Islamist elements also fared well in the parliamentary elections which began in Egypt in December 2011. When announced in mid-January 2012, the final results confirmed that the moderate Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party took 47 % of the seats in the lower house of parliament, and the ultraconservative Salafist Nour Party won another 25% of elected seats.
Faced with an increasingly volatile political climate in Libya, the NTC at the end of January 2012 issued an election law governing mid-June elections for a constituent assembly whose job will be to draft a new constitution. An earlier draft of the election law reserved 10% of assembly seats for women, but when women’s and rights groups complained this was not enough, the final version of the election law dropped altogether the quota set aside for women. The 2012 election law also calls for two-thirds of the assembly seats to go to political parties, a provision adopted under pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood, the only political group with a possibility of winning a majority in the election. While these elements of the electoral law have increased speculation that Libya could become the next Islamist state, the skeptics fail to recognize that Libya has always been an Islamic state.
Robin Wright’s analysis of the 2009 pro-democracy protests in Iran reminded me that, ironically, one result of a generation of forced Islamism in Iran is that Iran is probably the Middle Eastern country where Islamism has the least general appeal. In many Middle Eastern countries, Islamism has been a way to resist secular dictatorships. But in Iran, many educated middle class people are contemptuous of attempts to force people to wear Islamic dress and to behave according to the dictates of conservative interpretations of Islam. Consider the story Wright tells on p 109 of Rock the Casbah:
“Majid Tavakoli spoke to one of the Tehran rallies. When police pursued him, he tried to escape by cloaking himself as a woman. He was eventually caught. The regime published a mug shot of him in female disguise, then charged him with `insulting the supreme leader’ as well as `collusion against the regime.’ He was sentenced to eight years in prison…
“Iran’s young launched a `We are all Majid Tavakoli’ campaign. Men took pictures and videos of themselves dressed in women’s hejab and posted them on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and opposition sites. They also Photoshopped the blue and black hejab worn by Tavakoli and superimposed it on pictures of Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader. Both circulated widely. Both reflected public scorn for Iran’s leadership.”
Anyone who is interested can see a nice overview of the “We are all Majid Tavakoli” campaign here:
