Mediaboss Marketing

On Dec. 17, 2010, the world was changed forever by the actions of one man. A Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire outside the provincial headquarters of Sidi Bouzid in protest against local police officials who had seized his fruit cart.

Just 28 days later, Tunisias Jasmine Revolution had ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, driven by the righteous fury of a population who had witnessed enough, a reaction not just to the desperation and subjugation of a 26-year-old street vendor, but to the routine humiliation and oppression of many decades.

One question frequently asked during the early days of the Arab Spring was whether the Arab world was ready for democracy. After 10 years, it is clear that it was always the wrong question. The Arab public systematically dismantled decades of oppressive silence overnight. The question was always whether the rest of the world was ready to support them. The answer to that question should be clear from the decade of Middle Eastern blood spilled to almost total indifference from world powers.

For generations, Middle Eastern dictatorships had grown bloated and complacent, consoled by the false belief that their security apparatus could intimidate their populations into subservience in perpetuity.

But by 2010, those dictatorships no longer held a monopoly over information. Greater access to the internet in the Middle East brought social media, and with it access to the kind of platforms for ideas and debate that many of these same dictatorships had so effectively prohibited, repressed, and criminalized in previous decades.

Under those new conditions, the suicide of a young Tunisian man in the small city of Sidi Bouzid was no longer a local story reduced to a footnote dismissed in a state-controlled newspaper, it was a tragedy that triggered widespread outrage and a civilian uprising that would result in the downfall of a 23-year-dictatorship in the space of just 28 days.

Tunisians were not alone. Witnessing events in Tunisia, civil protests broke out across the Middle East in a series of uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. The Middle East had previously lived for generations in a culture of fear and silence, where even mild public criticism of political authorities resulted in arbitrary arrest, torture, and even death. For the first time in the lifetimes of many, that silence had finally been broken, and it was now the tyrants who were trembling with fear.

After Ben Ali, Egypts Hosni Mubarak, Yemens Ali Abdullah Saleh, and eventually, Libyas Muammar al-Qaddafi fell. The uprisings spread as far as Bahrain and Syria, where the Assad regime had been in power for four decades.

However, the Arab Spring and the political movements it created were less united by collective democratic goals than they were by a rejection of decades of failed governments. The uprising in Syria, for example, began as small regional protests calling for political reforms, not the downfall of the dictatorship. It was only after the initial calls were met with overwhelming violence that those calls eventually changed.

But other than geographic proximity and a shared history of living under dictatorship, the Middle Eastern uprisings had very little in common, besides the chant that spread collectively across the region: The people want the downfall of the regime.

This sense of optimism, this palpable feeling that democratic freedoms could finally be in reach for people across the Middle East, was so dangerous to the hereditary dictatorships and monarchies that governed them that they spent the next nine years at war against their own populations, salting the earth to make sure the democratic movements that terrified them could never take root again.

Hundreds of protesters were killed by security forces in Bahrain and Libya in the first few weeks of the uprisings. Bahrains protests were crushed, Libyas death toll began to spiral out of control, prompting a U.N.-Security Council response, mandating a NATO no-fly zone, eventually leading to Qaddafis downfall and extrajudicial execution by Libyan rebels on the streets of Sirte on Oct. 20, 2011.

By December 2011, the Assad regime had murdered more than 5,000 civilians, many of them protestors gunned down on the streets of Syria, or arrested and tortured to death. By 2020, Syria has become the worst war of the 21st century, with the U.N. officially giving up on counting the death toll in 2014, with the last estimate put at more than 400,000 dead in April 2016, with the true figure expected to have risen substantially since then.

There is no way to neatly package the impact of the Arab uprisings into comforting lessons for the future. While the death toll and infrastructure damage in Libya has remained several orders of magnitude below the bloodshed in Syria, it is still no success story. While the Western-imposed no-fly-zone reduced civilian suffering and was never intended as state-building, the civil war, migrant slave markets, and deteriorating human-rights situation remains a shameful legacy for the international community that intervened, but failed to follow through.

Things are little better elsewhere. Revolutions were crushed, or fell under the weight of nationalist or Islamist counterrevolutions.

In many cases, especially Syria, the uprising was not crushed from within, but from without, only falling after the full-scale military intervention of Iran and Russia. Syrian revolutionary interests were also further destabilized, co-opted, and corrupted by Qatar and Turkey.

The dictatorships in Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain continue to receive legitimacy and support from the Gulf monarchies, just as the Gulf states continue to provide legitimacy and support to Libyas embattled warlord Khalifa Haftar in his goal to take control of the country from the barely functioning Turkish-backed, U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord.

The Gulf States are not the only culprit. The grotesque embrace of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisis junta by the United States government that began under former President Obama, even after killing 1,000 civilians during the Rabaa Square massacre, was perfectly encapsulated by outgoing President Donald Trump referring to Sisi as his favorite dictator at an international summit late last year. France, which has played a crucial role in legitimizing Libyas Haftar alongside its Gulf allies, has also embraced the Sisi regime, with French President Emmanuel Macron handing the dictator Frances highest award, the Lgion dhonneur, last week.

This cycle of conflict is far from over. The protests and ongoing economic difficulties in Lebanon and Iraq show that the public appetite for democratic change is still burning strongly, even after a decade of crushed regional protests, mass displacement, and Western indifference. Irans regional Shiite paramilitary organizations and their brutal techniques continue to escalate tensions, and non-state Sunni fundamentalist organizations are finding fertile ground throughout the chaos. The economic and sociopolitical factors that triggered the Arab Spring uprisings are significantly worse than they were in 2011, and thats before the region has fully realized the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Arab Spring may be over, but the civilian uprisings in the Middle East have barely begun. The Middle East now finds itself in the state of flux that Karl Marx described as permanent revolution, the aspirations of its people permanently churning but never fulfilled There is no way for dictatorships to turn the clock back to 2011, and there is no desire from their populations to accept a status quo that permanently disenfranchises them. The powder is drier than it has ever been; all that is missing now is the next spark.

Read the rest here:
The Arab Spring Showed the People Want Democracy but the World Failed Them. - Foreign Policy

The year 2020 brought us mostly bad news regarding the state of global democracy, though there were some preliminary signs that things might yet turn around.

Over the past decade, we have been facing what democracy expert Larry Diamond calls a democratic recession, in which authoritarian governments have flourished and the rule of law has been undermineda situation that he worries might evolve into a full-scale depression on the scale of the 1930s. On a geopolitical level, two big authoritarian powers, China and Russia, have consolidated their rule and have been aggressively supporting antidemocratic initiatives around the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted Chinas standing in many ways: Though it was responsible for the original outbreak, its ruthless containment measures have apparently defeated the disease, and its economy is back to pre-pandemic levels. Chinas foreign policy has turned much more aggressive, with Beijing picking fights with neighbors like India and extending its dictatorship to Hong Kong, in violation of its 1997 pledges. It has put millions of its own Uighur citizens in camps, to very muted international protest.

Russia, for its part, has continued to destabilize democratic countries, from near ones like Ukraine and Georgia to distant ones in Europe and the U.S. through weaponized social media. Moscow has allegedly attacked opposition politicians like Alexei Navalnywho was, according to the German government, likely poisoned over the summerand lends strong support to Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko in suppressing mass calls for democracy.

The more insidious threats have come, however, from within established democracies, where democratically elected leaders have sought to erode constitutions and the rule of law. The Covid crisis has given them a perfect opportunity to expand executive authority, as when Hungarys Parliament voted to give Prime Minister Viktor Orban emergency powers. Similar power grabs or efforts to delay elections have occurred in the Philippines, Tanzania, El Salvador and Bolivia. Under the cover of Covid, Indias prime minister, Narendra Modi, has continued implementation of anti-Muslim policies initiated in 2019, like a new citizenship law disenfranchising them, and a reduction of Kashmirs status and autonomy.

See the article here:
Francis Fukuyama on the State of Democracy in 2020 and Beyond - The Wall Street Journal

An authoritarian inclination is in considerable part an inherited aspect of personality, according to behavioral economist and political psychologist Karen Stenner, author of The Authoritarian Dynamic, a groundbreaking exploration of the way a predisposition toward authoritarianism interacts with changing perceptions of societal threat. Its expressed as a desire for order through strong authority and shared values and norms that reinforce unity and conformity and minimizes differences, diversity, and discord.

Authoritarian voters, said Stenner in an interview, are highly sensitive to perceived threats to what she calls oneness and sameness.

That ends up being threats to authorities, institutions, and core values, she said. So the things that most upset them are loss of confidence in, and loss of shared respect for, leaders and institutions, and secondly, loss of a sense of shared values and norms. That impulse often manifests itself in a sense that we have lost the things that made us great, we have lost our way of life, the things that make us real Americans, the things that make us one and the same.

She estimates that about one-third of any population, across nations, has this inclination to some degree and that they are activated in times that are complex, chaotic, or stressful, periods that see challenges to authority, protests, dissent, and efforts to increase individual freedom.

The more tolerant a modern liberal democracy becomes, the more it emphasizes individual freedom and diversity, then the more complex political and social life becomes, the more chaotic and disorderly things feel, and the more distressing it is to authoritarians, Stenner explained.

Thats why societies that appear to be growing steadily more inclusive, tolerant, and pluralistic sometimes see sudden eruptions of intolerance or bigotry. The very complexity inherent to liberal democracy trips the authoritarian impulse that has until then lain dormant in the population, resulting in their increased demand for leaders and policies that shore up oneness and sameness, she said.

Trump clearly attracted those voters, said Matthew MacWilliams, author of On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History, his cogent new book exploring the tension between democratic ideals and authoritarian impulses in American history. MacWilliams, who previously ran a political consultancy, was finishing a late-career PhD thesis on authoritarianism in 2015 when Trump jumped into the presidential race.

Trump comes down the escalator and I start listening to him, and during the first few months of his campaign, everything he was doing is what the strongman would do to activate authoritarians, he said in an interview.

That is, singling out an other different from, and a supposed threat to, mainstream America and its values, often as part of a broader conspiracy, and portraying himself as the only one willing to confront that problem.

Trumps others were illegal immigrants and Muslims, whose entry to the country he promised to stop by building a border wall and enacting a Muslim ban.

Fascinated, MacWilliams put a poll in the field and came away with this conclusion: The best single predictor of support for Trump wasnt a voters race or income or education level, but whether he or she had strong authoritarian tendencies.

Now consider conspiratorialism, the belief in and promotion of groundless and often wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Trump is not the first national leader prone to conspiracy theories. But we have never had a president so invested in alternative realities. Further, if polls are accurate in saying that one-third to one-half of Trump supporters credit some aspect of the QAnon whirl of absurdity in a nutshell, that Trump is heroically battling deep state pedophiles who run a child-trafficking ring this is a particularly fertile period for fever-swamp foolishness.

Another barometer of that propensity for the preposterous: Despite any credible evidence of widespread fraud, upward of 60 percent of Republicans at least profess to believe the recent presidential election was somehow rigged.

Conspiracy theories have long been a tool of authoritarian demagogues. Stenner also sees extensive overlap between authoritarian and conspiratorialist mindsets among voters, saying the closed personalities and cognitive limitations that underlie authoritarianism also render one susceptible to conspiratorialism. MacWilliams says it makes intuitive sense that there would be considerable convergence, given that authoritarians tend to be driven by fears and thus are more prone to perceive possible threats on the political horizon.

These are two areas I plan to explore further. But readers, I need your help. Have you seen a friend or relative surrender to authoritarian impulses or slide into conspiratorialism? Why do you think it happened? Have you had any luck in changing their perspective or disabusing them of factually unfettered fantasies, and if so, how? Do you see a way for political leaders to reduce the anxieties that activate the authoritarian impulse while also protecting rights and opportunities for all members of our pluralistic society?

Please e-mail your stories and thoughts to me at scot.lehigh@globe.com.

Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.

See more here:
Beware of authoritarianism and conspiratorialism, twin threats to our democracy - The Boston Globe

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

I dont remember who made this point a few days ago, but its worth repeating: Every Republican who yelled and screamed about Donald Trump being robbed was someone with no responsibility over election administration. Among those who did have responsibility for the counting of votes and the declaring of winners, every single one acted properly. That includes governors, secretaries of state, county clerks, registrars, election commissioners, judges (most of them, anyway), and the Supreme Court.

This is, needless to say, not a defense of the jackasses who kowtowed to Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh by going on Fox News every day to whip the Republican rank and file into a frenzy over a stolen election. They did real damage, and they deserve to be shunned. That said, even direct, personal pressure from Trump himself failed to move any of the Republican officials who actually had the power to aid his doomed cause.

Im not entirely sure what lesson to take from this, but at the very least it suggests that democracy in the United States is a little stronger than we might be giving it credit for.

Read this article:
So How Is Democracy Doing These Days? - Mother Jones

There are indications that President-elect Joe Biden intends to make supporting democracy a key element of his administrations foreign policy. This is a pragmatic decision based in an understanding of national interest that recognizes that threats to democracy overseas imperil U.S. security and prosperity at home.

Some of the most critical challenges to democracy the new administration will face on day one include the erosion of democratic rights at the hands of authoritarian regimes that have exploited COVID-19 to expand their power; the persistent and pervasive effects of expanding kleptocracy; violent conflict rooted in a breakdown of the state-society contract; and a version of governance antithetical to individual freedoms that China is proffering in tandem with opaque investment deals.

The Biden administrations strategy to strengthen democracy will need to address each of these threats, offer a positive vision for democracy globally, and harness the full range of available U.S. tools, both diplomacy and foreign assistance. One of us, with another colleague, recently outlined a five-part agenda for doing just this.

Shoring up citizen-centered governance in countries that are strategically important to the United States will be central to addressing many of these challenges, and a key component of such a democracy agenda. Citizen-centered governance means that institutions and processes are open and transparent, informed by citizens views, and address peoples needs. A citizen-centered governance roadmap focuses on creating the enabling environment for responsive, responsible, and accountable government. This includes supporting reforms that allow for greater democratic participation, decentralized public management, and the provision of citizen-friendly official information.

Here, we outline why bolstering governance in priority countries can help address some of the most pressing democracy challenges and offer three ways the new administration can do so.

Ineffective governance is both cause and consequence of some of the most urgent democracy challenges globally, including mounting kleptocracy, the resurgence of authoritarian rule, and protracted violent conflicts. A common denominator of poorly governed societies is the lack of citizen involvement in the decisionmaking process. Conversely, citizen engagement is associated with better governance outcomes. To advance democracy, the Biden administration needs to pair convening like-minded leaders with sustained efforts to address the root causes that preclude democracies from delivering by empowering citizens as change makers.

Kleptocratic leaders continue to enrich themselves at the expense of their citizens, siphoning public assets to offshore jurisdictions and diverting government resources to regime cronies. Weak domestic institutions, opaque government spending, and a permissive international financial environment combine to enable kleptocrats to steal public resources, which not only deprives the citizenry of much-needed resources but in many cases fuel criminal activities that can threaten U.S. interests.

COVID-19 has given kleptocrats and other authoritarian-leaning leaders an excuse to extend their reach and suppress dissent from opposition groups and civil society organizations, reducing their capacity to hold government accountable. This in turn makes it less likely that pro-democracy activists effect change, depriving the U.S. of new potential allies and partners. Poor governance in the form of absent institutional safeguards, generalized opacity, and limited oversight enables overreach.

In many weak or failing states, the breakdown of the state-society contract, the governments inability to deliver, and predatory elites using public office for private gain continue to fuel instability.

The pandemic has exacerbated these challenges, weakening the capacity of people across the globe to make their voices heard and endangering their livelihoods in the process.

As the new administration crafts its democracy agenda to address these and other challenges, it should make reinforcing citizen-centered governance a central element. Widespread disillusionment with democracy can only be addressed if the public perceives democracy as a system that actually helps solve citizens problems. This requires tackling the governance shortcomings that prevent citizens from directly participating in the democratic process: entrenched corruption, feeble representative institutions, and the hyper-centralization of power. To do so, the Biden administration can take three steps.

First, it should fight global corruption by eliminating impunity for kleptocrats, using open data platforms and policies to increase transparency, and re-invigorating bilateral reform assistance to bolster domestic anti-graft campaigns. The beneficial ownership transparency requirements included in the National Defense Authorization Act recently passed by Congress provide the upcoming administration with a phenomenal tool to tighten the grip on corrupt foreign nationals. To hold kleptocrats accountable, the administration should promote the adoption of similar standards internationally and enhanced asset recovery frameworks, and work with allies to improve enforcement of U.S. anti-corruption laws. The scope of anti-corruption programs and initiatives should be expanded to more seriously counter foreign malign actors attempts to weaponize corruption to exert undemocratic influence abroad, including by supporting investigative journalists and democratic activists in exposing capture of political and business elites. Throughout, the United States would do well to deemphasize big-bang-type legal reforms, which are often elusive, and instead prioritize and support home-grown solutions and gradual improvements.

In tandem with these efforts to bring kleptocrats to account, the U.S. should aggressively pilot and scale innovative digital tools for improving transparency and accountability in the e-governance, civic tech, and private sectors. Blockchain, data analytics, and artificial intelligence have significant potential to help reduce costs in public procurement and other sensitive sectors as well as increase the efficacy of anti-corruption measures. Machine reading, for instance, allows for the rapid analysis of public records to reveal fraudulent bids. These efforts need to be complemented with improving internet penetration in underserved areas and coupled with interventions that address political incentives, rent-seeking, and other complex corrupt behaviors that cannot be changed with technology alone. Supporting civil society in credibly imposing costs on incumbents, through improved monitoring and mobilization capacities, is a necessary step in this direction.

Revitalizing bilateral anti-corruption reform assistance in priority regions (Central America, Eastern Europe, South East Asia), especially during windows of opportunity due to domestic political changes, will help bolster domestic anti-corruption efforts. While the challenges to international assistance to anti-corruption reform in Ukraine shows the limits of this approach, the now-dismantled U.S.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) provides a potential roadmap of what can be accomplished when the United States couples diplomatic pressure with support for technical assistance.

Second, the U.S. should counter executive overreach by helping parliaments become more professionalized, interconnected, and transparent, including by working with the U.S. Congress to expand efforts such as the House Democracy Partnership. Especially in presidential systems, legislatures provide executive oversight that when endowed with full law-making and financial autonomy can help keep the government in check. Strong judiciaries complement robust parliaments in limiting executive overreach. Beyond capacity building for judicial staff, the United States can support reforms that grant tenure to judges, which can insulate them from political pressures, and ensure judiciaries randomly assign cases, which can help avoid executive interference in judge selection.

To complement these initiatives targeted at government actors, the United States should continue equipping civil society organizations with resources to operate in difficult environments and ensure the sustainability of their efforts through fomenting collaboration with the private sector and technology companies. This includes fostering a free media environment where foreign entities can invest to support local outlets.

Finally, the administration should support effective decentralization and prioritize piloting and scaling governance solutions generated at local levels. In many emerging democracies, the gap between the center and the rest of the country is widening in terms of socio-economic indicators and the quality of government services. Helping rebalance the political weight of remote, rural, or otherwise disadvantaged areas is critical for ensuring cohesive communities, mitigating conflict, and increasing domestic support for democracy. But more can also be done to harness the extensive innovation local officials and political actors are undertaking, especially in urban areas. During COVID-19s initial wave, for example, city-to-city exchanges were critical to share lessons and expertise. Many low-cost initiatives that were started at the municipal level, such as participatory budgeting, can help democracies deliver. This requires ensuring that subnational governments have the ability and funds to experiment with solutions.

In the face of new and old threats to freedom and prosperity globally, a reinvigorated U.S. push to strengthen citizen-centered governance abroad will fill a critical gap in the Bidens democracy agenda as currently outlined. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed the consequences of opaque, ineffective, and exclusionary management of public affairs in terms of human loss, negative health impacts, and economic destruction. By shoring up citizen-centered governance, the new administration will help position its partners to address current challenges and be more capable to respond to the next big crisis. By emphasizing the importance of strengthening democracy at home, the new administration will make sure the United States can lead by example and that its offers of assistance abroad are credible.

See the article here:
Strengthening citizen-centered governance should be a core element of the Biden administrations democracy agenda - Brookings Institution