Ufahamu Africa

Ep. 119: A conversation with Shamiran Mako and Valentine Moghadam on “After the Arab Uprisings”

June 05, 2021 Shamiran Mako and Valentine Moghadam Season 5 Episode 119
Ufahamu Africa
Ep. 119: A conversation with Shamiran Mako and Valentine Moghadam on “After the Arab Uprisings”
Show Notes Transcript

In their upcoming book, "After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa," Shamiran Mako and Valentine Moghadam share their work on democracy and social transformation in North Africa after the Arab Spring. In an interview with Rachel, Mako and Moghadam talk about the six years of research leading up to the book and explain the four key frameworks of their analysis: state and regime type, civil society, gender relations and women's mobilizations, and external influence.There's no news wrap this week, but you can still see what we're reading, listening to, and learning this week in the show notes on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.   

Books, Links, & Articles

After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa by Shamiran Mako and Valentine M. Moghadam

The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform by Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds

How To Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

“Morocco ‘weaponized’ migration to punish Spain. That’s more common than you think.” by Kelly M. Greenhill

What would bring stability after the death of Chad’s president?” by Daniel Eizenga

Somaliland at 30: Still unrecognised, but alive and well” by Markus Virgil Hoehne

“Polls Open in Somaliland’s Local and Parliamentary Elections” by Harun Maruf and Khadar Mohamed Akule

“What Do We Know About Chinese Lending in Africa?” by Zainab Usman

Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.

Kim Yi Dionne  

0:02

Welcome to Ufahamu Africa, a podcast about life and politics on the continent. I'm Kim Yi Dionne, your host. We have an extended conversation this week that reflects on the mass protest movements that occurred about a decade ago now, in North Africa. We're going to skip our traditional news wrap. To get you quickly to that conversation,  checkout our website ufahamuafrica.com, for a few links to things we read this week that we found interesting or thought provoking. For example, the news about Morocco weaponizing migration flows to punish Spain for allowing medical treatment of a leader in the Sahrawi independence movement for Western Sahara. And a piece by recent guest, Dan Eizenga, that puts the Chadian coup into perspective by comparing it to other recent political transitions in West Africa, those pieces and other links, including two pieces that come up in this week's conversation you can find on our website. I also want to remind all of you that we're eager to hear your good news so that we can include it in our season closing episode, did you get a new job, finish a project you deeply cared about or worked a long time to bring into the world, we would be particularly grateful to hear your voices. So go ahead and record your good news on your laptop or your phone and email it to us at ufahamuafrica@gmail.com. Rachel spoke this week with Valentine Moghadam and Shamiran Mako about their new book After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa. Valentine Moghadam is a professor of sociology and international affairs at Northeastern University. And her research expertise is on revolutions and social movements, transnational feminist networks, and gender development and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa. Her co-author, Shamiran Mako, is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Her research focuses on international relations with an emphasis on foreign intervention, ethnic conflict, political violence in divided societies, and institutions and state building. Let's listen now to Rachel's conversation with Valentine and Shamiran.

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl   
2:20

Well, thank you, Valentine, and Shamiran so much for being on Ufahamu Africa. Today, we're really excited to talk with you about your forthcoming new book with Cambridge University Press, which is titled After the Arab Uprisings. And so we wanted to come into this book a little bit to talk about it's a comparative study of seven cases, actually, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. And so I wanted to get a chance to think broadly about the Northern African cases. And of course, in comparison to the other cases that you look at in terms of those that experienced mass social protests in 2011. In what we might call the Arab Spring, and then what kinds of outcomes we've seen since that time. And so I think it's really a wonderful opportunity for our listeners to get some insight on these cases. And I was wondering, Valentine, if you could start out by telling us about the book, what do you think are kind of the main arguments? And how do you describe it for our listeners?

 

Valentine Moghadam 
 3:30

Yes, well, thanks very much for this opportunity to share our work in our book with you. That book was several years in the making. And we came together several years ago, after having, you know, read a number of books and articles on the Arab Spring and such, and we thought that, you know, they made really good contributions, but there were certain gaps that we found in the literature. And so we started to raise a number of questions and discuss a number of questions. And that's basically how we organize the book. So the questions that the book addresses are, what were the conditions that set off the Arab Spring protests in 2011? And why did the countries that experienced the Arab Spring move off in such divergent directions and have such diverse and divergent and in some cases radically divergent outcomes? Sub questions were why only Tunisia? Why was Tunisia and to a lesser extent Morocco the only country to proceed on a path of democratic transition? We do look at seven cases, including four North African cases, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Egypt is sometimes called Middle Eastern, but technically it's in North Africa. And so why Tunisia and why not Egypt? There was a lot of excitement about Egypt in early 2011. And I remember myself having so many discussions with people about those exciting dynamic eighteen days of Tahrir Square and what the outcomes might be, and so on. And then, of course, why not Libya, which had the support of Western countries and NATO, after all, NATO had intervened to make sure that Mu'ammar Al-Qadhdhāfī would lead the scene. And, the idea was that Libya would then proceed on a democratic transition, but in fact, very far from that occurred. And there were these early celebrations of Libya's purported dynamic civil society. But, of course, that came to naught as well. And then we have some other questions, too. What is the relationship between democratization, civil society, feminist movements? And international interventions? When are and what type of international influences are positive, constructive, and productive? And what types are? Not so? And last but not least, we asked in what ways do the Arab uprisings and our seven cases and the divergent outcomes that we describe in what ways do they help to refine existing theoretical perspectives on revolutions on democratic transitions on gender and women's mobilizations on states and institutions? So we hope that our rich empirical studies have also made a theoretical contribution and help to build theory in these different areas and domains.

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl  
7:12

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think that the, the combination for me and the empirical richness as well as the theoretical punch is really critical in this moment, when we're looking not only at what makes for successful democratic transitions, but the flip side of the coin, sometimes in terms of what allows authoritarians to hang on and stabilize or re stabilize, or new forms of authoritarianism to emerge in the face of mass social mobilization. Right, so Shamiran I was wondering, can you tell us what, you know, in terms of looking across these variety of factors? What is the main theoretical punch of the book? What would you say that it contributes to our understanding of, of transition? And in particular, of transition that is responding to mass social protest?

 

 Shamiran Mako 
8:04

Sure, yeah. Thank you, again, for having us. As Val said, we kind of, what the book does, it kind of looks bottom up. So what's happening across the cases on a micro level of state development, and we focus on four kind of interlocking variables. So we look at what's happening at the state level with state institutions. And then we look at structural factors and mezzo factors. So what's happening at the state level in terms of institutional development of the states across these cases, and across time, we look at civil society formation and development and strength. We look at gender mobilization, which is something you know, new in terms of taking that variable seriously as a holistic variable that has an impact on the transitions that we see, which is a novel argument of the book. And then we look at external influences as well. And one of the things that, you know, we kind of come up with is that one democratization is, you know, obviously, not a linear process. But we really kind of situate the ways in which we look at outcomes and trajectories or trajectories and outcomes within broader works on contentious politics, comparative politics, international relations, but again, bringing in that kind of gender dynamic. And that's unique in the sense because one of the arguments we make in the book, or two kind of in a way interlinked arguments is: One, looking at the seven country case studies that experienced contemporaneous protest movements at the same time within a particular regional setting is that gender dynamics mattered. They mattered in terms of how social forces mobilized it mattered in looking at the strength of civil society organizations that were tied to gender and women's movements and mobilizations. And that oftentimes the cases where we see variation, so in terms of strength or weakness, of women and genders, gender mobilization and women's movements in general, is that states that kind of shifted in a more positive direction, initially, as an initial outcome of the protest movements of 2010, or 2011, is that, you know, countries like Tunisia, and Morocco, to an extent had more positive gender relations than other countries. So that's one of the kinds of big theoretical contributions that we make. The other is we really kind of hone in on this question of external intervention, and influences. And in that, we look at the ways in which, you know, the international system, both in coercive and non coercive terms interacted with the protest movements themselves. And to do that, when we kind of started digging into the data. You know, one of the things that we found is that whether or not countries experienced coercive interventions, so militaristic interventions, places like Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, or countries that had non coercive forms of influence, right, so these are through, you know, international organizations through foreign aid allocations and things like that, and particularly socio-economic aid allocations in the case of Egypt, more kind of militaristic aid, is that the the, the leverage that those types of interventions have affected the different outcomes that we saw as well. And one of the kind of takeaways from that factor is that, you know, obviously, countries that experienced militaristic interventions had both fought more violent outcomes, but also produced either failed states, or states that descended into civil wars, or in the case of Bahrain, you had an external intervention for the purpose of saving the monarchy, which really, you know, subverted the protest movement there, in 2011. And so these are the two kinds of key contributions that we look at, in terms of the way in which we integrate our theoretical framework around these four variables, and the ways in which we compare these four variables across the seven case studies.

 

 Valentine Moghadam 

12:27

And also the interaction that across these four variables to if I can just interject that because we, we also point out that successful democracies, I mean, you know, in terms of answering your question, you know, why, why only Tunisia and to a lesser extent, Morocco, that successful democracies emerge from strong and healthy civil societies. So there's a link between democracy, democratization, democratic transitions, and civil society. So we were looking also at pre-existing civil society, in these seven cases. So those kinds of civil societies that are more conducive to democratization would include, for example, local authorities, political parties, trade unions, professional associations, feminist organizations, and other civil society organizations with a commitment to civil rights. So these, you know, are prereq prerequisites for democratization. And for, you know, collective action, but people also must believe in rights and freedoms. And that wasn't the case everywhere. So as we looked at some surveys, you can see more attention to rights, personal rights, freedoms, democracy, etc, and belief in democracy in some countries more than others.

 

Shamiran Mako
14:05

It's so interesting. I mean, I think that that really speaks to when we're thinking about ways to support. Again, you know, my mind is in so many of the West African and East African cases right now that are seeing these increasing autocratization from the center from existing presidents. Right. And so the question is how to support the democratic movement from within and it's, again, it's, it's civil society, it's protest, it's mass social mobilization. Coming from a different starting point, right, kind of moving in a different direction. But your point is so well taken about both the belief in that endgame in terms of the rights and freedoms but also the strength of the pre existing civil society and how  it's constituted.

 

 Valentine Moghadam 
14:55

Yeah, but we also draw attention as Shamiran was pointing out too the risks And, you know, economic difficulties, very wide inequalities, and of course, conflicts and wars, which often are generated by the kinds of coercive action that, that Shamiran was mentioning, these threaten any kind of movement towards democratization and put sometimes threaten democratic transitions themselves.

  

Rachel Beatty Riedl  
15:27

Mm hmm. Absolutely. So, I was wondering if Shamiran, can you start us off? I know, we were just mentioning that this book, of course, there's every book really is, but this book is a labor of love. And you came to it, you know, to write it together. So could you tell us a bit about the process and the evolution of the project, how you came to decide to write this book and, and what it looked like to focus in on these set of seven cases? And how did you think about what each one represented in your minds?

 

 Shamiran Mako 
16:00

Sure, yeah. Thank you so much. So the project, the idea of Bahrain, the project really started around 2015. I was at the time working on research, relating to the case of Bahrain, and the Saudi intervention in Bahrain specifically, but also, you know, the kind of geostrategic position of the country for the United States. And so when looking at these types of forms of influence, that really was a question that I was occupied with at the time. And I met Val around that time, and at Northeastern, and, you know, she had talked about this kind of project that she was embarking on, in looking at perhaps doing this kind of broader comparison of one of the outcomes that we were seeing. And at the time, around 2015, is one, the book by  Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and  Reynolds had come out on the Arab uprisings in the Arab Spring, which is one of the most, I think, theoretically driven work on this question, at least from across national comparison, ours differs a bit in terms of scope, but also the cases we examine. And as we were, you know, talking about looking at variation that we were seeing happening at the region at the time, and at the time, you know, we're looking at, like, four years into the protest movement. So there were a lot of moving targets. And there still is, right, the countries in many ways are still in transitions, or some of the countries are mired in these really protracted and international civil wars. And so what we saw was an opportunity to look at patterns, patterns and processes. And at the time, we really weren't, you know, we were thinking about outcomes, but we hadn't come to any conclusions about outcomes, because, you know, there were so many different processes that were happening inside of these countries. And things were changing very rapidly, in some cases, you know, places like Libya and places like Yemen, and Syria, etc. And, of course, in Tunisia, and Morocco in different ways, as well, and in Egypt with the, with the reversion and the coup in 2013. So one of the things that we did was kind of started accumulating data, but also, you know, jotting down and having meetings about some of the outcomes, potential outcomes that we were seeing out of these cases, that had, you know, either embarked on certain paths, or that were still ongoing. And it's, it was a labor of love, because it took about, you know, six, five or six years to think about and to write. And when we approached Cambridge about the project, Maria Marsh was incredibly enthusiastic. And, you know, the book got really good reviews when we got it back. And in the way, you know, we were excited and embarking on the project, because we were looking at, you know, processes of variation as they were happening. And that meant that we were able to extract data as data was coming in, right. And kind of sometimes, actually, even in real time. But in other cases, you know, because the transitions were so complex, and because we were looking at seven cases. And really, our framework is holistic in the sense that there's four variables we're looking at across the seven cases. It also made the project challenging because things were evolving so quickly. And, you know, once the manuscript was finished in the you know, and getting to the, to the stage, that it's that it's at now, it's forthcoming. It's going to be out in print next month. Val and I were having a conversation and we thought, we're so glad we waited this long. And having this kind of nine to 10 year time period, to really think more holistically about what did we end up seeing where does the Arab uprising Where did the Arab uprisings fit within this really incredibly rich literature on, you know, democratization, etc, but also on the literature, incredibly rich literature that's come out on the Arab Spring and the Arab uprisings over the past decade. And so that's, you know, that's a kind of a short way of saying how the project came about, and some challenges. But it's definitely been a, an enriching experience in that sense, because, again, we were able to kind of have this distance, a decade long distance, and looking at the data, and looking at some of our findings, you know, in the more holistic way, I think. 

 

Valentine Moghadam 
 20:44

We had a, it was a very enriching experience, and we work together very well, because Shamiran is a political scientist, I'm a sociologist, we come at some of these issues, in a very, you know, through our disciplinary experiences and backgrounds, which turned out to be quite complementary. And so we drawn a variety of disciplinary traditions, actually, for this book, we did have, I mean, it was a challenging task, it took us a while to do this book, again, for variable seven cases. But we also had the advantage of several years after the uprisings, to be able to look back, to be able to read the literature, to be able to build on, obviously, some of the rich literature, but also to be able to say that, you know, we're contributing something different. So we have the advantage of time. And, and, and so in some ways, our findings and conclusions are somewhat sober. They, they, they do not have the kind of zeal and enthusiasm and energy and, you know, excitement that people had in 2011. But we make a good case for why these trajectories occurred. In fact, I think our book does a pretty good job of pointing out that in most cases, these outcomes were inevitable. You know, a lot of people are very good in Middle East Studies, North African Studies and so on. But it was, for example, to me very surprising to hear back in 2011, that, you know, people were very excited about Libya and Egypt, and I found that incomprehensible, especially when compared to a country like Tunisia and what I knew about Tunisia, and its civil society, its feminist organizations, its movements, its attempts at some kind of, you know, Republican institutions, political parties, and so on. Its strong secular left tradition, compared to, say, Libya and Egypt. So I think that we have the advantage not only of the years, but also of our own understanding of the strengths and limits of our particular country cases that we studied. 

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl   
23:24

Absolutely. I was wondering, sort of thinking about that process. Right. I mean, I do think that your look is both comprehensive in terms of timeframe and from the vantage point that we stand at now and, and holistic in terms of thinking about the variety of variables that you highlight. And so I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about how you see these kind of four broad domains in terms of thinking about the comparison and contrast across the state and regime type, the nature and strength of civil society organizations with women and gender mobilization, and external influence, right, both coercive, militaristic and non coercive intervention. So if we break that up into kind of two and two into for you, for you both to respond to and drawing on your disciplinary angles, I think, Shamiran, can you tell us a bit about state and regime type and dynamics of external influence in terms of thinking about the variation in the North African cases in particular?

 

Shamiran Mako 
24:33 

Sure, yeah. So one of the the other challenge that I should highlight when we were looking at this kind of speaks to this question, in looking at the cases that we wanted to include or exclude, you know, for example, Algeria is not part of our case election because when we look that you know, the data, Algeria and Jordan, although especially Jordan had some mass protests, but, you know, they they weren't as big as an And as consistent across a particular time as the seven cases we examine. And so when we started looking at this question of okay, what is the nature of the state, what is the what is the institutional composition, we really were looking for ways to analyze and kind of synthesize micro- and meso-level variation. And here, we started looking at the differences in their political systems, we looked at institutional capacity in terms of state ideology, the role of the military center periphery relations and actually state capacity both in the political and economic sense. And what we saw, in particular, some of the kind of variation across the North African cases, were a bit more prominent, right, and that, you know, looking at a place like Tunisia, where, you know, you have a state that had from the onset, kind of more historically rooted forms of contentious politics that were tied to different civil society movements and different labor movement. And that kind of was unique to Tunisia, although Morocco also had that. And so the ways in which political actors and leaders in the case of Morocco, the monarchy, in the case of Tunisia, you know, from Bourguiba, to Ben Ali, and then obviously, post 2011, is that we found that political leaders in the spaces that had strongest stronger civil society movements and stronger kind of gender movements had, and have had more interactions with the different social forces that were pushing for change. Right, and that you didn't see repression, you know, used right away in the kind of, you know, in the kind of more violent cases that we saw in other places. That's not to say it wasn't used, but it wasn't as prevalent. But at the same time, what we saw was that the state had negotiated also with women's groups and women's civil society organizations. And that kind of made Tunisia, most notably, but also to an extent Morocco, but unique. The other thing we factored in was the nature of the military, and whether or not you know, the political systems were closely tied to the military, or there was a kind of a bit of a distance between the military and the ruling regime. And in the case of Tunisia, most notably, you know, it's that one of the observations is that the military was kind of hesitant, right to repress the protest movements kind of mass, as we saw in other places in the kind of more violent transitions in Syria, and so on. And it's, it's interesting, because that changes the dynamic between the both this the the, the nature of this structures of the state, and how the state then responds to different social forces. And one of the things we highlight in this is also a some emerging research, more recent research that's looked at, including people like Sharan Grewal, who's looked at well, why did the Tunisian military defect right or not necessarily defect but not repress the protest movements. And that kind of, you know, the, the finding is that a lot of the lower ranking officers in Tunisia also came from the peripheral regions of the country, that were quite sympathetic to the protest movements, right. And so that made them less likely to engage in repression, and also respond to but at least calls to repress the protest movements. The other one is really what we saw in Tunisia, which we didn't really see in other places, was that President Essebsi decided to remove the military as a representative body from the National Security Council. And that kind of depoliticized to an extent the military from the state, which is a pattern that Tunisia had, to an extent. Whereas in other cases, you know, in the case of Syria, for example, or Libya, the military and Yemen, the military is very much, you know, tied to the regime, and definitely enjoyed a closer relationship with the regime than in other places, and of course, to an extent that that holds for Egypt. And so when we're looking at how the state was responding, we really kind of zoomed in on these, these factors, to kind of try to explain variation of why we saw different outcomes and how the state responded to mass popular protest movements that were initially in almost all of the cases non-violent, right. And in some cases, they became violent, and so. 

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl 
30:10

Wonderful. Yeah, it's so interesting in terms of thinking about the variety of the factors and not just military strength, right, or the use of the military, but the makeup of the military and the way in which demographic, disjunctures really shaped the way in which the state was able to command the coercive forces against its own citizens or not, as the case may be. So Valentine was wondering if you could come in and speak to this a bit more to in terms of thinking about, as we were discussing the civil society, the role and the strength, the nature of civil society, and the role of of women's roles and gender mobilization, in particular, and thinking about, again, not just overall strength, and numbers, but how those were constituted, and what kinds of goals they shared, vis-à-vis with other actors in society.

 

 Valentine Moghadam 
31:10 

And the two are linked: civil society and women's organizations, because of course, feminist organizations are part of civil society. And so our book definitely looks at that. I mean, we look at the way civil societies were constituted, across our seven cases. And we also look separately, but also in that chapter on civil society, the way, you know, women's organizations were present visible, influential or not. And, you know, in terms of theoretical contributions to, you know, we tackle in the civil society chapter, we tackle the debate about civil society in the larger literature. You know, on the one hand, civil society is, you know, this arena of associational life and a domain that, you know, protects citizens and organizations from the state and in some interpretations from the market. But in other interpretations, civil society is really part of the state. And the sort of boundary and border between the state and civil society is rather porous and civil society basically functions to legitimize the state, that's a somewhat of a Marxist inflected definition or approach to civil society. So, we feel that both of these arguments have merit, but it depends on the context. And we feel that in, for example, contemporary, advanced democratic capitalist, you know, societies and systems, civil society and the state are very much linked to each other and linked with each other. And, you know, there is quite an interrelationship between the two, but in authoritarian states, no. And that's why there is such a crackdown on civil society organizations precisely because they are a threat to the state and its institutions. And so when we looked at our seven cases, and try to determine the way the civil societies were constituted, and the kinds of challenges that they may have posed to the state systems, including to the militaries, we found that they were most robust in Tunisia and Morocco, and surprisingly, not so much in in Egypt, which, frankly, wasn't that much of a surprise. Because under, you know, first Sādāt, but also Mubarak, there was much less room for maneuver for civil society in Egypt than there was in you know, Tunisia, another authoritarian state. But there you go, there are varieties of authoritarianism, we finally concluded. So that civil society in Morocco and Tunisia was allowed to grow in a way that it wasn't allowed to grow in, in Egypt, and that goes also for feminist organizations. The women's organizations in Egypt were, you know, attacked by, you know, police and, and the security services in a way that did not really occur in Tunisia and Morocco. Now, it's also true that there was some restraint. Let's put it that way on the part of some feminist groups in in Tunisia when I was interviewing some of their founders and leaders some years back, they did mention that when They were discussing women's issues that was okay, because the state itself, especially the Ben Ali state, presented itself as the champion of women's rights. But once they went outside of this sort of a more narrow framework of women's rights, and they began to talk about human rights and social rights, more broadly, labor rights, etc, that's when, you know, sometimes they would get into trouble. And, for example, a conference that they might have wanted to hold in Tunis was then prohibited and banned. But, you know, nonetheless, there was more room for maneuver for civil society and for feminist organizations, in these two cases, Tunisia and Morocco, than anywhere else. And so these two as prerequisites for democratization, also helped to explain why the outcomes were so very different in those two cases than in, in the other cases of betting, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen.

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl  
36:11

I really think this is so fascinating, and so important for us to take into account again, in this time of really, you know, as we look at a global backsliding of democracy and forms of autocratization that are taking so many different faces from Mali in terms of coup and extra institutional forms versus the kind of institutional centralization. 

 So, you know, I really appreciate this look at the North African cases and putting them in context of the kind of Arab region. And so, before we go, I wanted to ask you both the question that we asked of all of our guests on the podcast, which is, what are you reading? What might you recommend to our listeners?

 

 


Shamiran Mako 
36:54

Sure, um, this, one of the books that I've really started digging into, is Daniel Immerwahr’s, How to Hide an Empire. And that came out of an interest in looking at the ways in which these are the historical legacies of American interventionism both, you know, domestically on like native territory, etc. And how that then gets, you know, in a way, outsourced to the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and so on. This history has become really, really fascinating. And much of that came out of my other work and looking at the Iraq war, but also in looking actually at the ways in which the US intervened in some Arab Spring countries, both in terms of, you know, coercive interventions and non coercive intervention, so eight allocations to places like Morocco and Egypt, for example, versus, you know, more kind of indirect coercive interventions in places like Syria and Yemen, and so on. And Libya, of course, most notably. So that's what I'm reading. It's an incredibly enriching book. That's given me a really good perspective. That, you know, that's driving all sorts of foreign policy questions for me. From that perspective. 

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl  
38:25

Fantastic. I would love to take a look at that. Thank you for that recommendation. And Valentine, what about you?

 

Valentine Moghadam 
38:28

Well, I'm chuckling to myself, because I have a pile of books, novels in particular, which I have been meaning to read over the past few years, and have simply not gotten to them. Not only because of, you know, the books that Shamiran and I just completed, but also because of other research projects, and so on. But also because of my other readings, I read the New York, the London Review of Books, which is one of my favorites. I read The Economist, I read the Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Financial Times, and I just don't have the time to read novels these days, one day, I will get to them, perhaps, you know, during retirement. But let me just also just and, Rachel, if I may, by pointing out because you raised this question of autocracy automatization. And that is, of course, a concern. And you know, many people have written about it. And of course, we also refer to it in our book. Again, one of the contributions that we make is to point out that democracy is not simply an end point. It is an ongoing project. And we cite the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, to that effect, because he notes the necessary conditions for effective democratic governance. And he points out that they're rare, and that they're difficult to achieve. Especially during times of untoward economic conditions, etc, which we've been seeing since at least 2008. So it's an ongoing project. And, you know, we saw that some of our cases, the cases that have done well, like Tunisia and Morocco are still struggling in the context of these difficult economic conditions which have been made even more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic. But we we do end on on an optimistic note, which is to say that the enduring legacy of the Arab uprisings is that democratization is entirely possible in the MENA region, despite these entrenched structural and institutional obstacles, which are very real, but but it is possible to, to, to overcome them. 

 

Rachel Beatty Riedl  
40:52

Absolutely. I think that's so well said both in terms of the optimism, you know, in looking across the globe of what is possible. And yet also the ways in which democratization work is, democracies work is never finished, it's never consolidated. And it's an imperfect project that we should all as citizens, as members of various civil societies, all be working to perfect and to strengthen and enrich for the society as a whole. So I think that's, that's so well said and really something that we can all take to heart. Thank you both so much for being on our podcast and for sharing your excellent work with us. We'll share the link to this forthcoming book in our show notes on our website. 

 

Valentine Moghadam 
41:44 

Thank you Rachel, with pleasure.

 

Kim Yi Dionne  
41:45

That's all for this week. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ufahamu Africa. To find any of the articles, books or links we talked about, head to ufahamuafrica.com. Don't forget to follow and share your thoughts with us on Twitter at UfahamuAfrica. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, SoundCloud and Stitcher. If you like what you're hearing on Ufahamu Africa, please share this episode and review our show on Apple podcasts. This podcast is produced by Megan DeMint with help from Research and Production Assistant Fulya Felicity Turkmen. We are generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and receive research assistants from Cornell University and the University of California Riverside. Our music is courtesy of Kevin MacLeod.