Democracy Digest

Public protests and prospects for reform in Iran

Credit: MEI

Over the last few months, Iran has experienced a series of street protests in rural areas and social arenas once seen as the key support base for the Islamic Republic, the Middle East Institute notes. Politically active youth are voicing their frustrations with the country’s political, social, and economic prospects. Many of these protests as well as online activism have been met with pushback from conservatives and crackdown from the government. What are the prospects for change in Iran’s existing political system?

The speakers

Daniel Brumberg, Director, Democracy and Governance, Georgetown University,
Senior non-resident fellow, Project on Middle East Democracy
Shadi Mokhtari, Professor, American University
Azadeh Pourzand, Co-founder and executive director, Siamak Pourzand Foundation [and a former Penn Kemble fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy]
Alex Vatanka, moderator, Senior Fellow, MEI

When: Tuesday, April 24, 1:30-3:00PM

Where: Middle East Institute, 1319 18th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036

RSVP

USAID’s redesign: how do democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) fit in?

How do democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) fit in to the USAID’s new redesign? Brookings analyst George Ingram asks.

The DRG center would be located in the new Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation (DDI), but DRG issues are core to fragility, so how will they plug into the work of the R3 [Relief, Resilience, and Response] bureau? Beyond that, they are important for U.S. leadership globally, so does their location as a center for excellent along with various other technical centers provide them the prominence and access they deserve?

“Pairing the new Bureau of Development, Democracy and Innovation with the Bureau for Policy, Resources and Performance might work better. There is natural linkage of technical expertise, program design, and innovation with policy—they need to be closely connected and should inform each other,” he suggests. RTWT

The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: a New Political Islam

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of a crop of present-day political leaders who value the respectability an ostensibly democratic election confers but don’t want to risk actually losing the vote, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall writes:

Worried politicians in Paris, Berlin, London and Washington no longer see a reliable friend and ally in Ankara. They see an autocratic figure exploiting nationalist and neo-Islamist sentiment, xenophobia and Europhobia, and feelings of public insecurity brought on by next door’s Syrian crisis, to justify egregious human rights abuses, institutional vandalism and anti-EU, anti-western policies.

Like Turkey under Erdogan’s ruling AK party, Indonesia has also been held up as an exemplar of the compatibility of democracy and political Islam. But although the presidential election is more than a year away, the rising noise of political Islam is taking on ominous overtones for the incumbent, President Joko Widodo, Asia Sentinel reports.

Islamists have endorsed human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and mobilize supporters, according to Emmanuel Karagiannis, a Senior Lecturer in King’s College London’s Department of Defense Studies.

Islamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world, constituting a new political Islam that is global in scope and yet local in action, he writes in The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice. Many Islamists turn to activism, still more participate formally in the democratic process, and some, in far fewer numbers, advocate violence—a wide range of political persuasions and tactics that reflects real and perceived political, cultural, and identity differences.

Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism, Interpreting the Iran-Saudi Rivalry and the Rise of Sectarianism, and Challenges to Democratic Consolidation in Tunisia are among the panels at The Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy’s 19th Annual Conference – ‘Authoritarianism and Democratic Decline in the Age of Sectarianism and Populism’, CSID, Thursday, April 26, 2018 from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM (EDT), Washington, DC.

The future of political Islam: Trends and prospects

Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, the progression of events in the Middle East has provoked new questions on the role of political Islam in the region, the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy notes:

The Arab Spring offered Islamist parties the opportunity and challenge of governance, and the widely varying results led many observers to reconsider basic assumptions on political Islam. Lines drawn between ideology and politics have become blurred. Common conceptions of Islam and the nation-state as incompatible have come under review. As scholars and Islamists alike imagine the future of political Islam, these considerations and others will play a central role.

On April 24, the Center will host a discussion on the state of political Islam and the questions and myths which surround its development.

Panelists

Jocelyne Cesari (above), Professor of Religion and Politics, University of Birmingham; Senior Fellow, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University | @jocelyne_cesari
Shadi Hamid, Senior Fellow, Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, The Brookings Institution | @shadihamid
Peter Mandaville, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, The Brookings Institution; Professor of International Affairs, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University | @pmandaville

When: Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 9:30 — 11:00 a.m.

Where: The Brookings Institution, Saul/Zilkha Room, 1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC.

Fighting the Hydra: whose state organs are ‘in hock to some sort of kleptocracy’?

The British government refused to assist a French investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud by the UK telecoms giant Lycamobile – citing the fact that the company is the “biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party” and gives money to a trust founded by Prince Charles, BuzzFeed reports:

When BuzzFeed News first approached HMRC to ask about its response to the French request, the agency’s senior press officer strongly denied that Lycamobile’s donations would ever be cited as a reason not to conduct criminal raids. “No HMRC official would ever write such a letter,” he said. “This is the United Kingdom for God’s sake, not some third world banana republic where the organs of state are in hock to some sort of kleptocracy.” However, after verifying the contents of the email seen by BuzzFeed News, another HMRC spokesman said that it was “regrettable”.

Latin America’s Battle against Corruption: A Path Forward – (above) a new report from AS/COA and Americas Quarterly – suggests eight ways to build upon recent progress in the region’s fight against graft. Read the report.

Anti-corruption activists are mourning the passing of Karen Dawisha (right), author of “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?”

The book argued that corruption and authoritarianism in Russia in recent decades were not byproducts of the country’s emergence from communism but rather building blocks of a plan devised in the early 1990s by Mr. Putin and a circle of trusted associates, the New York Times reports:

The book made accusations so weighty that Cambridge University Press refused to publish it for fear of being sued by Mr. Putin or his allies under Britain’s restrictive libel laws. …[Dawisha] noted in a letter that Mr. Putin’s friends had succeeded in building channels of influence in British institutions, prompting Cambridge University Press to “cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings as a result of fear of legal actions.”

“These Kremlin-connected oligarchs feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools,” she wrote.

Western governments began to embrace her central thesis: that a network of corrupt oligarchs centering on Mr. Putin formed the basic structure of his political system, the Times adds.

“What wasn’t understood was that it went back to this St. Petersburg inner circle,” said Charles G. Davidson, the executive director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “The contention in Karen’s book that was so controversial at first — much less so now — is that there was a plan all along by Putin to take over the place.”

Because kleptocratic networks are transnational, anti-corruption alliances outside a country’s borders are also vital, according to a new paper from Carnegie’s Sarah Chayes (right). In Fighting the Hydra: Lessons From Worldwide Protests Against Corruption, she outlines several lessons for activists who wish to challenge corrupt systems, including:

A detailed reform agenda that targets the kleptocratic network’s diverse capabilities will be crucial to exploiting whatever window of opportunity does open.

This agenda should be communicated to ordinary people in such a way as to capture their imaginations, so support doesn’t flag when some symbolic victory is achieved.

Long-range planning is required to effectively deal with the multiple likely countermoves the campaign will encounter.

Alliances are force multipliers. Independent individuals or institutions within a corrupt government invariably control some levers of power, or at least information. Because kleptocratic networks are transnational, alliances outside the country’s borders are also key. RTWT

How did kleptocracy affect the trajectory of democratic development in Russia? the National Endowment for Democracy’s Melissa Aten asked analyst Lilia Shevtsova (right).

It seems to me that there are two important points, Shevtsova argued.

First, we have to distinguish between corruption and kleptocracy. Corruption presupposes the existence of a more or less independent bureaucracy and state apparatus on the one hand, and the business class on the other, which allows the business class to bribe representatives of the elite. This is not a kleptocracy. This is simple and primitive corruption.

Kleptocracy is the merger of power and property. Those who rule the country own it. This is a phenomenon that has emerged in the societies that have failed to transform themselves. The Eastern European communist countries that experienced successful anti-communist revolutions were lucky because they did so before this merger occurred. Anti-kleptocratic revolutions are much more complicated, and I don’t know whether they are possible everywhere.

North Korean activists endangered

Credit: ChinaAid

Along the North Korean border, dozens of missionaries are engaged in work that puts them and their North Korean converts in danger. In recent years, 10 such front-line missionaries and pastors have died mysteriously, according to the Rev. Kim Kyou Ho, head of the Seoul-based Chosen People Network, a Christian group that runs a memorial hall in the South Korean capital for the victims. North Korea is suspected in all those deaths, Associated Press reports:

Hundreds of other missionaries have been imprisoned or expelled by China, which bans foreigners from proselytizing. It is perilous work. Li Baiguang (above), a Chinese human rights lawyer whose work defending Christian pastors and farmers had prompted repeated death threats, died on Feb. 26, hours after being admitted to a Chinese military hospital for what his relatives described as a minor stomach ailment.

The case has prompted calls for an independent investigation from Amnesty International and the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, AP adds, which noted Li had been “detained and physically attacked many times” for his work and cited reports he had recently appeared to be in good health.

RTWT

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