Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East Project Director Ellen Laipson Contributing Authors Richard Cincotta James C. Clad F. Gregory Gause, III Robert Grenier Andrew Houk Andrew Marshall David Michel Courtney C. Radsch Corey Sobel Mona Yacoubian May 2011 Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East Project Director Ellen Laipson Contributing Authors Richard Cincotta James C. Clad F. Gregory Gause, III Robert Grenier Andrew Houk Andrew Marshall David Michel Courtney C. Radsch Corey Sobel Mona Yacoubian May 2011 Copyright © 2011 The Henry L. Stimson Center ISBN: 978-0-9845211-8-0 Cover and book design by Shawn Woodley and Lacey Rainwater All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent from the Stimson Center. Stimson Center 1111 19th Street, NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Telephone: 202.223.5956 Fax: 202.238.9604 www.stimson.org Contents Preface .................................................................................................................................v Timeline of Events ............................................................................................................. vi Understanding Change in the Middle East: An Overview ............................................1 Ellen Laipson Sector Reports Academic and International Organizations The Middle East Academic Community and the “Winter of Arab Discontent”: Why Did We Miss It? ...............................................................................................11 F. Gregory Gause, III Socioeconomic Studies ............................................................................................29 Richard Cincotta Democracy and Human Rights Non-Governmental Organizations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) ...............................................................41 Mona Yacoubian Journalism and Social Media Media ........................................................................................................................55 James C. Clad Blogosphere and Social Media .................................................................................67 Courtney C. Radsch Private Sector Risk Analysis ............................................................................................................83 Robert Grenier and Andrew Marshall Think Tanks Think Tanks ..............................................................................................................95 Andrew Houk and Ellen Laipson Appendices I. Contributing Authors’ Biographies...........................................................................107 II. Experts Interviewed or Consulted ............................................................................109 III. Mission Statements of Organizations Interviewed or Consulted .............................112 IV. Selected Publications, Blogs, and Websites Consulted ............................................121 V. Insights from the Experts .........................................................................................130 Preface | v Preface he momentous events sweeping the Arab world since late 2010 raise important questions about the art and science of analyzing political and societal events. In an age of information surplus, which creates the illusion that one can easily know Twhat is happening anywhere in the world, big surprises still occur. Societies change, governments make choices that have consequences, and the political life of a country or a region is transformed. For analysts in and out of governments, the upheaval in the Middle East lends itself to reflections about how regional experts with deep knowledge of the Middle East, and those who use distinct political science or other methodologies to understand processes of change, fared in their assessments of the likelihood of change. The Stimson Center invited a group of experts who represent distinct, non-governmental institutional perspectives to look back on the work of these sectors, and evaluate how they looked at prospects for change in the Middle East. The sectors include: university scholars, think tanks, democracy and human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), journalists, social media, and private business. The study addresses in particular these questions: 1. What were the main judgments about prospects for change in the Middle East from 2005 to 2010? 2. Were there underlying theories or models of change that guided the analysis? 3. What were major turning points or “light bulb” moments in the analysis? 4. Will the methods of analyzing the region change as a result of the upheaval? The result is “Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East,” with our title taken from an interesting piece written by Max Rodenbeck, of the Economist. In July 2010, he wrote that a “seismic shift” was about to occur in Egypt. I would like to thank all of our contributing authors, as well as the team who worked on the book at Stimson: April Umminger, Alison Yost, Shawn Woodley, Jim McGurrin, and Kerri West; as well as our interns John Doble, Daniela Manopla, and Peter Klicker. The Stimson Center is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to developing pragmatic approaches to enduring and emerging problems of international security. It is supported by foundations, US and foreign governments, corporations, and private individuals. Its work on the Middle East has been supported in recent years by the US Institute of Peace, the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, The Ploughshares Fund, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Government of Sweden, and the Exxon- Mobil Corporation. From 2005 to 2010, many experts were drawing important analytic conclusions about growing weakness at the top and rising assertiveness at the bottom of various arab societies; few were able to net out the shifting power equation. a selection of key events and insights from diverse experts: “Youth … in much of the Arab world, will remain a ticking time bomb” —Dina Shehata, early 2008 IRAQ | JanUaRy 2005 First nationwide election post Saddam Hussein EGYPT | apRil 2006 EGYPT | apRil 2008 Renewal of emergency laws Labor activists start using Facebook to EGYPT | March 2007 coordinate mass strikes 34 amendments to the constitution outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood MIDDLE EAST | 2007 TUNISIA | JanUaRy 2008 War on bloggers Revolt of the Gafsa Mining Basin workers and youth TUNISIA | OCtOber 2005 “Freedom of Expression in Mourning” Internet campaign starts “A budding culture of change EGYPT | FEbruaRy 2005 is … imaginatively challenging Mubarak announces multi- the status quo” candidate presidential elections for September ‘05 —Robin Wright, 2008 vii “Egypt…is likely to produce an explosion at any moment” “Seismic —alaa al aswany, May 2010 shift about to occur” EGYPT | JUnE 2009 —the Economist, July 2010 Obama speech in Cairo, “A New Beginning” TUNISIA | OCtOber 2009 TUNISIA | December 2010 Ben Ali and his ruling RCD Mohamed Bouazizi party win re-election self-immolation EGYPT | November 2010 Parliamentary elections garner “Tunisia is coming low turnout and apart at the seams” allegations of fraud —human Rights Watch, May 2010 1 Understanding Change in the Middle East: An Overview Ellen Laipson An Explanatory Note about the Communities of Experts his report is structured around the diverse communities of experts on the Middle East and on political change. We organized our research by looking at distinct institutions and the individual researchers in them, and designated a lead authorT for each institution or sector. Those institutions included: universities, research institutes in international organizations, the media (traditional and new social media), think tanks, business and risk firms, and democracy and human rights non-governmental organizations. We wanted to examine whether these different expert communities drew different conclusions or used different methodologies in assessing prospects for change in the Middle East. We found that some of the sectors – the business sector and NGOs in particular – have distinct methods and a defined mission that enabled us to cover their work within clear parameters. Those two sectors also do not have a public record of reports that would capture all of their thinking; therefore, interviews were central to our analysis of those sectors. Another feature distinct to these two sectors is their ability to move resources agilely when circumstances shift: they are attuned to such change as part of their basic business model. In the case of NGOs, there was also value placed on cross-regional learning, with the lessons of democratization successes figuring prominently in their work. NGOs and social media share the characteristic that their core mission is not research and analysis; rather, they should be seen as two possible vectors for information and insight about societal activities and sentiments that could be analyzed by others to interpret broader political realities. 2 | Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East All the remaining sectors, we discovered, live in a loosely confederated community of scholars and thinkers, where individuals may have a professional base in one community, but easily and frequently publish in the online and hard-copy outlets of other institutions: university professors are regular bloggers on media outlets; think tanks publish volumes in which academics and journalists, as well as former government officials, offer their