“Whiggish social science makes democratic reversals all the more unexpected and disappointing for us academic observers. If democracy is the fruit of long-standing social processes -- the spread of education, global communication, rising incomes and networks of trade -- then we expect political institutions to evolve with the same slow pace of change, or perhaps to catch up to the “predicted” level of democracy in a burst of surface tension. This form of causal analysis trips over the fundamental mismatch between generally slow-moving socioeconomic factors and the rapid ricochets of democratic trajectories. The lesson I propose is that our roller-coaster emotions at the coming of the Arab Spring were not just the product of an ideological commitment -- the belief that Arabs could have democracy too -- but also the product of a theoretical commitment -- the belief that political outcomes have long-term or at least medium-term causes. That theoretical commitment led many observers to identify the causes of the uprisings immediately after they occurred, and to consider it a failure that they had not foreseen them . In the years since, they have had to walk back some of those explanations, as the dependent variable has shifted. An older, alternative approach to democratization is to take the pessimistic view that experiments in popular governance generally fail.”
“In the end, the extent to which the Ennahda congress changes Tunisian politics may depend on the extent to which Ennahda itself changes. Analogies have been drawn to Turkey’s experience in the early 2000s, when the Islamist AKP recast itself as a socially conservative party and highlighted its economic platform in an effort to broaden its support base. Ennahda may have the AKP in mind, but the more relevant model today is arguably Morocco, where an Islamist party with Brotherhood roots legislates in parliament and even occupies the prime ministry but leaves overtly religious activities to its sister organization in civil society. Whether Ennahda changes its internal structures; where the party comes down on divisive legislation, such as the regulation of problematic imams or the recent proposal to remove the religious imprint on the country’s inheritance laws; and the degree to which the party campaigns on religiously oriented themes in the upcoming election cycles will give observers a clearer picture of Ennahda’s longer-term plans and more ammunition for the debate about the continued evolution of political Islam in Tunisia and in the wider Middle East.”
“On May 8, four men carried out a brutal mass shooting, emptying their magazines into an adjacent car as they drove along the Nile in Helwan, a district in Cairo. Eight policemen were killed during the attack, which was claimed by both the Islamic State in Egypt (that is, the branch of the global organization that operates in mainland Egypt, rather than Sinai) and a lesser-known group, the Popular Resistance Movement. Our long-term research shows that violence like this has been thriving in mainland Egypt for years. While the insurgency in the restive North Sinai has garnered a great deal of concern, actors in the mainland (that is, outside of Sinai) have evolved since then-Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah El Sisi asked for a popular mandate to counter terrorism in July 2013, and those actors continue to carry out regular attacks across the country. These actors are neither monolithic nor immutable; violence has seen two distinct phases, and is possibly now entering a third. While all three phases have seen a mix of small attacks with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), shootings, and intermittent large-scale attacks, the actor landscape has shifted.”