Meet the Middle East Initiative’s 2014-2015 Research Fellows

The Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative and the Center for Public Leadership recently launched the Emirates Leadership Initiative (ELI), a new and exciting collaboration between these two centers at Harvard Kennedy School. ELI is funded by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and provides the critical opportunities needed for emerging leaders from the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East to confront the region’s public policy issues in question through a multi-pronged approach. ELI features four main programs: the Graduate Fellowship Program; Policy Field Visits to the UAE; Executive Education Programs; and the Research Initiative.

One component of the ELI Research Initiative – the Research Fellows Program – allows the Middle East Initiative to host six resident fellows at the pre-doctoral, post-doctoral and/or faculty level for one year.

Here are the summaries of each of the 2014-2015 Research Fellows’ current projects:

Manal A. Jamal

Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science, James Madison UniversityProject: “The Arab Uprisings & Movement Mobilization in Cross Regional Perspective”

While at the Middle East Initiative, Manal is wrapping up her first book and beginning a second project. One over-arching theme animates these projects: Why and under what circumstances do individuals, groups or movements choose to organize and mobilize, and what factors shape these processes over time. Manal examines these issues through a cross-regional lens exploring various Middle Eastern and Latin American cases. In her first book, Democracy Promotion in Distorted Times, which draws from fieldwork for which she won the best fieldwork award of the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association, she examined the impact of the political settlements and the mediating role of Western donor assistance on political movements and emergent civil society groups in the Palestinian territories and El Salvador, culminating in Hamas’ election victory in 2006 and the political aftermath that transpired. In her new project, The Arab Uprisings & Movement Mobilization in Cross Regional Perspective, she evaluates the political-economic determinants of social movement organization that led to these moments of upheaval in Egypt and Tunisia, compared to their predecessors in Latin America, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. She examines these developments during the two decades that preceded these uprisings, focusing on the various policy interventions that mediated these different cycles of movement upheaval. Of particular concern is how these different patterns of mobilization shaped the political outcomes that transpired. This is the initial phase of a multi-year project that will provide qualitative, empirically-based analysis of these developments in broader cross-regional perspective, and eventually result in a book manuscript.

Mostafa Hefny

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, Columbia University Dissertation: “The Material Politics of Revolution and Counter-Revolution”

Mostafa’s dissertation examines autonomous political actors under the banner of independent labor unions in the wake of the revolutionary upheaval in Egypt. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, and drawing on literatures in political theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this work attempts to ground analysis of political transformation in the material tools, familiar and novel, available to actors in the wake of the popular 2011 uprising. The dissertation explores the interaction between the activities of an organizing labor class on one hand, and a reconfigured and recalibrated network of formal politics on the other. By engaging the bodies of literature on democratization and political representation, the dissertation theorizes new mechanisms of collective agency and dependence at the heart of political transformation, whilst putting into sharper focus those aspects of the revolutionary situation that either empower citizens or facilitate rejuvenated authoritarianism. Building on its case study and its theoretical implications, the dissertation concludes with an outline of a materialist theory of democracy.

Muhammed Y. Idris

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, Pennsylvania State UniversityDissertation: “Measuring Democratization: Censure in Middle Eastern Institutions”

Muhammed’s research covers various topics within the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa and leverages open-source, socially-generated, “big data” to model and forecast financial risk and political instability. This includes his dissertation work which focuses on the mediating effect of institutions on financial markets before, during, and after the Arab Spring. In particular, the thesis considers why risk in the region throughout the Arab awakening was driven by volatility in Islamic and not conventional stock indices. Drawing upon literature on the political economy of financial markets as well as industry experience and narratives, it provides an account for how investors account for political risk in their trading behavior and, therefore, contribute to financial market volatility. The mediating effect of institutions on this decision making process provides an explanation for the heterogeneous reactions of investors to political uncertainty when evaluating stock performance in Islamic and conventional indices. Empirically, these casual mechanisms are tested using daily machine-coded event data on political instability in, and stock price data from, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. In addition to its theoretical contributions to ongoing debates on the consequences of the Arab Spring and the political economy of financial markets, the project also provides a set of tools for conducting quantitative political risk analysis. In addition to other projects on the political economy of authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, Muhammed has also conducted methodological research on ties in survival modeling and unit testing in statistical programming.

Jean Lachapelle

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, University of TorontoDissertation: “The Dictator’s Fear: Threat Perception and State Violence in Egypt”

Jean’s research examines the political causes of violence in authoritarian regimes. In his dissertation, The Dictator’s Fear: Threat Perception and State Violence in Egypt, Jean addresses the important question of how political elites in the pre and post-Mubarak era (2004-present) calculate the risks and returns of using violence. He argues that authoritarian elites are most often concerned with an opposition group’s ability to build anti-regime coalitions. Utilizing an original dataset of protests and police responses based on his extensive field research in Egypt, Jean demonstrates that a group’s ‘diffusion capacity,’ namely, its perceived ability to mobilize groups from different classes and ideological orientations, is what most often triggers a regime’s ‘low-intensity coercion,’ which seeks to contain, rather than eliminate opposition through arrest, imprisonment, and mostly-non-lethal crackdowns. The second part of his dissertation examines ‘high-intensity coercion,’ sustained episodes of large-scale, intensive and public violence aimed at eradicating, rather than containing, the opposition. Jean documents the exceptional breadth and intensity of repression following the July 3, 2013 overthrow of Mohamed Morsi and places it in broader historical perspective. Specifically, he compares the case of post-2013 Egypt with post-1973 Chile and other cases of authoritarian violence to contend that the military overthrow of an ideological opponent tends to generate acute perceptions of an existential threat among security forces that strengthen cohesion and create incentives for large-scale violence. In short, Jean’s research argues that different forms of violence have different causes. Low-intensity coercion arises because authoritarian regimes seek to prevent the diffusion of dissent across societal cleavages. High-intensity coercion arises when regimes perceive a threat as imminent and existential.

Yasser El-Shimy

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, Boston University Dissertation: “The Fumbled Transition: Egypt’s Failed Consolidation of Democracy”

Yasser’s dissertation attempts to answer the basic question of why Egypt’s move towards a more representative political system failed to materialize in the years between 2011 and 2013, and what lessons could be extracted from the failure. This question has implications which go beyond the parameters of the Egyptian case, and may well shed light on the prospects for political development across the Arab world, particularly countries that underwent mass popular uprisings in the so-called Arab Spring. This would not only satisfy academic curiosity, but also would promise normative policy recommendations for the establishment of durable political systems and institutions in these countries. He poses two main questions: Why was there no democratic pact in post-Mubarak Egypt among the political actors? And why did the pact(s) between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood unravel, moving the country from a transitional path to a military takeover? Yasser hypothesizes that, in the absence of developed or mature political actors, an inclusive democratic pact was impossible to achieve. Only the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) and the army were capable of forging and delivering on a pact, which they did twice. However, the pacts forged between the military and the Ikhwan unraveled both times due to the exclusion of the critical third actor, the non-Islamists, who assumed the role of a spoiler. The two parties’ failure to resolve fundamental power-distribution disagreements allowed non-Islamists to continue agitating against nascent tentative “pacts,” thus tempting each party to seek more power than originally allotted.

Atiyeh Vahidmanesh

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Economics, Virginia TechDissertation: “Inequality of Opportunity, Social Mobility and Education Achievement in the Middle East”

Atiyeh’s dissertation predominantly examines inequality of opportunity in various areas. She attempts to answer the question, what is the level of inequality of opportunity (IOP) in education and wage in the Middle East. Her research also addresses how IOP may exacerbate social mobility, and how this can explain recent social movements in the region. Her initial results have shown that the level of IOP in education is fairly high in the Middle East compared to other regions around the world. Atiyeh will try to explain why the IOP index is quite large in the region. She also plans to investigate the effects of tracking (grouping students in different branches) on inequality and social mobility. Her hypothesis is that tracking causes an increase in inequality of opportunity because families are more likely to invest in their children’s education in countries with tracking systems. In addition, Atiyeh will also investigate the accessibility of basic resources and opportunities such as education attainment, sanitation, electricity, and clean water for children in the Middle East. Understanding the disparity between levels of access to basic opportunities and resources is also critical to her research; it seems that the Middle Eastern governments provide basic opportunities to an acceptable extent, but that both the education system and the condition of labor markets cause an increase in the level of inequality of opportunity in education and wage. Atiyeh will be testing this hypothesis in her thesis.

For more information on the Emirates Leadership Initiative research fellowships, please visit this page.