Governance

On June 24, Turkey will go to early presidential and parliamentary polls. The snap elections come amidst significant macroeconomic turmoil. As fears persist over the strength of Turkey’s economy, what can be said about how the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has managed public resources since its arrival into power in 2002? Do patterns of government spending reflect development or economic needs or do political priorities largely dictate how budgets are allocated?

Throughout the 2000s, Turkey was portrayed as a model of social and economic success for other countries in the MENA region. Ahead of the country’s early presidential and parliamentary polls, this column reports research evidence on how the ruling Justice and Development Party has managed public resources and fostered local economic development since it took power in 2002. The government has played a substantial role in influencing local economic performance on a discretionary basis.

"Donald Trump and Abu Bakr el-Baghdadi peddle similar fantasies to ordinary people living in diminished and stressed conditions. The fantasy of being born again into a perfect, orderly and triumphant world is hard to resist for ordinary men and women whose ordinary lives have suddenly taken a turn to vulnerability, uncertainty, weakness, humiliation, and even military and terror attacks by hostile foreigners they can neither understand nor neutralize. They are promised, and expect to enjoy, instant personal wellbeing, communal power, and national re-assertion, in Nevada and New Jersey as in Raqqa and Casablanca..."

"Like most public political dramas across the Middle East, the current events in Lebanon revolving around uncollected garbage are really about several different issues that have merged into one."

Audio recordings from MEI's Spring 2015 Study Group Rethinking the Arab State: the Collapse of Legitimacy in Arab Politics, with Professor Michael C. Hudson.

During the Spring 2015 semester, Prof. Hudson hosted a distinguished group of scholars to re-examine the foundational concepts of legitimacy, the state, civil society, religion, and regional stability in the wake of the Arab Uprisings.

The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform investigates the wide variance of occurrence and outcomes of Arab uprisings and the deep historical and structural roots of power imbalances within societies to ask why regime change took place in only four Arab countries and why democratic change proved so elusive in the countries that made attempts.

An audio recording from Samer Shehata, Associate Professor of Middle East Studies, University of Oklahoma.

On March 3, 2015 at MEI, Prof. Samer  Shehata assessed the role of the military and pre-2011 regime figures in Egypt's political transition from authoritarianism to apparent democratic opening, and now back to a military-backed authoritarian government, to ask how useful the term 'Deep State' is to understanding Egypt's politics.

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Dr. Abbas Al-Mejren, Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative and Professor of Economics at Kuwait University, discusses economic development plans in Kuwait and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, including poverty alleviation and rationalizing subsidies.

"To understand why the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have had different outcomes, leave aside the dominant narrative of secularism, Islamism and the political weakness of the youth. [T]he more fundamental and essential role [is that] of the ruling elite, without whom no country can make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. We must think of those old elites, even in a revolutionary uprising, as active participants who are neither passive nor innocent."