Thanassis Cambanis

Photos: Youmna El-Khattam/Collage: by Nermine El-Sherif

[Published in the Carnegie Reporter. Preview available on Carnegie Corporation website.]

Research on the edge

Even in the early days of Syria’s uprising, it was nearly impossible to do independent research. From early on in the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, which began in 2000, very little leeway was allowed for any work that might challenge the regime. Academics, journalists, political activists, even humanitarian workers were subject to harsh measures of control. The situation worsened after peaceful protests erupted across the country in 2011. Nonviolent activists were imprisoned, exiled, or killed, and armed insurgents took their place. From the start, the conflict restricted movement around the country. Even worse, authorities on the government side and later among rebels wanted to manipulate any research or reporting from their tenuous zones of control. Analysts began to call Syria a “black box,” an unruly place off-limits to credible researchers.

Into this confusion stepped two Syrian-born academics: Omar Dahi, an economist at Hampshire College, and Yasser Munif, a sociologist at Emerson College. They practiced traditional disciplines at reputable research institutions, but they wanted to conduct unconventional research. How were Syrians adapting to the transformation of their society and the disintegration of an old order? Dahi and Munif wanted to bring systematic rigor to studying the experiences of the thousands, eventually millions, of Syrians who were building new modes of self-governance, beyond Assad’s control, or who were adapting to new lives and identities in the maelstrom of exile. They believed they could conduct meaningful social science in the “black box.”

“Most of the research about Syria revolved around geopolitical conflict and strategies, interested in a top-down perspective,” Munif said. “I was interested in the other way around. I wanted to understand participatory democracy, the different ways people were conducting politics after the collapse of the state.”

Like other radical developments that accompanied the Arab uprisings and government backlash, Syria’s crisis demanded sustained scholarly attention. And research in a rapidly evolving war zone, in turn, required support from a flexible and imaginative institution. Dahi and Munif found their backer in the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, a quietly transformative venture that’s been midwifing a network of Arab scholars to more confidently practice a new brand of social science that rises directly from the concerns of a region in turmoil.

Dahi and Munif applied in the fall of 2012 for the first batch of funding offered by the grantmaking organization, known by its acronym, the ACSS. Dahi wanted to study the survival strategies of refugees. By the time his grant had been approved and he began research, the number of refugees had swollen from a few hundred thousand to nearly two million. He partnered with researchers and activists in the region who were devoting much of their time to the urgent needs of resettling refugees and defending their rights. Munif wanted to study the way local people took charge of their own lives and governed themselves. He chose a provincial city called Manbij, in northeastern Syria. By the time he began his field research, government troops had been driven from the city, leaving it in the hands of local civil society groups and rebels.

By 2014, Munif had to interrupt his own work prematurely when Islamic State rebels conquered Manbij. “Without the ACSS, I wouldn’t have been able to do this type of work. They funded the entire project from A to Z,” Munif said. “ACSS is willing to experiment with new types of research, new methodology. With the Arab revolts they are funding some interesting projects that would not get funding from traditional sources.”

Arab social science

It’s worth pausing for a minute to look at the research that came out of Munif and Dahi’s loose collaboration, because it conveys a sense of what a different kind of social science looks like—in the terms of ACSS, a “new paradigm” that addresses questions of concern to people who live in the Middle East and North Africa.

In his work among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, Dahi identified ways that humanitarian aid manipulated the politics of the refugees, in some cases fostering deeper sectarian division, and in others strengthening a more inclusive kind of citizenship. At the same time, Dahi helped to build an online portal that will serve as a data resource for other scholars. He found many willing collaborators within the active community of regional researchers, advocates, and activists. Munif has already published extensively on the local governance and decision-making structures he discovered in Manbij, and he’s currently working on a book that counters “the dominant narrative about Syria,” which in his view “reduces the Syrian uprising to violence, chaos, and nihilism.”

This project is but one of dozens supported by the ACSS since it set up shop in 2010 with a tiny staff but grand ambitions to foment change in intellectual life in the Arab world. Formally, the Arab Council incorporated in October 2010 but only hired staff and began operations from its Beirut headquarters in August 2012. The experiment is still young, but after two major conferences to present research, two business meetings of its general assembly, and the third cycle of grants underway, ACSS is moving from its organizational infancy into adolescence.

Still, some might see its mission as exceedingly quixotic: to foster a standing network of engaged activist intellectuals who set a critical agenda and use the best tools of social science to address burning contemporary questions. And all this ambition comes against the backdrop of a region governed by despots for whom academic freedom is in the best cases a low priority, and in the worst, anathema. “We’re enabling conversations that hadn’t taken place,” said Seteney Shami, the founding director of the ACSS. “It’s too soon to say how we’ve affected social science production, but we have created new spaces. I think we have made a difference.”

The method is as straightforward as the idea is bold. Solicit proposals, especially from researchers who aren’t already part of well-funded and established networks, or who are working on different questions than the mainstream Western academy, which still dominates the research landscape. Invite researchers (ACSS-funded or not) from the region to join the ACSS as voting members who ultimately control its policies and agenda. See what happens.

Since doling out its first grants in 2013, the ACSS has awarded $1.162 million to 108 people. Its annual budget has grown from $800,000 in 2012 to close to $3 million in 2015. The first round of research has been completed, and voting members of the Council’s general assembly this year elected a new board of trustees. (There are 58 voting members out of a total of 137 in the general assembly, according to Shami.) It’s been a dizzying journey for a small organization that supports a type of research criminalized throughout much of the region.

The founders and original funders were determined to promote regional scholarship. Carnegie Corporation in particular has aimed much of its funding in the region toward local scholars, with the intention of stimulating and enabling local knowledge production. The Arab Council complements a number of other efforts in the region to strengthen research and social science. New universities, think tanks, and research centers are emerging in the Arabian Peninsula. Arab and Western academics have formed partnerships, sometimes individually and sometimes at the level of academic departments or entire universities. The magnitude of the ACSS’s impact will only become clear in the context of a wide web of related ventures—all of them taking shape at a time of enormous change and pressure.

All across the Middle East and North Africa, academic researchers face daunting obstacles. There are bright spots, like the active intellectual communities in the universities in Morocco and Algeria. But some of the oldest intellectual centers, like Egypt, struggle under aggressive security and police forces as well as university leaders whose top concern is to ferret out political dissent. War has disrupted intellectual life in places like Syria and Iraq. Government money has poured into the education sector in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, but the lack of academic freedom has dulled its luster.

“The Council was conceived at a time when repression was high but the red lines were clear,” Shami said, referring to the years before the uprisings, when the ACSS was in its planning phase. The current logistical challenges underscore the difficulty of the changing conditions for researchers in the Arab region. An organization dedicated to free inquiry, the ACSS chose to incorporate in Lebanon, where it could operate without governmental restrictions and draw on a vibrant local academic community. Even that location is an imperfect choice.

Members from Egypt, for example, now face new restrictions when they want to visit Lebanon. So far it’s not impossible for Arab scholars to travel around the region, but it’s getting harder. Lebanon’s excessive red tape has thrown up numerous hurdles. For example, the ACSS is currently seeking special permission from the government of Lebanon to allow its international members to vote online on internal policy questions. Equally important, according to Shami, is that work permits for non-Lebanese people are becoming more difficult to obtain, which makes it challenging for the ACSS to hire staff from different parts of the region.

Many resources other regions take for granted don’t exist in the Arab region, where governments restrict access to even the most mundane archives. Data about everything from the economy to food production to the population is treated as a state secret. Permits are difficult to secure. Until the ACSS compiled one, there wasn’t even a comprehensive list of the existing universities in the region. It was these challenges that the founders of the ACSS had in mind, but by the time the organization incorporated in borrowed space in Beirut, the ground had begun to shift. Tunisia’s popular uprising in December 2010 began years of political upheaval across the region. The horizons of possibility briefly opened up, until the old repressive regimes returned in full force almost everywhere except Tunisia.

“We started off at a moment of heightened expectations about the role social sciences could play in the public sphere,” Shami said. “Now we’re in a situation that is far worse in every possible way. These are all big shocks for a young institution. But so far, so good. People are saying it’s impossible to work, but the evidence is that they’re still producing.”

Everything all at once

The ACSS put a lot of balls into the air from the start. Its founders wanted to create a standing network for scholars from the region and who work in the region. Their goal was to empower new voices, connect them with established academics, and nurture the relationships over a long term. That way, even scholars at out-of-the-way institutions, or smaller countries traditionally ignored by the global academic elite, might get a hearing. The Council also wanted to integrate Balkanized research communities, bringing together scholars who often published and collaborated exclusively in Arabic, English, or French.

Other long-term goals factor into the project’s design. Some of the grant categories, like the working groups and research grants, explicitly aim to change the discourse in academic social science. Others, like the “new paradigms factory,” intend to bring activists and public intellectuals into conversation with academics. The ACSS is a membership organization; each grantee can choose to become a permanent member with voting privileges—a sort of institutional democracy and accountability in action that the Council hopes will filter into other institutions in the region.

Finally, this summer (2015) the Council will publish its first in-house work, the Arab Social Science Report, a comprehensive survey of the existing institutions teaching and doing research in the social sciences in the region. The ACSS has established theArab Social Science Monitor as a permanent observatory of research and training in the region and hopes to produce a new report on a different theme every two years, in keeping with its role as a custodian as well as mentor of the Arab social science community.

The inaugural survey demanded an unexpected amount of sleuthing, said Mohammed A. Bamyeh, the University of Pittsburgh sociologist who was the lead author on the report and helped oversee the team that produced it. In some cases it was impossible to obtain basic data such as the number of faculty at a university or their salaries. “If you call them, they will never tell you,” Bamyeh said. “For some reason, it’s a secret.”

In the end, however, a year’s worth of legwork produced a surprisingly thorough snapshot of social science in the region. Researchers identified many more academics and other researchers than they expected, and a wider range of periodicals and institutions. Freedom of research turned out to be a better predictor of quality than funding did, Bamyeh said. The quality varied widely, but Bamyeh said social science in the region is “mushrooming.” We may not have appreciated this growth because we don’t have an Arab social science community,” he said. “We have a lot of individuals doing individual research but they are not connected to each other.”

Sari Hanafi, a sociologist at the American University of Beirut, has studied knowledge production in the Arab world and is intimately familiar with the paucity of quality peer-reviewed journals, professional associations, and the unseen scaffolding that supports top-notch research. He was one of the founding members of the ACSS and currently sits on its board, but he is pointed about the bitter challenges impeding research in the region.

“Social science in the Arab world is in crisis,” Hanafi said. “Social sciences are totally delegitimized in the Arab world.” Repressive states wanted only intellectuals they could control, he maintains, so they starved institutions that could produce the large-scale research teams required for any serious, sustained research. The problem has been compounded, Hanafi said, by ideologues and clerics who want to fulfill the role that social science should rightfully play: providing data, assessing policy options, and generating dissent and criticism.

Quality research anywhere in the world depends on money, intellectual resources, and the support of society and the state, according to Hanafi. “In the Arab world, this pact is still very fragile,” he said. “You don’t have a strong trust in the virtue of science.” He hopes that the ACSS can play a part in a wider revival, in which social scientists reclaim their influence and beat back the encroachment from clerics and authoritarian states. “The mission and vocation of social science in this region is to connect itself to society and to decision makers,” Hanafi said. He believes the Arab world needs stronger institutions of its own, including independent universities, governments sincerely committed to funding independent research, and professional associations for researchers. Efforts like the Arab Council can help pave the way.

Participants at the ACSS conferences are encouraged to present and publish in Arabic. The Council also emphasizes the value of its members as a collective network. Pascale Ghazaleh, a historian at the American University of Cairo, said it was “mindblowing” to meet scholars she’d never heard from around the region at the the ACSS annual meeting in Beirut in March 2015. She said she was moved to hear her colleagues discussing their work in their own language. “It was the first time that I’d been surrounded by people who were unselfconsciously using social science terminology in Arabic,” Ghazaleh said. “It’s something to be proud of.”

The language is part of an intentional long-term strategy to anchor the Council and its social science agenda in the region. Although many of its founders have at least one foot in a Western institution, Shami said that “we see ourselves as fully homegrown and firmly based in the region but interacting with the diaspora as well.” The majority of the trustees, for instance, are based in Arab countries.

“It is an ongoing conversation as to who decides the main questions of research for social sciences,” Bamyeh said. “Can there be something like an indigenous social science that has its own methods? It is essential for social sciences in the Arab world to develop a strong sense of their own identity.” As an example he cites an Egyptian sociologist in the 1960s who discovered at the post office a bag of unaddressed letters, most of them containing prayers and pleas for help from the poor written to a popular folk saint. A clerk was about to throw them away. The sociologist took them home and produced a seminal study of Egyptian attitudes and mentality.

That’s the sort of approach that Bamyeh said he hoped to see employed after the Arab revolts. Instead, he was disappointed to find many American sociologists trying to apply existing Western models to the cases of Egypt and Tunisia. “It was an opportunity to acquire new knowledge,” Bamyeh said. “We need an independent Arab social science that feels its own right to ask questions, questions not asked by the European and American academy. It’s not nationalistic, although it might sound that way. It’s really a question of a scientific approach that comes out of a local embeddedness.”

Activist research

The architects of the ACSS have embraced that quest, encouraging research that springs from local problems, and supporting work from outsiders and nonacademics. In Beirut, the ACSS supported an atypical multidisciplinary research team that explored the misuse of public space and the confiscation of people’s homes. As a result of that research project, Abir Saksouk, an architect and urban planner without an institutional home of her own, launched an ongoing public campaign to save the last major tract of undeveloped coastline in Beirut.

Today she is spearheading one of the most dynamic and visible grassroots social initiatives in Lebanon: the Civil Campaign to Protect the Dalieh of Raouche. The Dalieh is the name of the grassy spit of rock that flanks Beirut’s iconic pigeon rocks. Cliff divers used to perform death-defying Acapulco-style style leaps from the Dalieh’s cliffs until last year, when developers suddenly fenced off the last publicly accessible green open space in Beirut. The campaign that Saksouk helped initiate wants to stop the Dalieh from being transformed into a high-end entertainment and residential complex.

“ACSS was a huge push forward,” Saksouk said. It wasn’t the money, she said, so much as the people with whom it connected her. She was mentored by academics, given a platform to publish in Arabic, and introduced to other people thinking about ways to engage with their city. “My activism on the ground informed what I wanted to focus on in my research, and the paper I wrote for the ACSS informed my activism,” Saksouk said.

The Civil Campaign has started a contest, soliciting alternative, public-minded proposals for the Dalieh peninsula. The point, Saksouk said, is to energize a social movement and change the way Beirutis think about their city’s public space. Her research collaborator, Nadine Bekdache, studied the history of evictions, and together the pair explored the concepts of public space and private property. These are theoretical concepts with explosive implications, especially in a place like Beirut where a few powerful families dominate the government as well as the economy.

“A lot of people are sympathetic but don’t think they can change anything,” Saksouk said. “We’re accumulating experiences and knowledge. All this will lead to change.”

Egypt: In the shadows of a police state

In contrast, the clock has turned backward on the prospects for reform and innovation in Egypt, long considered a center of gravity for Arab intellectual life. Egypt has some of the region’s oldest and biggest universities, and historically has generated some of the most important thinking and research in the Arab world. But Egypt’s academy has suffered a long, slow decline as successive dictatorships suppressed academic life, fearing it would breed political dissent.

In the two-year period of openness that began after Hosni Mubarak was toppled in 2011, university faculty members won the right to elect their own deans and expel secret police from their position of dominance inside research institutions. Creative research projects proliferated. The ACSS was just one of many players during what turned out to be a short renaissance. A May 2015 U.S. State Department report on Egypt’s political situation found “a series of executive initiatives, new laws, and judicial actions severely restrict freedom of expression and the press, freedom of association, freedom of peaceful assembly, and due process.”

At least one well-known the ACSS grant winner, the public intellectual and blogging pioneer Alaa Abdel Fattah, languishes in jail; he was detained before he could complete the paperwork to start his research. Officials even took away his access to pen, paper, and books after his prison letters won a wide following.

Universities have seen a severe decline in academic freedom and some researchers have stopped working or have fled. Outspoken academics like Khaled Fahmy, a historian who has been a critic of military rule and also a spokesman for freer archival access, are waiting out the current turmoil abroad. Political scientist Emad Shahin (who left Egypt and now teaches at Georgetown University) was sentenced to death along with more than a hundred others in May 2015 in a show trial. Some Egypt-based researchers have left since 2013, many grantees remain. The ACSS continues to receive applications from Egypt, and has become all the more vital to that country’s scholars.

Cairo native and historian Alia Mossallam used her research grant to hold an open workshop about writing revolutionary history. As protests roiled the capital, Mossallam quietly organized a workshop that drew 20 people, some from the academic world, some activists, and some professionals and workers who were intrigued by her proposal to study the historiography of “people who are written out of histories of social movements and revolutions.”

Tucked away on an island in the Nile in Upper Egypt, Mossallam’s workshop brought professional historians together with amateur participants. They studied the history of Egyptian folk music and architecture, they looked at archives and newspaper clippings, and then the students used their new skills to produce historical research of their own. Mossallam carefully avoided politics in her open call for workshop participants, but any inquiry into the history of revolution and social movements at Egypt’s present juncture is by nature risky.

Contemporary politics might be a third rail, but in her workshop the Egyptian participants could talk openly about past events like the uprising and burning of Cairo in 1952, or the displacement of Nubians to build the Aswan High Dam. At a time when political speech has been banned, history offers a safer way to talk about revolution. “These workshops are a search for a new language to describe the past as well as the present,” Mossallam said. “Watch out for how you’re being narrated. A lot of the things the participants wrote engaged with that fear, the struggle to maintain a critical consciousness of a revolution while it’s happening.”

Her project wouldn’t have been possible without the Arab Council’s forbearance. The Council encouraged her to find creative ways to engage as wide an audience as possible and gave her extra time to recalibrate her project as conditions in Egypt changed. No other Arab body gives comparable support to Arab scholars, Mossallam said. “They ask, are we asking questions that really matter?” she said. “Are we trying to reach a wider public?”

Can it last?

Sustainability remains an open question. Although the ACSS is registered as a foreign, regional association under Lebanese law and considers itself a regional entity, the organization currently depends on four funders from outside the Arab world for its budget: Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the International Development Research Centre of Canada, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. If at some point in the future those funders turn their attention elsewhere, the ACSS, for all its promise, could quickly reach a dead end. According to Shami, “It’s as sustainable as any other NGO that depends on grants.”

While it’s politically tricky for an Arab institution to take Western money, funds from various regional sources can come with strings attached. Ideally, Shami said, the ACSS would like to find acceptable funding sources from within the region.

The Arab Council’s accelerated launch has attracted wide interest, creating new challenges as the organization matures. “We’ve built up a lot of expectations. People think we have unlimited resources,” Shami said. “We might be coming up against hard times. We might be starting to disappoint people.” Just as important as money is the political structure of the region. Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco remain the only relatively free operating environments for intellectual work in the region, and that freedom is always under threat from militant movements, authoritarian parties, and regional wars.

Deana Arsenian, Carnegie’s vice president for international programs, attended the March 2015 meeting and was impressed by the enthusiasm of the several hundred participants, whose optimism for research far exceeded their expectations for their region’s political future. “The act of creating a network across multiple countries is in and of itself a major feat, given the realities of the region,” Arsenian said. “While it’s a work in progress and many aspects of the association have to be worked out, the interest among the members in making it succeed seems very strong.”

ACSS came at a moment of great change and opening in the Middle East, and was rooted in a region that needs to be heard from. From the beginning the ACSS has intentionally included all those who reside in the Arab region regardless of ethnic or linguistic origins, as well as those in the diaspora. As it moves past the startup phase, the Arab Council’s scholars will have to decide whether their aim is to increase the visibility in the wider world of scholars of the region, or whether it’s to create a parallel universe. It will also have to grapple with its definition: what is an “Arab” council? Shami herself is of Circassian origin, and there are plenty of other non-Arab ethnicities and language groups in the region: Kurds, Berbers, and so on. Many of the early success stories in the ACSS are geographical hybrids, trained by or based at Western institutions, which she points out reflects the global hierarchies of knowledge production.

The Council might also have to refine the scope of work it supports. So far, in the interest of transparency and interdisciplinary research, the ACSS has been very flexible and open to all communities of scholars, knowing that as a result the work of its grantees will be uneven. Another question is whether, once the novelty wears off, the ACSS conference will become a genuine source of scholarly prestige for social scientists. Its second annual conference, in March of this year, attracted four applicants for every presentation slot. Almost nobody who was invited to present dropped out.

Arab Council has already identified a greater breadth of existing scholarship in the region than its founders expected. Over time, it will gauge the quality and rigor of that work. “It’s too early to see the dividends or the fruits, because these fruits depend on how social science is professionalized or institutionalized,” Hanafi said.

Dahi, the economist from Hampshire College who researched Syrian refugees, has stayed involved with the ACSS, helping to organize its second conference this year. Regional research has grown harder, he said, because of the “climate of fear” in places like Egypt and the impossibility of doing any research at all today in most of Syria, Iraq, and Libya. “The carpet is shifting under our feet in ways that academics don’t like,” Dahi said. “Academics like a stable subject to study.”

He believes the Council will face a major test over the next years as it shifts from dispersing grants to pursuing its own research agenda, like other research councils around the world. “The key challenge will be this next step, because you need to create this tradition of quality production of knowledge,” Dahi said. “I’m optimistic. Supply creates its own demand. I don’t believe that in economics, but I do believe it in knowledge production.”

Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/FILE

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

The Arab world can’t feed itself, and that’s how the region’s dictators like it.

EARLY IN THE Tahrir Square revolution, a group of retired Egyptian generals sat poolside at Cairo’s Gezira Club and worried about whether the country’s ruling elite could survive a popular uprising. It was February 2011, a week before President Hosni Mubarak was toppled. Millions of freshly politicized Egyptians had already taken to the streets. And yet, some of these career security men were unfazed.

“The only thing we really need to worry about is a revolution of the hungry,” said one, a retired Air Force general. “That would be the end of us.”

As it turned out, it took less than four years for Egypt’s dictatorship to reconstitute itself, crushing the hope for real change among the people. In no small part, the regime’s resilience was due to its firm grasp of bread politics. The ruler who controls the main staples of life — bread and fuel — often controls everything else, too.

Nonetheless, the specter of a “revolution of the hungry” still worries authoritarian rulers today, in Egypt and throughout the Arab world. Roughly put, the idea is shorthand for an uprising that brings together not only the traditional cast of political and religious dissidents but also pits a far greater number of poor, uneducated, and apolitical citizens against the state.

Look across the region, and regimes have good reason to be afraid. Even in countries where obesity is widespread, people suffer from low-quality medical care and malnutrition due to a lack of healthy food.

The basic equation is stark: The Arab world cannot feed itself. Rulers obsessed with security have created a twisted web of importers and bakeries whose aim is not to feed the population efficiently or nutritiously but simply to maintain the regime and stave off that much feared revolution of the hungry. Vast subsidies eat up the lion’s share of national budgets.

So far, the bakeries haven’t run out of loaves in two of the region’s biggest bread battlegrounds, Egypt and Syria. But the sense of plenty is only an illusion. Food is expensive, people are poor, and repressive regimes rely on imported wheat financed through foreign aid. It’s an unsustainable and volatile cocktail.

“You have a system where access to food is a primary mechanism of social control,” said journalist Annia Ciezadlo, author of the book “Day of Honey,” who has written extensively about food subsidies, unrest, and the use of food as a weapon in the Middle East. “The moment something happens to that supply of subsidized food, everything can go out of control.”

THE ARAB UPRISINGS of 2010 and 2011 offered only the most recent glimpse of what it would look like if people got hit where it hurts the most: at the dinner table.

In 1977, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt managed a feat that had been considered impossible when he broke with the entire Arab world and initiated a peace process with Israel, even traveling to Jerusalem to address the Knesset. The bread conundrum, on the other hand, proved much more intractable.

Sadat tried in January 1977 to cancel Egypt’s expensive wheat subsidy at the urging of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Riots swept nearly every major city, and in two days Sadat caved. He restored the bread subsidy that has remained in place ever since, and the Egyptian military took control of many crucial bakeries to ensure that the government could control the bread supply in a crisis. That awkward status quo prevails to this day. The government’s bread economy is inefficient, unstable, and nearly entirely dependent on foreign imports. But any attempt to tinker with bread prices or subsidies still terrifies the country’s rulers and enrages its citizens.

Regimes took heed. Hafez al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, extolled peasants in his rhetoric and made food independence a central pillar of his regime. For decades, Syrian officials constantly bragged they didn’t need to import wheat.

Dictators in the Arab world learned that one of the best routes to dominance runs through the bakery. Rulers the world round usually deploy some variant of pocketbook politics, rewarding their loyalists with perks like community centers, jobs, and payola — and punishing opposition areas by scrimping on their basic services like roads and schools. In many Middle Eastern countries, the level of control was more basic: Without the government, citizens would starve.

The brittle, undemocratic regimes had, however, no mechanism of oversight and little resilience to withstand outside shocks. So distant events like a bad crop on the Black Sea or low rainfall in Canada could quickly translate into a political crisis in the Levant or North Africa. In 2008, world food prices spiked, and, once again, bread riots broke out across the Middle East. Regimes scrambled to cover the shortfall with handouts and subsidies, on the assumption that their populations might tolerate repression but not hunger.

Indeed, rising commodity prices were one of the triggers in the 2010 to 2011 uprisings. Protesters in Tunisia brandished baguettes. In Egypt, many of the revolutionary chants talked about food, and a central demand was for “bread, freedom, social justice” (it rhymes in Arabic).

The first Syrians to rise up against Bashar Assad included many poor farmers who had been displaced by drought and the government’s neoliberal disinvestment from agriculture. Caitlin Werrell and Francesco Femia at the Center for Climate and Security in Washington, D.C., argue that a series of droughts in Syria from 2006 to 2010 created the preconditions for the uprisings — crop failures drove farmers off their land and raised the level of desperation until Syrians directly challenged their ruler.

Saudi Arabia’s ultrarich monarchy calculated that it could survive any challenge from political dissidents critical of the country’s lack of rights and freedoms — as long as it could keep its citizens in material comfort. The king quickly increased handouts to citizens, and after a brief rumble, Saudi Arabians sat out the regional wave of protests that swept through nearly every other Arab state.

Yet the obsession with food sovereignty and security remains close to the region’s despots. Saudi Arabia has purchased land in fertile water-rich countries like Ethiopia in order to secure its food supply.

In Syria, unscrupulous combatants on all sides have made food one of the war’s central battlegrounds. The regime blocks delivery of food aid to rebellious regions; its blockade of the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus has also kept out truckloads of UN food aid, causing years of famine in the camp. Further afield, the regime routinely bombs bakeries in areas that fall under rebel control, in a method colloquially referred to as “starve-or-surrender.”

The Islamic State, for its part, has made control of the food supply a basic part of its blueprint for power, starting with the bakeries and wheat warehouses, and even facilitating the international aid deliveries that have kept some parts of northern Syria from suffering the same fate as Yarmouk.

THE ARAB STATES are the world’s largest net importers of grains, depending on exports from water-rich North America, Europe, and Central Asia.

So it follows that bread riots will break out every time there’s a disruption in the global food supply. Anger will bubble up every time there’s a drought. Or when oil profits fall and it becomes harder to pay for grain imports. The Middle East North Africa region consumes about 44 percent of global net grain imports, according to Eckart Woertz, author of “Oil for Food: The Global Food Crisis and the Middle East”: “Self sufficiency is not an option in the region,” he said in an interview.

Still, most scholars now accept the idea first proposed by the economist Amartya Sen, that food shortages and famines are usually caused by political mismanagement, not by an actual lack of food.

In the Middle East, that means conditions are still ripe for a tempest. “At the end of the day, we can explain the crisis in terms of political economy: corruption, crony networks favored over rural populations. Droughts don’t cause civil war in Los Angeles,” said Woertz, who studies food and security at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, a think tank.

And it can’t be ignored that droughts have been a fact of life in the arid Arab world as long as there has been agriculture, and bread riots on their own have yet to transform a dictatorship into a democracy. That’s because the problem is much larger: People in the Arab world have been kept poorer than they should be by corrupt repressive governments that hog national wealth for a tiny elite. Until that changes, hunger and food insecurity will remain yet another symptom of the region’s terrible governance.

Issue brief for The Century Foundation. Download as pdf.

With the Iran nuclear negotiations concluded, attention ought to shift to a political solution for the troubling war in Syria, which has killed about a quarter-million people (estimates range from 230,000 to 320,000¹), while displacing 4 million refugees into the Levant and Turkey.²

The United States remains an indispensable source of influence in the Middle East—when it chooses to get involved. It can shift the dynamics of the Syrian civil war by taking two steps. First, Washington should pour a new, higher level of support into the northern front of the civil war, in coordination with key allies, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Second, it should continue to promote an end to the war through political negotiations that include all the key domestic and international actors in the conflict and exclude only the most extreme jihadist rebels.

A sustained intervention through proxies on Syria’s northern front would be a messy and inconclusive affair, but if carefully tailored, with pragmatic expectations, it could completely shift the political horizon for the Syrian civil war. No foreign intervention can create an idealistic group of democratic, secular rebels ready to take over the entire country of Syria and replace the regime. With international support, however, it is possible to create a coalition of nationalist rebels capable of making gains against both the regime in Damascus and jihadist extremists, including ISIS, the Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham. An invigorated nationalist opposition could provide the final incentive needed to bring Syria’s combatants into a productive negotiating process.

The conflict is newly ripe for a diplomatic resolution, requiring only a catalyst. Russia, focused on the Ukraine crisis, would entertain an end to the war that preserved its status quo security interests in the Levant. The political and economic windfall from the nuclear deal in Vienna could prompt Iran to increase its aggressive involvement in Syria,³ but it might simultaneously make Iran more open to discussions of a settlement.⁴ An insecure and aggrieved Saudi Arabia will need to be wooed, as its leaders are irritated by the prospect of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement.⁵ Yet, the rise of entrenched jihadis and the civilian bloodletting in Syria is equally troubling for the Saudis.⁶ Turkey is increasingly facing the risk of a spillover effect from the conflict in Syria, and would benefit from a calming of the crisis along its borders.⁷

All these factors suggest that a well-designed U.S. initiative, coupled with a concerted push to shift the military balance of power on the northern front, could trigger a genuine effort to negotiate an end to the war in Syria.

Existing Intervention: A Sorry Mess

Currently, the Damascus regime and its Iranian backers have encountered little resistance to their maximalist, often criminal tactics. The regime appears to continue to use chemical weapons with little consequence.⁸ Its armed forces and semiofficial militias have massacred tens of thousands of civilians by dropping barrel bombs, naval mines, and other indiscriminate explosives on neighborhoods under rebel control.⁹ Yet, the international community has raised no meaningful objections.

American involvement in Syria has been desultory. More than a year ago, when the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shām (ISIS) expanded its dominion in Syria and Iraq and captured the city of Mosul, Washington vowed to do something; it would no longer consider the war in Syria a strategically inconsequential problem that could be ignored. But a year later, the United States has lagged on its promise to train and equip Syrian rebels. The latest venture, approved a year ago with a $500 million budget, just sent its first class of recruits into the field in July—a paltry contingent of sixty.¹⁰ The Pentagon is hamstrung by its obsession with vetting fighters, and its standards are so impractical and unrealistic that they disqualify most credible commanders. The train-and-equip program is further hampered by the insistence that its graduates only fight Islamist jihadists rather than the regime in Damascus.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has not even decided what kind of support to give to the soldiers it has dispatched into northern Syria under the latest iteration of train-and-equip. “I think we have some obligations to them once they are inserted in the field,” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter told a congressional committee. “They know that we will provide support to them.” But he could not specify what that support would entail: “We have not told them yet,” Carter said the week the newly trained fighters were deployed.¹¹

The U.S. air campaign against ISIS has struck limited targets. With few trusted local proxies on the ground, the U.S. Air Force can have only minimal impact. For now, the only local proxy with fighters on the ground that can regularly ask for U.S. air strikes is the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).¹² The YPG has successfully taken some territory from ISIS, but is anathema to Turkey. Whenever the YPG is too successful, as in June when it captured the border crossing of Tal Abyad between Turkey and Syria,¹³ the Turks become alarmed and resentful. Ankara considers the YPG as indistinguishable from the PKK, militant Kurdish separatists who have waged an on-again off-again violent campaign in Turkey. The Turkish government will never support an anti-ISIS or anti-Assad campaign dominated by the YPG Kurds.

Meanwhile, as U.S. efforts have floundered, ISIS continues to deepen its state structures, military capacity, and territorial control, and it looks more like an established entity with each passing day.¹⁴

With all this bad news and so many unreliable partners on the ground, it’s no wonder that President Obama has kept his distance. Rebels willing to do business with the CIA, DOD and other government agencies have proven a mixed bag. In 2014, for instance, the United States invested considerable resources in Jamal Maarouf’s secular nationalist Syria Revolutionaries’ Front (SRF), which then took control of much of Idlib province. U.S. involvement initially was viewed as a success; a modest amount of money, along with anti-tank missiles, had shifted the battle in favor of “moderate” rebels. In practice, the rebels proved not so moderate, and the success was short lived. The SRF’s governance of Idlib was capricious and riddled with corruption. Civilians in Idlib came to resent the inconsistency and predatory abuses of their liberators. The province suffered punishing regime air strikes, as do all areas liberated by rebels. Eventually, Islamists took over the province and roundly defeated the SRF, which then collapsed.¹⁵ 

Today, the liberated areas of Idlib province are controlled mostly by the Nusra Front (Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate), and Ahrar el-Sham, a jihadi group that has won plaudits for being more homegrown and nationalist than ISIS and Nusra, but which in practice shares their extreme views, which are incompatible with a pluralistic or secular state. The areas of Idlib province controlled by secular nationalists under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) survive as timid oases of relative moderation. FSA commanders interviewed in Reyhanli said they do not even try to control local governance, the economy, or social services (as Islamist militias do in their domains), and they admit that they must surrender some share of their resources and weapons to the Islamists who control the FSA’s access to Idlib. They rely on the black market for fuel, sometimes indirectly buying the diesel for their tanks and vehicles from ISIS.

Willing Partners

The good news is that there are still plenty of commanders willing to fight under the banner of the FSA, do business with the United States, and espouse political principles and talking points that make them palatable to mainstream Syrians. A recent visit to the Turkish-Syrian border showed a growing group of commanders who control boots on the ground, have a nationalist, rather than Islamist style, and have demonstrated an ability to learn politically.

“At the end we will support any government that gives all Syrians their rights,” Colonel Fares Bayyoush, an army defector who commands an FSA brigade in Idlib province, said in an interview at his headquarters in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli. “From our side, we are going to behave like Syrians. . .If we in the FSA get power, we will protect coexistence.” Half a dozen FSA commanders interviewed in Reyhanli and Gaziantep voiced the same refrain: they want a resolution to the Syrian war that protects all sects and ethnicities, and they want to eliminate the jihadist groups while reintegrating their supporters into society. They have demonstrated a history of coordinating military operations with Kurds and with Islamist fighters. They express a willingness to negotiate with elements of the regime, and they claim to include Christians, Druze and Alawites among the ranks of their fighters.

Much of this sentiment is probably tailored for Western consumption, but it also marks a considerable shift compared to a year ago. Interviews in the same border towns with the same groups in the summer of 2014 had revealed a propensity for grandstanding, Sunni triumphalism, and petulant demands that the U.S. military intervene directly and win the war for the opposition. Today, the same commanders have learned a new political language. The rhetoric of rights and national unity in the hands of pragmatic fighters signals the beginnings of a national accord that could lead Syria out of its fratricidal war.

So long as the United States is looking for a functional alliance and not for idealized founding fathers, it can find what it needs to shift the Syrian dynamic among the grab-bag of Syrian nationalists clamoring for American money and weapons on the northern front.

The framework for forming this alliance already exists. The United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other aligned players dispense military aid and cash to their preferred rebels through coordinating bodies—known colloquially among fighters as “military operations rooms”—in Reyhanli, Turkey and Aleppo, Syria. Some powers are believed also to fund favored proxies independently on the sly, but the operations rooms were founded with the stated goal of streamlining and unifying the funding of anti-Assad rebels.

And there is evidence to support this approach. Whenever the major outside powers work together to direct their weapons, funding, and intelligence in tandem, there are considerable gains on the ground as witnessed in the regime losses in Idlib and Aleppo provinces over the last year.¹⁶ When foreign powers work at loggerheads, fractiousness increases, along with infighting within and between the nationalist FSA, the Islamists, the Kurds, and the regime.

Changing the Dynamic on the Ground

The groups seeking aid through the operations rooms have proven their elasticity. Some, like the Noureddin Zinki Brigades, temporarily lost American backing when some of their weapons ended up in the hands of jihadists.¹⁷ Much of this leakage is unavoidable. For example, in Idlib province, the secular nationalist FSA brigades desperate to keep American support still operate at the pleasure of the militarily dominant Islamists.

This is a dynamic that the United States can change. First, it must make some tough choices in tandem with key allies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and perhaps other regional players such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. There are at least a dozen rebel groups well known to foreign governments. The foreign backers of the anti-Assad forces must agree on a small number of commanders and groups acceptable to all

Perfection will be the enemy of progress. None of the FSA militias are ideal, but most of them have nationalist roots and agree on the key points that inform long-term U.S. goals: preservation of Syria’s borders, a pluralistic state that safeguards the rights of all ethnic and sectarian communities, and an end to foreign domination of the state. Saudi Arabia will dislike Muslim Brotherhood militias. Turkey will prefer groups with a Sunni Islamic flavor and will seek to minimize the role of the Kurdish YPG militias. The United States will want a commander who pays lip service to America’s political vision for Syria. These lowest-common denominator characteristics can be found in a single militia.

The nationalist groups whose long term goal is to hold power in Syria also have come to understand that it’s not feasible to massacre members of minority groups, dictate terms to foreign powers, or transform Syria into an Islamic republic. A year ago, many FSA commanders interviewed in the border region were not willing to openly espouse nationalist political goal, or did not understand the type of political language that would enable them to win international support. Today, many of them have learned an entirely new vocabulary. FSA battalions have united in a coherent communications structure, which is ripe for sustained international backing.

An effective strategy would have to follow a long-term plan that includes, at a minimum, the following elements:

1. Coordinated backing of a single commander, or small number of commanders. The United States, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia would have to direct their resources in harmony to selected groups and exclude funding and weapons for all others. As has occurred throughout the Syrian conflict whenever funding shifted, fighters would abandon atrophying brigades and join the well-funded and well-armed groups.

2. Effective governance of rebel areas. The foreign backers, led by the United States, would have to keep their proxies on a short leash, forcing rather than trusting them to behave well. That means long-term funding and arming that is dispensed in weekly bursts and carefully monitored. If a proxy group mistreats minorities, or engages in black market fuel trade, or extorts money from civilians, it will forfeit its weekly cash payment. The United States and others will also have to send huge amounts of nonmilitary aid to enable effective governance in liberated areas, which would require a full buy-in from Turkey.

3. Security in liberated areas. Unless liberated areas are safe for civilians, the regime will win even when it loses. There are many options, but all of them require an end to the Damascus regime’s unfettered control of Syria’s airspace. Curtailing the Syrian regime’s sovereignty would entail a significant change in U.S. commitment, which will require a change of position by the White House and political legwork domestically to win approval. The most maximal option is a no-fly zone supported by the United States and Turkey. In a less dramatic move, the United States could back a no-fly zone enforced by Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. It could politically support a middle option whereby Turkey would shoot down regime bombers and helicopters using land-based systems in Turkey. Or, at the most minimal, international teams of special forces (from Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey or the United States) could sporadically shoot down regime bombers using portable surface-to-air missiles. This last option would introduce enough risk and uncertainty for the regime that it would be forced to reduce its indiscriminate bombing. One reasonable objection is that most liberated areas are currently controlled by Islamist extremists: Ahrar al-Sham, Nusra, and ISIS. The United States understandably does not want to be seen acting as Al Qaeda’s air force, which is why it’s crucial that air cover evolves in tandem with backing for nationalist, non-jihadi rebels. Air cover and an internationally backed safe zone should be extended as a start over any area held by non-jihadi rebels.

4. Shifting the political and military balance of power. Gains by nationalist rebels would weaken the Islamists (ISIS, Nusra, and Ahrar) and would also weaken the regime. It is crucial that nationalist rebels, backed by the United States and others, win support and trust from fence-sitters, tribes, and rural religious Sunni Arabs who currently tilt toward Islamist groups or the regime. The U.S.-backed rebels would have to avoid sectarian massacres or Sunni triumphalism. They would have to continue showing an ability to work with all Syrian sects and ethnicities and continue espousing a commitment to a secular nationalist governing ideology that preserves Syria’s territorial integrity and opposes Islamist extremists. Such a position would make the rebels palatable to mainstream Syrians as well as to political actors with whom the opposition will ultimately have to reconcile in a negotiated settlement: quiescent members of the business class from every ethnic and sectarian background, the ruling elite, and its international backers.

5. A peace process. U.S.-orchestrated intervention on Syria’s northern front can feed a process of negotiating a political settlement. Rebels cannot win outright; neither can the regime or the Islamists. But a consolidated front of nationalist rebels can make peace with a subset of the regime and begin the arduous process of reconstituting the Syrian state. For a new strategy to succeed, the United States would have to regularly renew its invitation and commitment to support an inclusive political negotiating process to end the war.

A Long Haul

The United States has been mysteriously AWOL in Syria, even since “declaring war on ISIS” a year ago and undertaking a desultory bombing campaign. Now, with the peril of Iran’s nuclear program apparently contained, the United States ought to ramp up its diplomatic and indirect military engagement in Syria, with the intention of forcing a fair political settlement.

A concerted and sustained U.S.-orchestrated campaign to empower one faction of nationalist rebels could do wonders to change the dynamics of the fitful negotiations to resolve the Syrian civil war. There’s nothing the United States could do to make the anti-Assad rebels win, even if it wanted to. But by placing its thumb on the scale with a vigor that it has so far avoided, the United States could propel its preferred faction to dominance within the fractured milieu of anti-Assad forces.

The United States could alter the dynamic of the war and the position of key outside sponsors of the conflict—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar—with a sustained political and military commitment to nationalist rebels who express a commitment to a multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian Syria within its current borders and based on an inclusive definition of citizenship.

Such a partnership is feasible, so long as it has realistic aims: not to win the war for one faction or hope to eliminate jihadist extremists overnight, but to make all parties to the civil war realize that a political compromise will leave them better off than a continued war.

The mechanics are clear. First, the United States must acknowledge that a resolution in Syria will require the involvement of all the parties to the conflict, including Washington’s unsavory allies and its persistent rivals. Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey will have to be at the negotiating table. So will some unseemly Islamist rebel factions. Any party excluded from negotiations, like ISIS or the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, must be instead roundly defeated with military force. It is not possible to ignore the extremist groups and yet concede them the territory under their control.

Any new approach could still take years to change the overall direction of Syria’s war. A shift in the U.S. approach to the northern front would require considerable diplomatic work with Turkey and Arab allies. But a pragmatic plan could get the key players onside and frame the goals for the conflict in a more realistic way. Nothing will change as long as each group of combatants thinks it can achieve total victory. But the political dynamics will change as the balance of power on the ground shifts, and the only proven force that has affected the course of the conflict to date has been the sustained flow of money, weapons, and foreign political attention.

At worst, the United States will fail to persuade all its allies to fully cooperate with the strategy and will end up with a few tighter partnerships among the rebels, but no major strategic yield. At best, the United States will convince the other sponsors of the Syrian conflict that they no longer have free access to run killing fields and  that they will have to pay a much higher price to stick with the status quo—or else will have to look for political compromises.

Notes

1 Estimates from the United Nations and Western news agencies place the minimum death toll at 230,000. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates a minimum death toll of 320,000.
2 In addition to the 4 million refugees who have fled Syria, nearly 8 million internally displaced people have been forced from their homes but still live in the country. See Nick Cummings-Bruce, “Number of Syrian Refugees Climbs to More Than 4 Million,” New York Times, July 9, 2015,http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/world/middleeast/number-of-syrian-refugees-climbs-to-more-than-4-million.html?_r=0.
3 Sean D. Naylor, “Will Curbing Iran’s Nuclear Threat Boost Its Proxies?” Foreign Policy, July 20, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/20/will-curbing-irans-nuclear-threat-boost-its-proxies/.
4 Jessica Schulberg, “Obama: No End to War in Syria Without ‘Buy-In’ From Iran,” Huffington Post, July 20, 2015,http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/15/obama-iran-deal_n_7802768.html.
5 Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky, “It’s Time to Stop Holding Saudi Arabia’s Hand,” Foreign Policy, May 12, 2015,http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/12/its-time-to-stop-holding-saudi-arabias-hand-gcc-summit-camp-david/.
6 David Gardner, “The Toxic Rivalry of Saudi Arabia and ISIS,” Financial Times, July 16, 2015, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8bba2ab4-2b00-11e5-8613-e7aedbb7bdb7.html#axzz3gdqpeelg.
7 Semih Idiz, “Turkey Needs to Drop Its Dead-End Foreign Policy,” Al-Monitor, July 21, 2015, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/07/turkey-west-european-union-us-time-to-readjust-compass.html.
8 Adam Entous, “Assad Chemical Threat Mounts,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/assad-chemical-threat-mounts-1435535977.
9 Lucy Westcott, “United Nations: Assad’s Barrel Bombs Continue to Kill Syrian Civilians,” Newsweek, June 27, 2015,http://www.newsweek.com/united-nations-assads-barrel-bombs-continue-kill-syrian-civilians-347782.
10 Jennifer Rizzo, “Carter: U.S. Trains Only 60 Syrian Rebels,” CNN, July 7, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/07/politics/united-states-training-syrian-rebels-ashton-carter/.
11 See Roy Gutman, “First contingent of U.S.-trained fighters enters Syria,” McClatchy, July 16, 2015, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article27446395.html, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Syrian rebels get their first U.S.-trained fighters,” Washington Post, July 15, 2015,https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/first-us-trained-syrian-fighters-reenter-their-country/2015/07/15/6e6c0551-353d-4e17-961b-98995321576c_story.html.
12 See Denise Natali, “The Coalition’s quagmire with Syrian Kurds,” Al Monitor, July 14, 2015, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/07/coalition-quagmire-syrian-kurds.html#. See also Roy Gutman, “U.S Moves Its Syrian Air Campaign to the West,” McClatchy, June 30, 2015, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article25909303.html.
13 Thomas Seibert, “ISIS is Losing in Northern Syria, but Ankara is Unhappy,” Daily Beast, June 16, 2015,http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/16/isis-is-losing-in-northern-syria-but-ankara-is-unhappy.html.
14Tim Arango, “ISIS Transforming Into Functioning State That Uses Terror as a Tool” New York Times, July 21, 2015,http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/world/middleeast/isis-transforming-into-functioning-state-that-uses-terror-as-tool.html.
15 See Liz Sly, “U.S.-backed Syria rebels routed by fighters linked to al-Qaeda,” Washington Post, November 2, 2014,https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-backed-syria-rebels-routed-by-fighters-linked-to-al-qaeda/2014/11/02/7a8b1351-8fb7-4f7e-a477-66ec0a0aaf34_story.html. Zack Beauchamp, “American strategy in Syria is collapsing,” Vox, November 4, 2014,http://www.vox.com/2014/11/4/7150473/american-strategy-in-syria-is-collapsing.  A similar collapse struck another U.S. favorite, the Hazm movement; see Ian Black, “US Syria policy in tatters after favoured ‘moderate’ rebels disband,” Guardian, March 2, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/us-syria-policy-tatters-moderate-rebels-disband.
16 Firas abi Ali, “Syrian Opposition Success in Idlib Province Likely to Threaten Aleppo, Latakia, and Assad’s Hold on Power,” IHS Jane’s Intelligence Weekly, April 27, 2015, http://www.janes.com/article/51012/syrian-opposition-success-in-idlib-province-likely-to-threaten-aleppo-latakia-and-assad-s-hold-on-power.
17 Author interview with Noureddin Zinki Brigades official, Antakya, Turkey, June 2015.

[Published in Foreign Policy.]

“The World Has Changed,” trumpeted the front-page headline of the Iranian reformist daily Etemaad on July 15, the day after Iran signed a nuclear deal with the six world powers. But as U.S. President Barack Obama attempts to build on this agreement, he will find that changing the destructive dynamics of the Middle East is far more difficult than any negotiation in Vienna.

For years, U.S. leaders have staked their hopes for calming decades of sectarian war, insurgency, and tension in the Middle East on rehabilitating Iran, a bête noire in the eyes of Washington and its allies. But if there’s any hope of changing these dynamics, the United States is going to have to dive quickly and deeply into the region’s feuds. Wars have spiraled out of control in four Arab countries, and Iran is only partly to blame. A more cooperative Tehran — which may or may not materialize after the nuclear agreement sinks in — could open the door to calming the bloodshed in Syria, where Iran is a lead player. But the roots of the wars in Iraq and Yemen go deeper than Tehran’s machinations, and Iran has almost no role in the Libyan conflict.

After the deal, like before, U.S. interests will be challenged by clever and aggressive foes, but also by ruthless allies. If the United States wants to alter the dynamic, it will have to give up its linear approach and play what Joseph Nye describes as “three-dimensional chess.” Until now, Washington has insisted on taking on one crisis at a time, meaning that a pileup of disasters has festered while the White House looked only at the Iran nuclear deal.

That mindset won’t work. It will take far more than a change in Iran to end the Syrian civil war. Same for Yemen.

So, what will work?

First, the United States will have to engage Iran and other bad actors in each of the region’s hot spots. Obama has already expressed the intention of doing so: At his press conference on July 15, he spoke of “[jump-starting] a process to resolve the civil war in Syria” and that “it’s important for [Iran] to be part of that conversation.”

Second, at the same time Washington tries to engage diplomatically with Tehran, it will also need to raise the costs for Iran of continuing to do business in the same bloody way it has across the region. With billions of dollars flowing back into the country after the lifting of sanctions, there’s a risk that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will intensify its expansionist approach and investment in proxy wars. A direct war with Iran isn’t a wise option, but ignoring its machinations has left it free reign to expand its dominion in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. The only remaining option is to engage in messy proxy warfare as well, giving sustained military and political backing to anti-Iranian proxies, which will make it expensive for Iran to meddle around the Arab world. This will give the United States a new card in the negotiations to come: It can offer to restrain its proxy militias if Iran does the same.

Third, the United States will face the challenging task of getting its recalcitrant allies onto the same page. In the Syria conflict, that will mean butting heads with Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, all of which have poured money into rival rebel factions, allowed a free-for-all in the border zones, and paved the way for the entrenchment of hard-line Islamists within the uprising. Washington will need to convince its partners to pick a single rebel coalition to back and then endow it with real and sustained support. That’s the only way to tilt the balance inside Syria and increase the likelihood of a political solution that empowers nationalist rebels at the expense of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the radical Islamists.

After years of myopic focus on Iran’s nuclear program, the United States will have to take an unsentimental and cleareyed inventory of its dysfunctional allies. It can only expect so much from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and Turkey — but with these sorts of friends, it behooves Washington to lower its expectations and take a more transactional approach to enlisting cooperation, whenever possible, on a single issue or subsets of issues. A disappointed Saudi Arabia, for instance, might play ball with the United States on Syria — even as it opposes Washington’s policy in Iraq. Turkey could be convinced to better police its border in exchange for a U.S. policy shift on the Kurds, who have made rapid gains in northern Syria.

The biggest benefit of the Iran deal is the diplomatic process it created. The intense relationships that evolved over the course the negotiations can now be used to open conversations on other issues. Whether those conversations bear fruit is another matter — but history teaches us that personal trust among diplomats can change the direction on the ground.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of this agreement as an inflection point akin to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which completely shifted the dynamics of the Middle East conflict. The Iran nuclear talks are more like the Madrid process, the breakthrough that lead to the Oslo Accords: a first diplomatic step that could, in turn, lead to other diplomatic steps. And like the Oslo Accords, it could still ultimately fail to accomplish any of its stated goals.

So let’s not overstate the impact of the agreement just yet. The agreement hasn’t yet given the world any tangible achievements, in the form of abated extremism or disarmed militants. What’s more, the Middle East remains on course for another decade of murderous warfare, deepening sectarian feuds, and destabilizing polarization. These are grim phenomena with inescapable and dangerous strategic consequences for Middle Eastern countries, global energy markets, and the security interests of the United States.

If the Obama administration hopes to change this reality, it will need to pressure every major player — both allies and adversaries — to shift course. Iran, the Syrian regime, and Hezbollah could be emboldened by the deal and tempted to double down on their current maximalist bets. Troublesome friends such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, meanwhile, have continually undermined U.S. aims in the Middle East and will do so with even more boldness as they try to derail the nuclear deal.

Washington is going to need to change the calculations of both groups, and it’s not going to be easy. The Obama administration will have to manage petulant allies enraged by the deal and persuade drifting fence-sitters like Turkey and Egypt to play a more constructive role in breaking regional stalemates.

It will also have to defy recent history by rolling back Iranian influence at a time when Tehran will be motivated to try to expand its reach. Iran, after all, already successfully expanded its reach through militant proxies and tightened relations with key Arab allies even during the period when sanctions crippled its economy. With a deal concluded, Tehran won’t walk away from its achievements. If the nuclear negotiations were grueling, imagine how hard it will be to pressure Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to sacrifice a material alliance with Syria, Iraq, or Hezbollah.

For years, Obama administration insiders have quietly spread the word that the president wasn’t tuned out on the Middle East. Instead, they argued, he was following a strategic order of operations. The first step was trying to seal a nuclear deal with Iran, the regional tiger, and then systematically deal with the region’s instability, proxy wars, and sectarian strife.

The coming months will test that claim. If Obama does in fact have a plan to use an Iran deal as the cornerstone of a new regional order, the real work begins now, and it will be messy. The dirty business of superpower realpolitik, a combination of muscle and diplomatic savvy, comes next. It’s what the United States should have been doing all along. The Iran deal gives it a chance to reboot and get it right.

[Published in The New York Times.]

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — The worst day on the set of “Banned in Syria,” the actors agreed, was when the sniper struck in June. A location scout was preparing for the day’s filming when a single bullet killed him instantly.

The cast and crew continued undeterred. That is the bargain when you sign up to produce a rebel television series in the wartime Syrian city of Aleppo with little pay, no insurance and militias that want you dead.

During a marathon filming in June to rush this season’s episodes to air in time for Ramadan, the producers of “Banned in Syria” overcame obstacles from the lethal to the prosaic. A second crew member was wounded in crossfire and died several days later. Barrel bombs and shells derailed scenes. Out of respect, filming also paused during the frequent passing funerals. At the end of each day, the technicians struggled with the painfully slow Internet connections as they uploaded footage to film editors at the office just across the border here in Gaziantep.

A scene from the episode “Genie, Genie,” one of the most popular of “Banned in Syria.” It features a dimwitted genie fielding the poignant but comical wishes of the denizens of Aleppo. Credit: Lamba Productions

The creators of “Banned in Syria,” a show that parodies all sides in Syria’s civil war, are desperate for their work to succeed as profitable entertainment — and as political satire.

Most of the scenes take place in the rubble-strewn streets of Aleppo or in damaged buildings. The show skewers President Bashar al-Assad and his government, as well as the religious groups that have taken over much of the uprising. It even mocks the rebels in the Free Syrian Army, who provide security when the show is filmed on location.

“We make fun of the way they treat civilians, but they have no choice but to protect us,” said Yamen Nour, one of the stars of the show. Mr. Nour, 37, a painter and actor who led demonstrations in 2011, considers his theater and television work a continuation of the revolution by other means.

“We want to show people that we are still living,” he said. “It’s very difficult to make people smile during war. We want them to forget the war for a moment.”

Tony el-Taieb, 24, the producer of the series, said he and the 55 or so actors and crew members who work for his company, Lamba Productions, believed that Syria’s original revolutionaries must establish cultural alternatives to those generated by the government in Damascus.

“Our videos drive the regime crazy, because we show the reality,” Mr. Taieb said. “We can’t leave the field of drama to the regime.”

The political ethos of “Banned in Syria” and of Lamba is quintessentially urban and cosmopolitan — the spirit of the original nonviolent uprising in 2011 against Mr. Assad that preceded the civil war. The idea was to broach every taboo subject big and small: the fawning respect accorded to military officers, family feuds and even religion.

To minimize danger, Lamba does editing and postproduction in an apartment here, but Mr. Taieb insisted that filming, theater production and most radio broadcasting take place in Aleppo, a divided city that was once Syria’s economic powerhouse and now symbolizes the society’s intractable divisions and the wanton destruction of the four-year war.

“Banned in Syria” airs on Aleppo Today, a channel for revolutionaries, but Mr. Taieb said the serial gets most of its views on YouTube. He has received messages from friends and relatives of officials about recent episodes, and the comments on YouTube and Facebook suggest that government stalwarts and active-duty soldiers are among the fans of the series.

“We’re talking about everything you can’t discuss in Damascus, because there the walls have ears,” Mr. Taieb said.

A lawyer and activist from a wealthy Sunni Muslim family in Aleppo, Mr. Taieb, whose real name is Qusai Hayani, adopted a Christian nom de guerre when the uprising began in the hopes of persuading minority friends to join the revolution.

While rebel militia ranks are overwhelmingly Sunni, Lamba Productions reflects Syria’s ethnic and sectarian diversity, with team members representing Alawites, Christians, Druse and Kurds.

Authenticity is important to the producers, but then so is staying on budget. The cast and crew members said they supported filming the series inside what they considered “liberated Syria,” but they also realized they could not afford multiple takes.

The resulting complications are visible in “Genie, Genie,” one of this season’s most popular episodes, featuring a dimwitted djinn fielding poignant but comical wishes from the denizens of an apocalyptic Aleppo.

“The passport you gave me was fake!” complains the hapless Syrian, played by Jihad Saka Abu Joud, 32, who found a magic lamp in the ruins of his home.

“Sorry,” replies the genie, played by Mr. Nour. “My supplier is a jerk.”

A real-life shell explodes in the background, a puff of smoke visible in the frame. The ersatz genie delivers his next line without missing a beat. Mr. Abu Joud flinches then recovers. The take rolls on.

Mr. Abu Joud can mug like the British character Mr. Bean, but he has gained notoriety for another talent: singing ballads. During breaks, Mr. Abu Joud regaled the crew with revolutionary songs, though he feared Aleppo residents would resent them or consider them frivolous. He discovered the opposite, however.

In an encounter captured on video, Mr. Abu Joud stops singing as a funeral procession approaches. The father of the deceased orders Mr. Abu Joud to resume and dances as his grieving family intermingles with the “Banned in Syria” crew.

“This support gives us a lot of power,” Mr. Abu Joud said.

The last episodes were still being edited during the first week of Ramadan, in the middle of June, in a fevered rush. After midnight during one of those sessions, some of the actors and Mr. Taieb gathered around a monitor to admire the genie episode. The unpacked bags of equipment from the filming in Aleppo were still piled in a jumble by the door.

Although the team is mostly secular and includes several non-Muslims, it refrained from eating and smoking in the common areas of the office during the Ramadan fast. After sunset, though, the Bohemian air returned. Coffee cups littered the tables and a haze of cigarette smoke reduced visibility across the room.

Most of the actors are wanted by the government. Mr. Taieb’s father was held for nearly a year, and the brother of another player, Zakaria Abdelkafi, remains in prison.

For all the risk and the weighty mission, the actors and producers seem to be having a good time. As the crew finished the postproduction work for “Banned in Syria,” they were already developing a concept for a 24-minute drama about a journalist covering Syria’s war and future comedic pieces.

And while filming during a civil war is less than ideal, there is at least one production benefit.

“If there were no war, our work would take much longer,” Mr. Nour said.

Others on the team agreed.

“Can you imagine how long it would take to build the set of a destroyed building?” Mr. Abu Joud said. “Thanks to the war, it’s all ready to go.”

PHOTO: ADEM ALTAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A woman and a child left a Syrian shop in Mersin in March.

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas]

MERSIN, Turkey — WHEN MARWAN MUNIR left Syria three years ago, he only intended to stay away from home a short while, like most of the refugees he knows. Munir worked as a trainer at the local professional soccer club in Lattakia, a coastal city known for its fair Mediterranean climate and its boisterous waterfront cafes.

Today, Munir is the founder and head coach of a new Syrian national soccer team made up of rebels in exile, which hopes to displace the regime-backed soccer team in Damascus. He has found a home in Mersin, Turkey, a sort of doppelganger just around a bend in the Mediterranean from his hometown. After practice, Munir and his players repair to teahouses along the sea where Syrian expatriates refresh the coals on the water pipes and Arabic competes with Turkish as the lingua franca.

“I don’t want to learn Turkish,” Munir said. “I don’t want to admit that we might stay here.” But he has proven quite adept at learning the ways of the country where he now lives with his wife and three daughters, along with approximately 1.7 million other displaced Syrians, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Munir has skillfully negotiated with the local mayor’s office to find a top-notch training facility in this resort town that’s a three-hour drive and a cultural world away from the Syrian frontier.

Some of the refugees in Turkey cluster just over the border, ready to slip back home as soon as they feel it’s safe. But many others, like Munir, have migrated deeper into Turkey and further from home, establishing bases and communities that hint at a long time horizon — and though it’s politically toxic to say so, at permanence. “It might take 10 years for the war to end,” said the coach.

He’s loath to consider the possibility that the regime could survive and the rebellion could end in complete failure, but he admits it’s a possibility. “If our side loses, then we’ll stay in Turkey forever,” he said.

IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Palestinians have long been synonymous with permanent diaspora. Waves of refugees remade the region after wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967, destabilizing neighboring governments in Jordan and Lebanon, while bringing with them established fortunes and businesses. Palestinian culture and politics provided a vital injection of dynamism to public life in the nations that hosted refugees. But the never-ending refugee presence also brought tension and periodic crises that continue to flare generations after the first Palestinian refugees arrived.

Arab governments vowed never to repeat the same mistakes. When millions fled Iraq after the civil war provoked by the 2003 US invasion, many were allowed to make temporary homes in neighboring Jordan and Syria, but entirely on a short-term, provisional basis. Governments made it very difficult for refugees to get papers and settle down. As the worst fighting subsided, they were encouraged or even pushed to return home.

Syria’s civil war has now dragged on far longer than the bloodiest period in Iraq, and the two biggest hosts of Syrian refugees — Turkey and Lebanon — are starting to see what it looks like when a long-term emergency ages into the new normal.

There are about 4 million Syrian refugees registered by the UNHCR, and nearly twice as many displaced from their homes but still inside Syria. No precise numbers can track the human and societal toll, but the migration does take a disproportionate toll on certain groups.

Doctors, for instance, fled the city of Aleppo en masse early in the war after a concerted campaign of violence against them. Aleppo’s industrialists and skilled workers, who formed the backbone of the country’s manufacturing base, have also disproportionately moved elsewhere, sometimes reopening their old factories and workshops in Turkish cities like Gaziantep.

Syrian laborers and professionals have flooded into Turkey and Lebanon, sometimes displacing local workers and meeting with resentment. They gather at Syrian restaurants, usually reincarnations of establishments in abandoned, now war-torn, neighborhoods back home in Syria.

In Lebanon, the 1.2 million registered refugees represent about a quarter of the country’s entire population. The actual number of unregistered Syrians is probably significantly higher. Since the beginning of 2015, Lebanon has enforced a policy of limited welcome, after years of effectively leaving the border open. Now Syrians need a visa or proof of a certain amount of wealth before entering Lebanon. They’re more carefully tracked, after six months or a year many are forced to leave the country.

IN TURKEY, HOWEVER, signs of a permanent diaspora are emerging. Turkey has officially embraced displaced Syrians as part of its active support of the rebellion. Turkey’s government was among the first to call for the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and has placed its considerable political resources behind the uprising. A shared Sunni Islamist ideology unites many of the anti-Assad militants with Turkey’s powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some Turkish institutions, notably the more risk-averse military, have warned against getting too deeply involved in Syria’s civil war. But Erdogan has plunged ahead, allowing rebels to set up bases in Turkey, providing the most reliable staging ground for humanitarian relief to beleaguered northern Syria, and effectively keeping the opposition alive by providing a secure rear area for refugees and combatants.

Most of the time, Syrians cross the border freely, without officials keeping any record. Even when Turkish officials close the border for weeks or a month, as they did during clashes in June, they allow wounded Syrians to enter Turkey. Vetted Syrian rebels can cross the border freely even when it’s closed to civilians.

Those who intend to return home stay close to the frontier, like filmmaker Muhannad Najjar. He lives in Kilis, directly on the border, where dozens of new concrete apartment blocks and compounds have sprung up in the last two years, as the sleepy way-station has swelled into a sizable city-in-waiting, its new ranks populated almost entirely by people like Najjar who don’t intend to stay long.

Najjar visits his village near Aleppo whenever the crossing is open. He has registered his newborn daughter in Turkey, and until recently he had an official Turkish identity card that allowed him to access free health care and other Turkish government services. The last time he came back from Syria, he said, the card was confiscated without explanation.

“They don’t want to make it too easy for us,” he said. “But I feel safe here.”

There is a booming border economy fueled by the war in Syria, mostly centered on trade, smuggling, and humanitarian aid. International aid groups run massive operations along the border. Syrian and foreign companies that work inside Syria often have headquarters, training, and back-end facilities in Turkey where it’s less dangerous. But all this border activity will cease as soon as the war ends, or even sooner, if the rebels can secure some of the areas they control from regime bombing.

But hundreds of thousands of Syrians have moved further afield into Turkey, severing themselves from the conflict economy. Skilled workers have flocked to Bursa, on the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul, for jobs in mills and factories.

The Fethiye quarter, a few tram stops from Topkapi Palace and Istanbul’s premier tourist attractions, has become an almost entirely Arabic-speaking neighborhood. Syrian rebel groups have set up political offices in nondescript apartment blocks. Young refugees study in intensive Turkish language programs.

Like Istanbul, Mersin is a decidedly Turkish place, not some border town. It’s a popular beach destination, and enjoys a reliable Mediterranean breeze all the way into the green hills overlooking the city.

Tens of thousands of Syrians have settled down here, drawn by the cheaper rents and the sense of stability. In border towns like Kilis, speculators have doubled rents for tiny flats. Mersin, in contrast, welcomes newcomers to its steady port economy.

THE NEW NATIONAL Syrian soccer team trains every evening, when the summer sunshine has subsided. Manager Anas Ammo and the coach, Munir, recruited players to defect from clubs inside Syria, and held tryouts along the border. The full squad only came together in May, and expects to play its first exhibition matches in the fall.

“We represent the Syrian people,” said Ammo. “The regime’s team represents the military, politicians, and the Ba’ath Party.”

More than anything else, however, the soccer team is an acknowledgment that many of the millions of Syrians who have taken up residence inside Turkey don’t plan to go home. Nearly a hundred years ago, millions were displaced at the end of the war between Turkey and Greece. One of the first things the refugees did in their new homes was re-create a memory of their old communities through football clubs, usually named for the town from which they fled.

“My dream is to go back home. If I can’t, then my second dream is to play on the Syrian national team, even here,” said Omar Hajj Mohammed, 23, a star midfielder from Lattakia who is one of the new team’s prized recruits. He played on a junior club team in Syria as a teenager before he was drafted into the regime’s military at the start of the uprising. He defected to the Free Syrian Army after 10 months. Eventually, he quit the fighting, working first as a construction worker in a Turkish border town and later at the fish market in Mersin.

None of the founding members of the exiled Syrian football team like the idea that their idealistic efforts will cement their position in the diaspora. But they said that after years of active resistance, their return to football marks a turn away from war and toward a future, even one far from home.

Their familiarity with the waterfront neighborhoods, the local Turkish sports officials, even the passing workers laying a new promenade by the sea, bespeak a growing rootedness. It’s too early to say whether the Syrians, like the Palestinians, will remain refugees for generations. But most of them come from communities so thoroughly destroyed they will take decades to rebuild. They’ve been away so long, it’s hard for them to imagine what return would look like.

Smuggler boats leave daily for Europe from Mersin, but Hajj Mohammed has decided he’d found a place he could stay. “I don’t want to be any further way from my family than here,” he said. “If I can’t be with my family, I might as well return to soccer.”

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

[Published in Foreign Policy.]

BEIRUT — Fadi Hallisso and his colleagues have taken on a nearly impossible task. In the fifth year of the war that is ravaging his homeland, Syria, his small team is cobbling together programs to help fellow refugees who have been left homeless and stateless by the conflict.

But the very same grassroots style that has made Hallisso’s group, Basmeh & Zeitooneh, an icon among humanitarians has also exacerbated its funding difficulties. Most of the grants that Basmeh & Zeitooneh won from international funders in the first years of the crisis have run out, leaving it with the ability to cover only about a third of its budget.

“Compassion and the sense of emergency faded about a year ago,” Hallisso said. “We’re trying to prepare people to rebuild Syria in the future. But we don’t know what we’ll be able to continue doing next month.”

Money problems are now afflicting every organization trying to help Syrians. Interest in the grinding conflict has flagged; sporadic political attention and media coverage mostly focus on the Islamic State, while fewer and fewer governments respond to the United Nations’ “urgent appeals” for aid. According to the latest U.N. figures, only about one-fourth of the needed money for Syria has been pledged this year.

For a sense of what that looks like at the street level, there’s no better place to look than Basmeh & Zeitooneh, which Hallisso and a group of friends established in 2012. The group has done everything right — rising out of the community it serves, responding quickly to new local needs, delivering help with minimum funds wasted on costly overhead — yet it faces a worse funding shortfall than its bigger, more lumbering counterparts.

As a result, it has been forced to shutter successful initiatives. This spring, it had to close five programs, including a vocational training initiative that had established several refugee women as small-business owners. Its school only has a month’s funding left, and it has had to stop paying some of its 100-plus staff members, almost all of whom are refugees themselves.

Even international funding for strictly emergency aid, such as food, has completely dried up.

“If a hungry man shows up at our center, we can’t tell him, ‘We can’t give you food, but you are welcome to come to our arts and culture center,’” Hallisso said.

These struggles are par for the course for the overall aid effort. The numbersare staggering: 4 million Syrians have left the country, and another 7.6 million are internally displaced. Tens of thousands have been newly displaced from their homes in fighting in the month of June. According to UNOCHA, the U.N. agency that tracks the overall effort to respond to Syrian needs, there’s a $5.6 billion funding shortfall this year.

Basmeh & Zeitooneh’s story parallels the rise and fall of interest in Syria’s plight. In the fall of 2012, Hallisso and his group of friends collected $15,000 from private donors, mostly wealthy Syrians, and used it to bring winter gear to freezing refugees. In the process of responding to requests for help, they discovered that many of the needs of the refugee population were being unmet. In response, they decided to launch Basmeh & Zeitooneh in the Palestinian camp of Shatila, a ramshackle neighborhood in south Beirut that has long been a bastion of official neglect.

Hallisso, 37, began his professional life as a computer programmer and steward of his family’s engineering business in Aleppo. The work, however, left him with “an emptiness, a lack of meaning,” he said. He found more fulfillment running youth scouting programs, and eventually he quit a lucrative business career to enter the Jesuit priesthood.

He changed course once again in 2011, after Syrians rose up peacefully against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “I felt my prayers had been answered. People were fighting for their dignity,” he said. “The first months we were drunk with joy.”

Most international humanitarian groups don’t set foot in Shatila, where Basmeh & Zeitooneh established its base, because doing so is considered a security risk. There were no international groups working with the new Syrian arrivals in the camp or with the long-standing Palestinian population. But Basmeh & Zeitooneh dove right in, opening a community center on an upper floor of a narrow apartment building.

The approach was simple and small in scale. It started with a few programs, such as emergency resettlement aid, rent subsidies, women’s workshops, and lessons for children, delivering everything out of a single space that was located in the middle of the neighborhood where the refugees lived. The founders had noticed that other “women’s centers” set up by NGOs languished because they were hard to reach and because they weren’t child-friendly. So Basmeh & Zeitooneh laid out an intimate space where women could attend training while their kids played in the room next door, in the care of a trusted neighbor.

Moujfa al-Ali, 40, fled with her seven children to Beirut a year and a half ago from a small town outside Damascus. Her kids study in Basmeh & Zeitooneh’s school, while she went through a vocational training class and subsequently opened a clothing shop across the street from the NGO. For the first time in her life she has a job, and she’s now the family’s primary breadwinner.

She credits Basmeh & Zeitooneh for enabling her family to make progress amid the mayhem. “The war happened, and we must overcome obstacles,” she said. “We have accomplished something that we must not lose.”

Basmeh & Zeitooneh grew quickly. Individuals gave it cash donations, and then bigger NGOs and donors, like the U.S. Office of Transition Initiatives, directed more than $1 million in grants to the group. It opened community centers in Tripoli, the Bekaa Valley, and another Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut.

But the organization quickly found itself hemmed in. Major donors don’t give grants to local groups, preferring to work with major nonprofits that run massive multicountry programs. When Basmeh & Zeitooneh staffers approached the United Nations for grants, they were told to pitch projects bigger than $5 million. If they proposed a $5 million project, Hallisso said, they were told they didn’t have the capacity.

Bigger aid groups prefer to do projects themselves, Hallisso said, resorting to partnerships with local groups like Basmeh & Zeitooneh only when their more expensive, often foreign, employees can’t get access to “beneficiaries.”

“In Tripoli, they only started looking for local partners when their employees started getting kidnapped,” Hallisso said. “This is insulting. This talk about building local Syrian capacity is BS. We are only there to take the risks for you.”

An emergency without visible end might still be an emergency, but Syria’s crisis has passed the point where the world is able to respond to it in crisis mode. In June, Basmeh & Zeitooneh won an unexpected reprieve with a 350,000-euro grant from Irish Aid. It has also started an online campaign on the regional fundraising platform Zoomaal. But the larger concerns about funding remain.

“It’s inevitable after four years that it’s hard for people to remain engaged in the massive need and the crisis,” said James Sadri, who heads The Syria Campaign, an effort to refocus Western interest on the crisis.

Sadri’s organization represents 300 organizations that work inside Syria or with Syrian refugees. The campaign’s goal is to mobilize Western public interest around action items that arise from a Syrian agenda, like expanding the amount of aid or ending barrel bombing. People can still have impact, Sadri said, by supporting the hundreds of individual groups working at great risk on the ground in Syria or by pressuring Western governments to shift policy. Yet it’s difficult, he said, to convince people that anything they do as individuals can make a difference or that there is a way forward in a complicated conflict like Syria’s with messy, violent politics.

“This agenda shouldn’t be defined by Western NGOs or Westerners. It should be defined by Syrians,” Sadri said. “If we’re serious about putting Syrians at the heart of what Western NGOs do, then we have to listen to them.”

For now, Basmeh & Zeitooneh is — like the Syrians it serves — simply trying to survive. As Lebanon has tightened restrictions on Syrians and on NGOs, Hallisso’s colleagues have opened an office in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep. The top managers work for a fraction of the salaries they’ve been offered at other NGOs. When they travel outside Lebanon, they’re never sure whether they’ll be allowed back in — just one of the many pitfalls of having refugees run a refugee aid organization.

Whether operating on generous donations or on a shoestring budget, Hallisso and his colleagues plan to continue their work.

“Abandonment and despair are dangerous,” Hallisso said. “When you show people solidarity, it will give them hope.… We are building the daily capacity within our community. We cannot wait until the war ends to start.”

TCF Policy Brief

The war unfolding in Yemen has created a humanitarian and political catastrophe.¹ Since Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s civil war at the end of March, the conflict has spiraled into an open, multiplayer regional war that has killed more than 2,000 people. For long stretches, Yemen’s seaports have been blockaded, threatening the food supply of an estimated half of the population of 24 million. Meanwhile, the number of displaced has lurched upward to 1 million.²

The conflict in Yemen marks yet another unfortunate escalation in the region that will exacerbate security problems and political divisions. This time around, Arab governments and the United States should do everything they can to calm the conflict before it becomes another intractable killing field. Washington already recognized Yemen’s strategic importance and for years has targeted terrorist operatives there with drone strikes. Now, the United States and its allies have the opportunity to learn from recent missteps in the region and take advantage of the halting negotiations that opened recently in Genevabetween the warring parties.³

The next few months offer a narrow window to prioritize diplomacy over military action in a bid to shift worsening dynamics across the Middle East. Regional governments and multilateral organizations ought to take every conceivable diplomatic step available today, even in the face of likely failure or obstruction, to address the Yemen crisis. Otherwise, it could quickly turn into another Syria, an intractable, grinding conflict that destroys one nation, while implicating a raft of others in a conflict that has no good possible outcomes.

This brief will assess the interests of outside powers that are playing a significant role in the Yemeni civil war and try to identify points of entry for diplomacy and de-escalation, with the long-term goal of creating new forums for dialogue between Saudi Arabia, Iran and other governments. The riskier internationalized phase of the war in Yemen is only three months old, and it has dragged in many key players in the region, including the United States. Military action is unlikely to resolve the conflict there, but an effective political process—which depends on international support—might reverse a dangerous escalation.

Download this Issue Brief as a PDF

A Complex Conflict—and Its Consequences

In Yemen today, two amorphous and loosely allied coalitions are battling each other, with one roughly grouped behind Saudi Arabia and the other behind Iran. The dynamics and identities of these groupings are fluid and malleable. And as with the three other hot wars currently being fought in the Arab world—in Syria, Iraq, and Libya—the Yemen conflict is marked by a considerable degree of external interference. The stakes are high for the foreign interventionists: Saudi Arabia and its allies believe their stance in Yemen denotes a line of departure in a belated, but essential, campaign to check Iran’s influence, while Iran sees Yemen as yet another battleground on which it can pressure its regional rivals while maintaining a plausibly deniable degree of involvement. ^4,5 

Foreign support has emboldened militias on both sides of the conflict, and almost all sides are already pursuing military options.⁶ While Yemen’s competing factions fight, Al Qaeda inthe Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been entirely spared foreign military strikes and is enjoying renewed latitude to operate.⁷

The Yemen crisis poses many dangers. The most obvious lie in Yemen itself, where starvation could become endemic and an avoidable escalation of civil war could lead to a mass humanitarian tragedy. Security blowback is an equally intense strategic concern. AQAP has been one of the most active groups plotting international terrorist attacks, including against the United States. The disruption of U.S.-allied counterterrorism efforts in Yemen, and now the collapse of any central state authority, directly empower AQAP and increase the threat to the United States.⁸ The coalition led by the Houthis, a group with a distinct tribal and sectarian identity inside Yemen, which is currently supported by Iran and by deposed president Ali Abdullah Saleh, has grievances mostly rooted in the local sharing of power and resources.⁹ It is impossible to assess whether Iran views the interests of the Houthi alliance as close to Iran’s core interests, or whether it tactically views the Houthis as another chit to deploy in a region-wide strategy that seeks to maximize Iranian footholds that can be used to project power or can be traded away in negotiations.

The Yemen war also has clear ramifications for its direct neighbors. Rightly or wrongly,Saudi Arabia always has considered Yemen a core national security interest,¹⁰ often trying to manage Yemen’s affairs as if it were another Saudi province. The tightly intertwined business elites of the two countries¹¹ and a hard-to-police shared border¹² make it hard for Riyadh to ignore developments to the south. Since March of this year, Saudi Arabia, acting out of genuine fear of Iran’s expanding influence, has embarked on a coalition air war that has no discernible end game.¹³ While Saudi perceptions might be exaggerated, developments in Yemen are indeed linked to Iranian efforts to deepen their partnership with the Houthis. Critics paint the Saudi intervention as impulsive and slipshod and point out that King Salman could not persuade long-time Saudi beneficiaries such as Pakistan and Egypt to contribute troops for a potential ground operation.¹⁴ But Saudi Arabia’s concerns are real, and they cannot be wished away by governments that do not share them. Any broader strategic rapprochement in the region will require a clear understanding of the concerns of the Arabian Peninsula monarchies and measures to restore their sense of security and confidence.

Doubtless, the humanitarian emergency in Yemen will strain an already bad security climate. But it also provides an opportunity to engage the full array of problematic and recalcitrant regional governments with an eye toward assuaging their insecurities and creating diplomatic avenues through which they can explore more enduring fixes to regional problems. The current historical moment, while high risk, offers an opportunity for outside powers to deploy diplomatic influence in a concerted and sustained manner. It is worthwhile in its own right to try to limit the war in Yemen and to calm tensions between the complex web of combatants. But equally importantly, any well-designed initiative—even one that fails—could amount to a major accomplishment if it began to fill the void of regional mechanisms through which rival states can directly negotiate.

What would such an initiative look like, and why should there be any hope that it will work any better than the plethora of failed diplomatic initiatives around the Syrian civil war?

Formulating a Response

The cascade of events that escalated the civil war in Yemen signals a repositioning by key regional powers. Indeed the conflict brings into sharp relief some of the perceived and actual interests at stake for key players, including the Sunni Arab monarchies in the Arabian Gulf, the rulers of Iran, and outside guarantors like Russia and the United States. But this volatile and vulnerable period has an upside: by laying bare some of the fears and ambitions of key regional actors, the turmoil invites governments with the potential for good offices to organize several different diplomatic initiatives. At worst, they will amount to a little more talk in a region that does not experience enough, at least between adversaries. At best, multilateral and bilateral diplomatic initiatives can serve as life-saving palliatives for the immediate catastrophe in Yemen and also potentially as vehicles to curtail the conflict and begin a long process (with admittedly long odds) of creating a nonmilitary forum to resolve regional tensions.

Absent a sharp change of direction soon, the war in Yemen risks following the same course as Syria’s: devolving into an unwinnable and destabilizing stalemate, shredding national well-being for Yemen and prestige for outsiders who thought they could determine the conflict’s course.¹⁵ Because the regional external stakeholders in the Yemen war are concurrently implicated in Syria’s, it is worth trying to persuade them to change course in Yemen before it is too late. Paradoxically, some of the same players that have been ineffective or malignant in Syria could play a positive role in calming tensions in Yemen, perhaps because their own prestige is not yet on the line. The United States, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations are obvious candidates to serve as early diplomatic brokers.

Existing diplomatic outreach has reaped some benefits. The UN appointed a new envoy on April 25 and helped negotiate a humanitarian ceasefire in May.¹⁶ The United States government has met with both sides of the conflict inside Yemen, and it has been adept at simultaneously managing multiple aspects of the diplomatic crisis. The talks in Geneva that begin on June 14 hold some basic promise but fail to include all the necessary actors.¹⁷ A concerted diplomatic push could be catalyzed by comparatively level-headed players, such as the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and the United Nations, and could make use of problematic but potentially useful forums such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Arab League. The aim would be to begin a diplomatic process that would include, even at a remove, both Saudi Arabia and Iran, and which would have at least a prospect of serving as an avenue to address the bedrock security concerns undermining regional security and driving the Yemen war. Any diplomatic effort to reduce tension between those two nations must take into account their stakes throughout the region.

Iran

Iran is enjoying a moment of expanding regional influence, but one that it perceives as under constant threat. It has made headway in negotiating a nuclear framework agreement with the United States and Europe, but it has suffered extensive economic isolation under sanctions.¹⁸ Iran has outsized influence over Iraq’s government, but that government has porous control over its own territory and can barely maintain a fiction of national sovereignty over Kurdish and Sunni areas.

The Syrian regime has been a tight client of Iran, but at great cost to Tehran—perhaps as much as $60 billion in financial support and a hard-to-measure, but deep, commitment of military and political resources.¹⁹ Iran and its partner, Hezbollah, have kept the Syrian regime afloat, but they have found the Syrian sponsees brittle and unresponsive to the political requests of their paymasters, who have unsuccessfully counseled the regime to experiment with political conciliation to end the civil war. Meanwhile, the ISIS proto-state in Iraq and Syria entails a direct and violent challenge to Iranian designs, interests, and legitimacy in the Arab and Islamic world.

Engaging Iran on the issue of Yemen while all these factors are in play could yield multiple benefits. Internal competition inside Iran between the military-revolutionary guard complex and the clerical-merchant elite raises the possibility of exploitable differences of opinion within the Iranian government. Yemen talks might also be an avenue to gauge whether Iran has changed its position on other issues in the wake of the nuclear framework accord negotiations. It is also possible that Iran does not see Yemen as a core interest and might even desire a de-escalation there, even as it appears to ramp up its military commitment in Syria. All these factors suggest that, while Iran seems ascendant, its concerns and internal dynamics open the possibility for a wider spectrum of diplomatic engagement.²⁰

Yemen talks allow for a narrow focus, but all the players are aware of the wider context. Iran and the United States are on the verge of a major shift as a result of the nuclear negotiations. Arab governments are nervous that Washington will tilt away from them and toward Iran. It is important to manage the exaggerated fears and expectations; any U.S. shift on Iran is likely to be incremental, and a diplomatic process can help calm insecurities that can produce destabilizing violence like the war in Yemen. There is alo an economic component to discussions with Iran that could provide significant leverage to increase security. If and when sanctions on Iran are loosened, the Western sponsors of the nuclear talks could wisely direct a sizable share of their proceeds from the resulting economic boom to the very same Sunni Arab countries most worried about Iran. If Arabian Peninsula economies profit from Iran’s opening—through trade, the funneling of Western investment via Arab entrepôts in the Gulf, or even through direct investments of their own—the long-term prospects for peace and stability increase. ²¹ 

The mechanics of such an economic windfall might be complicated. New private investment in Iran will not be driven by the diplomatic priorities of Western governments. But it is very possible that some of the biggest new, or renewed, foreign economic partnerships with Iran will come from companies that are traditional partners of government policy, like U.S. defense contractors and engineering conglomerates or European chemical and automobile manufacturers.²² The goal for diplomats would be to encourage investors to allow some of the post-sanctions Iran bonanza to pass through the Arab world, perhaps through creative partnerships between Western corporations and financial and technical partners in the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. An imperfect but useful analogy can be found in Iraq’s Kurdish north, where the Kurdistan Regional Government and its predecessors opened the borders to massive, profitable Turkish investments. The Turkish stake (and profits) in Kurdish Iraq have created enduring shared interests and reduced long-running tensions, despite real political disagreements. ²³

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia in March used the Arab League to launch its entrance into the Yemen war, and it has tried to rally pan-Arab support against what it describes as foreign Iranian aggression.²⁴ The rhetoric of the March summit had overtones of Sunni Arab Nationalist grievance against a Shia and Persian-inflected conspiracy.²⁵  There were also overt notes of triumphalist return of the established conservative political order after a period of experimentation ushered in by the period of popular uprisings.

Any sense of a restoration, or a new Pax Arabicus, is premature, however, and will quickly fade. Saudi Arabia already is seeing the difficulty of imposing a clean solution on Yemen and is reportedly considering a partition of the country.²⁶ Riyadh is also well aware of the intractability of the Syria conflict, and it has begun to see the drawbacks of the ally it enlisted by helping install Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as Egypt’s ruler.

King Salman is experienced, but he is new in his role as king and is heavily reliant on his approximately thirty-year-old son to shape policy.²⁷ Transition periods allow for flux and also for adaptation. If Salman can be persuaded that it will protect Saudi’s core security interests, he could probably accept some shifts in policy on Yemen, or perhaps even on the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

The new administration in Saudi Arabia is experimenting with a new approach to foreign policy. It is a ripe moment to establish new mechanisms with Saudi Arabia because the kingdom’s top officials, and its policy orientations, are changing. King Salman has openly reconsidered the kingdom’s outright hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood;²⁸ he has taken a step back from his predecessor’s tight embrace of the dictator Saudi helped install in Egypt;²⁹ he has taken new initiative to invigorate Sunni rebels in Syria;³⁰ and he hassuggested in a range of leaks and public statements that Riyadh is willing to strike out on a policy course independent from Washington.³¹ However, that last position might be bluster, since Saudi and the United States have close, intertwined policy interests, including limiting the reach of Al Qaeda, maintaining a free flow of oil to global energy markets, and trying to check Iranian regional hegemony. Saudi Arabia depends on the U.S. security umbrella, and the United States depends on Saudi’s willingness to adjust the amount of oil it pumps to maintain world supplies in the face of geopolitical disruptions caused by events like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the embargo on Iranian oil, and the sporadic disruption of Libyan oil supplies since 2011. There is not likely to be a divorce, but Saudi Arabia is looking for supplementary partners and has made clear that it feels the U.S. is inadequately committed to Arab regional security.³² Regional discussions might offer an opportunity for Washington to emphasize its long-term investments in the region and its commitment to stability.

A (Limited) U.S. Role

Somewhat by accident, the United States has found itself in a position where it can negotiate along a complimentary line of diplomatic inducements. And Washington has taken this opportunity with more alacrity than it has at other junctures since the Arab uprisings began.

While finalizing the nuclear framework agreement with Iran, the United States simultaneously signed on to an explicitly anti-Iran war in Yemen³³ and withheld military support in Iraq until Iran-backed militias took a backseat in the battle for Tikrit.³⁴ The United States showed that it could keep its eyes on many parts of the map at the same time and that it would play hardball with Iran on other issues, even while making compromises in the interest of limiting its nuclear program.

The United States can do the same with its allies as well. It can assist the Saudi campaign in Yemen in the short-term, while counseling the development of an exit strategy. It can also volunteer to coordinate complementary, if not identical, positions for Egypt, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Riyadh is unlikely to embrace a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, but it might effectively shelf its opposition in exchange for a symbolic increase in U.S. security guarantees for the Arabian Peninsula.

Creative diplomacy can explore other pathways to reassure allies and convince them to accept otherwise unpalatable tradeoffs. An example of the kind of innovative, small-scale problem solving that could evolve in the framework of regional talks involves nuclear power. Arab states are dissatisfied that they lack nuclear programs while Israel maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal and Iran appears to be on the verge of winning international approval for a robust research program that will leave it only a few steps away from a weapons program. The United States could look for ways to alleviate this dissatisfaction, for example by taking the lead in sponsoring nuclear power plants in the Gulf and its Arab allies, such as Egypt and Jordan. U.S. companies have already been making inroads—Westinghouse is part of the coalition that is currently building nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates. Official backing behind such a strategy, however, would also signal commitment and perhaps act as a salve for local energy problems and symbolic compensation for a perceived technology and support gap. Nuclear power is just one example of a secondary area that could be channeled in the Yemen talks to prompt progress on a wider scale.

Enabling Regional Dialogue

At the moment, there is no forum in which Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia regularly sit together to air regional concerns. Nor is there a meaningful forum where the full range of regional actors who actually affect developments on the ground regularly meet. If regional dialogue is to have a place in cooling down Yemen—as well as the other wars in the Arab world at the moment—such a forum would have to include the Arab States, Iran, Turkey, and probably Russia, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations. The path to such a structure is long and would probably have to begin piecemeal, but a genuine Yemen contact group would be a fine place to start.

The crisis in Yemen is in early enough stages to enjoy the potential for amelioration. Furthermore, all the key players have in front of them Libya and Syria, vivid examples of what happens in an entrenched war zone in which the combatants and sponsors refuse to engage in diplomacy. The first step would require the United States and Russia to set an example and show that, even while confronting one another over the crisis in Ukraine, they can agree to support a dialogue, even a tense one, over a second issue, in this case Yemen. The United Nations talks in Geneva could be expanded upon, or even moved to a neutral location closer to the region like Nairobi, Athens, or Istanbul. The first agenda could focus simply on humanitarian relief and access, but all players would have to be invited, including Iran.

Hopes for a diplomatic initiative on Yemen should be muted. The habits of bluster, confrontation, and proxy warfare are deeply engrained, and normalized relations have eluded key Middle East actors for nearly half a century. The United States has contributed to this culture by its support for an often moribund Israel-Palestine negotiating framework and by regularly backing diplomatic initiatives, like the Geneva process on Syria, that are meaningless from the start because they exclude key actors in the conflict.

In the event of a strong push from international and regional diplomats, key actors, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, might respond with recalcitrance or even outright rejectionism. But if the initial agenda focuses on humanitarian matters and battlefield access for neutral parties, and possibly on communications channels for battlefield deconfliction that could prove useful to all parties, it will be easier over time to persuade Tehran and Riyadh to take part.

The key is to attract the full range of players. The initial agenda can revolve around comparatively easy matters, such as opening ports to more regular food deliveries, increasing battlefield access for internationally recognized humanitarian aid workers, and the creation of some kind of emergency communications channel to reduce the risk of an unintentional international escalation of the war. Little is lost if the entire process amounts to a failed diplomatic initiative. Any resulting political embarrassment for supporting governments can be managed. The conflict in Yemen, however, is too important to simply be allowed to unfold at the mercies of regional powers acting in the grip of uncertainty and perceived threat. And a new diplomatic approach carries the possibility, however slim, of creating a useful new forum where adversaries can talk to each other in a conflict-ridden region that sorely lacks one.

Notes

1. Stephanie Nebehay, “Yemen faces humanitarian catastrophe without vital supplies: Red Cross,” Reuters, May 27, 2015,http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/27/us-yemen-security-redcross-idUSKBN0OC1W720150527.
2. See UNOCHA Yemen page for overview of latest statistics on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen: “Yemen,” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, June 2015,  http://www.unocha.org/yemen, accessed June 9, 2015.
3. “In Geneva, Ban says international community has ‘obligation to act’ for Yemen peace,” UN News Centre, June 15, 2015,http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=51153#.VX7_IflVhBd.
4. Peter Salisbury, “Yemen and the ‘Saudi-Iranian Cold War,’” Chatham House, February 18, 2015.http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/field/field_document/20150218YemenIranSaudi.pdf.
5. Mohsen Milani, “Iran’s Game in Yemen: Why Iran Is Not to Blame for the Civil War,” Foreign Affairs, April 19, 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/2015-04-19/irans-game-yemen.
6. Some photographs of the conflict have been collected on The Atlantic website: Alan Taylor, “The Saudi Arabia-Yemen War of 2015,” The Atlantic, May 7, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/05/the-saudi-arabia-yemen-war-of-2015/392687/.
7. Hugh Naylor, “Quietly, al-Qaeda offshoots grow in Yemen and Syria,” Washington Post, June 4, 2015,http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/quietly-al-qaeda-offshoots-expand-in-yemen-and-syria/2015/06/04/9575a240-0873-11e5-951e-8e15090d64ae_story.html.
8. Azmet Khan, “Understanding Yemen’s Al-Qaeda Threat,” PBS NewsHour, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/al-qaeda-in-yemen/understanding-yemens-al-qaeda-threat/.
9. Khaled Fattah, “Yemen: Sectarianism and he Politics of Regime Survival,” in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 223.
10. Ginny Hill and Gerd Nonneman, “Yemen, Saudi Arabic and the Gulf States: Elite Politics, Street Protests and Regional Diplomacy” Chatham House Briefing Paper,https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Middle%20East/0511yemen_gulfbp.pdf.
11. Peter Salisbury, “Yemen’s Economy: Oil, Imports and Elites,” Chatham House Middle East and North Africa Paper 2011/02, 9–12.
12. Anthony H, Cordesman, “Saudi Arabia’s Changing Strategic Dynamics” in Saudi Arabic: Security in A Troubled Region (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2009), 31–32.
13. Bruce Riedel, “Why Saudi Arabia’s Yemen War is Not Producing Victory” Al-Monitor, March 26, 2015, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/05/yemen-war-escalates-stakes-raise-saudi-princes.html.
14. Mark Perry, “US Generals: Saudi Intervention in Yemen a ‘Bad Idea,’” Al Jazeera, April 17, 2015,http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/17/us-generals-think-saudi-strikes-in-yemen-a-bad-idea.html;Kenneth Pollack, “The Dangers of the Arab Intervention in Yemen,” Markaz: Middle East Politics & Policy, March 26, 2015,http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2015/03/26-pollack-saudi-air-strikes-yemen; and Frederic Wehrey, “Into the Maelstrom: The Saudi-Led Misadventure in Yemen,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 26, 2015, http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=59500.
15. Peter Salisbury, “Is Yemen Becoming the Next Syria?” Foreign Policy, March 6, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/06/is-yemen-becoming-the-next-syria/.
16. “Secretary-General Appoints Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed of Mauritania as His Special Envoy for Yemen,” UN announcement,http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sga1563.doc.htm.
17. Economist editorial offers minimal expectations for the June 14 “consultations”: “No end in sight,” The Economist, June 13, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21654077-start-peace-talks-raises-little-hope-fighting-yemen-will?fsrc=rss%7Cmea.Humanitarians call for a permanent ceasefire: “Aid agencies: Permanent Yemen ceasefire needed now to save millions,” International Rescue Committee, June 11, 2015, http://www.rescue.org/press-releases/aid-agencies-permanent-yemen-ceasefire-needed-now-save-millions-24975.
18. US State Department page on Iran sanctions: “Iran Sanctions,” U.S. Department of State,http://www.state.gov/e/eb/tfs/spi/iran/index.htm, accessed June 15, 2015.
19. Eli Lake, “Iran Spends Billions to Prop Up Assad,” Bloomberg View, June 09, 2015.http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-09/iran-spends-billions-to-prop-up-assad/.
20. Thomas Juneau, “Iran’s Failed Foreign Policy: Dealing from a Position of Weakness,” Middle East Institute, May 01, 2015.http://www.mei.edu/content/article/iran%E2%80%99s-failed-foreign-policy-dealing-position-weakness.
21. Andrew Torchia, “Billions for Grabs if Nuclear Deal Opens Iran’s Economy,” Reuters, April 05, 2015.http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/03/iran-nuclear-economy-idUSL6N0X003P20150403.
22. Martin Hesse, Susanne Koelbl and Michael Sauga, “An Eye to Iran: European Businesses Prepare for Life after Sanctions,”Der Spiegel, May 18, 2015. http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/european-business-prepare-for-lifting-of-iran-sanctions-a-1034240.html and Jeremy Kahn, “Iran Lures Investors Seeing Nuclear Deal Ending Sanctions”, Bloomberg, August 17, 2014.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-17/iran-lures-investors-seeing-nuclear-deal-ending-sanctions.
23. PKK guerilla fighters have never given up their base of operations in Iraqi Kurdistan and have apparently organized attacks inside Turkey from their base in the KRG. But Turkey has exhibited patience and understanding with the KRG, not holding them responsible for the militants on their soil, perhaps because of the thriving economic relationship that the KRG has invited. See Denise Natali, “Turkey’s Kurdish Client-State,” Al-Monitor, November 14, 2014. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/turkey-krg-client-state.html# and Soner Cagaptay, Christina Bache Fidan and Ege Cansu Sacikara, “Turkey and the KRG: An Undeclared Economic Commonwealth,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy Policywatch No. 2387, March 16, 2015 http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/turkey-and-the-krg-an-undeclared-economic-commonwealth.
24. James Stavridis, “The Arab NATO,” Foreign Policy, April 09, 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/09/the-arab-nato-saudi-arabia-iraq-yemen-iran/.
25. Thanassis Cambanis, “Iran Is Winning the War for Dominance of the Middle East,” Foreign Policy, April 14, 2015.http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/14/yemen-iran-saudi-arabia-middle-east/.
26. David B. Ottaway, “Saudi Arabia’s Yemen War Unravels,” The National Interest, May 11, 2015.http://nationalinterest.org/feature/saudi-arabias-yemen-war-unravels-12853.
27. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Surprising Saudi Rises as a Prince Among Princes,” New York Times, June 06, 2015.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/world/middleeast/surprising-saudi-rises-as-a-prince-among-princes.html?_r=0.
28. Yaroslav Trofimov, “Saudis Warn to Muslim Brotherhood, Seeking Unity in Yemen”, The Wall Street Journal, April 02, 2015.http://www.wsj.com/articles/saudis-warm-to-muslim-brotherhood-seeking-sunni-unity-on-yemen-1427967884.
29. H.A. Hellyer, “The New Saudi King, Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood”, Al-Monitor, March 24, 2015. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/03/saudi-arabia-new-egypt-muslim-brotherhood.html.
30. Erika Solomon and Simeon Kerr, “Syria’s Rebels Heartened by the Healing of Sunni Arab Rift” Financial Times, April 13, 2015. http://www.ft.com/intl/.cms/s/0/16a10034-df6c-11e4-b6da-00144feab7de.html#axzz3chSsxTTY.
31. Ray Takeyh, “The New Saudi Foreign Policy” Council on Foreign Relations Expert Brief, April 17, 2015.http://www.cfr.org/saudi-arabia/new-saudi-foreign-policy/p36456.
32. Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky, “It’s Time to Stop Holding Saudi Arabia’s Hand” Foreign Policy, February 12, 2015http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/12/its-time-to-stop-holding-saudi-arabias-hand-gcc-summit-camp-david/.
33. Micah Zenko, “Make No Mistake—the United States is at War in Yemen,” Foreign Policy, March 30, 2015.http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/30/make-no-mistake-the-united-states-is-at-war-in-yemen-saudi-arabia-iran/.
34. Rod Nordland and Helene Cooper, “US Airstrikes on ISIS in Tikrit Prompt Boycott by Shiite Fighters,” New York Times, March 27, 2015,. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/world/middleeast/iraq-us-air-raids-islamic-state-isis.html.

DOWNLOADS

• Managing the War in Yemen: Diplomatic Opportunities in the Mayhem

AP AND GETTY IMAGES PHOTOS; GLOBE STAFF PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and President Gerald Ford met in Helsinki at the All European Conference on Security and Cooperation in July 1975.

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS AGO this summer, King John and a group of feudal barons gathered at Runnymede on the banks of the Thames River. There he agreed to the Magna Carta, which for the first time limited the absolute power of the monarch and established a contract between ruler and ruled. The mother of modern treaties and law, the Magna Carta began a global conversation about the responsibility of the powerful toward people under their control.

A scant four decades ago, also this summer, another gathering in the Finnish capital of Helsinki produced a second series of accords. While far less well known, the signing of the Helsinki Accords was a critical juncture in the long struggle of the individual against state authority. Building on some of the same ideas that undergirded the Magna Carta, the Helsinki Accords codified a broad set of individual liberties, human rights, and state responsibilities, which remain strikingly relevant today, whether the subject is China’s Internet policy, the Islamic State’s latest outrage, or the American “war on terror.” The language of human rights has become the lingua franca for criticizing misbehavior by states or quasi-governments.
Today, most governments have signed on to the United Nations’ definition of universal human rights, only disagreeing about whether their own transgressions run afoul of them. Rights groups are ubiquitous, criticizing the treatment of American prisoners, Chinese sweatshop workers, Iranian dissidents, and other groups whose rights are abridged.

Yet for the widespread agreement that human rights represent shared, universal values, it’s still hard to predict when a campaign based on moral accusation can change the actions of a state. Indeed, the question is no longer whether human rights can make a difference, it’s whether they will in any particular case.

It wasn’t always so. Until recently, human rights were hardly part of the realpolitik discourse and were certainly not considered an effective cudgel against powerful regimes. That changed 40 years ago, when powers from both sides of the Iron Curtain signed the Helsinki Final Act and unwittingly ushered in the era of the human rights group.

Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and the Moscow Helsinki Group played key roles in the fall of the Soviet Union. They galvanized public dissatisfaction at home, embarrassed their governments abroad, and catalyzed the Soviet bloc’s loss of legitimacy. Many historians now believe that the 1975 Helsinki Accords and the human rights movement they engendered played a pivotal role in ending the Cold War, far exceeding the humble expectations of the diplomats who brokered the agreement.

“The most important legacy of the Helsinki Final Act today is that citizens have the right to monitor and report on the human rights records in their own country,” said Sarah Snyder, a historian at American University who has written a book called “Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War.” Prior to 1975, groups like Amnesty International tried to create international pressure with letter-writing campaigns, usually from outside the country where an injustice was occurring. Snyder believes that Helsinki created a new paradigm of human rights and a global slate of organizations that pursued them, with lasting impact — all the more impressive, Snyder said, because Helsinki wasn’t a legally binding treaty. “The only way it was binding was morally,” she said.

Academics have given a name to the idea that human rights advocacy can change facts on the ground: “The Helsinki Effect,” also the title of a 2001 book by political scientist Daniel Thomas, which popularized the argument that human rights trumped geopolitics and economics in resolving the Cold War.

How did a nonbinding, lumbering bureaucratic agreement reached four decades ago spawn the modern human rights movement? And what’s left of the legacy of Helsinki?

KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

Members of the Polish trade union, Solidarity, on strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980.

AT THE HEIGHT of the Cold War, the Soviet bloc was a closed and inaccessible society. Many people who lived behind the Iron Curtain weren’t allowed to leave, and outsiders were permitted only tightly controlled, limited glimpses at life inside. The specter of cataclysmic conflict hung over East and West, with both sides brandishing thermonuclear and conventional arsenals that were unthinkably vast and destructive.

Throughout the Cold War, there were points of tension followed by periods of accommodation. The Helsinki Accords marked one of the latter. Relations across Europe had become so strained and so dangerous that Moscow, Washington, and all the capitals in between agreed there had to be some degree of relaxation. Both sides wanted to avoid a continental war between the superpowers. Both sides sought to end what they saw as belligerent expansion by the other.

They gathered in Helsinki on Aug. 1, 1975, to sign an agreement that turned out to be a seminal breakthrough — although not in the way that either side expected. The agreement signed by 35 states, including the United States and the USSR, focused for the most part on reestablishing respect for borders, national sovereignty, and peaceful resolution for future disputes between states. It also included a clause recognizing universal human rights, including freedoms of thought, conscience, and belief.

President Gerald Ford was castigated by his domestic critics for signing away the farm, because he had acknowledged Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the Soviets trumpeted Helsinki as a tremendous victory, enshrining their sphere of influence and providing international legitimacy to their repression of citizens and governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. They were so unconcerned about the human rights provisions that they published the Helsinki Final Act in full in the pages of the state newspaper, Pravda.

Western diplomats had modest hopes that the personal freedoms enumerated at Helsinki would ease the way for Eastern Bloc spouses married to Westerners, and for cultural and academic exchanges that promoted international dialogue.

But the importance of Principle Seven became evident almost before the ink was dry. Civic groups sprung up across the Eastern Bloc, determined to exercise their right to monitor their own governments’ compliance with Helsinki. Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet dissident, oversaw the founding of the Moscow Helsinki Group at his apartment in 1976. Activist playwright Vaclav Havel helped set up Charter 77 in Prague the following year. A Helsinki watch group opened in Poland in 1979.

The watch groups became very public thorns in the side of Communist governments. Their leaders were well known domestically and had contacts in the West, particularly in the press. They mobilized global attention to the human rights abuses of the Soviet Union and its client dictators.

And when governments subjected the watch groups to withering pressure, the activists asked their supporters outside the Iron Curtain to establish a unified organization that could defend the Helsinki Watch monitors. Human Rights Watch, perhaps the best-known and farthest-reaching global rights advocacy group today, originated with the Helsinki Watch group founded in 1978.

A brilliant, if perhaps unintended, enforcement system was built into Helsinki. All the signatory nations agreed to reconvene regularly, and the 10-point document contained many items of great political and security import to the Soviet Union. If the Soviets wanted to keep the benefits of Helsinki, they’d have to put up with attacks on their human rights record at the follow-up meetings.

“Without this follow-up mechanism, I think there would have been a big celebration after the signing, and we never would have heard of the Helsinki Final Agreement again,” Snyder said.

Instead, a panoply of Eastern Bloc activists and their Western supporters flooded diplomatic confabs at Belgrade, Madrid, and Vienna with details about oppression and abuses. Often, the Helsinki monitors became celebrities themselves, drawing widespread attention when they were persecuted and detained by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

The Helsinki-inspired human rights movements put a face on government oppression and placed rights atop the Cold War agenda alongside arms control. To the frustration of Soviet leaders, the world became absorbed by the plight of jailed activists and refuseniks denied exit visas.

By time Mikhail Gorbachev took over the leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985, he couldn’t sidestep human rights concerns when he began to negotiate a full détente.

THE NAMING AND SHAMING techniques pioneered by the Helsinki monitors run deep in the DNA of contemporary human rights groups. “The mechanisms that were so essential to Helsinki remain a key tool of the human rights movement today,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “How does the human rights movement get anything done? By shaming, and by enlisting powerful governments to act on behalf of victims of human rights violations.”

For decades after the ratification of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights remained largely an abstract concept in world politics. Most governments agreed with the principle but comfortably ignored human rights in practice.

The crumbling of the Soviet empire gave the human rights movement both experience and legitimacy. The Berlin Wall came down, and Eastern Bloc countries toppled their homegrown dictators. Lech Walesa, head of the Solidarity trade union, was elected president of Poland. Vaclav Havel, a playwright and signatory of Charter 77, won the presidency of Czechoslovakia and worldwide renown as a highly cultured philosopher-king. A generation after the Helsinki monitors came to prominence as victims of tyranny, they had become the face of a new democratic political elite.

The changing values that elevated them have become part of the world’s political orthodoxy; even governments that routinely violate human rights still pay them lip service.

“Even North Korea is pretending to accept human rights,” Roth said. “Governments care about their reputation and don’t want to be seen as violating human rights norms.”

Authoritarian backlash is another legacy of the Helsinki era. Dictators have also studied the rise of the civic monitors, and concluded that groups like Human Rights Watch really could cause them problems. A common result has been to strike hard and quickly against human rights groups, especially when they are run by locals who have moral authority. Vladimir Putin’s rise to power has been accompanied by the silencing and killing of many credible rights monitors. Iran’s ayatollahs deployed maximal force to destroy the “Green Revolution” of 2009. Egypt’s dictatorship rails against any criticism of its human rights record as meddling and foreign interference, and prosecutes domestic rights group with the same zeal that it pursues armed antigovernment insurgents. Despotic regimes have made it common practice to starve rights groups of funding and deny them permits to operate.

Given the success of authoritarian regimes, not everyone is convinced that the Helsinki effect is as pronounced as its champions claim. Among the many commemorations scheduled for the 40th anniversary year, a group of scholars is gathering at the Sorbonne in Paris this December to explore how much the agreement and the human rights movements it created really were responsible for social and political change.

“My feeling is that we really don’t know that much, beyond generalities, that is, in terms of how the ‘Helsinki effect’ effectively operated by way of changing East European societies from within,” one of the organizers, Frédéric Bozo, a historian the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, wrote in an e-mail. He’s also not sure whether anything about the Helsinki era applies to today’s thorny nexus of human rights and political power — another area he said is ripe for further inquiry.

Skeptics of the narrative of human rights triumphalism point out that the US government always paid more attention to transgressions committed by its rivals than by its friends. That pattern continues today in Washington, with pointed human rights criticism of China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran. There’s far less enthusiasm in the West for documenting human rights abuses by allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel — or for that matter, addressing the plight of those held without trial at Guantanamo Bay or killed in drone strikes.

In some ways, the world was more binary during the Helsinki era. Two major superpowers dominated the world; if they agreed, most other nations fell into place. Nonstate actors hadn’t assumed their central role in international politics, with their destabilizing penchant for asymmetric warfare.

Even pessimists like Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris, admit that Helsinki produced an enduring change. Le Gloannec believes the world is headed for dark times, with resentment driving an anti-Western wave led by tyrannical demagogues like Russia’s Putin. The war in Ukraine could spread farther into Europe, she believes, and human rights norms won’t do anything to calm tensions.

Despite her grim forecast, Le Gloannec belives that civic and human rights are here to stay — thanks to Helsinki. “We have a new paradigm,” she said. “People have the right to defend their rights, to fight for their rights.” However fragile, it’s a paradigm that for the first time placed individuals, rather than nation states, at the center of international relations.

Christian Stemper, Lupimaris

Sure it’s parochial, but I’m always delighted when I find something entrancing that’s from Paros. No single place has more of a spiritual claim over me, and although Paros is not my sole home it is home in a rooted way that feels more solidly anchored than my loyalty and identity to my adopted home of New York. And so I felt a frisson when I found Christian Stemper’s Lupimaris (Wolves of the Sea) project today on the internet. He is raising money to produce a photo book of this project full of love and beauty. Looking at these images put a bounce in my day which I hope to share with you. Stemper’s images reminded me of Platon’s Paros series.

Some years ago, in a local exhibition space a hundred meters from my mother’s door in Paroikia, I stumbled across a riveting exhibit of photographs by Platon. I had not seen his work before (my memory is blurry, but I think this exhibit took place a year or two before Platon exploded to fame and photographed all the world leaders at the UN summit in New York, for The New Yorker.) Platon is six years older than me and apparently spent some of his childhood, and many of his summers, in Paros. I’ve never knowingly interacted with him, but many of the characters in his pictures are people I’ve known my whole life, like the grocer Diplos, or like the fisherman and dock hand who used to pilot one of the small boats across the bay to the beach. I never knew that fisherman’s name, but as 5-year-old I dreamed idly of growing up and having this man’s serenity. Platon’s photographs captured something I had been looking at for a lifetime, and the animating feeling that thing had evoked, and they did it in a way that felt utterly different to me than photographs I had seen. Familiar, intimate, dissonant, jarring, but jarring in the sense of revealing a new perspective on the known. I thought of those images when I saw the Lupimaris portraits today.

Platon’s Fisherman portrait

Cicero Magazine Q & A

Photo credit: MOHAMED EL-SHAHED/AFP/Getty Images

[Published in Foreign Policy.]

The outrageous death sentences in Egypt over the weekend, and the muted reaction from Western governments, suggest that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has cemented a ruling coalition that will propel him out of a transitional phase into a long-term project of power consolidation.

Lost amid the court ruling against more than 100 defendants — which include academics and senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood, even Egypt’s sole elected civilian president, Mohamed Morsi — is the mounting evidence that Sisi has cobbled together a workable formula for ruling Egypt. This formula might be doomed in the long run, but the long run can be very far off indeed.

Today’s governing agenda in Egypt centers around three things: a crackdown on “terror” and dissent, maintaining a steady flow of cash from the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, and modest economic reforms that at a minimum give the impression of vision and positive momentum.

The government’s “war on terror” will resonate with Egyptians for quite some time. Jihadi attacks have proliferated since Morsi was deposed in July 2013; one fact sheet released by the government last year documented more than 700 people killed in the attacks. There have been dozens since, mostly targeting security forces and government facilities.

The public is repulsed by the bomb attacks on the police, army, and other government branches. Even most of the Muslim Brotherhood supporters of the deposed Morsi also condemn the insurgency and its terrorist tactics. As a unifying ideology for the Egyptian state, a war on terror might not suffice — but it will go a long way to mobilize what might be otherwise tepid support for Sisi and the military.

In prosecuting its war on terror, Egypt has lumped the Muslim Brotherhood together with the jihadi Ansar Beit al-Maqdis — equating dissent in the vernacular of political Islam with bombings and assassinations. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization of extreme ideology,” Sisi told the Washington Post in March. “They are the godfather of all terrorist organizations. They spread it all over the world.”

Perhaps Sisi is motivated by a sincere belief that the entire Islamist current is collectively responsible for the recent attacks, or perhaps he’s made a cynical calculation that the spate of violence offers an opportunity to eliminate the mainstream Islamist opposition under the cover of fighting an insurgency.

The battle against Islamists has given Sisi some legitimacy — but it isn’t what brought him to power. For that he counted on Gulf money, an initial precondition of the coup that toppled Morsi. As we’ve heard in great detail on leaked recordings from the office of Sisi’s chief of staff, the president made clear that he expected the billions to flow unabated from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies: “Man, they have money like rice,” a man who sounds like Sisi famously says in one of the leaks.

This might sound like thuggish extortion, but it’s also shrewd politics. Sisi recognizes that the Gulf can afford to underwrite Egypt, and that it’s willing to indefinitely pay $10 billion or more a year for a dependable ally in Cairo. Egypt struggles to import enough fuel and food staples to keep the country functioning and the poor quiescent; without Gulf money, the summertime power outages would likely turn into long-term blackouts and electricity rationing.

Egypt’s rulers have historically feared a “revolution of the hungry” if the circumstances decline for the nation’s many poor.

Economic reform, the last piece of the formula, is trickier. It’s become clear that Sisi’s autocratic ways and narrow, nepotistic circle of military advisors will preclude creative governance. But while significant reform is off the table, piecemeal improvements to the subsidy system could serve Sisi adequately for the medium-term. Meanwhile, theatrical flourishes like the $45-billion new capital planned for the desert outside of Cairo — a boondoggle for Emirati construction conglomerates which will probably never be built — and massive proposed public housing, irrigation, and road works projects give the impression of a nation on the move.

If even a small fraction of these projects materialize, Sisi will cement deep support in some quarters. Wealthy business owners and the small but politically influential middle class have both reliably remained in Sisi’s corner, and could benefit from infrastructure development. The military will also play a major role in any large-scale construction projects and, if shrewdly distributed, new housing or other perks could neutralize some of the few potential oases of organized political opposition, such as factory workers in the cities of the Suez Canal zone and the Nile Delta.

The medium-term stability of Sisi’s regime, however, may lead to more trouble for Egypt down the road. His repressive policies will not cure the country’s many ills, and are guaranteed to drive Egypt into even worse shape that it was when it rose up against Hosni Mubarak in January 2011. Recent events underscore Sisi’s paranoid style, punctuated over the weekend by banning soccer fan clubs known as Ultras and sentencing exiled political science professor Emad Shahin to death. As Shahin put it in a statement, the show trials are a centerpiece of Sisi’s effort “to reconstitute the security state and intimidate all opponents.”

The pattern of prosecutions fits that argument. If the government casts its net wide enough, it won’t have to worry about student union protests or critical university professors, because the majority of Egyptians will be frightened into silence.

Sisi’s paranoid style appears to be the product of a coherent view among Egypt’s fractious security services, which are showing a unity of purpose in carrying out the campaign against all political dissent. The military, police, intelligence agencies, and courts are pulling together to carry out the government’s political vision — an impressive bureaucratic achievement, but one that bodes poorly for democratic reform.

The downsides of the new dictatorship’s governing approach will be toxic for Egypt over the long haul. Securing the cooperation of a balkanized bureaucracy is not the same as controlling it: Sisi has the courts in lockstep on his side, but at the expense of their reputation. The courts have clearly abetted military rule, disbanding the elected parliament on flimsy pretexts, barring popular presidential candidates, and certifying election laws that served the military’s aims.

As a result of these machinations, no one will be able to take the judiciary seriously as a branch of government — and a future ruler, even an unelected autocrat, who wants to restore some semblance of the rule of law will face a daunting rebuilding job. The situation only deteriorated further today, with the appointment of Ahmed el-Zend as justice minister: The head of the influential “Judge’s Club” famously told a television show that judges “are masters in our homeland. Everyone else are slaves.”

The army, which paved Sisi’s path to power, remains the president’s only native constituency. But there’s no evidence to suggest that in a crisis — say, an economic collapse or a widespread popular uprising — Egypt’s generals would sacrifice their own institutional privileges to protect Sisi.

Even authoritarian rulers must play politics to retain power, pacifying the key organizations and constituencies that support them. Under the former dictator Hosni Mubarak, the military had to compete against the police, the intelligence services, and the circle of business moguls around the ruling family for its perks. Today, the military possesses unchecked power, which is likely to lead to greater corruption, unaccountability, and serial failures to accomplish the basic bread-and-butter business of the state.

This incompetence will negatively affect the very war on terror upon which Sisi is building his legitimacy. Jihadis are openly operating out of the Sinai, but according to the few independent reports that come out of the peninsula, poorly trained soldiers have employed scorched-earth tactics in retaliation, bombing towns and arresting random men while actual jihadis escape. Convicting and trying men for crimes theyprobably didn’t commit — as appeared to occur over the weekend in aballyhooed terror trial — won’t end the destabilizing domestic insurgency either.

Sisi also faces other long-term threats that are not solely of his making. These include an untenable national balance sheet, subsidies too expensive to maintain and too crucial to eliminate without massive social dislocation, growing unemployment, and inadequate water for agriculture under current usage practices.

Ultimately, any economic reform will depend on foreign pressure — a formula that didn’t work when the United States was the primary donor. Perhaps financial advisers from the United Arab Emirates will have better luck as they try to implement better practices in the ministries and government offices that will absorbed upward of $32 billion from the Gulf monarchies ever since Sisi’s coup. If those massive sums can’t buy meaningful political influence or instill sound economic practices, no amount of foreign money will.

The new regime is clearly unable to resolve these challenges, but history suggests that mismanagement can continue for a long time. Indeed, perhaps the greatest threat to Egypt is that Sisi simply muddles through. There are surely fissures within the regime, but he doesn’t need a monolithic ruling elite: He needs just enough power to stay in charge, and enough international support to ignore the outrage of Egyptians who want civil rights, political freedom, and genuine economic development.

[Published in Medium.]

The first time I told a group of graduate students that laptops and cell phones were forbidden in my classroom, the outcry was instantaneous. Why was I acting like such an old fogey? It was a seminar about war writing, in a wired classroom in the Internet age. To further confuse things, I am a technophile and was not that much older than my students at the time. I didn’t look like an enemy from the other side of the digital divide — so why the cruelty and ignorance?

By the end of the war-writing course, no one was complaining about the phone and laptop ban. Technology, like everything, has its place, and a good educator (or a good anything) is always open to the right tools at the right time. When we conducted Skype interviews with faraway subjects in Gaza or Iraq, we used a laptop and projector. Out of the classroom, much of the research and collaborative work occurred online, and when needed, students were welcome in the classroom to use their devices for presentations or to look up something relevant.

In this particular classroom, I was trying to teach a specific kind of thinking and writing, which benefitted from a technology-sterile environment. We were collaborating to understand the architecture of powerful stories, the process of gathering narrative strands and information in the fog of war, and what each individual needs to do to transcend assumptions and approach their own voice as a writer. These were intellectually intense and intimate group discussions. The learning that took place required trust and a sense of community that in this case was in part abetted by the act of putting aside our devices for the duration of our meetings.

I’m open to the possibility that in some classroom environments, screens might add something. In a large lecture class with hundreds of students, a shared Twitter handle might foster participation and connection. I’m not sure. But I figure my challenge as a teacher (or a conversationalist for that matter) is to be interesting. If I fail, if I am boring, nothing will change that: not a common hashtag, not PowerPoint slides crisscrossed by an animated Tintin, not a simultaneous online dialogue.

Fans of technology in the classroom, like Michael Oman-Reagan, often cite efficiency; note-taking is quicker, and so is access to online databases and other enriching resources. That’s true, but it’s not always an advantage to be able to jump down a rabbit hole, even a fascinating one; back in the “old” days classes didn’t instantly consult the encyclopedia sitting on a shelf in the back of the room.

Saving time doesn’t necessarily mean better learning or information processing. Many of us long knew anecdotally what science has increasingly made clear: humans aren’t capable of multi-tasking — instead, they just shift rapidly and sequentially between different tasks, degrading their focus on all of them. Even when I’m teaching, I momentarily lose focus if I see an alert for an important new email or a particularly juicy news item.

When I’m teaching, the goal is to communicate. I need the attention of my students with as few distractions as possible. Once I have their attention, it’s up to me to hold and engage it.

In small seminar courses, I found the quality of interaction increased consistently the less screen time we had. It’s not that different from the rest of my life. When I’m writing or researching on my computer, I hate to be interrupted. And conversely, while I love staying in touch with friends and sources around the world through instant messaging platforms, when they ping me while I’m walking somewhere I find myself either bumping into things or missing key parts of the exchange. Satisfaction in my marriage grows when my spouse and I maintain a border between our digital and flesh-and-blood “communications platforms.” When I’m forced to use my laptop during an interview, I find the quality of the conversation always suffers, because of the lost eye contact and imperceptible shift of the center of gravity to the glowing screen.

There are some decent arguments to be made for technology, and some of them point to rare occasions or exceptions when the classroom door ought to be opened to technology. But all too often one encounters fatuous whining. You need Evernote to write your thesis? That’s great, you’re welcome to it. But you don’t need to input our in-class conversation directly onto your laptop. Similarly, it’s hard to take seriously someone who compares the need for laptops in a lecture class to eyeglasses, or banning laptops to the medieval practice of tying up left-handed people because they carry the mark of the devil.

At Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, I spent three hours a week with my seminar students. They had plenty of time outside of class to create stickies to remember tasks, organize book-length projects on Scrivener, or to partake in any of the plethora of everyday technological wonders on which all of us rely. No one says don’t use these things. But why the drama when someone requires you to wait an hour before you do?

A smart, adaptable and resourceful person in today’s world ought to know how to draw on the vast resources of the wired world, amplifying their intellectual power through digital tools and online resources. She also ought to know how to thrive when those tools are out of reach. Anyone who argues that it’s always better to incorporate digital tools into a classroom setting (or any other human interaction, for that matter), is as much a fool and absolutist as the technophobe fogey who never wants to see a laptop or phone.

Technology fetishists sometimes get confused when someone asks them to put away their phone or shut their laptop. They mistake their comfort with technology with a right — specifically, a misguided, nonexistent right to use their technology whenever they want and however they want.

Here’s where the techno-evangelists really lose perspective. They seem to think that their online access, and their gadget comfort zone, is a God-given entitlement of which they must not be deprived for an instant. And while it’s not so with every teacher or in every classroom, that’s another learning experience that I was delighted to give my students: the opportunity to be bored without recourse to the dopamine-squirt of seven-second feeds.

There’s a whole world of ways to tune out, and while I’m glad today that some of them involve the information and interactions on my phone screen, I’m glad that just as many involve staring out a window, or at a point just beside a speaker’s head, or simply and honestly falling asleep. I don’t begrudge students who pass out or let their minds drift, although their class participation grade would suffer; and I certainly didn’t mind if my students, who were after all adults, popped out of the classroom to take a phone call or deal with an important email.

My responsibility as a teacher was to stimulate and engage my students. If I failed to do that, they were welcome not to take my class, or to turn their thoughts elsewhere. Nothing about the digital age, however, says I have compete hand-to-hand with a screen connected to the Internet. There are plenty of things I can do on my computer or phone that, in the moment, would beat out the real world. My screen life might even be more engaging than a class full of students I’m supposed to be teaching, or a lout I’m interviewing, or a street riot I’m trying to navigate. Time and again, though, I make the choice to disconnect from my devices for a spell and engage with something else — even when that something disappoints, tires, or simply makes demands of my mind.

Any teacher who asks their students to do the same thing for an hour or a school day isn’t a luddite shunning the marvels of a technologically-enabled classroom. They’re a human being, and they’re doing those students a favor.Those who panic shrilly at the prospect of an entire class period without their devices might find that learning and living without a computer for an hour or two at a time can be quite a thrill. And when it’s not, being bored without a screen has its benefits too.

Munir Makdah, Fatah boss of the camp and commander of the Joint Security Committee. Photo: Thanassis Cambanis

[Published in Foreign Policy.]

AIN EL HILWEH, Lebanon — The gunmen who control this tiny, cramped Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon are uncharacteristically eager to please. Hardened militants scurry to meetings with political rivals, and speak with newfound candor to journalists about past unsuccessful efforts to overcome a history of deadly feuds in the camp.

For decades, the coveted slot of camp boss has gone to the man able to deploy the most shooters and force Ain el Hilweh’s unruly clans and factions to fall in line. Today, however, an unlikely new order prevails: Bitter rivals have forged an unprecedented level of cooperation to police their sometimes-anarchic camp, forcing the most violent jihadists to lay low, and even turning over Palestinian suspects to the Lebanese Army, an act that just a few years ago would have been considered an unpardonable treason. Strongman Munir Makdah, a member of the Fatah movement, presides over a special council of 17 militia leaders — including some borderline jihadists — who must approve the most sensitive moves.

“It’s very important: This is the first time we’ve done anything like this,” Makdah said during a recent visit to his headquarters, nestled in Ain el Hilweh’s claustrophobic horizon of apartment blocs. “I call it the democracy of the gun. We tell our brothers when they visit that they can do the same thing in Palestine.”

Since its establishment in 1948, Ain el Hilweh has been a byword for militancy — a haven for fugitives and a bête noir (at different times) to the Lebanese government, the Israeli military, even the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

An estimated 100,000 people live in the camp, which is rimmed by walls, barbed wire, and army checkpoints. Under a convoluted agreement, Lebanese soldiers search the cars going in and out, but don’t enter the camp itself, leaving policing inside to the Palestinian factions.

The experiment underway in this camp represents a rare instance of cooperation and pragmatism in a region where fragmentation and infighting is the norm. Much more is at stake than simply the stability of an overpopulated square kilometer: There is a widespread fear that if the Islamic State, or jihadists sympathetic to the group, ever gained a foothold in Lebanon, it will be in a place like Ain el Hilweh — where residents are poor, politically disenfranchised, and ineffectively policed.

The agreement in Ain el Hilweh presents significant potential upside, too, in a region currently short of examples of political progress. The camp is home to actors who can impact flashpoints all over the region: It could contain the seeds of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, while authorities everywhere might look it as a model for a successful initiative to curb jihadists.

“Syria’s war was like a storm coming to us,” Makdah said. “Everyone was worried about the camps. We reflect society.”

When it comes to security, senior Hamas officials in Ain el Hilweh amiably take orders from Makdah. At the camp’s Hamas office, a visiting Fatah official refilled the Hamas chief’s coffee cup as the Hamas official gave his unvarnished assessment of the regional security situation. “Honestly, we Palestinians are in a weak position,” said the official, Abu Ahmed Fadel.

Fadel said it took the factions much too long to learn the lesson of the crisis in the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon in 2007, when jihadists battled the Lebanese Army. That fight destroyed the entire camp and left 27,000 residents homeless. Ever since then, Fadel said, Lebanese leaders suggested that the Palestinians set aside their internal differences and form a united front. It took what Fadel called “the fires in Syria” to finally push the sides to agree.

“Compared to what’s happening around us, we’re a stable river,” said Khalid al-Shayeb, the Fatah deputy who’s in charge of the patrols in Ain el Hilweh and the neighboring Mieh Mieh camp. “We managed to neutralize the threats from Palestinians much more effectively than the Lebanese Army has managed to neutralize the threats from the rest of Lebanon.”

There’s no sign here of the discord that forced a bitter break between Hamas and its long-time patrons in Damascus, or the blood feud between Hamas and Fatah, or between Hamas and the more extreme religious factions like Islamic Jihad and Ansar Allah. One fear has managed to outweigh all that acrimony: the dread of an encroachment by the Islamic State, whose entry into the camp could provoke outsiders to destroy it and cost the grand old factions everything.

“People should be united because there is a threat to everybody,” said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.

That’s not to say that the camp’s residents have entirely stayed out of the Syrian war. Some reports say that one of Makdah’s own sons snuck into Syria to join the jihadists. Makdah has figures of his own: precisely 52 Palestinians from all the camps in Lebanon, he says, have been tracked joining the Syrian jihadists.

The impact of the war is felt everywhere in Ain el Hilweh. A human flood of refugees has entered over the past several years, filling the impossibly crowded camp to its breaking point. According to Makdah, at least 20,000 newcomers moved to the camp since 2011, when war broke out in Syria. Officials have struggled to maintain the camp’s fragile water supply and say they can’t provide adequate education, housing, and health care to the camp’s residents. Until last week, Makdah said, he had turned over his offices to refugees. Now that they’ve found better dwellings, he’s moved back in.

A murder in April tested Makdah’s efforts to construct a new order in the camp. A Lebanese supporter of Hezbollah named Marwan Issa was dragged into Ain el Hilweh and murdered. According to Palestinian security officials, Issa was a member of a Hezbollah auxiliary militia called the Resistance Brigades, and his suspected killers were known arms dealers. They believe the murder was related to a weapons deal gone awry. Two suspects were quickly apprehended. Leaders of the 17 factions called an emergency meeting to vote on whether to hand them over to the Lebanese authorities.

“Usually the Islamic factions object,” said Bilal Selwan Aboul Nour, the camp security officer in charge of liaising with the Lebanese security establishment. “In this case, it was different. The victim was Lebanese. And if we didn’t cooperate, it could bring trouble on the entire camp.”

Aboul Nour immediately delivered the captives himself to the Lebanese Army barracks up the road.

A third suspect in the murder remains at large in the camp, however, illustrating the limits of this new cooperative order. That suspect is under the protection of Jund el-Sham, a jihadist faction, in the Taamir area of the camp. “We can’t use force,” Aboul Nour said. “He’s in an area outside our control.”

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have been patient and understanding, according to the Palestinians, although Hezbollah called the killing a “stab in the back of the Lebanese resistance.”

It was the Islamic State’s infiltration of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus that motivated the dithering Palestinian factions to unite last summer. At the time, the already unraveling region was experiencing extra strain: The Islamic State had seized much of northern Iraq and declared a caliphate, and had seized control of some entrances to Yarmouk and assassinated Palestinian operatives, according to Baraka. Senior officials from Fatah, Hamas, and the Lebanese government quickly agreed that if the Islamic State could win followers in Yarmouk, it could easily do the same in Lebanese camps.

Since September, the Palestinian Joint Security Committee has doubled the number of camp police in Ain el Hilweh from 200 to 400. Fatah supplies the top commanders and foots 70 percent of the cost of the committee, and Hamas provides the rest. The officers are mostly familiar faces in the camp, some of them veteran fighters in their fifties. Now they wear red armbands that identify themselves as Joint Security Committee fighters. Makdah has not only brought together Fatah and Hamas, he has also convinced jihadists and secular Marxists to police the camp in joint patrols — a success that eluded generations of Arab leaders before him.

Most of the fighters still stay close to their factions: In the headquarters, Fatah old-timers cluster around the small fountain full of goldfish. Outside, Ansar Allah’s fighters — identifiable by their long Salafi-style beards — politely decline to talk to reporters. Near the hospital, the clean-shaven leftists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shun the uniform altogether; their unit commander, Ali Rashid, wears blue jeans and a brown leather jacket. The groups sometimes organize joint patrols, and the major checkpoints include fighters from all the factions.

It was especially difficult for secular leftists to join forces with Islamist jihadists, Rashid said.

“We agreed that we would cut off any hand that tries to mess with security in the camp,” Rashid said. “We cannot tolerate even the smallest action from any takfiri [extremist] who enters here.”

So far, he said, the extremists in the camp have obeyed the new order. They might shelter fugitives — but so long as the fugitives are in the camp they refrain from any active role in militant operations.

Makdah says the camp really needs 1,000 police officers. In March, he extended his writ to the nearby camp of Mieh Mieh. If the experiment continues to succeed, Palestinian and Lebanese security officials said they hope to spread the experiment to all the Palestinian refugee camps in the country.

Ain el Hilweh’s unique circumstances make it an unlikely template for other places: It’s a hyper-politicized area whose claustrophobic living conditions make the Gaza Strip appear positively suburban by comparison. But sudden and intense collaboration between militants of secular, Marxist, Islamist and jihadist pedigrees show just how dramatically the Syrian war has shaken the old order. And it provides a fleeting glimpse of the kind of politicking — and transcending of old divisions — that has so far escaped mainstream Palestinian politics and the revolutionary movements that fueled the Arab Spring uprisings.

Photo:  MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

LEBANON’S MOST powerful Sunni and Shia warlords entered delicate negotiations to calm sectarian strife earlier this year, terrified that the mass killing in next-door Syria was about to engulf their own country.

There were many prickly agenda items: the central role that the Shia party Hezbollah plays in propping up Syria’s dictatorship; the cozy relationship between rich Sunni bosses and the crop of nihilist jihadis who are responsible for some of the most chilling murders; and a spate of beheadings and riots.

In the end, the two sides could agree on only one major concession to cool the conflict from the boiling point it had reached: Take down the big posters.

This compromise, at first glance, may sound almost pitifully small. At the time, Sunni jihadists were killing national army soldiers in the mountain town of Arsal, while Shia neighborhoods were celebrating their war martyrs as the only defense against the creation of a stifling, genocidal caliphate. And the only thing that sectarian leaders could agree on was a moratorium on images and iconography.

Yet the accord makes a powerful true-life argument about incitement.

The ubiquitous images of martyrs, religious leaders, and warlords, the slogans about death, sacrifice, and religions painted on walls and banners, both sides agreed, posed a genuine risk. Taking down some of the most intense signs of sectarian propaganda isn’t as big a step as disarming a militia, but in Lebanon’s ongoing experiment with religious and communal tension, this spring’s accord over visual propaganda marks an important test.

If the architects of the agreement and the social scientists who argue that the visual displays of sectarianism raise fears and the risk of violence are right, then Lebanon will reap major dividends from the iconography gambit — and in the process, give credence to the argument that visual propaganda plays an integral role in conflict.

But just how important are these signs and slogans? Can posters actually shape people’s identities and political views, mobilize them to fight, prime them to enter a zero-sum struggle against other people whom they consider different and less human? Or do they merely reflect discord and sectarianism that come from conflicts over resources and are nurtured slowly in places like schools, mosques, and churches?

“These flags are everywhere. We need a break from them,” said Jeanine Jalkh, a Lebanese journalist who has written extensively about ways to heal war-torn societies.

Tens of thousands of dead from the Lebanese Civil War, which raged from 1975 to 1991, are still unaccounted for; many victims are believed to have been killed by warlords and factions that still predominate today. So for many Lebanese, Jalkh said, the banners and flags they pass every day serve as a painful reminder of an enemy group that might still control their neighborhood — and that they hold responsible for a major, unprocessed loss. “To make peace, we’re going to need a multifaceted process,” she said. “We’re going to have to deal with memory, and with accountability.” Toning down the symbols, Jalkh believes, is a great place to start.
ACROSS THE ARAB world, the fight for power increasingly is being waged in sectarian terms, by militias whose loyalists and leaders identify themselves as Sunni, Shia, Christian, or some offshoot sect rather than by any other ethnic or political identity.

It’s not always accurate, but the signs and banners make a good bellwether of where the conflict stands. When sectarian militias are enjoying an entente, the peacocking subsides: no new posters and flags, none of the enormous billboards, and building-sized banners. When tensions run high, on the other hand, sectarian iconography proliferates.

The first steps to remove the icons in Lebanon went smoothly. In March, Hezbollah and its biggest Shia ally, the Amal movement, dismantled some of their largest party banners hanging in Beirut. The main Sunni party, the Future Movement, took down many of its posters and banners in Beirut and the cities of Sidon and Tripoli, which have diverse populations but also host concentrations of Sunni jihadists.

Mixed neighborhoods and sectarian borders have, not surprisingly, been the biggest flashpoints in Lebanon. As a result, these areas also host some of the more in-your-face iconography. The main highway to the airport, for instance, is a road that nearly everyone in the country travels. It also passes through Hezbollah’s heartland in South Beirut. The party has erected dozens of massive posters featuring Hezbollah martyrs along the motorway and raised hackles when they erected photographs of visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in 2010, an event that many Sunnis still bring up today. Entrances to Christian neighborhoods, meanwhile, are often marked by spray-painted or stenciled crosses on walls — most often a stylized cross of the Lebanese Forces, a militia responsible for many of the worst atrocities of the civil war — and photographs of their militia-leaders-turned-politicians.

It was in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city, that the campaign to calm sectarian tensions hit a bump. Since 2011, rounds of violence have wracked the city, pitting local Sunnis, who support the Syrian uprising, against Alawites, who support the Assad regime. Both communities have been sending fighters and weapons to Syria since fighting broke out there, and Lebanese politicians have tried in vain to keep their fighting on the far side of the border.

The city’s Sunni majority nurses a host of grievances. Poverty and unemployment are endemic. The central government has neglected Tripoli for decades. The city’s Sunni leaders, many of whom are multimillionaires and at least one of whom is a billionaire former prime minister, have stoked a sense of sectarian grievance while doing nothing themselves to help the city. Militancy and jihadist thought has proliferated among the Sunni populace, along with a sense that they are subject to punishment only because they are Sunni while the Lebanese Army and government are dominated by Shia and Christian movements.

One night this spring, Khaled el-Daher, a populist Sunni Islamist member of parliament, heard that the regional governor was removing jihadist flags from Nour Square, the symbolic gateway to Tripoli. He instantly framed it as a religious war against Sunnis and summoned a who’s-who of hard-core religious activists and jihadi sympathizers to join him in the square after midnight.

“This is a humiliation for the Sunnis!” he shouted to the crowd and assembled media. “If there is a decision to remove religious flags, let it be imposed on all religions, Muslim and Christian. Let them start with the crosses on the churches in Beirut and the statue of Christ the King in Jounieh!”

Daher’s stand brought Tripoli to the verge of open warfare, as Lebanese Christians, many of whom already feel politically marginalized and vulnerable, were stirred into action. The central importance of the sectarian symbols that adorn conflict in the region became immediately clear — as was the difficulty of taking even the most extreme of those down.

The centerpiece of Nour Square is a statue, about 10 feet high, of the word “God” written in simple Arabic calligraphy. A smaller sign identifies Tripoli as “the citadel of the Muslims.” Around the statue hang flags with verses of the Koran in Arabic script. Daher, an influential boss who was a member of the Sunni Future Movement until he was expelled as a result of his grandstanding about the flags, is unapologetic.

“This is God!” he explained in an interview. “Will you remove God from our city?”

JOSEPH EID/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The centerpiece of Nour Square in Tripoli is a statue of the word “God” written in Arabic calligraphy.

Islamic leaders and movements have flown flags with professions of faith ever since the time of the Prophet Mohammed. Today extremist groups, including ISIS and Al Qaeda, have adopted one form of this traditional flag as their battle standard, creating a vexing issue for purists like Daher.

Some Sunni leaders have found an easy workaround: Hang the same slogans on white flags, to keep the focus clearly on the religious dictates and not the contemporary political conflict. But it is on this score that Daher and other militant leaders in Tripoli expose themselves to charges of incitement.

“If criminals from ISIS kill under this flag that reads ‘No God but God,’ must we remove it?” Daher says. “Should we ask to Christians to remove the cross because it was used by the Crusaders?”

Daher defends all the symbols as a benign Lebanese tradition, a way of building community around leaders and shared values.

“The criminal is committing his crime under a flag — let us talk about the criminals, not the flag,” Daher said. “The problem is not with the pictures. It is with the practices: the weapons, the militias.”

SOCIOLOGIST SARI HANAFI at the American University of Beirut has been studying the process of incitement. He says that simplistic sectarian discourse has created a receptive audience for extremist recruitment: people deluged with banners and slogans, assertions about identity and threat that are not based on arguments and evidence.

“At one end of the spectrum, it’s about ignoring others, constructing a sense of otherness,” Hanafi says. “At the extreme, it becomes incitement, like ISIS.”

The peace process in Northern Ireland included a careful study of the use of flags and symbols to intimidate and mark territory, and efforts to change the way that symbols were used to heighten tensions. Researchers and peace advocates there recommended stringent regulation of flags and banners in public spaces, and the replacement of sectarian motifs with national, neutral, or intercommunal symbols.

Post-conflict reconciliation in places like Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and South Africa gave careful consideration to the creation of national symbols and efforts to deflate old sectarian or racial symbols. But Lebanon can only borrow a little from those other countries, because in Lebanon there hasn’t been any process to reconcile the civil war-era sectarian militias or to process the crimes of that era. Lebanon has enjoyed a sort of durable truce among sectarian factions since 1991, but nothing like an actual peace and reconciliation agreement that could lead to a nonsectarian order.

According to the Sunni and Shia politicians in Lebanon who agreed to take down the imagery, the move has two aims: The first goal is to make rival communities feel less threatened, and the second is to reduce the sense of urgency and mobilization that the ubiquitous signs provoke. Their experiment will ultimately show whether the simple act of removing some of those pointed symbols can slacken people’s thirst to fight.

Around Tripoli many of the most visible signs, banners, and photographs are gone.

Two black flags fly outside the Tripoli office of Bilal Doqmaq, a firebrand Sunni Salafi cleric who has been accused of rampant incitement and who was briefly detained this spring on charges of weapons trafficking. He likens the black flag to the cross over the Vatican or the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

“We lie to ourselves when we say the problem is gone when we remove these flags,” Doqmaq said. “That is the first step, when we need a million.”

This pessimism, however, belies Doqmaq’s true message. He is as responsible as any other militant for fanning the flames of violence. But what he is saying is that, to get groups like Hezbollah to moderate, symbols are a key part of the campaign. When the ubiquitous flags of war stop billowing, that will be a real first step to calming down the men and boys who do the shooting.

Capsule review by John Waterbury in the latest Foreign Affairs

Once Upon A Revolution: An Egyptian Story
By Thanassis Cambanis
Reviewed by John Waterbury
FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE

Cambanis’ remarkable account of Egypt’s 2011 uprising and 2013 counterrevolution is built on his firsthand reporting. Cambanis was in the country during both developments and shared in the initial euphoria and in the bitter disappointment that followed. He tells the story mainly through in-depth profiles of two men: Basem, a middle-aged, secularist architect who became politically active in anger at the almost comically fraudulent 2010 parliamentary elections that confirmed President Hosni Mubarak’s grip on power, and Moaz, a young activist in the Muslim Brotherhood, impatient with the group’s leadership and willing to cooperate with people like Basem. Cambanis’ analysis is sharp, and he does not hold back when it comes to graphically depicting the Egyptian state’s violence against its own people, be they Coptic Christians or Muslim Brotherhood supporters. In his gripping account of the 2011 massacre of some two dozen Copts at a protest in front of the Maspero television building in Cairo, Cambanis squarely blames the violence on the military leadership. Likewise, Cambanis accuses the military of deliberately killing as many Brotherhood supporters as possible during a protest against the 2013 military coup that brought General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power. Cambanis claims, at one point, that the lessons of the 2011 uprising cannot be unlearned. But even though the Egyptian people pushed out one autocrat, Sisi’s regime is more authoritarian and less liberal than Mubarak’s. So it’s not altogether clear what the lessons are.

Photo Credit: Mohammed Huwais / Stringer

[Published in Foreign Policy.]

By Thanassis Cambanis

BEIRUT — The war in Yemen and the breakthrough nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States have sent the already frenzied Middle East analysis machine into meltdown mode. These developments come fast on the heels of almost too many changes to keep track of: the Iraqi government’s capture of the city of Tikrit, rebel gains in northern and southern Syria, and mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Tunis and Sanaa.

This drumbeat of headlines, however, should not distract us from the larger meaning of events in the Middle East. We are witnessing a struggle for regional dominance between two loose and shifting coalitions — one roughly grouped around Saudi Arabia and one around Iran. Despite the sectarian hue of the coalitions, Sunni-Shiite enmity is not the best explanation for today’s regional war. This is a naked struggle for power: Neither of these coalitions has fixed membership or a monolithic ideology, and neither has any commitment whatsoever to the bedrock issues that would promote good governance in the region.

This is, in some ways, an updated version of the vast and bloody struggle for hegemony that shook the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s. In that era, a coalition of reactionary monarchs, led by Saudi Arabia, did battle with a coalition of Arab nationalist military dictators, led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Just like in that past era, every single major player today is opposed to genuine reform and popular sovereignty.

Today’s ascendant regimes are all reactionary survivors — and sworn enemies — of the Arab Spring. The Iranians mercilessly crushed the Green Revolution in 2009, and have invested heavily in authoritarian partners in Iraq and Syria, paramilitary group such as Hezbollah, and non-democratic movements in Bahrain and Yemen. Iran’s leaders are theocrats, but they are savvy and pragmatic geopolitical worker bees: They have backed Sunni Islamists and Christians, while even some of their close Shiite partners — like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite, and the Zaidi Houthis in Yemen — belong to heterodox sects and don’t share their views on religious rule.

On the other side of the struggle are the Arab monarchs from the Gulf, run by the same families that brought us the Yemeni war of the 1960s. They have extended their writ through generous payoffs and occasional violence, like the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain in 2011, which saved the minority Sunni royal family from being overrun by the island kingdom’s disenfranchised Shiite majority.

This Saudi-led alliance is Sunni-flavored, but it would be incorrect to see it as monolithically sectarian.

This Saudi-led alliance is Sunni-flavored, but it would be incorrect to see it as monolithically sectarian. Not long ago, in fact, Saudi Arabia underwrote the same Zaydis it is now bombing in Yemen. The current coalition relies for populist credibility on Egypt, whose governing class is dominated by secular, anti-Islamist military officers. It enjoys dalliances in various conflict theaters like Syria and the Palestinian territories with Muslim Brothers and jihadis. It has drawn extensively on help from the United States — and on occasion from its supposedly sworn enemy, Israel.

Perhaps the best glimpse of the Saudi-led alliance’s goals came when Kuwaiti emir Sabah al-Sabah addressed the Arab League at the end of March, in the meeting that inaugurated the war in Yemen.

“A four-year phase of chaos and instability, which some called the Arab Spring, shook our region’s security and eroded our stability,” the emir thundered. The uprisings, he said, encouraged “delusional thinking” about reshaping the region — perhaps a reference to Iran’s ambitions of regional influence, perhaps a reference to the ambitions of Arab reformers to limit the influence of the repressive states propped up by the Gulf monarchies. To the emir, the only outcome of uprisings was “a sharp setback in growth and noticeable delay in our progress and development.”

This is the crux of the regional fight underway: the old order, or a new one that would transform the balance of power — while changing little else about the way the Middle East is governed. The Saudi bloc wants to turn back the clock to the status quo ante that existed before the uprisings. The Iranian bloc wants to permanently alter the region’s balance of power. Both factions are run by opaque, secretive, repressive, and violent leaders. Neither side is interested in popular accountability, better governance, or the rights of citizens.

For all the doubts about Saudi Arabia’s capacity to craft and execute complex policy, the kingdom has cobbled together a formidable coalition. It quickly signed up most of its clients and partners for the air campaign, including Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. The United States supported the war, despite its reservations. Of the kingdom’s close allies, only Pakistan has so far resisted pressure to join the fight.

In just the last year, we’ve seen at least two major volte-face. Riyadh helped engineer a regime change in Egypt, ushering President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power. After experimenting with quasi-democracy and a Muslim Brotherhood presidency that defied the powerful Gulf monarchies, Cairo is now governed by a military dictator who walks firmly in lockstep with Riyadh — even promising to dispatch ground troops to a war in Yemen of which he would have probably preferred to steer clear. Qatar, the unbelievably rich emirate that has long cultivated an independent foreign policy, also found itself strong-armed by Saudi Arabia and finally caved. Its emir abdicated in favor of his son, a 34-year-old political novice, and today Doha is reading from Saudi Arabia’s song sheet.

Both examples show that this is not a monolithic bloc bound by uniform ideas of authoritarian rule or Sunni supremacy. Instead, it is a messy realpolitik coalition hammered together by shared interests — and at times by bribes and blackmail. Its members don’t agree on everything: Saudi Arabia hates Russia, in part because Moscow backs Iran and Syria. Egypt loves Saudi Arabia because Riyadh keeps its economy afloat — but it also loves Russia, because it can play off military aid from Vladimir Putin against that from the United States. In public, Sisi praises the Gulf leaders — but in leaked private recordings, he dismisses them as oil bumpkins who can be bilked of their money by more dynamic Arab nations. Qatar no longer openly defies Saudi Arabia, but it still supports Muslim Brothers and jihadis in Syria to the extent it can, and in opposition to Saudi preferences.

Since Saudi Arabia’s gloves came off in Yemen,

Sunnis across the region have expressed a kind of fatalistic relief: At last someone is doing something to confront Iranian influence.

Sunnis across the region have expressed a kind of fatalistic relief: At last someone is doing something to confront Iranian influence. But Tehran has extended its influence carefully, hedging its bets by supporting multiple groups in every conflict zone and always maintaining a degree of remove — if their investments fail, it will have not lost a war in which it was a declared combatant. This blueprint has served Iran well during 30-plus years of intervention in Lebanon and Iraq, and four years of orchestrating major combat in Syria. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has entered the Yemen war directly, and therefore has no cover. It will own the civilian casualties, and inevitably — when the war has no clear and easy outcome — it will own a failure.

History is not on Riyadh’s side in this campaign. Regional wars tend not to go well for invaders; just think of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait or the last Yemen war in the 1960s. The U.S. invasion of Iraq should also offer a cautionary lesson: Many people at the time, including some Iraqis, felt that some major action was better than the status quo, that toppling Saddam Hussein would at the least get a hairy situation unstuck. They were soon disabused of that notion, as Iraq spiraled into chaos.

America should take particular care in this conflict. It has built deep alliances with Saudi Arabia, and it has been far too hesitant to reinvent its dysfunctional relationship with Egypt in the post-Mubarak era. It should act as a brake on Saudi Arabia’s outsized expectations in Yemen, and it should exact a price for any support it gives the war there. Any campaign in Yemen should strengthen, rather than undermine, counterterrorism efforts there, and the United States should share its military know-how in exchange for Saudi cooperation on the Iran deal.

Sure, it’s bizarre to see the U.S. military working with Iran to battle the Islamic State in Iraq, while working against Tehran in Yemen. It’s also refreshing. This isn’t a homily; it’s foreign policy. It’s encouraging to see the United States operating around the edges of a complex, multiparty conflict and finding ways to advance American interests. Its next challenge will be finding new ways to simultaneously pressure rivals like Iran and recalcitrant allies like Saudi Arabia.

But to a large extent, the United States is a sideshow: The main event is the regional struggle for influence between the Iran and Saudi blocs. One need only look at the two major events this spring — the Iran nuclear deal and the capture of Tikrit with the help of Tehran’s military advisors — to get a sense of who’s winning. America’s preferred side has bumbled impulsively from crisis to crisis, buying or strong-arming support and launching military adventures that are likely to produce inconclusive results. Iran’s side, meanwhile, has crafted tight state-to-state relations with Syria and its onetime enemy Iraq, and has deepened its influence in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen. Despite the theocratic dogma of Iran’s Shiite ayatollahs, the regime in Tehran has managed to position itself as the regional champion of pluralism and minorities, against a Saudi grouping whose philosophy has drifted dangerously close to the nihilism of al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Unless Saudi Arabia and its allies can learn a new, more durable style of power projection, their costly feints will only buy short-term gains. The kingdom might manage to bomb the Houthis back to their corner of Yemen, and its Syrian clients may seize some more towns and cities from Assad, but the long-term trend points in Iran’s favor.

Illustration: KIM MAXWELL VU/GLOBE STAFF

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas section]

BEIRUT — On the day that Houthi rebels took over the capital of Yemen in February, US diplomats moved into high gear to do what they are increasingly tasked with doing when the countries they cover explode into crisis: Pack up and leave.

In the month that has followed, Yemen has erupted into one of the scariest hot spots in the world, hosting a high-stakes regional war entangling most of America’s allies and enemies on top of one of the busiest shipping lanes for the global oil supply. Additionally, there is the threat of terrorism: Yemen has produced some of the most significant Al Qaeda plots against American targets since 9/11, but counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering efforts have collapsed along with the US diplomatic exit.

With no diplomats, counter-terrorism operatives, or top-secret spies on the ground, the United States is left with less visibility than ever into a rapidly shifting conflict.

It’s not that foreign service officers suddenly lack the courage or desire to stay put when the countries where they’re stationed go haywire. Rather, a succession of United States administrations has increasingly decided that, in a post-9/11, post-Benghazi era, the stakes for putting civilian diplomats in harm’s way are too high. President Obama’s political wrangle with Congress in the aftermath of the 2012 murder of J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, made an already deteriorating situation even worse. Few, if any, US diplomats today are given the freedom to exercise their professional judgment of what risks are worth taking.

Throughout the combustible region stretching from Pakistan to Morocco, where America has expended most of its foreign policy energy in the last four decades, its diplomatic presence operates at a paralyzing remove, behind concrete as well as perceptual barriers. And intentionally or not, the result leaves the United States flying blind in places where information is the hardest to obtain and where diplomacy may be the most vital.

“WE ARE NOW too restrictive. We need a course correction,” said Ronald E. Neumann, who served as an American ambassador in volatile spots including Afghanistan and Algeria, before retiring in 2007.

Crafting foreign policy requires information and judgments that even the most skilled diplomats and observers can’t cull from afar, Neumann explained. In Yemen, for instance, with the well-connected ambassador now having to work remotely by phone and in meetings abroad, the United States is forced to rely much more on the biased analysis of allies like Saudi Arabia.

“If you’re going to avoid a civil war, it requires understanding what the parties want and being able to broker solutions,” Neumann said. “You can’t do this from a distance.”

But a great distance is exactly what separates American diplomats from flashpoints like Yemen, Syria, and Libya today. In other war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States retains an information network from its long periods of military occupation, but that too is shrinking. American understanding and insight into global conflicts are as limited as ever.

What is lost when diplomats must withdraw — or are forced to operate out of fortress embassies with elaborate security protocols restricting their ability to meet with the people who provide crucial analysis and avenues of influence? Can America even properly understand the places that top its list of threats?

THE DANGERS TO Americans serving the country’s interests abroad are very real and long-running.

“If you’re an American, you’ve got a bull’s-eye on you that others don’t,” said Ryan C. Crocker, who has served as ambassador in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.

In 1979, Iranian radicals took over the US Embassy and held 52 hostages for more than a year; that crisis fatally hobbled Jimmy Carter’s presidency. In April 1983, a suicide bomber blew up the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63. In 1998, massive bombs ravaged the American missions in Kenya and Tanzania. These attacks are only the most scarring of dozens of bombings, assassinations, and other assaults that have targeted US diplomats over the years — so many that the State Department collected them into a glossy brochure.

The consensus among career diplomats is that there’s a way to do an effective job despite threats — so long as they’re allowed to take some risks and keep missions open even in turbulent countries.

But at least two factors have conspired to dramatically reduce America’s diplomatic footprint. The first is the complexity of the threats and violence in trouble areas like Yemen, Libya, and Syria.

The United States shut down its embassy in Damascus in 2012 because of the risk of suicide car bomb attacks. As Libya melted down in the summer of 2014, diplomats were ordered to leave. The same thing happened when the war in Yemen spiraled this February. In three of the four war zones presently raging in the Arab world — all conflicts in which the United States is either directly involved or has close allies fighting for critical interests — the State Department has no eyes on the ground.

“You lose an enormous amount when you’re no longer in the country. You have a reduced ability to persuade and influence, and a reduced ability to understand,” said Robert Ford, who served as the last US ambassador to Syria.

When the uprising began in 2011, Ford was omnipresent, cutting an unusually visible profile for an American diplomat, even paying a surprise visit to antiregime protesters in the city of Hama in July that year. He reluctantly closed the Damascus embassy in early 2012 but continued the job for several years at a distance before retiring and becoming a critic of US policy on Syria from his perch at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.

The second factor hampering diplomats is the political skittishness that followed the murder of Stevens and three other Americans at the hands of extremists in Benghazi in 2012.

The Benghazi killings have made it even harder for diplomats to take what they consider reasonable risks. Stevens dedicated his career to tireless outreach and interpersonal contact. Former colleagues, including Crocker, Neumann, and Ford, said it was ironic that the political fallout from Stevens’s murder had curtailed the very brand of diplomacy that Stevens championed.

As Crocker put it, “Chris Stevens would roll over in his grave if he knew how his death has been misused.”

VISITING US EMBASSIES these days can entail running a humiliating gauntlet of body searches, blast barriers, and walled holding areas. And if a US diplomat comes to you, it often means invasive searches beforehand with bomb-sniffing dogs and obtrusive security details. In places like Iraq, where meeting with Americans can put someone’s life in danger, potential interlocutors often prefer not to run the risk if it is overly complicated to talk.

In other words, American diplomacy is becoming increasingly fearful and hidebound. But what is the cost to our foreign policy? How much have we lost in actual influence and actual knowledge because of this bunker diplomacy?

We’re in the process of finding out. In Yemen, the United States is supporting a foreign war against a tough nation that has frustrated every previous foreign military intervention. America might be making decisions based on simplified assertions that its own diplomats contradict: for instance, the characterization of the Houthis as a simple Iranian proxy rather than as a formidable local alliance supported by Yemen’s former president (who is not a Houthi). Elsewhere, the United States seems fuzzy on the dynamics of tribes, of disenfranchised Sunnis, even on the breadth and depth of support for jihadist movements. It’ll be hard to contain ISIS, or prop up the Iraqi government, or limit the repercussion of the regional wars in Yemen, Syria, and Libya if the United States is no longer sure of basic descriptive facts — who supports warring parties and powerful ideologies, what’s at stake in the tangled alliances, what complexities underlie the region’s sometimes simplistic sectarian rhetoric.

Mokhtar Lamani, an international diplomat from Morocco who ran an Arab League mission in Iraq at the height of the civil war and later worked for the United Nations in Syria, said he felt sorry for his American colleagues and their oppressive security protocols, which he believes lost them a wide array of contacts and insights.

In Baghdad in 2006, Lamani lived outside the Green Zone, where he regularly met with Iraqis who opposed the US occupation. Eventually he gave up hosting Americans at his mission because of the exhaustive advance searches that he feared would tip off extremists to his whereabouts. “It was easier for me to go see them in the Green Zone,” he said. “But life in the Green Zone had nothing in common with the rest of Iraq.”

One seasoned observer of Middle East diplomacy, the scholar Randa Slim, argues that the Americans relied too heavily on second-hand information from exiles like Ahmad Chalabi during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, resulting in major missteps, including the decisions to disband the military and to dismantle the Baath Party.

“The United States went into a country in which we have not had a diplomatic presence since 1991 and, as a result, had no active on-the-ground intelligence since that date,” Slim said.

Lamani noted that Americans often suffer analytical lapses because they don’t talk to politically unpalatable or contentious players. In Syria, American diplomats avoided meeting with extremists from the opposition even when they were the ones in control of the military uprising. In Iraq, many of the hostile factions and religious leaders refused to meet with Americans on principle, and the Americans didn’t always find ways to bring them to the table.

“In diplomacy, you have to be in contact with everybody,” Lamani said. “There are two kinds of rules that harm American diplomats: the physical rules that keep them from being on the ground, and the political isolation they have imposed on them.”

Even the Americans know from experience that there’s no substitute for being there. Neumann recalls that at the peak of the Algerian war in the 1990s against an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, experts agreed that the fight was a stalemate and that eventually the secular government would have to reach a political settlement with the Islamists. Despite a very restrictive security environment, Neumann and his political staff spent a year interviewing Algerians, collecting all the information they could, and reached a surprising conclusion: The government was actually winning. Armed with this new analysis, the United States could update its own strategy.

“There’s a lot of things you can do if you’re not stupid,” says Neumann, clarifying that he means so long as diplomats take calculated risks rather than behaving recklessly.

Yet in Lebanon, seven years after the bombing, the United States reopened its embassy on a hilltop far north of Beirut, surrounded by an army of private mercenary guards. Even today, more than three decades after the 1983 attack, diplomats visit Beirut in convoys, with armed guards, sometimes clearing cafes of their patrons to hold meetings. In contrast, European diplomats work in the Beirut city center, traveling independently by taxis or driving their own cars, and they’re free to meet activists, dissidents, Hezbollah members — whoever will talk to them.

THE UNITED STATES now relies extensively on second-hand reports: from British diplomats, who are allowed to move around more; problematic allies like the Saudis; or local politicians, who also can’t be fully trusted. Other limitations are self-inflicted — the United States legally prohibits itself from talking to groups that it labels terrorists, making it harder to deal with critical players, especially foes such as the Taliban or Hezbollah. The United States has not had an embassy in Iran since 1979, making it harder to manage relations with perhaps the most important adversarial actor in the Middle East.

Diplomats, for their part, have tried to make up for the security mentality with creative workarounds. They call old contacts on the phone or on Skype and invite people they know from the past to meet them at the embassy or on neutral ground, like in a Baghdad hotel lobby or at the Kandahar Airport. Others elude threats — and tight budgets — by traveling incognito to meetings in beat-up old cars rather than in attention-grabbing convoys of SUVs with tinted windows.

Ford recalls as a political officer in Algeria, when it became too dangerous to move comfortably around the countryside, he lured reluctant guests to the embassy by inviting them for Lebanese takeout. Eventually he hosted hundreds of meetings that way.

Neumann suggests that the United States could mitigate some of its lost access by extending the length of diplomatic tours, keeping political officers and ambassadors in their posts for two or three years instead of one. Some regional actors like Iran keep their envoys on the same portfolios for a decade or more.

Crocker believes the damage is getting worse. Until now, the United States has been saved from falling totally out of touch by a generation of diplomats who had a chance 20 or 30 years ago to build contacts with whom they could communicate closely in the new era of fortress diplomacy. Despite their zeal, younger diplomats never got the chance to drive themselves around the countryside meeting the dissidents, intellectuals, business people, journalists, and regular people who become any diplomat’s most important informants.

“It’s our future that’s at peril more than our present,” Crocker says. “You cannot practice diplomacy with a zero-loss mentality.”

In Yemen, the United States has withdrawn all civilian, military, and intelligence personnel. That move likely relinquished its only opportunity to affect or even end the war. Instead, Saudi Arabia, which has a stake in pushing back the Iran-backed Houthis, is, more or less, dictating US policy.

“There’s no question that we don’t have as much information as we would like,” Ford said. “And we have less ability to persuade people to move in directions that might resolve the conflict.”

[Review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books]