[MUSIC] The Roman statesman Cicero wrote some 2,000 years ago in his Treaties on the Republic the following about the indispensable characteristics a political community must possess if it wishes to survive. He wrote, unless a state maintains a balance of rights, duties and functions so that state officials possess enough power, deliberations of the leading citizenry, and enough authority, and the people enough freedom, it is not possible for it to remain stable. This, unfortunately, is not a description that would apply to many contemporary Arab states. And this is in essence what this course is all about, the Arab exception. Welcome, my name is Ebrahim Afsah. I'm an associate professor of international law here at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. I invite you to join me on a journey of discovery into the contemporary Arab state system. Trying to understand why that balance of rights, duties, functions has proven so elusive. Why meaningful deliberations with the citizenry remain absent. Why administratively weak states mistake coercive power for authority, and why a minimum level of individual, social, economic and political freedom is necessary for communal stability. The Arab world is in deep crisis. Of the 22 member-states of the Arab league, at least five have essentially collapsed. Their governments being unable to control the territory, uphold basic order, let alone provide essential services. Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria exist in name only today, as their territories have fallen to competing murderous armed groups. The life of the inhabitants of these states is nasty, brutish, and short, as coined by the English Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes in an influential description of life before the foundation of the social contract to create the state. Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain have experienced massive popular unrest, leading to the violent overthrow of the government and/or massive repression. Only Tunisia holds any promise, however tenuous, that these democratic aspirations for greater public participation and a better life might one day lead to anything else than yet another autocracy. Political life in Lebanon and Algeria remains fragile and suspended after their traumatic civil wars. Sudan saw its southern parts secede after a long, brutal and still unresolved civil war. The Comoros, Djibouti and Mauritania have all experienced high rates of violent regime change. Palestinians remain under Israeli occupation, and their aspiration for equality and statehood remain as elusive as ever. The oil-funded autocracies of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar appear stable for now. But considerable doubt remains about the resilience of a socioeconomic model built on religious extremism, rents, imported indentured labor, and foreign military protection. This was most dramatically shown by the invasion and subsequent liberation of Kuwait by Western troops. Only Jordan, Morocco, and Oman show for now any semblance of normal, but not particularly well-functioning, governance. The Arab journalist Hisham Melhem opens a piercing critique of the current state of his people in the following extremely troubling words uttered in response to the massacres, mass rapes, and proudly claimed sexual enslavement of women, deliberate destruction of priceless cultural artifacts, and mass civilian casualties. He wrote: Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented, and driven by extremism- the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition- than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. These are all phenomena that have largely gone un-protested in an Arab and Muslim world otherwise all too willing to enact violent apparatus of choreographed rage at the slimmest of slights to the perceived dignity of the religion in whose name these various atrocities continue to be committed. Melham continues, every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions, and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies of the Gulf, which, for the moment, are holding out against the tide of chaos, and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world. End of quote. It is actually a remarkable phenomenon that a few Danish cartoons led to concerted, bloody, global protests by a large number of Muslims, including many so-called moderates, while the abduction and sexual enslavement of young Yazidi and Nigerian girls was and continues to be met by a deafening silence. The serious and sustained loss of moral compass in the treatment of its own culture and religion has had momentous practical implications, as Melham concludes. Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to the self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the Americans and western countries. Melhem's words are tragic and powerful, yet hardly hyperbolic and harder still to dismiss. In the following, I will investigate one of Melhem's particular observations more thoroughly. Namely, that the promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings has not been fulfilled. Rather than announcing a democratic awakening, the so-called Arab spring that began in 2010 has failed, and instead has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian, and regional divisions, and the reassertion of absolutism. This raises the obvious question, whether there is something inherent in the Arab, and by analogy, Muslim condition that makes them special. Does this condition make them impervious to generally observable trends towards greater accountability, popular participation in political decision-making, greater generation and fairer division of economic wealth? Some argue that this so-called Arab or Islamic exceptionalism stems from the existence of specific anti-democratic cultural or religious forces, which not only make the civilization particularly resistant to the norms and ideas of democracy, but of modernity more generally. The exception refers to the curious absence of politics, the meaningful struggle over competing interests within structured, accepted channels, the surprising lack of solidarity, social cohesion, as well as legal certainty and respect for human dignity in ossified, unproductive, and unimaginative societies. As Cicero's opening quotation showed, certain ingredients of statehood cannot be ignored if a political community wishes to survive. They concern, ultimately, the creation of political institutions in which competing interests can be articulated and agglomerated. The creation of governance institutions in which decisions can be carried out through a mixture of administrative capability, cohesive power, and social legitimacy. This investigation into the institutional preconditions for stable communal life thus points us to a second, more conventional set of explanations for the Arab Exception. Rather than relying on notoriously imprecise concepts such as culture or religion, I propose here to apply general social science to investigate the nature of the political, legal, social, and economic institutions that have developed, or failed to develop, in the Arab world. We will investigate whether these popular manifestations were indeed a democratic awakening, why they occurred where they did and not elsewhere, and why they largely failed. [MUSIC]
