bush.tamu.edu school uncorked … · web viewforeign aid, whether that's more broadly or...

Justin: Welcome to another episode of Bush School and Court. We are doing another live taping with a fabulous guest who we will introduce momentarily. But we are back at Downtown on Court in downtown Bryan. And we have an audience again this evening who hopefully will have some questions for us as we wrap to a close.

Justin: We're gonna do a slightly different format today since both Greg and our guest, who I'll introduce momentarily, share some common expertise. Rather than bringing in someone else for the panel, we're just gonna open it up for a panel conversation pretty much from the beginning. I'm going to introduce our guest, ask her a couple of questions about how she identifies as a researcher and some of her recent work, and then we're just gonna dive full in to Middle East. And I will be as much a audience member as anything at that point.

Justin: So, welcome back Greg. You weren't with me last time, I think. When the last episode that was published.

Greg: I missed you terribly.

Justin: I know. I missed you terribly, too. The episodes are not the same without you.

Justin: So today, we have the pleasure of having Dr. Erin Snider with us. She is one of our colleagues. Greg is her boss.

Greg: To the extent that anyone in [crosstalk 00:01:21]

Erin: Comments will be calibrated accordingly.

Greg: To the extent that anyone in academics has a boss.

Justin: Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Erin: So hierarchical, Justin.

Justin: Well when we had Dr. Lori Taylor on, I referred to her as my boss. So, I feel like that's only fair.

Justin: Professor Snider is an assistant professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University, within the Bush School of Government and Public Service. And she is a Carnegie Fellow at the New American Foundation. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research and book report focuses on the political economy of aid and development in the Middle East. Book project. I went with a book report.

Erin: So much more concise.

Greg: I think in sixth grade, she wrote a book report.

Bush School Uncorked with Erin Snider (Completed 02/23/19)Transcript by Rev.com

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Erin: Yeah, I did.

Justin: No winning with this crowd. Okay. She does a lot of work on aid and development in the Middle East with ongoing work examining the economic underpinnings of the 2011 Arab uprisings and the politics of transitional aid. Her research has been published or is forthcoming from International Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Middle East Policy. I think that's it. That's a pretty-

Erin: That's a lot to have-

Justin: That's a lot. So now we know all about you. So, now that we've got the bio part done, tell the listeners a little bit about what type of research you do. I know we talked about some publications and broadly focused area. What's really driven your research from an interest standpoint?

Erin: Yeah, I can tell you in a nutshell a little bit about how I even became interested, I think, in what I'm working on. So, sort of broadly, my interests are focused on the politics of development, the political economy of development in the Middle East, and definitely, the politics of foreign aid, whether that's more broadly or particular to this region as well.

Erin: When I first began the work that I'm focused on now, I was somehow unsatisfied with, I think, the scholarly approach towards understanding big questions about democracy and democratization in the Arab world. And kind of the starting point for the research that I'm working on, in some ways, was a 2005 study, this was at the very beginning of my doctoral work, that was trying to understand the impact of the US's spending on democracy programs in the world. An attempt to really understand the question: does spending on democracy aid work? Does it actually spread democracy, does it cultivate democracy? And the results of this study, it was a cross-national aggregate study, concluded that yes, it works everywhere but in the Middle East.

Erin: And for Middle East scholars, I think that they had some ideas about why that didn't resonate, why things weren't working. But intellectually, for me, the way that people were even talking about democracy and democratization, seemed very particular and not really reflecting, let's say, the views and the voices of citizens in the Arab world and so reflected in some sense, one conception of democracy that was very much a more Western, liberal democratic focus of the term itself. And so, in kind of the first year of my doctoral work, I was trying to understand what I thought were shortcomings of the study, what it would look like ... if we wanted to understand why democracy aid wasn't working, well then what would it look like to ask the people who were the recipients of this aid and to get a better sense of what was actually happening on the ground?

Erin: And to circle back to your question and sort of what drives me or what I'm really interested in and fascinated by, it is this question. Kind of a bottom-up understanding of development from citizens within the region and how they're understanding different efforts that have happened in the region.


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Justin: And so, as you've sought to look at this differently, what have you found taking some of these bottom-up approaches? I mean, I assume that it's much more complicated than just, "it did work or it didn't work" and "boo, it doesn't work in the Middle East."

Erin: Right. And I think for starters, when we as scholars ask if something's working or not working, well what does that even mean? And there are certain constraints that people in Washington, policy practitioners, people that work in foreign aid, have to work with, right? As an example, if we talk about something like democracy aid, for the people that work in this area, whether they're scholars or practitioners, people that work in democracy aid in Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans, etc., they conceptualize this aid as something that is best measured meaningfully in generational terms.

Erin: So, if we wanna understand how a democracy program is working, it makes sense to think about looking at success in a 10 to 15 year marker. Well, the way that a lot of government programs are structured, they have to come up with measures for folks in Congress, who approve the budgeting for these kinds of programs and so-

Greg: Every year.

Erin: Every year, right? So-

Justin: Not a 15 year timeline.

Erin: No, not at all. So they might be sympathetic and that might, you know, "Intellectually, this makes sense for what we understand-" maybe our understanding of democracy to be, and that it takes a long time to see the development of that in D.C. When you talk with people that work at the US Agency for International Development, which is the primary agency that is in charge of democracy aid, they'll tell you with great frustration, "Each year, we have to go to Congress and respond to this question: how much did democracy grow in Egypt from last year to this year?" And that's a dumb question. It is a fundamentally dumb question, but you have to come up with some indicators, something to be able to sell and to maintain interest from members of Congress to continue funding these programs.

Erin: So, between my work and the work of a lot of other really great scholars, they've talked about incentive structures, right? What's driving programs? Scholars that work on international peacekeeping, for example, will tell you, "If we just think about international peacekeeping, and we want to understand how it could be more effective, it makes sense that such efforts are going to work better if the locals themselves have a voice in those efforts, and ideally are driving those efforts," right? I think most of us ... that sounds like common sense to us.

Justin: Yeah, this parallels to like how we think about doing projects domestically with local government, so we're at the local level. And we wanna have engagement and buy-in from the actual community or ... it doesn't work when you just come in and say, "Here's how we're gonna do it."


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Erin: Exactly. And so, from the democracy standpoint, it's like, what would it look like if a democracy program were driven by local interest in Morocco, in Bosnia, wherever? And so, thinking about what sort of institutional mechanisms are in place that are preventing that from happening and locking in, in some ways, one particular approach. And I'm really fascinated, beyond even the Middle East, just thinking about the role of ideas in political economy. Why some ideas went out over others despite, in some cases, when we have evidence of learning that things aren't working the way they should. Why do we keep seeing the same kinds of programs that aren't working properly?

Justin: So why do we just gotta stick to those same narratives and those same stories? I was just teaching class about decision making and biases and cognitive biases and how we keep repeatedly telling ourselves these same stories even when they aren't working, and how we have such a hard time changing our narratives about things. You mentioned that, so this might be the only time when I can work PA in carefully. So I'm gonna jump in while I have the opportunity.

Justin: But, one of the things that you mentioned about USAID and kind of meeting measures every year and how that would be different from a bottom-up approach, got me thinking one of the kind of common refrains from management is: "You get what you measure." And so I imagine this is probably emblematic in these aid programs as well, when you go through and pick these measures in a specific way so that you can have some yearly report of change in them, that guides the policy process to focusing on those measures in ways that I imagine aren't always helpful.

Erin: Yeah. I absolutely agree, and I think that there's a certain path dependency that takes effect at some point. And that is really, really difficult to reverse course, because bureaucracy, right? And so I think that in the Middle East, when you ask this question, "Why isn't democracy aid working?" There are some people, they're not completely wrong in some ways, that will say, sarcastically in some cases, "Well it was never meant to work." That the US or other actors have no interest in, what some people would say, real democracy, what the people want. And there's some truth to that, I think, too.

Erin: But I also think that there is nothing really nefarious about why aid efforts haven't been working better. I think I would just say, we can think about the banality of bureaucracy at the end of the day, too. That there are lots of really good people that are engaged in these efforts who are struggling to cobble something and to get something good out of this system. But they have to make concessions and some sort of compromise to be able to get some semblance of a program through.

Erin: I'll give you an example. So, a couple of years ago, when I was in Morocco, and I was talking with some of the people that are working on the US's democracy program in Morocco. They'll say, to what I was just mentioning earlier, "Ideally, the program would look like this." Right? Reflecting Morocco's political context, the nature of civil society in the country, etc. So, this is what the program would look like ideally. But we can't get any money for that program, right? So from this woman's perspective, this program, which made sense for Morocco and was the best choice for a democracy and governance program, was not going to elicit any response from Washington. And so she


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said, and this was in 2014, she said, "The only way that we're going to be able to get the attention of Washington is to frame this program in terms of counter-terrorism or counter-violence programs." Right?

Erin: And so, in some ways, there's a marketing component of this, too, right? So, we can take this same program, but now how do we pitch it in a way that a senator, a representative, or people within upper leadership in AID are going to respond to, too? Because that's part of the system. And I think that in some ways, scholars haven't paid enough attention to thinking about these components from the policy end, and the compromises. And so, if we know more about that, then that also helps us, I think, to understand why programs maybe aren't as responsive as they could be.

Justin: So, one of the things that you mentioned early on and I think we've been giving specific examples of and batting around a little bit, is the idea of the political economy for actually engaging in democratic aid and financial aid. The US, for example, chooses some countries to invest more in financial aid towards democracy efforts than others. And my guess is, it's not based completely on need, for example.

Greg: You would be right about that.

Erin: As my colleague...

Justin: Greg couldn't even keep a straight face with me saying that.

Erin: Snarkily respond, rightly so.

Justin: So, what are some of the motivations that, say the US or other democratic countries, since this is kind of the lens we've been looking at, when do they engage in financial aid towards other countries, and why?

Erin: I'll say that, certainly for people that either study the Middle East or follow events in the region closely, they wouldn't be surprised to know that our aid is not driven purely for developmental reasons. And Egypt is the primary example of that. Some people say-

Greg: Well, Israel might be the primary example of that.

Erin: Well, and Israel is linked to that.

Greg: Right.

Erin: Yeah, exactly.

Greg: Because Israel, for all sorts of reasons, which one can agree with or disagree with, gets the highest per capita American aid outside of war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, right? But, none of that aid is directed to specific development programs or democracy programs, it's given as budget support to the Israeli government, right? Whereas our aid


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to other places like Egypt, Morocco, is administered through American actors and contractors, right?

Greg: Sorry. I'm jumping in. You go ahead.

Erin: No, but that's exactly it. And so when you look at how much the US has traditionally, up until I would say the last 5 years, given to Egypt, is that reflective of the state? You know, the poverty statistics, developmental indicators in Egypt? No. And this is something-

Greg: And certainly not in our aid to Israel, which is, aside from the smaller oil states, the highest per capita income in the Middle East.

Erin: Yeah, and the money we give to Egypt is a reflection of the Israel factor, right? Which is that after Camp David, more or less kind of reward for keeping the peace between the two countries. And this is something I think that also doesn't get enough attention in terms of understanding ... well, the terms of that aid have always been tricky. With the US aid to Israel, it's a direct cash transfer. And with the US's aid to Egypt, it's always been based on Egypt giving indication of how it needs to be used developmentally.

Erin: So the US insisting that we're going to give you, let's say, 200 million dollars for economic assistance, etc. And the Egyptians have always resented the terms of this. And that's also important to know in terms of their resistance towards all sorts of things that the US has asked the government to do. Whether it's doing better in the realm of human rights, financial reform, etc. And it's something, if you study power and politics ... they know the Israelis are getting a direct cash transfer, and they're being asked to, you know, well, "We'll give you this $1.3 billion in aid, or $800 million in aid, but you have to spend it in these ways with our assistance and work."

Greg: Buying only American products.

Erin: Buying only American products. Yeah.

Greg: Having Americans oversee the projects. And we're only talking about developing aiding. We're not talking about military aid, which is completely different ...

Erin: That's another issue altogether.

Justin: So, even the development aid is just a direct transfer to their general revenue funds, essentially?

Erin: For Egypt?

Justin: For Israel.

Greg: Yes.


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Erin: Yes.

Justin: Interesting. Is that common ... is Israel the kind of [crosstalk 00:15:35]

Greg: No, it's the only-

Erin: It's the only-

Greg: It's the only case.

Erin: It's the only case. It gets to be the special snowflake in this equation. But this is important to know in terms of when the US, after 2004, this is post-9/11 when the George W. Bush administration started making Egypt of its focus for its democracy aid programs in the Middle East, started pressuring the government basically to do better on democracy, in a nutshell. There was a lot of resistance, particularly within one ministry that deals with all of the foreign aid, and one minister in particular who developed this reputation amongst US diplomats for being a formidable opponent in some ways.

Erin: The US Ambassador to Egypt at the time told me that she had said in one meeting that this, the US's insistence that money be spent towards particular reforms, she called it "an indecent proposal." And this was repeated not only by the ambassador but by various diplomats as well, too, and this-

Greg: She's seen too many American movies.

Erin: She has. But then there's something fundamentally that the diplomats who are working with her in those sessions would acknowledge, of like, "Obviously we don't agree with her, but she's not wrong either." This is something within the power dynamics that we have to reckon with. And she for sure has her own political motives for why she doesn't want to be cooperative, or from her government's perspective, be cooperative. But this is something, again, if you're dealing with aid, it's useful to know all of these moving pieces.

Justin: So one other kind of setting the context, at least for my own figuring out what's going on ... for international aid, do our policies stay relatively consistent over time? I know, for example, Israel being a case where maybe it has stayed consistent over time, but are we looking at when a new president comes in, do they just kind of tear up all the old sources of aid and start all over, or is it a pretty stable level of investment?

Erin: Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's an enormous amount of continuity in general, particularly with aid to the Middle East, and that reflects the geopolitical situation. The fact that this region is important for the US's security interest, the peace agreement with Israel, etc. And so, this notion that you could have, you know, if you didn't like the policy, and you became the president the next day, that you would just overturn it, is just a nonstarter given the delicacy of the situation. Which many people are not happy with.


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Erin: I think that there was a frustration in the years leading up to the Arab uprisings of 2011 that, you know, well why isn't the US being pressuring and holding regimes in the region accountable for a repressive behavior, restrictions in general in civil liberties? And I think to your question, in some ways 2011, many people thought could be something different. In other words, there are lots of scholars who think about fiscal crises or revolutionary moments as the only kind of moments you have to do something radical and to have a change in policy. That this is a moment where governments can kind of step back and say, "Maybe we haven't been engaging with the region in the right way. Maybe this is an opportunity and a moment to have a really, a serious readjustment of policy."

Erin: And I, naively, at that time, because I was in Egypt at that moment ... and in some ways, this week and the previous weeks have been a bit bittersweet because this is the eight anniversary of the Arab Spring and I was in Egypt throughout all of it. And at this moment, I remember, because the feeling then was extraordinarily euphoric, and the United States was trying to figure out how it wanted to respond to what was happening. Egypt is an enormously important partner, it's important for our security interests, we have millions and millions of people who are saying, "We do not want this regime in power anymore." A regime that the United States, and other governments as well, supported. So if you're the United States and you're seeing millions of people in the streets saying they want this regime to go, what do you do?

Erin: And this is a very delicate situation. I don't think we'll have the full record for maybe another 30 years, when things have been fully declassified, but from the things that have been written thus far ... a book by David Kirkpatrick which came out a few months ago, that relies on a lot of interviews with diplomats about what was actually going on during this timeframe-

Greg: Did you see Kirkpatrick tried to get into Cairo today and they wouldn't let me in?

Erin: They wouldn't.

Greg: They detained him.

Erin: They put him on a plane back to London. Yeah. This used to be the New York Times's correspondent in Cairo, during the revolution. He's now, I think, based in London. But he wrote a book, whose name I'm forgetting at this moment, kind of looking at this timeframe, the first couple of years of Egypt's uprising, up until the coup. If you ask Egyptians, it's not a coup, but the second revolution.

Greg: Right, the second revolution.

Erin: For some Egyptians.

Greg: Some Egyptians think. We'll get into the details of that.


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Erin: We'll get into that. That brought President Sisi into power as well, too. But this was a moment that many people were really hoping, and I think a great many Egyptians hoping as well, that the United States would do something a bit differently. And, you know, I'll say in fairness that I think if you're the United States government in this situation, you're sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't. And this is why I think the Obama administration was quite careful in the early stages, in January of 2011, because if you come out too strongly in support of the people, then that's an opportunity potentially for the Mubarak regime to say, "The United States is doing this. It's not actually owned by the people."

Erin: And so, you wanna keep the focus on the people, that this is coming from the citizens of the country, and you don't want the footprint of the United States on this. At the same time, many people within the US government wanted to send a signal to the people as well, that we're supportive of you, broadly defined, even if they themselves at that time hadn't figured it out. So, I think the delicacy of all this ... oh, the David Kirkpatrick book, Greg is showing me on Google, is Into the Hands of the Soldiers. He needs to now give me some profits from this book now [crosstalk 00:21:36] our esteemed audience.

Greg: Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East.

Erin: Which has, you know, won him basically being kicked out of Egypt today, as the case may be, too. But again, to your question, this moment of the difficulty of changing directions given the delicacy of the situation. I think there just hasn't been ... I think there just isn't a toleration for risk of any sort, I think. And I think that that's obviously frustrating for people that work on this region, for scholars of the region, and certainly for citizens of the region that might like to see something different.

Greg: So we basically don't want democracy in the Arab world, right? "We" meaning the United States of America, the United States government.

Erin: So, it's interesting you say that, because I was going over old interview notes three days ago from an interview I had with a woman who worked at the Embassy, maybe in 2007. And she was adamant ... you know, at the time, in 2007, even all throughout the 2000s up until ... Egypt during the 1990s and 2000s, people would certainly never say that things in Egypt were amazing and safe and democratic. No one was saying that. But they would say, at the end of the day, Egypt was not perfect, but it's stable.

Erin: And so you hear this word constantly, in English and in Arabic, that Egypt is stable, it's a stable country, and this is, amongst other things, the value of the relationship. Not perfect, but it's stable. And when I was going over these interview notes, this diplomat said ... you know, and she was exasperated, and she said ... there were some expletives along the way with it, but she-

Greg: This is a family podcast.

Erin: This is a family podcast, so I will not say that. But she said, empathically, "This country is not stable. It just has the veneer of stability." And, kind of a comment she made about,


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basically, it would just take a spark to set things off. And that struck me even then, at that point for me, because if you were living in Egypt, and depending on where you were living, you could sense growing tension in the country. That was 2007, I mentioned, and that kind of feeling of things being ... it's hard to articulate it, but just being off or heavy in the city, would increase in the years thereafter.

Erin: And she said, after making that comment about, you know, this country is not stable, despite what people are trying and pitching, hopefully, to audiences around the world, she said, "The US does not want democratic change." And another diplomat who said, quite candidly, "Well, the US wants democracy unless it's with a Muslim government." This is very candid. These are diplomats that are working, that are heavily involved in negotiations at this time. And the rhetoric at this time, this is, again, under the George W. Bush administration, was, "Yes, we want elections. Yes, we want democracy." And Palestinian parliamentary elections were the first sign, in 2006, that well, if the elections brings someone into power that we're not happy with, then we're not okay with democracy.

Greg: Happened in Egypt, too.

Erin: It happened in Egypt, of course, too. Yeah.

Greg: Tell the folks.

Erin: When?

Greg: No, about in the Bush administration, the push on Mubarak to have more open parliamentary elections.

Erin: Yeah, I mean-

Greg: Right? That was, oh ...

Erin: Five?

Greg: Five? Yeah.

Erin: Yeah. I mean, there's more pressure for this. There are some people within the administration saying that maybe we should stop pushing so hard in elections, but maybe we should push on other aspects of opening the political space.

Greg: But I think-

Erin: You saw the ascension of the brotherhood? Is this what you're-

Greg: Right, well, yeah, but I think the listeners need to know that-

Erin: Go for it, yeah.


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Greg: Right? In '05, the Bush administration, which after 9/11, basically said, "What the Arab world needs is more democracy, because democracies don't produce terrorists." But, you know, that's something one can argue. But, you know, people in Italy during the Red Brigades might feel differently. And we've got a monument in Oklahoma City ...

Erin: Right, McVeigh.

Greg: Right? Here in the United States. But, it was theory. Right? You open up these political systems and you let people express their views publicly and contest for elections and they won't blow stuff up. So, the Bush administration, I think, was sincere in that belief.

Erin: Yes, I think that they were sincere, if naïve.

Greg: If naïve, right.

Erin: And I think it's important, because there's a nice link with some of dynamics we're dealing with now, in 2019, in this country in terms of thinking about the value of experts and the value or lack thereof of expertise.

Greg: Let me go back-

Erin: Yeah, oh sure. 2005.

Greg: Just so people can ... right. So, they did push Mubarak, and he had a ... you tell me if I'm wrong. He had a relatively more open parliamentary election in which the Muslim Brotherhood got 20% of the seats.

Erin: Running as independents.

Greg: Running as independents. They couldn't run as a party, but everybody knew who the Brotherhood counts are. And then, in '06, if I recall right, the Palestinian parliamentary elections, won by Hamas, which is the Muslim Brotherhood in the Palestinian territories. Well, these two election results, I think, dampened the enthusiasm of people in the Bush administration, for democracy in the Arab world.

Erin: So, in 2005, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a speech at the American University of Cairo, again, with grand rhetoric, saying that, again, the US ... and again, it was a recognition. This is post-9/11 and, as Greg mentioned, for the first time, democracy enters into the national security strategy. It was always there in the backdrop, so to speak, of policy. But for the first time after 9/11, this connection that, you know, in places where there's lack of opportunity, there isn't democracy, then this fosters conditions for extremism, maybe terrorism, etc.

Erin: And so, this is where the kind of renewed push for things came. So Condoleezza Rice comes to Cairo and she makes this big speech saying, "Look, in the past, we supported wholeheartedly authoritarian governments, and we shouldn't have done that


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necessarily," and you know, "We are here for democracy, open for the people," etc., etc. That was 2005, I think. Late 2005. But, as Greg mentioned-

Greg: Right when she becomes Secretary of State.

Erin: Exactly.

Greg: Right.

Erin: Exactly. And then, again, you have the elections in Egypt and also in Palestine, and things change very quickly. And so what happens, after 2006, immediately the rhetoric is brought down and Arabs in the region see this, they hear this, they know this. In other words, in 2004, if you were telling Egyptians that the US at this time really, really cares about democracy. You know, how do you think about ... and for Americans that are engaged, whether from the government side or working with NGOs, etc. How do you convince people of your efforts? That, "No, no, this time we really mean it. This time we're really serious about it." Even if it delivers outcomes that maybe don't necessarily align with where the US would ideally maybe want the country to be.

Erin: And so after 2006, you ... again, it was recognition for many. I'll just say from the Egyptian context, when I was there, that Egyptians were like, "Well, see, we told you so. You didn't really care about this. Governments only care about it when it fits their strategic imperatives."

Greg: And then we do it again. Right? With President Obama.

Erin: Which state are thinking about?

Greg: Well, President Obama going to Cairo and basically giving a speech somewhat similar to Condoleezza Rice's speech. Re-engagement with the Muslim world after this trauma of Iraq war, and you know, we want human rights, we want all these things.

Erin: And meant to reset the Bush era. Yeah.

Greg: And then 2011 happens. And while the administration, you know ... those days in Tahrir Square, one can argue about how the administration's position evolved in the ... what would we say, like 20 days, 21 days?

Erin: Before Mubarak's resignation?

Greg: Yeah, from January 25th to Mubarak's resignation.

Erin: In February, yeah.

Greg: Afterwards, the United States was supportive of an electoral process that brought to power a Muslim Brotherhood president and an Islamist-dominated Parliament. When the Islamist-dominated Parliament was kicked out, we were, "Eh, okay, maybe that's not


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the best thing." And then when President Morsi is overthrown in a military coup, we refuse to call it a military coup, because if we called it a military coup, we'd have to cut off aid.

Erin: The law says that we have to cut off aid [crosstalk 00:30:11]

Greg: Legally obliged to cut off aid. So we never called it a military coup, even though it was a textbook military coup. So, I think-

Erin: There's a lot of rhetorical dancing that happens all over the place during this time-

Greg: I think in their own ways, both George W. Bush after 9/11 and Barack Obama were both committed to the idea of democracy as an American value that we wanna encourage in the Middle East. And when they saw it, they moved away quickly.

Erin: Yeah. I think, again, just to kind of circle back to Justin, what you had said about policy directions and whatnot, you can want something, but again, whether you have ... you know, there's the political will in Washington to have patience with that and to know that if you're trying to challenge 30-plus years of authoritarian rule, that's ... turning that around toward some idealized version of democracy is going to take a long time and is going to be messy. And I think anyone who reads the news would know that. Certainly scholars know that.

Erin: But there's a lot of discussion now. I mentioned the eight year anniversary of the Arab uprisings. Well, the Arab Spring failed. It's the Arab winter in all sorts of terrible, seasonal [crosstalk 00:31:29]

Greg: The Winter of Arab Discontent.

Erin: I tell my students-

Greg: I tried to get that to be the name, right?

Erin: That's a terrible name.

Greg: The Winter of Arab Discontent.

Erin: That's an awful term. I'm sorry, Greg.

Greg: Well, first off, it happened in-

Erin: You're my boss, but that's a terrible [crosstalk 00:31:46]

Greg: First off, it happened in the winter. Right? January, February, March-

Erin: But an Egyptian winter is kind of warm-


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Greg: Yeah, that's true. And it certainly was an expression of discontent.

Erin: Sure.

Justin: You tried.

Greg: Look, I published that in a piece in 2012.

Erin: Was that the foreign affairs piece?

Greg: No, it was something I did for a Think Tank in Washington. And it never caught on. This Arab Spring thing caught on.

Erin: The seasonal stuff, we can bicker about what we wanna call it. The Arab uprisings, the Arab revolutions, Arab [crosstalk 00:32:24]

Greg: I think Arab uprisings is becoming the-

Erin: This is my favorite. I think it's a little bit more accurate. But, regardless, I think that maybe six months into the uprisings, not just Egypt but throughout the Arab world, or even a year after, you have pundits and not so many scholars, more pundits, kind of declaring them to be dead. Well, everyone said this was gonna be such a good idea and look where it got us. I'm like, well, if you are a scholar of social movements or revolution broadly defined, you know that revolutions take a long time. We can reference our own revolution, we can talk about the French Revolution, what was happening in Europe in 1848. These things take a long time.

Erin: And so, I still think it's a bit short-sighted to declare what's been happening to be dead. I think it's a process.

Greg: But it's not good.

Erin: Oh, it's pretty terrible. I'm not gonna put glitter on the situation.

Greg: Right? Syria, Yemen, Libya. Not good.

Erin: No. Profoundly bad. Profoundly bad. I was in Egypt for a couple of weeks over our winter break here and I was struck by ... I spend a lot of my time these days for work in North Africa, but predominantly Morocco and Egypt these days. And this last trip to Egypt was really more depressing than the previous trips. And it keeps getting a little bit darker. And I think that when you talk with people, and these are friends and colleagues of mine who were very much politically engaged, activists that were very much involved with what was happening in the period up to the uprising in 2011 and throughout the messiest parts of it in Egypt. That things are so bad in Egypt these days, and the environment is so restrictive, that there's a deep sense of, in some cases, PTSD, from people who've been through a lot. And in some ways, today, the statistics vary, but,


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most people I think agree that the current situation in Egypt, politically, is more repressive than it was under the Mubarak regime.

Greg: I think that's the unanimous sentiment of people who look at Egypt.

Erin: The numbers are terrible in terms of thinking about political prisoners, despite what the government might say. And it's-

Greg: Political deaths.

Erin: Yeah. And if you think about where Egypt was in the imagination of many people around the world, and that first romantic idea of what was happening, and the focus on the power of the people to change things. People in Egypt, for years leading up to 2011, even as the situation economically, politically, became worse, would say, "No matter how hard it gets, the Egyptians are not a revolutionary people." Which is a crappy thing to say, to be sure.

Erin: And I myself probably said it at one point, even in like 2009, 2010, when things really were getting bad. Where you would just wonder, how, especially ... the majority of Egyptians are struggling. There are 100 million, I think at last count-

Greg: Already 100 million.

Erin: Yeah.

Greg: Wow. I would've guessed 85 million. A hundred million Egyptians.

Erin: I mean, 85 was a while ago.

Greg: I oughta keep up.

Erin: Yeah. I remember feeling in 2009, 2010, and this is after a couple of protest movements by a group called the April 6 Movement, we had increasing protest by labor against some of the economic reforms that were going and the forms of privatization and crony capitalism that were going on in the mid-2000s. And you could feel the situation in 2009 and 2010, and I remember saying to some of my friends, "What's the breaking point?" Because it feels terrible, you can sense how stressful life is for people here. And this is why, amongst other things, between Tunisia and Egypt, why it was such a surprise that this finally happened.

Erin: And so now, in 2019, those problems haven't gone away. The economic situation, the economic grievances, that shaped ... they weren't the sole reason for the protests that we saw in the Arab world, but they were an important part of it. The sources of those grievances have not gone away. And I think the situation for governments in Tunisia has been a challenge. How do you deal with the economic situation? How do you keep people engaged? There are still waves of small-level protest throughout the Arab world that don't get coverage, but they're happening in Morocco, they're happening in


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Tunisia. In Egypt you can't protest now, but there are people that are enormously unhappy.

Erin: So, it's a situation I think, when people ask about, well, are things really dead? As Greg said, things are terrible, but I still try and keep a long view of thinking that there's still hope, maybe, ahead.

Greg: So, before we open up to the audience, who's been patient, let's bring it back to America and democracy aid. You and I, I think agree on a lot of the analyticals here, but probably disagree on whether the United States should promote democracy in this part of the world. So, given this track record, do you think that there's still some usefulness in terms of actual democracy promotion to these kinds of small-bore projects that the United States funds in places like Morocco and Egypt, when, at the top level, when the issue of democracy actually comes across the radar screen of presidents and secretaries of state and national security advisors, they're actually very nervous about it.

Greg: So, there's a tension there. Is there any effectiveness, if you want to see a more democratic Middle East, in doing these small-bore things?

Erin: Yeah, I think that's a great point. There's a tension in this in general, whether in the scholarly literature that tries to think about and talk about things, of, is it working or not? Or in thinking about the utility of, well, if we know we have these contradictions, that the United States is giving an enormous amount of money for military assistance in Egypt, what is the effect of $20000 here for a democracy project?

Erin: The answer to that, as with everything, is complicated. Just as an example, if you're a civil society organization, let's say in Tunisia or Morocco, and you're benefiting from a grant that is helping you to organize and educate people in your community, and you're getting a lot of positive responses, is that effective? Yeah, it's effective. Is it helping you to do your work and to develop? Yes. How does it all connect? That's the trickier bit. I will say that the way that the United States in general has talked about democracy in the region, I think has always been problematic. There are a lot of more critical scholars of development and democracy aid that say, "The way the United States and a couple other donor governments even conceptualize democracy needs some work."

Erin: So, just as an example, years ago, an Egyptian woman that I spoke with who was not supportive of US foreign policy in the region, and thus not supportive of the US even engaging in democracy promotion said, "Look, well, first of all, why is the US insisting on, let's say, particular kinds of electoral assistance? Why isn't the United States focusing more on education or health?" And her argument was basically that, well, we can make an argument and say that support for education and health is the foundation of a healthy democracy. And so, if you have a struggle with illiteracy in Egypt, let's say, well, then focusing on teaching people to read is an important skill, right? In thinking about foundational aspects of it.

Erin: But she also raised something important, which is, again, if the civil society that you think should be the recipient of your foreign aid, or democracy aid in this case, doesn't


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want to be associated with it for foreign policy reasons, as is the case, are there other avenues and ways of supporting that? And so some scholars say, "Look, if the US has an image problem," as it does, to be sure, "then maybe it makes more sense for the US to support more multilateral efforts towards democracy." So, helping to support other European organizations through international organizations, etc. To acknowledge that it can't be maybe a straight actor in this situation.

Erin: Yeah, I think that that's one component and aspect of it. I think that there's a great reticence to re-haul even our way of thinking and our programming on these issues in general. But I think that that's one important aspect as well to think about. That the US can want to support, let's say, civil society in Egypt, but if some members of civil society think that that aid or accepting the aid is going to cause them problems, and they don't want to be associated with it, well you have to, again ... these are kind of the ethical issues even, of aid, that I'm really interested, too. Of like, well, you want to do good things, but if doing this particular kind of aid causes more disruptions to civil society, and causes civil society in a country to turn against each other, maybe this isn't the best route or the best strategy to doing that, too.

Erin: So I think a lot of rethinking needs to be done, but in some ways, I think that there's not bureaucratically a lot of support for that right now. And that's disappointing in terms of thinking about opportunities that really were, I think, available in 2011 to do something different.

Greg: Right. Anybody have any questions? Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yes, I have a question. So, regarding that aid program for the democracy, as far as I know, there are many theories regarding the [inaudible 00:42:02] of supporting democracy. And because a relationship between economic development and democracy is also [inaudible 00:42:11] so in terms of the program, I want to know what kind of theoretical framework could be supporting that program?

Speaker 4: And that was my first question, but as I'm hearing the discussion there ... so actually, the targeting of the program itself is very ... sometimes the United States want that country or that area to be democratic but sometimes they're not. And also there are a lot of factors surrounding the target itself. The target itself is changing, I mean, being surrounded and being impacted by the other factors, but then the program itself is actually targeting the purpose of that program. The purpose being full of [inaudible 00:42:54]. So then, what's going on there? The program. That's [crosstalk 00:43:02]

Greg: Right. So I think there's probably two issues in here. One is the general idea of the relationship of economic development to democracy, right? The very early stuff, back in the 60s, that says, unless you get to a certain per capita income, you're not gonna be democratic. And then, is the target the top of regime? Is it national elections? Or is the target developing democratic ethos in civil society that one hopes is gonna filter up and out?


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Erin: Yeah, I think this is a great question. I would say that first of all, there are really thoughtful people within USAID, whether their voices get heard out. And policy is a different story altogether.

Erin: But I'll tell you that in the early 1990s, when people were first putting together the first proper democracy programs throughout the world, when they were thinking about, "Okay, well where do we start from? What does a template for a democracy program look like?" They were looking at the work that people in our tribe do. So, they were looking at scholars of democratization. And the assumptions that were really popular then, which was, and I guess in some ways still is, dominating conversation unfortunately, which is that support for economic reform will eventually give rise to political liberalization and maybe democracy.

Greg: It worked in China, right? So we can, you know-

Erin: Right. Exactly. We can go full speed ahead on that, too. So, initially, that was, again, if we're being fair, it was kind of a learning progress. So they began with that. And that made sense in some ways in a place like Egypt, because if you were to talk with President Mubarak and the Egyptian government in the 1990s and say, "Well, we wanna support a democracy program." They may not tell you to go to hell implicitly, but they're not gonna talk with you if you're using that word and feeling like they're bullied.

Erin: So the way that diplomats even use ... they found that if they pitch things in terms of economic reform, that was the way that they got the audience that they needed to even have a foothold from which to even talk about programs in the region.

Greg: And a lot of Americans believed that.

Erin: And they still do. And I think actually whether we're talking about events in the Middle East or even thinking about politics in this country, these are moments where it's kind of, well, maybe we need to go back and revisit those assumptions. Maybe things, not shockingly, are more complicated than we might think they are. We do have good scholarship that does show a connection between that, but in an authoritarian regime, we also know that to be an authoritarian regime and to survive, you're pretty crafty, right?

Erin: And so, if you're forced to do some tenants of economic reform like privatization, because you have to to get international support, etc., you're going to engineer it so that you're staying in power, right? So, in the academic literature, it assumes that authoritarian regimes are invested in the mechanisms by which economic reform gives to democratization. And we know that that's fundamentally not true. And that's really important for people to know.

Justin: This makes me think of-

Greg: Or, you want your friends to get rich.


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Erin: Ideally, too, yeah.

Greg: That's basically-

Erin: So you can stay in power and they'll support you.

Greg: That's basically the ...

Justin: One of the things that strikes me about this conversation, just as not knowing the literature, is the focus on elections. On the one hand, if you made me sit around and talk about democracy, and I didn't know history from the past 10 years, I would've thought, "Yes. Elections. That would be the thing we need to be shooting for. Makes good sense." And then, you kind of watch it play out in almost joke form in lots of places, right? Where we have "elections" in all kinds of places that aren't really free and fair elections. But "Hey, look, we got-" you know, Putin gets to say this, right? "We have elections."

Greg: Or, we have elections in a place like Iraq which actually are real, right? People do vote and people go to parliament and governmental decisions are based upon the balance of power in parliament. But, what was the cost to achieve that? Right?

Greg: Time for one more maybe?

Justin: Yeah.

Speaker 5: I wonder, what do you think about US withdraw reform from Afghanistan and Syria? And what will be the destiny of foreign [inaudible 00:47:09] in this country as well?

Erin: An easy question.

Justin: So, the question was, thoughts about withdrawal from both Syria and Afghanistan and whether intervention is good and when is it good to leave? I think.

Erin: To be honest, I don't know. I think that, again, to kind of circle back to the phrase, "It's complicated," it's complicated. I'm not a scholar of current Afghan politics, so I'll put that on the table and also more directly, also Syrian politics. But, I think that the notion of withdrawal is simplistic and naïve and I think it's disastrous. As complicated as Afghanistan has been, I think that withdrawing complicates the US's situation, complicates the situation for many Afghans as well, too.

Erin: Yeah, to be honest, I don't know. I think that this is an area like the ... a lot of people and scholars, you can't say with certainty where any of these actions are going to lead. But from my perspective, I think a complete withdrawal is really problematic.

Greg: So on March 21st, Ryan Crocker, former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, former Dean of the Bush School, will be back on campus giving a talk on US policy in Afghanistan. And Ryan has very strong opinions on the issue of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. I feel a little different than Erin does. I think 17 years in Afghanistan has been an awfully long


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time. I'm not really sure what six more years will do to change the situation. I don't think that the United States went into Afghanistan to democratize it. It would've been nice if we could've provided stable governance in Afghanistan, but we didn't want to invest either the time or the manpower, the soldiers, to do that.

Greg: Syria is a very different story. We didn't really intervene in Syria except in the most small-bore way, right? There was never more than a few thousand American troops in Syria at any one time. With a very specific, anti-ISIS mission. Our policy was Assad must go, and the Syrian people must have a free choice, but the United States never invested really any substantial resources in that.

Greg: And then there's Libya, where we did invest substantial resources in helping to bring down the Gaddafi regime. And then we said, "Okay, good luck, guys." Right? So American policymakers who are getting tired of the Middle East will say to you, "We get criticized no matter what we do. We go into Iraq and Afghanistan, we stay a long time, and people criticize us and we don't get very good results. We go into Libya, we don't stay a long time, we don't get very good results, and people criticize us. We don't go into Syria basically at all, and there's no good results, and people criticize us."

Greg: Erin talked about people in Egypt getting fed up, and you can kinda tell leading up to 2011 ... I think you can kind of tell that people in Washington are getting fed up with the Middle East. And it's no accident, I think, that in the last three presidential elections, the candidate who was more dovish on the Middle East won the election. Including Donald Trump, who I think was more dovish than Hillary Clinton. Criticized the wars, we gotta get out, right? And so I think that there's a certain Middle East fatigue that's occupying a lot of American policymakers.

Justin: I'm gonna say, we'll have another talk with a former Bush School student who currently is in Afghanistan working with the Afghanistan government. And she has strong opinions about the peace deal that's being negotiated currently with the US government and with the Taliban, and concerns about the Afghan elected government not playing a significant role. So you will get to hear some conversations about that coming up.

Justin: I would just echo that things are complicated. And not only is it complicated, but not my area of expertise. But I can say just, it is hard to watch when you do have friends in these places and you do see some of the concerns. For example, in Afghanistan, with concerns about women's rights as powers may be turned back over to the Taliban, the women there that have stepped up and taken leadership roles and engaged in education efforts, really that are left in limbo when the negotiation is with an entity that was part of the reason we went into Afghanistan to begin with.

Greg: I don't think that was a reason we went into Afghanistan, but okay.

Erin: That wasn't the reason, but that was an important part that came out of that, too. And I think that even in the early 90s, before there was a will to go into Afghanistan, people were paying attention to what was happening under the Taliban. There was a ... I can't remember the name of the Afghan women's group who was, again, this was the early


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days of the internet, who were sending out videos of women getting stoned and all sorts of other terrible things. So people were aware of it then, and then post-9/11 of course, there's reason and rationale to go in.

Erin: I just worry, you know, we think about withdrawing because, to be sure, people are right to be fatigued, I think. Especially for people who have served there. Not just served there once but many times, in some cases. But what are the consequences of a full withdrawal, right? Would you be in the same place 10, 15 years from now?

Erin: I also think it just underscores, too, the problems that I think people in Washington have communicating what the US is doing in other parts of the world, especially in the Middle East. If this about security, how are these actions a part of US security interests? How is this a part of defending US security? And I think that, in general, whether we're talking about democracy or military efforts overseas, that a better job could be done in terms of explaining to the public in this country the rationale and the logic of what's going on.

Justin: So maybe what we need is a clear US grand strategy?

Greg: There's that-

Justin: There's that word again.

Greg: "Grand strategy."

Erin: That's so tempting.

Justin: Brought it back in.

Greg: But what does that mean?

Erin: What does that mean?

Greg: And on that note ... I think we have to thank our audience.

Erin: Thank you so much.

Greg: I think we have to thank our hosts at Downtown on Court here in Bryan, Texas.

Justin: And to our guests.

Greg: And to our guest-

Erin: Thank you for having me, yeah.

Greg: ... Professor Erin Snider.

Erin: Thank you for having me.


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Justin: And we will be bringing you more episodes soon. Thank you.

Erin: Thank you.


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