(POMED's full notes continue below, or view them as a pdf.) Kenneth Pollack opened by explaining the purpose of the presentation, saying, “One of the things that we have been striving to do at Brookings is to help bridge the gap between the Arab and Muslim world and the United States of America.” To build an understanding of developments in the Middle East, the Brookings Institution has focused a great ...

The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings released the 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll today and held an event (full notes forthcoming from POMED) marking the publication of the results. The poll-- conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the UAE from June 28-July 20 of this year, in conjunction with Zogby International -- recorded a striking drop in optimism among Arabs toward American policy ...

Lebanese MP Fouad Siniora, head of the Future Movement parliamentary bloc, chaired the first of a series of planned meetings yesterday in an effort to reach a unified stance among the parliamentary majority regarding the draft law to grant Palestinian refugees greater rights and improve their humanitarian situation. March 14 Secretariat Coordinator Fares Souaid, representatives from the Lebanese Forces, and several members of the Future Movement, as ...

A recent study carried out by the National Center for Social and Criminal Research reports that those in Egypt's socio-economic elite as well as its extreme poor do not have a strong sense of citizenship, due to a number of factors including the lack of democracy, political and civil rights, and basic freedoms in Egypt; the state media's failure to inculcate a sense of national citizenship; the absence of "civic ...

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) held a press conference yesterday to announce the completion of a 578-page report on torture, detention, and human rights abuse in Egypt. According to the annual report, in 2009, 12 people were tortured to death by Egyptian police; 63 cases of torture in detention occurred; 530 cases of mistreatment of prisoners were recorded; 113 people were detained arbitrarily; 20 “disappearances” occurred; the ...

In a piece in Foreign Policy, Freedom House highlights the twenty nations it has identified as the "least free" in its 2010 Freedom in the World report. Six nations and territories in the Greater Middle East and North Africa (GMENA) are featured in the piece: Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara.Freedom House offers harsh criticism of the human rights and democracy records of the regimes in ...

Egypt received the worst ranking among Arab states on the World Justice Project's (WJP) 2010 rule-of-law index, announced at a MENA conference on the rule of law held by the organization in Morocco over the weekend. Egypt received low scores in a number of categories, including government accountability and security and stability. The report also ranked Egypt the lowest among Arab states on government transparency, legal competence, official corruption, ...

One month ago, POMED released its annual report on the Obama administration's FY 2011 federal budget request for democracy, governance, and human rights in the Middle East. Today, as part of our efforts to expand access to POMED's publications, we held an event in Cairo to launch an Arabic version of the report.  The full Arabic report is now available on our website to download as a pdf.

The Project on Middle East Democracy and the Heinrich Böll Foundation co-hosted an event on Capitol Hill to mark the release of a new publication, The Federal Budget and Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2011: Democracy, Governance, and Human Rights in the Middle East. What are the most significant changes in these portions of the budget request, as compared with the appropriations made in previous years? How does the budget impact ...

Earlier today, Freedom House officially released the latest edition of "Countries at a Crossroads," a report which assesses democratic governance and "provides a clear diagnosis of the factors that separate stronger performers from those that continue to stagnate or backslide in ways that threaten essential rights and freedoms." As the report's managing editor, Jake Dizard, explains at FP's Middle East Channel, "the Middle Eastern states included in the ...

In its two most recent offerings, the Arab Reform Bulletin assesses the political landscape in both Algeria and Kuwait. Journalist Mahmoud Belhimer, troubled by the failure of recent government initiatives to alleviate Algeria's ongoing economic turmoil and build a higher level of democratic pluralism, wonders how a forthcoming generational shift in political leadership might affect Algeria's democratic trajectory. Yet regardless of who succeeds President Bouteflika, Belhimer contends that "the next president will not succeed ...

The National Democratic Institute recently released its "Final Report on the Lebanese Parliamentary Election" , which finds that although the 2009 contest was "fundamentally peaceful and well-administered," a combination of political deals and a unique electoral system "meant that the outcome was predetermined in all but a few of the most contested regions." To improve Lebanon's electoral processes and strengthen its vulnerable democratic institutions, NDI offers a set of sixteen general recommendations ...

On Thursday, the State Department released its 2009 Human Rights Report which explores trends and developments in 194 countries, and provides a thorough accounting of "a year in which ethnic, racial, and religious tensions led to violent conflicts and serious human rights violations and fueled or exacerbated more than 30 wars or internal armed conflicts." 2009 was also a landmark year for the proliferation of information and connection technology, which, while serving as a ...

As thousands of soldiers, police officers, and security officials went to polls today for early voting, three separate attacks killed at least twelve people at voting stations in Baghdad. This comes after a larger attack on Wednesday that killed nearly three dozen. Still, despite the fear in some circles that the recent uptick in violence might delay the U.S. withdrawal, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell assured reporters that the president's timeline remains unchanged, saying that "it would take an extraordinarily dire ...

Less than one day after releasing six journalists and activists on bail, Iranian officials banned two major opposition newspapers, including the country's largest reformist publication, Etemad, which had been one of the few opposition journals to withstand the government crackdown after the June 2009 election. According to Etemad's editor-in-chief, the Iranian Ministry of Culture accused the publication of violating media laws that, among other things, prohibit "insulting Islam libel against authorities and government institutions."Mohamed Abdel Dayem of the Committee to ...

After much anticipation, a new website called Meedan has been officially launched granting English and Arabic speakers the opportunity to bypass typical language constraints when reading stories, posting comments and engaging in conversation about issues, events and topics of interest. In short, the site allows English readers to read news articles originally published in Arabic, and vice versa.Ed Bice, Meedan's co-founder and chief executive, laments in the Guardian that there is a "tremendous amount of media ...

After two years as a monthly publication, the Arab Reform Bulletin, a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has altered its format and will now issue one or two articles per week. Its two most recent releases focus on the Muslim Brotherhood's newly elected leadership and how Iraq's forthcoming elections have exposed gaps in U.S. policy. In trying to analyze the significance of a reconfigured Brotherhood, Husam Tammam writes ...

In response to Le Journal's shutdown as well as the recent arrest of Moroccan blogger Boubaker Al-Yadib, Freedom House released a statement strongly denouncing the government's "use of exorbitant fines and libel cases to silence Morocco’s critics." According to Freedom House advocacy directory Paula Schriefer, Al-Yadib's arrest and subsequent six-month sentence was in response to his role in organizing a week-long blogging strike to protest restrictions on free expression. Courtney ...

The Project on Middle East Democracy hosted an event to analyze President Obama’s first year in office and present ideas for a more substantive engagement in democracy promotion moving forward. In his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama declared, "To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect." This vision of a "new way forward" became a theme of ...

The new issue of the Arab Reform Bulletin, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, highlights ongoing political battles in Palestine, Jordan, Libya, and Egypt. Helga Baumgarten, professor of political science at Birzeit University in Palestine, uses her column to explore the question, "Who will be Arafat's true successor?" The increasingly complex nature of the Palestinian political infrastructure has thrown a wrench into the traditional power equation which presumed, "whoever ...