The Arab Human Development Report, a publication from the UNDP that consistently draws commentary from anyone and everyone interested in Middle East politics, typically inspires a lot of positive response from the development community. For one, members of the Arab intelligentsia collaborate to write it, so it derives some credibility from that. Second, it doesn’t spare Arab governments in its assessments of the problems the region now faces. Outside this community, though, what impact does the report really have? Moataz Abdel Fattah points out in the Arab Reform Bulletin this month that the AHDR actually reaches a rather limited audience. The intellectuals who author it are marked as members of opposition movements in their respective countries, so their criticisms of the government suggest a specific political agenda rather than, or at least in addition to, rigorous objectivity. He also notes that the warm reception of the report in Western [i.e. American] political circles does nothing to enhance the authority of the report in certain Arab communities, political, intellectual and others.

His points are well made. However, it seems that the most obvious point to be made is that the report is really long (the 2009 report, published in July, is 288 pages in English) and jargon-laden. Is it perhaps unrealistic to expect that a report clearly oriented toward a very specific audience would have anything but a limited impact?

… to teach people how to behave on the train. The sheer number of people who want to use the Metro, combined with the newness of the project, has meant chaos for the system.

FP’s Paul Collier writes a Pro and Con list as if he were an authoritarian leader (Egypt’s Mubarak was his inspiration). He evaluates the different avenues available to dictators whose power is subject to upheaval. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Option 1: Turn over a new leaf and embrace good government

Pros: This is probably what most people want. I might start feeling better about myself, and I might even leave a legacy my children could be proud of.

Cons: I haven’t much idea how to do it. The skills I have developed over the years are quite different—essentially, retaining power through shuffling a huge number of people around a patronage trough. My God, I might have to read those damned donor reports. And even if I worked out what needed to change, the civil service wouldn’t be up to implementing it. After all, I’ve spent years making sure that anyone who is exceptional or even honest is squeezed out; honest people cannot easily be controlled.

Worse still, reform might be dangerous. My “friends,” the parasitic sycophants with whom I have surrounded myself, might not put up with it: They might decide to replace me in a palace coup. They would probably dress it up to the outside world as “reform”!

But suppose I did it. Suppose I actually delivered good government. Would I get reelected? I start to think about all those rich-country political leaders who over the years have met me, often lecturing me on the need for good governance. I do a rough tally: They seemed to win their own elections only about 45 percent of the time.

So, even if I pull it off, I’m still more than likely to lose power. Best to cheat. But how?

It’s a bit silly, but points out the intense skepticism with which “elections” have come to be regarded in contexts where democracy is modified by words like “young” “emerging” or even “un”. As Collier remarks at the end of this piece, only the truly paranoid resist holding elections, because there are so many possible ways to manipulate the results. I found this part above, though, especially clever, because it points out how entrenched the behaviors of authoritarian governments are. Collier puts it in Mubarak’s voice to be funny, but the authoritarian tradition in Egypt didn’t start with Mubarak and in all likelihood will not end with him. The institution itself may be site of entrenchment here, not the personality of this man:

President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak

Haed al Ghwell, professor at the Dubai School of Government, argues that the financial crisis should force Dubai toward greater transparency in governance and operations, ultimately situating it for greater success in the future. If the government of the cosmopolitan emirate chooses to heighten its secrecy and under-the-table atmosphere as a response to the tough times, then he would presumably predict a sluggish and incomplete recovery; alternatively, seizing this opportunity to implement a better governance system could end up a boon for Dubai.

Toby Jones, history professor at Rutgers and expert on Saudi Arabia, assesses King Abdullah’s cabinet shakeup of last week in Foreign Policy. Jones argues that the King’s sacking of the head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice - i.e. the morality police, or mutawa’een - and his appointment of a woman, Noura al Fayez, as deputy minister for girls’ education should be understood not as expressing any urgent or radical desire for reform, but as an effort on his part to consolidate central power with the monarchy.

Maybe. It would certainly be a cold day in hell if the Saudi monarch took steps that he thought would actually erode his power in a significant way. What interests me about Jones’ column is not his argument that these steps are not transformative. I am interested in the idea that, since these steps are not transformative and constitute only an incremental shift toward curbing the rabid religiosity that restricts life in the Kingdom and incorporating women into the political system, that they should not be called reform. What, then, should we call them? Could it be reform of a non-representative cabinet? Certainly it constitutes a reform of the gender-discriminatory trend of not having women in government. I can understand how it could be understood as a failure with respect to reforming the undemocratic nature of the Kingdom’s government - having a King, after all, is the very essence of undemocratic - but is Jones then seriously adopting as his ideal the toppling of the Saudi monarchy? That seems a somewhat lofty standard by which to evaluate governance there.

I would be hesitant to adopt that sort of attitude. Without making any value judgments, I would say that, given that separation of religious institutions and state institutions and equal (or at least ostensibly equal) opportunities for participation in government regardless of gender are both meaningful elements of liberal democracy as the United States defines it, the idea that a monarch sees each of those paths as helpful in consolidating his power means that U.S. policy has had an impact. If the King thinks that enfranchising women is beginning to carry weight, and disenfranchising the religious establishment, however incrementally, is less risky, then perhaps U.S. foreign policy is actually making progress toward achieving its goals. (Whether those goals are intelligent or practical is a question for another day).

Jones’ complaint, it seems, is not that the King’s actions do not constitute change, but that the change they represent is not radical. That seems rather obvious. The fundamentally undemocratic monarchy has not been weakened by these changes. But it’s possible that the strategies of the monarchy have fallen more closely in line with the ideals of Western liberalism. Does that not constitute a radical change?

We can be sure that more information will come to light over time, but as of now we know that Nouri al Maliki's government is pushing out those employees in the government's ministries charged with overseeing the bureaucracy and keeping it transparent. The forcings-out (firings, retirements, etc) were not publicly announced but have recently come to light. Iraqi officials confirmed the dismissals yesterday; between 7 and 9 such employees have been dismissed. Of course, different sources attribute different degrees of political motivation to the situation. It doesn't require much reflection to see why dismissing accountability officers en masse suggests that you might have something to hide; on the other hand, the posts were created in response to American pressure, and several of these appointments were made under and by L. Paul Bremer's administration in 2004. (I haven't yet found information regarding whether there was any overlap between Bremer's appointees and the dismissed officials). I think there's something fundamentally different about dismissing an anticorruption officer from a post that has been in place in a sovereign government for years and dismissing an anticorruption officer from a post created and filled by a government widely considered an occupying force. Does that mean Maliki's/his government's dismissal of anticorruption officials isn't shady? Of course not. But it significantly complicates the issue.

… the female ones, anyway, and of course they are in favor. Iraq's Parliament right now is 25.5% female - the US House is 16.8% female, and the Senate 16%. Since the women as a group form a big enough bloc to disrupt the body's work if they make a collective decision to do so, they were able to protest the speaker, Mahmoud al Mashhadani's, comments that women cannot lead because concerns that their husbands will take second wives distract them by boycotting the following days’ legislative session.

I’m someone who finds comparisons helpful, but in this case, I think it's important to recognize the importance of Iraqi women's independent political power without comments about how much more sexist the Middle East is than other parts of the world. Iraq needs individuals of all genders, ages, classes, religions, sects and regions to invest in the political system, and the fact that these women have chosen to do so in this case, despite the fact that the enviroment is clearly inhospitable to them, is commendable.

Rami Khouri at the Daily Star enumerates the reasons why Arab countries should be concerned about the downturn.

William Hybl, Chairman of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, answers FAQs about Getting the People Part Right: A Report on the Human Resources Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy. (This last link downloads the PDF). The report calls for, essentially, a reconfiguration of the way that the Foreign Service thinks about public diplomacy, with the fundamental message that we should treat it as much more important than we now do. Here are some standouts from the report:

On job descriptions:
Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, what struck the Commission was this basic fact: with the possible exception of a small number of "American Presence Post" (APP) officers, there is virtually no one in the State Department whose primary job it is to directly engage foreign publics on matters salient to U.S. policy.

This is pretty amazing, especially when you contrast it to the advertising culture that we have domestically. How is it that the same country that enjoyed Thank You For Smoking because of its witty and insightful cultural commentary has no one selling our programs to the (probably sometimes hostile) foreign publics that we are trying to work with?
On the future of the Commission:
I think the three top priorities of the Commission would be: 1) beefing up our PD training and, in particular, adding a multi-month intensive long-term training course that focuses on substantive communication; 2) revising the EER [employee evaluation] form and work requirement statements, as we have described, so that they are better aligned with the Secretary's vision of PD outreach, which they are not at present; and 3) taking a fresh, and honest, look at the PD area office structure to determine if real value is being added , and then going where the answers take us, rather than viewing the matter through the prism of parochial bureaucratic interests or simply continuing to do what we've been doing "because that's how we've always done it."

…
In terms of longer-term projects, we have three main priorities: 1) we want to play a significant role, in collaboration with the State Department and academia, in developing the substantive PD training course that we are calling for; 2) we are developing a "Country Music Initiative" designed to leverage the power of America's most popular genre of pop music , 60 million daily listeners! , and the desire of the country music industry to get more involved in public diplomacy; and 3) we intend to host a "National Public Diplomacy Summit" in the summer of 2009 that will bring together the country's top minds and produce a proceedings paper that can serve as a useful reference for the new Administration.

Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark has been very vocal about the need for a shift in PD approaches in the next administration; you can read all his PD related posts here. And, if you are in Washington, you can attend a panel on public diplomacy in the next administration tomorrow.

Of course, there are counter-arguments to the assertion that we need better public diplomacy - the obvious one being that, if you have bad policies, then public diplomacy is just putting lipstick on a pig. (Couldn't resist, sorry). I’m inclined to think, though, that even if you do have bad policies (and it seems like, in this argument, the “bad” policies are ones that go against the self-interest of the population where any PD efforts would be targeted) then bothering to sell them to the population at all constitutes at least an acknowledgment that their opinion matters. It seems to me that the current PD model is based on the premise that the opinions of foreign publics for whom American Foreign Service officers seek to design a policy do not matter. It's an undemocratic relationship, based on a model that has a not-subtle whiff of colonialism. Even if you do have policies that are not designed with the best interest of the foreign public in question at heart, then caring enough to sell it to that public constitutes a reconsideration of that relationship wherein public opinion carries weight. That in itself constitutes a big change.

Transparency International recently released their 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index. Iraq is in the bottom (most corrupt) 3 for the second year in a row - #178 of 180 countries. Qatar is the least corrupt Arab country, according to the table, at #28. (The US is #18).

Correction: As the report is titled Corruption Perceptions Index, it is important to distinguish between actual corruption and citizens’ perceptions of corruption. These two measures are not precisely correlated though we can assume some relationship. Furthermore, the Corruption Perception Index measures perceptions of public-sector corruption and understands most citizens to be victims, not perpetrators, of this practice. Apologies for the careless phraseology and thanks to commenter c.sydow for the correction.