ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter critically reviews existing scholarship exploring the interactions between international and transnational actors and domestic political change in the Arab Middle East (AME). In other regions unencumbered by the Arab world’s geo-strategic burdens, some domestic actors have been successful in an indigenous marshaling of the benefits of soft power. Activists in Latin American countries, for instance, tapped into transnational networks advocating specific issues to secure international pressure on their governments, as the norms and networks literature discussed here attests. By contrast, a foray into the scholarship on US civil society and democracy promotion efforts reveals their limitations. Studies of US War on Terror “development” and “nation-building” policies in the AME also reflect the compounded challenges of a US seeking to build institutions broken and to fill voids created by its occupying military, particularly in Iraq. Reading these cumulative US efforts as self-consciously articulated “narratives” of soft power allows us to untangle their relationship to hard power, assessing them in the broader context of how US grand strategy in the War on Terror is “told” to the world. This exercise serves to unpack the knowledge-power nexus as “theory” informs “policy” and vice versa, and it foregrounds the later investigation into how the two kinds of power are obscured by design, conflated in the narrative itself. Notably, “rogue” Syria is missing from the panoply of “democratizable” or “buildable” states in the period before the Arab Spring. The hard power of sanctions and international isolation eliminates the possibility of its inclusion. Thus the chapter examines scholarship bringing together two levels of analysis: domestic (Arab) politics, usually the domain of comparative politics or area studies, and international or external (US) intervention in the AME, a topic customarily reserved for studies of international relations or its subset of US foreign policy analysis. I cast the topics of scholarly discourses probing US policies towards the AME, including its funding of NGOs, strengthening Arab civil society, democracy promotion, development and state-building, into the frame of “soft power.” This is an analytically useful way to explore a myriad of US interventions in the AME in almost all their forms short of, but not unrelated to (and
sometimes directly complementary to), military or hard power. A scrutiny of this scholarship indicates that Arab countries, the most prominent geography of the Islamic world, remain, in the words of Edward Said, as “immensely relevant and yet antipathetically troubled, and problematic” in US expert (and media) discourse (1981, x), as ever. Amid the extensive academic (and policy) debates on what the US has done in the AME, what it should do, and what it can do better, Syria, given its designation as a rogue state, is largely absent. Such an omission is telling and consequential for later US policy. Thus the amalgamation of US soft-hard-smart power in its War on Terror policies in many ways prepares the ground for responses to the Arab Spring. Examining the discourses of both American academics and policymakers is therefore vital to understanding not only the “international politics” of the Arab uprisings but also the trajectory of indigenous political change itself as publics react and respond. Military occupation may predictably spur an insurgency, as in Iraq, but even the use of soft power will engender collective citizen responses. The stage is set for resisting, bottom-up narratives. I begin here with a critical look at the constructivist literature on norms and their “movement” in the international political arena. While most of this literature has examined empirical cases outside the Arab Middle East, cataloguing it provides indispensable background and justification for the relevance of soft power as a way to explore the interactions of domestic, international, and transnational levels of analysis. Intended more as a conceptual and theoretical journey into the US and international factor in the politics of the AME than a temporal exploration, the chapter then moves to discussing the literature on US civil society and democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East. In this context, the initiation of the post-9/11 US War on Terror, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq on the one hand, and reactions to the Arab Spring commencing in 2011 eight years later, have been critical junctures in US policy towards the region. Importantly, the first was a US-engineered set of projects and policies, the second, a series of responses to indigenous mass mobilization. Viewing US interventions and involvement in the Arab world from the perspective of soft power demonstrates the extent to which US “state-building” and “nation-building” projects in the region can be disentangled neither from its use of military force nor from its other non-military democracy and civil society promotion efforts in the Arab Middle East. Such an intertwinement is theoretically interesting but has proved rather challenging at the level of policy and “grand strategy” in particular, as scholars such as Boyle (2008) note. Next, the chapter briefly explores Syria’s designation as “rogue state” and thus its exemption, if not exclusion, from US soft power efforts in the region. This hardline US policy echoes the trend evident in both scholarship and policy to favor top-down, elite interaction and analyses over bottom-up, popular concerns and politicking. Finally, the chapter’s exploration of the scholarly literature on US democracy promotion in the region, particularly in light of the Arab Spring, reflects somewhat of a crisis in political science. With the exception of a few key works, scholars largely failed to predict the mass protests-turned-revolutions sweeping the region. More than four years
into the Arab uprisings, the chapter thus assesses the extent to which their dramatic unfolding has confirmed or challenged earlier scholarship on the US’s role in the AME in an interrogation of the implications of empirical developments on Arab democratization theory in general.
