How Can the Arab World Move Beyond Conflict?

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2018, pp. 56-57

Waging Peace

The Arab Center Washington DC held its annual conference, titled “The Arab World Beyond Conflict,” on Sept. 20 at the JW Marriott in downtown Washington, DC. Speakers diagnosed the underlying causes of instability in the region—namely poverty, unaccountable leadership and the rise of belligerent actors—and offered suggestions for how the region can move beyond these paralyzing realities.

Rami Khouri, professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, argued that poverty is the pre-eminent cause of conflict in the region. Recent data shows that two-thirds of the Arab world lives in poverty or at the edge of poverty, he noted, and 60 million of the region’s 400 million people depend on aid to survive. He cited autocracy and “nonstop foreign military intervention” as two major drivers of this poverty.

The region’s poverty epidemic is largely ignored, Khouri added. “We’re dealing with a rather catastrophic situation, which is almost totally unreported in the Arab press and in the international press,” he warned. Describing the region’s poor as “invisible people,” he lamented: “They don’t matter, they don’t have power, they don’t have agency. No one cares about them.”

Solutions to the poverty crisis, such as improved educational systems and more reliable social safety nets, will only emerge if the Arab people are empowered to engage in governance and civic activities, Khouri emphasized. “If we can only do one thing in the Arab world, it’s to provide freedom of expression,” he stated. “Unless individual citizens and groups of citizens are able to speak their mind freely—to check authority, to hold power accountable, to express their grievances, to provide solutions, and to be involved in constructive mechanisms of development, if we don’t have that fundamental underlying freedom to use our voice and our mind—then almost nothing else will get done.”

Sara Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, reiterated this point. The region’s repressive rulers intentionally avoid political reform in order to ensure that public accountability does not threaten their power and access to wealth, she noted. The bottom line, she emphasized, is that poverty and instability will remain as long as average citizens are denied meaningful say over their government’s actions. “So long as states in the region continue to see power as a zero-sum game versus their own citizenry, it’s difficult to envision stable and just states in this region, at least in the short term,” she said.

Bessma Momani, professor at the University of Waterloo and a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation, emphatically argued that the Arab world’s leaders must reimagine economic development. At the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, she pointed out, the region was experiencing very strong economic growth, with new towers, malls and resorts popping up in major cities. Nevertheless, the region’s citizens rebelled against their governments.

The problem, according to Momani, was that these major land development projects were incorrectly equated with success and prosperity. “These were very much false forms of modernization,” she said. “Every Arab country was growing [economically], but something wasn’t right. What wasn’t right is that it wasn’t inclusive. People did not feel it in their very pockets.”

Instead of investing in massive projects that do little to benefit average citizens, Momani said Arab governments should work to provide the basic services that people crave, such as trash collection, suitable public transportation and community parks. Their citizens would gladly pay taxes and support their governments if they saw a return on their money, she surmised. “People don’t mind paying taxes,” she said. “What they do mind is paying taxes that aren’t being used on them. The challenge is, in the Arab world the taxes go up but the services go down.” This dynamic, she noted, naturally leads to popular unrest and instability.

The Arab world, Momani emphasized, needs “leaders who see growth in terms of their people. They cannot look out from their high-rise towers and see the built environment and think that’s development. If we can’t get that out of their heads, I don’t see a future for the Middle East.”

Ambassador Amatalalim Alsoswa, Yemen’s former minister of human rights and its former ambassador to Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, noted that wars, military spending and corruption also deflect money from projects that benefit the common good. “Imagine if the millions and millions of dollars spent on weapons and bombs in the current conflicts in the Arab world were instead used to build schools, hospitals, bridges and recreational parks,” she said. “Imagine if elites stopped filling their own pockets and did everything in their power to eliminate poverty and discrimination.”

On the geopolitical front, Mehran Kamrava, director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University-Qatar, said the Middle East is being destabilized by a zero-sum contest for control and influence among its powerful countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran. Every major country in the region, he pointed out, has deployed sectarianism as a tool in their quest for power. “They are all guilty in terms of [propagating] a sectarian narrative that supports their regional ambitions, and of course their political projects domestically,” he said.

He also cited as another cause of conflict the rise of “belligerent actors” who have no regard for customary regional diplomatic processes. “What we are seeing is a breakdown of traditional diplomatic norms in the Middle East, which has resulted in a pervasiveness of military actions, resort to military boycotts, blockades—things that some years ago were rare occurrences,” he said. “The Arab order, whatever of it there once was, has completely broken down,” he added, as the region’s actors now play by their own rules.

—Dale Sprusansky