At a moment marked by war, regional fragmentation, and mounting uncertainty across the Middle East, the Program on Arab Reform and Development (ARD) at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a wide-ranging conversation between historian and Middle East scholar Joel Beinin and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Senior Research Scholar and ARD Associate Director.

The discussion explored how the region’s current crises fit within longer historical trajectories, and what they may signal for the future of political order, state power, and social movements in the Arab world.

Throughout the conversation, Beinin situated contemporary wars and political ruptures within broader histories of authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and the erosion of regional political cohesion. The discussion ranged from the legacies of the post-9/11 era to the fragmentation of the Arab regional order, the failures of democratization, and the global rise of the far right.

Here are five major takeaways from the discussion:

1. The current moment is not simply another regional crisis — it reflects the fragmentation of the Arab order itself.

One of the central themes of the discussion was that today’s regional turmoil differs fundamentally from earlier periods of instability. Beinin argued that while the Arab world has long experienced cycles of war, authoritarianism, and external intervention, the current period is distinctive because the very idea of a coherent “Arab world” has weakened dramatically.

As Beinin put it, “A quarter of a century ago, you could still talk about the Arab world with a certain sense of unity… and today, increasingly, it doesn’t.” He stressed that this fragmentation is not merely geopolitical but also political and ideological. Regional powers now pursue sharply divergent agendas, while many traditional centers of Arab political and cultural influence have declined.

Egypt occupied a central place in this analysis. Beinin argued that Egypt, historically viewed as a political and cultural anchor of the Arab world, can no longer plausibly play a regional leadership role. He described the Egyptian regime as deeply constrained by debt crises, Gulf dependency, and intensifying authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) increasingly shape regional politics, albeit without the broader political legitimacy or cultural influence once associated with Cairo.

The result, according to Beinin, is a region characterized less by shared political trajectories than by fragmentation, competing alignments, and increasingly localized struggles for survival and authority.

2. The legacies of the post-9/11 era continue to shape U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Early in the conversation, Sallam read aloud a passage from President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, warning that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Sallam then revealed that the quotation was not from President Donald Trump, but from Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The exchange set up one of the discussion’s recurring themes: the persistence of interventionist frameworks in American political discourse on the Middle East.

Beinin argued that much of contemporary U.S. rhetoric surrounding Iran reproduces assumptions and narratives that shaped the run-up to the Iraq War. “None of it was true when they said it about Iraq,” he remarked, “and none of it is true when they’re saying it about Iran.”

More broadly, he suggested that the post-9/11 political climate fundamentally reshaped how the United States discussed the region. Reflecting on the years after the September 11 attacks, Beinin described g a political atmosphere in which attempts to contextualize regional dynamics were frequently dismissed as apologetics for extremism.

The conversation repeatedly returned to the dangers of reducing regional politics to moral binaries or civilizational narratives. Instead, Beinin emphasized the importance of historically grounded analysis attentive to state interests, political economy, and international power relations.

3. The authoritarian restoration after the Arab uprisings has become deeper and more punitive.

Another major takeaway concerned the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 and the broader trajectory of authoritarianism in the region.

Beinin argued that states such as Egypt and Tunisia have emerged from the post-uprising period with harsher and more consolidated forms of authoritarian rule than existed prior to 2011. “Any kind of political, civil, even to some degree cultural resistance has been stamped out,” he said, citing the expansion of surveillance, imprisonment, and repression.

Yet the discussion also rejected the simplistic notion that the Arab uprisings were meaningless failures. Beinin pointed to later protest waves in Sudan and Algeria during 2019–2020 as evidence that activists and civil movements had absorbed important lessons from the earlier uprisings.

In Sudan in particular, he argued, protest movements understood that “the army is not on the side of the people,” reflecting a deeper awareness of how military institutions could derail revolutionary transitions. At the same time, Beinin stressed that regional interventions by Gulf powers played a major role in undermining these movements. He described how competing regional actors backed rival military factions, contributing to fragmentation and ultimately overwhelming civilian political forces.

The broader implication was that authoritarian resilience in the Arab world cannot be understood solely through domestic dynamics. Regional rivalries, external funding networks, and transnational counterrevolutionary alliances all play a central role in shaping political outcomes.

4. The Middle East’s crises are increasingly tied to a broader global rightward shift.

While much of the conversation focused specifically on the Arab world, Beinin consistently situated regional developments within broader international trends.

He argued that the current moment reflects not only regional disarray but also the rise of increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian political currents globally. Beinin pointed to “a hard lurch to the right” in multiple countries, including Israel, India, and parts of Europe.

This international dimension, he suggested, has profound implications for the Middle East. The rise of nationalist and authoritarian politics globally has helped normalize more extreme forms of militarism, ethnonationalism, and state violence. It has also weakened many of the international norms and institutions that once constrained state behavior, however imperfectly.

The discussion of Israel occupied a particularly important place here. Beinin linked Israel’s rightward shift to broader transformations in global politics. At several points, the conversation underscored how the wars in Gaza and Lebanon cannot be understood in isolation from these wider ideological and geopolitical currents.

Rather than treating the Middle East as uniquely unstable or exceptional, Beinin repeatedly encouraged the audience to see the region as deeply connected to broader crises of democracy, inequality, nationalism, and authoritarianism unfolding globally.

5. Historical perspective remains essential in moments of upheaval.

Perhaps the most important theme running through the conversation was methodological rather than purely political: the insistence on historical perspective in moments of crisis.

At the outset of the event, Sallam emphasized that the purpose of the discussion was “not to chase after the headlines,” but rather to “take the long view” and place contemporary developments “in conversation with scholarly research and debates.”

Throughout the conversation, Beinin repeatedly cautioned against analyses driven solely by immediate events, media cycles, or simplistic geopolitical narratives. Instead, he urged audiences to understand contemporary wars and political transformations as products of longer histories involving colonial legacies, state formation, authoritarian restructuring, social movements, and international intervention.

The discussion ultimately offered no easy optimism about the region’s future. Yet it also rejected fatalistic portrayals of the Arab world as uniquely doomed to instability. Instead, the conversation highlighted the importance of historical memory, critical scholarship, and political analysis capable of connecting contemporary crises to deeper structural processes.

A full recording of the conversation can be viewed below:

In a seminar hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Matthew Levitt, who directs the Washington Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, discussed the Middle East's changing strategic landscape through the lens of the 2026 Iran conflict. While Israel and the United States have achieved significant tactical successes against Hezbollah and the Houthis, Levitt argued, the countries have struggled in progressing the victories to long-term resolutions. He said state actors alone do not drive the region's conflict, but rather that proxy networks and aggressive public relations narratives hinder efforts towards stability.

Levitt then discussed the larger geopolitical effects of the conflict, including the shrinking chances for traditional peace agreements and increasingly negative international views of Israel after the October 7 attacks. He suggested that real changes in Israel’s global position would need political shifts and more transparency at home, while also noting the deep domestic doubts about solutions like a two-state framework. The discussion included the role of outside powers — especially China — in influencing regional dynamics through economic ties to Iran. He also touched on the likelihood that U.S.-Israel relations will increasingly shift from direct aid to joint investments in technology and defense.

CDDRL Visiting Scholar Michael Albertus’s Research Seminar presentation, “Winning Under Electoral Authoritarianism: Turning Out the ‘Right’ Votes in Venezuela,” examined how electoral infrastructure can become a subtle but powerful tool of authoritarian political control. The presentation, based on joint work with Felipe Baritto and Dany Jaimovich, focused on Venezuela and asked whether the expansion of polling centers under Chávez and Maduro was simply a response to demographic demand or whether it was politically targeted to benefit the ruling coalition.

The central puzzle of the presentation was that Venezuela substantially expanded its electoral infrastructure between 2000 and 2024, with the number of polling centers increasing by about 70 percent, even though population growth was much smaller. Albertus situated this puzzle within the broader literature on competitive authoritarianism, where regimes often maintain formally competitive elections but tilt the playing field through institutional design, state resources, media control, opposition harassment, and selective manipulation. His key contribution was to show that the organization of voting infrastructure itself may belong on this “menu of manipulation.”

The empirical strategy was built around a geocoded dataset of voting centers across Venezuelan election periods. The authors identified “new” polling centers and used stable polling centers to construct electoral Voronoi polygons, which served as local catchment areas. This allowed them to ask whether areas with higher prior support for Chavismo were more likely to receive new voting centers in later periods. Their baseline models used polygon and election-period fixed effects, with controls such as population, and clustered standard errors by municipality.

The main result was that lagged regime support predicted the creation of new polling centers. A 10-percentage-point increase in regime support was associated with roughly a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability of receiving a new polling center relative to the sample mean. Areas in the top quartile of regime support were about 30 percent more likely to receive a new center. These effects were strongest in urban areas and became larger as elections tightened and regime support weakened.

Albertus also presented evidence that new polling centers were not politically neutral spaces. Many carried regime-aligned names and ideological language, including terms associated with Bolivarianism, Chávez, communes, popular power, and revolutionary programs. This suggested that polling centers were not only administrative sites but also spaces of political embedding.

The presentation then turned to consequences. New polling centers were associated with higher turnout, especially in areas already supportive of the regime. They were also linked to smaller polling centers and more single-table centers, which may have made voter monitoring easier. In the 2024 election, the opposition's collection of actas (vote tabulations) was less likely in polygons where new polling stations had previously been established, suggesting that infrastructure expansion may have weakened the opposition's monitoring capacity.

Overall, the presentation argued that authoritarian regimes do not always need to rely on blatant fraud or overt suppression. They can instead selectively expand access, making voting easier for supporters while improving their own capacity for mobilization and monitoring. The project’s broader significance lies in showing how seemingly technical decisions about election administration can have deeply political effects.

The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, based at the University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, today released the findings from two national Community Forums on the evolving expectations around privacy and governance of AI-powered wearable devices. In collaboration with Meta, the forum engaged a representative sample of 550 participants — 300 from the United States and 250 from India — to solicit people's perspectives on user controls and societal expectations. The Community Forums were conducted as national Deliberative Polls.

As AI wearables see rapid adoption worldwide, understanding public attitudes can help to ensure these technologies are developed and deployed responsibly. Three key themes emerged from the forum. Participants in both the U.S. and India indicated the highest levels of support for users having controls over when their wearables passively process environments and actively capture data. U.S. participants consistently favored individual agency over how wearables are used, both in public and private settings, whereas in India, there was a slight preference for governments to decide wearable usage rules in public spaces. Additionally, U.S. participants supported workplaces and schools having the primary authority to decide how AI-powered wearables should be used in those environments, while Indian participants also saw a significant role for governments in these settings.

The forum also revealed important nuances in public perspectives. For example, participants expressed a preference for AI wearables that are tailored to cultural and regional contexts, rather than standardized global designs. There was also broad support for AI agents capable of responding to emotional cues, underscoring the public's desire for personalized, human-centric wearable experiences.

"This global forum provided invaluable insights into how the public's expectations around privacy and governance of wearable AI are evolving," said Alice Siu, Associate Director of the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab. "The findings will be essential for policymakers, technology companies, and other stakeholders as they work to ensure these powerful technologies empower users while respecting fundamental rights."

Katherine Casey, professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the faculty director of the King Center on Global Development, presented her team’s work in a CDDRL Research Seminar on Thursday, May 7. Casey opened her talk establishing that citizen esteem for politicians is on the decline. In the U.S., only 16 percent trust the federal government. Across 30 African countries, while 75 percent believe elections are the best way to choose leaders, only 37 percent are satisfied with how their democracies are working. Casey asserts that the root of this dissatisfaction runs deep, ultimately posing the question: how can high-human-capital, representative individuals be identified, screened, encouraged to run for office, and brought into consideration by political parties? 

Casey’s team examined local governance in Sierra Leone to answer this question, partnering with government and civil society to test an intervention designed to induce candidate entry. The field experiment was a nationwide, randomized controlled trial covering all fourteen local district councils in Sierra Leone. The team chose to focus on local councils because the barriers to entry are low, the work requires competence but is not particularly specialized, and its part-time nature allows candidates to run without quitting their day jobs. The experiment included two rounds of random assignment and implementation. 

The experiment focused on three headline factors: representation, quality, and gatekeeping. During the representation phase, the field team visited villages and spoke with residents to better understand who they would want to represent them. These nominees were then screened for quality using metrics for human capital, work experience, local experience, managerial capital, and conscientiousness. After this screening, candidates' profiles were sent to political parties. Of those nominated at the representation level, 85 percent were willing to share their profiles, and 89 percent said they were interested in running for office. 

When conducting analysis, Casey’s team found that top nominees from the representation stage score higher than both status quo applicants and incumbents on quality metrics, differences that are large in magnitude and highly statistically significant. Many top nominees came from traditional authority lineages, and many work in education, positioning them as alternative elites. Among lower-ranked nominees, only 16 percent ultimately entered electoral races, but this rate rose to 25 percent among top-ranked nominees.  Their entry enhanced the maximum observed quality of applicants in the potential candidate pool.

Analysis was then conducted to determine whether the parties selected any nominees from the profiles, which found that nearly all wards had at least one candidate selected and that nominations increased the likelihood that a local woman would make the candidate list.  Incumbents were highly favored in this election, leaving little space for new entrants to win elected seats.

Casey ended her talk with a few conclusions. Firstly, the intervention successfully identified popular, high-quality, new entrants to politics, drawn from a different set of elites. The nominees self-selected into the entry on quality, boasting the highest observed quality among applicants and selected candidates, which also showed that representation need not trade off quality. Casey’s team also found a challenge in translating willingness to run into formal applications, a challenge she believes could be honed in on with more recruitment efforts. Ultimately, the collaboration between research and policymakers crafted a unique model to empower dissatisfied voters to nominate leaders they want to see in office.