The ACRPS weekly seminar returned for the 2018-19 academic year this week, focusing on the regional and international roles in the democratic transition process that followed the 2011 Arab uprisings. Despite the expanding role of foreign powers over the past 7 years, and the implications for the democratic transition processes in the region, Arab research has not delved deep into this topic. Consequently, the Arab Center decided to launch the weekly academic seminar with a detailed discussion about the role of foreign forces, addressing the problems posed, with objective and accurate explanations, and assessing their effects. The researchers presented the papers they had prepared for the conference, "External Factors and the post-2011 Democratic Transition in the Arab Region", held in Tunisia on 21-22 September 2018.

The first session of the Seminar, moderated by Morad Diani, reviewed the theoretical problems concerning external factors and their relationship to democracy. Abdel-Fattah Mady presented a critical typological reading of the literature on this relationship, and the most prominent foreign influences on the course of the democratic transition. The researcher affirmed that interest in the topic is still limited. Most studies were concerned, at large, with domestic factors, the weight of which has been overestimated. They focused on domestic factors, especially the rentier economy, the role of tribalism, the encroachment of the security establishment, and political culture, with little attention given to external factors. The researcher detailed several priorities for expanding the scope of Arab research in the topic, including the historical heritage of the nation-state building and the role of the foreign in that process, the Western hegemony that shaped the inter-Arab relations and examining anti-democratic sentiment in the region.

Researcher Abdou Moussa presented a paper that looked at the external economic factors, by applying the case study of Egypt and examining Neoliberalism and democratic transition and the impact of international monetary organisations on the consolidation of authoritarianism. He used the premise of distributional conflicts and their impact on democratic prospects, arguing that the application of neoliberalism in the periphery countries of global capitalism, went beyond programs and policies agreed upon with the international financial institutions, to serve as an incentive for social division and political exclusion during the transition process. The author concluded that the nature of neoliberalism in periphery countries, especially the conditions of its formation, lies in two factors: shock therapy recommended by the international financial institutions, and political and social repression. He said that the concurrence of these two factors remain a distinctive feature of the neoliberal formula of the military regime.

Ahmed Qassem presented his analysis of the impact of regional and international interventions in the ongoing conflict in Libya on the democratic transition following the 2015 Skhirat Accords (the Libyan Politcal Agreement). He contended that the agreement was the result of a consensus between local and regional forces. These forces built their foreign policies towards the conflict in Libya balanced between their fears of the political and economic repercussions of democratic transition, and their interests and ambitions to gain influence. The conflict of interests between external forces was an important factor along with domestic factors in the failed implementation of the terms of the political agreement and in disrupting the process of democratic transition.

In the second session, moderated by Marwan Kabalan, Dr. Dana El Kurd presented a comparative analysis of the US role and impact on democratic transition in Egypt and Bolivia. She demonstrated that local capacity for mass mobilization was increasingly linked to the will of external actors, especially those able to support or hinder the transition, such as the United States. El Kurd stressed that one of the main reasons for the failure of the democratic transition in Egypt was the long history of the US sponsorship of tyranny in Egypt. Not only did it oppose the transition to democracy, but it strengthened authoritarian systems through different mechanisms. She pointed out the interesting diverging experiences of authoritarianism faced by the opposition in Bolivia and Egypt. In Egypt, the opposition confronted selective mechanisms of cooptation and repression, pushing opposition groups into a state of increased ideological polarization. This ultimately weakened the opposition's capacity, in general, to disrupt the stability of the authoritarian regime, or to urge its international backers to review their positions. In Bolivia, polarization existed but at an organic level. External factors did not agitate the regime to engage in greater repression during the democratic transition, nor did external powers support particular opposition groups over others. This ensured that capacity of opposition groups remained symmetric, and polarization, while present, did not turn into a zero-sum game. Since the United States did not seek to secure the authoritarian regime in this country, in contrast to its role in Arab countries, Bolivian political actors were able to come to compromises and maintain the democratic system.

Ridwan Ziadeh presented the final paper on international foreign policies in Syria, explaining that the role and impact of external factors in the Syrian revolution escalated until they became a decisive factor. The evolution of the US role in the Syrian conflict and occupation has become a major issue, with the transformation of the peaceful revolution into an armed revolution, and then into civil war before becoming an international conflict. The Russian role represented the strongest glue and greatest protector for the Syrian regime, preventing its overthrow despite Syria becoming a regional and international proxy war. The researcher pointed out that President Trump's announcement of his withdrawal from Syria led to the decline of US influence, handing over full control over the Syrian landscape to Russia. He concluded that Russia and the Syrian regime, alone, are the two parties that have a strategic plan based on repeating Putin's actions in Chechnya. The US and the West in general have no strategy in Syria, nor do they want to develop a strategy that requires any effort on their part.