Policy Briefs on Global Challenges to Democracy

This report aims to examine the process of Tunisia’s autocratisation, which continues to reverse the gains from the 2011 Arab Spring. With receding civic freedoms and the rising tide of populist politics, there does not seem to be much room for democratic resilience and defence against democratic backsliding in Tunisia. The report provides a background that outlines key areas where democratic gains from the 2011–2021 period have been reversed since the July 2021 coup, and maps out the political landscape, highlighting the main difficulties facing the protection of civil society and civil and political freedoms. It then offers recommendations designed to limit the impact of autocratisation and revive free civil activism.

This report examines Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein political order, a consociational arrangement known as muhasasah, or the apportionment of power resources among the country’s ethno-sectarian groups. Designed to accommodate societal diversity, muhasasah has become a fundamental flaw in Iraq’s political system. Instead of fostering national consensus, it has hardened ethno-sectarian identity politics, and has become synonymous with dysfunction, corruption, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Bold reforms are needed and radical recalibration beyond identity-based quotas toward functional governance, meritocracy, accountability, and citizenship is imperative.

This report analyses Egypt’s opposition, which has failed to rise up to the challenge of being a democratic force in the country’s politics. Horizontal solidarity and mounting challenges to incumbent governments are currently missing components among opposition actors. The status quo reveals a situation in which the multitude of political parties, officially numbering 87, on the Egyptian political scene alternate between unity and division in their relations with each other and have failed to affect a shift from being a ‘loyal’ to ‘democratic’ opposition. Sustained interparty cooperation across the domains of shadow government, prisoners of conscience and election campaigns can contribute to remedying these weaknesses within Egypt’s potentially vibrant opposition.

This report evaluates the implications of Morocco’s political trajectory, arguing that it represents a form of adaptive governance rather than substantive democratization. It highlights Morocco’s specific model of managed pluralism, in which periodic multiparty elections function within a system of controlled pluralism. The analysis demonstrates how the democratic process operates within a specific architecture, characterized by the structuring of the margins of political competition and the centrality of the monarchy. The paper further analyzes the reconfiguration of the political landscape, specifically the consolidation of the National Rally of Independents as the country’s ‘quasi-ruling party’. The policy paper concludes with several recommendations.

This paper contends that the future of Palestinian governance requires more than technocratic fixes. Palestine is increasingly besieged, externally by the genocidal campaign in Gaza and the enduring Israeli colonial control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory (oPt), and internally by authoritarian fragmentation within the Palestinian political system. The current configuration of governance operates through elite consensus, donor patronage, and institutional paralysis. This paper calls for the articulation of a new social contract and concludes with recommendations for the construction of new institutions that embody popular sovereignty under conditions of ongoing colonial fragmentation.