Policy Briefs and Reports

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.

This paper surveys the landscape of women’s inclusion in Arab politics since 2011 and to analyze the status of gender relations in Arab authoritarian domestic politics. It identifies three interrelated trends that have variously unfolded across the region: the general retreat in women’s bottom-up mobilization, a separation between women’s political leadership and the democratic question, and the increased insecurity of women in settings besieged by conflict. The paper concludes with some recommendations for local/regional civil society and international allies seeking to enhance Arab women’s substantive political inclusion and participation in zones of de-democratization and violent conflict.

The Arab region, or MENA (Middle East and North Africa), has had a chequered history with democratization. Today, the prevailing trend is less one of democratic transition than of autocratization and democratic de-consolidation. Against this backdrop, the Toda Peace Institute presents An Eye on Arab De-democratization, a series examining patterns of democratic erosion across nine countries, alongside a case study on the gender dimensions of democratization.