This paper explores the Congressional passage of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SALSRA) of 2003, addressing the question to what extent, and in what ways, the passage of the legislation can be interpreted as an outcome of ethnic lobby influence on Capitol Hill, or, alternatively, to what extent it can be seen as a function of changing US interests in the aftermath of 9/11. Based on field (interview) research in both the US and Lebanon, as well as a survey of archival material from Lebanese-American organizations, and government documents, the paper explores the activity of the Lebanese American organizations that lobbied in favor of the Act, including the fifteen organizations that endorsed a 2002 advertisement in the Congressional newspaper "Roll Call" in favor of the legislation. The dynamics in the case of SALSRA are illustrative of the full spectrum of Lebanese-American diaspora organizations and their diverse policy positions. The stance of Jewish American and Arab American organizations on SALSRA is also taken into account, but the focus is on the Lebanese-American Council for Democracy, a US organization of supporters of General Aoun; the US Committee for a Free Lebanon, closely linked to the US neo-conservative political establishment; and the American Task Force for Lebanon, which testified in opposition to the Act before Congress. The paper discusses the intersection between ethnic lobby goals and positions, and the US national interest, as defined at the time under the George W. Bush administration, dynamics which resulted in the passage of the Act. The paper also addresses the arguments in favor of and against construing the passage of the Act as a litmus test for the relative influence of ethnic lobbying organizations.

How effective is democracy assistance funding in promoting and developing democracy? A cross-national quantitative study commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2006 addressed this question and found that funding for democracy does impact the level of democratization in a recipient country. Regionally, the study found that obligations for democracy had the largest effects on democratization in Asia and Africa and that in general, democracy assistance funding mattered more "in 'difficult contexts' with the Middle East being the exception to this general pattern." That the authors of the study provide no explanation for this exception raises several questions about the nature and execution of the programs in the region: How have such programs been constructed over time; how much influence do local actors and organizations exert in the construction of programs and in what circumstances would U.S. funded assistance programs have substantive impact in the regione This paper addresses these questions through an examination of US democracy assistance programming in Egypt and Morocco, two of the largest recipients of democracy funding in the region. Both states have embarked on some measures of political and economic reform. That the results today bear no real resemblance to democracy forces the question: How effective can democracy assistance be in an autocratic statei Programs designed to encourage democracy in an overwhelmingly authoritarian context must be conscious to political context, namely the structure of power and institutions in the state. Without understanding how institutions have evolved and the web of relationships formed, it is impossible to construct an assistance program that is anything more than a fahade. In order to understand the constraints presently facing reformers in the region, I consider the evolution of the political landscape in both states through an examination of the structure of authoritarianism, its reinforcement and its endurance despite both internal and external challenges. I then consider the role of the opposition to the state, principally the organization of associations, syndicates, and NGOs as well as the role of political parties in both Moroccan and Egyptian politics. Finally, I conclude by examining US democracy assistance in both states. Previous research on US development assistance criticizes the construction of aid programs and their tendency to reinforce power structures it aimed to change. I consider whether this dynamic is continuing currently and what, if any, influence local activists and organizations exert in the construction of US funded assistance programs.

2010 MESA Paper Proposal My paper brings together two important historical narratives, the history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the rise of conservative political power in late 20th Century America. It examines how the American conservative ideologues responded to Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with a special emphasis on how the American Right grappled with the rise of political Islam. Conservatives struggled to understand this ascendant ideology that rejected both western-style capitalist modernity and communism, and to decide whether its proponents were dangerous enemies of the West or potential allies in the Cold War. In the decades after World War II, American conservatives often subscribed to orientalist stereotypes and misperceptions of the Middle East. They viewed it as a backwards region of violence and instability, as a hotbed of third-world nationalists hostile to the West, and as a landscape of rich natural resources fueling American prosperity (although the rise of OPEC allowed Arab economic power to begin threatening American hegemony and affluence). Yet it was not until the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath that political Islam became central to American conservatives' perceptions of the Middle East. American foreign policy analysts struggled at first to understand the rise of the Islamists, because they did not easily fit into the Cold War paradigm of a binary world divided between two superpowers' respective spheres of influence. Militant Islam gradually came to be seen as a serious challenge to global modernization and westernization, American political and economic power, and U.S. national security. My study begins in 1978, when movement conservatives largely remained outside of prominent positions of power within the U.S. government. From the sidelines, they denounced President Carter's responses to the Iran hostage crisis and the conflict in Afghanistan as weak, indecisive, and overly conciliatory. Different factions within the emerging New Right coalition provided somewhat divergent perspectives about the Middle East and Islam. I analyze the views of three groups: mainstream conservatives (associated with National Review and the Republican Party), neoconservatives (former liberals on their way out of the Democratic Party coalition, in large part due to their hawkish foreign policy views), and the Religious Right (grassroots social conservative activists strongly influenced by conservative Christian theology). The election of Ronald Reagan brought conservative ideologues to power; I close my paper with a discussion of how their ideas influenced and altered U.S. policies in the Middle East.

Scholars have recently turned to emotions to understand and explain events in world politics. Although this turn is appealing, most scholars have failed to critically examine the relationships between emotion, language, identity and foreign policy. This paper explores these relationships. It ultimately argues that without an explicit appreciation of the emotional narratives that constitute Self/Other relations, we remain hampered in our understanding of how identities come to take shape as they do, why certain identities matter more than others, and how the binding of emotions to entities produces enduring patterns of Self/Other interaction. Through an analysis of United States policy towards the Israeli- Palestinian, this article highlights the importance of emotion and affective practices in world politics.