In February 2006 then-Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, declared that the United States would financially support regime change activities in Iran in hopes of helping to bring about a ‘velvet revolution.’ Since that time, Iranian activists for any kind of reform have fallen under new kinds of governmental scrutiny and surveillance. Their activities, some begun even before the U.S. announcement, are now viewed by some Iranian government officials as threats to national security, falling conveniently within a broadly-interpreted umbrella of regime change. Iranian activists meanwhile continue advocating for change under these new conditions and sometimes at great personal risk. Many take the position that their advocacy is based on Iranian laws and call simply for enforcing the existing legal codes. Even so, such activists risk falling under suspicion of having a political allegiance with the U.S. and its policy of regime change. While such governmental prohibitions have dampened the broad hopes for reform, the activities have continued and have indeed multiplied in form and scope. This paper considers how the governmental response to the regime change policy has produced new avenues for seeking legal change. This paper focuses on the activities of legal reformers, with an emphasis on the new politics of ‘rights talk,’ including women’s rights and human rights, and sheds light on the increasingly sensitive nature of any kind of rights-based advocacy. By exploring changes in domestic reform activities by non-state actors, however, this paper suggests that activism continues in new forms as part of a dialogical response to the new constraints on activism. This paper considers some specific forms of advocacy and governmental responses to them, including the mobilization of ‘social movements,’ other, more individualized activities using the civil courts, as well as less organized and informal networking activities, to gauge some of the pitfalls and possibilities for legal reform in Iran.

Protests have morphed in Egypt since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. What used to be expressions saved for the most egregious governing or regional offenses are now commonplace. The base of protesters widened across the political spectrum nationally as resistance became explicitly directed against Hosni Mubarak and his regime. State repression used to be deployed to control and discipline those opposing the political order. The aim was to not allow dissent to fester. Recently, however, the Egyptian state has been exchanging violence for legal repression. Egypt’s new elite – led by the heir apparent Gamal Mubarak – are repackaging authoritarian rule. The younger Mubarak’s elite is trying to constitutionally impose the political system’s will over the citizenry by adopting governing strategies and language from Western democratic systems to underpin their rule. This is distinctly noticeable by their creating an imagined America to justify their monopoly of political power in Cairo. The argument of this paper is that the rebranding performed by Egyptian elites extends beyond the usual violent tactics and strategies of authoritarian containment. This is an overarching and ambitious shift to keep the state politically unchallengeable but in a less overtly repressive way. Rather than fragmenting dissent with force, the state is relying on new laws and discourse framing techniques to achieve a similar end. The state remains wholly repressive – just less visibly so. The paper’s purpose is to contribute to the existing theoretical literature on authoritarianism by advancing research that examines changes in discursive governance practices and state violence. To prove this argument, I will make use of extensive interviews and field research conducted in Egypt between 2004-2007 as well as of primary documents. The findings complement the wider debate on contemporary Egyptian politics as well as the work by a larger group of scholars currently researching the relationship between dissent and repression. Similarly, it adds to elite politics and authoritarianism generally.

While scholars have long been interested in the interaction between dissent (e.g., protest, strikes, terrorism and insurgency) and repression (e.g., bans, mass arrests, torture and genocide), it is only in the past few decades that social scientists have begun to examine this topic in a rigorous, systematic manner. Commonly referred to as the study of “conflict processes” (Lichbach and Gurr 1981) or, more simply, the “dissent-repression nexus” (Lichbach 1987; Moore 1998; Davenport 2005a), this work has produced two contradictory sets of findings. On the one hand, dissent has consistently been found to increase repression in every statistical investigation (e.g., Ziegenhagen 1986; Poe and Tate 1994; Davenport 1995; Franklin 1997; Poe et al. 1999; Keith 2002; Davenport and Armstrong 2004). On the other hand, repression has been found to have every imaginable influence on dissent, including no influence at all (e.g., Lichbach 1987; Gupta et al. 1993; Khawaja 1993; Rasler 1996; Moore 1998; 2000), demonstrating the instability of coercive effectiveness. What accounts for this imbalance in research findings? Theory suggests that there should be a proportional balance in the coerciveness of tactics employed by dissidents and authorities. Using tit-for-tat logic, each side is expected to escalate (or de-escalate) coerciveness in response to the actions of the other. The first finding identified above, that dissent increases repression, fits this model of proportionate response, but the second, that repression has all types of effects on dissent, does not. In this paper, I argue that this inconsistency and the potential imbalance in the response of dissidents to repression is due to limitations in the way dissent and repression are normally conceptualized, how the theoretical explanations are invoked to explain contention, and the ways in which data on dissent and repression are collected and analyzed. Using extensive primary and secondary sources, I use a combination of large-N, qualitative, and ethnographic data to explore the relationship between repression and dissent through a detailed study of protest activities in Jordan. One period of protest—the six weeks of demonstrations against the Israeli invasion and destruction of several towns in Palestine (including Jenin and Nablus) in March-April 2002—is examined in micro detail. The quantitative data illustrates patterns of protest activities and the response from various securities agencies, incorporating spatial dynamics. Ethnographic research of several groups that participated in the events reveals the micro-details of planning and also the groups’ expectations about responses from security agencies.

Despite pledging to escape the democratization telos of earlier literature, comparativists have generally framed recent politics in the Middle East through a dualistic view of democracy and dictatorship. Domestic human rights advocates and political activists are treated as opposition movements struggling to replace authoritarian rule with a more democratic political system. This paper joins a small but growing set of scholarship that approaches reform movements without presuming a particular outcome or goal. Drawing on the recent publications of leading intellectuals behind the Egyptian Movement for Change (Kefaya), I assess the critiques and proposals of Tariq Al Bishri, Mohamed El Sayed Said, and Abdel-Halim Qandil. In their goals and strategies, these authors exhibit a level of nuance and pragmatism that differs substantially from, and usefully complicates, the prototypical images of anti-authoritarian opposition within American political science. With Kefaya now in its fifth year, the movement’s core leaders and nominal affiliates have begun to reflect on their record challenging the autocratic government of Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981-present). Al-Bishri’s Misr: Bayn al-`Asyan wa al-Tafakuk (Egypt: Between Disobedience and Disintegration), Said’s al-Intiqal Al-Dimuqrati al-Muhtajiz fi Misr (The Blocked Democratic Transition in Egypt), and Qandil’s al-Ayam al-Akhira (The Last Days) reveal the parameters of that discourse, including the beginnings of a critical self-assessment and reevaluation of the group’s approach. These books convey a highly pragmatic and measured approach to political reform, at odds with many of the assumptions of mainstream democratization studies. All three authors were instrumental in the inception of Kefaya during 2004-2005, but their programs for reform would fit uneasily in the conventional category of “moderate opposition.” Their demands upon the regime are more prudential and more inventive than presumed in the democratic transitions literature, while their attitude toward the allegedly radical Muslim Brothers reflects much greater openness to long-term cooperation than commonly assumed. Transcending the language of democracy and authoritarianism, with its fin de siècle connotations, these texts shed light on how Egypt’s latest intellectual-activists have understood their work emboldening fellow citizens and constraining an arbitrary chief executive. Their political work and scholarship offer a provocative reference for all those seeking to understand contemporary struggles for human equality and emancipation.