Order From Ashes

What’s it like to come of age in a Muslim Brotherhood family in Egypt’s Nile Delta? Abdelrahman Ayyash recounts his childhood, political awakening, and disenchantment.

Ayyash recounts his early history cocooned in a Brotherhood community that took care of its members’ schooling, moral training, social life, and career counseling. And he recalls with stark frankness his shock, as a young blogger and political activist, at the political rigidity of the movement in which he’d been raised.

Ayyash’s personal journey from a young movement standout to dissident, critical researcher opens Broken Bonds, a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The remaining episodes of Broken Bonds explore the triple crises facing the Brotherhood, the organization’s likely resurgence, and how observers and policymakers mischaracterize the Brotherhood and its significance.

Broken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt’s presidency in 2012, to the organization’s disarray and marginalization today.

The podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of “Faith and Fracture,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants:

• Abdelrahman Ayyash, fellow, Century International 

The catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 had particularly dire consequences for the millions of displaced Syrians living near the epicenter. Many of them have moved multiple times to flee violence. Since September, an outbreak of cholera has rapidly spread across Syria and entered Lebanon. And to make matters worse, international humanitarian aid is only allowed to enter northern Syria through a single border crossing, which is closed because of earthquake damage.

On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast from Century International, Aron Lund discusses Syria’s unending catastrophe, its origins in bad governance, and what donor nations can do to help.

Years of war, drought, and climate change have ravaged Syria’s water supply and infrastructure, forcing half of the population to drink unsafe water. Now, the earthquake has compounded the damage to Syria’s built environment, exacerbating Syria’s already dire humanitarian situation.

Read more about the human and environmental origins of Syria’s deadly cholera outbreak in Aron’s Century International report “Cholera in the Time of Assad.”

Participants:

• Aron Lund, fellow, Century International 

This fall, news broke that a web of thieves—including high-level officials—had stolen $2.5 billion in Iraqi government cash. The scam is only the most recent example of systemic corruption perpetrated by Iraq’s elites since 2003. The country’s new government has its work cut out for itself. 

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Sajad Jiyad talks about the sordid theft and the way forward to fight corruption.

Sajad shares more about the origins of Iraq’s consociational system of power sharing, and public graft, in his report “Corruption Is Strangling Iraq.”

Participants:

• Sajad Jiyad, fellow, Century International 

America maintains an enormous military infrastructure on the Arabian peninsula and in the Persian Gulf. How should the United States shrink this enormous footprint while continuing to protect its interests and those of its sometimes difficult partners in the region?

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Becca Wasser considers some of the practical ways in which a progressive-minded United States could shift away from its overinvestment in military bases.

Despite the war in Ukraine and rising tensions with China, the United States retains a massive and problematic military footprint in the Middle East, which creates moral hazard and often locks Washington into military solutions ill-suited for complex policy problems.

Figuring out how to get the balance right in the Middle East can help the United States strike a more healthy, and less militarized, balance throughout the world.

This episode of Order from Ashes is part of a regular series on progressive foreign policy in the United States. We’re looking to start a constructive conversation about the specifics of a progressive foreign policy that remains invested and engaged in the world, while moving away from reflexive militarism and toward a framework based on rights and values.

Participants:

• Becca Wasser, senior fellow, Center for a New American Security

Progressives have done a good job articulating the problems with bad policies, especially the Global War on Terror, which worsened the problems it was supposed to solve.

But what is the better, progressive alternative?

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, New America fellow Alex Stark outlines some of the specific ingredients of a policy that tries to promote genuine stability. 

Sound, progressive counterterrorism would build on a complex and sustainable vision of stability, rooted in rights and better governance. Instead of seeking to eliminate violent groups, it has designated as terrorists, a progressive counterterrorism policy would invest in accountability and development, along with military operations, to marginalize violent groups. 

This episode of Order from Ashes is the first in a regular series on progressive foreign policy in the United States. We’re looking to start a constructive conversation about the specifics of a progressive foreign policy that remains invested and engaged in the world, while moving away from reflexive militarism and toward a framework based on rights and values.

Participants:

• Alex Stark, fellow, New America

The United States and Lebanon are, in some ways, very different political contexts, and yet organizers face strikingly similar dilemmas and pitfalls in both countries. Both Nicole Carty and Jean Kassir have been actively involved in politics since 2011—Carty in the United States and Kassir in Lebanon. In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—the two activists share their insights.

In their experience, movements go through similar cycles. Carty and Kassir emphasize the importance of developing movement infrastructure to avoid the pitfalls associated with these cycles, and to capitalize on moments of mass mobilization—to seize opportunity. Movements must also be able to create moments, not just react to them. 

A lack of transmission of skills between generations and a disconnect between movements causes stagnation and the repetition of mistakes. Both activists describe learning lessons from movements across the globe in terms of tactics, discourse, and political imagination. And both emphasize careful thinking about learning and the transmission of skills. 

By fostering both transnational and intergenerational learning, movements may have some hope of avoiding the familiar pitfalls.

This podcast is the final of a special eight-part season of Order from Ashes, as part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include: 

• Jean Kassir, co-founder of Lebanese media platform Megaphone

No matter how big they are, protests alone do not create political change. They must be nurtured into something more enduring: a movement. Movements are neither protests nor organizations.

Ivan Marovic cut his teeth as a student activist in Serbia in the 1990s and as a leader of the Optor movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic. Since then, he has worked with dissidents and movements all over the world. In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—Marovic talks about the importance of skill-building for movements.

Unlike many other factors that affect movements, skill-building is something that can be controlled. The skills of organizing, communicating, strategic planning, and tactical innovation must be nurtured at the grassroots level. This is all the more crucial in authoritarian settings where crackdowns seek to break any civil society networks and may seek to eliminate leadership. Marovic emphasizes the importance for movements of learning, self-reflection, and time spent together.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.

Participants: 

• Ivan Marovic, director of field education, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, DC

For the last decade and more, popular outrage at police brutality has driven mass protests in both the Middle East and the West. Opposition to police excesses—from crackdowns on protests in Egypt and Iraq to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020—has highlighted the need for change. 

In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes— anthropologist Hayal Akarsu and sociologist Alex Vitale argue that policing crises around the globe are connected; that is, they are all part of one broad crisis with different local permutations. These permutations may include repressive political policing, long-term corruption and ineffectiveness, everyday policing, or a combination of these, as well as economic factors such as increasing inequality. As awareness of the climate crisis deepens, the role of police in protecting corporate interests may become an increasingly prominent feature of the crisis of policing legitimacy. 

Police reform is, more than ever before, a global industry, which circulates experts, tools, standards, models, and training programs. As such, police reform is a key part of foreign policy initiatives, diplomacy efforts, and development programs. A transnational framework enables us to see these connections.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Hayal Akarsu, assistant professor of anthropology, Utrecht University

From Poland to the studios of Fox News, reactionaries have recast progressive ideas about gender as a militant “gender ideology” that threatens society and its values. These politicians and pundits stoke this and other “moral panics”—mass frenzies of fear about practices, ideas, or identities that supposedly threaten a country’s innocence or moral character. 

Moral panics are an increasingly prominent feature of the political landscape around the world, and they increasingly focus on gender. This episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—draws on examples from Egypt, Poland, and elsewhere to show how leaders, media, and other actors cultivate, promote, and even invent these moral panics. These actors exploit moral panics to rapidly construct social coalitions that might not otherwise coalesce. And in case after case, moral panics are shown to be about power—more policing of the marginalized; stifling social and economic change that would cost the elite; fighting democratic reforms; and redirecting grievances toward scapegoats. 

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Lobna Darwish, gender and human rights officer, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights

Pundits, policymakers, and even academics often treat the Middle East as “exceptional”—a region of primordial violence and war, stuck in premodern social dynamics. But such conflict is not unique to the region—the United States and Europe have, of course, fought in multiple wars, though often not on their own soil. It is because of these assumptions that news coverage of the war in Ukraine is viewed with justifiable shock, but the media often treats violence in Iraq or Syria  as relatively unremarkable—the Middle East is supposed to be used to war. 

In this episode of Order from Ashes, the scholars Karma R. Chávez and Maya Mikdashi talk about moving beyond the common exceptionalizing frameworks that surround region, gender, and sexuality. They argue that, if straight and queer sexualities are analyzed together—rather than treated as if the condition of LGBTQ minorities is solely its own separate issue—observers can better understand how state and social power operate. Queer or marginalized genders and sexualities are policed or controlled, but so too are straight sexualities and all genders, in ways that are fundamental to how state power operates. The broader implication of their analysis: when we stop seeing the Middle East as exceptionally authoritarian, backward, and violent—and stop seeing the United States and Europe as particularly democratic and civilized—the transnational contours of war and power become clearer.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants:

• Karma R. Chávez, chair and associate professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas, Austin