Brookings:

Growing the Global Internet Economy by Ensuring the Free Flow of Data Across Borders

David Dreier and Joshua Meltzer — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:32:00 -0400

Digital connectivity is the most powerful driver of social and economic change the world has seen. The Internet will connect an estimated 5 billion people by 2020. That many already use cell phones. Connectivity is reshaping the landscape we inhabit, changing the ways we communicate, learn and do business. It is behind the world’s most transformative trends, including an unprecedented empowerment of the individual.

The free flow of data is a core element of the Internet that has underpinned this growth in connectivity, innovation and productivity. This freedom has been vital to the growth of digital trade in goods and services, a quickly growing share of global GDP. Its importance is evident every minute as citizens, businesses and governments access global services such as cloud computing, and health and education opportunities. Entrepreneurs in developing countries benefit from free flow as they sell their products globally over the Internet, using international financial data transfers to process transactions. It has also been a critical factor in the explosive growth of access to information and human opportunity.

We are, however, only at the beginning of the digital age. It is hard to grasp the enormity of what this advance portends. More data was created and exchanged last year than in all of human history. The growth in the use and exchange of data is accelerating exponentially--fueling massive new economic activity, enabling major advances in scientific research, analysis of big data, and providing tools to help address existential challenges to human well-being such as climate change.

There are, however, some major speed bumps that threaten this advance as governments around the world are increasingly seeking to restrict or control the flow of data.

No question about it, the Internet is disruptive. That’s why it’s not hard to understand the impulse to control it. But, as with everything, there is a balance to be sought. For example, efforts to prevent cyber crime, or maintain the privacy of personal data should avoid unnecessary restrictions on the free flow of data across borders. Attempts by government to limit data flows to restrict market access or provide unfair commercial advantages to domestic businesses reduces international trade. This is discriminatory and trade-distorting, and should be prohibited.

Many governments are already restricting the free flow of data. These attempts are most blatant in repressive and authoritarian countries, but evident even in open societies. Across the world governments are grappling with how to reconcile the freedom of the Internet with the need to address some of the harms associated with its use.

But as government interference in the free flow of data multiplies, we may be reaching an inflection point that could determine kind of Internet the world ends up with. It could become truly global, open and accessible to all. Or, the Internet could become increasingly balkanized and closed, with a loss of economic and social potential that harms all.

International trade forums are starting to discuss how to find the right balance between the free flow of data and action to address legitimate concerns about harmful use of the Internet. In fact, cross border data flow is quickly emerging as an important 21st century trade issue. It is not adequately regulated under the rules of the World Trade Organization and the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement is the first trade agreement to try to address issues related to cross-border data flows. The issue is also part of negotiations under the Trans-Pacific Partnership and will figure prominently in talks for a projected EU-U.S. trade agreement.

It is vital we get it right in these agreements. To do so we need a deeper and wider understanding of the value and stakes associated with the free flow of data across borders. The Annenberg-Dreier Commission and the Brookings Institution are trying to build that awareness, so vital to the world. We are partnering in a meeting next week—the start of a larger project—that will gather some of the top experts from the Asia Pacific region to examine the interests in play.

The aim of this project is to build greater understanding in this region on the importance of the free flow of data as a driver of international trade, economic growth and innovation. The U.S. has developed a thriving Internet industry with regulation that balances the free flow of data and access to the Internet with the need to protect legitimate interests such as the protection of intellectual property, fighting cyber crime and maintaining the privacy of personal data.

Other countries are also trying to capture the gains from the Internet economy. And while this should be encouraged, doing so with regulation that is discriminatory and restricts access to the Internet will harm trade, impede growth and is will be harmful to all. On the contrary, an open Internet that encourages access to data and fosters competition will deliver the most economic benefits globally.

Developing a common understanding of these challenges and charting a way forward may ultimately be key to global stability, security, and growth—in short, to building the collaboration necessary to sustain a world we’d want to live in.

Authors

Image Source: © Kacper Pempel / Reuters

United Nations Global Education First Initiative's Youth Advocacy Group

Jenny Perlman Robinson — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:42:00 -0400

In September 2012 United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched a five-year education campaign, the Global Education First Initiative, to put every child in school, improve the quality of learning and foster global citizenship. To advise and support the implementation of the initiative, the Global Education First Initiative convened a Youth Advocacy Group of 15 young leaders from around the world. I sat down with two of the Youth Advocacy Group members, Joseph Munyambanza of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Anna Susarenco of Moldova, to discuss the group’s mandate and their personal commitment to education for all.

To see more videos about the Global Education First Initiative, please visit our YouTube page.

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The YAG Provides Grassroots Knowledge to Decision-makers On Improving Education

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Bringing Mentoring to the Refugee Camp

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Authors

Jenny Perlman Robinson

Enlisting Iran On Syria Will Backfire

Michael Doran — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

“There are few nations in the world with which the United States has less reason to quarrel or more compatible interests than Iran.” So wrote Henry Kissinger in 2001. The sentence is more than just the assessment of one man. It expresses the deep longing of much of the American foreign policy establishment. For more than three decades the United States as been at odds with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout the entire period, however, a dream of cooperation has captivated even the most hard-bitten American realists.

This dream beguiled Ronald Reagan. He sent his national security adviser, Robert C. Macfarlane, to Tehran, carrying a key-shaped cake, which was meant to symbolize the unlocking of doors between the two countries. The very same vision also convinced Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 to express regret for American meddling in Iranian politics back in 1953, at the time of the Eisenhower administration. The mea culpa was meant to elicit a reciprocal gesture from Tehran, which never materialized.

As Secretary of State John Kerry labors to organize the Geneva conference on Syria, he will undoubtedly hear advice from those who are captivated by the dream. The Russians, for their part, have explicitly called for Iranian participation in the conference, now scheduled for the second week in June. The French, by contrast, have flatly opposed the idea. "We do not want Iran," a foreign ministry spokesman said in Paris with admirable clarity. Meanwhile, Kerry and the State Department have remained mum. We must hope that their silence does not imply any agreement with the Russians. Any effort to enlist the aid of Tehran – direct or indirect – would backfire.

Violent sectarianism, Islamic extremism, and terrorism are stamped in the DNA of the Islamic Republic. It leads an anti-American coalition throughout the region. Its allies, Assad foremost among them, are the sworn enemies of the allies of the United States. Fruitful cooperation between Washington and Tehran is impossible.

More importantly, it is also harmful to American interests. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, entertains no reciprocal dream of friendship. He wisely recognizes that he is locked in a zero-sum game with the United States. He periodically responds to gestures of friendship from Washington, because he knows that sitting down with the Americans, if only to scorn them, is an effective asymmetric tactic. It allows him to affirm key planks of Iranian propaganda: that the United States is a country in decline, that it is searching for the exits in the Middle East, and that it has no choice but to cut a deal with Iran, the rising power. The Islamic Republic’s message to America’s Arab friends is crystal clear: “Obama is intent on courting us. He will sell you down the river just to get into our good graces.”

The Islamic Republic is the primary external enabler of Assad’s murderous policies. By seeking Tehran’s help, if only indirectly, at the Geneva conference, the United States would simply be embracing the role that Iranian propaganda has assigned it.

The Geneva conference itself is already being read in the Middle East as a sign of American backsliding. When Assad ignored explicit American red lines on chemical weapons, the Obama administration responded by calling on the Syrian opposition to sit down with his representatives. It reacted, that is, with what everyone in the Middle East sees as a gesture of renewed respect for a murderous regime.

Many in the Middle East see America’s erasing of its own red lines as part of a pattern of capitulation to Iran. Assad is Tehran’s best ally, so it is only natural that the Arab friends of the United States read American policies toward Syria against the background of the Iran problem. Over the last decade Tehran has repeatedly ignored explicit warnings regarding its nuclear program. But the West has greeted each transgression with a tacit acceptance of the fait accompli. No one today believes that the United States will actually deny Iran the complete nuclear fuel cycle. With or without Iranian participation, the Geneva conference already appears as yet another example of American retreat in the face of aggressive Iranian policies.

Authors

Michael Doran

The Legacy of Reform in Iran, Sixteen Years Later

Suzanne Maloney — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The date of May 23 on the Western calendar corresponds to the second of the month of Khordad on the Iranian calendar. It is a date of some political significance and poignancy for Iranians. Sixteen years ago on May 23, 1997, reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami surprised the country and the world with a massive upset victory in the election to succeed then-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The date itself, Dovvom-e Khordad or the Second of Khordad, became a mantra for change and the shorthand for a new political movement, one that was focused on gradual reform within the confines of the existing framework of the Islamic Republic.

The significance of Khatami’s victory continues to reverberate, even in today’s Iran. While politics in the Islamic Republic had always featured a strong element of competition among the array of factions that comprised the revolutionary coalition, the Second of Khordad was the first time since the revolution that an Iranian presidential election proved genuinely competitive. The invocation of the date as a rallying cry was short-lived, however. Iran’s conservatives responded to this vigorous new political force with a backlash that paralyzed Khatami’s presidency and targeted many of the reform movement’s leading partisans and intellectuals with violence, repression and forced exile.

The agenda of the reform movement centered around the concepts of moderation, tolerance, accountability and rule of (man-made) law. These were revolutionary ideas in the Islamic Republic circa 1997; however, Khatami was determined both as a matter of strategy and as a function of his cautious nature to avoid revolutionary action. Popular support represented the reform movement’s most powerful instrument of leverage— at least at the outset, before the stratospheric expectations attached to it were inevitably dashed—but it was one that the reformists were almost invariably unwilling to use. This made the movement viable within the paranoid parameters of the revolutionary theocracy, but it ultimately left its agenda vulnerable to the willingness of their hard-line opponents to use any means necessary.

Ultimately, however, it was not simply repression that undermined the reformists. Rather, it was the evidence, borne of the eight-year Khatami experiment and the bald-faced manipulations of the system by his successor, that the Islamic Republic cannot be durably moderated by a movement that sidesteps its central idiosyncrasy— the divine mandate of the office of the Supreme Leader, which in the Islamic Republic transcends such trivialities as the rule of law. Despite the real tactical genius they displayed in seizing the presidency and sustaining their movement in its early years, the reformists never managed to navigate beyond this impasse, either intellectually or strategically. And the events of 2009 further eroded the viability— and thus, the popular appeal— of the reformist approach of gradualism, incrementalism and change from within.

Although the reform movement was stymied and largely forced to the sidelines of Iranian decision-making, it managed to have a meaningful, positive impact on the lives of Iranians through specific policy advances as well as the general reinvigoration of civil society and the media. Some of its achievements endure, such as the establishment of elected city and village councils for the first time in Iranian history. Still, in the eight years since Khatami left office, his two most important contributions— the unleashing of Iranians’ sense of political entitlement and the rehabilitation of Iran’s role in the world— have been forcefully reversed. Judging from the orchestration of the current presidential campaign and, more broadly, Tehran's embrace of autocracy in recent years, it is hard to envision an outcome to the June 14 election that restores either in the short term.

Today, the reformist movement is scattered and dispirited. It retains a small faction in parliament that, to its credit, has managed to navigate its minority party status with some adroitness. It asserts enough of a stake in the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic that its most prominent candidate for the presidency, Mohammad Reza Aref, managed to survive the electoral vetting process. But it is a quest that seems purely symbolic given the fate of the last election’s reformist candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi— who have been held, mostly incommunicado, under house arrest for more than two years.

On its sixteenth anniversary, the Second of Khordad was all but ignored within Iran. Rather, Tehran hopes that the presidential campaign just getting underway will end the cycle of electoral unpredictability and republican aspirations that 1997 Khatami victory incited. And instead of marking the milestone of the reformist upset at the ballot, the current power brokers prefer to commemorate another anniversary which happens to fall on the subsequent day. The third of Khordad, or May 24, marks 31 years since the liberation of the city of Khorramshahr, which had been occupied and heavily devastated by the September 1980 Iraqi invasion. Unfortunately, these themes of heroic resistance against a more powerful adversary are more resonant with the Iranian leadership today than the mantra of accountability, respect and rule of law invoked by Khatami and the Second of Khordad.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

The Outside-In Campaign Strategy of Iran's Nuclear Negotiator

Suzanne Maloney — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:26:00 -0400

Saeed Jalili has been getting a lot of press lately – not for his day job, as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, or even for the responsibilities that come with it, as the lead negotiator on the nuclear issue with the United States and its international partners. Rather, this forty-something bureaucrat has emerged as the front-runner in the contest to succeed the notorious Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the next president of the Islamic Republic.

Conventional wisdom on Iran has a decidedly mixed track record, but it’s easy to appreciate why Jalili is seen as leading the pack that has gotten the nod from Iran’s Guardians’ Council. Here’s a hint: it’s not a reflection of charismatic campaign skills or a strong track record on the issues, like the economy, that really matter to Iranians. Rather, Jalili is seen the most likely contender because he appears to optimally fulfill the requirements of the only voter who really matters: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He fought in one of the most brutal battles of the long war with Iraq, losing part of his right leg in the process, and later completed his doctorate in political science at a hard-line Iranian university, where his dissertation focused on the diplomacy of the prophet Mohammad. This was a subject he would later propound upon in his first meeting with Western nuclear negotiators.

He has worked directly for Khamenei, as director-general of the supreme leader’s influential office. He was plucked from relative obscurity six years ago to coordinate Iran’s national security strategies and lead the nuclear negotiations with the West. Along the way, Jalili earned a reputation for piety, honesty, and absolute fidelity to the authority of the Supreme Leader. His continuing role as the chief nuclear negotiator makes it unlikely, in my opinion at least, that the leadership would condone a disappointing showing in the polls. For all these reasons, he has been considered for many months a possible successor to Ahmadinejad, and a number of Iranian conservative politicians either withdrew in his favor or indicated that they would consider doing so.

In a sense, Jalili is Ahmadinejad 2.0, a younger-generation hardliner who boasts total commitment to the ideals of the revolution, a limited national profile and no serious power base within the establishment, making him perfectly subservient to Khamenei. Ahmadinejad proved to be a disastrous pick on almost every basis— beyond his chaotic economic policies and proclivity for alienating the international community, the president’s devout beliefs proved a little too messianic for the traditionalist clergy and he overreached in asserting his own ambitions. The sequel is softer-spoken, more carefully vetted, and more reliable. Still, Khamenei’s willingness to take a chance on another young acolyte after such a divisive experience underscores the extent to which the aging revolutionary recognizes the need for generational change within the leadership if the Islamic Republic is to endure.

Although he promises to be more docile than Ahmadinejad, Jalili may yet prove capable of innovation. The most interesting dimension of his candidacy to date is his apparent strategy, which is relying not simply on the top-down influence of Khamenei, but also on an appeal to the international media, presumably as a means of bolstering his stature at home. The man who has reportedly brought turgid discourse to new heights in his diplomatic exchanges with American and international negotiators is suddenly turning on the charm for the foreign press. Over the past week, he has conducted interviews with the Financial Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and he (or someone on his staff) has become a prolific tweeter in both Persian and English. (The English-language tweets, whose odd cadence suggests an overfamiliarity with auto-translate programs, are almost poetic in their inanity.) He has an official campaign website, a Facebook page, a Google Plus site and an Instagram account, as well as a host of friendly aggregator sites. If the world uncovers an authorized Jalili Tumblr blog, it won't come as much of a surprise.

This frantic deployment of social media— most of the sites and tweets appear to be about two weeks old— and international journalists would be comical if it weren’t being undertaken on behalf of a government that has waged a lengthy and often successful campaign to harass bloggers and inhibit its citizens’ access to the internet and a free press. Setting that gaping hypocrisy aside, it says something about Iran's complicated relationship with the world that even the scion of a state that inveighs against the prevailing order still craves international legitimation as a statesmen. Ultimately, the sophistication of Jalili’s campaign is indicative of a significant investment of time and energy, and it reflects, presumably, a real determination to win the presidency. Iranians and the world must surely hope that Jalili’s embrace of modernity in service of his presidential ambitions will extend to a more prudent approach to governing Iran if and when he actually assumes the office.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

This Week in Immigration: SJC Sends Immigration Reform to the Floor

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:06:00 -0400

Big news in immigration policy: Last night, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send S.744 to the Senate floor. In a 13-5 vote, Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake joined their Democratic colleagues. Much of the day was focused on contentious amendments aimed at making the pathway to citizenship impossible for undocumented immigrants. Sen. Hatch’s reworked high-skilled amendments were approved. “With a heavy heart,” Sen. Patrick Leahy withdrew one of the most controversial amendments extending immigration protections to gay couples.

A brief recap of last week’s markup: Last Tuesday the Committee wrapped up amendments regarding border security and began discussion of temporary high-skilled workers. Notably, the Committee rejected the use of a biometric entry-exit system as a trigger for beginning the legalization process (expect Sen. Rubio to bring it up again) and approved an amendment that doubles labor certification fees, allocating them to STEM education. On Thursday the Committee addressed E-Verify.

The House’s Gang of Eight – Democrats Luis Gutierrez (IL), Zoe Lofgren (CA), John Yarmuth (KY), and Xavier Becerra (CA), and Republicans Raul Labrador (ID), John Carter (TX), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), and Sam Johnson (TX) – has come to an “agreement of principles” and will release a bill in the near future. The road was (and still is) rocky, with talks looking like they might unravel right before their self-imposed deadline of last Thursday. Rep. Carter is a vocal critic of the Senate bill and anti-immigrant rhetoric is harsh in the House, so expect this bill to be more conservative than S.744.

In the meantime, the Rep. Bob Goodlatte is not satisfied with S.744 and House Judiciary Committee is still working on its piecemeal approach to immigration reform. Over the last week it held hearings on its two bills, covering E-Verify and a temporary agricultural worker program, as well as the Senate’s bill. Next up is a bill from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) addressing “rules for highly skilled and educated foreign workers.”

It is well documented the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) union isn’t happy with the Schumer-McCain bill. But another agency union is joining them – U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) – claiming “the bill would fail to address an ‘insurmountable bureaucracy’ at the federal agency.”

How does your legacy on immigration issues affect your election prospects? It depends on who you ask, but it promises to play a role for Republicans eyeing 2016 or former U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo’s potential bid for Colorado governor. For one Republican, it was enough to change parties: the Republican National Committee’s State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach switched his affiliation to Democrat because of the “culture of intolerance” toward immigrants.

There is a slew of government reports from the last week to check out:

The Congressional Budget Office released their 2013 update to “A Description of the Immigrant Population.” It includes some great top-level statistics about the foreign-born population in the United States.
The Congressional Research Service released a report finding “a widely touted Border Patrol initiative to send migrants back to Mexico far from the points they are caught entering the U.S. illegally has one of the worst track records at discouraging people from trying again.”
The Census Bureau released a report estimating “net international migration is projected to overtake natural increase as the driver of population growth in 2032.”
USCIS released the latest DACA applicant numbers. As of April 30, they received 515,922 applications.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © ERIC THAYER / Reuters

After 50 Years of the OAU-AU: Time to Strengthen the Conflict Intervention Framework

Julius Agbor and Tatah Mentan — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:19:00 -0400

2013 marks 50 years since the birth of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which became the African Union (AU) in 2002. This week, as the continent’s leaders and other Africanists meet to commemorate this special occasion, it is also the appropriate time to reflect on some of the principles, successes and shortcomings of the organization. In particular, we would like to consider why the organization has been particularly slow in intervening in situations where the “responsibility to protect” is clearly mandated. The “responsibility to protect” is a United Nations (U.N.) principle endorsed by the AU (in what has come to be known as the “Ezulwini Consensus”) and represents the right to intervene in a member states’ internal affairs in situations where citizens’ welfare has been significantly undermined. Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Acts of the AU state that “[T]he Union has the right to intervene in a member state pursuant to a decision of the general assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” While the AU has been lauded for its multilateral peace-keeping initiatives, notably in Sudan, its ambivalent, and at best muted, response to the humanitarian crises in Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and, most recently, Mali—very similar to the OAU’s inaction in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Somalia—has drawn much criticism. On the other hand, the AU has been quick to express reservations about the intervention of Western nations in its member states’ affairs, notably, with the recent French movements in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, and NATO in Libya. This controversy about the timing of international interventions suggests the need for a fine line to be drawn between the AU’s long cherished principle of non-interference (stipulated in Article 4(g) of the Constitutive Acts) and the AU’s “responsibility to protect” framework, without which the continental body will increasingly lose its relevance. Following the AU’s inertia to respond to these situations, pundits have speculated on what would have happened to Côte d’Ivoire, Mali or Libya had France or NATO not intervened at all.

Although it is probably too early to pass judgment on the efficacy of the AU’s revised peace and security framework, the evidence over the past two decades does not suggest the pan-African body has been effective at mitigating humanitarian crisis on the continent. The reasons for the ineffectiveness of AU’s intervention are both ideological and logistic. On the ideological front, it seems that the principle of non-interference in member states’ internal affairs has had a preponderant influence on the organization’s decision-making process, and for genuine reasons. Many African states have weak governance structures, and cases of widespread human rights violations are still rampant on the continent. The evidence suggests that civil wars and most of the parameters which define a failed state are the result of poor governance. Similarly, Africa is the only continent that continues to experience famines in the 21st century, and the evidence linking famines to poor governance is compelling. Unfortunately, the AU lacks oversight over most of its member states with respect to governance, which continues to be treated as a domestic affair. As evidence, only 26 of its 54 member states have ratified the protocol establishing the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights—the arm of the AU charged with ensuring the protection of human and peoples’ rights on the continent. This fact suggests that arriving at a consensus decision to intervene in a member state is often problematic. Thus, at the level of the AU general assembly, when it comes to voting in favor of or against an intervention to avert a humanitarian crisis, it can be expected that the overwhelming majority of governance-deficient AU member states would oppose such an intervention, even if the need is glaring. This difficulty in achieving consensus partly explains why the AU has been less proactive in mitigating conflicts and also why its response to crisis situations has been sluggish. Thus, a more proactive conflict prevention, mitigation and management strategy necessarily involves early warning monitoring, which includes the ability to identify governance failures and systematically address them. A good point of start in upholding continental best practices in governance could be by imposing on its member states the requirement that presidential term limits must not exceed two terms of a maximum of seven years each.

Logistical issues linked to inadequate resources, lack of technical know-how and poor planning have also impaired the AU’s ability to respond in a timely manner in order to avert humanitarian crises. To be able to prevent civil wars, there is need for a credible assessment of war signals. Also, a built-in system for evaluating success and failure has to be designed into the intervention process. Further, part of the problem with intervention in African conflicts is poor planning: An inadequate assessment of what it takes to succeed in each particular intervention often leads to huge casualties and resentment from member states to support future initiatives. Poor planning is also evidenced in unrealistic timetables for intervention. Sometimes, it is the lack of a critical diagnosis of the root cause of a conflict that hinders effective intervention. Considering the U.N.’s superior resources and comparative advantage in early monitoring, evaluation and conflict mitigation in general, the AU stands to gain from continued collaboration with the U.N. Sudan and the DRC are clear cases of the benefits of such collaboration. Of course, these examples do not necessarily suggest that the U.N. should take the front role in crisis prevention in Africa. Rather, the AU must be at the forefront of this prevention by stengthening the role of its regional economic communities (RECs) in transparently providing early warning signals. With proper coordination and collaboration, the RECs have proven to be an effective channel of intervention in conflicts as was seen in the recent case of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) intervention in the Central African Republic.

The case for strengthening the AU’s conflict intervention framework is further buttressed by the fact that, in Africa, transnational corporations (TNCs) compete with state institutions in the economic, political and social spheres. With increasing globalization, TNCs with more and more power and influence may be problematic for individual African states to handle in isolation. For instance, TNCs have been big players in fueling conflicts in mineral-rich African countries. Also, a recent phenomenon that is yet to be acknowledged is the potential role of big TNCs’ tax haven practices in further weakening the governance capabilities of African states, which would in turn nurture future conflicts. For instance, an investigation headed by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has concluded that the practice of tax havens by TNCs is costing Africa $38 billion a year in lost revenue. Such activities clearly undermine the quality of life of African citizens, and therefore some structured intervention by the AU is warranted given the limited ability of individual African states to effectively address them.

In conclusion, although it is difficult to envision an AU where every domestic issue would be discussed and picked apart, there are certainly areas where some structured regional intervention is mandated. For this continental body to remain relevant, it will have to transparently restructure and strengthen its intervention framework to allow it to swiftly respond to humanitarian crises as well as enable it to cope with new challenges posed by a globalizing world economy.

Authors

Julius Agbor
Tatah Mentan

Image Source: © Joe Penney / Reuters

Marijuana Legalization: Early Lessons from Colorado and Washington

Beth Stone and Jonathan Rauch — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:16:00 -0400

Last November, in defiance of federal law, the states of Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana. What are the two states learning from implementation efforts so far?

On May 21, Governance Studies at Brookings and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) held a Congressional briefing and released the paper Q&A: Legal Marijuana in Colorado and Washington. The related event and paper are products of a partnership between Brookings and WOLA focused on the marijuana legalization policy debate.

The panelists were Jack Finlaw (chief legal counsel for Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper), Alison Holcomb (drug policy director, ACLU of Washington State), and Mark A. R. Kleiman (professor of public policy, UCLA). Congressmen Jared Polis (D-Colorado) and Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) provided additional remarks. John Walsh of WOLA moderated the discussion.

Panelists said the states confront challenges in implementing legal marijuana, especially with respect to the issues of taxation, quality control and underage use:

Holcomb mentioned that Washington, in particular, faces challenges because, unlike Colorado, it did not start with a well developed regulatory structure for medical marijuana, so it can’t “copy and paste” specific policies.
Finlaw emphasized the difficulties faced by marijuana retailers who, due to marijuana’s illegal status under federal laws, often cannot conduct their businesses through banks. They also cannot deduct businesses expenses from their federal taxes. Both problems make it harder for Colorado to regulate and tax the industry.
Holcomb agreed on the tax issue and said that there is more work to be done on amending the federal law, particularly as attorneys are actually advising some marijuana dealers not to pay taxes in order to avoid self-incrimination under federal law.
Kleiman discussed the testing of marijuana products for quality and composition. He said this process is very difficult because no one audits the testing firms, especially troubling because they insist, “We’re honest, but everyone else cheats.”
Kleiman also pointed out that the more careful a state tries to be in laying down and enforcing clear rules for marijuana production and distribution, the more vulnerable it is to federal intervention. He also warned that policy makers in this space should be wary of making promises they can’t keep, particularly when it comes to underage marijuana use.

Join Governance Studies at Brookings for an event next week, Wednesday, May 29, where Jonathan Rauch, E.J. Dionne, William Galston and others will speak on the politics of marijuana legalization and release a new study on marijuana, generational change and the future.

Watch the video of the event below »

Authors

Beth Stone
Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Nick Adams / Reuters

"Khomeini Would Have Been Disqualified:" Hashemi Rafsanjani's Supporters React to His Rejection

Mehrun Etebari — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:44:00 -0400

The move by the Guardian Council, announced yesterday, to deem former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani unqualified to run in the upcoming presidential election was accepted by some elements of Iranian political society – particularly among the more conservative elements of the Principlist camp – but came as a shock to many of his supporters, who tend to lie in the reformist and centrist segments of the Iranian political spectrum. Below are four translated excerpts of reactions from notable Rafsanjani supporters in Iran.

Tehran MP Ali Motahari, a frequent conservative critic of Ahmadinejad and a leading Principlist supporter of Rafsanjani’s candidacy, in an open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei appealing Rafsanjani’s disqualification:

“This disqualification, with was made based on the two unjustified reasons of physical incapacity and playing a role in the sedition of 1388 (2009), will inflict serious damage on the upcoming election, and will not contribute to correctly building the political epic you are seeking. I strongly believe that, if Imam Khomeini himself had, under a different name, participated in this election, even he would have been disqualified, for even he faced some criticism at times. Be informed that, with the entrance of Mr. Hashemi into the election, such enthusiasm erupted among the people and such hope entered their hearts for a reform of problems and for expedited progress of the nation, and that with his disqualification, naturally this enthusiasm and hope has disappeared.”

(For further coverage of this letter in English, visit Al Monitor.)

Elsewhere, Motahari mocked what he saw as the arbitrary nature of the “physical capacity” justification for Rafsanjani’s disqualification, telling Mehr News, “I propose that, to assess the physical capacity of Mr. Hashemi, there be a 200 meter race between him and Mr. Jalili [who reportedly lost part of a leg in the Iran-Iraq War] and a wrestling match between him and Mr. Haddad-Adel.”

Reformist political analyst and professor Sadegh Zibakalam, writing on his Facebook page:

“The atmosphere that took hold in our society after the registration of Mr. Hashemi was reminiscent of that of the 2^nd of Khordad, 1376 [the date on which Mohammad Khatami won a sweeping victory in the 1997 presidential election]. I was personally surprised by the extent of the celebrations and the wave of happiness and jubilation that erupted. In the week that followed, I saw many people, including academics, bazaaris, and others, who would say that they had planned not to vote but were doubting that decision with the arrival of Hashemi. I believe that Mr. Hashemi’s age is just an excuse and the true reason [for his disqualification] is the wave that occurred in society and caused deep worry to the Principlists. I believe that…we were heading for another 2^nd of Khordad. How did they wish to stop this wave? The wave was either leading to a 2^nd of Khordad of 1376 or to a 22^nd of Khordad of 1388 [the date of the disputed re-election of Ahmadinejad in 2009].”

Zahra Mostafavi, politician and daughter of Khomeini, in open letter of appeal to Khamenei:

“The very day that I heard the Imam [Khomeini] express his approval of yourself to be the leader – and I have always defended and expressed that view myself when necessary – I also learned of the approval of Mr. Hashemi’s qualification, for the Imam mentioned his name too, just after yours. Fortunately, and as you deserved, you were elected by the Assembly of Experts, and I did not see the need to bring up his comments on this matter. But unfortunately, today I see that the Guardian Council has taken it upon itself to disqualify [Hashemi] from the presidency. As a sister, I tell you that this action has no purpose but to insert distance in between two companions of the Imam and to neglect the delight and happiness the people on the street had found for the system.”

(For further coverage of her remarks in English, visit Al Monitor.)

Naimeh Eshraghi, Granddaughter of Khomeini and reformist activist, as quoted in remarks to the Tasnim news site

“Advanced age is not something for the Guardian Council to assess, as the law allows for people of that age to become candidates for the presidency. If the Guardian Council disqualified Hashemi, it should have a convincing reason to do this…and Mr. Hashemi will certainly react via legal means, although I do not believe that he will show objection in this matter. The solution to Mr. Hashemi’s disqualification by the Guardian Council is not to crowd the streets in protests and creating disturbances.”

Authors

Mehrun Etebari

Good Data: The Foundation of Open Government

Sally P. Paxton and George Ingram — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:36:00 -0400

It is not often one gets excited over a dry, hard-to-understand government memorandum, but the newly released executive order, Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information, and its accompanying memorandum are grounds for applause. The open data and transparency community, both in Washington and internationally, have been quick to give much deserved praise for this effort to make U.S. government data truly open and accessible.

Led by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, this policy makes open government and transparency core aspirations of the administration. It contains specific steps for agencies, including 1) making data readily accessible and useable, 2) using common, open standards; 3) modernizing information systems; 4) sharing best practices; and 5) reporting progress. As characterized by the Sunlight Foundation, the policy "signals a new era for open data in our government”.

This new policy applies to all executive agencies, with some exceptions for national security systems. For those of us focused on foreign assistance, however, the question is what it will mean for aid information – and more importantly – for improving our aid effectiveness?

The quick answer is quite a bit. If these approaches are adopted and implemented rigorously by U.S. agencies administering foreign assistance, it could pave the way for a revolution in the way aid information is shared and used throughout the delivery chain. Overall, this new policy strengthens the chances of the U.S. government delivering on its commitment to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which U.S. agencies are beginning to implement, but whose progress has been very slow. The Office of Management and Budget Bulletin, published in October 2012, made some important steps forward for U.S. reporting on foreign assistance. By comparison, the executive order is a leap forward. Why? Here are some highlights:

For the first time, data will have to be in “open and machine-readable formats”, such as XML, the format that IATI uses. This is hugely important for ensuring that the data is as accessible as possible for all potential users. To date, the U.S. has only published partial foreign assistance data from two U.S. agencies – the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Millennium Challenge Corporation – in the machine-readable IATI XML format, so the new executive order should provide a strong impetus to kick-start progress in other agencies. The importance of machine-readable formats will also be reflected in how donor agencies perform in this year’s 2013 Aid Transparency Index. Data that complies with the IATI standard – in machine-readable, XML format – will be deemed most transparent, as recognized by the U.S. commitment to this internationally comparable data standard.

Agencies now have to support “downstream” users and systems, paying attention to how our own systems maximize information interoperability and accessibility. This means that U.S. systems need to take into account other complementary initiatives, such as IATI. It is therefore a prime opportunity to build IATI compliance into our systems. This supports IATI’s aim of “publish once and use often” for different purposes and different users. So, when doing system upgrades – as recommended in a number of reports, including by the General Accountability Office – we need to be smart about maximizing our IT investments.

Deadlines matter and the executive order sets them. Transparency commitments, such as the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, are great concepts but their implementation has been problematic. Almost two and a half years have passed since the Dashboard’s creation and it is still largely incomplete. It is encouraging, therefore, to see the executive order include the development of a “Cross-Agency Priority” (CAP) goal to track implementation progress with metrics and milestones. This should build on the goals set by the U.S. implementation schedule for IATI by urging agencies to produce good quality, IATI-compliant data.

Best practices will be shared online. Such a repository of agencies’ tools and methods helps us all solve problems and be more effective and efficient. To date, 37 official international donor agencies have signed IATI and 22 have begun publishing to the IATI standard. The sharing of concerns, system limitations and data issues have already proven to be useful in easing and speeding the process of adaptation to open data for all participants. The same holds on the U.S. domestic front. With over 25 U.S. agencies involved in some aspect of administering foreign assistance, it makes sense to bring all agencies into a common learning space to foster “government-wide communities of practice”.

This new approach to open data is both visionary and detailed, and we hope the data starts flowing soon. In the spirit of this new policy, we should embrace IATI as best practice in open aid information and learn lessons from others who have piloted this initiative before us. The president has set the goal of U.S. leadership in open data. It is now the task of the aid transparency champions within the administration to see this through to fruition.

Authors

Sally P. Paxton
George Ingram

Image Source: © Jerry Lampen / Reuters

Suburban Poverty Profiles: Montgomery County, Maryland

Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:27:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Suburban Poverty in America, a new book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, explores the growth of suburban poverty and offers unique policy solutions for revitalizing struggling communities. Montgomery County, Maryland is one of the spotlight suburbs, whose plight has also been recognized by NPR. Learn more about the book and other suburban communities at confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org.

Montgomery County, Maryland— a suburban county adjacent to the nation’s capital— consistently ranks among the country’s wealthiest counties. In 2010, it ranked twelfth in the nation for median household income at more than $89,000. Yet in recent years, this million-person jurisdiction has grown increasingly demographically and economically diverse, changing the scope and scale of need among the county’s residents.

The 2000s, in particular, were a period of marked transformation in Montgomery County. Through the middle part of the decade, more jobs and people came to the county and the number of residents living in poverty dropped slightly. However, the disruption of the Great Recession more than erased those gains. No other county in the Washington region, including the District of Columbia, experienced increases in poverty of the same magnitude during the late 2000s.

Data Point: In the three years between 2007 and 2010, Montgomery County shed more than 37,000 jobs, dropping below its 2000 jobs total by 2010.

At the same time that the county faced unprecedented economic challenges, it also experienced a rapid demographic transformation. The 2010 census revealed that, for the first time, non-Hispanic whites constituted less than half (49 percent) of the county’s residents, down from 73 percent two decades earlier. And while immigrants accounted for fewer than one in five residents in 1990, in 2010 they represented almost one-third of the population and almost 40 percent of poor residents.

Data Point: Between 2007 and 2010, the number of residents living below the federal poverty line grew by two-thirds, or more than 30,000 people, pushing the poverty rate up by nearly 3 percentage points.

Rapid increases in poverty, coupled with the shifting demographics, often left communities in suburban Montgomery County struggling to play catch-up without the resources to match the growing and changing needs of their residents. In response, leaders across the county came together to make sure diverse communities in need do not miss out on critical safety net services because of lack of information or cultural barriers, described further in our local innovation profile of Montgomery County’s Neighborhood Opportunity Network (PDF).

Authors

Do Americans Know How Well Their State’s Schools Perform?

Martin R. West — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:00 -0400

Among the most common rationales offered for the Common Core State Standards project is to eliminate differences in the definition of student proficiency in core academic subjects across states. As is well known, the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) required states to test students annually in grades 3-8 (and once in high school), to report the share of students in each school performing at a proficient level in math and reading, and to intervene in schools not on track to achieve universal student proficiency by 2014. Yet it permitted states to define proficiency as they saw fit, producing wide variation in the expectations for student performance from one state to the next. While a few states, including several that had set performance standards prior to NCLB’s enactment, have maintained relatively demanding definitions of proficiency, most have been more lenient.

The differences in expectations for students across states are striking. In 2011, for example, Alabama reported that 77 percent of its 8^th grade students were proficient in math, while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered that same year indicated that just 20 percent of Alabama’s 8^th graders were proficient against NAEP standards. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, roughly the same share of 8^th graders achieved proficiency on the state test (52 percent) as did so on the NAEP (51 percent). In other words, Alabama deemed 25 percent more of its students proficient than did Massachusetts despite the fact that its students performed at markedly lower levels when evaluated against a common standard. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has gone so far as to accuse states like Alabama of “lying to children and parents” by setting low expectations for student performance.

There’s no doubt that the definition of proficiency in many states provides a misleading view of the extent to which students are prepared for success in college or careers. Yet whether the way in which states define proficiency matters for student achievement is far from clear. As Tom Loveless demonstrated in the 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education, the rigor of state proficiency definitions is largely unrelated to the level of student achievement on the NAEP across states. Similarly, Russ Whitehurst and Michelle Croft have shown that the quality of state standards (as assessed by third party organizations) is unrelated to NAEP scores, a finding confirmed by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Josh Goodman in an analysis that examined the effects of changes in the quality of standards within states over time. The lack of a systematic relationship between either the rigor or the quality of state standards and student achievement casts doubt on claims that higher and better standards under the Common Core will, in and of themselves, spur higher student achievement.

Less attention has been paid to whether the rigor of state standards matters for public perceptions of the quality of the schools in their states and local communities. If using a more lenient definition of proficiency leads citizens to evaluate their schools more favorably, then the advent of common expectations under the Common Core could alter public perceptions quite dramatically – perhaps increasing pressure for reform in regions of the country in which state proficiency definitions have provided an inflated view of student accomplishment. Is such an outcome likely?

To shed light on this question, I use data from two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012 under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. In each year, my colleagues and I asked a nationally representative sample of roughly 2,500 Americans to grade the public schools in their local community on a standard A-F scale. In the figures below, I examine whether the average grade the residents of each state assigned to their local schools is associated with the share of 2011 8^th graders deemed proficient by the state’s own test and by the NAEP. To the extent that differences in the definition of proficiency from one state to the next interfere with citizens’ ability to discern the performance of their local schools, we should see that the average grades citizens assign their schools hew more closely to proficiency rates as determined by state tests than by the NAEP.

The figures demonstrate the opposite. Figure 1a shows that average citizen ratings of local schools across states are only weakly correlated with 8^th grade proficiency rates on state tests. Although the relationship is statistically significant, it is quite small in size: a 10-percentage-point increase in the share of students deemed proficient is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of just 0.03 points on a GPA-style scale (i.e., A=4.0; F=0). Figure 1b, in contrast, reveals a markedly stronger relationship between citizen ratings and NAEP proficiency rates, with a 10-percentage-point increase in proficiency associated with an increase in citizen ratings of 0.17 grade points.

Figure 1a: Relationship between the Average Grades Assigned to Local Public Schools and Proficiency Rates on State Tests

Figure 1b: Relationship between the Average Grades Assigned to Local Public Schools and Proficiency Rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from the 2011 and 2012 EdNext-PEPG Surveys, state education agency websites, and the NAEP Data Explorer.

Notes: Average grades are reported on a standard GPA scale (i.e., A=4, F=0). State and NAEP proficiency rates are the average of 8^th grade proficiency rates in math and reading. The regression analyses used to generate fitted values are weighted by the inverse of each observation’s estimated variance to account for differences in the number of respondents from each state; unweighted regressions yield substantively similar results.

A simple regression of the average grades citizens assign to local schools in each state on NAEP and state proficiency rates simultaneously confirms that average grades (1) are strongly correlated with NAEP proficiency rates and (2) after controlling for NAEP proficiency rates, have no relationship whatsoever with proficiency rates on state tests. An increase in NAEP proficiency rates of 32 percentage points – the difference between Washington DC and Massachusetts – is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of more than a half of a letter grade. Holding NAEP scores constant, a difference in state test proficiency rates matters not at all.

In short, this evidence suggests that Americans have been wise enough to ignore the woefully misleading information about student proficiency rates generated by state testing systems when forming judgments about the quality of their state’s schools. This does not mean that they ignore state testing data altogether. Indeed, Matthew Chingos, Michael Henderson and I have shown that, within a given state, the grades citizens assign to specific elementary and middle schools are highly correlated with state proficiency rates in those schools. Nor does it necessarily imply that information from the NAEP has a causal effect on perceptions of school quality. The relationship between NAEP performance and the grades citizens assign their schools could easily be driven by other variables, such as the prosperity level of the state, that influence student achievement levels and could also influence school grades. Yet it does suggest that the implementation of the Common Core, by providing information about performance against a common standard, may have less of an impact on public perceptions of school quality than many have projected.

Authors

Martin R. West

Image Source: © Jim Young / Reuters

Obama’s National Security Speech and Pakistan

Bruce Riedel — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:22:00 -0400

On Thursday, President Obama plans to deliver a speech on national security and counterterrorism issues. The speech comes at a particularly awkward time in Pakistan, the epicenter of the global jihad for more than a decade. Nawaz Sharif has just been elected for an unprecedented third term in a nation extremely unhappy with America's counterterrorism policies, especially the drone war fought in its skies from bases in Afghanistan.

President Obama faces the challenge of defending his policies and explaining why they are needed. He must do this without further alienating an angry Pakistan and its newly elected civilian government which is struggling to find its own way to deal with the terror Frankenstein that threatens the world and Pakistan itself. It may be mission impossible. Despite years of drone attacks and the death of Osama bin Laden, Pakistan remains the base for the top three most wanted terrorists on the U.S. Most Wanted list: al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, Taliban chief Mullah Omar and Lashkar e Tayyiba (LeT) boss Hafez Saeed.

In fact, Omar and Saeed enjoy the patronship and protection of Pakistan's army. More global terror plots have originated in Pakistan than anywhere else since 9/11. Without the drones, there would be little or no pressure on the terror infrastructure in Pakistan. Despite over $25 billion in American economic and military aid since 9/11, the Pakistani authorities cannot be relied on to fight the danger posed by al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, or LeT. Obama recognized that fact when he sent the SEALs to kill bin Laden without telling any Pakistani official that we had found him hiding inside the highly secure Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

But Pakistan is also a victim of the terror monster it has coddled for decades. Over 45,000 Pakistanis have died in terror-related violence since 9/11, and dozens more died in the election campaign just ended. Sharif has pledged to seek a political solution to the violence. He has campaigned against the drones and faces a national consensus that wants them to end. His main opponent Imran Khan promised to shoot them down if elected (probably with American supplied F-16s).

Obama significantly expanded drone attacks in 2009 and many dangerous terrorists have been eliminated by them. The price has been to further alienate the Pakistani people. His speech this Thursday is not likely to please many in Pakistan. The already very difficult U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship is at a crucial juncture with the first ever transition from one elected Pakistani civilian government to another in the country's history after a full term in office. Reconciling our counter-terror mission with our interest in promoting democracy in Pakistan will not be easy. If it is impossible, then the fate of U.S. relations with the most dangerous country in the world is headed toward an even more deadly outcome.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Image Source: © Larry Downing / Reuters

Iran's Guardians Versus The 'Grey Eminence'

Suzanne Maloney — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:06:00 -0400

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has found his field of dreams, with Tuesday's announcement of the list of eight candidates who secured approval to run in Iran’s upcoming presidential election. The most remarkable aspect about the list was the two names that were missing: those of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a two-term former president and one of the founders of the revolutionary state, and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose infamy within Iran almost eclipses that of his primary patron, current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The decision probably paves the way for an anodyne campaign that displays— with one key exception— mindless deference to the ideological strictures of Khamenei’s rule.

The announcement came near nightfall in Tehran, where rainy weather as well as the preemptive deployment of riot police and an internet slowdown helped ensure that the news was digested quietly. While it is improbable that the candidate list itself could spark street riots, today’s Islamic Republic takes no chances. The security measures reflected the overabundance of caution that has characterized Iran’s political environment since the post-election unrest of 2009, when an unexpectedly exuberant reaction to a regime stalwart persuaded the Supreme Leader to effectively dispense with the pretense of a credible vote-count and declare victory for his then-favored son, Ahmadinejad.

Ever the pragmatist, Rafsanjani navigated that crisis warily, and only ever advocated a truce with the opposition Green Movement that emerged briefly in its wake. Still, the prospective candidacy of a politician whom a dissident once dubbed the 'Grey Eminence' for his Machiavellian tendencies buoyed the hopes of the vestiges of the Green Movement and of the reformists who had preceded them. That development surely helped seal his fate for this ballot. Rafsanjani’s rejection provoked some surprise and plenty of cynicism, as the figment of the regime’s adherence to procedural correctness was abandoned for a wholesale embrace of the primacy of absolute obedience.

However absurd the Islamic Republic’s vetting process has been in the past – and more than two dozen elections over the course of 34 years have provided plenty of fodder – the suggestion that a man who has been at the apex of power in the Islamic Republic since its inception no longer meets its constitutional standards for the presidency carries the farce to a new level. Rafsanjani sits on the Assembly of Experts, which appoints Iran’s supreme leader, and leads its Expediency Council, which adjudicates challenges to proposed legislation. The determination that he is unfit for the presidency inevitably calls into question the credibility of these other institutions. The other rationale on offer— the aspersions on Rafsanjani’s advanced age (78) that were invoked by a number of conservative power brokers— is similarly insupportable. The Islamic Republic is, after all, a clerical gerontocracy. Rafsanjani may be closing in on 80, but he cuts a relatively spry figure among the Iranian political establishment, including by comparison with its late founder who seized power as a septuagenarian.

Rafsanjani's rejection suggests that the Supreme Leader— along with his key constituencies in the traditional clergy and the Revolutionary Guard— saw Rafsanjani’s electoral exclusion as a lesser threat than his inclusion. Apparently they calculated that his prospects for animate a challenge to the system as a candidate outweighed the possibility that his rejection would alienate the establishment or provoke popular unrest. For a regime that is increasingly incapable of tolerating mass political engagement, it was probably a judicious call.

Iranians are watching Rafsanjani’s next step closely. The Iranian press and social media are abuzz with reports: one of his sons asserts that he would not challenge disqualification, while his daughter notes that he rejected pressure to withdraw his candidacy quietly. The former president has apparently retreated to Qom, a move that may invoke powerful symbolism from Iranian history, when protestors against an unjust monarch took sanctuary in Qom. However, it remains unclear whether Rafsanjani’s retreat is intended to bolster his case with support from the country’s powerful seminaries, or intended to lick his wounds and spare his dignity.

The Rafsanjani saga is spellbinding, but it is possible to make too much of his rejection. Over the past 10 days, I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the emerging Rafsanjani-as-Iranian-savior meme for a couple of reasons. First, it’s simply impossible to know what if any popular mandate Rafsanjani could command. After all, his last successful bid for elective office took place 20 years ago, a time that it is at most a hazy memory for the majority of Iran’s disproportionately young population. Since that time, he lost two subsequent attempts at the ballot box, a 2000 parliamentary campaign and the 2005 run against Ahmadinejad for the presidency.

His losses reflected his profoundly mixed reputation among ordinary Iranians, if my own anecdotal experience is any guide. The image of the former president as an infallible architect of economic reform is in fact greatly exaggerated. He did spearhead the post-war reconstruction program against considerable domestic opposition, but his policies also instigated a destabilizing debt crisis and spiraling inflation. Rafsanjani’s reputation for personal enrichment, the ascendance of his sons and daughters and nephew, and the culture of crony capitalism that emerged during his tenure left deep resentments among ordinary Iranians whose share of the post-war spoils typically did not expand.

And for all the outrage over his exclusion, it’s worth recalling that Rafsanjani knows a thing or two about rigging elections. In his first election to the presidency in 1989, he ran virtually uncontested; the Council of Guardians rejected all but one of the other 80 prospective candidates who applied. His opponent, a former agriculture minister and parliamentarian, was perceived at the time as merely “a name to fill out the ballot sheet,” who chivalrously articulated no opposing views in helping Rafsanjani cruise to a margin of 94 percent of the vote. His 1993 reelection was only mildly more competitive with three rivals approved out of 128 aspirants. In the interim, Rafsanjani helped engineer the culling of leftist candidates from the 1992 parliamentary elections on the grounds that they opposed his economic reforms.

In Iran, what goes around tends to come around, and the curtains probably closed on Rafsanjani’s opportunity to lead the Islamic Republic out of its ideological wilderness years or even decades ago. He will remain a force to be reckoned with in the arena, most notably through his longstanding ally Hassan Rouhani, whose bid to run managed to pass the Guardians’ Council scrutiny. Rouhani has nowhere near the name recognition of Rafsanjani, but he is a political figure of some stature and reputed intellect, who was one of the earliest and most vocal establishment critics of Ahmadinejad. He negotiated Iran’s short-lived suspension of uranium enrichment with the Europeans in 2004, and even in his incipient presidential campaign he has had the audacity to highlight the plight of Iran's political prisoners. A Rouhani win seems beyond improbable at this stage, but his approval offers a silver lining for Iran’s dispirited reformists mourning the loss of Hashemi Rafsanjani.

While the Rafsanjani furor is likely to deflate over the course of the campaign, the rejection of Ahmadinejad’s protégé, Mashaei, may well escalate before it is over. The news of Mashaei’s rejection seemed entirely foreordained; no one other than President Ahmadinejad himself anticipated that the Guardians' Council would allow the man dubbed the leader of a 'deviant current,' intent on subverting the revolutionary system and prone to blasphemy, to run for the country's second highest office. Ahmadinejad’s other allies had already withdrawn from the campaign, ostensibly to augment Mashaei’s chances, and now the mercurial president has literally no horse in the race and arguably no stake in keeping faith with the political establishment intent on eliminating him.

The president and his protégé are not without recourse; they have a claim on some residual popular base and a burgeoning political machinery. And most importantly, Ahmadinejad has already proven he is unencumbered by a sense of fidelity to the established rules of the Islamic Republic; among his other leverage, he has already threatened to reveal damaging information about the scope of his contested victory in 2009 in order to undermine the system. As a result, the most compelling dimension of Iran’s 2013 presidential elections may not be which candidate wins the office, but rather how the incumbent leaves the office.

Over the course of upcoming days, check back with Iran @ Saban for more on Mashaei, Rafsanjani and the ongoing fallout from the latest news. We’ll weigh in on the candidates who were approved, most notably nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili who has emerged as the analytical community’s pick for early front-runner. And we want to encourage you to join the conversation; email your thoughts on the candidate list and all the other Iran news of the day to IranAtSaban@brookings.edu, and we’ll post comments, questions and comebacks as they trickle in.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

What is Iran's Nuclear Red Line?

Steven Pifer — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:05:00 -0400

Tehran’s denials and protestations to the contrary, its nuclear ambitions clearly go beyond peaceful, civilian purposes. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is soon expected to issue a report stating that Iran has increased its capacity to enrich uranium but is limiting the most worrisome activity. This raises the question of how far Iran wishes to proceed down the nuclear path. The answer is important, as there is an important distinction between an Iran that has assembled (and perhaps tested) a nuclear weapon, and an Iran that has a latent nuclear capability but does not take the final step of pulling the pieces together to have a nuclear weapon.

The short answer to the question now is that we do not know. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Iran wishes to have a nuclear weapons option but has not yet decided whether to build a bomb.

Concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions has grown as it has enriched uranium at facilities at Natanz and Fordow, facilities about which Tehran did not inform the IAEA until others revealed them. The Iranians conduct uranium enrichment operations to 3.5 percent, which they say they need for fuel rods for nuclear power reactors, despite the fact that Russia has contracted to sell Iran the fuel rods that it needs for its sole power reactor at Bushehr. More troublesome, Iran also enriches to 20 percent. The Iranian government claims that it needs 20 percent enriched uranium for fuel for the Tehran research reactor, though it is not clear that Iran has the technical capability to produce fuel rods for that reactor.

Although 20 percent qualifies as “highly-enriched uranium,” weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90 percent or greater. Once uranium has been enriched to 20 percent, it is much of the way to 90 percent. Interestingly, while enriching to 20 percent, Iran has taken some of the resulting uranium gas (referred to as uranium hexafluoride) and converted it to uranium oxide, a solid powder. Iran thus has kept its stock of uranium hexafluoride enriched to 20 percent below the amount that, if enriched to 90 percent, would suffice for a nuclear bomb. Some see that as a signal that Tehran is sensitive to Western concerns. While the process of converting uranium hexafluoride to uranium oxide can be reversed, it takes time.

Of course, Iran must do more than have fissile material. Can it construct a deliverable nuclear weapon? Building a “gun-type” bomb is relatively simple (to the extent that the physics of nuclear weapons can be called simple). U.S. scientists in 1945 were so confident of the design for the bomb used on Hiroshima that they did not bother to test it. But a gun-type weapon would be large and bulky, probably weighing on the order of five tons.

Building a sophisticated weapon that could fit in a ballistic missile warhead—the delivery means of choice—poses a more demanding technical task. The weapon needs to be small and durable enough to withstand the dynamic and thermal stresses of ballistic flight. While the IAEA has questions about past Iranian weaponization activities, the U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Iran in 2003 halted its nuclear weapons program (PDF), which it defined as weaponization work as well as enrichment.

As for the delivery system, Iran has an inventory of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The Sajjil-2, currently under development, has an estimated range of 2200 kilometers. That puts the Gulf states, Israel and southeastern Europe in range, but Iran still has a long way to go before it could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States.

So Iran has made varying degrees of progress down the tracks—enrichment, weaponization and delivery system—needed to have a viable nuclear weapon. How far will it proceed?

One option is to build a bomb and, to show the world its nuclear prowess, conduct a test. But that option poses real risks for the Iranian government. It would make Iran even more of a nuclear pariah and increase its international isolation. It would provoke huge concern in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, perhaps leading the Saudis—and others such as Egypt and Turkey—to pursue their own nuclear weapons programs. And it would indisputably cross the red lines that Jerusalem and Washington have drawn.

The second option is that Iran develops its enrichment, weaponization and missile technologies so that it has a latent nuclear weapons capability but stops short of putting the pieces together. In this option, Tehran might continue to limit its stock of uranium hexafluoride enriched to 20 percent by converting some to uranium oxide. Assuming that Iran does not have a covert enrichment facility (something Western intelligence services undoubtedly spend considerable time and effort looking for), we would know of an Iranian decision to enrich its uranium to weapons-grade, as the IAEA monitors its facilities at Natanz and Fordow. While experts differ regarding how much alert time the world would have, there would be tactical warning—currently measured in months—of a decision by Tehran to produce weapons-grade uranium.

The distinction between these two options is important. While no one, particularly Israel, would be comfortable with a latent Iranian nuclear capability, that is vastly preferable to an Iran with even a small stockpile of nuclear weapons. It would pose less of a threat to the nuclear non-proliferation regime. It would leave time for international sanctions to intensify their impact on the Iranian economy and perhaps affect the calculations in Tehran. And it would give the UN Security Council Permanent Five plus Germany time to explore whether the Iranian government is prepared to consider a negotiated settlement that satisfies international concerns.

Authors

Steven Pifer

Barack Obama and China's Xi Jinping to Meet In California

Richard C. Bush III — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:37:00 -0400

Yesterday, the White House announced that President Obama will meet with China’s President Xi Jinping on June 7-8 in California. The announcement said that the two will hold “in-depth discussions on a wide range of bilateral, regional and global issues, . . . review progress and challenges in U.S.-China relations over the past four years and discuss ways to enhance cooperation, while constructively managing our differences, in the years ahead.”

Yet the purpose of this meeting is not to bargain or to solve specific problems, but to set a tone and create a sense of shared fate between the two leaders by allowing Obama and Xi to firmly establish a good personal relationship, a precondition for the successful conduct of their bilateral relations. The two got a start on that task last February, when Xi visited Washington as China’s vice-president. Two days in California allows both more time and an informal environment for each to talk about his domestic challenges and visions for the future, about his country’s role in the international system and how US-China relations fits with all of this.

Such an interchange is particularly important because each president sits atop a complex and sprawling governmental system that is not easy to monitor or control. This is one of the reasons for recent frictions between the two countries. Their California encounter meeting provides Xi and Obama the opportunity to identify and enlarge the areas of overlap in the interests of their two countries, and then, when they return to their capitals, to set priorities in their systems accordingly. Having seen the value of creating this opportunity, they should seize it.

Authors

Richard C. Bush III

America and Iran: Wrestling with Ghosts

Suzanne Maloney — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:56:00 -0400

One of the very few feel-good stories in the recent history of U.S.-Iranian relations came to an unexpectedly abrupt end last week, when Iranian authorities cut short a series of wrestling exhibition matches in the United States. The first round, held in New York last Wednesday, drew large, boisterous crowds and buoyant media coverage, helping to animate a three-nation campaign (with Russia) to sustain wrestling as an Olympic sport and raise funds for youth wrestling programs. No sooner had the applause in New York died down, however, than Tehran opted to ditch a planned Los Angeles stop on the tour, and the Iranian wrestlers quickly returned to Tehran on Saturday.

So far, the rationale for the decision seems vague, and there are discrepancies between the statement of the exhibition’s American sponsor, USA Wrestling, and the official Iranian press agency's rendition. News reports referenced Iranian concerns about security provisions, and rumors circulated of anticipated protests by members of the large Iranian diaspora living in Southern California. Whatever the explanation, the hasty truncation of the American-Iranian wrestling tour is unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. For all sunny sentiments associated with cultural diplomacy, managing the political and logistical complexities of people-to-people exchanges between such longstanding adversaries can be fraught with potential minefields.

I should know; as a graduate student in the late 1990s, I participated in several of the first academic exchange programs between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. And I experienced first-hand the excitement as well as the issues that go along with such efforts. Thanks to funding from both governments and the coordination and contacts of the American Institute for Iranian Studies, I was able to study Persian at the Dehkhoda Institute in Tehran, travel widely throughout the country, and conduct research for my doctoral dissertation on Iran's Foundation for the Oppressed and other parastatal organizations. Fumbling my way around a country that I had studied extensively but never visited was an amazing experience. Iranians treated me and my fellow American interlopers with the hospitality for which the country rightly used to be legendary and the curiosity that inevitably accompanies three decades of official estrangement.

However, I also came to appreciate how precarious these enterprises can be. The problem with people-to-people diplomacy is, well, the people. Amateur ambassadors can be mighty difficult to manage, particularly with the limited oversight of what are ultimately low-priority programs. Inserting a gaggle of grad students, or wrestlers or any of the other professional groups that have sought to overcome official estrangement through bilateral exchanges, creates endless opportunities for normal human interactions to explode into diplomatic incidents. I'll never forget the combination of exhaustion and anxiety on the face of the one of the many Iranian handlers when a few Americans unexpectedly found ourselves in the midst of a gun battle between police and drug runners in the southeastern city of Kerman. We had arrived in Iran just as the regime unleashed its repression of the July 1999 student protests, and now this real-time brush with the country's low-intensity drug war was just the kind of mess that could cost our minder his job and his future. "I am having a nervous breakdown," he confessed as he alternated between tea and chain smoking.

I suspect that there are a number of program officers within the State Department who can sympathize. During the Bush Administration's second term, then-Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns spurred a good-faith effort to expand educational and cultural exchanges with Iran. Artists, doctors, athletes and scientists from Iran crisscrossed America, sharing expertise and experience in subjects as diverse as earthquake science and engineering and AIDS treatment and education. Publicly, the programs often appeared to be blazingly successful in their stated goal of enhancing mutual understanding between Americans and Iranians. Behind the scenes, however, the story was often more complicated, thanks to Tehran’s paranoid conviction that these innocuous opportunities were the leading edge of a Washington-sponsored ‘soft revolution.’ A number of Iranians who participated in these exchanges found their passports seized or their professional advancement threatened; some feared returning home, and several were ultimately imprisoned after permitting their stories to be featured prominently in a major American newspaper.

I believe deeply in the mission and purpose of people-to-people exchanges. What little I understand about contemporary Iranian politics is grounded in the months I spent there over the course of 1998 and 1999, as well as the skills, contacts, and subsequent opportunities to visit Iran that I acquired as a direct result of that early immersion. Surely, the benefits for my fellow American participants— as well as the hundreds of Iranians who have been able to interact with their professional counterparts in the United States— have been at least as meaningful.

Still, people-to-people diplomacy is no substitute for official diplomacy, and it frequently offers as much complication as illumination. Back in 1999, my fretful Iranian minder won an early reprieve when our exchange program was unexpectedly curtailed upon the order of the State Department. A call from the Swiss ambassador, whose embassy serves as the protecting power of Americans in the absence of official relations, initiated a flurry of bureaucratic maneuvers to hasten our departure, and a few days later we were gone. I subsequently heard a range of rumors explaining the episode, including one focused around the efforts of the Clinton administration to establish back-channel cooperation with then-President Mohammad Khatami on counterterrorism efforts. Whatever the truth, nothing ever came of that initiative, and fourteen years later, the wrestlers' unfortunately early exit underscores the steep obstacles that remain in bridging the American-Iranian divide.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

Why Iran's Presidential Election Matters

Suzanne Maloney — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:26:00 -0400

In conversations with policymakers, journalists and analysts about the upcoming Iranian presidential elections, one question looms: does it even matter? Iran is, after all, an Islamic theocracy, a state in which the supreme leader is the ultimate decision-maker and elections are heavily stage-managed from start to finish. The president’s powers are explicitly limited, and whatever sense of electoral unpredictability that may have characterized Iran in the past— for example, in 1997, when a reformist cleric upset the heavily-favored front-runner— appeared to have ended with the contested 2009 reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Millions of Iranians outraged by the unusual speed and dubious margin of Ahmadinejad’s ostensible victory took to the streets chanting “where is my vote?” This violence that greeted this appeal, and the show trials and other Stalinist tactics that followed in its wake, seemed to suggest that Iran's quirky system had devolved to a more banal authoritarianism, where polls serve as mere pageants and institutions are unabashedly manipulated.

It would be tempting, then, to dismiss the election scheduled for June 14 as mere window-dressing or to disregard the brewing antagonisms within Iran’s political establishment as irrelevant. This would be a mistake, however, and yet another misreading of Iran’s complicated domestic dynamics. Don’t get me wrong— I don’t mean to suggest that the election will bear any resemblance to a truly democratic enterprise; even in the best of times, the Islamic Republic fell far short of meeting international standards for free and fair elections. However, while the outcome will be engineered, the element of improvisation is real, and the outcome of this latest twist in the thirty-four year power struggle within Iran will have significant implications for the future of the country and its role in the world.

If the past eight years of Ahmadinejad’s antics have taught us nothing else, they have demonstrated over and over again that Iran’s presidency matters. Despite its electoral illegitimacy, its institutional constraints, and the assiduous efforts of a system built around a divine mandate, the office of the presidency has emerged as one with real power to shape the context for domestic and foreign policy. The post exerts considerable authority over the Iranian budget, the framework for internal political activities, the social and cultural atmosphere, and even the most sensitive aspects of Iran’s security policies. Whoever assumes the office in August of this year will find himself near the apex of power, at a time of unprecedented external pressure and at the cusp of generational change within the Iranian regime. For this reason, the election and its outcome will have enormous sway over the future course of the Islamic Republic.

To appreciate the significance of the much-maligned Iranian presidency, simply consider the track records of its most recent occupants. During his two terms in office (1997-2005), reformist president Mohammad Khatami managed to curb some of the worst abuses of Iran’s own citizens and establish new avenues for political participation and speech. His tenure attracted foreign investment to Iran, unified its exchange rate, and established an oil stabilization fund to promote responsible economic stewardship. He repaired Iran’s relationships with much of the world, and even helped push through a multi-year suspension of the most worrisome aspects of its nuclear program.

It was not an unadulterated success by any stretch of the imagination; Khatami’s ambitions for change were inherently limited by his steadfast loyalty to the theocratic system and many of its most problematic policies, and even his mild reforms were thwarted at every turn by hardliners’ opposition. Still, compare those years to the two terms of his successor, who oversaw a crackdown against technocrats and the media, squandered an epic boom in oil revenues, and indulged in hate speech that helped alienate the world and isolate his country. It’s clear that Iranians as well as the international community were better served by Khatami’s halting moderation than by Ahmadinejad’s impetuous antagonisms.

It’s almost certain that the June election won’t produce a shocking upset or a reformist victory, and that whoever manages to secure the presidency this time around will offer continuity on the issues that matter most to Washington, particularly the nuclear issue. However, elections— even ones that are heavily rigged— represent critical junctures in the lifecycle of political systems, and in Iran they have repeatedly sent the revolutionary system careening in new directions. At times, these changes in course were deliberate, as in 1989 when Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani ran virtually unopposed in order to spearhead the country’s post-war reconstruction. At other times, the shifts have been wholly unanticipated, such as the advent of the reform movement or even Ahmadinejad himself, whose mid-term transformation from the Supreme Leader’s acolyte to his whipping boy has given the Iranian political establishment whiplash.

Iran’s revolution was the product of a deeply divided coalition that agreed on little beyond their opposition to the Shah, and throughout its history, the Islamic Republic has experienced a intense, evolving competition for influence. That contest remains as dynamic as ever, and the election will offer an opportunity for external observers to gauge the state of play. For those within the system, the campaign provides endless openings for ambitious contenders and rival factions to position themselves for future influence and reframe Iran’s political climate, just as Khatami and Ahmadinejad did. The election will help determine what becomes of a regime stalwart, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; the future prospects of the quixotic and enterpreneurial Ahmadinejad; and the rise or fall of a curious array of aspiring Iranian leaders.

And because the legacy of the revolution and Iran’s century-old struggle for representative rule has made popular participation incumbent even upon its theocracy, the election will mobilize millions of Iranians in ways that often prove difficult to control, even with a well-orchestrated repression. Over the course of the forthcoming weeks, we’ll be watching all these factors closely and seeking to interpret what the campaign and its outcome mean for Iran’s domestic evolution and its ongoing conflicts with the international community.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

Post-2015 Focus on Sustainable Development: How Education and Learning Can Play a Role

Allison Anderson — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:12:00 -0400

While the theme of the third meeting of the High-Level Panel on Post-2015 in Bali was on global partnerships, the meeting’s communiqué set up the handover from the high-level panel to the intergovernmental Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals (OWG). The communiqué calls for “a single and coherent post-2015 development agenda that integrates economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability”, and with good reason since the two development frameworks for post-2015—poverty alleviation and sustainable development—are not separate. Rather, they are interlinked challenges that need to inform each other and ultimately must be addressed together in one framework.

Moreover, the role of education and equitable learning in achieving sustainable development needs to figure prominently in these discussions. Sustainable development cannot be attained without education that provides learners with 21st century skills that equip them for healthy, safe, and productive lives, while also safeguarding the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

During the first three OWG meetings in March and April, participants shared their initial views on the relationship between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the key lessons from the MDGs. While it is still unclear how the OWG process relates to the post-MDG process, Co-Chair Macharia Kamau, the permanent representative of Kenya, did in fact say that the two processes are linked. According to Kamau, “The MDGs are the point of departure, while the SDGs are the destination.” It is critical that OWG members connect these two processes together, not only to avoid fragmentation of efforts at national and global levels, but also because long-term sustained poverty eradication is only possible in the context of sustainable development. As such, Paula Caballero, advisor to Colombian foreign affairs minister, told the OWG that the new agenda must reflect the deep inter-linkages between issues like education and productive lives, and have measureable targets that allow for differentiation between national contexts. This statement is significant as it mirrors discussions that are currently going on within the global education community. These discussions and ideas will also likely continue in the June OWG meeting on employment and decent work for all, social protection, youth and education.

Learning for Sustainable Development

UNESCO and UNICEF have an opportunity to make clear the linkages between education, poverty reduction and sustainable development since they are UN agencies responsible for providing an issues brief on education to the OWG. Education will also be discussed at the June meeting and at upcoming OWG sessions on sustainable and inclusive economic growth (November 25-27), sustainable consumption and production, climate change, disaster risk reduction, conflict peace and security (January 6-10, 2014), and promoting equality, including social equality and women’s empowerment (February 3-7, 2014).

In fact, education can assist in the process of shifting the global demand away from resource- and energy-intensive commodities and toward greener products and technologies, sustainable lifestyles and less pollution. Restructuring toward a green economy will require transferable skills, ones that are not necessary linked to specific occupations. Thinking critically, solving problems, collaborating and managing risks and uncertainty are core competencies that are critical for employment in a green economy and living together peacefully in a sustainable society. Moreover, since the effects of climate change are already being felt, the education sector can also play a critical role in teaching relevant skills for successful climate change adaptation and mitigation. Teaching and learning these 21st century skills should integrate environmental education, climate change and scientific literacy, disaster risk reduction and preparedness, and education for sustainable lifestyles and consumption.

In tandem with efforts to build 21st century skills, including skills related to sustainable development, the education community is working to develop measures that benchmark and motivate student learning. While currently there is no one global measure for 21st century skills, the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) is working to fill this gap by making recommendations for metrics around an adaptable, flexible skill set, such as collaborative problem solving, environmental awareness and social responsibility.

In addition to the discussions within the OWG, there is a current opportunity to input into the draft report of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network: An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development. This draft report puts forward 10 proposals for future Sustainable Development Goals, one of which is on education. The document will feed into the UN Secretary General’s report on the SDGs later this year. The draft is open for comments and consultation until May 22.

Authors

Allison Anderson

Welcome to Iran @ Saban

Suzanne Maloney — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:30:00 -0400

Welcome and khosh amadid!

Welcome to Iran @ Saban, a new blog featuring commentary and analysis on the array of issues related to Iran by scholars at the Brookings Institution. It takes only a quick scan of the headlines each day to appreciate the significance of Iran to American national interests and international security, and the variety and complexity of the issues and actors at stake. Through an intense focus on all things Iran, we hope to advance a better understanding of the internal dynamics of the Islamic Republic and promote effective international strategies for dealing with the challenges its policies pose.

We’ve timed our kick-off to coincide with the upcoming Iranian presidential election, in hopes of enriching the discussion that has already emerged around the ballot. As current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares to leave office, Iran's internal power struggles will enter a new phase. From now through the vote on June 14^th and presumably well beyond, we’ll closely follow the twists and turns of Iran’s frequently unexpected electoral dynamics and consider what the future may bring for Iran. This discussion will delve into the major issues confronting Tehran today, especially the economic crisis and the impact of sanctions.

Although the electoral interplay will consume a great deal of attention in the next few weeks, the focus of the blog will extend well beyond the events of the election and Iran's domestic dramas. We will be tackling Iran’s approach to the region and the world, its relationship with established and emerging powers, and the strategies and tactics of various players, including the United States, toward Tehran. Inevitably, we’ll spend a lot of time examining the nuclear issue, starting with the prospects for revitalizing the stalled negotiations between Tehran and the international community and discussions around alternative approaches if dialogue fails to produce a diplomatic resolution of Iran's nuclear ambitions. However, the sense of urgency surrounding the nuclear issue has narrowed the American debate on Iran in recent years, problematically in my opinion. For that reason, watch the space for a robust discussion of the range of issues and threats related to Iran, including terrorism, human rights, the peace process and the Syrian civil war, the rise of new regional and global powers, and the impact of technology and changes in energy markets on Iranian politics and the policy options of the international community.

Let me also say a few words about what this blog won’t be: this won’t be a vehicle for lobbying for or against any particular point of view. This blog will be infused with opinions – various and variegated – but in keeping with the Brookings’ mission, our discussions here on the blog will remain grounded in the ideals of intellectual objectivity, rigorous policy-relevant analysis, and civil debate. In that respect, we hope to integrate some of our longer form scholarship into the blog, by featuring previews of forthcoming publications related to Iran and initating conversations surrounding our ongoing research projects.

I also want to underscore that this will not be a solo venture. At the outset, my name may recur disproportionately, as the person charged with wrangling the blog’s content and as one of the few scholars who has the luxury of obsessing almost exclusively about Iran. However, Iran invokes a diverse and thorny set of foreign policy issues and concerns, and many of my Brookings scholars are at the forefront of research and writing on areas relevant to the Iranian challenge. We’ll try to draw in experts on a range of different regions, including China, Europe, and India as well as the scholars in our Doha office, and functional areas of expertise, such as energy, intelligence, and nonproliferation, and the site will feature the work of a fantastic team of Brookings staff providing with research and media support. As visitors to this site will soon appreciate, the whole of Brookings' work on Iran is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to close this opening with an overture: we want to extend the debate on Iran beyond the walls of Brookings, and we encourage you to join the conversation via email to IranAtSaban@brookings.edu We’ll also be on Twitter (via, among others, @maloneysuzanne) and engaging through a variety of other media.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney