In this book I have advanced the argument that political aid is both inherently political and deeply paradoxical; and that people involved in every sector of democracy promotion are intensely aware of the politics and the paradoxes.

By definition political aid interjects external symbolic, material, and institutional resources into national (and, in the Middle East, pan-Arab) arenas. If all politics involves competition over scarce resources, then political aid naturally stimulates controversy and rivalries. Inevitably resources flow to selected organizations, agents, and causes, but not others. Donors’ provision of expertise, technology, publicity, or funds to executive, judicial, legislative, or civic institutions affects the balance of power between and within those bodies. Even if the idea is that international agencies are supporting ‘transitions to democracy’ or ‘women’s empowerment,’ projects entail complex forms of cooperation and conflict. Practitioners and participants, including many cited here, realize the banalities of interagency and office politics on a commonplace level. This is ‘low’ politics.

Democracy promotion also reflects the ‘high’ politics of the international arena where the United States and European powers engage and ally with some Arab regimes and sometimes intervene militarily and/or diplomatically directly to influence outcomes. Certainly military and development assistance, and also political aid, reflect these power politics. However much Western advocates try to place democracy promotion on the altruistic end of the realism-idealism debate, many in the Arab world find connections to the colonial past and imperial present. Moreover as recounted in these chapters client governments variously sought to capitalize on political aid or made a big show of resisting ‘foreign interference.’ In many instances popular forces, counter-elites, and rights defenders sought to distance themselves from donor agencies and agendas. In all these ways, political aid was politicized.

Jackbooted security forces raided the offices of foreign and Egyptian political think tanks on December 29, 2011, confiscating computers, records, cell phones, maps, documents, and cash. Five of the organizations targeted were overseas branches of the federally funded quasi-non-governmental National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI), the International Center for Journalists, Freedom House, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The others were locally headquartered professional advocacy organizations, including the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and the Arab Center for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. The Minister of International Cooperation, Fayza Aboulnaga, often nicknamed “the iron lady,” and a “Mubarak holdover,” had asked prosecutors to investigate what foreign democracy brokers were up to, how Egyptian organizations received foreign aid, and whether they all had official authorization.

This news event was spun in various directions. That evening, Dawlat Soulam, a bilingual Egyptian-American, gave a scathing in-depth interview on a Channel 2 TV program called The Truth (al-Haqiqah) about why she and six colleagues had already resigned their jobs at IRI. She complained of blatant anti-Islamist bias in party training, CIA officers posing as democracy experts, grant-making according to ulterior motives, deliberate provocation of sectarian tensions, and anti-Egyptian prejudices expressed by drunken consultants at after-hours expatriate social gatherings. Soulam’s accusations fed tales in Cairo’s state-run media and unofficial rumor-mills about colonial agents undermining Egyptian sovereignty and fomenting instability.

On December 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein al-Takriti was hanged by a noose around his neck after being convicted of ordering a massacre of Iraqi citizens in 1982 in a place called Dujail. The videotape broadcast worldwide showed witnesses jeering as his body convulsed through the gallows. The trial had been an exercise in legal pluralism, the multicultural intermingling of legal orders. It dramatized some complexities of international interventions in the rule-of-law sector. The tyrant was captured by American forces and sentenced by an Iraqi High Tribunal organized and financed by the Occupying Authority. He was not charged with genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity under international law. Nor was he indicted for all his administrations’ atrocities. Rather, the verdict was rendered under the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code derived from an antecedent law promulgated by Great Britain under its League of Nations mandate and consistent with the Napoleonic code introduced by the Ottomans in their Mesopotamian provinces. Conducted in Arabic and Kurdish by Iraqi judges and prosecutors, the proceedings reflected Ottoman, customary, French, British, and Egyptian influences on Iraq’s courts system, and some American elements, but not more recent precedents, norms, and mechanisms in international criminal prosecution.

Few other initiatives were as sensationally fraught as the one culminating in this gruesome death chamber spectacle, and very rarely are foreign interventions as determinant as the American role in the Dujail proceedings. Yet multicultural legal systems and evolving transnational norms frequently call into question what system of laws applies in what circumstances. Inevitably probing the shifting confluence of municipal and transnational jurisdictions, legal development projects in post-colonial states and the Palestinian territories often confronted ambiguities between and among layers of judicial authority. Scholars posed these contradictions between law as a bulwark against police states and law as a tool of empire.

This book opened with a vignette. Police were investigating aggressively what foreign democracy brokers were doing in Egypt, how funds were being channeled to Egyptian advocacy groups, and whether these operations were lawful. The Minister of International Cooperation, Fayza Aboulnaga, alleged there was an “unauthorized” transfer in 2011 of nearly $48 million to local offices of American or international agencies and $6 million to twelve Egyptian organizations, and questioned whether they were properly accredited under the infamously restrictive Law 84 of 2002. By March 2012, Aboulnaga said the amount of American aid piped to NGOs in Egypt during the previous ten months reached $150 million.

This case, as it unfolded, demonstrated how political aid, especially through non-governmental conduits, could be deeply disputatious inside non-democratic polities and in the international arena. It was especially so during the extraordinary circumstances of social upheaval and regime transition in 2011. But fights over NGO registration had been going on in Egypt and other countries with similar legal and regulatory systems for a couple of decades. In 2011, the White House’s show of support for a post-Mubarak “transition to democracy” ran afoul of previous negotiations. After Mubarak’s resignation on February 11, the Obama–Clinton State Department decided to fast-track $65 million in budgeted official aid to four American groups and selected liberal Egyptian NGOs. This allocation reversed an earlier concession to Mubarak that permitted his ministers to vet grantees. The new policy skirting the Ministry of International Cooperation’s aid distribution pipelines drew kleptocrats’ ire.

After the Cold War, game-changing elections in several former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact countries seeking membership in the European Union were encouraged and celebrated by North Atlantic leaders. In the West, these elections were applauded as signs of the democratic will of the people but equally of the triumph of liberal ideals, Western military power, global capitalism, and a new more peaceful world order. There were inspirational examples elsewhere as well: the election of former political prisoner Nelson Mandela in post-apartheid South Africa springs to mind. As newsworthy, photogenic events marked by ceremony, celebrity, choreography, and – sometimes – a suspenseful crescendo and unpredictable denouement, breakthrough multiparty elections sparked ‘big bang’ theories about seamless political transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. In those exuberant years, it seemed obvious that the global hegemon, the NATO alliance, world centers of finance, and voters freed from the yoke of dictatorship all benefited from the ballot-box elixir. Elected leaders of advanced democracies instinctively prefer dealing with democratically elected governments, optimists reasoned, and would therefore extend moral support, technical assistance, and various incentives for one-party regimes to hold competitive electoral campaigns and peacefully yield power at the behest of voters. This vision is the poster child of ‘democracy promotion.’

Western democracy brokers looking at the Middle East pay special attention to women. Many projects in the legal sector, dealing with elections, and encouraging civic involvement specifically addressed Arab women’s rights and participation, and some women’s empowerment projects cut across those categories. Like all political aid programs, activities for women consist mainly of research and instruction, on the one hand, and institution-building, on the other, or more generally with the production of specialized kinds of information. By the same token, women’s empowerment is a sub-sector of socio-economic as well as political development assistance, noted for specialized thematic and institutional agendas grouped under two prevalent acronyms: WID (women in development) and GID (gender in development). WID and GID studies constituted a specialized field of academic and policy research beyond the recognizable transitology literature. Whereas until now our attention was mostly on national and international-level processes, the literature on gender empowerment leads us through anthropology, cultural studies, and political sociology to the participants’-eye view of interpersonal interactions, individual life experiences, and cross-cultural exchange.

From this perspective, we can consider how people interpret and instrumentalize the ideals of gender empowerment. Drawing on scholarship in women’s studies, this chapter tackles the dual connotations of ‘representing’ Arab women by looking closely at the semantics and mechanisms of political aid. It asks: how did individuals and bureaucratic actors react to and act on aspirational and material enticements – how did they interpret discursive and institutional practices? This question is addressed in two parts. The first dissects the ways ‘foreign’ experts and ‘local’ interlocutors respectively adduce the significance of matters such as voting, Islamic law, media performances, and ‘culture.’ The second part, about the political sociology of international aid for various women’s institutions, places recent initiatives in the historical context of feminine activism in national, pan-Arab, and international circles.