This person is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment.
Amy Hawthorne is a Middle East specialist with expertise in domestic Arab politics, human rights, and the possibility of democratic change in the Arab world. She is the editor of Carnegie's Arab Reform Bulletin, a new electronic publication featuring news and analysis about Middle East political reform.
Prior to joining the Endowment in June 2002, she was a research fellow in Arab politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where she studied U.S. policy toward democratization in the Arab world. Hawthorne also covered domestic political developments in Egypt, North Africa, the Gulf, and Yemen and regional trends in political reform and human rights. From 1996 to 2000, Hawthorne was senior program officer for the Middle East at the International Foundation for Election Systems, a U.S.-based NGO, where she designed and managed democracy promotion programs across the Arab world.
As a 1991-92 Fulbright scholar in Cairo, she was affiliated with the Women's College of Al Azhar University, the Arab world's oldest and most eminent seat of Islamic learning. Later, as a graduate intern at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, she followed human rights and political Islam.
Ms. Hawthorne is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Selected Publications: "Can the U.S. Promote Democracy in the Middle East?" Current History (January 2003); "Democracy Deficit: U.S. Democracy Promotion Efforts in the Arab World," (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, forthcoming); "Human Rights in the Arab World: The State Department's 2001 Report," Policy Watch (March 2002); "Do We Want Democracy in the Middle East?" Foreign Service Journal (February 2001)
With its July 2005 establishment of supposedly autonomous commissions to oversee this fall's presidential and parliamentary elections, Egypt joined several Arab countries that have created election management bodies. The ruling National Democratic Party has touted the commissions, headed by judicial figures, as enhancing constitutionally-mandated judicial supervision of the electoral process.
After a few months of quiet, Egypt's judicial independence movement in recent weeks has surged forward into a major confrontation with the Supreme Judicial Council, which pro-reform judges view as too closely aligned with the executive branch.
Participants from across the Middle East joined U.S. and European scholars and policy-makers at a three-day conference in Kuwait, to discuss the role of Islamist groups in Arab political reform. While suspicious of the U.S., most participants professed support for democratic principles and expressed interest in continuing the dialogue.
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has moved the issue of democracy higher on its Middle East agenda than has any previous US government. This represents a historic shift in the underpinnings of American strategic thinking on the Middle East. Washington has now linked terrorism against the US, religious extremism, and anti-American sentiment to the prevalence of authoritarian rule in the region.
Following internal maneuvering and international pressure, Yasser Arafat has agreed to a new government proposed by Prime Minister-designate Mahmud Abbas, paving the way for Washington's ‘road map’ for an independent, democratic Palestinian state. But can Abbas implement reform? How do Palestinians view the issue of reform? And, what is the relationship between reform and Arab-Israeli peace?
Listen to a debate on the prospects for democracy in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world, and on the United States’ role in Middle East democracy promotion. Click on link to listen to audio.
