Kjetil Selvik
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Kjetil Selvik was a Research Professor at NUPI and Head of NUPI’s Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development until 2024.
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The special issue discusses journalism and the challenge of democracy in transitional countries in Africa. We present in-depth treatments of the role of journalism in Zimbabwe and South Africa’s break with colonialism, Somalia’s breakdown after the fall of Siad Barré in the early 1990s and the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Political transitions open a time window during which the media system is in flux and actors try to influence it per their interests. What role does journalism play in such processes, and how do they in turn affect journalists?
Debating terrorism in a political transition: Journalism and democracy in Tunisia
In March 2015, in the midst of a political transition, Tunisia was rocked by a terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in downtown Tunis in which 21 people were killed. How did Tunisian journalists manage the tension between a heightened sense of insecurity and the country’s uncertain democratic development? This article analyses journalistic commentary on the causes and implications of terrorism four years into the transition sparked by the Arab uprisings. It provides an empirically nuanced perspective on the role of journalism in political transitions, focusing on journalists as arbitrators in public debate. We argue that influential Tunisian journalists fell back on interpretive schema from the Ben Ali era when they tried to make sense of the Bardo attack, thus facilitating the authoritarian drift of the Tunisian government at the time. They actively contributed to the non-linearity of a political transition, despite enjoying real freedom of speech.
Religious authority and the 2018 parliamentary elections in Iraq
This research brief analyzes the discursive production of, and political struggle over, religious authority in Shia Iraq. It examines Friday sermons held in the run-up to the May 2018 parliamentary elections.
Preventing Violent Extremism in the Balkans and the MENA: Strengthening Resilience in Enabling Environments (PREVEX)
The overarching objective of PREVEX is to put forward more fine-tuned and effective approaches to preventing violent extremism....
Breakfast seminar: Street versus system – the protest wave in the Middle East
Over the past months, popular protests have shaken the rulers of Algeria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. In this breakfast seminar, NUPI researchers discuss the nature of the protests and the prospects for change.
Elite Survival and the Arab Spring: The Cases of Tunisia and Egypt
The article compares the survival of old regime elites in Tunisia and Egypt after the 2011 uprisings and analyses its enabling factors. Although democracy progressed in Tunisia and collapsed in Egypt, the countries show similarities in the old elite’s ability to survive the Arab Spring. In both cases, the popular uprisings resulted in the type of elite circulation that John Higley and György Lengyel refer to as ‘quasi-replacement circulation’, which is sudden and coerced, but narrow and shallow. To account for this converging outcome, the chapter foregrounds the instability, economic decline and information uncertainty in the countries post-uprising and the navigating resources, which the old elites possessed. The roots of the quasi-replacement circulation are traced to the old elites’ privileged access to money, network, the media and, for Egypt, external support. Only parts of the structures of authority in a political regime are formal. The findings show the importance of evaluating regime change in a broader view than the formal institutional set-up. In Tunisia and Egypt, the informal structures of the anciens régimes survived – so did the old regime elites.
Turkey’s Syria policy and the refugee question
How is Turkey’s foreign policy shaped in the new presidential system? And how is Turkey’s Syria policy influenced by and influencing the refugee crisis?
Breakfast seminar: Can blockchain save journalism?
Professional journalism is under pressure worldwide. Walid Al-Saqaf argues that the underlying technology for Bitcoin could be a solution to the problem.
Teheran. Revolusjon og reaksjon.
(Norwegian only): Temaet for kapitlet er Teherans rolle og betydning i et Midtøsten i endring og konflikt. Jeg ser byen som brennpunkt for tre store slag som står i regionen: kampene over Vestens rolle, folkets makt over politiske avgjørelser og islam som samfunnskontrakt. Jeg viser hvordan kampene spilles ut i Teheran, og hvordan de speiler Irans utfordringer som regional makt. Kapitlet drøfter forholdet mellom innen- og utenrikspolitikk og tar konflikten med Saudi-Arabia som eksempel.
Autocratic legitimation in Iran: Ali Khamenei's discourse on regime 'insiders' and 'outsiders'
The article analyses Ali Khamenei’s discourse on insiders and outsiders in the Islamic Republic of Iran, arguing that it shows the leader of an electoral revolutionary regime striving to counter elite fragmentation and growing democratic demands. It studies identity demarcation as a tool of autocratic legitimation. In a political system where the possibility to access political positions depends on supporting a belief-system, all cadres share a basic identity, which rulers can exploit to draw boundaries between “us” and “them”. The analysis reveals how Iran’s leader capitalizes on the existence of an insider-outsider divide to promote ideas about an imagined “we” of the regime. The “we” is portrayed as an Islamic we, fully committed to his rule. The article maintains that Khamenei developed this discourse in response to the challenge of the Iranian reform movement. It analyses, first, the context in which the discourse emerged and, second, the discursive strategy itself, to substantiate the claim. It concludes that the discourse had two essential aims in the containment (1997–2003) and crushing (2009–2010) of the pro-democracy reformist and Green movements: to de-legitimate Khamenei’s opponents through othering and to legitimate the counter-mobilization of repressive agents.