The Foreign Service Journal, October 2019

30 OCTOBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL POLICYAND ISSUES Egyptian Advice Columnists: Envisioning the Good Life in an Era of Extremism Andrea B. Rugh, DIO Press Inc., 2019, $32.95/paperback, 266 pages. A few months after religious zealots assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, the Al-Ahram newspaper launched a column responding to letters from Egyptians caught up in the problems of daily living. The columnist, Abdul Wahab al-Mutawa, a self-proclaimed human- ist, published complaints about government services and offered solutions to personal problems. Al-Ahram also presented advice columns penned by religious sheikhs, most of them affiliated with Al-Azhar University, who sought to demonstrate Islam’s relevance to modern life. This book, part of the publisher’s Critical Pedagogies Series, is the first to draw on this rich material to examine the colum- nists’ prescriptions for leading a good life and their modeling of moderation. Andrea B. Rugh has been a technical adviser for USAID projects on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, and was a research associate at Harvard University’s Institute of Interna- tional Development from 1987 to 1994. She also worked for Save the Children and UNICEF in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has written 13 books on the cultures and societies of the Middle East. Mrs. Rugh is the wife of Ambassador (ret.) William A. Rugh, a 30-year Foreign Service veteran who served as chief of mission in Sana’a and Abu Dhabi. US Democracy Promotion in the Arab World: Beyond Interests vs. Ideals Mieczyslaw P. Boduszynski, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019, $85/hardcover, 240 pages. Former FSO Mieczyslaw Boduszynski examines the role the promotion of democracy has played in American foreign policy since the Arab Spring uprisings in the early 2010s. The Obama administration, he notes, supported the promotion of democracy during the uprisings, but two years later retreated from democracy promotion in those affected countries. What role democracy promotion should play in U.S. foreign policy remains a hot topic, particularly with regard to the Middle East, and the case studies here bring much food for thought. The author supplements his firsthand view of the Arab Spring as a U.S. diplomat in the region with a wide range of interviews with policymakers in Washington. “Boduszynski’s analysis is lively and engaging and offers valu- able insights into both the individual predispositions and the bureaucratic interests that led the United States to lean in at first, but then ultimately back away from a robust policy of democracy promotion,” says Michael Carpenter of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “It also provides a com- pelling theoretical framework for understanding … how and why the U.S. came up short in its response to the Arab Spring.” Mieczyslaw Boduszynski teaches U.S. foreign policy at Pomona College. Before that, he worked for the State Depart- ment, with postings in Albania, Kosovo, Japan, Egypt, Libya and Iraq. He is also a frequent op-ed contributor to publica- tions such as The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs and The Los Angeles Times . Ideology and Collapse: Risks of Climate Change Dismissal William McPherson, independently published, 2019, $9.95/paperback, 254 pages. As the consequences of climate change become more ominous, societ- ies across the globe are threatened with collapse. Even so, the actions of individual governments thus far have not proven effective in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. While there are many reasons for this, the principal issue is an ideology that prioritizes economic growth and untrammeled markets above all else, thereby preventing necessary actions to head off disaster. This book examines the sources of this mindset, then dis- cusses the specific reasons the Trump administration refuses to recognize and deal with the effects of global climate change— despite recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli- mate Change and the U.S. government’s own National Climate Assessment, which have all laid out the urgency of action in unmistakable terms.