In the Fall of 2009, the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) hosted a series of conferences with young Arab and American leaders in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. POMED is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to examining how genuine democracies can develop in the Middle East and how the United States can best support that process. The main purpose of these dialogues was to present suggestions to American leaders on how to engage Middle Eastern youth in improving relations in the region and to solicit concrete recommendations on how the Obama administration can turn its ideas into substantive policies. Two-and-a-half days of lively debate yielded 56 specific recommendations. Participants elected one Arab and one American representative to present their final recommendations to the Washington policymaking community and high-level U.S. officials at the Advocacy Summit in DC, the week of January 18, 2010. Cole Bockenfeld, IFES program coordinator, was elected by the conference participants at the Beirut conference to present these recommendations.

The week-long Advocacy Summit included meetings with policymakers from the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Congress. The group also met with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and IFES. The policymakers were presented with ways U.S. policy could help promote better relations in the Middle East. The democracy promotion organizations were urged to take these suggestions into consideration when implementing their programs in the field.

At IFES, the team met with Michael Svetlik, vice-president for programs, and Zeinab Abdelkarim, regional director for the MENA region. The POMED participants shared their commitment to supporting the electoral process as the best way to promote democracy and strengthen the quality of elections in the region. Also discussed was the need to develop new mechanisms to channel aid to a wider spectrum of local political actors and organizations in the broader region. Karim Bayoud from the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE), an IFES subgrantee, and Arab representative from the Beirut conference also praised the partnership of his organization with NDI and IFES as an effective model for promoting democratic reform in the region.

The recommendations made by the POMED participants, although made by those who attended the conferences in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, received strong support through polls implemented in the aforementioned countries to ensure they were representative of the population concerned.

Participants for POMED conferences in the Middle East were selected from almost 1000 applicants. POMED selected a very diverse group of 90 outstanding leaders to represent a broad range of ideologies, professions and perspectives. These under-35 civic leaders from both the Middle East and the U.S. met in Amman and Cairo to develop their recommendations on how the U.S. could follow through on the spirit of President Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo. The discussions focused on the four human dignity themes raised in that speech: democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights and development.

The full report is available on POMED’s website at http://pomed.org/after-cairo-january-2010/.