Liza Andersson, Searching Where The Light Shines

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2006. 9:189214 doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.072004.095345 Copyright c 2006 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved First published online as a Review in Advance on Feb. 7, 2006
SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES:

Studying Democratization in the Middle East
Lisa Anderson
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027; email: la8@columbia.edu
Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2006.9:189-214. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Syddansk University on 04/26/12. For personal use only.
Key Words
democracy, policy, democracy promotion, area studies, Arab world
Abstract For several decades, political scientists who work on the Middle East have been asked by both disciplinary and policy audiences about the regions prospects for democratization. We encounter difculties in answering that question because it arises from American disciplinary and policy preoccupations, not from regional political dynamics. As a result of those preoccupations, Middle East political scientists have neglected some of the major political forces in the region, while contributing to the development of general comparative theories of democracy and democratization only at the margins.
THE LOST KEY: WHERE IS DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

For the several decades preceding the turn of the twenty-rst century, political scientists who worked on the Middle East were confronted with scholars and policy analysts asking why the region seemed to be, as one of them put it, so singularly resistant to democratization (Bellin 2004, p. 139). Conspicuous by their absence in the Third Wave of democratization that began in the mid-1970s (Huntington 1993b) and in the worldwide embrace of democratic institutions that attended the end of the Cold War, the countries of the Middle East seemed to be growing increasingly anomalous. And what might have been merely scientic curiosities during the 1990s became major policy dilemmas after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Suddenly, the world seemed to wonder, in the words of a prominent Middle East historian, What went wrong? (Lewis 2003). By that time, American and, indeed, Middle Eastern political scientists had spilled considerable ink (which we will sample shortly) on the question of democracy in the Middle East, but they seemed to have found no satisfactory answer. Comparative political scientists who worked on democracy and democratization globally had consistently failed to include case studies from the Middle East, and Middle East political scientists therefore found, perhaps not surprisingly, that little of the general comparative politics literature provided hypotheses directly testable
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in the region. Political scientists struggled with the dilemmas posed by theoretical literatures that seemed to bypass the region and regional developments that provoked little attention from general comparativists. Was it even reasonable to consider the apparent changes in Middle Eastern regimes over the past 20 years in the context of democratization at all? Speaking of the allied literatures on economic liberalization, Heydemann (2004, p. 3) was moved to ask just such a question. In the region studied here, policy reform has been partial and selective at best. This reality has led some observers to question whether reform is an appropriate characterization of the shifts that have taken place in Middle Eastern political economies over the past ten to twenty years. . . . Why, after all, should theories of economic reform be expected to account for processes that, whatever we might call them, do not meet some minimally accepted denition of that process? Heydemann concluded that the changes in the Middle East could indeed be considered in light of the literature on economic reform, but the fact that he felt constrained to ask the question at all illustrates the isolation and anxiety that beset political scientists considering change in the Middle East. By the turn of the century, many worried that, even if economic change could be characterized as reform, the political developments in the region had not been part of a process that would meet some minimally accepted denition of democratization. Indeed, by then, both in the policy world and on the critical edges of the profession, there were increasingly vocal suggestions that perhaps something was amiss in the focus on democracy in Middle East studies. In late 2001, the historian Martin Kramer, who was allied with the neoconservative foreign policy establishment, published a blistering attack on the Middle East studies enterprise in the United States, faulting its leaders for, among other things, their excessive concern with democratization. According to Kramer (2001, p. 50), American political scientists who worked on the Middle East assumed that Americans would never understand a presentation of Islam in its own categoriesthat would take more knowledge and empathy than most students, journalists, and ofcials could be expected to muster. But they might see Islam and Islamist movements more favorably if they were presented in Western categories. . . . Why not place Islamist movements in the political category of participation, or even democratization? This project failed, argued Kramer, largely because democratic political participation itself did not materialize in any signicant degree in the region. Democratization was a procrustean bed into which the politics of the region t poorly. As a result, the region had little to offer the theorists of democracy, while its actual political dynamics remained as mysterious as ever. Although many of Kramers readers in the American Middle East studies community were quick to dismiss his critique (couched as it was in sanctimonious and self-serving terms), the qualms he expressed were not his alone. Mitchell, who
DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST
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was typically associated with progressive political positions, published a masterful assessment of Middle East studies several years later, in which he criticized political scientists assumption that the languages of political Islam, for example, can appear in Western scholarship only through a process of translation that enables them to speak in terms of the modernizing discourse of the West (Mitchell 2003, p. 24). Both Mitchell and Kramer argued that the focus on what they called Western categories and Western discourse distorts understanding of the dynamics of politics in the Middle East. For Kramer (2003, p. 57), this was bad policy:
In retrospect, the. . .elite in Middle Eastern studies had failed to ask the right questions, at the right times, about Islamism. They underestimated its impact in the 1980s; they misrepresented its role in the early 1990s, and they glossed over its growing potential for terrorism against America in the late 1990s. Twenty years of denial had produced mostly banalities about American bias and ignorance, and fantasies about Islamists as democratizers and reformers. For Mitchell (2003, p. 22), it was bad scholarship: On present evidence, reinserting Middle East area studies into the generalizing languages of political economy does not produce any increase in a universal knowledge of politics. It may help undermine some of the unsupportable generalizations of others. . .but such general theories are usually adequately critiqued when they rst appear. The generalizations survive simply as unsupported theories to be endlessly refuted, long after they are dead, in area studies scholarship. Battered from all sidesby policy advocates and academic colleagues, from the right and the leftpolitical scientists who worked on the Middle East at the beginning of the twenty-rst century confronted a signicant challenge (Lockman 2004). In the United States, policy makers and political scientists alike privileged democracy as the measure of politics, projecting American institutions, values, and purposes onto the rest of the world. Policy makers trumpeted the desirability of democracy as, to quote the U.S. Secretary of State, the ideal path for every nation (Rice 2005). Political scientists looked for what Mitchell (2003, p. 21) called some universal process of change that could govern the politics and history of non-Western regions, such as the process of development, democratization, globalization, or the introduction of free markets. Yet, in the Middle East, the elision of universal and western was meeting signicant resistance (Anderson 2003, 2004). This essay examines the efforts of American political scientists to address the prospects for democracy in the Middle East over the past 25 years. In doing so, it suggests that the projection of what can only be described as American hopes and dreams on the region imposed very high costs, not only in political but also in scholarly terms. The parochialism of American theories of democracy went largely unchallenged by hard cases while the dynamics of politics in the region
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went largely unexplained by applicable theory. Ultimately, this left the policy community ill-equipped to assess the likely reception of democracy-promotion efforts in the region, just as it left the scholarly community of the Middle East, both in the United States and in the region, without the critical review a broader discipline-wide debate should have provided.
ANSWERING THE QUESTION: THE STUDY OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Americans encountered the Middle East as a policy arena in the aftermath of World War II, as the United States assumed its global role as a postwar superpower. At that time, most of the countries of the modern Middle East were just gaining independence from European imperial powers that had profoundly shaped the region. Most of the states were little more than decades-old successors of the Ottoman Empire, which had been dismembered after World War I. These new states, and even those in the region that could claim a more ancient lineage as autonomous polities, had only recently been reorganized in the European image, with territorial boundaries, standing armies, national markets, and often parliaments. Little of that history was of consequence to the American political scientists of the time or, for that matter, since. Indeed, a rather good recent essay on the role of the military in inhibiting democratic development in the Middle East begins its argument with the phrase, from the beginning, in the post independence states of the Middle East. . . (Picard 2005, p. 118), reecting the widespread assumption that the period after independence in the 1940s and 1950s was, in most important respects, the beginning. In fact, the novelty and frailty of the European-style states of the region and the continuing importance of local, nonstate political forms and dynamics would prove to be a powerful but largely neglected feature of Middle East politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century. American political science was, and in many ways continues to be, profoundly ahistorical (Gilman 2003). Instead, after World War II American policy makers almost reexively supported freedomunderstood as national independence and sovereigntyand embraced modernization as a paradigm to frame analysis of policy questions and provide an alternative to the Marxist model provided by the Soviet Union. The critiques of modernization theory are legion, and they need not be rehearsed here except to recall that in the distinction between tradition and modernity, there was virtually no place for history. As a result, most American students of the Middle East encountered the region as if its societies had been born anew, somehow miraculously, at the independence of its states. In this respect, Israel represented a very powerful and deeply misleading example. That said, if the past of the region was murky, the future was clear: Modernization was expected to produce political democracy and economic prosperity, on the model of the United States of the 1950s. Analytical questions for political
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scientists revolved, as they would for the next 50 years, around democracy, and their audiences were both policy makers and scholars. One of the rst comprehensive efforts by an American political scientist to examine politics in the Middle East was Halperns The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa, published in 1963. As he pointed out, there were scarcely a handful of books in any language that analyze the relationship between social, economic, and intellectual forces and contemporary political trends in the countries of the Arab world. . . . Yet, he continued, even without these materials to draw on, an essay such as the present one must be attempted. The policy-maker and the concerned public need an analytical foundation for judgment before all the returns are in. Tellingly, however, Halpern also wrote that his book is addressed equally to those whose main concern is the increase of knowledge (Halpern 1963, pp. xxi). Halpern exhibited a remarkably acute skepticism about democracys prospects in the Middle East. He was quick to identify what would become a perennial feature of the political landscape: Everyone talks about democracy in the Middle East; no form of governmental organization is more popular. Even authoritarian rulers champion it by dening their regimes as being, in a special sense, democratic, or by promising to guide the state towards democracy. Much of the rhetoric about democracy was, in Halperns estimation, mere talk. . . . Its popularity as a word is due in part to the fact that the modern political vocabulary of the Middle East was learned largely from England and France, that using it seems to validate the speakers status as a modern leader, and make it easier to make political claims on the democratic conscience of the West (Halpern 1963, p. 221). Insincere rulers were not the only problem that confronted democracys advocates. More than 40 years ago, Halpern pointed to one of the principal dilemmas that would confront the democracy promoters of the twenty-rst century: Democratization is destabilizing. In order to reach [democratic] institutions, democrats must begin by accepting their inescapably subversive and radical role in the present environment, and deliberately bring about the social and economic changes which are necessary before democracy can reign (Halpern 1963, pp. 22123). A contemporary of Halperns, Morroe Berger, who would serve as the rst president of the Middle East Studies Association when it was founded in 1967, identied the policy puzzle succinctly: The West is confronted with the dilemma of supporting traditional autocrats or modern intellectuals who want to end Western inuence (Berger 1964, p. 297). The debates about the desirability of democracy attenuated in the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s. In some countries, particularly those allied with the Eastern bloc, the single-party developmental regime, modeled more or less explicitly on the Soviet Union, seemed better suited to the subversive challenges of social and economic development. Elsewhere, the United States threw its weight behind the traditional autocrats. As the Cold War congealed, both the United States and the Soviet Union began to prize stability and reliability in local governments over other values, including reform. Especially after the United States difculties
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in Southeast Asia, the policy goal of democracy became less importantindeed, less desirable, as President George W. Bush was eventually to concede: [S]ixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safebecause in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty (Bush 2003). American political scientists of the era occupied themselves with questions about the role of the military in politics, the nature of Arab nationalism, and the structure of the single-party state. Meanwhile, in many other parts of the world, change was inching forward, partly at the behest and partly to the surprise of the policy makers and political scientists of the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, unexpected transitions to democracy in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America spawned a vast and optimistic literature that came to be known as transitology (Karl & Schmitter 1991, Geddes 1999, Carothers 2002). By the end of the 1980s, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Democratization seemed to be appearing in what was once viewed as profoundly infertile ground, and democrats around the worldand throughout American political science took heart. In the Middle East, the appearance of this literature coincided with a period of economic contraction and political upheaval that prompted modest political reforms in a number of countries. In 1989, Jordan saw its rst parliamentary elections since the 1950s, and Yemen held its rst elections in 1993; both contests were considered essentially free and fair. The Syrian parliament was enlarged to include 60 seats for independent candidates in 1990, and in 1992 the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia established an appointed consultative council. In Algeria, the one-time single-party regime lifted restrictions on political parties and permitted competitive local elections in the late 1980s. Lebanon held its rst parliamentary elections in 20 years in 1992, and Kuwait, just liberated from Iraqs invasion, held elections for a parliament that had been suspended in 1986 (Niblock & Murphy 1990, Harik & Sullivan 1992, Richards & Waterbury 1996). The global democracy juggernaut seemed unstoppable, and there was ample reason to think that the Middle East was on the verge of a transition itself. Norton (1993, pp. 2056) expressed the consensus view among political scientists who worked on the region: Across the Middle East, from bustling bazaars, squalid slums and privileged urban enclaves, to sun-baked oil elds, rugged mountains and in thousands of villages, there is growing evidence of widening dissatisfaction with the reigning regimes. Governments, strapped by limited resources, massive and unwieldy bureaucracies, and the burgeoning demands of fast-growing populations, frequently are failing to meet the needs and the demands of their citizens. Although there is wide disagreement about the outcome, among those who follow events in the Middle East there is little doubt that regimes in the region
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are under increasing pressure from their citizens. In some instances, rulers prisoners of their own promises to lead their people to gloryare under siege from citizens no longer willing to believe empty promises or tolerate selfserving and incompetent ofcials. Repression at the hands of the state has become a topic of public discussion, and human rights activists, although still relatively few in number, have become increasingly vocal. In short, the regions governments, especially the Arab ones, face a persistent crisis of legitimacy. . . . The new language of politics in the Middle East speaks of participation, cultural authenticity, freedom, and even democracy. The democracy bandwagon was spacious and welcoming, and nearly all the political scientists who worked on the Middle East jumped on. Some looked for the patterns identied by the Latin American transitologists and found governments engaged in elite pact-making (Anderson 1991).1 A few theorists looked at regimes, especially at ssures within state elites, and found that liberalization initiatives were typically undertaken to fend off more serious challenges during scal crises (Robinson 1998). Others, including Norton himself, looked not to regimes but to social forces, notably to what they hoped would be analogous to the civil society attributed so much inuence in the transitions in both Latin America and Eastern Europe (Ibrahim 1995; Norton 1995/1996; Singerman 1996). Although this work produced a number of useful surveys of the regions political landscape, it soon ran into both empirical and analytical problems. From the empirical perspective, it turned out that the early 1990s were the high water mark of liberalizing or democratizing initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa. Algerias contested parliamentary elections were cancelled in 1992, and the country plunged into a decade-long civil war. Yemens democratic experiment also collapsed into civil war two years later. Tunisias National Pact proved little more than a fa cade behind which the government ruthlessly repressed virtually all opposition. Jordan rewrote its electoral laws to restrict competition; Egypt instituted antiterrorism legislation that reversed its earlier liberalization. Even the relatively late and closely monitored democratic experiment of the Palestine National Authoritythe 1996 elections that ratied Yasser Arafats leadership and produced the Palestine National Councilsoon corroded into what would be called the regions characteristic liberalized autocracy (Brumberg 2002). As early as 1993, Norton was reporting that more and more scholars of the Middle East were growing skeptical
1 In fairness to those of us who exhibited excessive enthusiasm during this periodand it was indeed excessivewe were not alone. Even some in the governments of the region thought that a new era was dawning. While conducting research for the article cited, about the national pact of Tunisia, I remarked to an erstwhile colleague in Tunisiaa professor turned Cabinet Ministerthat the government seemed to be following the path outlined in ODonnell & Schmitters Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Really? he said. Thats great! Whats the next chapter? Although I promptly sent him a copy of the book, by then it was already becoming clear that Tunisia was not on its way to democracy and, indeed, the subsequent decade was one of increasing repression.
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about the prospect that civil society would be able to take advantage of the limited liberalizations in the region (Norton 1993, p. 215). Did the empirical problems reveal analytical aws? Some theorists began looking more closely at the terms of reference in the literature on democracy and democratization. Taking what he called a less sanguine view of civil society in the Middle East, Wiktorowicz (2000, p. 43; also see Wiktorowicz 2001) argued: Rather than risk uncontrollable popular protest and collective action that could destabilize the political system, regimes such as those in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria (before 1992), and Jordan instead offered new, though oftentimes limited, opportunities for the creation of civil society organizations. Once created, these organizations were embedded in a web of bureaucratic practices and legal codes which allow those in power to monitor and regulate collective activities. . . . Under such circumstances, civil society institutions are more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism for collective empowerment. Later observers were even more blunt: It has come to be en vogue for members of the political and economic elites to found their own personal NGOs as a means of rent seeking, but also in order to feel the peoples pulse and manipulate interests (Albrecht & Schlumberger 2004, p. 374). The question was not merely whether ordinary citizens had been hoodwinked by clever, manipulative regimes (although it certainly often seemed that way), but rather whether civil society was the right lens through which to examine social and political life in the region at all. As the distinguished Lebanese political scientist, Ghassan Salame (1994, p. 12), put it, If, following Hegel, we view civil society as primarily a factor in the process of state formation, how do we adjust that denition to situations where the state has indeed been imported. . . and when in any case, that state has seen its bureaucratic apparatus set up even before civil society in its Hegelian sense has come into being? Should we then follow certain Hegelian and Islamist sociologists in distinguishing two civil societies, the traditional one which did in fact give rise to innumerable traditional states, and the modern one, dependent, westernized, brought into being by the modern state and born with the original sin of its colonial parentage? Can we really speak of the coexistence, even the superimposition, of the rivalry or the conict of two societies, one authentic, the other articially created? This question could have provoked interest in the history obscured by modernization theorys tradition, but instead it focused attention on the debates about the purposes and roles of Islam and Islamist movements in the politics of the region. Although in policy and scholarly circles Islam was sometimes dismissed as intrinsically incompatible with democracy, this attitude was seldom shared by the academic specialists. For example, Kedouries (1992, p. 1) famous remark that
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the idea of democracy is quite alien to the mind-set of Islam and Huntingtons (1993a, p. 20) observation that Islam has not been hospitable to democracy found little support among Middle East political scientists, although such statements retained enough currency to be available to policy advocates after September 11, 2001, often to unfortunate effect (also see Anderson 1995b, 2004; Hudson 1995). Most scholars of the region found that Islam, like its monotheistic counterparts Christianity and Judaism, was a vast, exible, and accommodating faith, available for interpretation in myriad ways. The use of religious precepts to justify violence, for example, was hardly unique to Islam, and many scholars found liberal strains prominent in Islamic thought. While some Islamist movements were said to be the Muslim counterparts of the Crusades of Europe, some Islamist political parties were considered the Muslim counterparts of Europes Christian Democrats (Binder 1988, Esposito & Voll 1996, Esposito 1999, Rosefsky Wickham 2002, Diamond et al. 2003, Abou el Fadl et al. 2004, Hunter & Malik 2005). It was Stepan, a political scientist better known for his work in other parts of the world, who demonstrated that the contemporary association of autocracy with Islam was falsemany nonArab Muslim states were already democratic. It was the Arab Middle East, as opposed to the Muslim world, that had a democracy decit, and this Stepan (2003) attributed to the regions modern history, specically the novelty and fragility of its states. In fact, the emergence of Islamist politics in the Muslim world had sometimes coincided with the emergence of democracy. Islam seemed to support democratic trends in some places, such as Turkey and Indonesia, while inhibiting them in others, such as Iran and Algeria (Beinin & Stork 1997, Hefner 2005). These two trendsthe rise of Islamic politics and democratizationmay have reected a common purpose, namely popular participation, and perhaps even a common prod: American efforts during the Cold War to combat communism and undermine Soviet inuence. As we shall see, some political scientists would look to international inuences both to assess the fortunes of democratic reform and to explain the rise of Islamist politics. It is certainly true that the United States had actively supported Islamist movements against godless communism, not only in Afghanistan but across the Muslim world, though usually at the expense of democratization. Many Middle Eastern regimes not only acquiesced to these efforts but actively participated. As Bronson (2005, p. 110) pithily put it, The politicization of Islam is. . . a direct outgrowth of the Middle Easts Cold War experience. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that in todays post-Cold War Middle East, the major constituency-based organizations in the Arab world that are best placed to organize politically are Islamist ones. Islam provided governments with not only an effective and apparently authentic idiom for popular mobilization but also a potent and often convenient rationale for government resistance to liberalization. Many regimes cited the ostensible dangers of Islamist inuence, including its role in mobilizing opposition to the regimes themselves and to Western inuence, as preventing them from pursing liberal or
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democratic reform. For many regimes this concern was, of course, somewhat disingenuous. It did raise the more academic question, however, of whether democratic values need, or even can, precede democratization. Rustows (1970) well-known argumentthat democracy is not produced by economic, social, or cultural processes but is the outcome of stalemated conictwas echoed by Salame (1994, p. 3): Democracy could be judged less by the attachment to its principles by some actor or the other [sic], than by its common use as a means to avoid civil war or institutional chaos. . . . The program of some opposition groups may well be simply to replace an existing authoritarianism by one of their own. . . . Democrats may not exist at all, or they may not exist in great numbers. Yet democracy can still be sought as an instrument of civil peace and hopefully, gradually, inadvertently, produce its own defenders. As a normative matter, the proposition that democracy might appear inadvertently was, no doubt, a weak reed on which to pin hopes for democratization in the Middle East. The argument that democratization may not require deliberate intent on the part of those who undertake it did serve, however, to turn attention from questions of culture to examination of the sorts of material incentives to liberalization or democratization that might exist in the region. Disenchanted with efforts to plumb cultural depths to assess the prospects of democracy in the Middle East, scholars looked to political economy perspectives. One of the main contributions of the study of the Middle East to the general postwar social science literature had been the notion of the rentier state (Karl 1997). In rentier states, revenues derived from sources that require little or no domestic laboroil production, for example, or strategic rents for pipelines, waterways, military basing rights, or simply political supportare said to release governments from reliance on domestic taxation and allow development of distributive or allocative states (Mahdavy 1970, Luciani 1990). Governments can, in essence, buy acquiescence to their rule by distributing goods and servicesand developing comprehensive domestic surveillance and repressionwithout exacting taxes. The fact that a virtual merry-go-round of military coups in a number of Middle Eastern countries suddenly ended in the mid-1970s, when oil prices increased dramatically and the United States and Soviet Union focused their attentions on maintaining stable allies, lent credence to the argument linking external revenues and regime longevity. Subsequent statistical analysis seemed to conrm the link (Ross 2001). Moreover, between 1982 and 1986, when oil prices plummeted and many governments cut back on once generous consumer subsidies, popular unrest broke out across the region. Bread riots took place in Tunisia and Morocco in 1987, in Jordan and Algeria in 1988, and in Egypt in 1992. Many observers, including many political scientists, explained subsequent liberalizations as regime efforts to pacify restive populations with inexpensive concessions. This apparent relationship between scal crises and political liberalizations in rentier states launched an
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intriguing but somewhat inconclusive debate about the importance of taxation in creating demand for representationor, as it happened, the importance of a lack of taxation and the provision of subsidies in mufing such demands (Anderson 1991, Chatelus 1993, Waterbury 1997, Herb 2005). Questions about representation also provoked examination of institutions. Cook (2005, p. 94) threw down the gauntlet in an article directed toward U.S. policy makers. The reason that the promotion of civil society, economic development and sanctions have not led to political reform in the Arab world, he argued, is that none of them addresses the real obstacles to change in the region: awed institutions. In fact, a small but careful literature on institutions in the region had already drawn from the work on the constitution-writing of postcommunist Eastern Europe, and several Middle East political scientists had examined constitutions, parliaments, and elections in the region (Baaklini et al. 1999, Dillman 2000, Posusney 2002, Brown 2003). Others adopted often sophisticated institutional and neo-institutional approaches to politics to examine the structure of government-opposition relationships (Lust-Okar & Jamal 2002; Lust-Okar 2004, 2005). The utility of institutional analysis was unclear, however, where presidents routinely won elections by 99.99%the infamous four nines of Syrias Haz al-Asad. Making a virtue out of necessity perhaps, several scholars wondered, as Wedeen (2003) put it, What was the purpose of xing elections that did not need to be xed? Why were the institutions of democracyelections, parliaments, judiciariesadopted so cavalierly and treated with such contempt? In Yemen, for example, the popular incumbent was expected to win Yemens rst free direct presidential election in 1999 handily. He nonetheless arranged to have his opponent disqualied and replaced him with a member of his own political party. Wedeen (2003, pp. 68490) pointed out that although the regime represented itself to foreign donors and citizens alike as an emerging democracy, the staged elections could not possibly have been intended to reassure Yemeni democrats or foreign observers of the regimes commitment to institutionalizing competitive, free elections. She concluded: The excessive bogusness operated as both a signaling device and a mechanism for constituting the political power it signaled . . . . Given the Presidents ability to win a credible election (or, for that matter, to rig one covertly), the regimes decision to produce an overtly phony one implies that the event did more than exemplify political power; it was also doing the work of creating it by demonstrating to ofcials and citizens alike that the regime could get away with the charade. The appearance (as opposed to the reality) of democracy seemed to serve several purposes, satisfying foreign donors who may have been ambivalent about genuinely contentious politics in the region while humiliating domestic opponents. As Talbi (2003, p. 5) pointed out, most elections in the region are won by vastly inated vote totals.
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These percentages are not, as one might believe, the result of naivet e, and still less of political blunders. They are carefully calculated. . . . The regimes are able to discredit and dishonor the intelligentsia by making them swallow these sham results and even publicly afrm them. . . . They are neutralized, rendered servile. . . . Interested in the role of foreign audiences, particularly donors, in the dynamics of regime stability and democracy promotion, several of the comparative political scientists who worked on the Middle East turned to international relations. Waterbury (1997, p. 145) felt constrained to remind his comparativist colleagues that the political economy of authoritarianism and democracy does not stop at a given countrys border but is in fact closely connected to international markets, sources of credit and arms, investment ows, strategic rents, and the instruments of international clientage and dependency. Agreeing with Waterbury, Ayoob (2005, p. 187) complained, it is regrettable that the majority of the literature on democratization produced in the past two decades has concentrated almost exclusively on internal dynamics, and the causes for the reversal of the democratization process have also been sought in the domestic sphere, to the near exclusion of external inuences. Yet attribution of causal inuence in the persistence of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to external actors, especially the United States, was often viewed askance, particularly but not only by supporters of U.S. policy in the region. Karawan (2002, p. 101) expressed an impatience that was hardly unique: The eld of Middle Eastern studies suffers from an excessive preoccupation with the United States and its policies toward the region, he wrote. Underdevelopment, the absence of democracy, the role of military elites, the rise of fundamentalism, and the persistence of Saddam Hussein in power have all been attributed to U.S. actions and desires. . . . The United States is an important actor, of course, but many analysts of Middle Eastern issues tend to attribute to it more power, more coherent strategic purposes, and more ability to produce its desired outcomes than it can possibly possess. Still, many theorists shared Bellins (2004, p. 148) conviction that Western interest in reliable oil supplies and growing concern about the Islamist threat provided a compelling rationale to western policy-makers to persist in providing patronage to many authoritarian states in the region. As Roosevelt said about Somoza, they may be sons of bitches but they are our sons of bitches. Eventually some of the erstwhile students of democratization in the Middle East, including Bellin, decided it was better to ask a different question: not Why is there no democracy? but What accounts for the persistence of authoritarianism? As Huntington (1993b, p. 28) had suggested to his fellow students of democracy, the appropriate question may not be Why has democracy failed in some areas? but How has it ever managed to survive anywhere? Salame (1994, p. 4) agreed:
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One needs to remember that authoritarian regimes, of various persuasions, have been the norm in world history and democracy has been and remains exceptional. Hence the basic intellectual effort should be to explain why democracy has owered in certain countries at certain times rather than, as is usually the case, to try to discover the reason for its absence from most countries most of the time. For the political scientists of the Middle East, however, the question could not be how democracy emerged or survived. It hadnt. Bellin (2004, p. 148) proposed that the solution to the puzzle of Middle Eastern and North African exceptionalism lies less in absent prerequisites of democratization and more in present conditions that foster robust authoritarianism, specically a robust coercive apparatus in these states. This was little more than the inverse of the democracy question, however, and many of the same factors that had been deployed to explain democracys fragilitythe availability of external rents, the limited popular mobilization for democracywere adduced to account for the robustness of the coercive machinery and the stability of the regimes. That there was a tautological character to this argument is not surprising; after all, authoritarianism is little more than a residual category in most political science, encompassing all the otherwise very varied nondemocratic regimes that have existed throughout history. One of the few efforts to examine paths to democracy that took history seriously, examining the signicance of different starting points (Geddes 1999), discussed no Middle Eastern cases and provoked unfortunately little discussion in the debates about Middle East authoritarianism and exceptionalism (Crystal 1994, Brownlee 2002, Bellin 2004, Posusney & Angrist 2005). By the turn of the century, the conclusion that the region had missed the boat on the Third Wave of democracy was unavoidable, but it was also deeply unsatisfying to most Middle East political scientists. For some diehard optimists, it was still simply a matter of time. Bronson (2005, p. 108) argued, for example, that for 15 years, the end of the Cold War . . . was delayed in the Middle East but that in 2005, the early lights of 1989 are dawning in the region. As we will see, this hope was shared by many U.S. policy makers, but for most political scientists, the pessimism of Bills (1996, p. 501) decade-old assessment seemed far more appropriate: American analysts continue to explore their political empty quarter in search of knowledge necessary to explain political development in the Middle East. Eventually these analysts all seem to end up at the same old watering holes, believing they have discovered new oases and giving them different names each time. In the 1950s and 1960s, the signs at the oases read liberal democracy and Westernization; in the 1960s and 1970s, the search focused on political development and political participation; in the 1970s and 1980s, the jargon was legitimacy and the state and society dichotomy; today, the words on the weatherbeaten old signs are civil society and democratization. We have come full circle.
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COMING UP EMPTY-HANDED: THE REALITY OF DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The repeated efforts of American political scientists to treat the prospects for democracy in the Middle East may not have been quite as disoriented as Bills lament suggests. After all, as Brumberg and others had shown, the regions regimes in the 1990s were not what they had been in the 1960s, or even in the 1980s. From the single-party and military regimes of the heyday of Arab nationalism to the assertive and confrontational autocracies of the early 1980s, many governments in the region evolved. By the middle of the rst decade of the new century, they were, in fact, more open and more experimental in their approach to reform. How this change should be interpreted remained quite a mystery, however, and the absence of consensus on analytical standards even for measuring change, much less establishing its signicance, produced vastly different assessments. In 2005, a policy-oriented political scientist expressed the U.S. policy communitys optimism and excitement: Across the Arab world, political activists are challenging the status quo. Egyptians are demanding an end to the state of emergency that has been in place almost continuously since the 1950s; Syrians have petitioned their government for political freedoms; Jordanians are seizing new economic opportunities; women in the traditionally conservative Gulf states are seeking wider political and economic participation; even Saudi Arabia is experimenting with elections at the municipal level. In two extraordinary moments in January 2005, the Palestinian and Iraqi people freely elected their leaders. During the following eight weeks, the people of Lebanon forced an end to Syrias military occupation of their country. Political, economic, and social changes are now clearly on the larger Arab agenda. (Cook 2005, p. 10) Only a year earlier, however, Bellin had reported that while the number of electoral democracies [in the world] has nearly doubled since 1972, the number in this region has registered an absolute decline. Today, only two out of twenty-one countries qualify as electoral democracies, down from three observed in 1972. Stagnation is also evident in the guarantee of political rights and civil liberties. While the number of countries designated free by Freedom House has doubled in the Americas and in the Asia-Pacic region, increased tenfold in Africa, and risen exponentially in Central and Eastern Europe over the past thirty years, there has been no overall improvement in the Middle East and North Africa. Aggregate scores differ little from 1972. (Bellin 2004, p. 139) Indeed, historian Robert Blecher argued that the Middle East became a good deal less democratic after the end of the Cold War.
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Jordan and Egypt reversed the limited democratic reforms they had instituted in the 1980s. After Islamists won the 1992 vote in Algeria, the ruling party canceled the elections, leading to a bloody civil war. In Palestine Yasser Arafat, with the support and encouragement of Israel and the United States, set up a nightwatchman quasi-state that spent more than one third of its budget on the police and the security apparatus. The Damascus spring that followed the death of Syrian President Hafez al-Asad in June 2000 has morphed into a bitter cold winter of despair. . . . (Blecher 2003) In fact, in Tunisia and elsewhere, liberalization had simply permitted the reestablishment of powerful private clienteles, and where this was true, liberalization proved to be positively antidemocratic (King 2003; see also Heydemann 2004, Brumberg 2005). Even after September 11, when American attention to issues of democracy seemed to be provoking another round of political reform, there was little genuine democratization. As Hawthorne (2005, p. 71) pointed out, With the exception of Morocco, in every national election held in the Arab world since September 11, ruling-party or progovernment candidates won by a wider margin, and opposition candidates had their poorest showing, since the introduction (or reintroduction, in some cases) of multiparty politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Even in Morocco, where the Islamist [party] became the third largest party represented in parliament after the 2002 elections, the top two parties essentially maintained their position, precluding any rotation in power. Small wonder that the policy communitys enthusiasm for what President George W. Bush called evidence of the success of his administrations forward strategy of freedom met with skepticism in the academic Middle East studies community. National elections were held in Afghanistan in October 2004 and in the Palestine National Authority and Iraq in January 2005, and Saudi municipal elections occurred in the spring of that year; these were all embraced by the U.S. government as indications of a new era in the region. Yet for most Middle East scholars, this was reminiscent of earlier responses to Western pressure: Arab incumbents quickly learned the lesson of what was expected internationally and adopted the democracy language; talking the donor talk became a prerequisite for political rent-seeking (Albrecht & Schlumberger 2004, p. 376). The intellectuals in the region often shared with their professional counterparts in the United States a fondness for, and indeed a commitment to, democratization (Arab Human Development Report 2004). It was not clear, however, how widespread or deep this attachment was beyond the intellectual elite. Lip service to liberal democracy, as an aspiration if not a reality, was common. As al-Azmeh (1994, p. 113) put it, The ubiquity of Arab discourse on democracy in recent years requires little documentation or demonstration. The question of democracy, together with the allied concern with the notion of civil society, is addressed in the Arab
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world in a myriad of political, academic, journalistic and other writings, and is the subject of inveterate commentary in casual conversations, in politicoacademic conventions and conferences. . . . With the exception of the radically primitivist Islamist discourse, the question of democracy has become a major constituent in the political vocabulary prevalent in the Arab world today virtually across the entire ideological and political spectrum; it is invading even the most archaic Arabian politics. Similarly, most polls in the region suggested widespread support for democracya nding that heartened the proponents of civil society (Tessler 2002, 2003). Despite their governments, at least the people of the Middle East seemed to care about democratic values and institutions. But did they? Posusney & Angrist (2005, p. 222) argued that in fact to an important extent, there is simply not a lot of organized popular enthusiasm for democratic reform and the development of parliamentarism in the region. Mernissi (2002, p. 52) suggested why that might be so, explaining that democracy is not well understood by most people in the region. How is this fascinating democracy perceived? she asked. What is that afrita [spirit], as it is called by my Aunt Aziza, who nishes listening to the eighty-thirty news every night. . .by murmuring, But what is this dimuqratiyya? Is it a country or an afrita or an animal or an island? Like the Muslim political activists who campaign, when they are permitted to do so at all, under the slogan, Islam is the solution, democracys proponents had made it little more, or less, than a magic formula that cured all ills. Democracy was endowed with a virtually talismanic quality, as a protean force capable, when meaningfully put into practice, of solving all outstanding problems (al-Azmeh 1994, p. 115). In fact, there were very few real democrats in the Middle East. As Salame (1994, p. 16) pointed out, banal as it may be, the statement remains valid; the fundamental political split in the societies [here] is not between opposing democratic forces but between forces which are often equally strangers to democracy (or equally uninterested in establishing democracy). . . . If the adoption of democratic elections by the Islamists is considered opportunist, reversible and insincere, the regime as well as many secularist forces certainly do not produce any more convincing professions of democratic faith. For many in the region, professions of attachment to democracy were, as Halpern had described them nearly 50 years earlier, simply devices by which to validate the speakers status as a modern leader, and make it easier to make political claims on the democratic conscience of the West. As Mernissi (2002, p. 53) pointed out, Some groups of people think [democracy] can promote their interests, especially those who know foreign languages, who have access to Western knowledge and culture. . . . This is generally the case with bourgeois city dwellers, both men and women, who operate in the elds of business and nance. It is also the case with university professors, artists and intellectuals. . . . Others
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may feel terribly threatened by that dimuqratiyya. . . . Can it be that the most dispossessed in our societies cling to Islam because they fear being forgotten by their own people, who have found another identity and are involved in other networks, especially those very strong ones that create prot on an international scale? Democracy in the Middle East was a deeply ambiguous, highly contested and often profoundly implausible notion. In what may be an apocryphal story, Saadeddin Ibrahim, Egypts most prominent sociologist, reported that Egyptian President Husni Mubarak often complained that the only problem . . . with free elections is that you cannot predict the outcome (Middle East Policy Council 2005). In much of the Middle East, democracy was perceived as neither natural nor desirable but as a transparent disguise for Western hegemonic designs on the region (Sadiki 2004).
WHY STUDY WHAT IS NOT THERE? THE IMPERATIVES OF VALUES, POLICY, AND SCIENCE
Clearly, the focus on democracy in the political science of the Middle East was not driven entirely by the politics of the region. Yet it proved very difcult for scholars of Middle East politics to escape the pervasive and powerful assumption that political change of any kind could be understood in terms of democratization. Indeed, Albrecht & Schlumberger (2004, p. 372) argued that an uncontested global paradigm. . .dictates that political change, if it occurs, should generally be in the direction of democratization. This paradigm proved to be an awkward and ill-tting framework for understanding dynamics in the Middle East, and that awkwardness, in turn, prevented the study of the Middle East from contributing as much as its practitioners would have liked to the development of general theory about democratization. Why had students of the Middle East devoted so much of their attention to an issue of apparently modest relevance in the region? No doubt a signicant reason was the normative commitment to liberal democracy of virtually all American and American-trained social scientists. Whatever enthusiasm the postindependence nationalisms of the nonaligned movement may have evoked in American social scientists had faded by the time of the United StatesSoviet Union d etente of the 1970s. By the 1980s, ODonnell and Schmitter were expressing the preference of political scientists of almost all partisan complexions for regimes that respected human rights and adopted democratic institutions (ODonnell et al. 1987). The impulse to study democracy reected not only the powerful pull of normative commitments but also the seductions of the policy world. Throughout the Cold War, the United States had advertised itself as the leader of the free world; President Jimmy Carter made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy; and both postCold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, emphasized the
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importance of democracy. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright articulated the Clinton Administration conviction that democracy is a signicant value on both pragmatic and principled grounds. As she said in a speech in Warsaw, inaugurating the Community of Democracies initiative that was to be a signature of her term as Secretary, In 1900, the number of countries with a government elected competitively and on the basis of universal suffrage was zero. Today it is 120. . . . All this is good but it provides no grounds for complacency. . . . An earlier generation fought to make the world safe for democracy. Our challenge is to strengthen democracy to make the world safe. . . . History shows that governments that are accountable to their people are unlikely to engage in reckless acts of aggression; while regimes that run roughshod over the rights of their own people will not hesitate to trample on the freedoms of others. Moreover, democracy is not just another form of government. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every person everywhere has a right to live under a democratic system. And every nation has a responsibility to respect this right. . . . (Albright 2000) Her successor as Secretary of State, Colin Powell, argued on the eve of the U.S.led invasion of Iraq that a U.S. victory could fundamentally reshape the Middle East in a powerful, positive way (quoted in Blecher 2003), and President Bush himself declared that the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world (Bush 2005). Unlike Secretary Albrights, President Bushs conviction that democracy is a universal value was not based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it was no less rm: We go forward with complete condence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have condence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. . . . History has an ebb and ow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty. (Bush 2005) The President concluded that, at long last, Americas vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. In the face of this bipartisan conviction, it was hard for American political scientists, particular the overwhelming numbers who concurred in the desirability of democratic government, to argue that democratization was not a signicant issue in the Middle East. Moreover, personal preferences and political convictions intersected with disciplinary imperatives, particularly in political science, to create an even more powerful pull toward the study of democracy. American political science was designed at birth for the study of democracy, and it had retained that congenital predisposition. Although the interwar period and the Cold War spawned a
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literature devoted to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, fascism and communism were diseases that aficted foreign lands; their study had relatively little impact at the heart of the discipline, which was devoted still to the examination, promotion, and maintenance of healthy democracy. With the wave of democratization in Latin America in the early 1980s and the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of that decade, the triumph of liberalism, democracy, and democratization seemed all but complete around the world, and the awkward t between American political science and the empirical landscape of much of the rest of the world seemed to be resolved. In a 1996 issue of the newsletter of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association, for example, Ames (1997, p. 12) wrote: From my perspective as a Latin Americanist, the state of comparative politics looks pretty good. Latin American political science, at least, is undergoing a renaissance. The return of competitive politics has renewed interest in parties, public opinion, elections, and legislative behavior; the stuff, in other words, of modern political science. This equation of the institutions of liberal politics with the research domain of modern political science suggested that the variety and dynamics of politics in the Middle Eastauthoritarian regimes, kinship networks, kings, cliques, clients, and religious communitieswere unt subjects for systematic political research. American social scientists who worked on the Middle East, where democratic institutions are largely absent, found themselves deprived of the promise that they would contribute to scientic advancement (Anderson 2003). From the perspective of Middle East studies, comparative politics remained more parochial than its aspirations suggested, privileging, as it did, Americanstyle democratic institutions as the standard by which politics can and should be measured. In the region itself, the association of the normative values of political liberalism and democracy with the practice of social science research was readily apparent even, perhaps especially, to the governments. American political scientists who ventured into the Middle East may have felt marginalized professionally, but their local counterparts often lost not only their scientic authority and policy platform but their personal freedom. In early 2001, Egyptian sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim was tried and convicted for tarnishing Egypts image and receiving foreign fundingfrom the European Commission for a documentary lm on voter registrationwithout government authorization. Ibrahim was eventually released after a worldwide outcry and several trials, but the point had been made: Americanstyle social science was not welcome. The vulnerability of the social science community in the region further weakened and complicated the project of Middle East political science as practiced in the United States. Some political scientists who worked on the Middle East felt that the imposition of a democracy agenda in Middle East studies had advantages even if it did not clearly address many of the compelling issues in the region itself. Shibley Telhami, for example, considered the focus on democracy profoundly important
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and helpful in our own discourse in America. . .because it has overshadowed the clash of civilizations thesis. Suddenly Arabs are normal people in the American discourse. Its not the barrier of culture, its not the barrier of religion, it is really just bad governments and people (Middle East Policy Council 2005). By and large, however, the costs seemed substantial. As Kramer (2001, p. 122) concluded, To put the Middle East before theorizing about the Middle East is to run the risk of being denounced as a disciplinary na f or a latent orientalist. In striking contrast, there is no professional cost for substantive error in interpreting the Middle East. . . . Reducing the Middle East to a set of proofs will not only perpetuate the marginality of Middle Eastern studies. It will rob the eld of its potential for contributing to the great debates, present and future, over the place of the Middle East in a globalized world. Mitchell (2003, p. 22) agreed: Writing about the politics of the Middle East as part of a general science of politics functions largely as a rhetorical device, providing linguistic markers of ones seriousness of purpose and scientic credentials. . . . [There is] a signicant loss if one allows the authority of the social science disciplines to persuade us that the only worthwhile ways of engaging with the politics and history of other world regions is [sic] to the extent that they can be made to appear as particular instances of the universal stories told in and about the West. The efforts to incorporate the Middle East in the project of establishing universal generalizations about politics through the lens of democratization had served neither the science of politics nor the study of the region particularly well. Both Kramer and Mitchell seemed to consider the aw intrinsic to the project itself, but for most political scientists working on the Middle East, that was by no means a foregone conclusion.
THE PERILS OF SEARCHING IN THE LIGHT, AND THE PROMISE OF THE SHADOWS
There is an old joke that captures the dilemma confronting the political scientists who studied the Middle East. One evening, a passer-by chances on a fellow searching for his lost house key under a streetlight. Hoping to be helpful, the spectator asks the searcher where he dropped the key. Across the street, comes the reply. Then why is he searching on this side of the street? The light is so much better over here. For more than 50 years, the policy and scholarly communities of the United States looked for glimmers of democracy in the Middle East. And occasionally they found themsmall traces of hope glinting in the bright light of U.S. policy
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and American social science: a parliament that confronted a president, a contested election deemed free and fair, intellectuals who argued for the reconciliation of Islam and democracy, judges who ruled against the executive branch, human rights advocates who protested ofcial misconduct. Laudable as these may have been, however, they did not turn out to be the key either to the nature of democracy and democratization or to the dynamics of politics in the Middle East. Political sciences disciplinary bias toward democracy and American foreign policys emphasis on democratization cast a bright light that confused and distorted the research agenda in the study of Middle East politics, thereby preventing it from contributing as much as it might to a genuinely comparative science of politics. The political dynamics of the Middle East at the dawn of the twenty-rst century did not reect debates on the merits of presidential and parliamentary institutions, nor even debates on the merits of democratic or authoritarian regimes for economic development, but questions of nation-building and identity formation (Dodge 2003, Medani 2004), the nature of tribal and ethnic politics (Khoury & Kostiner 1990), the resilience of monarchy (Herb 1999), the dynamics of rentier and distributive states (Ross 2001), the politics of informal economies (Heydemann 2004), the role of the military in dening communities and supporting regimes (Heydemann 2000), and the development of constituencies for terrorism, drug trafcking, or insurrection (Medani 2002, Picard 2005). All of these were issues of public moment and, presumably, of scholarly interest. The failure of most of the states of the Middle East to develop modern bureaucratic institutions resulted from the legacy of the Ottoman Empires collapse, European colonial policies, and global support of rentier regimesin other words, the modern history of the region. Both the regimes and, increasingly, the regional state system were challenged far more by groups espousing alternative ways of organizing political, social, and economic life, including the transnational Islamist movements and ethnic communities, than by political parties disputing policy positions. Indeed, some observers argued that it was precisely these kinds of issues that haunted democratic transformation in Iraq and across the region (Middle East Policy Council 2005, Carothers & Ottaway 2005). The experience of the Middle East suggests that, as Rustow (1970) long ago postulated, democracy does not tolerate widespread mental reservations about membership in the political community in which it is to be constructed. Such consensus is manifestly absent in most of the Middle East, thanks largely to the novelty, fragility, and lack of legitimacy of the contemporary states. Individuals in the region often pay greater deference to nonstate loyaltieskinship groups, ethnic and religious communities, ideological movements, even trading networksthan to the country of which they are ostensibly citizens. The relatively minor importance of states represents a tremendous challenge to the global institutions predicated on those statesfrom political organizations such as the United Nations and Secretary Albrights Community of Democracies to scholarly conventions such as the data banks and large-n studies built on national accounts and country studies.
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In their efforts to straddle the light and the shadows, many talented political scientists working on the Middle East sometimes inadvertently revealed the limits of the conventional science and policy on democracy and democratization. Although Heydemann argued in response to Kramers critique that when it comes to democracy and economic reformespecially the past 10 to 15 years work on the political economy of regime formation and transformationthe eld has been largely right, he attributed this to the fact that the persistence of authoritarianism, not the inevitability of democracy, has been the principle focus of research. The overwhelming sentiment among researchers has been not uncritical optimism about the prospects for democratization but a cautious and critical skepticism, verging at times on frank pessimism (Heydemann 2002, p. 103). It is fair to say, however, that most American political scientists, like most American policy makers, remained profoundly puzzled by the region and had not found the available political science literature especially useful in explaining why the Middle East was so resistant to democratization. Heydemanns defense itself revealed the depth of the dilemma, since as we have seen the persistence of authoritarianism is little more than the obverse of the inevitability of democracy, inected by pessimism. It directed attention to the same kinds of research subjectsthe strength or weakness of civil society, for example, or regime manipulation of interest groupsand deected attention from other questions that were perhaps less familiarly the stuff of modern political science but may, in fact, have revealed more about both the dynamics in the region and the prospects for democracy. Kramer (2001, p. 122) argued that the effort to t the Middle East into the restrictive terms of political science would rob the eld of its potential for contributing to the great debates, present and future, over the place of the Middle East in a globalized world. Mitchell (2003, p. 24) added that Area studies offer a place from which to rewrite the history of the social sciences, and to examine how their categories are implicated in a certain history of Europe and, in the twentieth century, an unachieved American project of universal social science. Perhaps we could both debate the place of the Middle East in the world and rewrite the history of the social sciences if we were willing to look for the key in the shadows. In fact, if we wish to nd out why the Middle East is resistant to democratization, we may need to do both. We may have to search a bit more in the shadows, in the arenas of political life less well illuminated by conventional political science. The history of the states established by European imperialism (particularly their unique combination of weak extractive capacity and generous welfare provision), the role of international competition in shaping the regimes of the region, and the growth of informal economies that violate the boundaries of the nation-state and challenge our capacity to record and measure regional markets, all represent research arenas for comparative political science that would both enhance our understanding of the region and contribute to a genuine science of politics. And that, in turn, would mean that political scientists who work on the Middle East would help to widen the circle that the discipline illuminates.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Barbara Geddes and Ira Katznelson for their very useful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. This essay draws on several of my previous articles, all listed below, and I am grateful to the many colleagues who commented, then and now, on my arguments. The Annual Review of Political Science is online at http://polisci.annualreviews.org LITERATURE CITED
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Annual Review of Political Science Volume 9, 2006
CONTENTS
BENTLEY, TRUMAN, AND THE STUDY OF GROUPS, Mika LaVaque-Manty HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF LEGISLATURES IN THE UNITED STATES,
Peverill Squire
1 19 45 67
RESPONDING TO SURPRISE, James J. Wirtz POLITICAL ISSUES AND PARTY ALIGNMENTS: ASSESSING THE ISSUE EVOLUTION PERSPECTIVE, Edward G. Carmines and Michael W. Wagner PARTY POLARIZATION IN AMERICAN POLITICS: CHARACTERISTICS, CAUSES, AND CONSEQUENCES, Geoffrey C. Layman, Thomas M. Carsey,
and Juliana Menasce Horowitz
83 111 127
WHAT AFFECTS VOTER TURNOUT? Andr e Blais PLATONIC QUANDARIES: RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON PLATO,
Danielle Allen
ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION AND ITS POLITICAL DISCONTENTS IN CHINA: AUTHORITARIANISM, UNEQUAL GROWTH, AND THE DILEMMAS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, Dali L. Yang MADISON IN BAGHDAD? DECENTRALIZATION AND FEDERALISM IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS, Erik Wibbels SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES: STUDYING DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Lisa Anderson POLITICAL ISLAM: ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS? Yahya Sadowski RETHINKING THE RESOURCE CURSE: OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE, INSTITUTIONAL CAPACITY, AND DOMESTIC CONSTRAINTS,
Pauline Jones Luong and Erika Weinthal
143 165 189 215
241 265
A CLOSER LOOK AT OIL, DIAMONDS, AND CIVIL WAR, Michael Ross THE HEART OF THE AFRICAN CONFLICT ZONE: DEMOCRATIZATION, ETHNICITY, CIVIL CONFLICT, AND THE GREAT LAKES CRISIS,
Crawford Young
301 329 353 vii
PARTY IDENTIFICATION: UNMOVED MOVER OR SUM OF PREFERENCES?

Richard Johnston
REGULATING INFORMATION FLOWS: STATES, PRIVATE ACTORS, AND E-COMMERCE, Henry Farrell
viii
CONTENTS
COMPARATIVE ETHNIC POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES: BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE, Gary M. Segura and Helena Alves Rodrigues WHAT IS ETHNIC IDENTITY AND DOES IT MATTER? Kanchan Chandra NEW MACROECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, Torben Iversen
and David Soskice
375 397 425 455
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CASE STUDY METHODS, Andrew Bennett and Colin Elman FOREIGN POLICY AND THE ELECTORAL CONNECTION, John H. Aldrich,
Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, Jason Reier, and Kristin Thompson Sharp
477 503
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY, James A. Robinson INDEXES

Subject Index Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 19 Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 19
529 549 552
ERRATA
An online log of corrections Annual Review of Political Science chapters (if any, 1997 to the present) may be found at http://polisci.annualreviews.org/

Liza Andersson, Searching Where The Light Shines

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Liza Andersson, Searching Where The Light Shines

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Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2006. 9:189214 doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.072004.095345 Copyright c 2006 by Annual Reviews.

SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES:

democracy, policy, democracy promotion, area studies, Arab world

THE LOST KEY: WHERE IS DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ANSWERING THE QUESTION: THE STUDY OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

COMING UP EMPTY-HANDED: THE REALITY OF DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Annual Review of Political Science Volume 9, 2006

143 165 189 215

301 329 353 vii

PARTY IDENTIFICATION: UNMOVED MOVER OR SUM OF PREFERENCES?

375 397 425 455

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY, James A. Robinson INDEXES

529 549 552

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