Liza Andersson, Searching Where the Light Shines

6 Apr 2006 17:16 AR ANRV276-PL09-10.tex XMLPublishSM(2004/02/24) P1: KUV

10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.072004.095345

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2006. 9:189–214doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.072004.095345

Copyright c© 2006 by Annual Reviews. All rights reservedFirst published online as a Review in Advance on Feb. 7, 2006

SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES:Studying Democratization in the Middle East

Lisa AndersonSchool of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York,New York 10027; email: [email protected]

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

■ Abstract For several decades, political scientists who work on the Middle Easthave been asked by both disciplinary and policy audiences about the region’s prospectsfor democratization. We encounter difficulties in answering that question because itarises from American disciplinary and policy preoccupations, not from regional po-litical dynamics. As a result of those preoccupations, Middle East political scientistshave neglected some of the major political forces in the region, while contributing tothe development of general comparative theories of democracy and democratizationonly at the margins.

THE LOST KEY: WHERE IS DEMOCRACYIN THE MIDDLE EAST?

For the several decades preceding the turn of the twenty-first century, politicalscientists who worked on the Middle East were confronted with scholars andpolicy analysts asking why the region seemed to be, as one of them put it, “sosingularly resistant to democratization” (Bellin 2004, p. 139). Conspicuous bytheir absence in the Third Wave of democratization that began in the mid-1970s(Huntington 1993b) and in the worldwide embrace of democratic institutions thatattended the end of the Cold War, the countries of the Middle East seemed tobe growing increasingly anomalous. And what might have been merely scientificcuriosities during the 1990s became major policy dilemmas after the attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001. Suddenly, the world seemed to wonder, in the words of aprominent Middle East historian, “What went wrong?” (Lewis 2003).

By that time, American and, indeed, Middle Eastern political scientists hadspilled considerable ink (which we will sample shortly) on the question of democ-racy in the Middle East, but they seemed to have found no satisfactory answer.Comparative political scientists who worked on democracy and democratizationglobally had consistently failed to include case studies from the Middle East, andMiddle East political scientists therefore found, perhaps not surprisingly, that littleof the general comparative politics literature provided hypotheses directly testable

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in the region. Political scientists struggled with the dilemmas posed by theoret-ical literatures that seemed to bypass the region and regional developments thatprovoked little attention from general comparativists. Was it even reasonable toconsider the apparent changes in Middle Eastern regimes over the past 20 years inthe context of democratization at all? Speaking of the allied literatures on economicliberalization, Heydemann (2004, p. 3) was moved to ask just such a question.

In the region studied here, policy reform has been partial and selective atbest. This reality has led some observers to question whether reform is anappropriate characterization of the shifts that have taken place in MiddleEastern political economies over the past ten to twenty years. . . . Why, afterall, should theories of economic reform be expected to account for processesthat, whatever we might call them, do not meet some minimally accepteddefinition of that process?

Heydemann concluded that the changes in the Middle East could indeed beconsidered in light of the literature on economic reform, but the fact that he feltconstrained to ask the question at all illustrates the isolation and anxiety thatbeset political scientists considering change in the Middle East. By the turn of thecentury, many worried that, even if economic change could be characterized asreform, the political developments in the region had not been part of a process thatwould meet some minimally accepted definition of democratization.

Indeed, by then, both in the policy world and on the critical edges of the profes-sion, there were increasingly vocal suggestions that perhaps something was amissin the focus on democracy in Middle East studies. In late 2001, the historian Mar-tin Kramer, who was allied with the neoconservative foreign policy establishment,published a blistering attack on the Middle East studies enterprise in the UnitedStates, faulting its leaders for, among other things, their excessive concern withdemocratization. According to Kramer (2001, p. 50), American political scientistswho worked on the Middle East assumed that

Americans would never understand a presentation of Islam in its owncategories—that would take more knowledge and empathy than most stu-dents, journalists, and officials could be expected to muster. But they mightsee Islam and Islamist movements more favorably if they were presented inWestern categories. . . . Why not place Islamist movements in the politicalcategory of participation, or even democratization?

This project failed, argued Kramer, largely because democratic political partic-ipation itself did not materialize in any significant degree in the region. Democra-tization was a procrustean bed into which the politics of the region fit poorly. Asa result, the region had little to offer the theorists of democracy, while its actualpolitical dynamics remained as mysterious as ever.

Although many of Kramer’s readers in the American Middle East studies com-munity were quick to dismiss his critique (couched as it was in sanctimonious andself-serving terms), the qualms he expressed were not his alone. Mitchell, who

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DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST 191

was typically associated with progressive political positions, published a master-ful assessment of Middle East studies several years later, in which he criticizedpolitical scientists’ assumption that “the languages of political Islam, for example,can appear in Western scholarship only through a process of translation that en-ables them to speak in terms of the modernizing discourse of the West” (Mitchell2003, p. 24).

Both Mitchell and Kramer argued that the focus on what they called “Westerncategories” and “Western discourse” distorts understanding of the dynamics ofpolitics 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 rightquestions, at the right times, about Islamism. They underestimated its impactin the 1980s; they misrepresented its role in the early 1990s, and they glossedover its growing potential for terrorism against America in the late 1990s.Twenty years of denial had produced mostly banalities about American biasand 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 generalizinglanguages of political economy does not produce any increase in a universalknowledge of politics. It may help undermine some of the unsupportablegeneralizations of others. . .but such general theories are usually adequatelycritiqued when they first appear. The generalizations survive simply as un-supported “theories” to be endlessly refuted, long after they are dead, in areastudies scholarship.

Battered from all sides—by policy advocates and academic colleagues, fromthe right and the left—political scientists who worked on the Middle East at thebeginning of the twenty-first century confronted a significant challenge (Lockman2004). In the United States, policy makers and political scientists alike privilegeddemocracy as the measure of politics, projecting American institutions, values, andpurposes onto the rest of the world. Policy makers trumpeted the desirability ofdemocracy 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 historyof non-Western regions, such as the process of development, democratization,globalization, or the introduction of free markets.” Yet, in the Middle East, theelision of “universal” and “western” was meeting significant resistance (Anderson2003, 2004).

This essay examines the efforts of American political scientists to address theprospects 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 hopesand dreams on the region imposed very high costs, not only in political but alsoin scholarly terms. The parochialism of American theories of democracy wentlargely 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 policycommunity ill-equipped to assess the likely reception of democracy-promotionefforts 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 broaderdiscipline-wide debate should have provided.

ANSWERING THE QUESTION: THE STUDY OFDEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Americans encountered the Middle East as a policy arena in the aftermath of WorldWar II, as the United States assumed its global role as a postwar superpower. Atthat time, most of the countries of the modern Middle East were just gaining inde-pendence from European imperial powers that had profoundly shaped the region.Most of the states were little more than decades-old successors of the OttomanEmpire, which had been dismembered after World War I. These new states, andeven those in the region that could claim a more ancient lineage as autonomouspolities, had only recently been reorganized in the European image, with territorialboundaries, standing armies, national markets, and often parliaments.

Little of that history was of consequence to the American political scientists ofthe time or, for that matter, since. Indeed, a rather good recent essay on the roleof the military in inhibiting democratic development in the Middle East begins itsargument with the phrase, “from the beginning, in the post independence states ofthe Middle East. . .” (Picard 2005, p. 118), reflecting the widespread assumptionthat the period after independence in the 1940s and 1950s was, in most importantrespects, “the beginning.” In fact, the novelty and frailty of the European-stylestates of the region and the continuing importance of local, nonstate politicalforms and dynamics would prove to be a powerful but largely neglected feature ofMiddle East politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Americanpolitical science was, and in many ways continues to be, profoundly ahistorical(Gilman 2003).

Instead, after World War II American policy makers almost reflexively sup-ported freedom—understood as national independence and sovereignty—and em-braced “modernization” as a paradigm to frame analysis of policy questions andprovide an alternative to the Marxist model provided by the Soviet Union. Thecritiques of modernization theory are legion, and they need not be rehearsed hereexcept to recall that in the distinction between “tradition” and “modernity,” therewas virtually no place for history. As a result, most American students of the Mid-dle East encountered the region as if its societies had been born anew, somehowmiraculously, at the independence of its states. In this respect, Israel representeda very powerful and deeply misleading example.

That said, if the past of the region was murky, the future was clear: Modern-ization was expected to produce political democracy and economic prosperity, onthe 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, andtheir audiences were both policy makers and scholars.

One of the first comprehensive efforts by an American political scientist toexamine politics in the Middle East was Halpern’s The Politics of Social Change inthe 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 betweensocial, economic, and intellectual forces and contemporary political trends in thecountries of the Arab world. . . .” Yet, he continued, “even without these materialsto draw on, an essay such as the present one must be attempted. The policy-makerand the concerned public need an analytical foundation for judgment before all thereturns are in.” Tellingly, however, Halpern also wrote that his book “is addressedequally to those whose main concern is the increase of knowledge” (Halpern 1963,pp. x–xi).

Halpern exhibited a remarkably acute skepticism about democracy’s prospectsin the Middle East. He was quick to identify what would become a perennial featureof the political landscape: “Everyone talks about democracy in the Middle East;no form of governmental organization is more popular. Even authoritarian rulerschampion it by defining their regimes as being, in a special sense, democratic, orby promising to guide the state towards democracy.” Much of the rhetoric aboutdemocracy was, in Halpern’s estimation, “mere talk. . . . Its popularity as a wordis due in part to the fact that the modern political vocabulary of the Middle Eastwas learned largely from England and France, that using it seems to validate thespeaker’s status as a modern leader, and make it easier to make political claims onthe democratic conscience of the West” (Halpern 1963, p. 221).

Insincere rulers were not the only problem that confronted democracy’s advo-cates. More than 40 years ago, Halpern pointed to one of the principal dilemmasthat would confront the democracy promoters of the twenty-first century: Democ-ratization is destabilizing. “In order to reach [democratic] institutions, democratsmust begin by accepting their inescapably subversive and radical role in the presentenvironment, and deliberately bring about the social and economic changes whichare necessary before democracy can reign” (Halpern 1963, pp. 221–23). A con-temporary of Halpern’s, Morroe Berger, who would serve as the first president ofthe Middle East Studies Association when it was founded in 1967, identified thepolicy puzzle succinctly: “The West is confronted with the dilemma of supportingtraditional autocrats or modern intellectuals who want to end Western influence”(Berger 1964, p. 297).

The debates about the desirability of democracy attenuated in the Middle Eastin the 1960s and 1970s. In some countries, particularly those allied with the East-ern bloc, the single-party developmental regime, modeled more or less explicitlyon the Soviet Union, seemed better suited to the “subversive” challenges of socialand economic development. Elsewhere, the United States threw its weight behindthe “traditional autocrats.” As the Cold War congealed, both the United Statesand the Soviet Union began to prize stability and reliability in local governmentsover other values, including reform. Especially after the United States’ difficulties

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in Southeast Asia, the policy goal of democracy became less important—indeed,less desirable, as President George W. Bush was eventually to concede: “[S]ixtyyears of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in theMiddle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannotbe purchased at the expense of liberty” (Bush 2003). American political scien-tists of the era occupied themselves with questions about the role of the militaryin politics, the nature of Arab nationalism, and the structure of the single-partystate.

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 politicalscientists of the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, unexpected transitionsto democracy in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America spawned a vast andoptimistic literature that came to be known as “transitology” (Karl & Schmitter1991, Geddes 1999, Carothers 2002). By the end of the 1980s, the communistregimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Democratizationseemed to be appearing in what was once viewed as profoundly infertile ground,and democrats around the world—and throughout American political science—took heart.

In the Middle East, the appearance of this literature coincided with a periodof economic contraction and political upheaval that prompted modest politicalreforms in a number of countries. In 1989, Jordan saw its first parliamentary elec-tions since the 1950s, and Yemen held its first elections in 1993; both contests wereconsidered essentially free and fair. The Syrian parliament was enlarged to include60 seats for “independent” candidates in 1990, and in 1992 the absolute monar-chy of Saudi Arabia established an appointed consultative council. In Algeria, theone-time single-party regime lifted restrictions on political parties and permittedcompetitive local elections in the late 1980s. Lebanon held its first parliamentaryelections in 20 years in 1992, and Kuwait, just liberated from Iraq’s invasion, heldelections for a parliament that had been suspended in 1986 (Niblock & Murphy1990, Harik & Sullivan 1992, Richards & Waterbury 1996).

The global democracy juggernaut seemed unstoppable, and there was amplereason to think that the Middle East was on the verge of a transition itself. Norton(1993, pp. 205–6) expressed the consensus view among political scientists whoworked on the region:

Across the Middle East, from bustling bazaars, squalid slums and privilegedurban enclaves, to sun-baked oil fields, rugged mountains and in thousandsof villages, there is growing evidence of widening dissatisfaction with thereigning regimes. Governments, strapped by limited resources, massive andunwieldy bureaucracies, and the burgeoning demands of fast-growing pop-ulations, frequently are failing to meet the needs and the demands of theircitizens.

Although there is wide disagreement about the outcome, among those whofollow 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 glory—are under siegefrom citizens no longer willing to believe empty promises or tolerate self-serving and incompetent officials. Repression at the hands of the state hasbecome a topic of public discussion, and human rights activists, althoughstill relatively few in number, have become increasingly vocal. In short, theregion’s governments, especially the Arab ones, face a persistent crisis oflegitimacy. . . . The new language of politics in the Middle East speaks ofparticipation, cultural authenticity, freedom, and even democracy.

The democracy bandwagon was spacious and welcoming, and nearly all thepolitical scientists who worked on the Middle East jumped on. Some looked forthe patterns identified by the Latin American transitologists and found governmentsengaged in elite pact-making (Anderson 1991).1 A few theorists looked at regimes,especially at fissures within state elites, and found that liberalization initiativeswere typically undertaken to fend off more serious challenges during fiscal crises(Robinson 1998). Others, including Norton himself, looked not to regimes but tosocial forces, notably to what they hoped would be analogous to the civil societyattributed so much influence in the transitions in both Latin America and EasternEurope (Ibrahim 1995; Norton 1995/1996; Singerman 1996).

Although this work produced a number of useful surveys of the region’s polit-ical landscape, it soon ran into both empirical and analytical problems. From theempirical perspective, it turned out that the early 1990s were the high water markof liberalizing or democratizing initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa. Al-geria’s contested parliamentary elections were cancelled in 1992, and the countryplunged into a decade-long civil war. Yemen’s democratic experiment also col-lapsed into civil war two years later. Tunisia’s National Pact proved little more thana facade behind which the government ruthlessly repressed virtually all opposition.Jordan rewrote its electoral laws to restrict competition; Egypt instituted antiterror-ism legislation that reversed its earlier liberalization. Even the relatively late andclosely monitored democratic experiment of the Palestine National Authority—the1996 elections that ratified Yasser Arafat’s leadership and produced the PalestineNational Council—soon corroded into what would be called the region’s charac-teristic “liberalized autocracy” (Brumberg 2002). As early as 1993, Norton wasreporting that more and more scholars of the Middle East were growing skeptical

1In fairness to those of us who exhibited excessive enthusiasm during this period—and it

was indeed excessive—we 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 Tunisia—a professor

turned Cabinet Minister—that the government seemed to be following the path outlined in

O’Donnell & Schmitter’s Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. “Really?” he said. “That’s

great! What’s 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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196 ANDERSON

about the prospect that civil society would be able to take advantage of the limitedliberalizations in the region (Norton 1993, p. 215).

Did the empirical problems reveal analytical flaws? Some theorists beganlooking more closely at the terms of reference in the literature on democracyand democratization. Taking what he called “a less sanguine view of civil soci-ety in the Middle East,” Wiktorowicz (2000, p. 43; also see Wiktorowicz 2001)argued:

Rather than risk uncontrollable popular protest and collective action that coulddestabilize the political system, regimes such as those in Egypt, Morocco,Algeria (before 1992), and Jordan instead offered new, though oftentimeslimited, opportunities for the creation of civil society organizations. Oncecreated, these organizations were embedded in a web of bureaucratic prac-tices and legal codes which allow those in power to monitor and regulatecollective activities. . . . Under such circumstances, civil society institutionsare more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism for collectiveempowerment.

Later observers were even more blunt: “It has come to be en vogue for members ofthe political and economic elites to found their own personal NGOs as a means ofrent seeking, but also in order to feel the people’s pulse and manipulate interests”(Albrecht & Schlumberger 2004, p. 374).

The question was not merely whether ordinary citizens had been hoodwinkedby clever, manipulative regimes (although it certainly often seemed that way), butrather whether civil society was the right lens through which to examine social andpolitical 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 processof state formation, how do we adjust that definition to situations where thestate has indeed been “imported”. . . and when in any case, that state has seenits bureaucratic apparatus set up even before civil society in its Hegelian sensehas come into being? Should we then follow certain Hegelian and Islamistsociologists in distinguishing two civil societies, the traditional one whichdid in fact give rise to innumerable traditional states, and the modern one,dependent, westernized, brought into being by the modern state and bornwith the original sin of its colonial parentage? Can we really speak of thecoexistence, even the superimposition, of the rivalry or the conflict of twosocieties, one “authentic,” the other artificially created?

This question could have provoked interest in the history obscured by moderniza-tion theory’s “tradition,” but instead it focused attention on the debates about thepurposes and roles of Islam and Islamist movements in the politics of the region.

Although in policy and scholarly circles Islam was sometimes dismissed asintrinsically incompatible with democracy, this attitude was seldom shared by theacademic specialists. For example, Kedourie’s (1992, p. 1) famous remark that

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“the idea of democracy is quite alien to the mind-set of Islam” and Huntington’s(1993a, p. 20) observation that “Islam has not been hospitable to democracy” foundlittle support among Middle East political scientists, although such statementsretained 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 counterpartsChristianity and Judaism, was a vast, flexible, and accommodating faith, availablefor interpretation in myriad ways. The use of religious precepts to justify violence,for example, was hardly unique to Islam, and many scholars found liberal strainsprominent in Islamic thought. While some Islamist movements were said to bethe Muslim counterparts of the Crusades of Europe, some Islamist political partieswere considered the Muslim counterparts of Europe’s Christian Democrats (Binder1988, Esposito & Voll 1996, Esposito 1999, Rosefsky Wickham 2002, Diamond etal. 2003, Abou el Fadl et al. 2004, Hunter & Malik 2005). It was Stepan, a politicalscientist better known for his work in other parts of the world, who demonstratedthat the contemporary association of autocracy with Islam was false—many non-Arab Muslim states were already democratic. It was the Arab Middle East, asopposed to the Muslim world, that had a democracy deficit, and this Stepan (2003)attributed to the region’s modern history, specifically the novelty and fragility ofits states.

In fact, the emergence of Islamist politics in the Muslim world had sometimescoincided with the emergence of democracy. Islam seemed to support democratictrends in some places, such as Turkey and Indonesia, while inhibiting them inothers, such as Iran and Algeria (Beinin & Stork 1997, Hefner 2005). These twotrends—the rise of Islamic politics and democratization—may have reflected acommon purpose, namely popular participation, and perhaps even a common prod:American efforts during the Cold War to combat communism and undermine So-viet influence. As we shall see, some political scientists would look to internationalinfluences both to assess the fortunes of democratic reform and to explain the riseof Islamist politics. It is certainly true that the United States had actively supportedIslamist movements against “godless communism,” not only in Afghanistan butacross the Muslim world, though usually at the expense of democratization. ManyMiddle Eastern regimes not only acquiesced to these efforts but actively partici-pated. As Bronson (2005, p. 110) pithily put it,

The politicization of Islam is. . . a direct outgrowth of the Middle East’s ColdWar experience. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that in today’spost-Cold War Middle East, the major constituency-based organizations in theArab 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 forgovernment resistance to liberalization. Many regimes cited the ostensible dan-gers of Islamist influence, including its role in mobilizing opposition to the regimesthemselves and to Western influence, as preventing them from pursing liberal or

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198 ANDERSON

democratic reform. For many regimes this concern was, of course, somewhat disin-genuous. It did raise the more academic question, however, of whether democraticvalues need, or even can, precede democratization. Rustow’s (1970) well-knownargument—that democracy is not produced by economic, social, or cultural pro-cesses but is the outcome of stalemated conflict—was echoed by Salame (1994,p. 3):

Democracy could be judged less by the attachment to its principles by someactor or the other [sic], than by its common use as a means to avoid civilwar or institutional chaos. . . . The program of some opposition groups maywell 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. Yetdemocracy 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 inadver-tently was, no doubt, a weak reed on which to pin hopes for democratization inthe Middle East. The argument that democratization may not require deliberateintent on the part of those who undertake it did serve, however, to turn attentionfrom questions of culture to examination of the sorts of material incentives toliberalization or democratization that might exist in the region.

Disenchanted with efforts to plumb cultural depths to assess the prospects ofdemocracy 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 post-war 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 domesticlabor—oil production, for example, or strategic rents for pipelines, waterways,military basing rights, or simply political support—are said to release govern-ments from reliance on domestic taxation and allow development of “distribu-tive” or “allocative” states (Mahdavy 1970, Luciani 1990). Governments can, inessence, buy acquiescence to their rule by distributing goods and services—and de-veloping comprehensive domestic surveillance and repression—without exactingtaxes.

The fact that a virtual merry-go-round of military coups in a number of Mid-dle Eastern countries suddenly ended in the mid-1970s, when oil prices increaseddramatically and the United States and Soviet Union focused their attentions onmaintaining stable allies, lent credence to the argument linking external revenuesand regime longevity. Subsequent statistical analysis seemed to confirm the link(Ross 2001). Moreover, between 1982 and 1986, when oil prices plummeted andmany governments cut back on once generous consumer subsidies, popular unrestbroke out across the region. “Bread riots” took place in Tunisia and Morocco in1987, in Jordan and Algeria in 1988, and in Egypt in 1992. Many observers, includ-ing many political scientists, explained subsequent liberalizations as regime effortsto pacify restive populations with inexpensive concessions. This apparent relation-ship between fiscal crises and political liberalizations in rentier states launched an

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intriguing but somewhat inconclusive debate about the importance of taxation increating demand for representation—or, as it happened, the importance of a lackof taxation and the provision of subsidies in muffling such demands (Anderson1991, 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. policymakers. “The reason that the promotion of civil society, economic developmentand sanctions have not led to political reform in the Arab world,” he argued, “isthat none of them addresses the real obstacles to change in the region: flawedinstitutions.” In fact, a small but careful literature on institutions in the regionhad already drawn from the work on the constitution-writing of postcommunistEastern Europe, and several Middle East political scientists had examined con-stitutions, parliaments, and elections in the region (Baaklini et al. 1999, Dillman2000, Posusney 2002, Brown 2003). Others adopted often sophisticated insti-tutional and neo-institutional approaches to politics to examine “the structure ofgovernment-opposition relationships” (Lust-Okar & Jamal 2002; Lust-Okar 2004,2005).

The utility of institutional analysis was unclear, however, where presidentsroutinely won elections by 99.99%—the infamous “four nines” of Syria’s Hafizal-Asad. Making a virtue out of necessity perhaps, several scholars wondered, asWedeen (2003) put it, “What was the purpose of fixing elections that did not needto be fixed?” Why were the institutions of democracy—elections, parliaments,judiciaries—adopted so cavalierly and treated with such contempt? In Yemen, forexample, the popular incumbent was expected to win Yemen’s first free directpresidential election in 1999 handily. He nonetheless arranged to have his op-ponent disqualified and replaced him with a member of his own political party.Wedeen (2003, pp. 684–90) pointed out that “although the regime representeditself to foreign donors and citizens alike as an ‘emerging democracy,’ the stagedelections could not possibly have been intended to reassure Yemeni democrats orforeign observers of the regime’s commitment to institutionalizing competitive,free elections.” She concluded:

The excessive bogusness operated as both a signaling device and a mechanismfor constituting the political power it signaled . . . . Given the President’s abilityto win a credible election (or, for that matter, to rig one covertly), the regime’sdecision to produce an overtly phony one implies that the event did morethan exemplify political power; it was also doing the work of creating it bydemonstrating to officials and citizens alike that the regime could get awaywith the charade.

The appearance (as opposed to the reality) of democracy seemed to serve severalpurposes, satisfying foreign donors who may have been ambivalent about gen-uinely contentious politics in the region while humiliating domestic opponents.As Talbi (2003, p. 5) pointed out, most elections in the region are won by vastlyinflated vote totals.

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These percentages are not, as one might believe, the result of naivete, andstill less of political blunders. They are carefully calculated. . . . The regimesare able to discredit and dishonor the intelligentsia by making them swallowthese sham results and even publicly affirm them. . . . They are neutralized,rendered servile. . . .

Interested in the role of foreign audiences, particularly donors, in the dynamicsof regime stability and democracy promotion, several of the comparative polit-ical scientists who worked on the Middle East turned to international relations.Waterbury (1997, p. 145) felt constrained to remind his comparativist colleaguesthat “the political economy of authoritarianism and democracy does not stop at agiven country’s border but is in fact closely connected to international markets,sources of credit and arms, investment flows, strategic rents, and the instruments ofinternational clientage and dependency.” Agreeing with Waterbury, Ayoob (2005,p. 187) complained, “it is regrettable that the majority of the literature on democra-tization produced in the past two decades has concentrated almost exclusively oninternal dynamics, and the causes for the reversal of the democratization processhave also been sought in the domestic sphere, to the near exclusion of externalinfluences.”

Yet attribution of causal influence in the persistence of authoritarian regimesin the Middle East to “external actors,” especially the United States, was oftenviewed askance, particularly but not only by supporters of U.S. policy in theregion. Karawan (2002, p. 101) expressed an impatience that was hardly unique:“The field of Middle Eastern studies suffers from an excessive preoccupation withthe United States and its policies toward the region,” he wrote.

Underdevelopment, the absence of democracy, the role of military elites, therise of fundamentalism, and the persistence of Saddam Hussein in power haveall been attributed to U.S. actions and desires. . . . The United States is animportant actor, of course, but many analysts of Middle Eastern issues tend toattribute to it more power, more coherent strategic purposes, and more abilityto produce its desired outcomes than it can possibly possess.

Still, many theorists shared Bellin’s (2004, p. 148) conviction that Western interestin reliable oil supplies and growing concern about the Islamist threat “provided acompelling rationale to western policy-makers to persist in providing patronageto many authoritarian states in the region. As Roosevelt said about Somoza, ‘theymay 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 thereno democracy?” but “What accounts for the persistence of authoritarianism?” AsHuntington (1993b, p. 28) had suggested to his fellow students of democracy,the appropriate question may not be “Why has democracy failed in some ar-eas?” 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 ex-ceptional. Hence the basic intellectual effort should be to explain why democ-racy has flowered in certain countries at certain times rather than, as is usuallythe case, to try to discover the reason for its absence from most countries mostof the time.

For the political scientists of the Middle East, however, the question could not behow democracy emerged or survived. It hadn’t. Bellin (2004, p. 148) proposed that“the solution to the puzzle of Middle Eastern and North African exceptionalismlies less in absent prerequisites of democratization and more in present condi-tions that foster robust authoritarianism, specifically a robust coercive apparatusin 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 democ-racy’s fragility—the availability of external rents, the limited popular mobilizationfor democracy—were adduced to account for the robustness of the coercive ma-chinery and the stability of the regimes. That there was a tautological character tothis argument is not surprising; after all, “authoritarianism” is little more than aresidual category in most political science, encompassing all the otherwise veryvaried nondemocratic regimes that have existed throughout history. One of the fewefforts to examine paths to democracy that took history seriously, examining thesignificance of different starting points (Geddes 1999), discussed no Middle East-ern cases and provoked unfortunately little discussion in the debates about MiddleEast authoritarianism and “exceptionalism” (Crystal 1994, Brownlee 2002, Bellin2004, Posusney & Angrist 2005).

By the turn of the century, the conclusion that the region had missed the boat onthe Third Wave of democracy was unavoidable, but it was also deeply unsatisfyingto most Middle East political scientists. For some diehard optimists, it was still sim-ply 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 wasshared by many U.S. policy makers, but for most political scientists, the pessimismof Bill’s (1996, p. 501) decade-old assessment seemed far more appropriate:

American analysts continue to explore their political empty quarter in searchof knowledge necessary to explain political development in the Middle East.Eventually these analysts all seem to end up at the same old watering holes, be-lieving they have discovered new oases and giving them different names eachtime. In the 1950s and 1960s, the signs at the oases read “liberal democracyand Westernization”; in the 1960s and 1970s, the search focused on “politicaldevelopment and political participation”; in the 1970s and 1980s, the jargonwas “legitimacy” and the “state and society” dichotomy; today, the words onthe weatherbeaten old signs are “civil society” and “democratization.” Wehave come full circle.

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COMING UP EMPTY-HANDED: THE REALITY OFDEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The repeated efforts of American political scientists to treat the prospects fordemocracy in the Middle East may not have been quite as disoriented as Bill’slament suggests. After all, as Brumberg and others had shown, the region’s regimesin the 1990s were not what they had been in the 1960s, or even in the 1980s. Fromthe single-party and military regimes of the heyday of Arab nationalism to theassertive and confrontational autocracies of the early 1980s, many governmentsin the region evolved. By the middle of the first decade of the new century, theywere, in fact, more open and more experimental in their approach to reform. Howthis change should be interpreted remained quite a mystery, however, and theabsence of consensus on analytical standards even for measuring change, muchless establishing its significance, produced vastly different assessments. In 2005, apolicy-oriented political scientist expressed the U.S. policy community’s optimismand excitement:

Across the Arab world, political activists are challenging the status quo. Egyp-tians are demanding an end to the state of emergency that has been in place al-most continuously since the 1950s; Syrians have petitioned their governmentfor political freedoms; Jordanians are seizing new economic opportunities;women in the traditionally conservative Gulf states are seeking wider polit-ical and economic participation; even Saudi Arabia is experimenting withelections at the municipal level. In two extraordinary moments in January2005, the Palestinian and Iraqi people freely elected their leaders. During thefollowing eight weeks, the people of Lebanon forced an end to Syria’s militaryoccupation of their country. Political, economic, and social changes are nowclearly 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 doubledsince 1972, the number in this region has registered an absolute decline. To-day, only two out of twenty-one countries qualify as electoral democracies,down from three observed in 1972. Stagnation is also evident in the guaranteeof political rights and civil liberties. While the number of countries designatedfree by Freedom House has doubled in the Americas and in the Asia-Pacificregion, increased tenfold in Africa, and risen exponentially in Central andEastern Europe over the past thirty years, there has been no overall improve-ment in the Middle East and North Africa. Aggregate scores differ little from1972. (Bellin 2004, p. 139)

Indeed, historian Robert Blecher argued that the Middle East became a good dealless democratic after the end of the Cold War.

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Jordan and Egypt reversed the limited democratic reforms they had institutedin the 1980s. After Islamists won the 1992 vote in Algeria, the ruling partycanceled the elections, leading to a bloody civil war. In Palestine Yasser Arafat,with the support and encouragement of Israel and the United States, set upa nightwatchman quasi-state that spent more than one third of its budget onthe police and the security apparatus. The “Damascus spring” that followedthe death of Syrian President Hafez al-Asad in June 2000 has morphed into abitter cold winter of despair. . . . (Blecher 2003)

In fact, in Tunisia and elsewhere, liberalization had simply permitted the reestab-lishment of powerful private clienteles, and where this was true, liberalizationproved to be positively antidemocratic (King 2003; see also Heydemann 2004,Brumberg 2005). Even after September 11, when American attention to issues ofdemocracy seemed to be provoking another round of political reform, there waslittle genuine democratization. As Hawthorne (2005, p. 71) pointed out,

With the exception of Morocco, in every national election held in the Arabworld since September 11, ruling-party or progovernment candidates won bya wider margin, and opposition candidates had their poorest showing, sincethe introduction (or reintroduction, in some cases) of multiparty politics in the1980s and 1990s. Even in Morocco, where the Islamist [party] became thethird largest party represented in parliament after the 2002 elections, the toptwo parties essentially maintained their position, precluding any rotation inpower.

Small wonder that the policy community’s enthusiasm for what President GeorgeW. Bush called evidence of the success of his administration’s “forward strategyof freedom” met with skepticism in the academic Middle East studies community.National elections were held in Afghanistan in October 2004 and in the PalestineNational Authority and Iraq in January 2005, and Saudi municipal elections oc-curred in the spring of that year; these were all embraced by the U.S. governmentas indications of a new era in the region. Yet for most Middle East scholars,this was reminiscent of earlier responses to Western pressure: “Arab incumbentsquickly learned the lesson of what was expected internationally and adopted the‘democracy language;’ talking the ‘donor talk’ became a prerequisite for politicalrent-seeking” (Albrecht & Schlumberger 2004, p. 376).

The intellectuals in the region often shared with their professional counterpartsin the United States a fondness for, and indeed a commitment to, democratiza-tion (Arab Human Development Report 2004). It was not clear, however, howwidespread or deep this attachment was beyond the intellectual elite. Lip serviceto 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 littledocumentation or demonstration. The question of democracy, together withthe allied concern with the notion of civil society, is addressed in the Arab

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204 ANDERSON

world in a myriad of political, academic, journalistic and other writings, andis the subject of inveterate commentary in casual conversations, in politico-academic conventions and conferences. . . . With the exception of the radicallyprimitivist Islamist discourse, the question of democracy has become a majorconstituent in the political vocabulary prevalent in the Arab world today vir-tually across the entire ideological and political spectrum; it is invading eventhe most archaic Arabian politics.

Similarly, most polls in the region suggested widespread support for democracy—afinding that heartened the proponents of civil society (Tessler 2002, 2003). Despitetheir governments, at least the people of the Middle East seemed to care aboutdemocratic values and institutions.

But did they? Posusney & Angrist (2005, p. 222) argued that in fact “to an impor-tant extent, there is simply not a lot of organized popular enthusiasm for democraticreform and the development of parliamentarism in the region.” Mernissi (2002,p. 52) suggested why that might be so, explaining that democracy is not wellunderstood by most people in the region. “How is this fascinating democracy per-ceived?” she asked. “What is that ‘afrita [spirit], as it is called by my Aunt ‘Aziza,who finishes listening to the eighty-thirty news every night. . .by murmuring, ‘Butwhat 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 todo so at all, under the slogan, “Islam is the solution,” democracy’s proponents hadmade it little more, or less, than a magic formula that cured all ills. Democracywas “endowed with a virtually talismanic quality, as a protean force capable, whenmeaningfully put into practice, of solving all outstanding problems” (al-Azmeh1994, p. 115). In fact, there were very few real democrats in the Middle East. AsSalame (1994, p. 16) pointed out,

banal as it may be, the statement remains valid; the fundamental political splitin the societies [here] is not between opposing democratic forces but betweenforces which are often equally strangers to democracy (or equally uninterestedin establishing democracy). . . . If the adoption of democratic elections by theIslamists is considered opportunist, reversible and insincere, the regime aswell as many secularist forces certainly do not produce any more convincingprofessions of democratic faith.

For many in the region, professions of attachment to democracy were, as Halpernhad described them nearly 50 years earlier, simply devices by which to “validatethe speaker’s status as a modern leader, and make it easier to make political claimson the democratic conscience of the West.” As Mernissi (2002, p. 53) pointed out,

Some groups of people think [democracy] can promote their interests, espe-cially those who know foreign languages, who have access to Western knowl-edge and culture. . . . This is generally the case with bourgeois city dwellers,both men and women, who operate in the fields of business and finance. Itis 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 mostdispossessed in our societies cling to Islam because they fear being forgot-ten by their own people, who have found another identity and are involvedin other networks, especially those very strong ones that create profit on aninternational scale?

Democracy in the Middle East was a deeply ambiguous, highly contested andoften profoundly implausible notion. In what may be an apocryphal story, Saaded-din Ibrahim, Egypt’s most prominent sociologist, reported that Egyptian PresidentHusni Mubarak often complained that “the only problem . . . with free elections isthat you cannot predict the outcome” (Middle East Policy Council 2005). In muchof the Middle East, democracy was perceived as neither natural nor desirable butas a transparent disguise for Western hegemonic designs on the region (Sadiki2004).

WHY STUDY WHAT IS NOT THERE? THE IMPERATIVESOF VALUES, POLICY, AND SCIENCE

Clearly, the focus on democracy in the political science of the Middle East wasnot driven entirely by the politics of the region. Yet it proved very difficult forscholars of Middle East politics to escape the pervasive and powerful assumptionthat political change of any kind could be understood in terms of democratization.Indeed, Albrecht & Schlumberger (2004, p. 372) argued that an “uncontestedglobal paradigm. . .dictates that political change, if it occurs, should generally bein the direction of democratization.” This paradigm proved to be an awkwardand ill-fitting framework for understanding dynamics in the Middle East, and thatawkwardness, in turn, prevented the study of the Middle East from contributing asmuch as its practitioners would have liked to the development of general theoryabout democratization.

Why had students of the Middle East devoted so much of their attention to anissue of apparently modest relevance in the region? No doubt a significant reasonwas the normative commitment to liberal democracy of virtually all American andAmerican-trained social scientists. Whatever enthusiasm the postindependencenationalisms of the nonaligned movement may have evoked in American socialscientists had faded by the time of the United States–Soviet Union detente of the1970s. By the 1980s, O’Donnell and Schmitter were expressing the preference ofpolitical scientists of almost all partisan complexions for regimes that respectedhuman rights and adopted democratic institutions (O’Donnell et al. 1987).

The impulse to study democracy reflected not only the powerful pull of nor-mative commitments but also the seductions of the policy world. Throughout theCold 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; andboth post–Cold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, emphasized the

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importance of democracy. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright articulated theClinton Administration conviction that democracy is a significant value on bothpragmatic and principled grounds. As she said in a speech in Warsaw, inauguratingthe Community of Democracies initiative that was to be a signature of her term asSecretary,

In 1900, the number of countries with a government elected competitivelyand on the basis of universal suffrage was zero. Today it is 120. . . . All thisis good but it provides no grounds for complacency. . . . An earlier generationfought to make the world safe for democracy. Our challenge is to strengthendemocracy to make the world safe. . . . History shows that governments thatare accountable to their people are unlikely to engage in reckless acts of ag-gression; while regimes that run roughshod over the rights of their own peoplewill not hesitate to trample on the freedoms of others. Moreover, democracyis not just another form of government. Under the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, every person everywhere has a right to live under a demo-cratic 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 MiddleEast in a powerful, positive way” (quoted in Blecher 2003), and President Bushhimself declared that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends onthe success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is theexpansion of freedom in all the world” (Bush 2005). Unlike Secretary Albright’s,President Bush’s conviction that democracy is a universal value was not based onthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it was no less firm:

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choicesthat move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; Godmoves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is thepermanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of thesoul. . . . History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visibledirection, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty. (Bush 2005)

The President concluded that, at long last, “America’s vital interests and our deepestbeliefs are now one.”

In the face of this bipartisan conviction, it was hard for American political sci-entists, particular the overwhelming numbers who concurred in the desirability ofdemocratic government, to argue that democratization was not a significant issuein the Middle East. Moreover, personal preferences and political convictions inter-sected with disciplinary imperatives, particularly in political science, to create aneven more powerful pull toward the study of democracy. American political sciencewas designed at birth for the study of democracy, and it had retained that congen-ital predisposition. Although the interwar period and the Cold War spawned a

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literature devoted to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, fascism and commu-nism were diseases that afflicted foreign lands; their study had relatively littleimpact at the heart of the discipline, which was devoted still to the examination,promotion, and maintenance of healthy democracy. With the wave of democratiza-tion in Latin America in the early 1980s and the demise of communism in EasternEurope and the Soviet Union at the end of that decade, the triumph of liberalism,democracy, and democratization seemed all but complete around the world, andthe awkward fit between American political science and the empirical landscapeof much of the rest of the world seemed to be resolved. In a 1996 issue of thenewsletter of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political ScienceAssociation, for example, Ames (1997, p. 12) wrote:

From my perspective as a Latin Americanist, the state of comparative politicslooks pretty good. Latin American political science, at least, is undergoing arenaissance. 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 ofmodern political science suggested that the variety and dynamics of politics inthe Middle East—authoritarian regimes, kinship networks, kings, cliques, clients,and religious communities—were unfit subjects for systematic political research.American social scientists who worked on the Middle East, where democraticinstitutions are largely absent, found themselves deprived of the promise that theywould contribute to scientific advancement (Anderson 2003).

From the perspective of Middle East studies, comparative politics remainedmore parochial than its aspirations suggested, privileging, as it did, American-style democratic institutions as the standard by which politics can and should bemeasured. In the region itself, the association of the normative values of politicalliberalism and democracy with the practice of social science research was readilyapparent even, perhaps especially, to the governments. American political scientistswho ventured into the Middle East may have felt marginalized professionally, buttheir local counterparts often lost not only their scientific authority and policyplatform but their personal freedom. In early 2001, Egyptian sociologist SaadeddinIbrahim was tried and convicted for “tarnishing” Egypt’s image and receivingforeign funding—from the European Commission for a documentary film on voterregistration—without government authorization. Ibrahim was eventually releasedafter a worldwide outcry and several trials, but the point had been made: American-style social science was not welcome. The vulnerability of the social sciencecommunity in the region further weakened and complicated the project of MiddleEast political science as practiced in the United States.

Some political scientists who worked on the Middle East felt that the impo-sition of a “democracy agenda” in Middle East studies had advantages even if itdid not clearly address many of the compelling issues in the region itself. ShibleyTelhami, 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 Amer-ican discourse. It’s not the barrier of culture, it’s not the barrier of religion, itis 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 riskof being denounced as a disciplinary naıf or a “latent” orientalist. In strikingcontrast, there is no professional cost for substantive error in interpreting theMiddle East. . . . Reducing the Middle East to a set of proofs will not onlyperpetuate the marginality of Middle Eastern studies. It will rob the field ofits potential for contributing to the great debates, present and future, over theplace 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 ofpolitics functions largely as a rhetorical device, providing linguistic markersof one’s seriousness of purpose and scientific credentials. . . . [There is] asignificant loss if one allows the authority of the social science disciplines topersuade us that the only worthwhile ways of engaging with the politics andhistory of other world regions is [sic] to the extent that they can be made toappear as particular instances of the universal stories told in and about theWest.

The efforts to incorporate the Middle East in the project of establishing univer-sal generalizations about politics through the lens of democratization had servedneither the science of politics nor the study of the region particularly well. BothKramer and Mitchell seemed to consider the flaw intrinsic to the project itself, butfor most political scientists working on the Middle East, that was by no means aforegone 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 scientistswho studied the Middle East. One evening, a passer-by chances on a fellow search-ing for his lost house key under a streetlight. Hoping to be helpful, the spectatorasks 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 betterover here.”

For more than 50 years, the policy and scholarly communities of the UnitedStates looked for glimmers of democracy in the Middle East. And occasionallythey found them—small 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 contestedelection deemed free and fair, intellectuals who argued for the reconciliation ofIslam and democracy, judges who ruled against the executive branch, human rightsadvocates who protested official misconduct. Laudable as these may have been,however, they did not turn out to be the key either to the nature of democracy anddemocratization or to the dynamics of politics in the Middle East.

Political science’s disciplinary bias toward democracy and American foreignpolicy’s emphasis on democratization cast a bright light that confused and distortedthe research agenda in the study of Middle East politics, thereby preventing it fromcontributing 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-first centurydid not reflect debates on the merits of presidential and parliamentary institutions,nor even debates on the merits of democratic or authoritarian regimes for economicdevelopment, but questions of nation-building and identity formation (Dodge 2003,Medani 2004), the nature of tribal and ethnic politics (Khoury & Kostiner 1990), theresilience of monarchy (Herb 1999), the dynamics of rentier and distributive states(Ross 2001), the politics of informal economies (Heydemann 2004), the role of themilitary in defining communities and supporting regimes (Heydemann 2000), andthe development of constituencies for terrorism, drug trafficking, 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 bu-reaucratic institutions resulted from the legacy of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse,European colonial policies, and global support of rentier regimes—in other words,the modern history of the region. Both the regimes and, increasingly, the regionalstate system were challenged far more by groups espousing alternative ways oforganizing political, social, and economic life, including the transnational Islamistmovements and ethnic communities, than by political parties disputing policy po-sitions. Indeed, some observers argued that it was precisely these kinds of issuesthat haunted democratic transformation in Iraq and across the region (Middle EastPolicy Council 2005, Carothers & Ottaway 2005).

The experience of the Middle East suggests that, as Rustow (1970) long agopostulated, democracy does not tolerate widespread “mental reservations” aboutmembership in the political community in which it is to be constructed. Suchconsensus is manifestly absent in most of the Middle East, thanks largely to thenovelty, fragility, and lack of legitimacy of the contemporary states. Individuals inthe region often pay greater deference to nonstate loyalties—kinship groups, ethnicand religious communities, ideological movements, even trading networks—thanto the country of which they are ostensibly citizens. The relatively minor impor-tance of states represents a tremendous challenge to the global institutions pred-icated on those states—from political organizations such as the United Nationsand Secretary Albright’s Community of Democracies to scholarly conventionssuch as the data banks and large-n studies built on national accounts and countrystudies.

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210 ANDERSON

In their efforts to straddle the light and the shadows, many talented politicalscientists working on the Middle East sometimes inadvertently revealed the limitsof the conventional science and policy on democracy and democratization. Al-though Heydemann argued in response to Kramer’s critique that “when it comesto democracy and economic reform—especially the past 10 to 15 years’ work onthe political economy of regime formation and transformation—the field has beenlargely right,” he attributed this to the fact that “the persistence of authoritarian-ism, not the inevitability of democracy, has been the principle focus of research.The overwhelming sentiment among researchers has been not uncritical optimismabout 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 mostAmerican policy makers, remained profoundly puzzled by the region and had notfound the available political science literature especially useful in explaining whythe Middle East was “so resistant to democratization.” Heydemann’s defense it-self revealed the depth of the dilemma, since as we have seen the “persistence ofauthoritarianism” is little more than the obverse of the “inevitability of democ-racy,” inflected by “pessimism.” It directed attention to the same kinds of researchsubjects—the strength or weakness of civil society, for example, or regime ma-nipulation of interest groups—and deflected attention from other questions thatwere perhaps less familiarly the “stuff of modern political science” but may, infact, have revealed more about both the dynamics in the region and the prospectsfor democracy.

Kramer (2001, p. 122) argued that the effort to fit the Middle East into therestrictive terms of political science would “rob the field of its potential for con-tributing to the great debates, present and future, over the place of the Middle Eastin a globalized world.” Mitchell (2003, p. 24) added that “Area studies offer aplace from which to rewrite the history of the social sciences, and to examine howtheir categories are implicated in a certain history of Europe and, in the twentiethcentury, an unachieved American project of universal social science.” Perhaps wecould both debate the place of the Middle East in the world and rewrite the historyof the social sciences if we were willing to look for the key in the shadows. Infact, if we wish to find 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, inthe arenas of political life less well illuminated by conventional political science.The history of the states established by European imperialism (particularly theirunique combination of weak extractive capacity and generous welfare provision),the role of international competition in shaping the regimes of the region, andthe growth of informal economies that violate the boundaries of the nation-stateand challenge our capacity to record and measure regional markets, all representresearch arenas for comparative political science that would both enhance our un-derstanding 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 wouldhelp 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 anearlier draft of this essay. This essay draws on several of my previous articles, alllisted below, and I am grateful to the many colleagues who commented, then andnow, on my arguments.

The Annual Review of Political Science is online athttp://polisci.annualreviews.org

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P1: JRX

April 5, 2006 20:54 Annual Reviews AR276-FM

Annual Review of Political ScienceVolume 9, 2006

CONTENTS

BENTLEY, TRUMAN, AND THE STUDY OF GROUPS, Mika LaVaque-Manty 1

HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF LEGISLATURES IN THE UNITED STATES,Peverill Squire 19

RESPONDING TO SURPRISE, James J. Wirtz 45

POLITICAL ISSUES AND PARTY ALIGNMENTS: ASSESSING THE ISSUE

EVOLUTION PERSPECTIVE, Edward G. Carmines and Michael W. Wagner 67

PARTY POLARIZATION IN AMERICAN POLITICS: CHARACTERISTICS,CAUSES, AND CONSEQUENCES, Geoffrey C. Layman, Thomas M. Carsey,and Juliana Menasce Horowitz 83

WHAT AFFECTS VOTER TURNOUT? Andre Blais 111

PLATONIC QUANDARIES: RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON PLATO,Danielle Allen 127

ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION AND ITS POLITICAL DISCONTENTS IN

CHINA: AUTHORITARIANISM, UNEQUAL GROWTH, AND THE

DILEMMAS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, Dali L. Yang 143

MADISON IN BAGHDAD? DECENTRALIZATION AND FEDERALISM IN

COMPARATIVE POLITICS, Erik Wibbels 165

SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES: STUDYING

DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Lisa Anderson 189

POLITICAL ISLAM: ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS? Yahya Sadowski 215

RETHINKING THE RESOURCE CURSE: OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE,INSTITUTIONAL CAPACITY, AND DOMESTIC CONSTRAINTS,Pauline Jones Luong and Erika Weinthal 241

A CLOSER LOOK AT OIL, DIAMONDS, AND CIVIL WAR, Michael Ross 265

THE HEART OF THE AFRICAN CONFLICT ZONE: DEMOCRATIZATION,ETHNICITY, CIVIL CONFLICT, AND THE GREAT LAKES CRISIS,Crawford Young 301

PARTY IDENTIFICATION: UNMOVED MOVER OR SUM OF PREFERENCES?Richard Johnston 329

REGULATING INFORMATION FLOWS: STATES, PRIVATE ACTORS,AND E-COMMERCE, Henry Farrell 353

vii

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P1: JRX

April 5, 2006 20:54 Annual Reviews AR276-FM

viii CONTENTS

COMPARATIVE ETHNIC POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES: BEYOND

BLACK AND WHITE, Gary M. Segura and Helena Alves Rodrigues 375

WHAT IS ETHNIC IDENTITY AND DOES IT MATTER? Kanchan Chandra 397

NEW MACROECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, Torben Iversenand David Soskice 425

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CASE STUDY

METHODS, Andrew Bennett and Colin Elman 455

FOREIGN POLICY AND THE ELECTORAL CONNECTION, John H. Aldrich,Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, Jason Reifler,and Kristin Thompson Sharp 477

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY, James A. Robinson 503

INDEXES

Subject Index 529

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 1–9 549

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 1–9 552

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/

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Liza Andersson, Searching Where the Light Shines

Documents

middle easthave

middle eastern regimes

major political forces

policy preoccupations

words democracy

major policy dilemmas

democracy promotion

policy audiences