Lisa Anderson’s article tackles the question of democratization in the Middle East and North Africa and why political scientists have had difficulties in explaining the failure of democracy to spread and the persistence of authoritarian regimes to survive in the region. Anderson begins by describing the often flawed framing of the study of Middle Eastern and North African democratization, explaining the main ideas political scientists have defaulted to when attempting to make sense of the exceptionalism of the region regarding authoritarianism. Among American scholars after the end of World War II, democratization was seen as a universal process of change that could guide the development of non-Western developing and underdeveloped regions which often failed to take into account external and internal variables such as political Islam and even Cold War geopolitical dynamics in the region. Anderson goes on to say that “American theories of democracy went largely unchallenged by ‘hard cases’ while the dynamics of politics in the region went largely unexplained by applicable theory” resulting in an ideologically fortified inertia within democratization studies which naturally supported American intervention, the continuance of domino theory Cold War era strategy, and the support of “traditional autocrats” who were seen as US-aligned partners in the fight against global communism (191).
Thus, Anderson’s main problem that she sees in American-centered scholarship inability to understand the socio-political and economic realities of the Middle East and North Africa is a reluctance to examine the region outside of a universalist predisposition to Western-style liberal tide expected to encompass the world in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. For most of the mid to late 20th century and the turn of the 21st century, political scientists studying the Middle East have been chiefly concerned with the region’s striking resistance to the introduction of democratic systems and principles even despite the outpouring of public support in these countries in favor of democracy. Anderson continues by elaborating that the failings of political analysts in the region cannot be squarely attributed to a US-centered blindspot for democracy, but also perhaps an inability to synthesize competing arguments from political economy to institutional analysis into a coherent framework for understanding the “exceptionalism” of Middle Eastern democratization. Potentially, the difficulty of analyzing the Middle East and North Africa’s attempts at democracy lies in an overemphasis on the importance of democracy in the region at the expense of seeking to understand the region distinctly outside the realm of democratic development. The development of rentier states, the suppression of civil society, and the democratic posturing of autocrats are illusory contributions to forming a clearer picture of the Middle East and North Africa but neglecting to confront “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” has largely left questions of democracy unanswered in the region and a continued, dogmatic belief in the primacy of modern democracy over any and all forms of illiberalism despite the historical and institutional differences across regimes (Anderson 209).
While the Arab Spring uprisings may have renewed interest in democratic experiments and public support for democracy in the Arab world, this would not, in my view, appear to alter the academic focus of Middle East studies from its preoccupation with democratic regime change. The Arab Spring uprisings confirm what scholars already know about the immense (though divided) public support for open society and the subsequent backsliding of democracy in the region only serves to demonstrate a binary tug of war between liberalism and Arab authoritarianism or militant Islamism which only reinforces a focus in regime change. Seeing the history of other regions within the context of particularities of universal (western-valued) stories reduces MENA to a “clash of civilizations” or “end of history” framing that appears paternalist in understanding the region and presupposes the desirability and possibility of Western-style democracy springing up ahistorically in a historically scarred and divided area of the world. Instead of trying to understand how democracy can expand to the Middle East and North Africa, a more productive question to ask would be what Middle Eastern and North African democracy look like and what democratic future the people living there envision.
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