September 20th, 2023
Anderson has some issues with how political scientists try to make sense of Middle East politics. One issue she has is political scientists making strong ideas on politics in the Middle East because they haven’t lived there yet. She goes on to explain why this may be the reason they are having a hard time fully understanding it. On page 19 of the document, she states that “American political scientists who ventured into the Middle East may have felt marginalized professionally, but their local counterparts often lost not only their scientific authority and policy platform but also their personal freedom”(Anderson, 2006). This issue is due to seeing and being under the influence of politics would give a very different perspective of them.
The other thing I noticed while reading is how some scientist would make generalizations based on their past knowledge of governments whether it be democratization or authoritarianism. This would lead to some false conclusions where scientists who work in the Middle East disagree with them. She explains that “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”(Anderson, 2006). This explains that maybe we need to go into analyzing the politics of the Middle East on a clean slate and through a different lens than we have in the past.
Anderson, L. (2006, February 7). SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES: Studying … – Annual Reviews. SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES: Studying Democratization in the Middle East. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.072004.095345