“The struggle against terrorism in the Middle East has led to a quest to find ways to counter the appeal of violent extremists. Thus far, US counter-messaging has failed to articulate a normative position that is responsive to the deeply-held beliefs of the majority of the world’s Muslims. To form a sounder approach, one must acknowledge that there are two…
Kathrin Thomas
Tunisia: Changing Patterns of Women’s Representation
“Benstead traces women’s descriptive political representation in Tunisia from the first woman elected to parliament in 1959 to the introduction of the law of parity following the Arab spring, which commits the state to ensuring equal representation in elected institutions. Under Ben Ali’s state feminism, the Constitutional Rally for Democracy (RCD) implemented a 20% party quota in 1999, which it…
The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. Social, Political and Economic Transformations
“The Arab Uprisings were unexpected events of rare intensity in Middle Eastern history – mass, popular and largely non-violent revolts which threatened and in some cases toppled apparently stable autocracies. This volume provides in-depth analyses of how people perceived the socio-economic and political transformations in three case studies epitomising different post-Uprising trajectories – Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt – and drawing…
Popular Support for Democracy in Autocratic Regimes: A Micro-Level Analysis of Preferences
“Scholarly opinions diverge as to which citizens in autocratic regimes actually prefer democracy to the status quo. While some argue that citizens with higher levels of socioeconomic status are more likely to prefer democracy because they desire political equality, others argue that the poor should prefer democracy most because they will have more relative power to affect redistributive policies. Analyzing…
Conceptions of Sharia and Support for Militancy and Democratic Values: Evidence From Pakistan
“Numerous empirical studies of the relationship between popular support for Islamism and support for democracy and violence have yielded inconclusive results. We suspect that this is largely because scholars have not operationalized support for Shari`a in ways that capture the concept’s multi-dimensionality. In this paper, we employ data derived from a carefully designed survey instrument that casts unique insights into…
Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view
“Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on…
Arab Public Opinion: Between Attachment to Islam and Commitment to Democracy
“International surveys of personal values have existed for almost 40 years (since 1981) in most European countries (the European Values Study or EVS) and in many countries of the world (the World Values Survey), enabling us to observe the evolution of the values of the citizenry in many areas (religion, family, politics, trust, tolerance etc.). Only in much more recent…
The Arab Spring, Support for Democracy, and Political Action: Seeking an Explanation for the Authoritarian Paradox in the Middle East
“This paper investigates the relationship between support for democracy and willingness to take political action in the Middle East before and after the Arab Spring. Despite general support for democracy in many Arab nations, as evidenced by open popular protests, most of the region remains under authoritarian rule. To explain this, I analyzed survey data from the World Values Survey…
The Lights of Iraq: Electricity Usage and the Iraqi War-fare Regime
“This article explores the lights of Iraq, Iraq’s variety of capitalism (VoC) and its system of public and fiscal governance. The first section examines Iraq’s VoC, which I define oil-led state-captured capitalism with associated oil-led state-captured war-fare regime. In formerly ISIS-occupied territories, war developments turned the system into an Insurgent ISIS-captured capitalism with associated Insurgent ISIS-captured war-fare regime. The second…
Environmental Activism in the Middle East: Prospects and Challenges
“Environmental activism has intensified across the Middle East and North Africa over the past few decades, focusing primarily on environmental issues that affect public health, livelihoods, and essential services. While intrusive security states limit information and stifle civil society, expanding educational opportunities, growing cities, and new means of communication have enabled environmental activism. This includes small-scale, informal, and localized activism…
In the Triple Threat to Tunisia’s Democracy, Corruption is King
“As austerity protestors clash with security forces in Tunisia, the country’s young democracy is threatened by a triple challenge: Insecurity, a lack of socioeconomic development and persistent corruption are interlinked and reinforce each other. Individually and in concert they undermine citizens’ confidence in the democratic system and hamper its ability to produce democracy dividends. Corruption is the most pernicious of…
The Frailties of Lebanese Democracy: Outcomes and Limits of the Confessional Framework
“Lebanon is frequently referred to as a model of a plural and stable democracy in the Middle East: a multi-ethnic and pluri-religious society that guarantees political representation through a power-sharing confessional framework. Numerous authors also see the consociational model as the best democratic alternative given such a high degree of domestic heterogeneity. However, by emphasising Lebanese stability vis-à-vis a troubled…
Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy. World System and World Values Perspectives
“This book provides an in-depth analysis of public opinion patterns among Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. On the basis of data from the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer Project and the Arab Opinion Index, it compares the dynamics of Muslim opinion structures with global publics and arrives at social scientific predictions of value changes in the region. Using…
Introduction to Measuring Women’s Political Empowerment Across the Globe: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Research
“This chapter establishes definitions of key concepts such as women’s political empowerment and establishes the theoretical and empirical goals of this volume. We identify the complexities in defining women’s global political empowerment, critically review prior research on elites and masses to develop definitional and measurement goals, and tie women’s global political empowerment to broader social concerns and processes. We briefly…
Political Elites in the Middle East and North Africa
“The Middle East and North Africa, consisting of most of the Arab League members plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey, are regions of the traditional Muslim homeland that lie closest to Europe and where post-colonial elites were particularly conditioned by the dialectics of emancipation. The more protracted the struggle, the greater the opportunities to forge populations into new nations led by…