ABSTRACT
There is an increasingly widespread view that the root causes of social and political tensions in the Muslim world, together with economic failure, arise from poor governance. In the Middle East and North Africa in particular, the persistence of despotic regimes is adduced as the source of regional failure, quite apart from the specific political issues in the region or the economic problems associated with the rentier states resulting from dependence on hydrocarbon production as the source of economic wealth. There is thus growing pressure on Arab states to engage in the process of democratization, in the belief that this will, alone, provide the basis for a resolution of the region’s problems. This, certainly, is the view of the neo-conservatives who have recently dominated the foreign policy and intellectual establishment in Washington.1 It has, as a result, also become the normative theme in much international relations discourse throughout the West and in the Middle Eastern and North African region itself.
