ABSTRACT
The period 1989-99 was one of the most pivotal in the history of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and during that ten-year span Jordanian politics went through no fewer than four major transitions. These included the initiation of a campaign for political liberalization and democratization (since 1989), the implementation of repeated IMF-directed economic adjustment programmes (also since 1989), the conclusion of a full peace treaty with Israel (1994), and finally, the transition within the monarchy itself from King Hussein to King Abdullah II (1999). This article will examine in particular two of these key transitions within Jordanian domestic politics, namely the political liberalization process and the monarchical transition. It begins with an overview of the liberalization process itself, then examines the royal succession from Hussein to Abdullah, and finally, provides an analysis of the 1999 municipal elections - the first under King Abdullah-in an effort to assess the state of political liberalization in Jordan in the early twenty-first century.
