ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War and the Gulf crisis (1990–91) sparked a new dynamic in the Arab world, indicative of a shift towards democratization. In the 1990s, a group of authors highlighted the existence of some tentative processes of liberalization in Arab countries, and even spoke of a democratizing ‘mini-wave’ (Norton, 1993). These dynamics were a result of several confluent factors. The most important of these were a greater presence and effectiveness of socio-economic organizations, a civil society in clear expansion (in terms of both mass schooling and the emergence of new middle classes), and foreign policy actions driven by Western states, as well as by governmental and non-governmental international organizations. At the beginning of the nineties, some experts therefore turned their attention to existing literature on the study of transitions towards liberal democratic systems, in an attempt to apply it to their analyses of the Arab world. However, with the failure of democratization, it soon became clear that the dynamics of transition in southern and eastern Europe or in Latin America were very different from those present in the Middle East or North Africa. The theoretical approaches of Rustow, O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead, and even those of Przeworski and Huntington, 2 were of little help in analyzing processes that took an alternative direction to those they had studied.
