ABSTRACT
Literatures on transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule, enduring authoritarianism in the Arab world, “hybrid” regimes, and the promotion of democracy in the region may have run their course in Middle East studies. 1 Authoritarian regimes indeed endure and it may be, as Noureddine Jebnoun observes, that “the focus on ‘democracy’ has been misplaced without [the] bedrock of ‘peaceable political regime change’ in the first place,” 2 in other words there is a lack of adaptable institutions or social capital. Yet authoritarian regimes also seem to float on quicksand, residually characterized simply as an absence of democracy. Democracy, moreover, as a group of distinguished political scientists evaluating USAID democratic governance programs declared,
cannot, in the present state of scientific knowledge of democracies and democratization, be defined in an authoritative (nonarbitrary) and operational fashion. It is an inherently multidimensional concept, and there is little consensus over its attributes. Definitions range from minimal—a country must choose its leaders through contested elections—to maximal—a country must have universal suffrage, accountable and limited government, sound and fair justice and extensive protection of human rights and political liberties, and economic and social policies that meet popular needs. Moreover, the definition of democracy is itself a moving target; definitions that would have seemed reasonable at one time (such as describing the United States as a democracy in 1900 despite no suffrage for women and major discrimination and little office-holding among minorities) are no longer considered reasonable today. 3
