Introduction

Political transformations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) ushered in by the Tunisian revolution in January 2011 initiated a period of renewed attention to the study of democracy in the Arab world (Brynen, Moore, Salloukh and Zahar 2012; Stepan and Linz 2013). Indeed, the political turbulence surrounding transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, on-going violence in Libya, and civil war in Syria raise a number of important questions as to how political change is conceptualized by scholars and policy-makers. With escalating violence in Iraq, eleven years following the start of the failed attempt to replace Saddam Hussein’s regime with a democratic government, the need to reflect on democracy and democratization has perhaps never been more urgent.