Suchergebnisse

This has been a difficult year for people who study the Middle East – as it has been for people who live there. Memorable mostly for its dilemmas and disappointments, it has not been the kind of year on which one would ordinarily dwell. Yet there are important lessons in this year, lessons about the relationship between scholarship and policy, about the responsibilities imposed by an academic life in a time of deeply divisive debate and conflict, and about why what we do is profoundly important, not just to the small community of our professional peers but for the health of our society and of our world. It is to those questions – and the lessons I believe we must draw from the experience of this year – that I want to devote our attention this evening.

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Understanding September 11 / ed. by Craig Calhoun. Project coord. by the Social Science Research Council. New York/N.Y. : New Press, 2002. - 454 S

This essay is an extension of the author's presedential letter to the MESA membership, published in the Association Newsletter, Winter 2003, and several passages are reproduced from that letter

Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways. Earlier problems of polarization had their roots in the long-present statist patterns of economic organization. By contrast, under free-market conditions, democratic consolidation faces a largely distinct set of challenges: the underarticulation of societal interests, pervasive social atomization, and socially uneven political quiescence founded in collective action problems. These can combine to undermine the efficacy of democratic representation and, consequently, regime legitimacy. The article utilizes data from the Latin American region since the 1970s on development, economic reform, and individual and collective political participation to show the effects of a changing state-economy relationship on the consolidation of democratic politics.

The governments of the Middle East & North Africa are remarkably resistant to democracy. This is not necessarily due to the Arab & Islamic culture; the political economy, economic distortions related to oil revenues & other factors, & the lack of a sense of national identity also contribute. Equally important in resistance to democratization is the external environment. Democratization & giving voice to the angry masses might unleash a wave of perhaps violent debate on nationalism, ethnicity, anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, & the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict that the US & the West want to avoid. Thus, the US permits the regimes in power to fix elections & it ignores human rights issues, serving neither peace nor democracy. M. Pflum