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In the post-Cold War era, why has democratization been slow to arrive in the Arab world? This book argues that to understand support for the authoritarian status quo in parts of this region--and the willingness of its citizens to compromise on core democratic principles--one must factor in how a strong U.S. presence and popular anti-Americanism weakens democratic voices. Examining such countries as Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, Amaney Jamal explores how Arab citizens decide whether to back existing regimes, regime transitions, and democratization projects, and how th

In the post-Cold War era, why has democratization been slow to arrive in the Arab world? This book argues that to understand support for the authoritarian status quo in parts of this region--and the willingness of its citizens to compromise on core democratic principles--one must factor in how a strong U.S. presence and popular anti-Americanism weakens democratic voices. Examining such countries as Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, Amaney Jamal explores how Arab citizens decide whether to back existing regimes, regime transitions, and democratization projects, and how the global position of Arab states shapes people's attitudes toward their governments.

Democracy-building efforts from the early 1990s on have funneled billions of dollars into nongovernmental organizations across the developing world, with the U.S. administration of George W. Bush leading the charge since 2001. But are many such ""civil society"" initiatives fatally flawed? Focusing on the Palestinian West Bank and the Arab world, Barriers to Democracy mounts a powerful challenge to the core tenet of civil society initiatives: namely, that public participation in private associations necessarily yields the sort of civic engagement that, in turn, sustains effective dem.

The title of the book needs no explanation: Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies. It marks an issue of widespread and obvious current relevance, especially in Europe and in the United States in the age of Donald Trump. It registers a claim that is surely controversial and that also perhaps blends empirical and normative judgments. The book is thus a perfect candidate for a Perspectives symposium because it opens itself to so many different perspectives.

In my book Of Empires and Citizens, I argue that at the height of the period of authoritarian rule in the Middle East, Arab societies were divided between those people who benefited from their leaders' relationship with the United States, and therefore sought to preserve the dictatorships, and those who did not, and therefore sought democracy. For the pro-U.S. camp, which was mostly comprised of the relatively affluent, the U.S.-backed regimes brought the stability necessary for economic growth. This group feared that democracy, which could bring to power anti-American Islamists, would weigh the economy down. The other camp, meanwhile, saw the United States as the primary underwriter of repression. This dynamic made Middle Eastern autocracies extremely durable: in the Arab world, the middle class, which tends to be the vanguard of democracy elsewhere, was at best ambivalent to rule by the people. In his review of my book ("The Persistence of Arab Anti-Americanism," May/June 2013), Marc Lynch implies that recent events in the Arab world have proved me wrong. He correctly notes that Islamist victories in Egypt and Tunisia have not brought the dramatic severing of ties with the United States that I argue some in the region had expected. Therefore, he seems to have concluded, those expectations must never have existed in the first place. Furthermore, they could not have informed the middle classes' negative perceptions of democracy. Yet the data, painstakingly gathered over a number of years in a number of countries, show otherwise. In my 2007 analysis of polls of Jordanians and Kuwaitis, among those who were favorably inclined toward expanding trade and business ties with other countries, most of whom were middle class, over 25 percent had favorable opinions of the United States. Only 12 percent of those who opposed trade ties had good views of the United States. Adapted from the source document.

Levels of both political and social trust tend to play a crucial role in democracies. Yet we have little understanding of the ways in which trust operates in nondemocratic societies. This article finds that levels of political confidence are linked to generalized trust in both democratic and nondemocratic states. In democracies, then, levels of generalized trust may reinforce existing democratic institutions. In nondemocracies, however, generalized trust may be linked to support for authoritarian patterns of rule. This article argues that although generalized trust serves democracy in democratic settings, it is not linked to democratic forms of political and social engagement in the less democratic states of the Arab world.