Pratt, Nicola. Democracy & Authoritarianism in the Arab World.

• Author: Uneke, Okori
• Position: Book review

Pratt, Nicola. Democracy & Authoritarianism in the Arab World. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007. 236 pages. Paper, $22.

Democracy & Authoritarianism in the Arab World attempts to debunk the oft-bandied notion that the Arab-Muslim world is inherently incompatible with the democratic ethos, such as freedom, representative government, and the separation of religion and state. While the existence of autocratic rule in this region of the world is not in question, many observers expected the wave of democratization that swept through most non-Western societies in the 1990s, notably Eastern Europe and Latin America, to rub off on the Middle East. Despite the adoption of economic reforms and the tolerance of civil-society groups by Arab regimes, the anticipated democratization process did not evolve at a sustained pace. What seems to have happened in response to prodding by the United States and the European Union for democratic reforms was that Arab regimes adapted by reorganizing strategies of governance to adjust to new global, regional, and domestic circumstances. Political scientist Steven Heydemann has described this strategy as "upgrading authoritarianism." (1)

The book comprises seven chapters. The first five chapters extensively examine the role of civil-society actors within the borders of the nation-state in the democratization process. Chapter 1, "Reconsidering Democratization in the Arab World," focuses on types of Arab regimes, the basis of authoritarian rule, the culture of authoritarianism, and democracy as counter-hegemony. Here, Pratt lays out a conceptual framework for understanding the sequence of events that impinge on state-civil society relations. Different Arab regimes have been classified as single party vs. family rule and radical vs. conservative. The author characterizes the regimes of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq (before the 2003 U.S. invasion), Syria, and Tunisia as "radical/populist/socialist/single-party" (p. 3). Using a historical, analytical approach, Pratt traces the genesis of authoritarian political structures to colonialism, and links a complex web of religious, social-class, gender, and ethnic differences to the regime type and the nature of political relations under that regime. She argues that the legacy of European colonial domination was the expansion in postcolonial states of state institutions, such as the bureaucracy, police, military, and state-owned economic enterprises. State expansion, in turn...