Jan.17 2012
A year has passed since a young vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolated
himself after his cart and dignity were taken away by police in the provincial
Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. Since the death of the 26-year-old, millions of
similarly disenfranchised, poor, and prospect-less Arabs have risen in revolt
across North Africa and the Middle East in a phenomenon widely dubbed the
“Arab Spring.”
On January 14, 2011, less than a month after Bouazizi’s death, Tunisia’s dictator
Ben Ali—who had ruled the country for twenty-three years—fled to exile in Saudi
Arabia. Nine months later, on October 23, Tunisians went to the polls to elect
a new constituent assembly, which will draw up a new constitution. Tunisia’s
formerly banned Islamist party, Hizb al-Nahda [the Renaissance Party], won the
first free and fair elections to emerge from the Arab Spring.
In Egypt, after only eighteen days of mass protests, Hosni Mubarak handed
over power to the military on February 11—ending the pharaoh’s thirty-year
reign as president. Jubilant crowds poured into Tahrir Square to celebrate and
demand a swift transition to civilian rule. The very next day the Egyptian army
suspended the country’s constitution and said it would rule by martial law until
elections were held. At this time, elections are being held for the lower house of the
Egyptian parliament, with the Muslim Brotherhood widely expected to emerge as
the largest political party in the country.
Elsewhere in the region—in Bahrain, Jordan, Iran, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—
“day of rage” protests flared up in the aftermath of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt.
They were typically accompanied by the sporadic killing of demonstrators by state
security forces and the arrest of opposition leaders. In Saudi Arabia demonstrations
were quelled before crowds could gather in the streets. Oil revenues were then
lavishly used to bolster the salaries of Saudi policemen, teachers, and clerics.
Israel Journal of foreign Affairs VI : 1 (2012)
10
In Libya, events unfolded very differently. Between late February 2011 and his
lynching on October 20, the world’s longest ruling dictator, Muammar Qadhafi,
lost his country to a motley coalition of tribal militias backed by NATO air forces.
In Syria, a minority Alawite regime is fighting for survival with extraordinary
brutality, edging the country toward full-blown civil war. Yemen, too, slips in and
out of civil war. In July, Sudan split along ethnic-religious lines into two separate
states. Kurdish national aspirations are resurgent in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
Al-Qa’ida leaders in the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb, and the Sahel are urging
their adherents to seize the numerous new opportunities presented by the chaos in
Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen to advance the cause of global jihad.
What are we to make of these tumultuous and varied events? What, if anything,
is the common thread running through them? Are we witnessing, as Fuad Ajami
would have it, a long-silenced Arab world “clamoring to be heard, eager to stake
a claim to a place in the modern order of nations”?1 Is the flowering of popular
revolt doomed to be extinguished by the onset of a harsh new “Islamist Winter,”
as Khaled Abu Toameh warns?2 Or will most Arab autocrats manage to adapt and
remain in power?
The Arab Spring does not constitute a single phenomenon or a disparate series
of unrelated events. Rather, what we are witnessing across North Africa and
the Middle East is the simultaneous unfolding of three grand, historic political
processes: democratization; authoritarian adaptation/succession; and state failure.
To gain an informed understanding of these processes, we shall draw upon social
science theory, outlining three stylized, archetypal interpretative lenses through
which to analyze the Arab Spring.
Freedom’s March: The Fourth Wave of Global Democratization
One interpretive prism would read the Arab Spring as the belated arrival of
democracy in the sole region of the world that previously seemed impervious to
it. Viewed through this lens, the 2011 Arab revolts represent another important
milestone in the centuries-long process by which modern political norms and
institutions have traveled—by conquest, trade, and diffusion of ideas—from
modest origins in eighteenth-century Europe to global dominance at the beginning
of the twenty-first. The “Freedom’s March” interpretation goes something like
this:
Three major waves of democratization occurred prior to the 2011 Arab revolts.3
The first, long wave (1774–1926) was rooted in the values of the American and
French revolutions, but materialized in the emergence of national democratic
institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—notably through the
11

gradual extension of universal adult suffrage and the establishment of executive
accountability to national parliaments as a matter of law. By 1926, thirty-three
countries (mostly in Europe and the overseas English dominions) had experienced
the transition to democracy, though many would subsequently lapse back into old
or new—and far more brutal—forms of authoritarianism in the bleak 1930s and
early ‘40s.4
The Allied victory in World War II and the early phases of decolonization in
Asia and Africa marked the advent of a second, short wave of democratization
(1945–62). Post-war Allied occupations helped establish representative regimes
in Austria, West Germany, Italy, Japan, and Korea.5 Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela either returned to democracy or
ushered in freely elected governments for the first time between 1943 and 1946.
And a number of new states—India, Israel, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and
Sri Lanka—began independent life as electoral democracies.
Despite significant retreats in the 1960s and early ‘70s—a reverse wave experienced
most harshly in Latin America—the dialectic of history proved fortuitous to the
spread of democracy once again. On April 25, 1974, the Portuguese Revolução
dos Cravos [Carnation Revolution] led to the overthrow of the longest standing
dictatorship in Southern Europe. Portugal’s domestic revolution heralded the
launch of a global one. The third wave of democratization quickly spread to the
rest of the Iberian Peninsula and Greece. In the 1980s it then spread to Latin
America, several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and, with the demise of
Soviet Communism in 1989–91, to Central and Eastern Europe.
By 2000, eighty democracies were created or restored, and the percentage of
democratic states in the world rose from 27 percent in 1974 to 63 percent.6 For
the first time in human history, democracy had become not only a near-universal
human aspiration, but the predominant form of government in the world.7
Transitions in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), and Ukraine (2004), together with
steady democratic consolidation among the other Balkan states, extended global
democratic gains a little further still—prompting Michael McFaul of Stanford
University to identify a fourth wavelet of democratization from 2000 to 2005.8 In
2006 there were 123 electoral democracies, 64 percent of the world’s total.9
Moreover, the “Freedom’s March” interpretation would assert that democracy
no longer faces an ideological rival with broad global appeal. Fascism and
Communism are dead, as is pan-Arabism in the Middle East. Salafist-Jihadi
ideology, while antithetical to liberal values, is no match for capitalist democracy
as a compelling organizing model for political order. Western victory in the Cold
War and the subsequent 9/11 attacks on the United States not only facilitated the
Israel Journal of foreign Affairs VI : 1 (2012)
12
expansion of democracy into the former Soviet bloc, the non-aligned group of
states, and several Middle Eastern countries, they also eliminated chief rationales
for tolerating some odious autocracies.
As a bulwark against Communist ambitions in Africa, for example, the apartheid
regime in South Africa could win support among Western democracies. The
disappearance of bipolarity, however, removed the already shaky ground upon
which white rule rested, resulting in the breakdown of apartheid and the transition
to democracy in the early 1990s. The disappearance of Soviet patronage eliminated
a key pillar of support for autocratic regimes in the Middle East, notably for
Egypt, Sudan, and Syria.
Even where authoritarian rulers still prevail, for the most part they no longer
champion an alternative model of government, but either claim their regime was
democratic (as in the case of Russian “managed democracy”) or that they are
gradually steering their volatile societies toward democracy (China, Egypt under
and after Mubarak, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia).
At the same time, democracy had now proven its ability to travel to regions of
the world previously thought to lack the necessary economic, social, and cultural
prerequisites for political freedom. In Latin America—a continent long assumed
to be too Catholic to sustain the Protestant ethic—all but Cuba and Venezuela
became democratic. “Asian values” and China’s ascendancy as a market autocracy
notwithstanding, by 2006 democracy took root in at least ten Asian nations,
including India, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Taiwan, and Thailand.
In the same year, of the forty-eight sub-Saharan African states, no fewer than
twenty-three (48 percent) were electoral democracies, including some of the
world’s poorest, post-conflict countries.10 As Larry Diamond, co-editor of The
Journal of Democracy, observed enthusiastically in 2003: “If democracy can emerge
and persist in an extremely poor, landlocked, overwhelmingly Muslim country like
Mali—in which the majority of adults are illiterate and live in absolute poverty,
and the life expectancy is forty-four years—then there is no reason in principle
why democracy cannot develop in most other very poor countries.”11
With the advent of the Arab Spring, freedom’s long march had finally reached
the southern shores of the Mediterranean and the Arab heartland. A fourth
global wave of democratization is upon us, protracted and messy as it may be.
Like water dripping on a rock, the forces of modernization and globalization have
corroded and finally cracked open the last remaining region of the world that
has long appeared—mistakenly, as it turned out—impregnable to the norms and
13

institutions of political competition and accountability. The fact that the revolts
are occurring in clusters of geographically proximate states is also reminiscent of
past patterns of democratization, which typically display regional “contagion” and
“domino” effects.
In the Middle East, as in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and even sub-
Saharan Africa before it, sudden political transformation resulted from gradual
socioeconomic and cultural change. Urbanization, higher levels of literacy, and
the internet produced social mobilization, attitudinal change, and expectations for
a better life.12 Al-Jazeera, Facebook, and Twitter have made Arabs, particularly
the numerous young, more capable of self-expression, more anxious to engage in
political activities, and more adroit at political organization. They also removed
the last vestiges of legitimacy from military, one-party, and monarchical forms of
autocracy. Sooner or later, even the “benign dictatorships” of Jordan and Morocco
are doomed to be swept away by the fourth wave of global democratization.
Authoritarian Adaptation and Authoritarian Succession:
From the Frying Pan into the Fire
The second interpretative prism would read the Arab Spring as foreshadowing
the replacement of “old” forms of Middle Eastern authoritarianism with new
ones. Just as autocratic Nasirism swept away the despotic ancien régimes of
King Farouk and his likes in the 1950s and ‘60s, so the decrepit remnants of Arab
secular, socialist nationalism are now being succeeded by new, mostly Islamist,
modes of political organization inimical to democracy. It is one thing to overthrow
a dictator, the authoritarian succession interpretation would point out; quite
another to replace that dictator with a functioning democratic society and state.
There are several religious, cultural, and economic characteristics of the Middle
East that are likely to perpetuate Arab exceptionalism in terms of the absence of
democracy. Examining the political histories of forty-five predominantly Muslim
countries, analysts find that only Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bangladesh,
Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mali, Senegal, and Turkey have ever had any
record, however brief, of political freedom. Of these, none could ever have been
described as a durable, credible democracy. Among the Arab countries, there are
zero states rated by Freedom House as democratic.13 Historically, as Elie Kedourie
documents in his seminal book, Politics in the Middle East, repeated attempts at
liberal political reforms in North Africa and the Middle East have failed. The
long-term pattern of political development in the region has been one in which
one form of authoritarianism replaces another.14 Moreover, autocratic rulers in the
region have generally proven adept at defusing threats to their regimes through
Israel Journal of foreign Affairs VI : 1 (2012)
14
controlled liberalization, rather than genuine democratization. This is particularly
true of the oil rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf.15
Cultural beliefs about legitimate political order among Arabs also paint a
discouraging picture. The Arab Barometer survey of five countries between 2003
and 2006 found that 56 percent of respondents agreed that “men of religion should
have influence over government decisions.” A 2003–04 survey found that more
than half of Arab publics thought that government should only implement Sharia
law.16
Similarly, regional dynamics militate against positive democratic development. In
Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa, countries became democratic
partly by emulating the norms and institutions of the neighbors they respected
and wanted to resemble. With the possible partial exception of Morocco and
Tunisia (which look northwards toward Europe), Middle Eastern societies fare
poorly where accountability, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights are
concerned. The Arab world’s group of association is the Arab world, not North
America, Europe, or Israel.
Furthermore, we are witnessing something of a “democratic recession” globally,
not the advent of a new wave of democratization. In fact, since 2006, global levels
of freedom have experienced the longest period of deterioration since the advent
of the third wave in 1974.17
Quite unlike in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, there is no effective
liberal opposition ready to succeed the old regimes—no Arab equivalent of the
Polish Solidarity movement. Decades of modern autocracy in the Arab world
have all but decimated middle-class, liberal constituencies in most Arab countries.
Consequently, it is only the organized Islamists who are truly positioned to exploit
opportunities for acquisition of power. The Muslim Brotherhood, in particular,
has an unparalleled organizational network, and no compunction in using its
mosques, schools, and charities in the service of its electoral ambitions.
Structural economic conditions across most of North Africa and the Middle East
also bode ill for democracy. Of the sixteen Arab countries, eleven are rentier states
in that they derive more than 70 percent of their export income from oil and gas
rents—income extracted from the ground, not from the productive efforts and
taxation of citizens.18 In the Middle East, in other words, the Western notion of
“no taxation without representation” is perverted into “no representation without
taxation.” Since most Arab states do not depend on taxing their population, they
have failed—and will, for the foreseeable future, continue to fail—to develop
the natural expectations of accountability and representation that emerge when
15

states depend on tax-paying citizens. The “resource curse” of oil- and gas-derived
income also retards the development of other sectors of the economy, encourages
cronyism, increases corruption, and allows Arab states to spend huge resources on
repressive security apparatuses.
In sum, according to the authoritarian succession prism, the Arabs would have
broken one set of handcuffs only to have them replaced by a new, fresh set. The
autocrats will either adapt successfully or be replaced by theocrats, not democrats.
Things Fall Apart: A Regional Cascade of State Failure
The third interpretive prism is in many respects the most historically intriguing,
but also the most unsettling. According to this reading, what we are witnessing
across North Africa and the Middle East is not the late onset of democratization,
or the replacement of capable old forms of authoritarianism with new ones, but a
regional cascade of state failure.
Lacking in security, legitimacy, and capacity, fragile modern Arab states are
disintegrating. They leave behind them under-governed or ungoverned spaces
that are being filled by a pre-modern, neo-medieval patchwork of non-state rulers
(tribes, warlords, criminal gangs), as well as by ultramodern transnational terrorist
networks such as al-Qa’ida, and new forms of hybrid terrorist/governanceproviding
organizations, such as Hizbullah and Hamas.
What we mean by “state failure” is perhaps best captured by recalling what we
have come to expect from the modern, functioning state. The state is a political
entity that successfully exercises a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical
force within a given territory and over a given population. A “normal” state also
commands the loyalty of its citizens and provides core public goods—above all,
security and the rule of law, but also markets, transport infrastructure, health, and
education.
Failed states are those that fall short of these minimal criteria, in that their
performance is lacking in terms of security, legitimacy, and/or the capacity to
deliver basic welfare-enhancing public goods. State failure is thus a gradational
concept, where under-performing states range on a continuum from fragility,
to failing and, in extremis, to fully collapsed states.19 Viewed through this prism,
conditions across much of North Africa and the Middle East appear ominous.
In terms of security, state failure is predominantly caused, and accompanied, by
ethnic, religious, tribal, or other forms of civil conflict. Countries experiencing
serious security gaps include principally both those that are in the midst of armed
Israel Journal of foreign Affairs VI : 1 (2012)
16
conflict and those just emerging from warfare.20 We observe all four elements
of the State Failure Taskforce characterization of the four major causes of state
failure—revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse regime change, and genocides/
politicides—occurring in the Middle East today.21
Revolutionary wars—episodes of sustained violent conflict between governments
(or external occupying powers) and politically organized challengers that seek
to overthrow the central government, replace its leaders, or seize power in one
or more regions—are currently unfolding, with varying degrees of intensity, in
Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Bedouin and Jihadi
groups are undermining Egyptian control of the Sinai Peninsula. Kurdish national
aspirations hold the potential for major, protracted conflict involving Iran, Iraq,
Syria, and Turkey. The military ousting of the Qadhafi regime by a coalition of
NATO-backed tribal opposition militias represents a “successful” revolutionary
war.
There are no fewer than 140 tribes and clans in Libya, of which thirty are influential
power brokers. It remains to be seen whether the National Transitional Council of
Libya is able to hold the country together in the aftermath of the 2011 civil war,
or whether conflicting interests and tribal differences will plunge post-Qadhafi
Libya into further civil conflict. After pledging that they would disarm and submit
to a single, central army after Qadhafi’s ouster, many militia leaders in Libya now
reportedly insist that they will retain their weapons and political autonomy as the
new guardians of the revolution.”22
So-called ethnic wars—episodes of sustained violent conflict in which national,
ethnic, religious, or other communal groups challenge governments to seek major
changes in status or forms of political order—are simmering in Algeria, Bahrain,
Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and among Palestinian
factions. In Egypt, dozens of Coptic Christians have been killed in clashes with
state security forces since October 2011. Among Palestinians, Fatah–Hamas
rivalry has already led to the successful 2007 violent Hamas coup in Gaza, with
Hamas seeking a further major Islamist revision in the form of politics not only
in the West Bank, but in Jordan as well. And in Lebanon, Hizbullah effectively
controls parts of the country and is widely acknowledged to be militarily stronger
than Lebanese state forces thus exercising a permanent, hair-trigger threat to the
fragile, ethnic-based constitutional order in the country.
Adverse regime change—major, abrupt shifts in patterns of governance, including
periods of severe elite or regime instability—recently occurred, or is currently
experienced, in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.
Lastly, genocide and politicide sustained activities by states or, in civil wars, by
17

either of the contending sides that result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a
communal or political group have taken place over the last decade in Algeria and
Sudan. Genocide and politicide are also grim possible scenarios in Afghanistan and
Iraq (once American troops leave), in Libya (should major reprisals be exacted
against the Qadhafi tribe), and in Syria (should the ruling Alawite minority lose
its grip on power).
Furthermore, according to the state failure interpretation of the Arab Spring, the
security gap across much of North Africa and the Middle East is both facilitated
and exacerbated by deep underlying deficits in the legitimacy and capacity of
Arab states.
A legitimacy gap exists within a state when a significant portion of its political
elites and society either rejects the rules regulating the exercise of power and the
accumulation and distribution of wealth in the country or resorts to alternative,
competing sources of authority tribal, ethnic, religious, or national.23 Legitimate
states are ones in which a strong sense of national identity has been successfully
formed; where the concept of citizenship holds genuine meaning for elites and
society; and where state institutions function transparently and are accountable
to the people.
The underlying problem for many Arab states today lies in their fundamental lack
of legitimacy. The societies of the Arab world are ancient, but as political entities
they are “instant states.”24 Like much of sub-Saharan Africa where the largest
proportion of failed states currently exists, Arab states came into being instantly
as the result of the dissolution of colonial empires. Rather than go through a slow,
convoluted process of state formation culminating in the development of the rule
of law, accountability, and national identity Arab states became states before they
could truly become nations.
This means that, with the possible exceptions of Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and
the tiny Gulf oil kingdoms, Arab states have not managed to forge the national
collective identities that are so vital for the ability of a society to generate welfareenhancing
public goods, and that can effectively compete for loyalty against premodern
tribal, ethnic, and religious identities.
To be sure, for several decades following the demise of the British, French, and
Ottoman empires, Arab nationalism and Cold War patronage managed to paper
over the essential differences. But the experiment in instant state formation has
basically failed, and we are now witnessing the manifestation of this failure on
a grand historical and regional scale. Arab states are mostly Potemkin-states;
brittle entities increasingly unable to hold themselves together by commanding the
Israel Journal of foreign Affairs VI : 1 (2012)
18
loyalty of their populace and exercising an effective monopoly on the legitimate
use of force within their borders.
Security and legitimacy deficits are compounded by weak state capacity. One need
only peruse the five existing Arab Human Development Reports sponsored by
the UN and independently authored by courageous Arab scholars to appreciate
the depth of contemporary Arab states’ inability to deliver core public goods and
opportunities to their bulging, youthful populations.25
By 2015 Arab countries will be home to some 395 million people, compared to
150 million in 1980. Of these, over 60 percent will be under the age of 25, with
a median age of 22. Despite oil wealth, GDP per capita in Arab countries grew
by a paltry 6.4 percent over the entire period from 1980 to 2004 (i.e., by less
than 0.5 percent annually). Oil has crowded out agriculture and manufacturing,
so that Arab countries were less industrialized in 2007 than they were in 1970.
Unemployment among youth and women is among the highest in the world, with
the overall poverty rate ranging from a low of 30 percent in Lebanon, to a high
of 59.5 percent in Yemen, and 41 percent in Egypt. 26 Along with sub-Saharan
Africa, the Arab world is the only region where the number of hungry or starving
has risen since the beginning of the 1990s.
Water scarcity and desertification are placing additional burdens on alreadyoverstretched
land, causing conflict over natural resources, population
displacement, and increased drug, weapons, and human trafficking. All of this,
according to the latest Arab Human Development Report, means that identitybased
groups in some Arab countries have sought to free themselves from
the captivity of the nation-state in whose shadow they live. 27 Moreover, like
democratization, state failure is a regional phenomenon, in that it predominantly
occurs in clusters of geographically contiguous or proximate states.28
Lastly, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Arab League not withstanding,
the Middle East remains singularly lacking in meaningful regional security,
political, and economic arrangements that could help hold Arab states together.
There is no Arab equivalent of the European Union (EU) or the weaker
Organization of American States (OAS) that might render collective assistance to
Arab states in distress. There is no Arab version of NATO or even the functional
equivalent of the African Union (AU) that could provide indigenous conflictresolution
mechanisms or peacekeeping forces. State failure in one or two Arab
countries, particularly in strategic ones such as Iraq or Syria, are likely to produce
dire spill-over effects for neighboring countries, resulting in a possible cascade of
failures across the region.
19

All Together Now
The three sets of grand political processes outlined above are, in reality, all unfolding
simultaneously in the North African and Middle Eastern geopolitical space.
They are intertwining within and across national borders and interacting with
one another as well as with broader variables in the contemporary international
system. Briefly, they carry the following consequences for Israeli foreign policy:
Israel has a deep vested interest in the emergence of consolidated liberal
democracies in North Africa and the Middle East, and so should strive, wherever
possible, to establish links with genuine democrats and to empower them where it
can. Moreover, just as the emergence of Southern Sudan as an independent state
provided Israel with a rare opportunity to establish diplomatic, economic and
security ties with a south eastern African country, resurgent Kurdish nationalism
creates new opportunities for constructive alliances.
Under the authoritarian adaptation scenario, existing regimes will reluctantly
liberalize in response to fear of instability; striving to accommodate and co-opt
opposition forces. Such accommodation may be direct—in that it will legalize
formerly banned political parties and form coalition governments with Islamists
—or indirect, opening up new space for opposition participation in economic
life, civil society, the media, and security forces. Authoritarian adaptation may
therefore lead to the Pakistanization of the state security forces of erstwhile
western supported Arab states, with Islamist elements penetrating military, police,
and intelligence agencies.
Liberalized autocracy is an inherently unstable equilibrium, however, and so is
likely to be succeeded, sooner or later, if not by democracy, then by new forms
of authoritarianism.29 Together with its allies, Israel would do well to closely
study, monitor, and report on Islamist movements’ efforts to exploit or subvert
new political openings. Military, diplomatic, and economic aid to North African
and Middle Eastern countries must also be more closely coordinated by Western
powers, and conditioned more stringently on substantive democratic reforms.
State failure means reduced threat of conventional war, but also the proliferation
of unconventional threats, notably the strengthening of terrorist networks and
weapon smuggling. Jihadist nodes in Yemen, Sinai, Somalia, Libya, Chad, Mali
and Nigeria will be in a better position to cooperate where central government
control is weak or absent. Chaos in Libya and regime weakness in Egypt have
already resulted in a flood of sophisticated weaponry into Sinai and Gaza. These
trends are likely to deteriorate further if Syria disintegrates into civil war and Iraq
becomes even weaker once US forces withdraw.
Israel Journal of foreign Affairs VI : 1 (2012)
20
Notes
1 Fuad Ajami, “Demise of the Dictators: The Arab Revolutions of 2011,” Newsweek,
February 14, 2011.
2 Khaled Abu Toameh, “From an Arab Spring to Islamist Winter,” Hudson Institute,
NY, October 28, 2011 (www.hudson-ny.org/2541/arab-spring-islamist-winter).
3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century,
(Norman, OK, 1991).
4 Ibid. pp. 13–18.
5 James Dobbins, America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica,
2003).
6 Larry Diamond, “The State of Democratization at the Beginning of the 21st
Century,” Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations (2005), 13–18.
7 Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value ,” Journal of Democracy, X:3 (1999),
3–17; Carl Gershman, “Democracy as a Policy Goal and Universal Value ,” Whitehead
Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations (Winter/Spring, 2005), 19–38.
8 Michael McFaul, “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative
Transitions in the Post Communist World,” World Politics, LIV: 2 (2002), 212–244.
9 Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2010: Global Data (www.freedomhouse.org/
uploads/fiw10/FIW_2010_Tables_and_Graphs.pdf).
10 Freedom House, Freedom in the World Survey 2007 (www.freedomhouse.org).
11 Larry Diamond, “Can the Whole World Become Democratic?” Center for the
Study of Democracy, UC Irvine, Paper 03/05 (2003), p. 6.
12 On urbanization and literacy in the Arab world, see the 2009 United Nations Arab
Human Development Report (www.arab-hdr.org). For example, in 1970 only 38
percent of the population in the Arab world lived in urban areas. By 2009 it was
nearly 60 percent. See also Beth Simmons, Frank Dobbin, Geoffrey Garret (eds.),
The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy (Cambridge, 2008).
13 Alfred Stepan and Graeme Robertson, “An ‘Arab’ More than a ‘Muslim’ Democracy
Gap,” Journal of Democracy, XIV: 3 (2003), 30–44.
14 Elie Kedoury, Politics in the Middle East (New York, 1992).
15 See Joshua Teitelbaum (ed.), Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf (New York,
2009).
16 Figures cited in Larry Diamond, “Why Are There No Arab Democracies?” Journal
of Democracy, XXI: 1 (2010), 96.
17 See Arch Puddington, “Democracy under Duress,” Journal of Democracy, XXII: 2
(2011), 17 31.
18 Diamond, op. cit., p. 98.
19 See Robert Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton, 2004).
20 See: Charles T. Call, “Beyond the ‘failed state’: Towards conceptual alternatives,”
European Journal of International Relations (2010), 5.
21 Report of the State Failure Task Force, Phase III findings (2000) (www.globalpolicy.
21
Amichai Magen
gmu.edu/pitf/SFTF%20Phase%20III%20Report%20Final.pdf).
22 David Kirkpatrick, “Local militias in Libya balk at giving up their arms,” International
Herald Tribune, November 2, 2011.
23 Call, op. cit., p. 6.
24 For a discussion of instant states and accompanying problems, see Paul Collier,
Wars, Guns, and Votes (New York, 2009), pp. 169–199. See also Uzi Rabi, The
Emergence of States in a Tribal Society (Sussex, UK, 2011).
25 The five Arab Human Development Reports are available at www.arab-hdr.org.
26 All figures drawn from the 2009 Arab Human Development Report: The Report in
Brief (www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2009/execsummary-e.pdf).
27 Ibid., p. 4.
28 Stefan Wolff, “The regional dimensions of state failure,” Review of International Studies,
XXXVII: 3 (2011), 951–972.
29 See: Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy,
XIII:4 (2002), 56–68.

Amichai Magen is head of political development at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism
(ICT) and a lecturer at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, The
Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya. Dr. Magen is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and a member of the World Jewish Congress (WJC)
Executive Committee.