“Waves” of Western Literature on “Democratization in the Arab World”

It has become commonplace among Western scholars to treat supposed processes of "democratization" in terms of "waves" since Samuel Huntington's seminal book published in 1991-The Third Wave. The Western literature on "democratization in the Arab world" is no exception, and some Western scholars have labeled the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 the "fourth wave of democratization". The main research question of this article is whether this literature, which has been accumulating from the 1990s onwards, consists of genuine scholarly analyses of political change in the Arab world or whether it is instead reflective of political exigencies of the West. This article falls closer to the latter position, and asserts that there are indeed waves of the Western literature on "democratization in the Arab world" rather than the so-called "waves of democratization". The article argues that there is at least some sort of correlation between the political exigencies of the U.S. leadership and this literature from the very beginning by discussing its relationship to the anti-Communist Modernization school of political development that emerged in the United States in the early Cold War years. The article also demonstrates that there is a striking continuity within that literature in terms of the themes it has covered despite its decades-long existence

Communism · Democracy · Democratization · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Third wave · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Political Conflict and Governance · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

• Democracy's Third Wave

  Open Access•Samuel P Huntington•Journal of democracy•1991

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