Despite the expectations of economic theory, a century of Arab-Jewish economic interaction in Palestine has not led to the convergence that is supposed to result from exchange between a capital-rich economy and a labor-intensive one. After 60 years of failed integration, the Arab population in Israel has fallen to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. With the Palestinian “regional economies” in Israel and the occupied territories operating as part of the same Israeli economic regime, the challenge for Palestinian economic policy makers is to build on the new paradigm in shaping a national development strategy aimed at reconstructing Arab-Jewish economic relations on the principles of balanced cooperation embodied in the Economic Annex of the 1947 UN partition resolution.

This article asks whether there are lessons that can be drawn from the democratization of Iraq for the possible democratization of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the wake of the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings. The paper draws on the democratization program in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 to demonstrate that focusing on the promotion of a liberal democratic model in Iraq translated into a lack of operational flexibility, which let democracy assistance unable to cope with socio-economic demands, local realities and reactions to democratization. Taking into account a variation in the intensity of interventionism between Iraq and MENA, the article argues that there is sufficient similarities between both cases to point Western democracy promoters in the direction of models of democracy that offer a more comprehensive response to the current political transition in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya than the traditional focus on the promotion of liberal democracy does.

On the heels of democratic uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), recent “mass incidents” (qunti shijian) in China have spurred renewed debate about the level of social dissatisfaction and the stability of authoritarian governance in the People’s Republic of China. Yet, unlike in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in the MENA facing widespread rebellion against their ruling regimes, protests in China have not been directed at central political leaders or the political system as a whole. By examining the similarities and differences between Chinese and Middle Eastern authoritarianism, this article seeks to uncover which factors underpin continued public acceptance of the Chinese Communist Party and which ones—if left unchecked—bode ill for the regime.

Recent debates on societal transitions to democracy have focused their attention on the notion of “civil society,” putting great hope in its democratizing effects. This essay reexamines the notion’s utility in the context of the post-2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. It argues that at least in its conceptualization along the lines of the “transition paradigm,” the civil society framework is unable to capture the complex catalysts of the non-teleological, open-ended uprisings in North Africa. Not only does it largely ignore the importance of socioeconomic forces as well as the non-institutionalized, spontaneous forms of organization present in these democratization processes; the analytical failure of the civil society framework also takes up a transformative power in and of itself, structuring the empirical realities that it claims to describe. The concept of civil society therefore fails to accurately represent the dynamics at play in Tunisia and Egypt, and has negatively shaped them with respect to the outcomes of revolutionary contestation. “Civil society” has integrated an open and contingent arena into the closed structures of reproduced sovereign statehood. Rather than unleashing democratic energies in Tunisia and Egypt, it has sometimes even reinforced the very power structures it allegedly set out to challenge. Borrowing from the work of Hannah Arendt on revolution and Giorgio Agamben on the notion of “destituent power,” this essay argues for a conceptual opening in our analytical framework that corresponds to the radical contingency that lies at the heart of any revolutionary process.

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, the so-called ‘Turkish model’ has become a key ingredient of the discourse of democratization in the Middle East. In this study, first, the assumption of the necessity of a ‘model’ for the emerging democracies in the Middle East will be discussed. This will be followed by a comparative analysis of the Turkish and Iranian models because of their potential to affect the policies of emerging states in the region. The study will acknowledge the fact that the full application of the model may not be possible, however, I will conclude that the Turkish model is much more applicable to the emerging democracies in Tunisia and Egypt than the Iranian model and it has a lot to offer to those societies in terms of guidance in areas such as the state-religion relations, economic development, and democracy building.

Recent debates on societal transitions to democracy have focused their attention on the notion of “civil society,” putting great hope in its democratizing effects. This essay reexamines the notion’s utility in the context of the post-2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. It argues that at least in its conceptualization along the lines of the “transition paradigm,” the civil society framework is unable to capture the complex catalysts of the non-teleological, open-ended uprisings in North Africa. Not only does it largely ignore the importance of socioeconomic forces as well as the non-institutionalized, spontaneous forms of organization present in these democratization processes; the analytical failure of the civil society framework also takes up a transformative power in and of itself, structuring the empirical realities that it claims to describe. The concept of civil society therefore fails to accurately represent the dynamics at play in Tunisia and Egypt, and has negatively shaped them with respect to the outcomes of revolutionary contestation. “Civil society” has integrated an open and contingent arena into the closed structures of reproduced sovereign statehood. Rather than unleashing democratic energies in Tunisia and Egypt, it has sometimes even reinforced the very power structures it allegedly set out to challenge. Borrowing from the work of Hannah Arendt on revolution and Giorgio Agamben on the notion of “destituent power,” this essay argues for a conceptual opening in our analytical framework that corresponds to the radical contingency that lies at the heart of any revolutionary process.