Many observers regarded 1999 as a year of progress for democracy in the Arab world. There is reason to doubt, however, whether any meaningful change has really occurred.
About the Author
Emmanuel Sivan is professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works, including Radical Islam (1990) and Mythes politiques arabes (1995), and the editor of War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (1999).
While President Ali ABdallah Salih continues to call Yemen an ’emerging democracy,’ it more closely resembles athe autocracy of the pre-unification North.
Despite a brutal thirteen-year civil war, Syrians are not building from scratch. In fact, Syria has a long and rich history of state-building to guide them.
Everything we know about getting and keeping democracy suggests we should be, at best, cautious about the prospects for Syria’s democratic future. But, as this collection of essays suggests, there…
