Valbjørn, Morten, and André Bank. "Examining the ‘Post’ in Post-Democratization: The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule through Lenses of the Past." Middle East Critique, Vol.19, No.3 (2010): 183-200.

Valbjørn, Morten, and André Bank. "Examining the ‘Post’ in Post-Democratization: The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule through Lenses of the Past." Middle East Critique, Vol.19, No.3 (2010): 183-200.

• Middle Eastern studies scholars have been increasingly pressured to reject the transition paradigm and accept that democratization is not going to come to the Middle East anytime soon, specifically abandoning the hopes for rapid democratization that were common in the 1990s (183-184).
• During the 1990s, academia was involved in a massive push to 'de-orientalize' the field by moving away from Cold War area studies programs and towards comparative politics. This was partially inspired by globalization and the idea that area studies was no longer useful, with the expectation that American companies and cultural norms would soon by common world-wide (184-185).
• This push towards comparative politics and seeing the Middle East as a full part of the global system meant that it was also included in conversations about democratization. It was thus expected that the Middle East would democratize, as part of the 'third wave' that began in the 1970s and in line with Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' (185).
• A group of former Middle East area studies scholars latched onto the idea of democratization and desperately grasped for examples to challenge the assumption that Islam was inherently undemocratic. Refusing to abandon the transition paradigm, they wrote desperate reports about any inch towards democratization in an attempt to prove that their region was part of wider trends (186).
• Many of the concepts from democratization elsewhere did not apply well to the context of the Middle East, as the ideas of power-sharing transitions, civil society jump-starting revolutions, economic liberalization leading to political liberalization, and the middle class acting as a bulwark for democracy have all failed to come true in the Middle East (187).
• However, the Middle East did not democratize in the 1990s and thus the majority of the political science community wrote off the region as exceptionally undemocratic. Lacking specific knowledge of the region, the general assumption was that something about Islam or Arab culture made the region inhospitable to democracy (185-186).
• Since the 1990s, the Middle East has become more exceptionally undemocratic as a region, having the gap between its democracy indices and those of other regions widen over time (187).
• The transition paradigm movement of the 1990s has come under increasing criticism from those who argue that this focus on democracy, which has never really appeared, has resulted in a dearth of research on other important topics. In particular, this has led scholars to ignore important changes within authoritarian governments and to falsely assume that all reforms have been towards democratization (187-188).
• This movement within the field, called 'post-democratization', has refocused towards explaining why authoritarian governments have been so successful, particularly on how they have responded to new challenges and pressures (189-190).
• The transition paradigm scholars have become increasingly isolated since the 2000s from both the general field of democratization in political science, which is uninterested in them since they have nothing to report, and from Middle Eastern area studies, which rejects their focus on liberal politics in a generally authoritarian region (190-191).
• Scholarship on the Middle East underwent an unsupported expectation of democratization in the 1950s, similar to that of the 1990s. Using liberal modernization theory, scholars predicted that the Middle East would become like develop into a image of the West and liberal democracy (192).
• Support for these theory died out by the 1960s due to repeated civil wars, coups, the dominance of absolute monarchies and one-party states, and the intensification of Cold War ideological battles that made the future of the developing world seem less certain (192-193).
• The theory was also heavily critiqued for ignoring important cultural and historical differences between the West and the Middle East and assuming that everything would eventually become Europe out of a banal ethnocentrism (193).
• A survey study by James Bill looked 104 pieces of American scholarship on the Middle East and determined that scholars had not really done anything important since the 1950s, but instead that most theoretical political science work on the region had just taken the same concepts without significantly altering or improving them (194).
• Four general trends are currently emerging in literature on the Middle East:
• Extraregional divergence and convergence, or the degree to which recent political changes in the West have occurred in other parts of the world, including the Middle East. In continues along the line of comparative politics, but rejects the idea that the West is ahistoric or defines modernity (195-196).
• Non-democratic legitimacy rejects the idea that only democratic systems are legitimate and focuses on the ways in which non-democratic governments in the Middle East cultivate legitimacy. It also questions why, after being legitimate for so long, authoritarian governments can loose legitimacy (196).
• Technical modernization without democratization looks at how modernization occurs without accompanying democracy, specifically about how authoritarian government employ rule by technical experts to achieve defined modernity objectives under the pretence of being apolitical (196-197).
• Regional-domestic intertwinement focuses on the affects of regional politics on developments in domestic politics in individual Middle Eastern countries. These studies focus on how ideological trends within the Arab world, like Arab nationalism or Communism, fed into domestic politics through regional dynamics (197).