Explores the many facets of Arab political thought from the nineteenth century to the present day.

This book provides a significant and unique contribution to the emerging literature of comparative political thought. Michaelle L. Browers offers compelling evidence, with extensive analysis and references, that a rigorous debate is taking place in Arabic concerning the value of democracy and civil society. Exploring the globalization of ideas of democracy and civil society, Browers addresses the question of what occurs when concepts cross the boundaries of cultures or languages. She analyzes the historical concept of democracy in Arab and Islamic political thought, the transformations that have occurred over the past several decades resulting from Arab forays into an international discussion of civil society and what these transformations tell us about the status of ideological and conceptual debates in the region. The book’s value, however, lies in its main premise: despite the dearth of actual democratic practices in the Arab world, intellectual elites of the region have vigorously debated reform concepts for decades. Browers emphasizes that current conflicts involving the Middle East are less about Islam against the west and its secular allies in the region and more about diverse sectors of Arab society grappling with how to reform overreaching and unjust states. Browers shows that the seeds of democratic reform in the region were well planted prior to the war on Iraq and the Greater Middle East Initiative.

The field of comparative politics traditionally has been divided into two camps: on the one hand, quantitatively driven work on a broad scale; on the other, more qualitative area studies. This edited collection promotes a new approach to comparative politics that transcends the debate about the future of the discipline. The contributors' essays are innovative in their interweaving of case studies of the political situations in particular regions with the project of political theorizing. The chapters take as their points of departure such diverse topics as the liberal tradition in United States politics, the impact of drug-related violence on democratic stability in Colombia, and the relationship between poverty reduction and support for democracy in Mali, thereby resoundingly demonstrating the broad relevance of the volume's unifying theme: theoretically informed comparative analysis. Students of politics, from advanced undergraduates to practicing scholars, will find this volume useful in assessing, analyzing, and uniting the fields of comparative politics and political theory.

This four-volume collection of cutting-edge and canonical scholarship counters the oft-cited opinion that studies of Middle Eastern politics are devoid of social scientific theory and method by providing an overview of the state of the scholarship in the field, innovations therein, and the debates that have advanced knowledge in the field. The collection covers the Arab world, from Morocco to the borders of Iran, with the focus primarily on the twentieth century, and especially the post-Second World War era. By choosing a wide array of authors, many of whom are from the region or from the non-Anglophone world, the full breadth of worldwide scholarship on the modern Arab world is on display. The collection defines politics broadly - in line with the most innovative current works in the field of political studies - to include not only politics at the state level, but also the public, social, and popular domains that define and shape (and are in turn defined and shaped by) politics.