| Review of: | Barriers to democracy: the other side of social capital in Palestine and the Arab world by Amaney A. Jamal |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Roger Heacock |
| Reviewed in: | International Affairs |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 83, Issue 06, Pages 1193-1234 |
Book Reviews: Middle East and North Africa
Amaney Jamal's volume is a welcome addition to the literature on democracy outside Europe and Latin America. Her thesis is that so-called civil society organizations, in regions characterized by authoritarian rule, do not necessarily contribute to building democracy, and sometimes may indeed serve to strengthen an overweening executive. They tend to fall into the sphere of influence of the regime and thus contribute to centrifugal rather than centripetal forces.
The case she analyses in detail is that of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) installed following the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat as Chairman. Most NGOs, she maintains, were created or co-opted by the PNA, their effectiveness guaranteed (or blocked) by Arafat himself, thus ensuring unconditional allegiance. The author then gives a brief overview of examples gleaned from secondary sources on other states in the Arab Mashreq and Maghreb, Morocco and, even more schematically, Egypt and Jordan. Her major conclusion and theoretical proposition is that one of the requisites of democracy, interpersonal trust, does not, in the Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian and, most probably, Moroccan cases, correlate positively with a democratic culture. A more logical conclusion might have been to cast doubt on the highly subjective notion of 'interpersonal trust' itself. If trust is the characteristic of pro-PNA associations, while opposition groups are more inclined not to trust even as they affirm more 'democratic' values, it would follow that these two values would be reversed if the opposition were to come to power, illustrating the concept devised by John Waterbury of a 'democracy without democrats'. Should one then not look beyond the mined field of democracy studies for sharper epistemological tools?
One might likewise question Jamal's widespread reliance on such authorities as Samuel Huntington (who is today most concerned with preventing the Latinization of US society and who, in one of the works cited, came out in favour of strong military regimes for the Third World), the aggressively conservative Freedom House and Francis Fukuyama, all of whom are powerful advocates of official US global values and policies, even as she leaves out the truly groundbreaking and agenda-free empirical-cum-theoretical works of Philippe Schmitter. This places the structure on decisively wobbly stilts. And the author's statement that men and the elites are more imbued with democratic values than women and the people at large is questionable. The dean of democracy studies, Robert Dahl, has, in his recent work, posited equality as a condition for democracy, and Ranajit Guha, founder of the Subaltern Studies Group, long ago demonstrated that an authentic democracy is indigenous and popular, owing little to colonial or local elites.
Some of the ambiguities pointed to here derive from the methodology adopted. The theory allusively elaborated is largely based on data culled through interviews conducted in the late 1990s in the West Bank. Largely anonymous local informers form the basis for generalized propositions in the case of the West Bank; the same goes for a mildly critical Moroccan sociologist, quoted anonymously (p. 111, fn. 50). Such protectiveness is unnecessary in these two polities, where people speak and write openly about such matters. Another principal source is Barry Rubin, whose excessive personalization (some would say, diabolization) of Yasser Arafat in justifying Israel's failure to keep its promises under Oslo is notorious. Perhaps most importantly, as in most of the Palestine democracy literature researched prior to the 2006 legislative elections, there is nary a word about Hamas-linked organizations.
Nonetheless, this book represents an important building block. It manages to transcend the dominant mode produced locally, where purely anthropological or personalized conceptions (manliness, headscarves, key leaders) have become substitutes for fundamental research even as they strengthen Orientalist projections onto the Palestinian case and indeed the Palestinian cause. One would hope that a follow-up would be forthcoming, taking up where Amaney Jamal left off.
The victory of Hamas in municipal and legislative elections in 2005 and 2006 was clearly the result of a political process based on the popularity of its civil society organizations, combined with the widespread mistrust of the PNA and trust in Hamas's ability to provide better governance. This change only apparently weakens the author's thesis. The Great Powers/funders and the occupier had placed social, economic and political power in the hands of the Authority exclusively, and everything was done by them to recreate the original conditions which lie at the basis of this significant empirical work: rule by Fatah, the designated governing party. The author's injunction to consider her book a 'starting point' and to revamp the historiographical, sociological and political conception of Palestine is therefore in order. This is all the more important as academics are having trouble understanding first the fact that, and then the reasons why, Islamist parties are the likely victors in any free election in the Middle East. A reading of this book will help, by beginning the process of disassembling the various disciplines' multifarious and misleading Orientalist 'idées reçues'.