Democracy Prevention explains how America's alliance with Egypt has impeded democratic change and reinforced authoritarianism over time.

Except for Israel, the Middle East remains largely untouched by the democratic revolution that swept across Eastern Europe and the former USSR. This book aims to explain and analyze the reasons why despotism or religious fundamentalism continue to control the Middle Eastern countries.

When a popular revolt forced long-ruling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign on February 11, 2011, US President Barack Obama hailed the victory of peaceful demonstrators in the heart of the Arab World. But Washington was late to endorse democracy - for decades the United States favored Egypt's rulers over its people. Since 1979, the United States had provided the Egyptian regime with more than $60 billion in aid and immeasurable political support to secure its main interests in the region: Israeli security and strong relations with Persian Gulf oil producers. During the Egyptian uprising, the White House did not promote popular sovereignty but instead backed an 'orderly transition' to one of Mubarak's cronies. Even after protesters derailed that plan, the anti-democratic US-Egyptian alliance continued. Using untapped primary materials, this book helps explain why authoritarianism has persisted in Egypt with American support, even as policy makers claim to encourage democratic change.

Three years after the first mass protests of the Arab Spring, senior scholars weigh in on how democracy is faring. Beginning in December 2010, a series of uprisings swept the Arab world, toppling four longtime leaders and creating an apparent political opening in a region long impervious to the “third wave” of democratization. Despite the initial euphoria, the legacies of authoritarianism—polarized societies, politicized militaries, state-centric economies, and pervasive clientelism—have proven stubborn obstacles to the fashioning of new political and social contracts. Meanwhile, the strong electoral performance of political Islamists and the ensuing backlash in Egypt have rekindled arguments about the compatibility of democracy and political Islam. Even though progress toward democracy has been halting at best, the region’s political environment today bears little resemblance to what it was before the uprisings. In Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World, leading scholars address the questions posed by this period of historic change in the Middle East and North Africa. This volume includes chapters examining several broad themes: the region’s shifting political culture, the relationship between democracy and political Islam, the legacy of authoritarian ruling arrangements, the strengths and vulnerabilities of remaining autocracies, and the lessons learned from transitions to democracy in other parts of the world. It also features chapters analyzing the political development of individual countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and the monarchies of the Gulf. Contributors Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui April Longley Alley Zoltan Barany Ahmed Benchemsi Mieczysław P. Boduszyński Nathan J. Brown Jason Brownlee Daniel Brumberg John M. Carey Michele Dunne Abdou Filali-Ansary Hillel Fradkin F. Gregory Gause III Husain Haqqani Steven Heydemann Philip N. Howard Muzammil M. Hussain Amaney Jamal Stéphane Lacroix Juan J. Linz Tarek Masoud Marc F. Plattner Tarek Radwan Hamadi Redissi Andrew Reynolds Michael Robbins Olivier Roy Peter J. Schraeder Alfred Stepan Mark Tessler Frédéric Volpi Lucan Way Frederic Wehrey Sean L. Yom

This book provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.