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| Volume XIV, Fall 2007, Number 3 |
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EXCERPT
"Primitive Democracy”: Mideast Roots of Collective Governance
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| Benjamin Isakhan |
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Mr. Isakhan is a doctoral candidate, research assistant and sessional
lecturer at Griffith University, Australia. An earlier version of this paper
was presented at the 2006 Australasian Political Studies Association
(APSA) conference in Newcastle, Australia.
The issue of Middle Eastern
democracy in the late twentieth/
early twenty-first century has
been controversial from at least
as far back as Samuel Huntington’s 1984
essay “Will More Countries Become
Democratic?” In it, he stated that “among
Islamic countries, particularly those in the
Middle East, the prospects for democratic
development seem low.” Huntington later
argued that each region of the globe has its
own individual religio-cultural essence that
plays a large part in determining receptivity
to democratic systems. He isolated two
examples, Islam and Confucianism, and
labeled them “profoundly anti-democratic,”
claiming that they would “impede the
spread of democratic norms in society,
deny legitimacy to democratic institutions,
and thus greatly complicate if not prevent
the emergence and effectiveness of those
institutions.” Building on this early work,
Huntington’s most influential book, The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order, goes even further by
claiming that the early twenty-first century
will be marred by the battle — both
physical and ideological — between these
anti-democratic “civilizations” and the
West.
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