Coming at the heels of September 11, Operation Iraqi Freedom has focused the limelight on the way in which the United States predicts and manages political change. The failure to find WMD and more important, the continued violence in Iraq instead of the hoped for democracy, has engender an acrimonious debate on the motives of the Bush administration and its uses or misuses of intelligence. The question of who got what right or wrong has been fought out along ideological, and partisan lines, with supporters claiming that, given what was known about Saddam Hussein, the decision to change his...

Exploring continuities and changes, this book provides the historical backdrop crucial to understanding how Iranian pride and sense of victimization combine to make its politics contentious and potentially dangerous.

Turkey is a pivotal state whose domestic political, economic, and social developments have important implications across the globe. Here a leading Turkish political scientist enhances understanding of the interactions of liberal democracy with longstanding cultural cleavages along secular-religious lines, ethnicity, and social class. This work focuses on how the process of urbanization and industrialization has led to social mobilization and population movements from villages into the cities and how competition to control the state and its networks of patronage has made politics contentious...

Turkey is a pivotal state whose domestic political, economic, and social developments have important implications across the globe. Here a leading Turkish political scientist enhances understanding of the interactions of liberal democracy with longstanding cultural cleavages along secular-religious lines, ethnicity, and social class. This work focuses on how the process of urbanization and industrialization has led to social mobilization and population movements from villages into the cities and how competition to control the state and its networks of patronage has made politics contentious...

This book provides readers with a fresh analysis of the Arab state by using a new theoretical framework: hybrid sovereignty. Hybrid sovereignty is used as an analytical tool to explain the survival of traditional patterns and forms of authority within the formal modern statehood. The author looks at various issue areas to make his argument: citizenship, the issue of minorities, electoral engineering, the failure of central rule, tribalism, and the lack of impersonal bureaucratic mechanism. He concludes that based on the problems at state-society level boundaries of statehood, the Arab state...

The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest and most important international Islamist group. Aside from strong organizations in Egypt, Jordan, Syria--where it provides the main opposition--and its Palestinian offshoot Hamas which rules the Gaza Strip, the Brotherhood has become active in Europe and North America.

The book examines the Hezbollah movement from a multidisciplinary, comprehensive, historical, and systematic perspective to explain how it has evolved since its inception in the early 1980s to the present.

Nabih Barri is a key figure in the Lebanese and Shi'ite politics for the last three decades. As the leader of the Shi'ite Amal movement since 1980 and as the Lebanese Speaker since 1992, Barri played a major role in all political events and processes in Lebanon between the early 1980's and today, including the current severe Lebanese crisis.

Against a background of weak and contested national identity and capricious interaction between religious affiliation and confessional politics, this book illustrates in detailed analysis this "comprehensive" project of Islamism according to its ideological and practical evolutionary change."