This book is concerned with EU democracy promotion inside Tunisia, the first Arab signatory of an Association Agreement with the EU. Focusing on the content, context, mechanisms, and outcomes of democratization via association, the authors examine whether Tunisia's specific mode of democratization works in tandem with EU democracy promotion objectives, and the extent to which both adapt association in a way that neither sabotages EU democracy promotion nor undermines Tunisia's specificity.

Drawing on Arabic, English and French sources, the book deploys a variety of methods and...

Rethinking Arab Democratization unpacks and historicizes the rise of Arab electoralism, narrating the story of stalled democratic transition in the Arab Middle East. It provides a balance sheet of the state of Arab democratization from the mid-1970s up to 2008. In seeking to answer the question of how Arab countries democratize and whether they are democratizing at all, the book pays attention to specificity, highlighting the peculiarities of democratic transitions in the Arab Middle East. To this end, it situates the discussion of such transitions firmly within their local contexts,...

Popular uprisings and revolts across the Arab Middle East have often resulted in a democratic faragh or void in power (Sadiki, 2004). How society seeks to fill that void, regardless of whether the regime falls or survives, is the common trajectory followed by the seven empirical case studies published here for the first time. This edited volume seeks to unpack the state of the democratic void in three interrelated fields: democracy, legitimacy and social relations. In doing so, the conventional treatment of democratization as a linear, formal, systemic and systematic process is challenged and...