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he asserts that consociation based on power-sharing arrangements cannot be sustained without

the continued support of regional and international powers pursuing their national interests.
He concludes that consociation does not provide long-term resolution of ethnic conflicts but
only conflict regulation in stable political environments.
The book details the history and impact of colonial rule, the reasons for the failures of the
1943 Lebanese National Pact and the 1974 Sunnyvale Agreement in Northern Ireland, and
the eventual imposition of power-sharing arrangements—the Good Friday Agreement (1998)
and the Taif Agreement (1989). Thus, the success or failure of these agreements depended
on the nature of relationships among the external actors and between them and internal elites.
The soundness of an analyst’s prognostication ultimately depends on the unfolding of events.
Kerr’s optimism about the Good Friday Agreement was based on the positive nature of
the developing interdependence among all internal and external elites and convergence of
interests of the British and Irish governments that culminated in the April 2007 power-sharing
compact, sixteen months after this book’s publication. In contrast, Lebanon’s consociation has
degenerated into chaos due to the country’s location near the epicenter of the Arab–Israeli
conflict, amid the clashing interests of Syria, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
This book has the added benefit of a foreword titled “The Realism of Power-Sharing,”
by Brendan O’Leary, who presents a critical and concise overview of consociational the-
ory and its evolution over several decades. He distinguishes between liberal consociation,
as in Northern Ireland, where citizens can vote for any candidate or party, and corporate
consociation, as in Lebanon, where voters are obliged to vote for the competing leaders
of their own ethnic/religious communities. One might propose a third variant—hegemonial
consociation—in which citizens vote for candidates belonging to various sectarian, tribal, or
ideological groupings under the control of a strong regime that acts as an “umpire” to regulate
the balance of power among the contending sides. This type of consociationalism is already
observable in Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Its wider
use could well bring greater stability to a number of deeply divided Middle Eastern, African,
and Asian countries. One might dare to suggest that a variant of hegemonial consociation, if
administered properly by a regional coalition including the neighboring states soon after the
U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, could have prevented the Iraqi quagmire.
Kerr’s book is a valuable contribution to the literature for its emphasis on the role of external
powers in determining the outcome of power-sharing agreements and for its many original
insights on the history and political dynamics of consociational rule in Lebanon and Northern
Ireland. Moreover, this book demonstrates that despite its shortcomings, the consociational
approach still remains a useful tool in the mitigation and management of internecine conflicts
that could otherwise result in civil wars or genocidal atrocities. I recommend it to policy
makers, comparativists focusing on segmented societies, Europeanists, Middle East specialists,
college students, and the thinking public.

NICOLA PRATT, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 2006). Pp. 240. $55.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

REVIEWED BY MARINA OTTAWAY, Middle East Program, Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, Washington, D.C.; e-mail: mottaway@CarnegieEndowment.org
doi:10.1017/S0020743808081130

Countries of the Arab Middle East have proven extremely impervious to democratic transfor-
mation. They have emerged from the wave of successful and unsuccessful democratizations
502 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008)

that swept much of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union, with their political systems
intact. It is not only that they did not become democratic—many other countries did not
either. Rather, for the most part they did not even try. To be sure, most Arab governments
now talk about democracy as their ultimate although very distant goal—each country at its
own pace and in its own fashion. In the meantime, monarchs continue to govern as well as
reign, and presidents remain unfettered by constitutional checks and balances. Blurring the
line between monarchies and republics, furthermore, presidents seek to stay in power for life
and even to anoint their sons to succeed them.
To analysts who reject, correctly, facile Western explanations about an eternal Arab cul-
ture of authoritarianism and equally facile Arab claims that link failure to reform to the
impact of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the region’s resistance to the inroads of democracy
presents a serious challenge. What explains the persistence of authoritarianism in these
societies?
Nicola Pratt seeks to answer this question in a book that shows greater familiarity with
theories and scholarly sources than with the political reality of the Arab world. The book
does a commendable job of summarizing, comparing, and integrating the work of scholars
who have addressed the authoritarianism of Arab political systems. It unfortunately does not
display the same degree of familiarity with, and firsthand knowledge of, the political process
and political actors in Arab countries. Although the author draws in part on her own research
among civil society actors in Egypt, most of the book’s conclusions are reached deduc-
tively from theory rather than inductively from observation and analysis of what is actually
happening.
What makes the book worth reading, as a result, is not what it tells us about authoritarianism
and democracy in the Middle East—you should not turn to this book to learn about the political
battles that are taking place and the political actors who are influencing them. Rather, the
book’s interest resides in what it tells us about the transformation in the thinking of what
used to be a Third World-ist left influenced by dependency theory. Forced to abandon many
of the old assumptions when history proved them wrong and political events made their
defense unsustainable, this left had to develop a new political model for developing countries
and a new vision of the role of external actors. This intellectual transformation parallels
that of many Arab actors, namely, the old Arab nationalists who have converted from the
glorification of the strong developmental state to that of an active, participatory civil society—
for example, from Nasserism to the launch of the Kifaya movement in Egypt. Nicola Pratt is
too young to have undergone that transformation in person. Her book, however, reflects the
change.
True to the Third World-ist approach, Pratt feels the need to explain present-day problems in
terms of the impact of the European penetration of the region and the subsequent integration in
the international economic system, as if history began then. Like all new Third World-ists, she
also recognizes that the remedy chosen by Arab nationalists in the past—the reliance on state
power and intervention without the participation of citizens—“normalized” authoritarianism
by fostering a culture that accepted it in the name of a project of national modernization. The
project failed, but authoritarianism remained.
That authoritarianism is now being challenged by the rise of new civil society actors
calling for political reforms, women’s rights, and human rights, according to Pratt. Together
with transnational actors who support them—Pratt goes to great lengths in trying to prove that
transnational civil society organizations play an important and legitimate role in promoting
reform—Arab civil society organizations have the potential for finally moving Arab countries
from authoritarianism to democracy.
Here is where the weakness of the research becomes most evident. Pratt looks at civil
society actors through the lens of theory, but she misses the reality of what these groups
 Reviews 503

really are and whether they have the capacity to perform the historic role that she assigns
to them. Yes, there are many new human rights and women’s organizations in the Arab
world, but how many people do they reach? How much support do they have? Who funds
them? Which groups have a popular following, and which are elitist organizations that exist
only because Western organizations fund them? How do Islamists and other civil society
organizations relate to each other? Theory does not answer these questions. Serious empirical
research would help, and this is where the book is weak.

FRED H. LAWSON, Constructing International Relations in the Arab World (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press 2006). Pp. 224. $48.00 cloth.

REVIEWED BY RAYMOND HINNEBUSCH, School of International Relations, University of St.

Andrews, St. Andrews, U.K.; e-mail: rh10@st-andrews.ac.uk
doi:10.1017/S0020743808081142

In this book Fred Lawson undertakes the important project of bridging the gap between
material and ideational approaches to understanding the dialectic between identity and the
territorial state, which is arguably the distinctive feature of Middle East international politics.
Many of the explanations in the literature for the emergence of nation-states are, Lawson
thinks, too focused on “ideas and beliefs rather than the material conditions that make it
possible for certain norms to arise” (p. 16), which is Lawson’s interest. His concern parallels
the debate between constructivists who insist on the importance of identity-derived norms and
materialists who focus on interests. Arguably the task is to identify the relations between the
two.
Chapter 1 provides a survey of theoretical issues derived from the European experience,
where a drive for congruence between nation (identity) and state (territory) produced a sta-
ble and effective political form that has been exported, with varying degrees of success,
worldwide. In the Middle East, however, rival qawmı̄ (Pan-Arab) forms of identity coex-
ist with state (wat.anı̄) identities and delay this convergence. Hence, states’ independence,
Lawson observes, marked no uniform transition to a Westphalian system. In Chapter 2 he
explores variations in this transition to Westphalianism in different states: some states were
far ahead of others in embracing sovereignty over wider identities—for example, Egypt and
Tunisia did so fairly early compared with Jordan and Iraq, and Syria is said to be a middle
case.
In the remainder of the book Lawson tests three theories in trying to explain these vari-
ations. What the three theories have in common is the hypothesis that state building, that
is, the development of material infrastructural power allowing state penetration of domestic
society, is associated with the normative embrace of sovereignty. However, Lawson rejects
the claim that relative state penetration by itself explains much. To be specific, he argues
that the Jordanian state penetrated and controlled society more than the Egyptian one, but
sovereignty was accepted earlier in the latter than the former. The argument that Egypt’s state
was weaker than Jordan’s is, however, strange because Lawson acknowledges that Egypt’s
central administration penetrated local areas, conscripted, built infrastructures, and managed
agriculture and irrigation. However, because Egypt under British occupation did not control
its own army, foreign policy, or the foreign capital and banks on its territory, it is thought
to lack stateness. Yet this was no less so in Jordan, where it was the British, particularly the
Royal Air Force, who empowered the monarchy against the tribes and Pan-Arabists, and the
state performed none of the complicated tasks it did in Egypt. In Syria, state penetration is