This comprehensive collection addresses the important question of political parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Written by historians, political scientists, and sociologists of the region, the book provides a pertinent analytical framework to understand the often complex and turbulent histories of these political parties, their role within the region, and their prospects in the wake of the post-2011 Arab Uprisings. The authors explore a rich and varied range of case studies including Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco. This book examines where political parties and organizations have been crucial to shaping contemporary historical events and political contestation, but also highlights their shortcomings and failures to deliver on the ambitions and hopes they had often evoked amongst their supporters. Furthermore, it looks at how political parties and their activities have intersected with important issues and themes such as gender, human rights, international solidarity, revolution and social transformation, and sectarian identity. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science, particularly within the MENA region. It was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

This major reference provides comprehensive coverage of the political parties and movements in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Frank Tachau and a group of prestigious scholars and internationally acclaimed experts on the region's political history describe the formation, evolution, and impact of parties in each of the 19 countries that are surveyed, and they also discuss Palestinian and Kurdish political groups. Bibliographies accompany each chapter. The two appendixes are chronologies of important dates in the political developments in the various countries and in the region and information about the genealogies of parties where country histories are particularly complex. A general index and internal cross-references make the data about the parties easily accessible to the political scientists, historians, and Middle Eastern students, teachers, and professionals for whom the survey is designed.

Why was Turkey - alone of all the modern states that emerged from the Ottoman Empire - the only Middle Eastern country to evolve lasting competitive political institutions? While democratic processes grew steadily in Turkey during the twentieth century, its neighbors turned to forms of authoritarian rule that reinforced the powers of armies, families, single parties, or monarchs. Michele Angrist argues that democracy and dictatorship in the Middle East can be understood by studying the nature and status of political parties operating at the moment of independence. Looking carefully at Muslim-majority states where parties played a crucial role in state formation between the 1940s and the 1960s, Angrist challenges the idea that Islam, class structures, levels of development, and/or international factors dominated domestic politics in the region. She writes across the regional divides that have isolated Turkish, Arab, and Persian studies from each other. Comparative political scientists, Middle East social scientists, and scholars of Turkey will find here a compelling account of party building and democratization in the modern Middle East.

This comprehensive Handbook analyses the political parties and party systems across the Middle East and North Africa. Providing an in-depth, empirically grounded and novel study of political parties, the volume focuses on a region where they have been traditionally and often erroneously dismissed. The book is divided into five sections, examining: the trajectories of Islamist, Salafi, leftist, liberal, nationalist, and personalistic parties drawing from different countries; the role political parties play in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries; the centrality of political parties in democratic or democratising settings; the relationship between parties and specific social constituencies, ranging from women to youth to tribes and sects; and the policy positions of parties on a number of issues, including neo-liberal economics, identity, foreign policy and the role of violence. This wide-ranging and systematic analysis is a key resource for students and scholars interested in party politics, democratization and authoritarianism, and the Middle East and North Africa. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780429269219

This book deals with political parties and movements in the various Middle Eastern states in the last 50 years, discussing extensively changes which took place in the region's states following what is called "the Arab Spring," and including recent developments in areas which underwent the processes involved in this phenomenon.

“Represents an important advancement in developing the strand of literature that considers how economic conditions affect Islamist movements.” —Middle Eastern Studies A. Kadir Yildirim and other scholars have used the term “Muslim Democrat” to describe moderate Islamist political parties, suggesting a parallel with Christian Democratic parties in Europe. These parties (MDPs) are marked by their adherence to a secular political regime, normative commitment to the rules of a democratic political system, and the democratic political representation of a religious identity. In this book, Yildirim draws on extensive field research in Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco to examine this phenomenon and assess the interaction of economic and political factors in the development of MDPs. Distinguishing between “competitive [economic] liberalization” and “crony liberalization,” he argues that MDPs are more likely to emerge and succeed in the context of the former. He summarizes that the broader implication is that the economic liberalization models adopted by governments in the region in the wake of the Arab Spring have significant implications for the future direction of party systems and democratic reform.