Statehood in the Middle East: In Search of New Models

... population. Such assessments are mainly characteristic of political scientists in the West who reflexively view the processes in the Arab world from an ideological angle, as a dichotomy of autocracies and democracies. The second school is not so straightforward ... ... after the political system imposed on Iraq has yielded an explosion of terrorism and a degradation of the very foundations of statehood. Democratic values in their Western sense do not fit the social psychology and political culture of Arab societies. ...