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Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World, by Amaney A. Jamal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xiii + 138 pages. Illust. Appends. to p. 151. Bibl. to p. 164. Index to p. 173. $35.
Reviewed by Steven Heydemann
Civil society has long occupied a privileged position, both in the practice of democracy promotion and in democratic theory. A strong civil society is seen as a necessary precondition for the development of democratic norms and practices among citizens and as a force able to hold state actors accountable. Despite active support from Western donors, however, Arab civil society has largely failed to emerge as an agent of democratic change in the Middle East. Instead, as Amaney Jamal points out in this insightful and provocative study of civil society in Palestine in the late 1990s, it has done the reverse. Jamal not only highlights the political and institutional constraints that undermine the capacity of Palestinian civil society to perform its erstwhile role as the carrier of Palestinian democracy, but shows how civil society sustains and reproduces the authoritarian norms and practices of the regime.
Tracing the trajectory of state-society relations in from Oslo (1993) through the late 1990s, Jamal finds that many of...