Book Review: Negotiating Change
By This is the eighth of a nine part series on the Patterson School Summer Reading List.
1. China’s Trapped Transition, Minxin Pei
2. The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs
3. Illicit, Moises Naim
4. In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce
5. The Utility of Force, Rupert Smith
6. The Box, Marc Levinson
7. Fair Play, James M. Olson
8. Negotiating Change, Jeremy Jones
Negotiating Change, by Jeremy Jones, is about democratization and political change in the Middle East. Jones, a Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government and a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, is extremely, if often implicitly, critical of US policy in the Middle East and in particular the process through which policy is made. In short, I think Jones would say, American policymaking has made cultural illiteracy a virtue, with disastrous effects.
Jones point is that context is important. Readings of Middle Eastern politics that don’t understand the local meaning of party politics and civil society inevitably fail to capture a reliable picture of what’s going on. For example, Jones argues that the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt doesn’t necessarily indicate that the movement is politically popular, or that it has achieved success on its own merits. Rather, the repressive Egyptian state has limited the capacity of civil society to develop. The state, however, is reluctant to invade the mosque, meaning that Islamic groups have a freedom to organize and assemble that other societal groups lack. The result of political oppression, then, is the production of a movement that may be more dangerous to the survival of the Egyptian state than the forces that the state is trying to repress. Although Jones recognizes that their may be cross-national similarities, he doesn’t apply the same lens to every country; again, context matters, and superficially similar events may have entirely different political meanings in different countries.
Jones is also keen to point out that the complexity of politics in the Middle East (and I think it would be fair to say in any region), makes facile surface evaluation of events nearly useless. It’s difficult to determine whether Middle Eastern states are democratizing, because the process of social change is radically different than what we would expect to see in, say, Eastern Europe. For example, he gives an excellent discussion of the role of monarchy in the Gulf states, noting that monarchy does not necessarily imply authoritarian, anti-democratic politics. In his discussion of Oman, he notes a variety of cultural mores that make it difficult for an outside analyst to determine whether particular institutions
Given his approach, Negotiating Change is necessarily fragmented and episodic. The main theme that comes through, though is that the statements of US policymakers on democracy in the Middle East are almost universally myopic and ill-informed. Without understanding Middle Eastern societies, it’s impossible to craft a policy likely to promote, rather than foreclose, democratization. I would add that this insight is particularly unfortunate for a foreign policy group that purports to believe that a) democratization should be the primary goal of US Middle Eastern policy, and b) virtually all experts on the Middle East are ideological poison. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a world in which the combination of those two traits could lead to any success at all.
Negotiating Change is a solid entry, valuable not only for its overall argument, but also for the detail it lends about the political and cultural systems of its subjects. Jones knows a lot about what he’s talking about; he’s traveled extensively in the Middle East, and conducted numerous interviews of policymakers and others. His book has few direct policy recommendations, but for those with an interest but not specialization in the Middle East, it’s a valuable resource.