Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights: Implications for International Relations
An attempt to defend the notion of human rights and democracy from cultural essentialism, to locate sources for human rights theory within Islamic texts, and to demonstrate how these ideas have already been inducted into political discourse and change in Muslim nations. Dalacoura begins with a concise discussion of the philosophical problems underlying human rights theory and the attempt to apply it cross-culturally, then moves on to present three examples of partial democratization in Muslim nations and to carefully recount the actual history of how and why these movements failed. Her purpose is to refute the notion that some unidentified but immutable aspect of Arab or Islamic character makes democratization impossible, by locating the precise historical and political reasons for failure, which naturally suggest ways that democratization might have succeeded instead. Her project is undercut a bit by her decision to just skip the Nasser era in Egypt; Egyptian history 1920s-1930s and 1970s-1980s are treated as two of her three examples, with the intervening fascist rule of Nasser treated as a "lacuna," despite her fleeting acknowledgement of the vast popularity of his rule, and his continuing status as an Arab hero. The example of Nasser is precisely the sort of thing people point to as proof of some inherently authoritarian/servile speck in the Arab character, so her failure to account for him in some way is a disappointment. Her chapter on Tunisia 1970s-1990s however importantly demonstrates how a brief spell of political freedom in that nation ameliorated the Islamist tide that swept the entire Muslim world during that period, forcing Islamist leaders to moderate their ideology and tactics in order to both protect their own political legitimacy and seek electoral victory. I think it's an important book in many respects, so it's a shame that it's not written for a general audience, but instead assumes a great deal of background knowledge on the part of the reader (it is actually a revision of her doctoral thesis for the IR Dept. of the London School of Economics and Politics). I am expecting to get her paper on the same topic that she's published through the Brookings Institution from the library, so maybe I'll end up being able to recommend that to people.