Considerable controversy swirls around the Western policy of exporting democracy to the Middle East. While it has long informed the foreign policy of Britain, the European Union and individual Scandinavian countries, the United States has seemingly reversed policy as President Obama has sought to distance himself from the overtly prescriptive policy that occurred during the neo-conservative ascendancy of his predecessor. President Bush argued that ‘military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth highway to nowhere’ and thus pressed for democratisation of the region, President Obama on the other hand stated, ‘no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.’  Some regard this new policy as a dereliction of duty and a recipe for continued autocracy in the region, perhaps even an abandonment of American core values. Others see any attempt to export democracy as counter-productive and hypocritical. While this broader debate unfolds, external promotion continues in the form of electoral assistance, civil society development, and support for ‘moderate’ Islamic movements, but so too does authoritarianism. This lecture will examine the possibilities and problems that democracy promotion poses for the Middle East.

Professor James Piscatori is one of the world’s leading authorities on political Islam and the politics, history and international relations of the Middle East. He is Chair and Head of the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, UK. Prior to this appointment he was Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. He was formerly a Fellow of Wadham College and of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Oxford. In 2009 he was inducted into the Society of Scholars of the Johns Hopkins University. Professor Piscatori’s publications include: Islam in a World of Nation-States (C.U.P. 1986), Muslim Politics (P.U.P., 1996) and Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral Principle in the Middle East (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, 2000). He is a senior editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World.