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Set includes revised editions of some issues.
ILLUSTRATED WITH COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS.
Southeast Asia, until the Asian economic crisis of 1997-2000, was a high economic growth area. However, despite the neo-liberal and globalizing logic of capitalism, local conditions and cultures determine that capitalism will spread in ways not entirely consonant with its Western origins. Capitalism is not a free-floating entity -- it is a socially embodied phenomenon that needs to function in various cultural contexts. Consequently, the tension between the universal status that some claim capitalism now occupies in the post-Cold War world and the particularities of the local cultures it enters should be of great concern.
In the wake of September 11 through the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a key tenet of U.S. foreign policy has been that promoting democracy in the Arab world is an important strategy in reducing terrorism; at the same time, some policymakers and analysts have held that democracy has nothing to do with terrorism -- or even that the growth of democracy in the Middle East may exacerbate political violence. However, scant empirical evidence links democracy to terrorism, positively or negatively. This study examines whether such links exist by exploring the effects of liberalization processes on political violence in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Morocco from 1991 to 2006. Drawing on data on the incidence of terrorist violence, extensive fieldwork and interviews in each of the six countries, and primary and secondary literature from and about each country, Kaye et al. find that political reforms have, in some instances, helped to marginalize and undercut extremist actors, but that these effects tend to be short-lived if reforms fail to produce tangible results. Moreover, when regimes backtrack on even limited openings, the risks of instability and violence increase.