Crisis of Democratisation in the Maghreb and North Africa

Abstract

Democratisation in revolutionary times matters to academia and to our social world. Reflecting on the urgent scholarly need among students of Arab and Middle Eastern politics to address the crisis of democratisation is imperative. A line-up of social scientists comes together to do just that: a focused and in-depth engagement with the problematic of the crisis of democratisation. To this end, the contributors in this Special Issue offer a ‘soft’ theorisation of the crisis of democratisation in the context of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its aftermath. Such an undertaking seeks at once context-focused analysis and sensitivity to the ‘specific’. That is, a set of articles that embraces multivocality of specialism, interpretation, methodology and positionality.