Returning to Political Parties?

Are Arab parties facing a predicament? Are they paying the price of repression
and limited pluralism? Have they become obsolete to the benefit of other
political groups and mobilization modes such as communities, tribes,
“asabiyyat” or to the disadvantage of non governmental organizations,
associations and social movements? While some predicted “the end of parties”
in the region as a result of authoritarian political systems, doesn’t the
recent transition from the one party rule towards a fragile plural party
system in many countries put again party organizations in the spotlight? Most
of the time, contemporary Arab parties have little mobilizing power. Yet some
are crawling out of underground activities and trying their hands at the
exercise of power after years of oppositions. Others, and mainly on the
Islamist arena, assert themselves as first hand mobilization structures, able
in certain cases to compete with regimes in power. This book addresses those
research questions. Emphasizing new and unpublished data, the book’s diverse
contributions tackle holistically party life in six countries that have
adopted very different political pathways: Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, Morocco,
Algeria and Iraq. All the studies approach the decline or the revival of the
parties from a long term historical perspective mainly with regard to
political institutions in those six countries. The studies focus on the rules
of party games, on the junction between “the right to politics” and “political
rights”. They reveal the fine-tuning between ideological frameworks and
political strategies. They raise questions about the renewal of elites, forms
of militant activism, the array of parties’ political activities, particularly
social ones. They examine the issue of identity construction and political
solidarities in the framework of the nation state, or in contradiction with
it. As a final point, the book inquires about how party life in those six
countries accounts for political transformations: possible democratization of
regimes, forms of domination that are played out within those regimes, the
emergence of the breakdown of leaderships and finally the rationale behind
mobilization and collective action. This book is published with the support of
the program on Political Party Development in the Arab World (Algeria,
Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco and Yemen) financed by the International
Development Research Center (Ottawa, Canada).This publication gathers a series
of studies undertaken within this framework. More studies are available on the
project's website: www.appstudies.org The opinions expressed in this book are
the responsibility of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies or the International
Development Research Center. The chapters in the book have been translated
from French and Arabic to English by Nathanel London, Francoise Gillepsie,
Nathalie Nahas, Angelique Baino, Jennifer Berry and Assaad Makary.