the U.S. leadership

It has become commonplace among Western scholars to treat supposed processes of “democratization” in terms of “waves” since Samuel Huntington’s seminal book published in 1991—The Third Wave. The Western literature on “democratization in the Arab world” is no exception, and some Western scholars have labeled the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 the “fourth wave of democratization”. The main research question of this article is whether this literature consists of genuine scholarly analyses of political change in the Arab world or whether it is instead reflective of political exigencies of the West. This article defends the latter position, and asserts that there are indeed waves of the Western literature on “democratization in the Arab world” rather than the so-called “waves of democratization”. The article argues that this literature has been reflective of the political exigencies of the U.S. leadership from its very beginning by discussing its relationship to the anti-Communist Modernization school of political development that emerged in the United States in the early Cold War years. The article also demonstrates that there is a striking continuity within that literature in terms of the themes it has covered despite its decades-long existence.