In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor's Note
  • Michael Collins Dunn

As what was once called the "Arab Spring" moves through its second summer, democratization advances by fits and starts, sometimes with retrograde motion. Egypt has an elected president, but its elected parliament has been dissolved by the Constitutional Court. Syria is mired in war, and the future of Libya is as uncertain as ever. Tunisia is perhaps the greatest success to date, but not without violence between secular and religious forces.

This issue includes studies of some relevance to the issue of democratization. Our lead article, by Steve L. Monroe, deals with the role of Salafi parliamentary blocs in two Gulf parliaments, Kuwait and Bahrain. It is a useful study of the oldest Gulf parliament (Kuwait's, also just dissolved) and the younger one in a troubled country, Bahrain; it is also a reminder that serious contributions are being made by graduate students: Monroe's paper grew out of an undergraduate thesis at Stanford and has been expanded in his present capacity as a Master's candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts.

Andrew Barwig addresses parliamentary and party life in two monarchies, Jordan and Morocco, discussing the emergence in the 2007 elections of "New Palace Guards," elites balancing loyalty to the Crown with efforts at reform. Specifically, he looks to electoral systems to explain these candidates' political behavior. An outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, it is another of several articles in this issue by recent Ph.D.s or promising Ph.D. candidates, producing innovative contributions at the start of their careers.

We don't often get articles on methodology or dealing with the problems facing researchers trying to gain access to information in the all-too-real world, but most researchers dealing with recent periods of Middle Eastern history, not to mention those dealing with contemporary politics, have learned from experience that questions of access to information in the contentious world that is the Middle East is not usually a model of the research approaches envisioned in some Ivory Tower. Lauren Banko's "Occupational Hazards, Revisited" borrows the title of an article by Ted Swedenburg in Cultural Anthropology back in 1989 on ethnographic research in Palestine. Banko, a doctoral candidate at SOAS, is a historian working on Palestinian issues during the Mandate period. The article examines the difficulties of access confronting outside historians seeking to work on the period in records in Palestinian and Israeli holdings in the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as the even greater obstacles confronting local Palestinian scholars.

Lina Khatib, William Dutton, and Michael Thelwall, in "Public Diplomacy 2.0," offer a look at how public diplomacy can function in the internet age with a case study of the US Digital Outreach Team. This group sought to engage directly with citizens of the Middle East by participating in discussions of US foreign policy issues on internet forums.

Our final feature is really the second part of a two-part study which began in our spring issue by Oren Barak and Eyal Tsur. The first part, "Continuity and Change in the Social Background of Israel's Military Elite," in the last issue, is nicely complemented by "The Military Careers and Second Careers of Israel's Military Elite." Both articles [End Page 407] draw on their database of all the Israel Defense Forces officers who rose to the highest two rank levels and served on the General Staff since 1948, and provide an innovative social picture of the senior leadership of the IDF and the changes it has undergone over the history of the state.

Our Book Review Article, by Peter Wien, deals with three new books on "Iraq Under Saddam Hussein," drawing on information gained after the fall of Saddam. It also amounts to something of a concession on our part, in that, after decades of spelling the Iraqi dictator's name the "scientific" way as Saddam Husayn, we have joined the rest of the English-speaking world in spelling it Hussein. The usual range of other books are reviewed in the Book Review section.

As always, our issue contains our Chronology, which has expanded due to the pace of events in the Middle East as of late...

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