The current difficulties that the Arab uprisings in west Asia face, most notably in Egypt, only affirm that the window of democracy is small and the implications of their closure cannot be underestimated. Yet the fact that there exists something so important, but so little understood or studied, is a cause for cautious optimism because it fi nally frees the study of Arab politics from the clutches of the two equally pretentious paradigms of "democratisation" and "post-democratisation".
