Traboulsi 47poverty begins to resemble a natural catastrophe or a contagious disease.
Consequently, we study poverty without studying wealth. We define the
“poor” but not the “rich.” As for the middle classes, they are either pic-
tured as being reduced in size and effectiveness and consequently dying
out or are assigned the role of repositories of the democratic mission.
In both cases, very little in terms of sociopolitical effort is invested in
studying their political behavior, assuming that they might tend toward
a homogeneous and unidirectional political behavior. As for the solution
to the problem of poverty, it is no less an ambitious UN project to eradi-
cate poverty on the world scale with fixed dates to complete the “job.” The
outcome is that the final eradication of poverty is annually deferred as the
campaign’s meager results are revealed.
uman rights and civil society occupy the political stage as the same H
treatment mentioned above is reserved for the state/civil society dichot-
omy. Rather than being a welcome complement and a corrective to the
rich and complex body of knowledge on state/society relations developed
by the social sciences over long decades, the famous “couplet” is turn-
ing out to be a factor of theoretical impoverishment due to its imposition
as a simplistic and reductionist formula over all the theoretical fields in
question.
I shall limit myself to two observations on this matter.
e first has to do with the intellectual production on democra-Th
tization in the Arab world. This has been increasingly dominated by
the explanations, and even theorization, of an absence—the absence
of democracy—rather than the most elementary and pressing task of
explaining, analyzing and diagnosing the presence of the actually exist-
ing authoritarian and despotic regimes. On the other hand, “filling” that
absence tends to increasingly take the form of simple modeling or wish
fulfillment both focused on the Western democratic model. Not that
there is anything wrong with wishing for that model, though it is not very
clear to what extent its advocates have assimilated it. The problem resides
rather in the fact that very little attention and even less intellectual effort
have been devoted to the diagnosis of authoritarianism and to the trac-
ing of the ways and means of the transition from authoritarian and des-
potic regimes to democracy, despite the iconographic importance given to
“democratization.” Such intellectual effort needs to produce knowledge on