Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 10, No. 1: 79-103 Political Organization in the Middle East and North Africa Larbi Sadiki and Amor Boubakri Abstract The essay seeks to look at the nature and peculiarities of political organization in the context of the Middle East and North African (MENA), with special reference to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, countries which experienced popular uprisings that led to the ousting of authoritarian rulers in 2011. The essay begins with a contextualization of political organization, examining aspects of continuity and discontinuity, while at the same time focusing on old problems and new challenges. To this end, the inquiry is twofold. The first section looks at the nature of political parties and party politics, including electoral processes before the Arab Spring. The second section turns to post-Arab Spring political organization. It highlights legal and practical issues involved in the current setting in which political organizations are being reconstructed in a way that supports a process of renewal of political institutions, including parties and political party laws. The strengthening of the democratic process, it is concluded, needs a favorable legal setting, which reforms political organization in order to avoid old problems (e.g., exclusionary practices and nondemocratic elections) and responds to new challenges (democratization). Keywords: Political organization, political parties, MENA, Egypt, Tunisia, democratization. Democratization and Authoritarian Politics: Pre-Arab Spring Scholars from Thomas Carothers1 to Laurence Whitehead2 question the Larbi Sadiki is Associate Professor of International Relations and Democratization in the Depart- ment of International Affairs, Qatar University. <
[email protected]> Amor Boubakri is Associate Professor of Public Law and a member of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences at the University of Sousse in Tunisia.