Abstract
The politics of the Middle East may be more dependent on the ambitions and whims of individual leaders than in any other region of the world. Middle Eastern leaders are often unconstrained by domestic political institutions or popular sentiment: Their ambitions and preferences, as well as their weaknesses and foibles, can make the difference between war and peace, revolution and stability. Leadership change in the Middle East, however, is infrequent and seldom routinized. The region often seems frozen in time, with certain leaders – Muammar Qadhafi of Libya, Yasir Arafat in the Palestinian Authority, and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, among others – ruling for decades. As Glenn Robinson remarks, “If anything, the contemporary Arab world has been marked by too much political stability at the top, not too little.”
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