Democracy and Pluralism in Muslim Eurasia

This book is devoted to the study and analysis of the prospects for democracy among the Muslim ethnicities of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), both those that have acquired full independence and those remaining within the Russian Federation. The nineteen Western academics and scholars from the Muslim countries and regions of the CIS who contribute to this volume view the establishment of democratic institutions in this region in the context of a wide and complex range of influences, above all the Russian/Soviet political legacy; native ethnic political culture and tradition; the Islamic faith; and the growing polarity between Western civilization and the Muslim world.

Yaacov Ro’i is Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. He has served as Director of the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies and has been a visiting fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, the Kennan Institute, and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the editor of Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies (1995) and the author of Islam in the Soviet Union from World War II to Gorbachev (2000) and Islam in the CIS: A Threat to Stability? (2001).