Islamism and Democracy in the Modern Maghreb

The literature on state autonomy has typically argued that the developmental state's weakness is accounted for by the relatively greater power of societal forces. The postulation of conflict between the state's purposes and partisan societal forces has been unable to shed much light on the enduring nature of the state-society duality. The literature on communitarianism has drawn attention to the multi-layered identities which underlie developing country politics and has underlined the efficacy of developmental action at the level of non-state actors. This article suggests that the community perspective can contribute towards a richer understanding of the state-society relationship than has been possible within the neo-statist paradigm. Without substituting community for the state, we need to modify at a broadly theoretical level the kind of macro-perspective, typical in comparative developmental studies, which adopts the physical boundaries of the state and its self-given developmental idiom, as the discipline's own conceptual boundaries.