The Rumi Forum presented "Political Division and Democratization in the Middle East" with Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, founding director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

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When we look to the legislative elections in Lebanon, The Palestinian Authority, and Iraq. these elections, rather than creating conditions of stability and political harmony, accelerated their societies’ entrance into to conflict and political rivalry, setting the stage for intense fighting and outbidding. Although the touted paradigm of democratic transition claims to guarantee peace and stability, it appears difficult, if not impossible for political entities in the Middle East, even the ones which have seemingly adhered to the standards of democratization, to attain peace and stability.

The strange paradox present in the three latter cases, is that the need for democracy is supposed to rise higher than degrees of division and unity. It is believed to be able to moderate the positions of the involved parties, spurring them to re-draft both evaluations and calculations, ultimately leading them to consensus, and even perhaps compromise. The exact opposite, however, happened in these cases.

Dr. Radwan Ziadeh is founding director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. He was most recently a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and a 2008–2009 Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights. A leading authority on human rights and political reform in the Middle East, Dr. Ziadeh was named Best Political Science Researcher in the Arab World by Jordan’s Abdulhameed Shoman Foundation in 2004. He is the author of numerous publications, including, most recently, Power and Policy in Syria: Intelligence Services, Foreign Relations and Democracy in the Modern Middle East (forthcoming in 2010). Dr. Ziadeh is currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.