Winner of the 2008 Best Book Award, Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association "Jamal's field research in the Palestinian West Bank suggests that the posited correlation between civil society and democracy is not quite so straightforward...These sobering findings need not cause those Arabs and outsiders seeking a democratic opening to give up on civil society. They should, however remind both the scholar seeking to understand and the reformer working to change of the need to appreciate how things actually work."
L. Carl Brown, Foreign Affairs "In the current study, Jamal emphasizes comparisons of associational life in the West with the Arab states. Accepted wisdom links associational life to the growth and maintenance of a healthy democracy. But the author's extensive fieldwork has uncovered a challenge to this conventional linkage, showing that associational life can be used to prop up undemocratic states. This is an important and timely insight."
M. Slann, Choice "Jamal's book ... is an excellent contribution to the literature on democracy and associational life and it serves as an important assessment of the impact of social capital on democratic life."
Donald G. Ellis, Ph.D., ASMEA (Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa) "Jamal's work ... deserve[s] attention from all of those who are concerned about the troubling quality of politics in the Arab world... Those engaged in democracy promotion, in particular, should read this volume closely and heed its lessons about the uneasy relationship between civil society and democracy in the Arab world."
Steven Heydemann, Middle East Journal "Amaney Jamal's volume is a welcome addition to the literature on democracy outside Europe and Latin America... A reading of this book will help, by beginning the process of disassembling the various disciplines' multifarious and misleading Orientalist 'idees recues'."
Roger Heacock, International Affairs