Jessica Stern Quotes

Advancing democracy does not always foster political stability.

You would be wrong to assume democracy would be the only alternative if the old regimes [in the Middle East] fell. There is a much better-organized alternative already waiting, and that is ... fundamentalism.

It will take more initiatives, both from within and beyond immigrant circles, to prevent Salafists and other Islamists from achieving the upper hand with their anti-democratic authoritarianism.

In many emerging democracies, democracy and stability are mutually incompatible.

Islam has been used in some countries, for instance Sudan, as a means for suppression and the installation of autocratic regimes. This, coupled with the censorship of moderate Muslim voices and increasing state patronage of religious scholars, has led to the propagation of a dogmatic form of divisive Islamic extremism, a form that rejects democracy, human rights, and good governance as devices of Western imperialism.

I am not big on the idea that a rapid injection of democracy will reform radical Moslems.

Islamic fundamentalists … had no interest in democracy except as a one-way ticket to power.

The transition from authoritarianism to democracy is not as easy as it appears in position papers – it is a rambunctious affair.

I worry that a democratic transition in this period for a state like the U.a. E. would put, us in the throes of reactionary conservatism, probably for the next 30 or 40 years. I look at what is happening in Egypt and other places, and I wonder, do I need that kind of transition?

We had a revolution 2 years ago, and we see a people moving from a completely authoritarian system into a democracy. They don’t know how democracy works. They don’t know the ingredients of a democracy.

The problem in Burma is the problem in Egypt, the problem you refer to in Yemen, and the problem in a lot of these countries in the world: that you can get stuck in the process of transition, in what’s been called a competitive authoritarian… a pseudo democratic regime.

Only two countries in this hemisphere are not democratic, but many countries in both Central and South America, and in the Caribbean, are really fragile democracies.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Latin America moved decisively away from military rule and toward civilian democracy.

Ignorant and illiterate people cannot understand democracy. They are prey to religious extremists.

Islam has been transformed from a religion to an ideology.

Or Wahab’s rebel brood, who dared divest The prophet’s tomb of all its pious spoil. May wind their path of blood along the West.

The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims! …. Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture.

No one wants war, neither we nor you. Our greatest efforts have been focusing on own people and forces within our boundaries, without war, to uproot the zealot Mullahs governing our country and replace them with a secular, democratic government which respects human rights and freedom.

Iran’s rulers are so fanatical and apocalyptic that even nuclear deterrence would have no meaning.

Stable liberal democracy requires more than just a shift in political forms; it also involves eliminating the antidemocratic social, cultural, and economic legacies of the old regime. Such a process takes lots of time and effort, over multiple tries. Historically, most initial transitions have been the beginning of a democratization process, not the end of it—something that the tortured histories of today’s mature liberal democracies make clear.

Establishing a stable democracy is a two stage process. First you get rid of the old regime, then you build a durable democratic replacement. Because the first stage is dramatic, many people think the game is over when the dictator is gone. But the second stage is more difficult. There are many examples of broad coalitions coming together to oust dictators but relatively few of them stayed together and agreed on what a new regime should look like.

The willingness of local elites to cope with the uncertainty of fully competitive politics will thus be the ultimate factor in determining whether competitive authoritarianism proves a way station for democratic development or a safe house for autocrats. .

The Bush Administration went into the Middle East thinking it was spreading democracy. Instead they spread sectarianism.

Every time we have toppled a secular dictator (in the Middle East), it has been replaced by a chaos and the rise of radical Islam…. Intervention has unintended consequences

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!