The Middle East keeps inching closer by the day into a collective chaos. It seems as though oppression, inequality, and violence have been systemically imbedded into the very make up of its societies. How can the people take charge of their own inalienable rights to freedom, equality and prosperity---to keep from backsliding into the graspof feudal, unhealthy ideologies as they face an increasingly interconnected world?
Rarely do political efforts focus on what causes a culture to emrge and prosper or stagnate and fail. In Elza Maalouf's groundbreaking new book Emerge! The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of the Middle East, we are introduced to a new paradigm for governance based on the Beck-Graves model of value systems and the theories of Spiral Dynamics Integral.
Maalouf, the founder of the Center for Human Emergence Mideast and co-founder of the Build Palestine Initiative, is a geopolitical expert on the region where she pioneered the application of Large-Scale Psychology and design concepts to conflict resolution. By placing democracy in an evolutionary, value-system's framework that is indigenously specific to the region, Emerge! demonstrates the foundations necessary for cultural change.
Maalouf's collaboration with her colleague and mentor Don Edward Beck establishes this model as the new standard for large-scale political change. Many of Beck's unpublished works, such as the adaptation of Sherif's Social Judgment Theory to the value-systems' model, are featured in detail along with many others of Beck's and Maalouf's own social psychology concepts.
Maalouf's framework for decoding the complexities of the Middle East succeeds in many places where the West's approach to conflict resolution has failed. By weaving together the threads that make up the patterns of each culture Emerge! shows the crucial roles memes play in creating a system of governance that truly fits. Not only does Emerge! ask us to seek understanding before we structure and create what Maalouf calls Functional Democracy, it shows us the necessity of teaching our youth to build their own sustainable, indigenous constructs.(SelectBooks)
Elza S. Maalouf is a Lebanese-American futurist, social scientist, and cultural development specialist focusing her work on geopolitics, cultural and political reform in the Arab world including Palestine,Kuwait, Dubai, and in Syria through the European Union SHAMS project (Sustainable Human Activities in Mediterranean urban Systems)
Don Edward Beck is a teacher, geopolitical advisor, and theorist focusing on applications of large scale psychology, including social psychology, evolutionary psychology, organizational psychology and their effect on human sociocultural systems. He is the co-author of the Spiral Dynamics theory, an evolutionary human development model. He spent many years adapting the work of his mentor and colleague, developmental psychologist Clare W. Graves, Professor Emeritus in Psychology at Union College in New York.
