Book

Description

Gaddafi's Parallel in the White House: A Comparative Study in the Personalization of Power, Institutions, Discourse, and Foreign Policy "From the Tent to the Estate" is a comparative political study that investigates the complex interaction between personalized executive leadership and institutional power. Using Muammar Gaddafi's Libya and Donald Trump’s American presidency as intentionally non-equivalent, asymmetrical cases, the book rejects political or constitutional symmetry between a revolutionary personalist regime and a constitutional democracy. Instead, it employs comparison as an analytical lens to examine how similar mechanisms of personalization—such as institutional bypass, leader-centered bargaining, direct public communication, administrative pressure, transactional diplomacy, and unconventional succession dynamics—operate across fundamentally distinct institutional architectures.   Spanning nine comprehensive chapters, the manuscript traces the tension between the legal-rational state and personalist authority, exploring how institutional resilience, bureaucratic autonomy, and constitutional checks resist or redirect executive impulses. A key contribution of the work is the conceptualization of the "institutional restoration debt," which analyzes the long-term governance, administrative capacity, credibility, and diplomatic costs inherited by successor administrations when public commitments and policies become tethered to an individual leader rather than enduring institutions. Ultimately, the book argues that personalization is an analytical variable rather than a static regime classification, addressing the core question of whether sovereign authority truly resides in the personal ruler or within an institutional order designed to outlast them.