Democratic Global Norms and Localization Dynamics in the Middle East

Liberal Democracy has been increasingly facing a host of challenges, including a growing contestation of its foundational norms such as separation of powers, rule of law, popular sovereignty, accountable governments and the safeguarding of individual rights, only to name a few. These norms represented the accepted, or at least mildly contested, framework behind postulated ‘waves’ of democratization. No region has been more impervious to these norms than the Midde East, where no lasting wave of democratization could be detected and no current regime may be described as liberal democratic. Yet, such norms have a presence in the region, informing and contributing to the ideological outlooks and political practices of many different actors: opposition parties, social movements, religious communities, ethnic or sectarian minorities, grassroots activists, intellectuals and artists, even militant formations. This is all the more the case given the momentous political crisis that the region is traversing, even in comparison to its troubled history: an embattled Iran, a post-civil war Syria, an ongoing genocide in Gaza, strained politics in Israel, an ever more assertive Turkey, only to name a few. To be sure, we are not suggesting seeking for and analyzing the mere adoption of liberal democratic norms of (mostly) western origin in the region; rather, we invite contributions which examine their localization, whereby local actors actively reconstruct external norms to ensure their compatibility with existing normative frameworks and political identities. In this panel, we call for contributions to explore how local actors in the Middle East do not passively adopt external standards, but instead selectively and creatively reinterpret them in ways that resonate with domestic values, inherited institutions and cognitive priors.