Political Civility in the Middle East

Contemporary debates about civility are shaped by the dominant liberal and secular narratives of a peaceful world of sovereign nation-states. For contemporary scholars and policy makers, the challenge is to insert meaningfully the political evolution of the Middle East in the dominant liberal-democratic discourse about the current international order without invoking ill-conceived notions of Islamic exceptionalism. The analyses gathered in this special issue challenge conventional '¬Üwestern'¬" perspectives on civility as an expression of state-guaranteed free association in a non-violent space of discourse and behaviour. Considering the articulation of '¬Ücivil'¬" and '¬Ücivilized'¬" state-society relations in contemporary Middle Eastern polities, this book proposes both conceptual and empirical insights into the dynamics of the local, national and trans-national formation of civility and of the civil sphere. Bypassing traditional oppositions between the '¬Üwestern'¬" and '¬ÜIslamic'¬" modernity, it provides an account of the communicative clusters of civility that represent the everyday formations of Islamic and secular subjects in settings organized by authoritarian-inclined state institutions and practices. It examines how the grassroots formation of '¬Ünew'¬" religious and secular identities/subjectivities and their relations with the '¬ÜOther'¬" underpin, as well as challenge and transform, the state-led processes of political ordering of a national and regional community. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.