Inclusion and Exclusion: Fragile Strategies of Deparadoxification in the Middle East

Abstract

Classical approaches to inclusion primarily focus on the ways in which the modern nation-state and, more recently, the cosmopolitan level ensure the integration of the national (and global) population by means of institutional mechanisms and cultures of participation. As far as the former aspect is concerned, the role of citizenship in ensuring (formal) equality between all citizens of a state has been at the centre of focus of this research tradition, in particular by stressing the political and social rights associated with citizenship in the context of the republican model and the welfare state.2 Moreover, transnational migratory movements and the settlement of significant ‘alien’ populations in foreign lands has enriched these approaches by analyses of dual and transnational forms of citizenship in the ‘age of flexible sovereignty’ and the changes these dynamics bestow on a traditionally state-centred understanding of citizenship.3 From this perspective, institutional regulations in citizenship law are, arguably, part of a larger phenomenon in the process of the institutionalization of human rights as a central paradigm in the evolution of the global political and legal system. Consequently, human rights have been referred to as ‘a new model of multicultural citizenship, legitimating the de-coupling of state membership, individual rights and national identities’ since the end of World War II.4 With a view to the participatory dimension of the integration/inclusion nexus, the role of ‘civil society’ has been central on three dimensions. First, in the context of the classical opposition between state/society in which scholars focused on the relationship between formal state institutions and ‘their’ distinct (civil) societies;5 second, in the defence of a quasi-primordial personal life-world operating against systemic mechanisms through an institutionalization of deliberative politics;6 and, third, in pleas for the role of a global civil society as a means of dialectic empowerment against the allegedly elite-driven forces of globalization and homogenization by local cultures, civilizations and identities, on the one hand, and universal rights and shared concerns of the subaltern, on the other.7 In turn, exclusion figures prominently as the ‘dark side’ of these integrative and emancipatory practices. The study of exclusion dynamics, therefore, comprises diverse phenomena on both the national and the global levels, relating, inter alia, to significant inequalities in individuals’ political and social rights as well as to structural and institutionalized impediments to a greater role in public affairs of individual groups of persons or of (global) ‘civil society’ more generally.