Liberal and Islamic Democratic Theory

The global financial crisis and the emergence of the new social movements like Occupy, Indignados or 99%, reacting to the rising inequality by formulating the quest for social justice as the quest for genuine democracy, have once again revealed the decisiveness of the problem of inequality for democratic theory and institutions. The concept of Islamic democracy, re-emerging from the events surrounding the Arab Spring, appeared as a possible alternative to liberal democracy and as an authentic democratic solution for the Arab world concerning primarily the questions of legitimacy, re-presentation, decision-making and inequality, both at the global and nation-state level. In the West, Islamic democracy has most frequently been conceived of as a liberal Islamic response to Islamic fundamentalism and by its advocates in the Arab region as an authentic Islamic alternative to Western dominated liberal democracy, later being regarded as ill equipped to address the problems of unequal global development and poverty. The concept of Islamic democracy offered convincing narratives in favour of social justice, thereby gaining a strong potential for grass-root mobilisation. The events of the second phase of the Arab Spring (after the authoritarian secular governments in Egypt and Tunisia were toppled) and the establishment of the political blocks ascribing to Islamic democracy like Ennahda in Tunisia and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, saw the continuing undiminished quest for "real democracy" and "social justice". The post-Arab Spring social demands, such as those articulated by the re-emergent Tahrir movement in Egypt and Kasserine uprising in Tunisia, seem to follow similar agendas to the new social movements Occupy, Democracia real! and 99% by challenging the social and economic regimes imbedded in the representative system of both liberal and emerging Islamic democracies. Hence, there is a call for "real democracy" beyond the traditional liberal economic framework, that poses the same structural limit to both Islamic and liberal democracies. The central objective of the project addresses the issues of inequality and social justice within the framework of Islamic and liberal democratic theories and political practices: firstly, by analysing the normative theoretic grounds of both political concepts contemporary liberal democracy and modern Islamic democracy in a comparative manner, focusing on the role of inequality in both theoretical narratives; secondly, by examining the inferences of globalisation, institutional change and financial crisis with democratic theories concerned; and thirdly, by searching for the shared understanding of what "real democracy" should comprise in the eyes of Arab and Western social movements.

No additional funding sources recorded.