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10 Nw. U. J. Int'l Hum. Rts. 194 (2011-2012)
The Middle East and Human Rights: Inroads towards Charting Its Own Path

handle is hein.journals/jihr10 and id is 196 raw text is: NORTHWESTERN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS The Middle East and Human Rights: Inroads Towards Charting its Own Path Shadi Mokhtari* I. INTRODUCTION The stunning wave of protest and change taking shape in the Middle East has had profound implications for human rights dynamics in the region. For decades, the Middle East saw human rights co-opted, appropriated, and instrumentalized on the one hand, and entangled with anti- imperialist discourses and cultural politics on the other. What is emerging in the region today is unprecedented public and civil society challenges to the former and a more complex treatment of the latter. This is most evident through the rise of an indigenous voice at the fore of current human rights contests-a voice that simultaneously rejects subjugation by the region's domestic authoritarian structures and by the foreign policies of powerful international actors. While this article will focus on the rise of an indigenous Middle Eastern human rights agenda, and a recasting of the relationship between human rights and the West, a number of other key trends can increasingly be identified. First, in the realm of women's rights, there is space opening to move beyond the cycle of sensationalist and decontextualized narratives of the passive, oppressed Middle Eastern woman emerging from the West, and contrasting constructions of religiously and culturally authentic gender codes deployed by local actors in response. Women's rights are still widely marginalized in the Middle East but there are prospects for important new inroads in the long run, particularly as women in the Middle East continue to assert their presence in the realm of domestic politics and link their struggle with wider rights struggles in their societies. Second, Islamist political leaders and religious figures are increasingly engaging and endorsing rights discourses. Even though this is often done in opaque and contradictory ways and some of the most critical Islam and human rights contests are those that lie ahead as Islamists gain political power, the disposition of embracing the idea of rights provides an important point of entry for these nascent contests on specific areas of rights concerns. Third, a fascinating dimension of the way conceptions of human rights are being formulated in the Middle East now is the way civil and political rights and social and economic rights have been entwined and increasingly invoked as equally pressing human rights. Due to its limited length, these trends will not be taken up in this article. Before beginning this discussion, a few caveats are in order. First, there is great diversity in the human rights dynamics and political contexts of the region's countries-even when considering only those in which protests or uprisings have materialized. Additionally, while my focus here is largely on several positive human rights trends, this does not mean that troubling trends are not emerging alongside those discussed, or that the trends identified will always follow a linear progression. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that almost all of the trends coming to the fore today have roots far beyond Tunisia's uprising. They did not appear overnight, but are instead the result of long-term political trajectories, including (but not limited 194 [ 2 012

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