Performative socialization in world politics: Islamism, secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt

Abstract

How do norms and discourses travel across cultural difference? How do actors negotiate the constitutive norms of liberal global governance at the juncture of the domestic and the international? This project provides an answer to these questions by developing a performative account of norm socialization and uses this theoretical framework to analyze Islamist negotiations of secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt. I suggest that the International Relations scholarship often takes socialization as a pedagogic process in which the non-West is made to transition into the norms of liberal modernity in a hierarchical relationship of authority. In this perspective, actors either socialize into liberal norms or resist them. After identifying the shortcomings of these narratives, I develop a reading that takes socialization as a performative process of cultural translation and norm appropriation. By so doing, I analyze the ways in which norms can be adopted non-normatively--at once inhabited and resisted. I argue that a performative reading enables a more complex understanding of the dynamics of normalization and resistance in socialization. Then I employ this framework to analyze Turkish AK Party's and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's negotiation of secularism and democracy by drawing mainly on the data I collected in my fieldwork research in Turkey and Egypt. More specifically, I examine the performative politics of translation and appropriation in the AK Party's notions of `democratic secularism' and `conservative democracy' and the Muslim Brotherhood's notions of `civil state within an Islamic framework' and `Islamic democracy.'