The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

In 1999, the Islamic Republic of Iran established elected local government by holding nationwide elections for city and village councils. Competing actors hoped it would support distinct outcomes: Islamization, administrative efficiency, and democratization. This chapter describes the underlying logic of these motivations and their outcomes over the two decades since: in the main, the triumph of Islamization and technocracy. It explores the regime’s use of local government and administrative law to undercut the democratizing potential of political decentralization through two arenas of local politics. The regime controlled the scope of local political participation through widespread disqualification of opposition individuals and political parties. The regime also severely restricted the autonomy of elected local government in passing legislation. This institutionalized elected local government as a subordinate administrative tier of the regime rather than a local partner in subnational governance. The chapter concludes that political decentralization in Iran is best interpreted through the theory of electoral authoritarianism and is best viewed historically as an integral part of building Iran’s authoritarian Islamic state.

This chapter reviews the existing literature on religious party change. The scholarly literature offers three major explanations for the divergence we observe in Catholic and Islamist parties’ trajectories and for why religious parties change, or moderate: religious, political, and institutional explanations. Despite major contributions to our understanding of religious parties, the literatures on Catholic and Islamist parties grew virtually independent of each other, focusing on entirely different sets of questions or factors that explain change in these parties. Building on the existing literature, this chapter lays out the theory developed in this book to explain religious party change. First, an overview of the political economic approach to the study of religion is presented; next, the chapter outlines the effect of institutions on political behavior, and in particular how religious institutions affect political behavior and religious parties. Finally, the major actors in the theory are analyzed before concluding with a comparative assessment of how Islamist and Catholic parties fit into the theory.

Chapter 6 dissects the drivers of Tunisian immigration politics before, during and after the 2011 regime change, focusing on the reasons behind restrictive policy continuity in the face of international and civil society efforts to initiate a liberal reform. I show that while foreign policy interests, the role of national identity narratives, and the imperative to secure state power over immigration have remained constants in Tunisian immigration policymaking, the role and weight of domestic factors such as public opinion and civil society activism in public policymaking has fundamentally changed after 2011. Yet, instead of triggering liberal reform in line with the revolutionary spirit, democratization has compelled political elites to put ‘Tunisians first’ and to sideline issues of racism and immigration. Ultimately, the bottom-up and external pressures that emerged after 2011 only led to minor, mostly informal policy changes that have not affected the restrictive core of Tunisia’s immigration regime in the first decade of democratization.

Chapter 3 dives into the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia. I introduce immigration policy developments in Morocco and Tunisia against the backdrop of both countries’ political regime dynamics. In particular, I provide concise accounts of Moroccan and Tunisian state formation trajectories and national identity narratives, as well as focused overviews of immigration and emigration patterns and policies from the early twentieth century until the end of 2020, including Morocco’s and Tunisia’s treatment of migrants during the first year of COVID-19. This offers the empirical backbone for the book.

Chapter 7 dissects power dynamics among actors involved in immigration policy in Tunisia through the 2011 regime change: democratic state institutions and the administration; CSOs and migrant associations; international organizations, legal actors, and the private sector. I show how democratization affected immigration policy processes in ambiguous ways and explain why the increase in citizens’ political freedoms and civil society activism has not spilled over into more openness towards immigration. After 2011, policy processes became more inclusive, as the role of Tunisia’s parliament and civil society was strengthened. However, democratization also brought inter-actor dynamics to the fore that put a break to immigration reform plans, such as turf wars within the administration or governmental volatility. At the same time, the democratic transition has only partially affected immigration policymaking, as dynamics of international norm adherence and the ambiguous role of employers in Tunisia’s largely informal economy remained relatively unaffected by the regime change. In this context, political elites opted for restrictive policy continuity instead of translating migratory experiences and democratic ideals into liberal immigration reform.

This chapter examines Protestantism’s relationship with human dignity in South Korea against the backdrop of the country’s modern history from the early stage of Protestant mission to the country’s democratization. Protestantism enshrines the biblical view of humankind as God’s creation. Since the first Protestant missionaries were sent to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Protestantism has influenced Koreans to respect the intrinsic value of every person. Protestant churches even played a vital role in protecting and promoting human dignity during the course of the country’s modernization, democratization, and economic development. This chapter demonstrates how Korean Protestants adopted and practiced the idea of human dignity, mainly focusing on their complicated responses to the country’s unstable political and social situations. Despite the risk of oversimplification, the chapter investigates this crucial topic by dividing the history of modern Korea into the three distinct periods: 1) early Protestant mission through Japanese colonization, 1884–1945; 2) independence through the Korean War, 1945–53; and 3) postwar national reconstruction through democratization, 1953–87.

Human dignity is not contained in the text of the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was not until early 90s that “dignity” was enacted in constitutional amendments, not as “human dignity” but as “dignity of women.” “Human dignity” entered into Taiwan’s constitutional jurisprudence through the Constitutional Court’s 1996 interpretation by enlarging the “women’s dignity” clause to include “human dignity.” And a generation of German trained legal scholars who formed a strong academic community aided rapid and extensive reception of the Constitutional Court’s interpretive move. In the following two decades, the Court has consolidated dignity as a fundamental constitutional value and has used it to serve four functions. The first is to add weight to the existing basic rights. The second is to ground unenumerated rights, such as right to privacy, right to reputation, and right of personality. The third is to entail inviolable core of basic rights not subject to balancing. The fourth is to balance constitutional duty and right. I also note that, after 2003, human dignity has increasingly been associated with the values of self-realization and self-fulfilment.

Held’s contribution is a precise summary of the crisis of democracy that he and his co-authors have described at length in Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (2013) and Beyond Gridlock (2017). His argument is that the global system of representative democratic states is now locked into a vicious cycle (“gridlock”). While it was initially a virtuous system after World War II, it produced a set of processes that transformed democratic globalization into a vicious system. He gives four reasons for this. The system now undermines democratic cooperation and freezes problem-solving capacity. He describes this gridlocked system in terms of four self-reinforcing stages of non-cooperation. This is a “crisis of democracy, as the politics of compromise and accommodation gives way to populism and authoritarianism.” In the conclusion, he cautions that we are heading down a path that is similar in several respects to the 1930s. He does not discuss ways forward in this brief paper, but he does so in Beyond Gridlock.