Beyond Lies the Wub: The Challenges of (Post)Democratization

This article examines current proposals for ‘post-democratization’ scholarship, providing support for the need of an epistemic shift in democratization studies both in a regional Middle Eastern setting and more generally. In doing so, it raises several questions about existing proposals, arguing that the failure thus far to challenge the currently hegemonic liberal, positivist democratization framework not just at a conceptual level, but also at an ontological and at an epistemological level, risks surreptitiously reproducing key analytical drawbacks built into democratization studies’ epistemic framework. The article then sketches a different approach to analyzing the democratization framework’s limitations, approaching it as a discourse in its own right, and based on this examination formulates an expanded and deepened research agenda for post-democratization scholarship that allows for reflexive scrutiny not just of the building blocks of post-democratization itself, but also for an analysis of the deployment of ‘democratization’ as a category of action, both in the process of knowledge production about democratization and in concrete political struggles.