The Regional Context of Human Rights in the Middle East

Human rights situation in the Middle East (ME) is a central concern in contemporary political as well as academic discourses. There is a considerable amount of literature on the subject, both academic and journalistic, in the Western world. A large part of that literature blames the ME in different ways for its ‘terrible’ conception and treatment of human rights norms. They typically, do not hesitate to contextualise it as ‘Middle Eastern’ phenomenon. It is fascinating, though, that such contextualization is proposed predominantly without a substantial and appropriate context analysis. In this article, a context analysis is conducted, adopting an Area Studies Approach to identify the major features of a Middle Eastern context where human rights norms experience the region’s realities. As a result, four particular items, Islam, oil, Islamic-Western relations, and Israel are proposed as the main factors that form the real context of human rights in the Middle East. This analysis demonstrates that the influential causes of human rights violations in the ME are from both internal and external sources. The internal sources are highlighted in the dominant works of the field. It is interesting, however, that these works largely ignore the external ones. The nature of external factors, Western or attached to Western treatment of the Middle East might reveal the real motivations behind such remarkable overlooking.