Where Norms Are Made: Lessons from the Middle East for a Post-LIO World

International Relations (IR) scholarship has long emphasized the international community as the primary locus of international norms. Regions are often treated as derivative spaces, mere offshoots of the global order, rather than as sites of autonomous normative production. This paper challenges that tendency by foregrounding regional norm construction as a serious and indispensable arena of inquiry, which both shapes intra-regional cooperation and reverberates into global discourses. The paper develops a conceptual framework to analyse regional norms in the Middle East and their implications for a post-LIO order. The concept of the regional community is introduced as an analytical heuristic bridging the gap between IR norms research and Middle East studies. It is no surprise that Middle Eastern regional discourses have largely been ignored by norms scholarship as they do not fit the field's conceptual patterns rooted in the study of the so-called LIO. Therefore, the regional community comes with four conceptual twists: (1) Regimes rather than states are the actors that engage in the regional community and act as central carriers of regional norms; hence, the regional community is embedded simultaneously in domestic and global discursive environments. (2) It is not consensus-orientation or intersubjective sharedness that defines the concept of norms, but rather process-orientation and ongoing change; in a fundamentally non-essentialist conceptualisation, norms are seen as collective notions and points of discursive orientation and reference (Hofferberth and Weber 2015). (3) Consequently, norms are ontologically ambiguous and always up to interpretation by actors. (4) As a result, the regional community is characterised by norm polysemy - the empirically observable plurality of norm meanings-in-use (Linsenmaier et al. 2021). Empirical studies should not attempt to determine static sets of regional norms, but rather focus on the processes of constant contestation and transformation that characterise the regional normative environment. Empirical explorations from the 21st century illustrate the value of this framework. First, regional debates surrounding the call for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction reveal a regional discourse that demonstrated its influence on global narratives. Second, notions of Arab solidarity exemplify region-specific normativity: a shared point of reference that is constantly evolving yet remains fundamental to regional politics. Third, discourses surrounding sovereignty and non-interference demonstrate both the polysemy and the relevance of the normative environment in Middle Eastern regional politics. Methodologically, the paper employs an analysis of regional multilateral discourses, drawing on hundreds of speeches delivered in multilateral settings as well as interviews with former high-level diplomats from the region. This paper offers a threefold contribution: (1) the introduction of a framework that brings together norms research and Middle East studies; (2) a deeper understanding of regional norms by taking the discursive agency of states and normative regional structures seriously; (3) insights into cases of normative contestation and norm polysemy that can teach us valuable lessons about a post-LIO world order.