Abstract:
Middle Eastern societies continued to be exposed to Western-originated dominant eco-political paradigms following the exchange of 19th-century colonial patterns with local authoritarian regimes. Exchanges developing with global paradigms have built up a resistance to socio-cultural structural changes and created conditions of internal conflict and social unrest in countries with a broad traditional and conservative public base that have not yet completed their nation-building, capitalization, and modernization processes. In this period, with the spread of neoliberalism the dominant economic paradigm to Middle Eastern countries, a significant change occurred in the centers of power and social stratification. The massive urban migration of the lower-middle and lower classes, who constitute the broadest base of society, unemployment, and urban poverty under neoliberalism have created many areas of social compression that conflict with traditional masculinity and femininity norms. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the handling of social movements in the Middle East within their historical depth, through the questioning points of historical sociology from a paradigm shift perspective. The study aims to build a bridge between the nation-state formations and democratization problem in the Middle East, its historical and sociological problems, and social movements. Accordingly, the study addresses the roots of the tension between the state and society in the modernization experience, through paradigms based on modernization and globalization.

Keywords: Dominant Paradigms, Paradigm Shift, Arab Movements, Historical Sociology

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