Decoupling Decentralisation from Democracy

Abstract

This dissertation asks a straightforward question: To what extent does Western academic discourse associate decentralisation with democracy, and how does the historical and contemporary application of decentralisation within Islamic governance contexts challenge this association? I argue that decentralisation is not an ideology but a neutral way of organising authority—one that can exist in many political settings. The first part of the study reads key texts with three approaches. First, it examines definitions and shows how democratic features are often included in what should be a general concept. Second, it looks at the narratives constructed by scholars—about context, motives, and origins—and finds that specific Western experiences are often presented as universal. Third, it highlights places where authors and institutions say, explicitly, that “real” decentralisation requires democratisation. Together, these threads reveal a tendency rather than a consensus, but the pattern matters: when democracy is built into the definition, non-democratic examples are ruled out from the start. The second part offers a counter-view by tracing forms of decentralisation in Islamic governance—starting from the Constitution of Medina, through the Rashidun and Umayyad periods, to Abbasid administrative delegation, and modern Saudi arrangements. These examples show that decentralisation can and does operate outside the Western-democratic frame. The conclusion is practical as well as conceptual: if we keep decentralisation definitionally neutral—“a transfer of authority and responsibility for public functions”—we recover its universality and avoid generalising contextual experiences.