Current literature on global norms of democratic governance suggests that, especially in less developed countries, decoupling - or feigning support for global norms such as a commitment to human rights without actually enacting these norms in local institutions - is endemic due to the fact that democracy is a Western concept which cannot be simply grafted unchanged onto new cultural contexts (Meyer et. al, 1997). This project argues that much of what is understood by Western scholars as decoupling in terms of mouthing support for democratic governance and political reform by non-democratic regimes is rather best understood as recoupling - co-opting an existing global norm to reflect local institutions while reconfiguring local discourses to make them appear compatible with global norms. This viewpoint is largely absent from existing literature. This study examines discourses of democracy among contemporary Arab political elites in order to observe how the concept of democracy is recoupled in this context.