Covering a time span from the late nineteenth century to the early 2010s, the papers of this panel argue for a differentiated approach to researching revolutions and nation-building processes in the Middle East. In doing so, they highlight the complexity, diversity, and multi-faceted nature of socio-political developments in the region as well as the agency of actors from the Global South, which are simultaneously characterized by their entanglement in global developments and their drive to emancipate from colonial powers. Burak Sayım investigates revolutionary uprisings in Middle Eastern and North African countries in the wake of World War I and contextualizes them within the 1920s as a global revolutionary decade. His research highlights that the revolutions of the early twentieth century were by no means a predominantly European or Western phenomenon. Similarly, Jonas Nabbe analyses uprising in the Middle East while advocating for an acknowledgement the great diversity of actors and socio-political contexts in the region. His papers emphasizes the necessity of overcoming Eurocentric and teleological assumptions to break with the democratization paradigm and the associated narrative of Middle East exceptionalism. Omer Awass uses the framework of “peripheralizations induced actions” to analyze the internal logics of state building and the reconstruction of state-society relation in Middle Eastern countries in the wake of the two world wars. In doing so, he shows how global forces influenced these local processes of state building and nationalization. The three papers contribute to a more nuanced understanding of socio-political dynamics in the Middle East in the twentieth century and highlight the agency of actors from the Global South in global processes.