Suchergebnisse

Hizb al-Tahrir (the Liberation Party, henceforth HT) is a unique kind of islamist organization. Compared with the two major islamist movements - Salafism and the Muslim Brothers - it exhibits certain similarities with each one but is clearly different from both. While most research to date has focused on HT in Europe and Central Asia, this article explores the ideology and function of HT in the West Bank, where it was founded in 1953 and where its leadership comes from today. By analysing Ht in the Palestinian context, it becomes apparent how important ideology is for the party, as the Palestine question has no pride of place even in the Palestinian branch of HT. Instead, it is the global aspiration of re-establishing the islamic caliphate that is of paramount importance. This very focus on ideology has led the party into relative obscurity in the Palestinian Islamist landscape, however. The analysis shows that a full understanding of HT must take into consideration the local contexts in which it operates; and that it is untenable on both ideological and practical grounds to lump different islamist movements together in one shared category. Adapted from source document.

Nationalist politics is widely recognized as a key site for the articulation, legitimation, and propagation of a national view of the world. But the effectiveness of nationalist politics in advancing this view ultimately rests upon the uses ordinary people make of it. Popular reception, however, is more often assumed than specified in the literature on nationalism. In this article, I identify the ways in which Romanian and Hungarian university students in the ethnically mixed town of Cluj, Romania, consume and engage—and deflect and ignore—nationalist politics. I examine the ways the students talk (and do not talk) about three hotly contested political matters: the debate over an independent Hungarian university in Cluj, the politics of the city's ultranationalist Romanian mayor, and the Romanian presidential elections of 2000. I show that the students can reproduce the nationally polarized terms of debate in response to survey questions. In the course of their everyday lives, however, there are few occasions in which they engage such issues. Instead, the students' apathy and disdain for politics in general precludes meaningful engagement of the issues in national or other terms. Nationalist politics misses its mark.

Much recent political thought has been devoted to the proposition that neither political endeavor properly understood nor theorizing about such endeavor is or could ever be a kind of rational activity. I examine three broad approaches that celebrate, respectively, rhetorical practices of political persuasion, agonistic conceptions of democracy, and, more generally, a kind of hard-headed critical realism rooted in the plain facts of political life. I argue that criticisms of rationalism in politics associated with these approaches systematically ignore central tenets of what might be called a post-Kantian convergence of recent and important philosophical perspectives and that such perspectives can be enormously useful in addressing and critically evaluating the underlying intellectual structures of political life.

The 'generation' has been largely forgotten in the fields of sociology and political science, especially regarding global politics. This volume re-engages the concept of a 'generation,' utilizing it to explore how it can help us understand a variety of processes and patterns in International Relations and Comparative Politics.