Suchergebnisse

This book re-evaluates the concept of anarchy in International Relations by drawing on anarchist thought. It is the first scholarly work to draw on historical anarchism to construct an international theory premised on the idea of states as anarchists. It puts forward a constructivist account of state behavior, termed 'polite anarchy', to theorize diplomacy, an area of IR which is increasingly recognized within the discipline as being under-theorized, by drawing on a contextual historical study of the idiom of politeness in the anarchist thought of the late-Enlightenment British radical, William Godwin, generally considered to be the founder of modern philosophical anarchism. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students of International Relations, the history of political thought, international political theory and anarchism, as well as historians and practitioners in the field of diplomacy and Godwin scholars.

Scholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as 'radical' is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.

AbstractScholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as 'radical' is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.

This article explores the ideological relationship between free market capitalism and Islamism. While existing studies have attended to Islam's engagement with capitalism, less attention has been given to the ideological intimacy of this relationship and, in particular, the increasing presence of radical free market thought in global Islamist politics, or what I have termed 'libertarian Islamism'. The dominant narrative of Islamism, thus, constricts our understanding of the wider ideological ecology at play in the global political mobilization of Islam. While political Islam is often regarded as being rooted in a broadly leftist intellectual milieu, it has rather encapsulated variant conceptions of liberty, both left and right, and is currently undergoing what one might term a 'free-market turn'. Within this milieu, a distinctly radical, anti-statist libertarian ideology has also emerged with an intimate relationship to conservative libertarian activists in the West. The presence of libertarian Islamism serves to recalibrate dominant understandings of 'radical' Islam and its purportedly fractious ideological relationship with the West.

This essay explores how particular variants of "Muslim anarchism", as distinct forms of radical anti-authoritarian religion, subvert conventional approaches to Islamic hermeneutics by drawing on intellectual traditions and discursive strategies external to them. Through recourse to the mutuality between autonomy and automatism, most notably in Western avant-garde and countercultural aesthetics, it elucidates the import of automatic transcendence and retro-futurist imaginaries as novel interpretative techniques for spiritual emancipation in radically libertarian approaches to Islam. My aim is to show how the rich, multivalent concept of automatism, neglected in studies of social and religious phenomena, can be a useful way of elucidating the hermeneutics of specific strands of Muslim anarchism. In doing so, the paper also challenges received understandings of "radical" Islam and the restrictive polarity between militancy and liberalism that has come to frame discussion on global Islam. To this end, I focus on the thought of Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), Michael Muhammad Knight and Yakoub Islam.

Clifford Geertz has noted recently that 'more than any other single thing, it has been the rising tendency to ideologize faith in so much of the Muslim world that has made it increasingly hard to arrive at summary accounts of what is happening there'. This recognition has not deterred the emergence of a veritable flood of literature, scholarly or otherwise, much of which provides sweeping holistic accounts of 'Islam' and the West's current engagement with it. The difficulty Geertz highlights is, ironically, also the impetus that drives the current hunger for such knowledge at the popular, academic and policy levels: the recognition of Islam, in its multifarious manifestations, not as a stagnant and ritualistic historical artefact, but as the major component of cultural renaissance and prime vehicle of dissident political mobilisation in the contemporary Muslim world.

"Leading scholars discuss how 'Islam' and 'liberalism' have been entwined historically and politically and how Muslims have thought about this longstanding relationship. Forged in the age of empire, the relationship between Islam and liberalism has taken on a sense of urgency today, when global conflicts are seen as pitting one against the other. More than describing a civilisational fault-line between the Muslim world and the West, however, this relationship also offers the potential for consensus and the possibility of moral and political engagement or compatibility. The existence or extent of this correspondence tends to preoccupy academic as much as popular accounts of such a relationship. This volume looks however to the way in which Muslim politics and society are defined beyond and indeed after it. Reappraising the 'first wave' of Islamic liberalism during the nineteenth century, the book describes the long and intertwined histories of these categories across a large geographical expanse. By drawing upon the contributions of scholars from a variety of disciplines -- including philosophy, theology, sociology, politics and history -- it explores how liberalism has been criticised and refashioned by Muslim thinkers and movements, to assume a reality beyond the abstractions that define its compatibility with Islam." (Publisher's description)

Enthält Rezensionen von: Ahmed, Akbar S.: Islam under siege: living dangerously in a post-honor world. - Cambridge : Polity, 2003. + Fuller, Graham E.: The Future of political Islam. - New York/N.Y. : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003