Suchergebnisse

Introduction : supplanting Eurocentrism --. - The nomadic-sedentary synthesis : amalgamated state-formations, 1500-1720 --. - The revolution of backwardness : the constitutional revolution, 1906-1911 --. - Nationless nationalisms : Reza Shah's reforms, Mosaddeq's revolt, 1921-1953 --. - The marriage of the cold war and oil : the birth of the citizen-subject and the revolution, 1961-1979 --. - An Iranian Janus : the making of revolutionary Islam --. - Conclusion : uneven and combined development and historical materialism

"Writing capitalism into Iran" arguably requires addressing a prior theoretical question regarding the origins and development of capitalism. This is because many of the existing analyses of Iran's experience of capitalist modernity tend to uncritically deploy classical Marxist theories of capitalist development. This literature's analytical problems, especially its recurrent recourse to exceptionalism, cannot be solved at the empirical or analytical level but rather at its intellectual roots in classical Marxism (see Samiee in this roundtable forum). This observation has been central to my research program. What follows is an extremely condensed genealogy of this research program and some of its analytical implications for Iranian studies.

How to theorize the nation's Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of 'societal multiplicity' and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism's expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into 'nationalist' projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation's political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain's imperial nationhood could be globalised. The paper therefore shows that IR's premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences' most enduring puzzles.

The Kurdish-led project of democratic confederalism in Rojava (north and north-east Syria) has emerged as an unprecedented experience in eco-feminist and anti-capitalist direct democracy with global significance and regional ramifications. There is however virtually no critical engagement with the project's intellectual foundations in the works of Abdullah Öcalan. This paper seeks to address this gap through a sympathetic critique of Öcalan's historical sociology of the formation and dissolution of the state. It argues that there is a theoretical tension in Öcalan's argument. His account of the originary rise of the Sumerian state is 'internalist' while his analysis of subsequent state-formation processes is 'interactive', which highlights the crucial role of external factors and hence implicitly the decisive significance of the condition of 'societal multiplicity'. The paper then draws on Kojin Karatani's 'modes of exchange' based world history to argue that Sumerian state-formation was also fundamentally interactive occurring within and through societal multiplicity. It therefore demonstrates the need for the incorporation of societal multiplicity in the conceptualisation of democratic confederalism and the analyses of its prospects as a non-statist political community. In so doing, the paper also contributes to critical geopolitics and anarchist international theory through underlining the social history of the rise of the state and the international nature of its dissolution.

AbstractExisting accounts of the Islamic State (IS) tend to rely on orientalist and technicist assumptions and hence insufficiently sensitive to the historical, sociological, and international conditions of the possibility of IS. The present article provides an alternative account through a conjunctural analysis that is anchored in an international historical sociology of modern Iraq informed by Leon Trotsky's idea of 'uneven and combined development'. It foregrounds the concatenation of Iraq's contradictory (post‐)colonial nation‐state formation with the neoliberal conjuncture of 1990‐2014. It shows that the former process involved the tension‐prone fusion of governing institutions of the modern state and the intermittent but steady reproduction, valorization, and politicization of supra‐national (religious‐sectarian) and sub‐national (ethno‐tribal) collective identities, which subverted the emergence of an Iraqi nation. The international sanctions regime of the 1990s transformed sectarian and tribal difference into communitarian tension by fatally undermining the integrative efficacy of the Ba'ath party's authoritarian welfare‐state. Concurrently, the neo‐liberal demolition of the post‐colonial authoritarian welfare states in the region gave rise to the Arab Spring revolutions. The Arab Spring however elicited a successful authoritarian counter‐revolution that eliminated secular‐nationalist forms of oppositional politics. This illiberal neoliberalisation of the region's political economy valorised the religionisation of the domestic effects of the 2003 US‐led destruction of the Iraqi state and its reconstruction on a majoritarian basis favouring the Shi'as and hence transforming sectarian tension into sectarian conflict culminating in IS. Thus, IS is, the paper demonstrates, the result of neither an internal cultural pathology nor sheerly external forces. Rather, it is the novel product of an utterly historical congealment of the intrinsically interactive and multilinear dynamics of socio‐political change.

This article investigates the limits of postcolonial International Relations' anti-Eurocentrism through an interrogation of its ambivalent relation with the category of 'the universal.' It argues that a decisive defeat of Eurocentrism, within and beyond International Relations, requires the formulation of a non-ethnocentric international social theory which postcolonial approaches, a la poststructuralism, reject on the grounds that it involves the idea of the universal equated with socio-cultural homogeneity. Yet, postcolonial approaches also theorize colonial modernity through deploying forms of methodological internationalism that broach the universal. Through a critical engagement with the wider field of postcolonial theory, and an anatomy of the notion of the universal in Hegel and Trotsky, this article argues that homogeneity is not an intrinsic quality of the concept of the universal, but a result of its specifically internalist mode of construction. Supplanting Eurocentrism therefore requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of the universal. But one which is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-transcendence of the particular, and re-comprehended as a radical amenability to, and constitutiveness of, alterity. This is, the article argues, a defining feature of Trotsky's idea of uneven and combined development. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]

Eurocentric approaches to political Islam tend to deploy an internalist methodology that theoretically obscures the generative and constitutive role of international relations. This article addresses this problem through a critical application of Leon Trotsky's idea of 'uneven and combined development' to Ayatollah Khomeini's invention of the concept of 'Islamic government'. It argues that this concept was international in its socio-political stimulus and intellectual content, and, crucially, reflected, influenced, and mobilised an emergent liminal sociality that combined Western and Islamic socio-cultural forms. This heterogeneous character of Iran's experience of modernity is, the article argues, theoretically inaccessible to Eurocentric approaches' homogeneous and unilinear conceptions of history, which, as a result, generate exceptionalist modes of explanations. Adapted from the source document.

This article investigates the limits of postcolonial International Relations' anti-Eurocentrism through an interrogation of its ambivalent relation with the category of 'the universal.' It argues that a decisive defeat of Eurocentrism, within and beyond International Relations, requires the formulation of a non-ethnocentric international social theory which postcolonial approaches, à la poststructuralism, reject on the grounds that it involves the idea of the universal equated with socio-cultural homogeneity. Yet, postcolonial approaches also theorize colonial modernity through deploying forms of methodological internationalism that broach the universal. Through a critical engagement with the wider field of postcolonial theory, and an anatomy of the notion of the universal in Hegel and Trotsky, this article argues that homogeneity is not an intrinsic quality of the concept of the universal, but a result of its specifically internalist mode of construction. Supplanting Eurocentrism therefore requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of the universal. But one which is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-transcendence of the particular, and re-comprehended as a radical amenability to, and constitutiveness of, alterity. This is, the article argues, a defining feature of Trotsky's idea of uneven and combined development.