British Encounters with the 'Islamic World' 1921-1989

This reviews the nature of British encounters with Islam from the 1921 Cairo conference at the apex of British power in the Middle East down to the Rushdie affair. As such it traces a movement from encounters largely overseas in imperial territories to a situation where former informal colonies, like Iran, were now affecting Britain's domestic politics. It also shows how British conceptions (though not necessarily understandings) of Islam changed over the period

Radicalization as a reaction to failure: An economic model of Islamic extremism

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002). Extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns negative, and whose level is optimally chosen by a revolutionary organization. The organization is bound by a free-access constraint and hence uses the degree of extremism as a means of indirectly controlling its level of membership with the aim of maximizing expected per capita income of its members, like a producer co-operative. The gist of the argument is that radicalization may be an optimal reaction to perceived failure (a widespread perception in the Muslim world) when political activists are, at the margin, relatively strongly averse to effort but not so averse to extremism. This configuration is at odds with secular, Western-style revolutionary politics but seems to capture well the essence of Islamic revolutionary politics, embedded as it is in a doctrinal framework. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Imagining the Middle East:The state, nationalism and regional international society

The Middle East is commonly perceived as a zone of cultural and political differences within the global international society. Imagining the Middle East as a ‘unique’ region is not a new idea, but relocating this conception within the English School (ES) of International Relations (IR) is. This article challenges the perceived ‘exceptionalism’ of the Middle East, which claims that the European concepts of state, sovereignty and nationalism are alien to Islam, therefore preventing the emergence of a regional international society. The first part highlights the correlation between Eurocentrism in IR and the lack of interest in regional – area – studies through the critique of Orientalism and the ES. The second part moves to demonstrate why the ES is more explanatory than other IR theories in the context of the Ottoman–European relations. The third part explores the ‘institutional distinctiveness’ of the Middle East, disproving the notion of regional ‘exceptionalism’ and IR’s foundational Eurocentric assumptions. This article concludes by arguing that there is a strong case for calling the Middle East a ‘regional interstate society’, which remains to be a litmus test of whether or not a truly global international society is possible