Pdf- The New World Order and the Tempo of Militant Islam (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (1997), 24(1), 5-24)

ABSTRACT: This paper assesses the social and political conditions that have led to the emergence of militant Islamic groups in the Arab world, especially since the 1967 Six Day War. However, the paper goes beyond the genesis of militant Islam to contest the hypothesis of state-sponsored terrorism by investigating two aspects of support that help keep the phenomenon alive; namely, their sources of funding and weapons. In turn, these aspects of support are broken down into international, regional, and local sources. The discussion shows that while the international and regional sources are significant, the local sources of support are decisive for the operations of the militant Islamic groups

Stable instability: the Syrian conflict and the postponement of the 2013 Lebanese parliamentary elections

Given the morass of the Syrian civil war and Lebanon’s exposure to the consequences, this article seeks to explore how the intersecting dynamics of Lebanese domestic conflicts and the multiple implications of the bloodbath in Syria have influenced the behaviour of Lebanese political parties in the on-going struggle over the formulation of a new electoral law, leading to a broad consensus among the country’s parties to postpone the 2013 parliamentary elections. The article argues that, while the usual attempts to profit at the expense of other groups in society are still present and that external patrons still wield great influence, the decision to postpone the elections also demonstrates a degree of pragmatism and political development since, despite dire predictions to the contrary, Lebanon has not succumbed to the return of its own civil war. Instead a complex mixture of pragmatism, elision of interests and external influence, combined with local agency has led Lebanon into a situation of stable instability

Just war and extraterritoriality: the popular geopolitics of the United States' war on Iraq as reflected in newspapers of the Arab World

As with all wars, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 needed to be portrayed as a just war in an attempt to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The United States was acting as hegemonic power in the international state-system and, in light of this role, had imperatives and tools in creating the argument for a just war that differed from those used by nonhegemonic states. The United States acted extraterritorially by diffusing a message of moral right. Arab resistance to the war was evident in the construction of the United States and its leadership as immoral, precluding its ability to wage a just war. This article focuses on the Arab response by analyzing the portrayal in Arab newspapers of the imminent war on Iraq. Sixty-five newspapers of the Arabic language (plus the Iraqi news agency), published in seventeen Arab countries, of which four were Iraqi newspapers, were consulted for the purpose of this study. Interpretation of the geopolitical rhetoric within newspaper reports and political cartoons published in Arab newspapers highlights the way that arguments of morality and immorality were connected to understandings of territorial sovereignty and hegemonic extraterritorial influence into territorial sovereign spaces