Jillian Schwedler

Can Islamists Become Moderates?: Rethinking the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis

Recent years have seen a surge of studies that examine the inclusion-moderation hypothesis with reference to political islam: the idea that political groups and individuals may become more moderate as a result of their inclusion in pluralist political processes. Most of these interventions adopt one of three foci: (1) the behavioral moderation of groups; (2) the ideological moderation of groups; and (3) the ideological moderation of individuals. after a discussion of various definitions of moderate and radical, the concept of moderation, and the centrality of moderation to studies of democratization, the author examines the scholarship on political islam that falls within each approach. she then examines several studies that raise questions about sequencing: how mechanisms linking inclusion and moderation are posited and how other approaches might better explain islamist moderation. finally, she offers a critical analysis of the behavior-ideology binary that animates many of these models and suggests some fruitful paths for future research.

The Third Gender: Western Female Researchers in the Middle East

Field research on politics in the Middle East poses far less problems for Western female researchers than many Westerners assume. The questions most commonly asked of me by colleagues include whether anyone will speak to an American woman (yes), and whether I need to wear a veil (no, but see below). Female researchers do face many challenges, but most have less to do with gender than with examining sensitive political issues in highly repressive environments. Of those that do concern gender, many vary by degree rather than type from the issues faced by female scholars conducting field research elsewhere. I draw heavily on my own overwhelmingly positive experiences with ethnographic research in Jordan and Yemen—totaling more than four years over the past decade, including nearly a year of research conducted post-September 11—and those of many friends in outlining the following issues facing Western female political scientists conducting field research in the Middle East. I would like to thank Laryssa Chomiak, Janine Astrid Clark, Sam Fayyaz, and Lisa Wedeen for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.

The Political Geography of Protest in Neoliberal Jordan

Studies of protest activities predominantly have focused on police–protestor dynamics and the political opportunity structures of the regime. This article goes beyond those studies by examining two new perspectives about protest activities, using Jordan as a case study. First, I posit that Jordan is less a case of ‘resilient authoritarianism’ than it is an example of new forms of non-democratic governance, with economic rights advanced while political rights are restrained. In this context, Jordan remains a security state, ‘liberal’ economically but not politically. It is also a state in which the reach of security apparatuses is highly varied spatially. Second, protest activities in Jordan are affected not only by the non-democratic nature of the state, but also by the country’s physical changes that are the direct result of rapidly expanding neoliberal economic reforms. This article links these two insights to provide a new framework for understanding the political geography of protest in a neoliberalizing authoritarian state.

ISLAMISTS IN POWER? INCLUSION, MODERATION, AND THE ARAB UPRISINGS ¤

Political inclusion is a major concern for democratizing states. Among the many groups excluded and repressed by the former regime, which should now be included? Which should be excluded? And who decides? With the extraordinary events of the Arab uprisings that began in 2011, a wider range of political actors than ever before have become directly engaged in debates and processes of political transition. The new political institutions, however, remain unstable and the distribution of power between them unclear. This paper explores the inclusion-moderation hypothesis with special attention to Islamist groups. It examines the literature on Islamist moderation prior to the Arab uprisings and asks whether the central tenets of those arguments hold in the dynamic environments of the post-revolutionary contexts, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, where Islamists have done well in free and fair elections. I argue that in unstable and changing institutional contexts, the logic of the inclusion-moderation hypothesis is less likely to be present, particularly when more extreme opposition groups challenge Islamists to prove their core commitment to a conservative religious political vision.

Comparative Politics and the Arab Uprisings

How have scholars working in the political science subfield of comparative politics approached the Arab uprisings in their analyses? Two dominant trends have been to explore the uprisings through the literatures on robust authoritarianism and on social movements. While each of these has produced rich and lively debates, scholars of Middle East politics have mostly drawn comparisons at the national level: for example, explaining variation between those state that experienced uprisings and those that did not, or between those uprisings that turned violent and those that did not. I suggest that adopting “states” and “movements” as objects of analysis can obscure some of the more unique dynamics of the uprisings—dynamics that might be leveraged in contributing new ideas to broader theoretical debates. I illustrate the ways in which research designs that focus on identifying and explaining variation between and across cases tend to assume discrete objects of study (i.e., regimes and movements) in ways that obscure other fascinating processes and practices at both the micro-level and in terms of the complex interconnections across states and regions. This focus has in turn led to a deficit in studies of in-case variation: how mobilization and state repression varied, for example, between Cairo, Alexandria, the Suez, rural regions, and other locations outside of Tahrir Square. Finally, I applaud and encourage the continuation of the lively and open debates within the field about the strengths and weaknesses of our earlier scholarship and the potential of various future research agendas.

Spatial Dynamics of the Arab Uprisings

A nalyses of the spread of the Arab uprisings have been dominated by three comparative angles. Single-country studies have emerged as the most common framework, often put to use in a second comparative approach of examining variation across cases. For example, studies explore which states have had major uprisings and which have not, which uprisings were peaceful and which were violent, and so on (Amar and Prashad 2013; Haddad, Bsheer, and Abu-Rish 2012; McMurray and Ufheil-Somers 2013; Sowers and Toensing 2013). A third approach explores comparisons with other waves of popular mobilization against authoritarian regimes, for example, in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so on (Patel, Bunce, and Wolchik 2013; Weyland 2012). These literatures investigate the complex processes of mobilization, revolution, and transition unfolding in parts of the Middle East since the outbreak of the uprisings in late 2010. From the literature on revolutions, for example, we know that a popularly based movement that brings about some change in political leadership does not necessarily lead to a regime change resulting in a fundamental overturning of an economic, political, or social system. From past cases we have learned that at least some old institutions and alliances almost always reemerge, and what form the new institution will take eventually is often unknown for several years—for example, think of the Iranian revolution, let alone the French revolution. As events in postrevolutionary Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen continue to unfold—and it is questionable whether those revolutions are even over—and as the bloody civil war in Syria continues, these insights provide us with useful tools for examining how institutions, processes, and power relations are changing—and how they are not. These comparative analyses make good sense, and there is certainly a need for detailed case and comparative studies. It is also easy to see how the Arab uprisings might be incorporated into courses that deal with revolutions, political transitions, socialmovements, and contentious politics. As discussed in the introduction to this symposium, however, the Arab uprisings offer some other exciting avenues for both scholarly research and incorporation into broader thematic courses.The spatial dimensions of the uprisings, for example, can reveal surprising insights while also substantively advancing scholarly debates. In this article, I examine some in-case as well as across-case variations in the Arab uprisings through the lens of political geography—that is, by directing attention to the spatial dynamics of the protests. DIFFUSIONS

Studying Political Islam

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East have produced an impressive body of scholarship that seeks to understand diverse groups and practices that are together called political Islam. Much of our work has drawn little attention outside of academia despite the obsession with Islam shared by policymakers and the general public. The many careful studies produced by academics and some journalists—typically based on extensive field research and use of primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—have to contend with bestselling books that trade in fears about the irrational, West-hating Muslim fanatic. Unfortunately, serious scholarship on political Islam cannot ignore this terrain of stereotypes and fearmongering, as it dominates mainstream debates about Islam and the Middle East. But in responding to these discourses, we often allow them to dictate our analytic starting point, resulting in less theoretical innovation and empirical insight than might emerge if we moved beyond the focus on Islamist groups and whether most are moderate or radical. Indeed, we might do well to abandon altogether the idea that “political Islam” represents a tangible object of study.

White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism and Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West

White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. By Hewitt Roger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 172p.

Faith in moderation : Islamist parties in Jordan and Yemen

75.00 cloth,

Understanding the Contemporary Middle East

29.99 paper. Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West. By Quintan Wiktorowicz. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 248p.