Mustapha Kamal Pasha

Predatory Globalization and Democracy in the Islamic World

The rise of Islamic activism worldwide, including the appearance of illiberal politics in Islamic cultural areas (ICAs), is usually seen as a reaction to globalizing modernization. Based on the assumption of an elective affinity between Western cultural assets and liberal democracy, most analysts neglect to see globalization, particularly, in its predatory form, as a constitutive condition of Islamism. Accentuating the cultural divide within ICAs, predatory globalization strives to constrict political space for democratic expression. The growing disconnect between an already fractured political community and an increasingly illegitimate state provides Islamicists the opening to capture key institutions in civil society or to create alternative avenues of communal identity, participation, and civic action. Prospects for building a liberal democratic order hinge mainly on a resolution of the internal dialectic within ICAs. The unstoppable march of predatory globalization, however, appears unlikely to yield either the political space or the historical time to bridge the deep chasm within ICAs.

Fractured Worlds: Islam, Identity, and International Relations

In an unprecedented display of intellectual philanthropy, the cultural turn in IR theory opened up new zones of engagement with other social worlds and their characteristic imaginings and impulses. On a positive reading of this trend, the field was well poised (until quite recently) to repudiate Eurocentric constrictions on its self-consciousness. In this improved climate, recognising other cultural worlds, including Islam and the identities lurking behind that generic label, was not going to be too difficult after all. In a dramatic reversal, however, the optimism warranted by the reflexive tenor in recent conversations in IR and poignantly expressed in appeals to identity/difference, culture, agency, and contingency, appears to have been short lived, deflated by the latest countervailing political and cultural tendencies. On this reading, the reversal is linked to the events of ‘‘9/11’’ and their aftermath. Shattering conciliatory overtures to other worlds and other words, the current climate makes dialogue with difference remarkably limpid, replaced by familiar binary tropes. While this gloomy sentiment is shared unevenly, the inclination to defeat the political aims of openness in the present context cannot be readily dismissed; the recognition of difference now can be more conveniently pinned to the sins of (relativist) multiculturalism and its reckless disregard for the more enduring features of Western exceptionalism, or even made to threaten progress, national security, and human civilisation. The world of Islam today appears quite menacing; Islam is a problem of geopolitics, not an object of cultural understanding. Attempts to recover the complexity, diversity, or agency within the heterodox worlds of Islam, therefore,

Islam, ‘Soft’ Orientalism and Hegemony: A Gramscian Rereading

Abstract The neo‐Gramscian framework offers one of the more innovative contributions to a discipline long embedded in the self‐same verities of behaviouralism, positivism and neo‐Realism. As with conventional wisdom, however, neo‐Gramscians reproduce either assumptions of liberal neutrality or cultural thickness in relation to the ‘peripheral zones’ of the global political economy. These tendencies produce a variant that can be likened to ‘soft Orientalism’. In the first instance, cultural difference is not much of an impediment to the establishment of (West‐centred) global hegemony. In the second instance, otherness becomes the principal source of counter‐hegemonic movements or resistance. This article provides a Gramscian rereading of these antinomies in relation to the apparent consolidation of a natural attitude towards Islam in the wake of recent dramatic events.

What Works in the Third World

When an acquaintance in Dar es Salaam invited me (JHM) to visit her family in an ujamaa (communal) village, I jumped at the opportunity. Hemmed in by the Indian Ocean on one side and groves of mango trees, coconut palms, jackfruit (which resemble large basketballs) and the infamous durian plant, with its succulent pulp of fine flavour but skunk-like smell, on the other, we careered southwards for 100 miles along a washboard road to the Rufiji River. There we navigated inland over a series of dirt paths until we reached our destination: numerous clumps of neat, thatched huts nestled astride the river bank.

Back to the Nineteenth Century for New Ideas

Saudi Arabia’s royal family is trying to spearhead an advanced industrial economy while inoculating against a social upheaval. Given the surge in the price of oil from about

The Conventional Route, Joining Global Capitalism: Track 2 — the Asian NICs

3.50 a barrel in 1973 to a peak of

The Exit Option, Withdrawing from and Re-entering Global Capitalism: China under and after Mao

34 in 1981 and 1982, billions of petro-dollars were made available to plough back into development projects and private industry. The sum accumulated in one year alone (1981) — a

Public Platitudes and Unfounded Attitudes

30 billion excess of income over expenditure — was truly colossal.

The Conventional Route, Joining Global Capitalism: Track 1 — Brazil

On the conventional route’s high speed track, only the more daring have managed to navigate the main thoroughfare. Fast-tracking runs greater risk of collision, but also offers the passengers greater rewards, at least in the short term, should they survive the deadly traffic. Both dismal failures and spectacular successes have been recorded.

Received Ideas and International Institutions

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China, like many underdeveloped countries, has sought to industrialize and to sell more of its manufactured products overseas. Once isolationist, China is now one of the world’s 10 largest trading nations, enjoying a surplus of nearly