Islamist Social Movements and Hybrid Regime Types in the Muslim World

ABSTRACT

Since the Arab Uprisings in 2010–2011 and subsequent counterrevolutions, socio-economic and political crises have occurred with rapid frequency in the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel. The aim of our special issue is to investigate how and why social movements that use references to Islam or an explicit Islamist framework have adapted their ideology and their toolbox in order to negotiate and navigate the social and political terrain created by the upheavals in the recent period? Using recent field data to enrich our knowledge of Islamist movements in countries where the Islamist phenomenon has been understudied, this collection provides a framework to understand the growing political volatility and hybridity in Islamist repertoires of contention. The authors of the volume each analyse cases of Islamist social movements shifting, or attempting to shift, from one repertoire to another – from transnational to national, from non-violent to violent or vice versa. The collection shows that social movements adapt in different ways and make use of resources available to them, at times moving far beyond their established ideology and traditional theological references.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle East
• Sahel
• Islamist social movements
• Islamism
• hybrid regime types
• contentious politics

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Kjetil Selvik, Olivier Roy, Bjørn Olav Utvik, Theo Blanc, and the Third World Thematics editorial team for very useful advice; all mistakes remain of course the authors’ own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Tunisia is included as a control case, see below.

2. Violence is in this case seen as armed jihad, or unplanned clashes with the state security apparatus, or vigilantist or other violence committed against humans.

3. For the nexus between repression, disengagement, and burn-out, see: Fillieule (2005): 28; (McAdam 2005, 67).

4. “Sectarianization” is the political instrumentalization of sectarian identities by identity entrepreneurs or an external political climate that heightens the salience of sectarian attitudes. (Hashemi and Postel 2017); (Valbjørn and Hinnebusch 2018, 45–47).

Additional information

Funding

The research and drafting of this paper were funded by a grant [No. Research Council Norway 261844] from the Norwegian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Tine Gade

Tine Gade (PhD, Sciences Po Paris, 2015) is Senior Research Fellow in the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs' (NUPI) Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development. She has done fieldwork on Sunni movements in Lebanon since 2008 and in Iraq since 2016. Gade currently leads the STATEISLAM research project (Reactions to state regulation of Islam in times of Daesh). Gade is the author of Sunni City: Tripoli from Islamist Utopia to the Lebanese Revolution (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2022), and has published in Social Movement Studies, Contemporary Arab Affairs, Idafat Arab Journal of Sociology, and in edited volumes.

Morten Bøås

Morten Bøås is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affair (NUPI). Bøås works on conflict and politics with a focus on West Africa and the Sahel. He is the author of a number of articles and his most recently published book is Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Interventions: a Guide to Research in Violent and Closed Contexts (2020, with Berit Bliesemann du Guevara)