Religions in International Political Economy by Sabine Dreher

Religions in International Political Economy by Sabine Dreher

Author:Sabine Dreher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030414726
Publisher: Springer International Publishing


Religious Counter-Elites and the Neoliberal Revolution in West Asia

After independence, many Middle Eastern (or West Asian) states were governed by secular authoritarian regimes that benefitted from rent incomes such as military aid from the United States, oil and gas revenues, remittances, or income from customs. This income allowed them to insulate themselves against pressures to change. Often a state elite developed, based on the military, the security apparatus, and the bureaucracy, and usurped and subsequently defended its rent-seeking position (Henry and Springborg 2010, p. 67ff.). It is against these regimes that politically organized religious activists emerged in a contest for power, as it became visible that many of the promises of a better life after decolonization had been broken, or that secular nationalism was not able to provide a convincing political and economic strategy for state-building. These activists used cultural politics in order to demand a greater share in the economic surplus (Ouaissa and Schwecke 2015) and religious nationalism developed (Juergensmeyer 2008). The latter was able to capture the national imagination as it was able to re-connect to a more glorious past under Islamic empires on the one hand but also to present itself as a more authentic form of national culture on the other hand.

In Muslim-majority countries, political Islam—the instrumentalization of Islam to pursue political objectives—has to be seen first and foremost as an alternative to failed authoritarian and often secular regimes (Colas 2004). This can also be observed in sub-Saharan Africa, as Nigeria, Mali, and Senegal show, where there are Islamist counter-elites in secular states that are developing a counter-culture to challenge established political and social norms (Pereira and Ibrahim 2010; Sow 2014). While many analysts try to present the Islamist challenge as a necessary step in the democratic process, a more fruitful approach is to see the Islamists as a counter-hegemonic elite fraction whose interest in democracy is often as strategic as that of the regime they are replacing, and who are dependent on local, regional, and global power configurations. In some cases, such as in Turkey or Pakistan they were supported by the secular regimes to undermine trade unions and communist parties (Ayoob 2004, p. 6; Şen 2010). With the exception of Turkey, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Iran, this political Islamist challenge has been unsuccessful. For example, Saudi Arabia sent its Islamists to Afghanistan to fight the communists and was able to avoid reforms at home that would endanger the position of the monarchy against the more republican oriented Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood (Wehrey 2015). Alternatively, in some states a secular regime in power suppressed the Islamist challenge violently, as happened with the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, or the 2013 coup in Egypt against the government led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Only the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ennahda in Tunisia, and the AK Party in Turkey stand out in the sense of Islamists successfully participating in political power while Islamic ideas of jurisprudence have slowly been integrated in Pakistan from the 1970s onward.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.