End of moderation: the radicalization of AKP in Turkey

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, AKP, was for many years believed to be paramount in ushering in a new era of moderate Islamism. However, in recent years, AKP has troublingly reversed course. From violent repression of the Gezi protests of 2013 to the 2016 abortive coup and subsequent crackdown on opposition, the party has lost all semblance of moderate Islamism and radicalized. If AKP had truly moderated, how could the party have changed in such a short period of time? What explains the radicalization of AKP? First, we argue that the strategic benefits of moderation far outweighed its costs, rendering it analytically improbable to determine whether AKP’s actions were genuine or merely strategic. Second, we show that AKP has been in a process of radicalization characterized by the adoption of anti-system, anti-democratic, and violent tactics and rhetoric since 2011. The disappearance of domestic and international structural constraints created the requisite background conditions for the party’s radicalization. Radicalization was facilitated by what we call ‘Erdoganization’, an ongoing de-institutionalization process within which Tayyip Erdogan gained complete control over the party. Additionally, a series of four “external shocks” threatened the party’s primary goal of gaining hegemony and caused the party to radicalize.     

Islamist Versus Islamist: Rising Challenge in Gaza

Islam's diversity is a direct result of centuries of schism and factionalism, and presents a challenge to the original spirit of unity as envisaged by its founder, the Prophet Mohammed. Rivalry within Islam undermines the precedent notion of unity through communal belonging (tawhid and ummah). Yet in the twenty-first century this diversity is ignored, and political Islam is represented as being more of a monolith than a spectrum of ideas and aspirations. Generally, the materialization of new Islamist groups is a challenge to those who hold that unity is all. In the Gaza Strip, specifically, the dominant Islamist actor, Hamas, is facing internal challenges from other Islamist elements. These rival Islamists are also influenced by events across their border in post-revolutionary Egypt where a plethora of new Islamist actors are vying for political space and power. This article deals with Hamas's Islamist rivals, and the effects they have had on Hamas's governance of the Gaza Strip, and political and religious legitimacy within it. It will focus on ideological and violent disputes between the Islamist elements in Gaza, and the means by which Hamas and its security elements have tackled newly emerging rivals.     

The role of religion in Islamist radicalisation processes

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to bridge the gap between social and religious explanations for Islamist radicalisation in the West by understanding the role of religion through the under-utilised perspective of sociology of religious emotions and Wiktorowicz’s concept of cognitive openness. The article draws on interviews with 23 different actors with first-hand knowledge of Islamist radicalisation, and analyses five in-depth interviews with former so-called radicals, four of whom were converts to Islam. The analysis thus has a special focus on the narratives and experiences of converts to radical Islamist worldviews. The radicalisation process of the formers was characterised by an interplay between context specific experiences and individual religiosity. There are social causes for seeking religion as it can provide an emotional meaningfulness in a state of cognitive openness connected to personal family social background, which can stretch over a long period. However, the interviews also show that religiosity affects the social: the religious emotions within radical Islamist groups create a tight-knit community of self-perceived righteous believers, tied to an emotional experience of empowerment that amplifies their radicalisation. The article concludes that the primary role of religion is to structure and direct the emotions from which so-called radical Islamists think and act within religious frameworks.     

The transformation of political party opposition in Malaysia and its implications for the electoral authoritarian regime

Malaysia's electoral authoritarian system is increasingly coming under pressure. Indicators of this are the metamorphosis of opposition forces since 1998 and, in particular, the results of the 2008 parliamentary elections. From 1957 until 1998 political party opposition was fragmented. An initial transformation of political party opposition began at the height of the Asian financial crisis, after a major conflict within the ruling United Malays National Organization in 1998. However, the regime was able to weaken the opposition, resulting in its poor performance in the 2004 elections. Afterwards, in a second transformation that has continued until the present time, an oppositional People's Alliance (Pakatan Rakyat) has emerged that now has a serious chance of taking over the federal government. This article argues that the increase in the strength and cohesion of political party opposition since 1998 has been caused mainly by five combined factors: the emergence of pro-democratic segments within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious middle class; the intensified interaction of political parties and civil society forces; the impact of new media; the eroded legitimacy of the United Malays National Organization and other parties of the ruling coalition; and the internal reforms within the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam SeMalaysia). Consequently it has become conceivable that the country will incrementally democratize in a protracted transition. Although the 1999 and 2008 elections were not foundational, they have been transitional. They may not have inaugurated a new democratic regime, but they have marked important phases in the struggle for democracy in Malaysia.     

Ennahda Islamists and the Test of Government in Tunisia

After winning the 2011 elections, the Ennahda Islamist Party was the majority partner in successive coalition governments, whose poor performance – namely in the economic and security fields – disappointed the people’s high post-revolutionary expectations. Opponents accused Ennahda of incompetence, greed for power and double talk. Many of the Ennahda-led governments’ failures were due to factors beyond their control, but some did indeed depend on Ennahda’s own political weaknesses. Nevertheless, Ennahda contributed positively to the overall development of Tunisia’s political transition thanks to its moderation and pragmatism and its contribution remains paramount for the democratic consolidation of Tunisia and other political Islamic actors.     

Millenarian groups and law enforcement agencies: The lessons of Waco

Why do violent movements participate in elections? To answer this question, we examine Hamas's formation of the Reform and Change Party and its iconic victory in the 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council. We argue that Hamas's formation of this party was a logical step, following nearly two decades of participation in local and municipal elections. Hamas's need to attract resources from external donors, who make funding decisions based on civilian support for the movement, best explains why Hamas decided to participate in local elections in the early 1990s, taking Hamas on a path that eventually led to its 2006 legislative victory. Hamas's foray into elections was consistent with its dual strategy of directing violence against Israel and building Palestinian support through welfare services. We demonstrate that changes in political opportunities (Fatah's decline and the increase in Hamas's popularity), institutional incentives (lax electoral laws and the holding of municipal elections), and the rise of moderate voices within Hamas explain the timing of its entry into legislative elections. Finally, we discuss Hamas's electoral victory, the need for cooperation between Fatah and Hamas, and the role played by international actors as significant factors influencing prospects for peace and democratization in the region.     

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary unit: the long collapse

ABSTRACT

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) fought one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in recent Latin American history. In 1996, the URNG and the Government of Guatemala signed a Firm and Lasting Agreement ending the country’s civil war and initiating the URNG’s post-war life as a political party. After finishing third in its initial electoral competition, the URNG has since been unable to capture more than 4% of the vote, on its own or in coalition, leaving it a minor political party. What explains the poor electoral performance of the URNG as a political party? Based upon fieldwork, elite interviews, and analysis of electoral data, I argue that the URNG’s minor party performance was caused by both organizational and institutional factors.     

Pathways of Islamist adaptation: the Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ lessons for inclusion moderation theory

The Muslim Brothers’ transition from religious movement to majority-seeking party in Egypt’s post 2011 democratic experiment offered a key test of the inclusion-moderation hypothesis. While the MB’s increasing religious and organizational conservatism at new electoral thresholds appears to challenge the hypothesis, I argue that it was the result of strategic adaptation based on functional alternative interpretations of political opportunity that did not require a trade-off between power-seeking and expressive goals, constrained by prior pathways of electoral adaptation, and shaped by the ambiguous political incentives of democratic transition. This article shows that the MB, like other religious parties, has alternated between strategies for electoral adaptation, challenging expectations of linear evolution; that majority-seeking sometimes encourages intra-movement dynamics that are radicalizing as well as moderating; and shows that expressive goals and identity remain important to religious parties even in office, and make some paths of adaptation more attractive while precluding others. While the case affirms the relevance of political learning mechanisms predicted by inclusion-moderation theory, the divergent outcomes of this learning suggest the need to focus on the contexts and motivations that set movements along one of multiple possible adaptive pathways.     

Religious parties and democracy: A comparative assessment of Israel and Turkey

Discussions of the role of religious parties in democracies can be highly misleading when they take the parties' ideologies at face value and assign them to the binary categories of moderate vs radical. Only by a careful review of how religious parties use religious and secular symbols in defining their political stances can we evaluate their roles vis-à-vis liberal democracy. The competing political ideologies of the Mafdal and Shas Parties in Israel and the National Action Party, the Prosperity Party and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey are foci of this analysis. Two controversial concepts, ‘redemption’ in Israel and ‘secularism’ in Turkey, are used to question how these parties appropriate religious symbols in their policies towards secular public and institutions. The arguments draw on a set of interviews with the religious party leaderships and a content analysis of party ideologues' views. The findings suggest that parties that adopt the strategy of sacralization (that is, assigning religious meanings to secular ideas thereby treating them as sacred) appear more moderate yet they are more likely to support authoritarian policies. However, the so-called radical religious parties tend to be more inclusive and are more likely to secularize their respective religious tradition internally by redefining secular terms. Despite their novel political agendas both groups fail to exhibit principled commitment to liberal values and fail to provide inclusive and coherent alternatives to their secularist counterparts.     

Local determinants of an emerging electoral hegemony: the case of Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey

“Party hegemony” is a macro-level characteristic of party systems, which is a product of persistent and overwhelming electoral victories that leads to domination of the parliamentary system by a single party. Party hegemony can only emerge through a collection of individual-level (albeit aggregated), lower-level structural, and macro-level institutional factors. This article intends to shed light on hegemonic party systems by incorporating all of these aspects. It analyses the case of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey as a hegemonic party in the making. Based on individual-level survey data as well as an original province-level dataset, the article examines the role of ideology, pork barrel politics, economic voting, demographics, and political institutions in AKP's rising hegemony. The replicable nature of the dataset enables further testing of these findings in comparable cases for generalizability.     

Transnational Islamist Networks: Western Fighters in Afghanistan,Somalia and Syria

Abstract

Western Muslims have joined jihadi groups in Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia and Syria to defend Islam from its perceived enemies. Transnational Islamist networks have played a pivotal role in bringing them to conflict zones by fulfilling three functions: radicalisation through mosques, radical preachers, and the Internet; recruitment which can be conducted either physically or digitally; and identity formation that provides the radicalised recruits with a larger cause to fight for as members of an imagined global community. Transnational Islamist networks are multifunctional entities on the rise.     

Cross‐cutting issues and the consolidation of democracy in Taiwan

This article examines the cause of Taiwan's recent successful democratic consolidation. It argues that cross‐cutting issues in the electoral process allow democratic systems to periodically generate new winners. The prospect of reasonable certainty to win gives different political groups, including previously anti‐system or semi‐loyal groups, incentives to adhere to the democratic rules of the game. This process contributed to the democratic consolidation in Taiwan. More specifically, the non‐mainstream faction of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party, which initially opposed democratization, and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which wanted more radical constitutional and political reforms, came to accept the post‐transition democratic regime due to the emergence of new electoral issues. New issues surrounding corruption and socio‐economic reforms allowed both the non‐mainstream faction of the KMT and the DPP to advance their interests through the democratic electoral process.     

From ‘feckless pluralism’ to ‘dominant power politics’? The transformation of Russia's party system

The transformation of Russia's party system demonstrates a trend towards a decrease in party competition since the establishment of the party of power, United Russia, which claims to have become the dominant party. These developments are unique among post-Soviet countries, which merely attempted to create personalist, rather than party-based, monopolies of ruling elites. Why have Russia's elites opted to build a party-based monopoly and what are the prospects of this enterprise? The formation of the ruling group's party-based monopoly is explained with the help of a part-contingent model of an interrelated chain of causes and effects: (1) open electoral conflict among elites; (2) forced instrumental use of political parties as tools by the elites, in this conflict; (3) elite conflict turned into a zero-sum game; (4) a set of incentives for the ruling elite to make further instrumental use of the party of power; (5) an effective constellation of ideological and organizational resources of the party of power. The article also analyses the benefits and risks of the dominance of the party of power and its possible role in the consolidation of a non-democratic regime in Russia, along lines comparable to the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico.     

Blogging in the Shadow of Parties: Exploring Ideological Differences in Online Campaigning

Blogging is an increasingly important practice in election campaigns, showing interesting variations across contexts. Recent research has shown that the adoption and use of blogs is strongly shaped by national institutional settings, that is, the different roles given to parties within political systems. However, intra-national differences in the practice of political blogging are yet to be explained. This article investigates the variation in usage of blogs in electoral campaigns in Sweden, a country characterized by strong political parties and a party-centered form of representative democracy. The central argument is that different parties utilize blogging in different ways. Just as blogging is shaped by how institutions support persons or parties, we propose that political blogging is shaped by party affiliation and ideological positions on individualism and collectivism. The empirical analysis, based on a survey among over 600 blogging politicians, confirms that ideological positions towards individualism and collectivism have a great impact on the uptake and usage of political blogs, portraying political blogging as a strongly ideologically situated practice of political communication.     

Terrorism,counter‐terrorism and democracy: The assessment of national security threats

The development of radical Islamist strategic thinking and the impact of post-modern, Western styles of thought upon the ideology that informs that strategy is often overlooked in conventional discussions of homegrown threats from jihadist militants. The propensity to discount the ideology informing both al-Qaeda and nominally non-violent Islamist movements with an analogous political philosophy like Hizb ut-Tahrir neglects the influence that critical Western modes of thought exercise upon their strategic thinking especially in the context of homegrown radicalization. Drawing selectively on non-liberal tendencies in the Western ideological canon has, in fact, endowed Khilaafaism (caliphism) with both a distinctive theoretical style and strategic practice. In particular, it derives intellectual sustenance from a post-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical thinking that in combination with an “English” School of international relations idealism holds that epistemological claims are socially determined, subjective, and serve the interests of dominant power relations. This critical, normative, and constructivist approach to international relations seeks not only to explain the historical emergence of the global order, but also to transcend it. This transformative agenda bears comparison with radical Islamist critiques of Western ontology and is of interest to Islamism's political and strategic thinking. In this regard, the relativist and critical approaches that have come to dominate the academic social sciences since the 1990s not only reflect a loss of faith in Western values in a way that undermines the prospects for a liberal and pluralist polity, but also, through a critical process facilitated by much international relations orthodoxy, promotes the strategic and ideological agenda of radical Islam. It is this curious strategic and ideological evolution that this paper explores.     

Living in the Past or Living in the Future? Analyzing Parties’ Platform Change In Between Elections,The Netherlands 1997–2014

Do parties change their platform in anticipation of electoral losses? Or do parties respond to experienced losses at the previous election? These questions relate to two mechanisms to align public opinion with party platforms: (1) rational anticipation, and (2) electoral performance. While extant work empirically tested, and found support for, the latter mechanism, the effect of rational anticipation has not been put to an empirical test yet. We contribute to the literature on party platform change by theorizing and assessing how party performance motivates parties to change their platform in-between elections. We built a new and unique dataset of >20,000 press releases issued by 15 Dutch national political parties that were in parliament between 1997 and 2014. Utilizing automated text analysis (topic modeling) to measure parties’ platform change, we show that electoral defeat motivates party platform change in-between elections. In line with existing findings, we demonstrate that parties are backward-looking.     

Structural Sources of Post-Communist Market Reform: Economic Structure, Political Culture, and War

Why did some post-communist countries implement more thorough market reforms than others? Four different structural explanations are considered: (1) relative size of economic interest group coalitions hurt by market reform; (2) predominant religious traditions, which may incorporate norms and institutions more or less favorable to market reform; (3) variation in historically based national economic and political expectations, in which greater pre-communist political and economic achievements may create collective rationales for more aggressive institutional and policy reforms; and (4) duration of large-scale military conflict, which may distract and undermine reformist governments. These explanations are tested both directly, and mediated through plausible process predictors—democratization, party ideological moderation or extremism, strength of the presidency, and party system concentration. The 28 post-communist countries are examined over shorter and longer time spans—2 years after the fall of the old regime and a decade or so after the fall. The two political culture variables—predominant religious tradition and national economic and political expectations—provide the most statistically significant and powerful predictors. War is also a significant and powerful predictor. Relative size of economic interest group coalitions is estimated to have little impact. Among the process variables, democratization and party ideological moderation have the most consistently significant and powerful impacts. One implication is that middle-range theories of political culture, which can be more firmly grounded in rational calculation and historical context, may be a promising way to remedy the weaknesses of political culture theories operating at the broader level of religion or civilization.     

苏维埃政权初期列宁的基层党组织建设理论与实践

十月革命胜利后,布尔什维克党掌握了国家政权,成为执政党。列宁在执政党基层组织建设中,坚持民主集中制,将共产党基层组织活动与工会、青年团等组织结合起来,由党领导其他群众组织共同发挥作用,这些理论和实践活动对苏联共产党的建设产生了深远影响。     

The Challenge of Talking about Terrorism: The EU and the Arab Debate on the Causes of Islamist Terrorism 1

The Arab “hegemonic debate” on the causes of Islamist terrorism nurtures (pan-) Arab, anti-Western sentiments and delegitimizes criticism of the political status quo. The European Union's emphasis on multilateral means of conflict resolution and trade promotion leads to official pronouncements that barely address the Arab world's domestic problems, instead referring to international tensions such as the Arab-Israeli conflict as a particular cause of Islamist terrorism and the need for cooperation with Arab governments. By failing to challenge the official narratives of authoritarian Arab regimes the EU obstructs interests in the democratization of the region and the delegitimization of Islamist violence.     

The Role of Safe Havens in Islamist Terrorism

This article will develop an explanatory theory on terrorist safe havens. Focusing on Islamist Terrorist networks, this article argues that four specific conditions are necessary for the establishment of a safe haven for Islamist terrorist networks: geographic features, weak governance, history of corruption and violence, and poverty. At the conclusion of the article, the developed theory is applied to the Tri-Border Area of South America (TBA), where the frontiers of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, an area overlooked by the 9/11 National Commission Report's list of Islamist terrorists' safe havens.