Hezbollah: Islamist Resistance Comes of Age

The Iranian revolution—the political realization of the Great Refusal of Western modernization—was a direct consequence a half century later of the forced secularization of the Ottoman Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk. With the superstructure of the Muslim ummah dismantled and replaced by the Turkish nation state, insurgent religious movements, from the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite imams of Qum and Najaf, moved into the vacuum to reclaim Islam from the shadow of Western dominance.
Now, history is turning again. Iran has been seized by violent turmoil as it seeks to reconcile democracy and religious rule. Secular Turkey is governed by an Islamist-rooted party. As they struggle to regain their balance, the global economic meltdown threatens a convergence against globalization that joins the Islamist resistance with populist backlashes elsewhere.
Two legendary intelligence agents, a Hezbollah leader, an Iranian dissident philosopher and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate, examine this historical turn.     

Structure,Agency And Hezbollah: a Morphogenetic View

The role and nature of Hezbollah’s involvement in Lebanese politics has been an omnipresent topic in Middle Eastern studies. The recent ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings further accentuated this complex role, given the party’s support for every single popular resistance movement in the Arab world, with the exception of Syria, its major political ally in the region. This stark contradiction highlights once again the question of how far Hezbollah should be perceived as a proxy client of both Iran and Syria or whether it represents an intrinsic and genuine local resistance movement. In this article I argue that scholarly treatment of Hezbollah’s nature, which has oscillated between structure-led, agency-led and dualistic types of analyses, is problematic. The article proposes a historically situated dialectical analysis of structure–agency which can potentially explain better how a legitimate social force can still be understood within the premises of proxy client politics.     

伊朗核问题的实质是伊朗的国家地位问题

自美国总统克林顿1997年5月为惩罚伊朗核计划而签署单方面制裁的行政命令以来,“伊朗核问题”已经存在了13年。13年以来,伊朗在发展核技术上面临的压力越来越大,联合国安理会从2006年起已相继通过了关于伊朗核问题的1个警告决议和3个制裁决议,新的决议也在酝酿之中。     

The Four P-Words of Militant Islamist Radicalization and Recruitment: Persecution,Precedent, Piety,and Perseverance

This article suggests that a single interpretative framework can be used to understand Islamist militant rhetoric, and to compare it to supposedly more orthodox campaigns such as Irish Republican militancy, differences of culture, scale, and lethality. Both refer to histories of persecution; cite exemplars of their just cause drawn from historical precedent; maintain utopian ideals and justifications of violence that drawn from culturally relevant versions of piety; and use examples of perseverance against overwhelming odds drawn from their respective histories. This framework of “4Ps”— persecution, precedent, piety, and perseverance—is apparent even on the Internet, where rhetoric is necessarily atomized.     

各种力量之间的一次较量--联合国改革的实质与前景

今年是联合国历史上最不平静的一年.年初以来,在联合国内围绕着联合国改革问题已举行了多次大会辩论,其激烈程度前所未有,但迄今依然意见纷纭,莫衷一是.这种激烈的辩论预计也将继续出现在9月14日至16日召开的联合国会员国首脑会议和新一届联合国大会上.     

Islamism, Nationalism, and Western Modernity: The Case of Iran and Palestine

The rise of Islamic politics in the Middle East, particularly since the Iranian revolution, is the most cited example that supposedly testifies to the “clean” separation between “Islam” and the “West.” In this essay, I argue that it is not Islamic movements and ideology that confirm this separation. Rather, it is their incorporation into the scheme of Western modernity, with its binary distinctions and evolutionary reading of history, which constructs this separation. Using examples from Iran and Palestine, I show how Islamic ideology indeed defies the basic premises of Western discourse on modernity, expose its limitations, and question the constitution of Islam and the West as allegedly distinct, even opposing, categories.

Iran and Terrorism: The Transatlantic Responses

Since 1979 the United States and several European countries have accused the Islamic Republic of Iran of supporting terrorism. This article does not seek to examine the validity of these accusations. Rather, it analyzes how Washington and Brussels have sought to change Tehran's policy. Special attention is given to organizations such as Hizbollah, Hamas, Jihad, and Mujahideen-e Khalq. In addition, Ayatollah Khomeini's Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Mykonos trial, and the Flatow Amendment are discussed. The article highlights the differences between the American and European approaches toward Iran and suggests that more cooperation between the two sides of the Atlantic is needed.     

金砖国家合作的宗旨、精神和机制建设

金砖国家合作的宗旨与精神一、金砖国家自身合作的特点金砖国家的形成和发展体现了当代国际力量对比的量变和质变进程,顺应了当代国际潮流的趋势,推动着国际体系朝着更加公正合理的方向前进。金砖国家正成为当代南南合作和南北对话的重要载体。     

The politics of the pipeline: The Iran and Afghanistan conflict

A war between Iran and the Taliban's Afghanistan was averted in September 1998. The roots of the animosity between the two sides go much deeper than the killings of Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan and the reported massacre of Afghan Shi'ites by the Taliban. As the Iranians see it, an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban is a threat to Iran's national security and economic and political interests not only in Afghanistan but, more importantly, in oil-rich Central Asia. The article argues that at the heart of the conflict between Iran and the Taliban is the question of whether Iran or Afghanistan should be the route for the export of oil and gas from landlocked Central Asia to world markets, as well as Pakistan's plan to use Afghanistan as a corridor to Central Asia. As explained in the article, for commercial and political reasons the Afghanistan route is preferred by both Islamabad and Washington. However, international oil companies prefer the Iran route as it is the shortest, safest and most economical.     

Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory

The idea our global polity is chiefly divided by territorially organized nation-states captures contemporary constellations of power and authority only insufficiently. Through a decoupling of power and the state, political spaces no longer match geographical spaces. Instead of simply acknowledging a challenge to the state, there is the need to rethink the changing meaning of space for political processes. The paper identifies three aspects, a reconceptualization of the spatial assumptions that IR needs to address: the production of space, the constitutive role of boundaries, and the problem of order. With this contribution, we argue that one avenue in understanding the production of space and the following questions of order is by converging systems theory and critical geopolitics. While the latter has already developed a conceptual apparatus to analyze the production of space, the former comes with an encompassing theoretical background, which takes "world society" as the starting point of analysis. In this respect, nation states are understood as a form of internal differentiation of a wider system, namely world society.     

The Antisocial Police Personality: A View from the Inside

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of two surveys, conducted in 1993 and 1997, which inquired into the attitudes towards aspects of their immediate and external working environments of New Zealand's senior health officials. The surveys are in the tradition of a growing body of international research which seeks to categorize respondents in terms of their bureaucratic “type.” Where the 1993 survey produced baseline information, the 1997 exercise served as a follow-up. Accordingly, the paper compares various results and discusses shifts in attitudinal orientation and bureaucratic classification. Key findings are that, in 1997, there has been a growth in both the number of “technocrats,” respondents with an aversion to politics but a strong commitment to policy programmes, and in the number of “classical bureaucrats,” respondents, again, with a dislike of politics but, in contrast to technocrats, with a short-term focus and tendency to react to policy problems as they arise. It is concluded that, while restructuring of the New Zealand health sector continues, there is a need to nurture “political bureaucrats:” those who can operate in a politicized environment and who can plan ahead with the participation of the attentive public.     

Islamic Fundamentalism and Women's Economic Role: The Case of Iran

It is commonly believed that Islamic fundamentalism is responsible for the low female employment rate in the Middle East and North Africa. I earlier presented evidence from Indonesia indicating that the deteriorating conditions of women's economic role in the 1990s was related to the economic circumstances of the Asian Crisis, not to the rise of political Islam (Bahranitash, 2002). In fact, in Indonesia, increasing support for the Islamic movement was itself spurred by the Asian Crisis. As a contrasting case, I here examine Iran, a country where political Islam has been in power for over two decades. If commonly held views about the impact of the Islamic religion on female employment were true, one would expect a steady or sharp decline of the female employment rate in postrevolutionary Iran. The empirical data show the reverse. Women's formal employment rates increased in the 1990s and did so much faster than they had during the 1960s and 1970s, when a pro-Western secular regime was in power. This sharp increase in women's employment seriously challenges the view that religion explains women's economic status in Muslim countries. The evidence from Iran indicates that the situation of women's employment there has followed a common pattern of elsewhere in the South—an overall increase in female employment. This fact then suggests that the forces of international political economy, rather than religion, appear to be a determining factor in the state of women's economic role in Iran.     

The Internet,the Perpetual Beta,and the State: The Long View of the New Medium

Though fecund as a medium across which subversive ideas can be propagated, the Internet is also hazardous to these ideas. By virtue of the perpetual beta and the increasing under-dominance of Internet content, which effectively means there is no last edit on the Internet, all ideas, including militant ones, are subject to the scrutiny of Internet users. The hazard of the perpetual beta and the new plasticity of information is atomizing the violent militant memes associated with Al Qaeda.     

The Varieties of Religious Reform: Public Intelligentsia in Iran

Religious intellectuals play a pivotal role in the transformation of the Islamic Republic of Iran from an uneasy mélange of theocracy and democracy to a liberal democratic state with a religious tinge. This article examines the provenance of reform religious intelligentsia (in contradistinction to the leading intellectuals of the reform) and its varieties. Religious intelligentsia are the carriers of the triple strands of reform thought (radical, muckraking, and political) among the engagé intelligentsia in Iran. This paper is a timely contribution and functions as a snapshot of the religious reform at the brink of the second landslide victory of President Khatami.