“Martyrdom is Life”: Jihad and Martyrdom in the Ideology of Hamas

This article analyzes the articulation of the doctrine of “Jihad of the Sword” and martyrdom by the Islamic Resistance Movement of Palestine, Hamas, as a central pillar of Palestinian identity and as a major source of political mobilization and national empowerment. As part of this concept Hamas presents martyrdom as the epitome of jihad and of Islamic belief. The end-goal of jihad is the destruction of Israel and the elimination of the Jews. By emphasizing the centrality of “Jihad of the Sword” Hamas's ideas reveal a certain similarity to, or inspiration by, radical Salafi-jihadist Islamic movements. While Hamas adopted a pragmatic approach on short-term tactics, these doctrines impose constraints on the scope of a profound ideological transformation it can undergo.     

The Ascendance of Political Islam: Hamas and consolidation in the Gaza Strip

This article outlines the means by which the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas has developed and implemented a consolidation of power strategy that is inexorably driving it to a state of increasingly authoritarian control in the Gaza Strip. It discusses the factors that have driven Hamas in terms of power seeking as primordial to all radical Islamist movements or as a result of or response to other factors outside its control. The article highlights the concurrent demise of the Fatah organisation in the Gaza Strip as the largest and most visible symbol of secularism. It then reflects on the role of external, including international, actors in accelerating consolidation tactics following the Hamas ‘takeover’ of power from the Fatah-dominated institutions of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in June 2007. The article aims to demonstrate that Hamas' control in Gaza is an important signpost in terms of developing Islamism in the Middle East region.     

Crescent and Sword: The Hamas enigma

This article analyses the popular support for Hamas, the most important of the Palestinian Islamist movements today and charts the movement's historical ascendancy from a fringe Gaza-based group to a mainstream Islamist movement and mouthpiece for dispossessed Palestinians. Since 2001 Hamas's leadership has come under increasing attack from Israel, which has killed a number of the movement's leaders and senior members, most prominently Sheikh Yasin, the movement's founder and spiritual leader, and his successor as Hamas leader, Abd al-Aziz Rantissi. Nonetheless, Hamas's duality as ‘worshippers’ and ‘warmongers’ has made the organisation extraordinarily popular among dispossessed Palestinians and has created a mounting political challenge to the secular nationalism of the plo. At present two-thirds of the Palestinians live below the ‘poverty line’ and it is likely that it is in this disenfranchised segment of the population that Hamas finds its core support. About one in every six Palestinians in the Occupied Territories benefits from support from Islamic charities. Hamas, for its part, allocates almost all its revenues to its social services, but there is no evidence that Hamas or the other Islamic charities provide assistance conditional upon political support.     

Al Qaeda as a Dune Organization: Toward a Typology of Islamic Terrorist Organizations

Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups offer the analyst a highly complex challenge. The current literature classifies Islamic terrorist organizations as either networked or hierarchical. Yet, this classification fails to account for the appearance on the international stage of a new type of global terrorism. Most notably, it does not capture the structure and mode of operation of Al Qaeda as it emerged after the 2001 U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan. This article therefore introduces a new conceptthe Dune organizationthat is distinct from other organizational modes of thinking. This conceptualization leads to a new typology of Islamic terrorist organizations. This typology concentrates on organizational behavior patterns and provides a framework for a comparative analysis of terrorist movements, which is applied to a study of Al Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.     

Doing Well by Doing Good: Understanding Hamas's Social Services as Political Advertising

Like many nonstate military actors, Hamas has long provided social services to its constituents, but the mechanism by which charity leads to increased public support is poorly understood. This article argues that providing charity benefits nonstate actors not because it isolates recipients or acts as a bribe but because it allows organizations like Hamas to overcome the legacies of their own military activities and extremist ideologies. Service provision allows them to demonstrate that they are not merely soldiers or ideologues, but capable bureaucrats and managers as well.     

Jihadist Highway to Jihadist Haven: Turkey's Jihadi Policies and Western Security

Turkish support to jihadists is not merely a tactic aimed at removing Assad from power. It stems from a strategic decision on the part of Turkish authorities to influence Middle East affairs through non-state actors, much as Iran has been doing for some time. Turkey's support of jihadists transiting into Syria and its establishment of close ties with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are joint aspects of this strategy. Turkish authorities have permitted Al Qaeda sympathizers to use pro-government media to promote their beliefs. The authorities have adopted a new political language that fuels anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. Prosecutors who have attempted to prevent shipments of weapons to Al Qaeda–affiliated groups in Syria have been fired and in some cases incarcerated. Indeed, by now Turkish prosecutors and the Turkish National Police are thoroughly intimidated. Not a single counterterror operation has been launched to disrupt Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s networks or recruitment activities. The Turkish National Intelligence Organization has been given full responsibility to deal with jihadist activities, without any active oversight, and the police are loath to venture into their territory. As a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey's jihadi policies have direct and indirect impact on Western security. This article examines Turkey's jihadi policies by examining official statements, media reports, interviews, and fieldwork.     

Bombers and Bystanders in Suicide Attacks in Israel, 2000 to 2003

This article analyses the results of interaction between suicide operatives and bystanders in the course of 103 suicide attacks in Israel over a recent 3-year period. It shows that bystanders' intervention tended to reduce the casualties arising by numbers that were both statistically and practically significant. When bystanders intervened, however, this was often at the cost of their own lives. The value of a challenge was particularly large for suicide missions associated with Hamas, but Hamas operations were also less likely to meet a challenge in the first place. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for counterterrorism. More systematic collection of statistical data relating to suicide incidents would be of benefit.     

Al Qaeda Confronts Hamas: Divisions in the Sunni Jihadist Movement and its Implications for U.S. Policy

Almost eight years after the September 2001 attacks, U.S. counterterrorism strategy would benefit from a clearer definition of its adversaries. Some have suggested that U.S. counterterrorism policy focus primarily on Sunni jihadists. This term would account for groups such as Al Qaeda and the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines, but not Shi'ite militias in Iraq or Hizbullah. Although any attempt to narrow the scope of U.S. counterterrorism strategy has merit, it is worth noting that important distinctions exist between the various groups. To explore these distinctions, this article examines the different historical trajectories and current arguments between two of the most well-known Sunni jihadists: Al Qaeda and Hamas.     

In the Name of the Cause: Women's Work in Secular and Religious Terrorism

The article begins by providing a brief history of the involvement of females in the conduct of modern terrorism and discusses the different ideological mindsets that account for their becoming more involved in terrorism associated with ethno-separatist rather than religious concerns, with an eye to the fact that the trend shows unmistakable signs of changing. Secondly, it considers the structure of logic, or systems of contention, that secular and religious groups employ in attempting to legitimize women and girls offering themselves up as martyrs, and discusses what mechanisms they share for doing so. The thesis of this paper is that secular and religious terrorism, though seeking to create significantly different worlds, one modern, the other traditional, fall back upon many of the same rhetorical strategies to justify females engaging in political violence, especially the rhetoric of martyrdom. The Sri Lankan nationalist-based Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is highlighted as the secular example and Hamas and Islamic Jihad as the religious ones.     

Could Hamas Target the West?

A violent Islamist organization, Hamas, is also a nationalist movement that holds “resistance” to Israel as its highest goal. Unlike global terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, Hamas has traditionally confined its violent activities to the local arena comprising Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. While citizens of Western countries have been killed in Hamas' indiscriminate suicide bombings, Hamas has not taken its violent campaign abroad targeting Israeli diplomats or Western allies. Indeed, several layers of disincentives mitigate against Hamas targeting Israeli interests abroad or targeting Western interests. But under what conditions might Hamas be prepared to target Western interests? The answer to this question requires a level of analysis approach that considers Hamas as an organization, as a conglomerate of semi-independent cells, and as a wellspring for rogue cells and independent actors, with these last two entities posing the greatest future threat. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is precedent for Hamas considering the attacks on Israeli interests abroad and on Western interests themselves. In final analysis, the author believes Hamas unlikely to attack Western interests in the short term. But the following analysis reveals that under certain conditions Hamas' attack calculus could change in the future.     

Transitional Justice as Global Project: critical reflections

This article critically reflects on the ways in which the global project of transitional justice is channelled or streamlined in its scope of application. Using the categories of when, to whom and for what transitional justice applies, it argues that transitional justice is typically constructed to focus on specific sets of actors for specific sets of crimes. This results in a fairly narrow interpretation of violence within a somewhat artificial time frame and to the exclusion of external actors. The article engages themes of gender, power and structural violence to caution against the narrowing and depoliticisation of transitional justice.     

Making post-Soviet counterpublics: the aesthetics of Limonka and the National-Bolshevik Party

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaper Limonka. In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discusses Limonka’s editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence, Limonka proposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture, Limonka produced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination of stiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militant stiob,” should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.     

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.     

Vivir bien governance in Bolivia: chimera or attainable utopia?

The notion of vivir bien – a complex set of ideas, worldviews, and knowledge deriving from indigenous movements, activist groups, and scholars of indigeneity – has become an overarching principle for policy-making and state transformation processes in Andean countries. This article analyses the contradiction between the principle of vivir bien as an egalitarian utopian category and its bureaucratic application in Bolivia to state formation processes and power dynamics involving social movements. It argues that while discursively grounded on such egalitarian principles as reciprocity and rotating authority, its implementation entails bureaucratic propensities to centralise power and authority. Instead of decolonising the state, it is used to discipline the masses.     

Huan Xiang

It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided societies but little attention has been paid to its applicability to societies where the primary political cleavage is between secular and religious forces. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the applicability of consociationalism to the case of the Palestinian Territory. We argue that, while Palestinian society is characterised by ‘pillarisation’ along a secularist/Islamist cleavage, formal power-sharing between the representatives of the two main Palestinian factions, namely Fatah and Hamas, has proved elusive. However, rather than seeking to explain the seeming inability of the factions to share power by reference to the nature of the cleavage, as other authors have done, we instead highlight the contextual factors that have made power sharing difficult to achieve, namely the difficulties Hamas and Fatah face in accepting each other as political partners, and opposition from external actors.     

The Struggle to Be Seen: Social Movements and the Public Sphere in Brazil

This paper analyzes how community movement activity in three popular neighborhoods in Belém, Brazil, shaped the dynamics of contention in the public sphere. Popular social forces, elite actors, and the state mutually influence each other across three moments of public interaction: it clarifying popular discourse, it the struggle to be seen, and routine politics. The article reverses the usual picture in movement research, which emphasizes movements as organizational outcomes to be explained, and instead builds on a body of research that explores how movements can contribute to broader processes of political change.     

Evaluating Nashi's Sustainability: Autonomy,Agency and Activism

This article explores the development of the Russian youth movement Nashi and its relationship with the state with the purpose of assessing the movement's long-term sustainability. Establishing a link between activists' political autonomy and their potential ability to sustain the movement without state support, this article examines the validity of the assumption that Nashi is simply an extension of the state, which the state can unilaterally direct as it sees fit. It contends that despite the movement's allegiance to the incumbent regime and its utilisation of state resources, Nashi activists have become increasingly politically autonomous and therefore capable of sustaining the movement in their own right.     

The International Criminal Court: limits,potential and conditions for the promotion of justice and peace

The International Criminal Court ( icc ) aims to promote not only justice, but also peace. It has been widely criticised for doing neither, yet it has to contend with some severe structural and political difficulties: it has limited resources, it faces institutional restrictions, it is manipulated by states, and it is criticised for an alleged selectivity in the way it dispenses justice. However, the icc could contribute significantly to the promotion of international justice and peace, and have a major impact on the prevention of crime, since its prosecutions represent a clear threat to highly placed individuals who commit serious crimes. While this article concentrates on the work of the icc in Africa, the only continent where it has issued indictments against suspected criminals, it also looks at its efforts on other continents. It argues that, in the larger international context, the contribution of the icc to international justice and peace depends on its institutional power and the support it receives from states, on its own impartial work, and on the way it is perceived by potential criminals and victims in the world.     

Static law and dynamic administration: Marshall dimock's assault on the legal profession

This article examines Marshall Dimock's thought on the relation between public administration and law. The examination revolves around his book, Law and Dynamic Administration,but also incorporates insights from his many other works. Dimock treated the idea of rule of law as an important source of authority and guiding principles for both the public administrative and legal professions. He criticized the legal profession harshly for its tendency in this century to disparage and reject law as such a source. Its treatment of law has led to many abuses that affect the legitimacy and efficacy of all who govern in our society. Dimock hoped to reunify the fields with a common jurisprudence that is mindful of public, institutional needs. In the process, he pressed the point that public administrators should be legal artisans in their own right, contributing confidently to the content and processes of the law for public benefit.     

The Struggle for Meaning of Obshchestvennyi Kontrol’ in Contemporary Russia: Civic Participation between Resistance and Compliance after the 2011–2012 Elections

This article explores contrasting conceptions of the essentially contested concept obshchestvennyi kontrol’, as understood by the anti-systemic opposition and the Kremlin. It shows that the period of contention accompanying the 2011–2012 elections allowed competing narratives of this concept to emerge. First, the opposition presented it as a means for citizens to hold corrupt authorities accountable to the law; second, the Kremlin promoted it as a means to enhance government efficiency. The article shows that the Kremlin has co-opted the counter-hegemonic discourse into a new law which delimits the possibilities for enacting this concept in a fashion that recalls Soviet governance practices.