Islam,Islamism, and Post‐Islamism: Rediscovering Politics after the War on Terror

Over the past twenty years, an influential body of conservative scholarship has focused on the alleged conflict between Islam and the West. Following widespread criticism of this scholarship, a number of commentators have revived its core assumptions to claim that the real conflict is between liberal democracy within Muslim societies and the political ideology of Islamism. In this article we trace the evolution of this scholarship, and suggest that recent empirical developments in the Muslim world suggest the potential for post‐Islamist parties to successfully adapt to the demands of democratic competition within Muslim societies. In this context, the emerging conflict is not between Islam and the West, or Islamism and the West, but between two very different discursive practices within the Muslim world that invoke Islam for radically different purposes. A traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he's in. ¹      

全球视野中的菲律宾伊斯兰化历史进程

菲律宾南部的穆斯林问题一直是现代菲律宾社会的热点,历史上的菲律宾也经受过伊斯兰教的重大影响。伊斯兰教传入菲律宾是它在东南亚迅猛的传播、扩张运动的一个组成部分,其传入菲律宾的过程可分为四个历史阶段。在全球视角中,菲律宾的伊斯兰化始于伊斯兰在全世界范围内东扩到达东南亚,一面是伊斯兰教东进,一面是西班牙西进、葡萄牙东进,在东南亚东端的菲律宾相遇碰撞。所以菲律宾的伊斯兰化是整个伊斯兰世界的扩张及其与基督教世界的争夺中的一个组成部分,是基督教世界绕过半个地球来到远东与伊斯兰世界再次发生文明冲突的碰撞的标志。     

Right-Wing Violence in Germany: Assessing the Objectives,Personalities and Terror Trail of the National Socialist Underground and the State's Response to It

In the last five years the forces of organised right-wing extremism have made electoral advances across many states in contemporary Europe. Germany has not been immune and the extreme right party, the National Democratic Party of Germany won its first seat in the European Parliament since 1989. The recent successes of the extreme right pose issues for European society about tolerance and immigration policy, but this scene has also been associated with an upsurge in racially motivated political violence and acts of right-wing terrorism. Much of this violence is perpetrated by small neo-Nazi styled groups. This paper looks at the most notorious and recent of such groups to emerge in Germany, the National Socialist Underground. The paper explores the origins and personalities behind this terror cell, provides derails of its criminal activities and murder spree, and questions why it took so long for the authorities to identify the NSU.     

Agency and Terror: Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin's Great Terror

This article presents an account of the history of Soviet repression, which integrates our current understanding of the scale and nature of repression with a history of the agents responsible for carrying out these operations. It notes that the major shifts in the nature of repression were accompanied by shifts in the operational leadership within the security forces, and that it was largely the same groups of individuals who were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization and the Great Terror. These were the groups associated with Efim Georgievich Evdokimov, which operated in Ukraine during the Civil War, in the North Caucasus in the 1920s, and in the Secret Operational Division within OGPU in 1929‐1931. Evdokimov transferred into party administration in 1934 when he became party secretary for North Caucasus Krai. But he appears to have continued advising Stalin and Yezhov on Security matters, and the latter relied upon Evdokimov's former colleagues to carry out the mass killing operations that are known as “The Great Terror” in 1937‐1938.     

Violence,the Subject,and the Beyond: Achille Mbembe and Violence in International Relations Theory

A double-barrelled question underpins this special edition: can International Relations (IR) be decolonised? If so, how? I argue that IR's insistence on more-or-less concretised subjects, which engage in dialectical relations of struggle, renders the discipline (and the practice it engenders) constitutionally blind to the origins of colonial violence. Traditional theory necessarily elides the violence which forges legible concrete actors and which culminates in colonialism and slavery. I offer a critique of this theoretical structure through Achille Mbembe's reading of Bataille, Fanon, Hegel, and Kojève, and I close by touching on the decolonising potential of Édouard Glissant's work for academic IR. I conclude that IR can indeed be decolonised, but it must become something quite unrecognisable if it is to do so.