Islamism,secularism and post-Islamism: the Muslim world and the case of Bangladesh

This paper provides a historical overview of the emerging post-Islamist phenomenon in the Muslim world and discusses the scope for sustainable democratic politics in Bangladesh. In the process, a model is proposed that purports to exhibit a level of compatibility with the perceived political landscape in Bangladesh. The model adopts a version of the Hotelling–Downs principle of democracy and sets it within the ‘post-Islamist’ paradigm in such a way that, if it can be implemented, even if only partially, may lead to the sustained political stability of Bangladesh. The paper highlights illiberal and undemocratic practices of the two dominant Bangladeshi political parties as a major feature of the present status quo. These practices dominate Bangladeshi politics through the continuous attempts of their exponents to impose monopolistic views on the various symbols of national identity, despite the multi-racial, multi-religious nature of Bangladesh society. The paper concludes that a democratic system of politics, which accommodates aspects of secularism, language, Muslim identity and post-Islamist ‘Islamic ethical–moral–legal codes’, remains the feasible political discourse for forming and consolidating the country’s multi-racial, multi-religious national identity over the long run and its survival as a sovereign state.     

Religious change in a minority context: transforming Islam in Sri Lanka

Scholarly work exists on how Muslim minority positioning affects identity and politics, but what is less known is its impact on religion. Sri Lanka’s 9% Muslim population, the country’s second largest minority, has undergone a series of recent changes to religious identity, thinking and practice, which have been shaped by its relationship to the dominant and warring ‘ethnic others’. As Sri Lanka plunged deeper into armed conflict in the 1990s, Muslims experienced significant shifts in religious thinking and practice, identifying strictly with a more ‘authentic’ Islam. After the war ended in 2009, Muslims became the target of majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist violence, resulting in a reinterpretation of Islam and a counter process of change. Using the Sri Lankan Muslim case study to engage with scholarly critiques of majority–minority binaries, this article analyses how religious change is brought about through the interjection of minority status with ethno-nationalisms and conflict. Its focus on Islam in Sri Lanka contributes to area studies and to Islamic studies, the latter through a rare analysis of Islamic reform in a Muslim minority context.     

When the center can hold: The primacy of politics in shaping Russian democracy

Violations of rights, a weak Duma, political parties dominated by bureaucrats, and corrupt privatization are ordinarily taken as signs or even causes of the failure of democracy in Russia or at best as normal traits of electoral politics in a middle-income state. Yet all of these are natural consequences of introducing democracy in a country with the Russian electorate’s distinctive recent experience of a loss of a third of the state’s territory and half its population. In such a democracy only a centrist, not a liberal, strategy can block a return to authoritarianism, and such a strategy in Russia will subordinate rights to the task of privatization that a Duma weakened by ideological, demographic and geographic impediments to party development cannot conduct. Consequently what are taken as signs or causes of democratic failure in Russia are instead necessary effects of introducing democracy in Russia’s special circumstances.     

Contested National Identity and Political Crisis in Bangladesh: Historical Analysis of the Dynamics of Bangladeshi Society and Politics

This paper develops the theme that the ongoing political polarization and political crisis in Bangladesh since its independence from Pakistan in 1971 reflect the fundamental weaknesses of the pillars of Bangladeshi society and national identity. The paper adopts an historical approach to explain why and how Muslim nationalism, which was the basis for the establishment of Pakistan, has re-emerged in contemporary Bangladeshi society and politics and is competing against Bengali ethnicity, language, culture and secularism (‘Bengali nationalism’) within an emerging ‘two-party’ political system. However, instead of establishing a stable political system following the Hotelling–Downs principle of democracy, the Bangladeshi society/polity has been polarized and divided almost vertically on the question of national identity and political philosophy and created sustained political instability and uncertainty. This has stifled the formation and consolidation of a national identity based on ethnicity/language/culture or religion/territory/political history or that have elements of both. Neither ethnicity/language/culture/secularism-based nationalism (Bengali nationalism) nor predominantly Muslim-territorial nationalism (‘Bangladeshi nationalism’) alone can dominate and flourish in Bangladeshi society and polity; instead, the objective conditions in the country dictate that a competitive democratic system of politics which accommodates aspects of secularism, language, Muslim identity and Islamic ethical–moral codes remains the feasible political discourse for forming and consolidating the country's multi-racial, multi-religious national identity over the long run and its survival as a sovereign state.     

‘Animals first!’ The rise of animal advocacy parties in the EU: a new party family

‘Euro Animal 7’ is the name given informally to 7 animal protection parties which represent voters in Cyprus, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. These parties contested in the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election and gained representation in Germany and the Netherlands. Animal advocacy parties are also represented in the national parliaments of Portugal and the Netherlands.

Animal protection is an emergent issue in international politics and this research offers an account of the political positioning of these animal advocacy parties, analyzing their manifestos and the election results. While acknowledging that some parties have distinct ideological traits and some are still reclusive in the form of a single-issue party, this article argues that animal advocacy parties constitute a new party family in European politics.     

Why Political Competition Can Increase Patronage

Patronage is important in developing countries, but its relationship to political competition has received little attention. Major literatures generate opposing predictions. In the good governance and democracy literatures, robust political competition is the antidote to patronage. But for scholars studying the process of democratization, competitive politics is associated with heightened social tensions and instability. Using data from an original survey covering 88% of local governments in Ghana, I show that political competition can increase patronage: where local elections are closely fought by the two main parties, local governments provide significantly more public sector jobs. I use qualitative data from 9 months of fieldwork to show the causal channel. I find a bottom-up phenomenon in which pressures for patronage come from parties’ own volunteers. Volunteers actively use their parties’ vulnerability in competitive elections to extract rewards. I locate the root of volunteers’ power in the nature of the party system, and I demonstrate that for 19 African countries, variation in party system strength is linked to certain forms of clientelism. These findings challenge assumptions that competitive politics will reduce patronage, as well as assumptions that a decline in one form of clientelism means a decline in all forms of clientelism.     

White Turks,Black Turks? Faultlines beyond Islamism versus secularism

According to popular views, contemporary Turkish politics is defined by the ideological conflict between Islamist and secularist parties. However, the focus on the Islamism versus secularism dichotomy, a common bias in the studies of Muslim countries, disguises a deeper faultline between the old urban elites and the newly rising provincial actors. This article highlights the need to see beyond the ‘Islamism–secularism’ divide and to consider the complex relations of power between alienated social groups in Turkey. It analyses the intricate and multi-layered forms of ‘othering’ in the urban secularist discourse, which perpetuates the inequalities and contention in society. Instead of taking the ‘Islamism–secularism’ divide as given, the article analyses the construction of secularist and Islamic identities and considers how this dichotomous discourse has empowered the urban parties to control the provincial. Finally, implications for the reconciliation of antagonised social groups are presented.     

Know thy enemy: Hizbullah, ‘terrorism’ and the politics of perception

The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims and in enduring the verbal and military onslaught against it. Although it is not the intention here to reduce explanations for Hizbullah's durability to discursive politics, this article suggests that both the labelling of Hizbullah as terrorist and, conversely, its identification as a ‘lebanonised’ political force that is about to make its conversion into an unarmed political party are misleading and incapable of grasping this organisation's complexities. In fact, both ‘terrorist’ and ‘lebanonised’ labels produce a quality of knowledge inferior to that produced by Hizbullah's own conceptualisation of its enemies. But most importantly, the debate on Hizbullah's alleged terrorist nature has obscured several of its traits that many should register before passing judgement on it. Our analysis shows that the variety of institutions Hizbullah has been carefully elaborating and readapting over the past two decades in Lebanon operate today as a holistic and integrated network which produce sets of values and meanings embedded in an interrelated religious and political framework—that of the wilayat al-faqih. These meanings are disseminated on a daily basis among Shi'a constituencies through the party's institutionalised networks and serve to mobilise them into ‘the society of the Resistance’ (mujtamaa’ al-muqawama), which is the foundation of the hala al-islamiyya (Islamic sphere) in Lebanon. Accordingly, any prospect of Hizbullah's transformation away from armed ‘resistance’ should be firmly placed in an analysis of its hegemony among the Shi'a of Lebanon and of the tools it uses to acquire and sustain this status.     

Politics of exclusion and institutional transformation in Ethiopia

Ethiopia experienced a critical juncture in 1991 with the defeat of the military dictatorship, opening up the possibilities of a new political order. Since then the country underwent social engineering and institutional transformation emerging as a leading reformist state under hegemonic-party rule with high institutional state capacity but also a concentration, and even personalisation, of decision-making power. This approximates to a path of ‘authoritarian institutionalisation’. This article argues that Ethiopia’s institutional trajectory can be explained by the nature of coalition politics in the formative years of transition, specifically the extent to which credible challengers were excluded from transitional processes. The strategy of excluding Pan-Ethiopian parties and sideling the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) set the country on the path of establishing a hegemonic rule by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Sustaining hegemonic rule entailed fending off threats from excluded groups in the 1990s but which coalesced into a strong electoral performance in the 2005 elections in whose aftermath the ruling party embarked on aggressive pursuit of state-directed development for political legitimation.     

Europarties and party development in EU-candidate states: The case of Bulgaria

This article examines the direct impact of Europarties on domestic party development, taking the case of Bulgaria when it was a European Union (EU) candidate country. It combines arguments from party theory and the Europeanisation literature and focuses on the overlap of these two fields of study and it investigates the direct impact of Europarties on the choice of electoral strategies made by political parties in candidate states. The study begins by proposing an analytical model that explains the electoral behaviour of political parties based on traditional propositions in comparative party studies. Then it proposes to view international impact as an additional constraint on that behaviour. The main argument is that, in certain situations, Europarties have intervened in domestic party politics and have played a role in the decision of parties to choose certain electoral strategies. It is suggested therefore, that viewing party electoral behaviour purely from the perspective of domestic politics would not only be misleading, but would also lead us to expect behaviour that might not have been a possible alternative for the parties at a given point in time.     

Political parties,party systems,and economic reforms: The Turkish case

Turkey’s experience with economic reforms and democratization since the early 1980s underscores the importance of the political parties and the party systems in the interactions between these two processes. The country’s experience with democratic politics and a multiparty system made a significant contribution to the resumption of electoral politics and redemocratization following three years of military rule in the early 1980s. However, the opening up of the political space and the reemergence of competitive party politics ultimately created problems for the successful completion of the economic reforms, as one-party dominance and majority-party governments gave way to fragmentation in the party system with weak coalition governments. The Turkish case is instructive of the difficulties facing countries that seek to simultaneously consolidate their democracies and liberalize their economies. Sabri Sayari is executive director of the Institute of Turkish Studies and research professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He has written extensively on Turkey’s domestic politics and foreign policy, and on issues related to political development, parties and party systems, and democratization.     

The iron law of Erdogan: the decay from intra-party democracy to personalistic rule

Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ suggests that oligarchic party rule is inevitable, yet many parties have shown a strong commitment to intra-party democracy. However, Turkey’s akp is a typified case of Michels’ law, displaying an explicit commitment to intra-party democracy, only to later abandon it. I ask what factors have facilitated this transformation. Why does the iron law of oligarchy display itself in some parties but not in others? I argue that intra-party democracy owes its existence to three indicators – inclusiveness, decentralisation and institutionalisation. Conversely, it should be observed that a party shifting from democratic to oligarchic or personalistic intra-party rule will display decreasing levels of these three indicators in terms of policy formation and candidate selection. By tracing akp’s internal party operations since its founding in 2001, I demonstrate a gradual deterioration in these indicators, reflecting a gradual deterioration of democracy within the party to oligarchy and then to personalism.     

Sectarianism and the prevalence of ‘othering’ in Islamic thought

The current sectarian conflicts in the Middle East did not arise solely from renewed geopolitical rivalries between regional powers. They are also rooted in a solid, theological articulation proposed by classic Islamic political theology. The exclusivist approach, which is a decisive part of the political, social and religious reality of today’s Middle East, benefits from a formidable theological legacy. Coining the notion of ‘othering theology’, this paper not only explores the ideas of leading classical theologians who have articulated a puritanical understanding of faith, but also explicates the politico-historical context in which these theologians rationalised their quarrels. Given the pervasive presence of these theologies in the contemporary sectarian polemics, the study of classical othering theology is highly relevant and, indeed, crucial to any attempt to overcome sectarianism in the region.     

EXPLAINING RADICAL POLICY CHANGE: THE CASE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY POLICY UNDER THE BRITISH LABOUR GOVERNMENT 2006–10

An innovative framework combining the ‘multiple streams’ (MS) and ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (PE) models of agenda‐setting is used to explain the transformation of UK climate change and energy policy under the Labour Government between 2006 and 2010. The coupling of the problem, politics and policy streams by policy entrepreneurs (MS), and changes in policy image and institutional venues (PE), were critical in opening a policy window, disrupting the existing policy monopoly and enabling radical policy initiatives. The case study suggests two revisions to the models: (1) policy windows can remain open far longer than either model typically predicts; and (2) party politics, especially where party competition generates a ‘competitive consensus’, can be important for both initiating and prolonging policy change in parliamentary systems. An important factor typically overlooked by both models is the significant policy entrepreneurship role that government ministers can play, particularly when an issue becomes part of their ‘narrative identity’.     

Voting ‘against all’ in postcommunist Russia

Since the early 1990s voters in Russia (and most of the other post-Soviet republics) have been offered the opportunity to vote ‘against all’ parties and candidates. Increasing numbers have done so. The evidence of two post-election surveys indicates that ‘against all’ voters are younger than other voters, more urban and more highly educated. They do not reject liberal democracy, but are critical of the contemporary practice of Russian politics and find no parties that adequately reflect their views. With the ending of the ‘against all’ facility in 2006 and other changes in the Russian electoral system under the Putin presidency, levels of turnout are likely to fall further and the protest vote will seek other outlets within or outside the parliamentary system.     

Reluctant terrorists? Transcaucasian social-cemocracy, 1901 – 1909

This article discusses the development of Transcaucasian social-democratic terrorism from 1901 to 1909. For two reasons the ‘psychohistorical’ model emphasising the subjective and irrational aspects of terrorism has only limited value for the Transcaucasian case. First, the significance of the contextual factor is powerfully underscored by the phenomenon of workers' ‘economic terrorism’. It was not uncommon even, for workers to blackmail reluctant party organisations into supporting the killing of their enemies. Secondly, the social democrats were not driven by irrational urges but followed a rationally motivated and selective terrorist strategy. They attempted to limit or prevent workers' terrorism from below, the ‘anarchist’ potential of which they considered a threat to the organised mass struggle. They set their hopes on a division of labour, with a militant but mostly peaceful workers' movement and terrorism as the prerogative of the party.     

Preparing for power: The German Greens and the challenge of party politics

This article argues that although there is no contradiction as such between radical commitment and practical politics, the demands of modern party and electoral politics present a challenge to radical parties. The case of the German Greens, Europe's most successful ecology party, is examined in this context, as they have faced this dilemma since their take-off into mainstream politics in the 1980s. This article assesses their response to the radicalism versus realism challenge over the past two decades, as well as considering its impact on the organizational structure of the party, its electoral strategy, ideology and policy agenda.     

Bangladesh Politics: Confrontation,Monopoly and Crisis in Governance

Despite the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Bangladesh since 1991, political governance of the country is still mired by innumerable ills. It broadly features a wide array of confrontation, competition, monopolization of state institutions and resources by the party in power. This trend of politics has tremendously weakened the formal accountability mechanisms and put governance in crisis. This article depicts the nature of confrontational politics in Bangladesh, its causes and impacts on governance with supportive evidence from both primary and secondary sources. As case examples, it shows how bureaucracy and local government institutions are grossly politicized as a result of confrontational politics and their impact on governance.     

Auckland,New Zealand – fair game for central party politics

This paper explores the influence of central party politics in Auckland local government, in New Zealand’s largest city, following the 2010 amalgamation. Political parties have been an accepted and dominant presence in European representative democratic local government, throughout the 20^th century. Not so, however, in New Zealand and Australia, where citizens have ‘flocked to the banner “Keep Politics out of Local Government”. Our analysis of the self-declared party accreditation status of candidates and elected members demonstrates that political affiliation, at least in the main centre Auckland, is on the rise, counter to assumptions that New Zealand local government is largely removed from central politics.