As North African, Middle Eastern, and Sahelian societies adapt to the post-Arab Spring era and the rise of violence across the area, various groups find in Islam an answer to the challenges of the era. This book explores how Islamist social movements, Sufi brotherhoods, and Jihadi armed groups, in their great diversity, elaborate their social networks, and recruit sympathizers and militants in complicated times. The book innovates by transcending regional boundaries, bringing together specialists of the three aforementioned regions. First, it highlights how geographically dispersed religious groups define themselves as members of a larger, universal Umma, while evolving in deeply embedded local contexts. Second, its contributors prioritize in-depth fieldwork research, offering fine-grained, original insights into the manifold mobilization of Islamist-inspired social movements in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Western Europe. The book sheds light on the tense debates and competition taking place amongst the different trends composing the Islamist galaxy and between other groups that also claim an Islamic legitimacy, including Sufi brotherhoods and ethnic and/or tribal groups as well. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

This book offers a fresh look at the role of coalitions in contentious politics in North Africa and the Middle East, based on conceptual reflexions and empirical case studies by researchers who have conducted extensive fieldwork in the region. Coalitions of actors that have traditionally not been allies have become a key feature of the protest movements that have emerged across North Africa and the Middle East since 2011. But what happens when Islamists ally with Leftists, workers with student unions and young engineers with local tribesmen? How do coalitions form across ideological, generational, professional, ethnic and class divides? Are such collaborations transformative? The authors seek to show that it is important to go beyond analyses that focus mainly on identifying the factors that led to a coalition’s success or failure: coalitions are moments of transformative encounter that can lead to changes affecting relations with political authorities, ideological learnings, repertoires of action and understandings of the notion of right. Instead of analyzing coalitions and social divides as two opposite processes, this book further argues that studying the alliance of social groups goes hand in hand with exploring processes of differentiation that are engineered by both political regimes and social actors. Focusing on the role of coalitions in contentious politics, before and after the Arab uprisings, this book proposes a sociology of coalitions in the Middle East based on key empirical examples, to analyze the transformations that emerged out of such alliances at the levels of repertoires of action, forms of organization, relations to political authorities and ideological learnings. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

This book explains the aspirations and concerns of Islamist actors in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings by looking at two sets of relationships between Turkey's ruling AKP and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the AKP and Tunisia's Ennahda. It presents a unique analysis of the interplay between the AKP, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood, characterizing the actors, the structure and the main features of the relationship and thereby illuminating a political confluence among these three critical Islamist entities in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. Existing scholarship has assumed that this relationship revolves primarily around an ideological Islamist agenda, however, this research demonstrates a more complex and nuanced situation. Ezgi Basaran puts forward that the interplay was not based on an aspiration of building an ideological Islamist bloc in the MENA region, but rather revolved around the concept of political success and had a strong neoliberal ethos. Basaran draws on data collected from over 60 interviews with high-level members of the AKP, Ennahda and Muslim Brotherhood to demonstrate how, in the hope of achieving success and legitimization, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood have relied on the managerial prescriptions provided by the AKP. The contents of this success formula were derived from the AKP's experience as an Islamist party in power since 2002 and includes tactics on crisis evasion, legitimization, winning elections and maintaining power.

To what extent can Islam be localized in an increasingly interconnected world? The contributions to this volume investigate different facets of Muslim lives in the context of increasingly dense transregional connections, highlighting how the circulation of ideas about ‘Muslimness’ contributed to the shaping of specific ideas about what constitutes Islam and its role in society and politics. Infrastructural changes have prompted the intensification of scholarly and trade networks, prompted the circulation of new literary genres or shaped stereotypical images of Muslims. This, in turn, had consequences in widely differing fields such as self-representation and governance of Muslims. The contributions in this volume explore this issue in geographical contexts ranging from South Asia to Europe and the US. Coming from the disciplines of history, anthropology, religious studies, literary studies and political science, the authors collectively demonstrate the need to combine a translocal perspective with very specific local and historical constellations. The book complicates conventional academic divisions and invites to think in historically specific translocal contexts.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of public opinion patterns among Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. On the basis of data from the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer Project and the Arab Opinion Index, it compares the dynamics of Muslim opinion structures with global publics and arrives at social scientific predictions of value changes in the region. Using country factor scores from a variety of surveys, it also develops composite indices of support for democracy and a liberal society on a global level and in the Muslim world, and analyzes a multivariate model of opinion structures in the Arab world, based on over 40 variables from 12 countries in the Arab League and covering 67% of the total population of the Arab countries. While being optimistic about the general, long-term trend towards democracy and the resilience of Arab and Muslim civil society to Islamism, the book also highlights anti-Semitic trends in the region and discusses them in the larger context of xenophobia in traditional societies. In light of the current global confrontation with radical Islamism, this book provides vital material for policy planners, academics and think tanks alike.

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in- between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics. In recent years, the Middle East has seen States attempts to shape buffer zones or safe zones in border regions, for example, in Syria’s borderlands in the aftermath of the civil war. Typically studies on in- between borders refer to three interrelated aspects: space (territorial, symbolic), power (states or non-state actors) and identity (definition of the self/other). In this volume, the authors investigate these axes of research through the notions of sovereignty and belonging in order to assess how these concepts may highlight in-betweenness through a political dimension. Stemming from a perception of the borders as processes, these various studies aim to explore the theoretical potential of in- between border spaces to re-think sovereignty and identity belonging in such interstitial zones. While notions such as heterotopia, margins, liminality, borderlands, buffer zones, no man’s land or frontiers will be explored, each case study highlights how actors, territory and powers relate to each other in order to improve our understanding of historical and political process that are shaping identities under spatial constraints. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

As the so-called Arab Spring has slid into political uncertainty, lingering insecurity and civil conflict, European and American initial enthusiasm for anti-authoritarian protests has given way to growing concerns that revolutionary turmoil in North Africa may in fact have exposed the West to new risks. Critical in cementing this conviction has been the realisation that developments originated from Arab Mediterranean countries and spread to the Sahel have now such a potential to affect Western security and interests as to warrant even military intervention, as France’s operation in Mali attests. EU and US involvement in fighting piracy off the Horn of Africa had already laid bare the nexus between their security interests and protracted crises in sub-Saharan Africa. But the new centrality acquired by the Sahel after the Arab uprisings – particularly after Libya’s civil war – has elevated this nexus to a new, larger dimension. The centre of gravity of Europe’s security may be swinging to Africa, encompassing a wide portion of the continental landmass extending south of Mediterranean coastal states. The recrudescence of the terrorist threat from Mali to Algeria might pave the way to an American pivot to Africa, thus requiring fresh thinking on how the European Union and the United States can better collaborate with each other and with relevant regional actors.