Insight Turkey
Insight Turkey
Challenging ideas
On Turkish politics and International affairs

Author

Zeynep Şahin

Zeynep Şahin
The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East
April 1, 2010
Political developments in the Middle East have recently received a great deal of attention by journalists, editors, and academics, in addition to government policy makers. It seems that everyone has become a stakeholder in the future of this region, where crises have unexpectedly worsened with the invasion of Iraq. Crises in the Middle East are commonly explained by the supposed ‘geo-strategy’ of Islam, along with theories about the clash of civilizations, which mainly assert that the Muslim world wages war on the West by using terrorism. For many, conflicts ranging from Palestine, to riots in the Paris suburbs, to Bin Laden, show the dramatic influence of the geostrategy of Islam. On the other hand, some researchers prefer to deepen their questioning and investigate the broader structural causes behind the conflicts. While the former approach suffers from reductionism, the latter requires an intellectual enterprise which takes into account historical, sociological, and political factors. It pays attention to the Middle Eastern context as well as the influence of larger international developments. Examining Middle East politics and Islam by focusing on different dimensions from his earlier studies, Olivier Roy takes a stand in favor of the second approach. His recently published book, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, advances his arguments presented in Failure of Political Islam (1994), Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (2004), and Secularism Confronts Islam (2007).

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