Assessing the impact of regime autonomy on Islamist resurgence.

Abstract

Why has Islamism become the dominant form of opposition in most Muslim countries since the 1970s? Western literature addressing this resurgence typically focuses on domestic socio-economic and political problems while barely acknowledging the role of international factors, e.g., military defeats and political dependence. Yet, the Islamist discourse is found to reverse the priorities: seemingly oblivious to domestic crises, it emphasizes first and foremost the need to achieve autonomy from the hegemonic West so as to restore a sense of dignity. This study goes beyond the established list of plausible--and often complementary--explanations, to evaluate the relative weight of that one actor emphasized by the Islamists themselves, hence its working hypothesis: the higher a regime's political autonomy from the West, the higher its ability to co-opt Islamist forces of opposition. On the basis of responses to questionnaires sent to Middle-East experts world-wide, we assessed the change in the ability of 16 Arab regimes in question to co-opt Islamist forces between 1989/90 and 1991/92. We then classified the regimes in question as either autonomous or non-autonomous from the West, according to their stated policies during the Gulf war/crisis in 1990/91. Comparing the two groups, we failed to discern two clearly distinct patterns of regime ability to co-opt Islamist forces ... unless we drop three countries from our sample. The latter validation of our hypothesis is not only weal but should also be tempered by the collateral finding that the data we obtained on the dependent variable manifested unquestionable symptoms of low reliability. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)