The Moderation of Islamist Movements
Are John Knudsen
Liv Tønnessen
The project investigates the impact of political inclusion on Islamist movements in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Sudan. The academic research tends to give precedence to the violent and militant Islamist movements. The argument developed in the recent literature is that Islamist rebellion and violence are products of political exclusion accompanied by repression from the state. However, there have not been systematic attempts at analyzing whether the opposite scenario, political inclusion into state institutions, moderates the political strategies and ideology of Islamist movements. This multi-disciplinary project assumes that political institutions impact on whether an Islamist movement takes a violent form or not. The state is central in that the difference between conflict and peace in a given country may be related to the establishment of certain institutions such as democratic decision-making.
Programme
