Al-Qaeda to Arab Spring: Islamist Terrorism and Democracy

摘要

There's nothing like a revolution to upend seemingly secure regimes, but also entire academic fields and approaches to scholarship. Ever since a humiliated fruit vendor in Tunisia named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself and then the Middle East aflame, one despot after another has crumbled, along with much of the received wisdom on the region from scholars and policy makers. Inevitably, Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East reads like a before-the-revolution project blindsided by events on the ground since it went to press. But let us hope that Katerina Dalacoura, a scholar of the tangled dance between Islamists and power in the Middle East, is busily researching a sequel. For Dalacoura, a lecturer in international relations at the London School of Economics, has written a useful primer on many of the emerging Islamist political actors, and, of equal inter est, she has offered a window on the ideological land mines that scholars navigated as they probed Islam, terrorism, and democracy in the years before the out break of this historic, messy, incomplete Arab Spring.