Al‐Qaeda to Arab Spring: Islamist Terrorism and Democracy

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02556.x
• Published date: 01 March 2012
• Date: 01 March 2012
• Author: Margaret Scott

314 Public Administration Review • March | April 2012

test the link between terrorism and democracy using

concrete case studies ranging from al-Qaeda to Hamas

on the Islamist terrorist side, and then to Islamists who

have renounced violence, from Egypt’s Muslim Broth-

erhood to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development

Party (JDP). Her conclusion is that there is no link;

more democracy does not mean less terrorism.

While this makes for an attention-grabbing title, chal-

lenges conventional thinking, and delivers a withering

punch to the democracy promotion crowd and to U.S.

neoconservatives, it is a conclusion that both overstates

her research and understates its importance. Dalacoura’s

research is less about terrorism and democracy than it is

about the more revealing question of how Islamist actors

react to authoritarian regimes and whether participation

or inclusion or repression matters. When her book went

to press, Turkey was the only Muslim- majority democ-

racy in the region, making the study of the link between

democracy and terrorism oddly premature and wrapped

up in yesterday’s disputations. Fortunately, despite her

meticulous attention to def‌i nitions, Dalacoura shifts

from investigating theoretical links between democracy

and terrorism to the richer topic of whether political

participation moderates Islamists in general and Islamist

terrorists in particular. Her likely unanticipated f‌i nding

provides an invaluable baseline of where various Islamist

groups stood right before the Arab Spring, how they got

there, and the evolution of their political ideas.

In her analysis of how Islamists change and of the

complex relationship between political inclusion and

moderation, Dalacoura’s book is an uneven but im-

portant contribution to the literature on religion–state

relations in the region.  is volume joins two other

noteworthy books, Authoritarianism in the Middle

East: Regimes and Resistance (2005) and Making Islam

Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn

(2007), in opening up new ways of looking at Islam

and politics in the region and providing the context for

evolving possibilities and challenges as political Islam,

in all its expressions, emerges in the struggle to create

new, democratic politics in the region.

Katerina Dalacoura, Islamist Terrorism and Democ-

racy in the Middle East (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011). 213 pp. $85.00 (cloth),

ISBN: 9780521683791; $26.99 (paper), ISBN:

9780521865180.

There’s nothing like a revolution to upend

seemingly secure regimes, but also entire

academic f‌i elds and approaches to scholarship.

Ever since a humiliated fruit vendor in Tunisia named

Mohamed Bouazizi set himself and then the Middle

East af‌l ame, 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 of‌f ered 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.

 e heart of Dalacoura’s book is her case studies, f‌i lled

with local knowledge and analysis, of Islamist groups

stretching from Algeria to Turkey and Iran. But she

wends her way to these case studies through an often

too complicated theoretical structure that reveals

how dif‌f‌i cult Middle East studies have become in the

shadow of the war on terror. Her theoretical scaf‌f olding

already seems rickety, but it was designed to challenge

two central post-9/11 shibboleths: that Arab exception-

alism explains the Middle East’s democracy def‌i cit, with

one of the cultural culprits being the incompatibility

of Islam and democracy, and that there is a causal link

between a lack of democracy and Islamist terrorism.

Dalacoura writes that the idea for this book came as she

examined this supposed causal link. Her method is to

Al-Qaeda to Arab Spring: Islamist Terrorism and Democracy

Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors

Margaret Scott

New York University

Margaret Scott is adjunct associate

professor in the Wagner School of Public

Service at New York University. She also is a

journalist, currently focusing on the role of

Islam in Indonesian politics. She has written

for the New York Review of Books,

Times Literary Supplement, and the

New York Times Magazine. Previously,

she was cultural editor of the Far Eastern

Economic Review, based in Hong Kong.

E-mail: ms4832@nyu.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 72, Iss. 2, pp. 314–316. © 2012 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2011.02556.x.