Contemporary debates about civility are shaped by the dominant liberal and secular narratives of a peaceful world of sovereign nation-states. For contemporary scholars and policy makers, the challenge is to insert meaningfully the political evolution of the Middle East in the dominant liberal-democratic discourse about the current international order without invoking ill-conceived notions of Islamic exceptionalism. The analyses gathered in this book challenge conventional 'western' perspectives on civility as an expression of state-guaranteed free association in a non-violent space of...

Contemporary debates about civility are shaped by the dominant liberal and secular narratives of a peaceful world of sovereign nation-states. For contemporary scholars and policy makers, the challenge is to insert meaningfully the political evolution of the Middle East in the dominant liberal-democratic discourse about the current international order without invoking ill-conceived notions of Islamic exceptionalism.

The analyses gathered in this book challenge conventional western perspectives on civility as an expression of state-guaranteed free association in a non-violent space of...

This book offers a framework for understanding the interaction between the academic disciplines "observing" contemporary political Islam and the individuals and communities being "observed" practicing it. Volpi investigates how different disciplinary approaches in the social sciences explain and understand their "Islamic" subject matter, revealing how political Islam is a phenomenon that each academic discipline analyses using its own dominant paradigms. He offers a multidisciplinary account of political Islam based on the insights provided by post-orientalism, international studies,...

This handbook provides an overview of the political processes that shape the Mediterranean region in the contemporary context. It divides up the issues of crucial importance to Mediterranean dynamics into seven analytical sections that guide the reader towards a comprehensive understanding of the main regional interactions and trends.

The book explores five main areas:

• Complex historical formation of the contemporary Mediterranean
• Geopolitical perspectices on the contemporary Mediterranean.
• A state-centric analysis of the international relations of...

This book offers a much-needed corrective to dominant approaches to understanding political causality during episodes of intense social mobilisation in North Africa.

Drawing on analyses of routine governance and of 'revolutionary' mobilisation in four countries of the Maghreb - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya - before, during and after the 2011 uprisings, Volpi explains the different trajectories of these uprisings by showing how specific acts of protest created new arenas of contention that provided actors with new rationales, practices and, ultimately, identities.

The book...

This book brings together a roster of prominent contributors to present a strategic interactionist perspective on the study of contentious politics in the Middle East in response to the Arab uprisings. The common thread among the contributions is an interest in the micro-level interactions between various strategic players, including not only the mobilization of protestors during the uprisings but also the responses of regimes. The book also examines short to medium-term adaptations of the regimes and the collective action of opponents in the post-uprisings period, as well as the subsequent...