By drawing on a large number of case studies of Islamist groups and personal interviews with experts and religious activists, Katerina Dalacoura tests a generally accepted hypothesis: Islamist terrorism is the product of a democracy deficit in the Middle East. Dalacoura challenges this conventional wisdom. She argues that there is “no necessary causal link between authoritarianism and Islamist terrorism in the Middle East” (11). In the introductory chapter, the author meticulously defines contested concepts, such as terrorism, Islamism, democracy, moderation, and political exclusion. In Chapter 1, Dalacoura situates the main hypothesis in terrorism studies literature and considers alternative explanations — ideational, political, socio-economic, and strategic/instrumental. She rightfully dismisses ideational explanations that claim an inherent link between Islam and political violence. While ideas might justify violence, Dalacoura contends, the important question to ask is why certain “interpretations [of Islam] have at times prevailed over others” (34). In the rest of the chapter, she evaluates the relative weight of political approaches, socio-economic approaches, and strategic/instrumental approaches in explaining the variation in her case studies.
In Chapters 2–4, Dalacoura explores the relationship between Islamist terrorism and democracy thematically. She examines transnational Islamist terrorist networks, such as Al Qaeda, in Chapter 2; investigates terrorism tied to national liberation using the examples of Hizbullah and Hamas in chapter 3; and discusses Islamist groups that use political violence as a tactic in domestic insurgencies, such as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and Gamaa Islamiya, in Chapter 4.
Next the author evaluates the relationship between political inclusion/exclusion and the behavior of nonviolent Islamist groups. In Chapter 5, she evaluates the experiences of Islamist groups that operated as oppositional forces, such as Islamic Action Front (IAF) and Wasat in Jordan, Muslim Brotherhood and Wasat in Egypt, and Nahda in Tunisia. On the other hand, in Chapter 6, she assesses the Islamist experience in the government, using the examples of the Welfare Party and Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey and the successive governments of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Dalacoura concludes that there is no direct link between political exclusion and terrorism. For instance, while repression and political exclusion can explain the growth (but not the emergence) of the GIA in Algeria or Gamaa Islamiya in Egypt, inclusion in Palestinian political processes does not provide an explanation for why Hamas adopts or eschews terrorist tactics. She also does not find a link between political inclusion and moderation of nonviolent Islamists. While the IAF's inclusion in the Jordanian system can explain its gradual moderation over the years, in other cases political repression is followed by moderation. For instance, Nahda in Tunisia always remained as a moderate force despite heavy repression by the Ben Ali regime, and the Islamist movement in Turkey has moderated even further after it faced political repression from the Turkish state during the soft coup known as the “28 February process.”
Dalacoura claims that socioeconomic and strategic/instrumental approaches supplement and refine political approaches and explain some of the variation in the case studies. Socioeconomically, where the Islamist movements are tied to middle-class constituents, as in Turkey and Tunisia they tend to be ideologically moderate. In many instances, according to Dalacoura, Islamist actors behave as rational agents and choose the best ideological or strategic option available to them given their objectives and political circumstances. Thus, one approach does not explain Islamists' behavior, and the conclusions the author draws are not parsimonious. Yet, this is not Dalacoura's fault. The reality is messy, and Islamists' behavior cannot be explained with reductive theories, as the author skillfully shows.
The hypothesis discussed in the book is at the intersection of various scholarly and theoretical debates. The author dexterously grounds her analysis in international democracy promotion literature, international relations literature, terrorism studies literature, and democratization literature, which analyzes the effects of state responses toward religious political actors on religious groups' ideologies in the field of comparative politics.
The book's title is a bit misleading. First, it does not reflect the fact that nonviolent Islamist movements are discussed in the book, although Dalacoura acknowledges that these groups form an overwhelming majority of Islamist movements (15, 123). Her analysis includes movements that have never used terrorism, such as the Welfare Party and JDP in Turkey, Nahda in Tunisia, IAF and Wasat in Jordan, and Wasat in Egypt. While she represents these cases as “the other side of the metaphorical coin” from Islamist terrorism (12, 181), clearly she uses these examples to test the inclusion-moderation hypothesis. The analyses of these parties' political trajectories do not help us understand Islamist terrorism, but rather, interrogate the link between political participation and nonviolent Islamist actors' political and/or ideological moderation, concepts succinctly defined and discussed by Dalacoura in the first chapter. Similarly, democracy is not an apt term for the title, because most of the book's discussion revolves around political participation in non-democratic or partially democratic settings. Even the author acknowledges this when she says that the study “investigates political as opposed to democratic participation as a likely cause of moderation” (18). Thus a title like “Islamist Terrorism, Islamist Moderation, and Political Participation in the Middle East” would probably better reflect the analyses in the book, although it might not be as marketable as the current title.
Despite this caveat, the book is very rich empirically, and Dalacoura convincingly defies conventional wisdom on a very important subject. She challenges foreign policy advisors who recommend blanket proposals to deal with Islamist political actors in the Middle East, terrorism experts who propose democracy as the only antidote to terrorism, and scholars who fail to appreciate the great variety of ideological objectives and operational choices among the Islamist political actors. Interested laymen, students, scholars, and policy makers would all benefit from reading this nuanced and intellectually stimulating book.
