Herbert Kitschelt:
Origins of International Terrorism in the Middle East
importantly, if they face strong repression at home and cannot forge a broad anti-regime coalition. At the root of today’s Islamist terrorism is predatory rule, which characterizes much of the Middle East and North Africa. Here, an institutional legacy from pre-modern times, oil wealth, and a lack of serious foreign threats have together consolidated a regime type whose incumbent rulers have a strong incentive to secure for themselves and their supporters a large part of the country’s resources. Islam is not a discernible factor in this development. Predatory regimes hinder economic growth with their rent-seeking policies that resort to arbitrary coercion, patronage, and tight control of markets. As soon as resource wealth is no longer able to keep up with population growth and thus imposes ever narrower limits on the strategy of co-opting potential opponents these regimes are confronted with mounting discontent. Against this background, a fundamentalist reading of Islam has become a powerful tool in the political mobilization of the various dissatisfied groups (the urban poor, the young intelligentsia, and the traditional petit bourgeoisie) into a (temporarily) united opposition movement. Its communitarian model of society appeals to those who have been uprooted and displaced by modernization. Furthermore, it has attained a sort of interpretive monopoly because all other ideologies presently available – notably those with socialist leanings – have failed. Only where repression foreclosed the path of mass mobilization did Islamist activists turn to terrorism as a strategy for challenging the regime. Terrorism became internationalized as a consequence of opportunity (Saudi-financed proselytism has created a transnational community of fundamentalist Muslims), need (effective repression at home), and a salient target (Western support for predatory regimes). In fact, the surge of Islamist terrorism heralds the decline of the Islamist ideology which is losing its appeal due to its trajectory of failures (Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan). However, the structural conditions that might give rise to a new surge of terrorism once the “right” ideology became available exist in various parts of the world, above all in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia.
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