Current Institutional Affiliation
Visiting Assistant Professor, Political Science, Tulane University

Award Information

International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2000
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
Government, Harvard University
"The Internal Dynamics of Moderate Islamism: Islamist Intra-Party Conflict and Ideological Contestation in Jordan & Egypt"

The project seeks to explain the divergence of Jordan from the pattern of Islamist party cohesion characteristic of the Muslim Brotherhood. The increasing level of intra-party conflicts in the Jordanian Islamist party is compared with the Egyptian party which continues to maintain the traditional cohesion. The underlying interest in the phenomenon is that intra-party conflict can be studied as a gauge of the ideological changes Islamism undergoes as Islamists become integrated in the political system, bringing about a tension between the ultimate goal of Islamism to establish a theocratic state, and the tenets of a liberal order. The hypothesis the research advances is that share of Islamist power is the variable which best explains the variance between the cases, whereby the higher the share of power, the higher the level of intra-party conflict. The primary goal of the project is to test this hypothesis against alternative explanation. The -secondary goal is to examine the implications of intra-party conflict on the ideological spectrum offered by the party. It hypothesized that the higher the level of conflict, the more ideological pragmatism is manifested by new vocal elites. The project seeks to buttress its validity through intra-case comparisons of Jordanian municipalities where Islamists hold varying levels of power, thus allowing a more rigorous test of the hypothesis by comparing units with higher level of homogeneity.

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