Search results for ""author azmi bishara""

In January 2020, US President Donald Trump announced his 'deal of the century'. Supposedly intended to 'resolve' the Palestine-Israel conflict, it accepted Israeli occupation as a fait accompli. Azmi Bishara places this normalisation of occupation in its historical context, examining Palestine as an unresolved case of settler colonialism, now evolved into an apartheid regime. Drawing on extensive research and rich theoretical analysis, Bishara examines the overlap between the long-discussed 'Jewish Question' and what he calls the 'Arab Question', complicating the issue of Palestinian nationhood. He addresses the Palestinian Liberation Movement's failure to achieve self-determination, and the emergence of a 'Palestinian Authority' under occupation. He contends that no solution to problems of nationality or settler colonialism is possible without recognising the historic injustices inflicted on Palestinians since the Nakba. This book compellingly argues that Palestine is not simply a dilemma awaiting creative policy solutions, but a problem requiring the application of justice. Attempts by regional governments to marginalise the Palestinian cause and normalise relations with Israel have emphasised this aspect of the struggle, and boosted Palestinian interactions with justice movements internationally. Bishara provides a sober perspective on the current political situation in Palestine, and a fresh outlook for its future.

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On Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations. Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11 Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by specific sociopolitical contexts. Bishara offers a sophisticated account of various movements—such as Wahabbism and Hanbalism—frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and examines patterns of modernization in the development of contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms, plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.

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Based on empirical and theoretical investigation, and original insight into how a local protest movement developed into a revolution that changed a regime, this book shows us how we can understand political revolutions. Azmi Bishara critically explores the gradual democratic reform and peaceful transfer of power in the context of Tunisia. He grapples with the specific make-up of Tunisia as a modern state and its republican political heritage and investigates how this determined the development and survival of the revolution and the democratic transition in its aftermath. For Bishara, the political culture and attitudes of the elites and their readiness to compromise, in addition to an army without political ambitions, were aspects that proved crucial for the relative success of the Tunisian experience. But he distinguishes between protest movements and mass movements that aim at regime change and discerns the social and political conditions required for the transition from the former to the latter. Bishara shows that the specific factors that correspond to mass movements and regime change are relative deprivation, awareness of injustice, dignity and indignation. He concludes, based on meticulous documentation of the events in Tunisia and theoretical investigation, that while revolutions are unpredictable with no single theory able to explain them, all revolutions across different historical and conceptual contexts be seen as popular uprisings that aim at regime change. The book is the first of a trilogy, the Understanding Revolutions series by Bishara, seeking to provide a rich, comprehensive and lucid assessment of the revolutions in three states: Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt.

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