The politics of inclusion is about more than hate, exclusion, and discrimination.  It is a window into the moral character of contemporary liberal democracies.  The Struggle for Inclusion introduces a new method to the study of public opinion: to probe, step by step, how far non-Muslim majorities are willing to be inclusive, where they draw the line, and why they draw it there and not elsewhere.  Those committed to liberal democratic values and their concerns are the focus, not those advocating exclusion and intolerance.
 
Notwithstanding the turbulence and violence of the last decade over issues of immigration and of Muslims in the West, the results of this study demonstrate that the largest number of citizens in contemporary liberal democracies are more open to inclusion of Muslims than has been recognized. Not less important, the book reveals limits on inclusion that follow from the friction between liberal democratic values.  This pioneering work thus brings to light both pathways to progress and polarization traps. 

At the Forefront of Political Psychology pays tribute to John L. Sullivan, one of the most influential political psychologists of his generation. Sullivan’s scholarly contributions have deeply shaped our knowledge of belief systems and political tolerance, two flourishing research areas in political psychology that are crucial to understanding the turbulence of our times.

This volume, compiled by three of Sullivan’s longtime colleagues and collaborators, includes cutting-edge contributions from scholars in political science and psychology. The book is divided into three sections; the first two focus on how Sullivan’s work on political tolerance and belief systems influenced generations of political psychologists. The final section offers a more personal look at Sullivan’s influence as a mentor to young scholars, many of whom are now intellectual leaders in political psychology. The chapters featured here elucidate how these students were able to flourish under Sullivan’s tutelage and lifelong mentorship.

One of John L. Sullivan’s defining traits is his generosity―as a scholar, mentor, leader, and friend. Over the years, many have benefited greatly from Sullivan’s willingness to share his intellect, insight, and passion for democratic values. This impressive collection will appeal to both students and professors of political psychology, but also scholars of social and political behavior, political tolerance, and anyone who has an interest in the contributions made by Sullivan.

Next to military means, causing disruption and interdiction, Western and local powers also relied on policies of containment to halt the expansion of the Islamic State’s territorial strongholds. Yet, a Cold War state-based strategy of containment seems not apt to counter a transformed Islamic State. This article, first, examines why containing the Islamic State was successful in the past. Second, the article argues that the Islamic State can still be contained if containment addresses the Islamic State’s hybrid nature rather than convulsively looking for the transferability of past containment aspects. In particular, this requires a focus on the struggle for power of the opponent and a foreign policy of restraint. Finally, the article proposes three angles to contain the Islamic State. Each angle exploits the persisting characteristics of the Islamic State as a revolutionary actor with internal contradictions and promulgating specific narratives which containment can engage.

This article examines the religious and intellectual dynamics behind the Ottoman military reform movement, known as the New Order, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Conventionally, the New Order has been examined within the framework of the Westernization of Ottoman military and administrative institutions. The Janissary-led popular opposition to the New Order, on the other hand, has been understood as a conservative resistance, fashioned by Muslim anti-Westernization. This article challenges this assumption, based on a binary between Westernization reforms versus Islamic conservatism. It argues that the Janissary-led popular opposition, which was consolidated long before the New Order, developed as a form of resistance by antinomian elements blocking the top-down disciplinary policies of the central state throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The New Order programme, which was unleashed in 1792, was also opposed by the Janissary-led coalition, on the basis that it would wipe out vested privileges and traditions. Supporting the New Order, we see a coalition and different intellectual trends, including: (i) the Euro-Ottoman military enlightenment, led by military engineers and scientists, which developed an agenda to reorganize and discipline the social-military order with universal principles of military engineering and (ii) Islamic puritan activism, which developed an agenda to rejuvenate the Muslim order by eliminating invented traditions, and to discipline Muslim souls with the universal principles of revelation and reason. While the Euro-Ottoman military enlightenment participated in military reform movements in Europe, Islamic activism was part of a trans-Islamic Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi network originating in India. We thus witness a discursive alliance between military enlightenment and Muslim activism, both of which had trans-Ottoman connections, against a Janissary-led popular movement, which mobilized resistance to protect local conventions and traditions.

When did European modes of political thought diverge from those that existed in other world regions? We compare Muslim and Christian political advice texts from the medieval period using automated text analysis to identify four major and 60 granular themes common to Muslim and Christian polities, and examine how emphasis on these topics evolves over time. For Muslim texts, we identify an inflection point in political discourse between the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a juncture that historians suggest is an ideational watershed brought about by the Turkic and Mongol invaders. For Christian texts, we identify a decline in the relevance of religious appeals from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Our findings also suggest that Machiavelli’s Prince was less a turn away from religious discourse on statecraft than the culmination of centuries-long developments in European advice literature.

On January 27, true to his campaign promise to suspend Muslim immigration, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting all immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States. By doing so, the Trump administration has taken a definite stance on what it holds as the threat posed by immigrants and refugees to U.S. security. As we argued in April 2016, however, democracies like the United States “are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants.”