USLAMISM · The United States and Political Islam: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective.

USLAMISM:The United States and Political Islam: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective.

USLAMISM is a novel effort to build on the lack of academic works examining socio-political phenomena, such as Islamism, within the broader narratives of American statecraft and diplomacy. Apart from major works led by Fawaz Gerges and Maria do Ceu Pinto in 1999, very few scholars have focused on this topic as an exclusive topic of their research since the Arab Spring and fewer still have mined archival resources to provide a current understanding of the US approach to political Islam. Compared to the state-of-the-art, USLAMISM is underpinned by a rigorous empirical approach favoring substantial documentation, semi-structured interviews and strong archival research. By employing a prism of Global Studies to contribute to academic research on US foreign policy in the Arab world since the late 1920s, USLAMISM also fosters a more nuanced and multidisciplinary perspective to understand the construction of ‘otherness’ in the Islamic world and contribute to the ongoing debate between (neo-) realists and constructivists especially on the issue of ‘national interest making’; and through its practical aspect, clearly contribute to the interactions between academic and non-academic sectors. The desired output of this project would take the form of a monograph and multiple peer-reviewed articles on the US policy towards the MB. Now, thanks to my research, we have, for the very first time, an in-depth investigation on the US State Department’s archives dealing with main Islamist movement, i.e. the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, I have collected a huge amount of first-hand discourses, interviews and reports on the US foreign policy towards political Islam, which allows me to be a leading research in the field of the US foreign policy in the Middle East and to deliver decisive breakthroughs in this field. Through my research, the academic sphere has at last one major manuscript (that I am now completing) on the whole history of the connections between the United States and the main Islamist movement in the biggest Arab country. This was never written before and the European Union is now the place where this research has been designed, produced and advertised. Two major fiels (International History and International Relations) are now characterised by a new topic (the US and Political Islam) and a new topic of research (States and Ideologies: how they interact and deal with each other, which is clearly a rising trend in the sphere of the Global Studies). Last but not least, in terms of policy-oriented expertise, the EU is now a place where a major researcher in touch with the best scholars and practitioners of the US foreign policy is doing innovative work and is able to generate op-eds, working papers, reports and policy-making approaches in the field of the US foreign policy, Middle East Politics and Radical ideologies.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз