Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Current events have caused many security theorists of late to focus their attention on unconventional warfare, state-building, democratization and legitimacy in the Middle east. While worthy topics all, this situation has left the other great security issue of our era, the eventual rise of rival powers to US dominance, less studied than it might otherwise have been. To be sure there is still much analysis of rising China, but too much is focused on how to ?manage? that rise. This terminology gives us false confidence that the determinants of a peaceful or conflictual rise lie in the hands of the diplomats and policies of the dominant state or states. A reasonable reading of history can be said to show that effects of the rise of new powers in an international system, while somewhat manipulable by actors, often hinge on less fluid factors. A Bismarck may have been able to temporarily ameliorate the effects of the rise of Germany through skillful diplomacy and moderate policies, but ultimately the size, location and implication of a rising Germany in the midst of the continental powers proved unmanageable and resulted in systemic upheaval. This project seeks to locate the causes of peaceful versus conflictual rise by looking at the nexus between systemic factors that form the environmental conditions of those instances of rising power, and the aggregate effects of political consequences of the multiple dyadic interactions between rising and existing great powers which constitute interaction of interests necessary to account for outcomes.This project will examine several previously ignored or understudied factors that play a roll in the peaceful or conflictual rise of powers. Most works examining this phenomena utilize models that assume one rising power versus one dominant power. Historically, this situation is rare. Take, for example, the international system of the late 19th century and early 20th century. In this system, there are several declining powers (France, U.K., Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire) and several rising powers (Germany, Japan, the U.S.). The implications of this are significant. With multiple rising powers, the one or two deemed most threatening are likely to face the brunt of great power efforts to prevent, diminish or contain their rise. The peaceful rise of the U.S. is the result of more than just an ideological affinity between the UK and a rising U.S. With so much focus on a rising Germany, the U.S. and Japan were largely unmolested in their respective rises during this period. The preceding situation also shows the importance of the geographic location of rising powers. With Germany emerging in the midst of the core while the US and Japan were expanding in the periphery, again, it is not surprising that more attention and effort were focused on Germany. Even states with interests in the same peripheral areas as the rising powers, such as the U.K. still faced greater concerns in the core.The number of existing powers is also important. One can easily deduce that with one or two polar powers, the rise of new powers is most disruptive. Transitions from hegemony are often conflictual. Potentially even more conflictual is the move from Bipolarity to Tripolarity. As any parent with three children can attest, the two versus one divides that are endemic to three player situations are maddeningly immune to resolution. In global politics, adding another power to a fairly balanced bipolar system can create fears of being overwhelmed. Greater numbers of powers, however, should be more fluid in their relations. For many years the European state systems of the 17th through early 20th century contained six or more powers. The distributional effects of one or two more should logically be much diminished in such a system. In addition to number of rising and declining powers and geographic location, I will utilize several other factors in this project, although length requirements preclude laying out all their logics in this précis. At the systemic level, whether a rising power is replacing a preexisting old power and thus retaining the same number of powers, versus adding new powers in addition to the old matters. At the state interaction level, ideology will play a role, resource sufficiency versus poverty is important, as is the complementary versus conflictual nature of the portfolio of interests in the rising versus existing great powers. Lest this project look like it employs the kitchen sink approach to explanation, these factors will be integrated into a tighter analytic framework in the following fashion. Analysis of the environmental systemic conditions in which the rise takes place will be consolidated by moving up the ladder of conceptual abstraction to posit various types of environments that represent conditions that will either work to ameliorate or augment the conflictual factors from the state interaction set of conditions. Additionally, the state interaction factors will be consolidated into a frame indicating propensity towards dyadic conflict. When coupled these two frames will generate expectations and description of the type of interaction we can expect from these factors. Brief plausibility probes will be conducted to lend preliminary empirical support to the analytical framework, and the implication for current international conditions will be explained.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: In 1976 an African American man named Fardee Mulazim was serving a life sentence for murder in the State Prison of Southern Michigan in Jackson. He suddenly announced that he had been called by Allah to reveal to his fellow Black prisoners a new faith. Mulazim’s new belief system included aspects of Afrocentrism, Egyptology, Garveyite separatism, Quranic Islam, selected quotations from the Bible, and New Age self-help philosophies. Mulazim named the new religion The Melanic Islamic Palace of the Rising Sun. Central to the faith were two tenets: First, that the presence of melanin in the skin of African peoples bestows upon them gifts of creativity, spirituality, and humanity that white people do not have -- hence the name Melanics. Second, that Nat Turner was the last Prophet of Allah. This was the same Nat Turner who led the insurrection of enslaved Africans in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.

The theology and the brief history of the Melanics illustrate several important features of the mentalities of Black men in and out of prison in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Melanics define themselves in their introductory literature, which they call “The Pack:”

The Melanic Islamic Palace of the Rising Sun is an activist Melanic Nationalist, and Pan-Afrikanist religious organization of independent origin (non-orthodox), concerned with the social, political, and economic liberation of Melanic People all over [the] world. We place major emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual growth and development of our people for cultural enrichment. We wholeheartedly realize the importance of a people’s history relative to their future achievements....

Because of the Melanics’ basic contention that incarcerated Black men are modern day slaves, and because the conditions under which they live at least partially validate that belief, the Melanic religion qualifies as what A. J. Raboteau called “slave religion.” Observing and recording the Melanics’ founding, their ideas, their rituals, their eventual banning, their perceived persecution, and current underground status, provides a unique opportunity for analyzing slave religion today and comparing it to slave religion in Antebellum America. But more than about the past, the Melanics inform the observer about the present and the future of Black male America. Since one-quarter of Black men eventually undergo the prison rites of passage, these lessons are of crucial importance for persons involved in trying to understand this phenomenon in order to change it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The placing of Islamic institutions ? religious-educated Islamic clergies and teachers in particular ? in the state has had an immense impact on state-society relations in the Muslim world. In Malaysia, the UMNO government's Islamization drive under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has led, through the increased employment of so-called ?Islamic? officials, to the organizational expansion of Islamic affairs in a wide range of the core jurisdictions of the ?modern? state. Such jurisdictional expansion of Islamic affairs poses an intriguing puzzle because it has been carried out as a part of state- and nation-building within a multi-ethnic/religious nation.
The paper seeks to resolve a key puzzle: why and how has institutionalization of the state Islamic apparatus taken place to the degree and in the way that it has? Conventional wisdom holds that ?institutionalized religion? within the state arose out of growing societal pressures, or from a threat caused by the rising influence of Islamic opposition parties. The paper extends this society-centric argument by examining both the cause and effect of the institutionalization of the state religious apparatus in three policy areas: Syariah (judicial), Religious schools (education), and Zakat (Islamic tithe/welfare). The central claim advanced is that patronage-driven incentive structures of the ruling party UMNO had a decisive effect on the variance in outcomes across policy areas. By contrasting the Malaysian case with the Indonesian case, the paper also sheds insight on the causal link between the rise of ?institutionalized religion? within the state and the mobilization capacities of Islamic opposition forces in the societal realm.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper analyzes the rise of political Islam in Turkey according to the political process model. The following research question is examined: “Why has political Islam, which has been part of Turkish politics since the 1970s, been on rise since the 1990s, but not before?” The rise of political Islam in Turkey occurred as a result of three interrelated factors: the state’s Turkish-Islamic synthesis policy (TIS—a mixture of Sunni Islam and nationalism), the malfunctioning secular state, and the Islamist political parties’ strong organizational networks. If the first stage of the movement’s mobilization (1980-1991) occurred as a result of political opportunities (the TIS), the second phase of the movement’s mobilization (1991-) occurred due to both political opportunities (the malfunctioning secular state) and organizational dynamics (the Islamist political parties’ strong organizational networks due to the TIS). Framing processes (shared understandings and strategic efforts of the movement’s activists for mobilization) played an important role in both stages of the movement’s mobilization.