Predatory Globalization and Democracy in the Islamic World

The rise of Islamic activism worldwide, including the appearance of illiberal politics in Islamic cultural areas (ICAs), is usually seen as a reaction to globalizing modernization. Based on the assumption of an elective affinity between Western cultural assets and liberal democracy, most analysts neglect to see globalization, particularly, in its predatory form, as a constitutive condition of Islamism. Accentuating the cultural divide within ICAs, predatory globalization strives to constrict political space for democratic expression. The growing disconnect between an already fractured political community and an increasingly illegitimate state provides Islamicists the opening to capture key institutions in civil society or to create alternative avenues of communal identity, participation, and civic action. Prospects for building a liberal democratic order hinge mainly on a resolution of the internal dialectic within ICAs. The unstoppable march of predatory globalization, however, appears unlikely to yield either the political space or the historical time to bridge the deep chasm within ICAs.