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Home
Apart
Avoiding Evasion
Explaining Alienation
Interview
Working Papers
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Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Hurst, 2010)
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Apart explores why many Western Muslims are disaffected, why others are engaged,
and why some seek to undermine the very political system that remains their primary means of inclusion.
Based on research conducted in London's East End and Madrid's Lavapies district, and drawing on over 100
interviews with community elders, imams, extremists, politicians, gangsters, and ordinary people just
trying to get by, Justin Gest examines young Muslim men's daily existences. Confronting conventional
explanations that point to inequality, discrimination and religion, he builds a new theory arguing that
alienated and engaged political behavior is distinguished not by structural factors, but by how social
agents interpret their shared realities. Filled with counterintuitive conclusions, Apart sounds an
unambiguous warning to Western policy-makers, and presages an imminent American experience with the same
challenges. How both governments and people discipline their fear and understand their Muslim fellows may
shape democratic social life in the foreseeable future.
For more information and extra content, visit the book’s companion website.
To buy Apart, see this special web offer.
International Affairs: "A rich, groundbreaking work which researchers and government officials alike will find both valuable and challenging."
To view a PDF of this review, click here.
Global Policy: "An important contribution in relation to understanding a much maligned and misunderstood body of people. …It deserves to be widely read."
To view a PDF of this review, click here.
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"Avoiding Evasion: Implementing International Migration Policy," Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, 24 (4), Spring 2011.
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Abstract:
Despite the broadening range of international arbiters of global migration, the state—with its sovereign control of its territory and its subjection to the politics of its society—remains the only arbiter that oversees the actual interactions during which a migrants rights agenda would be followed. Premised on this uncompromising truth, this article will first outline the debate about the role of international law in shaping national migration policies. It will next examine (a) the ways that states have been able to clutch their national sovereignty in matters pertaining to migration, and (b) the ways that international normative pressure has superseded state control. With these lessons of history and political structure in mind, this article will then consider avenues of implementation. In the end, I will argue that rather than portray migrants rights agendas as new acts of international law that states should approve, they should be framed as a selection of fundamental entitlements that are lifted from existing regimes to which states are currently subject. In this manner, migrant rights simply need to ask for adherence to laws that state governments have already enacted. This resolution enables activists to circumvent the backyard politics that have poisoned efforts to coordinate globalized standards in the sphere of migration law.
Click here to view this manuscript.
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'Explaining Muslim Sociopolitical Alienation in Western Democracies," in Francois Foret and Xabier Itcaina (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Western Europe, ECPR Press, 2011.
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Abstract:
Even while popular perceptions portray Islam and its European followers to be a thoroughly antimodern community reluctant to conform to the ultramodern, secular, liberal individualism of the West, a variety of scholars have quite astutely cut through the discourse to recognize a religious community that is very much embedded in and actively participating in European modernity. It is therefore perplexing that explorations of European Muslims’ “alienation” from their local democratic system focus on explanations that fail to take proper account of this modernity. Over the past 20 years, a plethora of studies incorporating diverse methods in different disciplines have examined the same general dependent variable—alienation and disengagement among European Muslims. In this chapter, I will critically review these four streams of argumentation, each of which points to certain structural circumstances. In the end, I find each of them to be insufficient in determining why, among young Muslims facing largely the same circumstances, some engage or accept the political system and others reject it. In response, I hypothesize that different behavioral reactions to the same set of sociopolitical conditions is dependent on individual perceptions, which tint interpretations and expectations about shared disadvantages. This conclusion opens the door to a reconsideration of the institutionalist-structuralist account of alienation, toward the development of a more reflective and normative depiction that engages the political beliefs of the individual. This hypothesis embraces the plurality, reflexivity, and individual autonomy embodied by the competitive cultural programs of European modernity.
Click here to view this manuscript.
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"Muslim Immigrant Integration in Europe", Interview, International Affairs Forum, Fall 2010, pages 139-143.
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Abstract:
This interview reviews recent research collected in Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West. It considers a variety of questions, including: What were your findings and your conclusions? To what degree did you find that perceptions were impacted by political actions by the government? How would you rate government actions toward the communities in the aftermath of attacks in both countries? What did they do well? What didn’t they do well? In terms of immigration integration in Europe, what do you think can be learned from your research? Did you uncover findings that could be applied in the United States?
Click here to view this manuscript.
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Working Papers
Abstract:
While a great deal of work has been done to understand the nature and causal mechanisms of
political engagement, political alienation tends to be attributed to the absence of factors
conventionally associated with civic activism. However, these theories of participation and nonparticipation are unable to classify or account for certain forms of political behavior—for
example, violent activism or permanent withdrawal. In the interest of better understanding the
nature of diverse forms of participation and alienation, this article disentangles these often
complicated concepts in a way that facilitates the development of empirically observable
variables and systematic empirical theory. It builds a model that unifies the sociological
approach to alienation—which examines intensities of rebellion and contestation—and the
political scientific approach—which examines intensities of engagement based on resources—as
two sides of the same coin. It argues that each approach only deals with half of a coherent
phenomenon. Although I suspect that each respective half is accurately understood in isolation,
my perspective is critical of both and constructive in a way that employs ideas from each side to
build a more comprehensive model of democratic and “anti-system” political behavior. As a
related hypothesis, I suggest that the anti-system behavior I classify is underpinned to a
significant degree by certain individual perceptions that I define. To exhibit their utility and
relevance, this hypothesis and system of classification are operationalized and briefly applied to
contemporary cases. The proposed typology reflects the keys to democratic systems’
sustainability by focusing on citizens’ reinforcement of its channels for consultation, and equips
researchers with a more objective vernacular to understand modern empirical phenomena.
Abstract:
An emerging consensus amongst scholars of political identity suggests that Western Muslims
live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. In considering this view, this
paper examines evidence from a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in
London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working class
Muslim men. While the results indeed re-affirm Western Muslims’ concomitant relationships
to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects’ multiplicity
is complicated by their desire to meet—not reject—the essentialist standards of belonging to
identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking
preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individual responses suggest
that respondents are trying to fulfill perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention
helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims’ expressed and well-documented “identity
crisis,” suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly,
complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation.
Abstract:
This study attempts to answer the question of what underpins and characterizes the creation and successful implementation of international norms. We ask this question in the scientific interest of developing a more systematic understanding of the process of global norm implementation, particularly as it pertains to the strategy and prospects of an international migrants rights regime. Grounded in an examination of six cases pertinent to migrants rights, it is the contention of this article that effective international normative agendas have complimented their appeals to states’ moral constraint by offering national governments persuasive rationales that enable them to justify the surrender of sovereignty in the light of national interests. This suggests that migrants rights agendas that seek to create ambitious (and perhaps politically unpalatable) new norms will have audiences of state institutions and bureaucracies who are apt to sit on their hands, while those that seek to implement and enforce established norms have a more likely path to execution.
Abstract:
Scholars are attempting to address the question of whether Western Muslims are primarily
oriented towards states of residence or whether their identities transcend national boundaries in
the name of broader Islamic solidarity. I ask, rather, if these two alternatives are necessarily
irreconcilable. In this article, I will argue that not only are these two ideas compatible. Indeed, I
contend that the reconciliation of the universal with the local is actually the default, observable
state of Western Islam, just as it is the default, observable state of Islam in Muslim-majority
countries. First, I will engage in a discussion about what we mean by the idea of
“transnationalism”, and why Western Muslims are a particularly interesting and useful case
study of this phenomenon. I will next critically review ideas about Western Muslim identity and
why it has ostensibly trended toward the transnational—and subsequently propped up the
argument that Muslims are actively “post-national” and have “abandoned” national political
arenas. I will then introduce my conception of Muslim’s situated transnationalism, and
commence an analysis of Muslim transnational spheres with an eye to their rootedness in
ambient debates, vernacular, values, and taste. In the end, I will argue that transnational
religiosity, sociality, and politics is subject and frequently adapted to local contexts, which
require transnational activities to fit in local structures of power and attract the support and faith
of individuals with locally conditioned preferences. While transnationalism is increasingly
facilitated by the capacity of globalizing technology, political and social communities remain
stubbornly tied to the local because individuals themselves remain situated.
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