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International relations in the making of political Islam: interrogating Khomeini's ‘Islamic government’
Eurocentric approaches to political Islam tend to deploy an internalist methodology that theoretically obscures the generative and constitutive role of international relations. This article addresses this problem through a critical application of Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ to Ayatollah Khomeini's invention of the concept of ‘Islamic government’. It argues that this concept was international in its socio-political stimulus and intellectual content, and, crucially, reflected, influenced, and mobilised an emergent liminal sociality that combined Western and Islamic socio-cultural forms. This heterogeneous character of Iran's experience of modernity is, the article argues, theoretically inaccessible to Eurocentric approaches’ homogeneous and unilinear conceptions of history, which, as a result, generate exceptionalist modes of explanations.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Journal
Journal of International Relations and DevelopmentISSN
1408-6980Publisher
Palgrave MacmillanExternal DOI
Issue
4Volume
16Page range
455-482Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Notes
Online First PublicationFull text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes