Varieties of Radicalism: Colonial Legacies and State-Opposition Trajectories in the Middle East

My book explains why opposition movements under authoritarian rule oscillate between moderation and radicalization and why some become fragmented and volatile while others stabilize. Rather than treating radicalism as an ideological process, I argue that it is a political outcome shaped by long-term structural conditions. In particular, colonial rule profoundly shaped the kinds of opposition organizations that emerged and the balance of power between competing factions within them. This process created durable “authority configurations” that structured how movements interacted with states long after independence. The result is recurring cycles of political contention rooted in historically-rooted power asymmetries that emerged from colonialism. This finding stands in contrast to much of the moderation literature, which offers a more linear story of democratic learning or ideological evolution.

The book develops a theory of how interactions between states and opposition groups unfold over time. Because these interactions are iterated, feedback loops are generated by regime repression and accommodation and intra-movement factional competition. Moments of repression reallocate power between factions within movements, producing cycles of moderation and radicalization that are often misread as shifts in belief rather than struggles over organizational control. By centering inter-factional politics, the project bridges comparative politics and international relations: it connects colonial state-building and sovereignty formation to contemporary patterns of domestic conflict, highlights commitment problems and legitimacy dilemmas familiar to IR scholars, and shows how international hierarchies influence domestic and regional politics.

Empirically, the book draws on two years of fieldwork across six countries, more than one hundred interviews with hard-to-access activists (including a generation of younger organizers reshaping political repertoires across the region today), extensive participant observation, and deep historical and archival research on the histories of colonialism and resistance across the Middle East and North Africa. It compares three very different movements: the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, the Iraqi Communist Party, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. By tracing their trajectories across colonial and postcolonial periods, I show how patterns of colonial “social restructuring” (forced rural-urban migration and economic modernization) shaped movement formation, how factional balances shifted in response to repression, and how contemporary radicals are negotiating with – and reacting against – the colonial legacies of earlier opposition politics.

A book workshop is scheduled to be held at Boston University in April 2026.

Baghdad, Iraq: a bust of “the everlasting martyr” Salam Adil (officially Husain al-Radi), the Secretary-General of the Iraqi Communist Party (Photo Credit: Nasir Almasri, Dec. 2024).