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International relations in the making of political Islam: interrogating Khomeini's ‘Islamic government’

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 11:55 authored by Kamran MatinKamran Matin
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 Development

ISSN

1408-6980

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Issue

4

Volume

16

Page range

455-482

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Notes

Online First Publication

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-07-03

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2012-06-18

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